Child of the Revolution

Story index

2008-05-25T18:58:00.000-07:00

** General Introduction

1. My mother, my father, and me

2.The boarding school for toddlers.

3. A child's life

4. Primary school - and Life with the family

5. Running away from school

6. My Parents and paternal uncles

7. My Maternal Uncles

8. The Cultural Revolution Begins

9. My Siblings become Red Guards

10. Our father is arrested

11. A Family of Ill Repute

12. I go to the countryside

13. Life at the Big Farm

14. I fall in Love

15. Escape to Mom's Village

16. My Father in Prison

17. The Death of Grandmother

18. On Becoming a Nurse

19. Entering College - by the front door and back door too

20. Beijing #2 Language School

21. Classmates and siblings

22. Finding a Husband

23. A Career as a tour guide.

24. Hard work and hard play

25. The Hong Kong Boyfriend

26. Leaving the People's Republic

27. High life in America

28. Student life in Chicago

**Remembering my Father

29. Boyfriends and computer classes

30.My Oldest Brother

**Tianamen Protest

31. My Second Brother

32. My Older Sister

33. My Younger Sister

34. My First Niece

35. Requiem for My Mother

36. Mom's Early Life

37.My First Boyfriend - 40 years later

Part Thirty Seven

2008-03-31T08:49:00.001-07:00

It’s been 39 years since I first met him
back when we both worked on that enormous state farm
up in northern Manchuria.
He was a bright, dreamy student back then
– and we fell in love.

In the early 1970’s, government policy allowed one child of each family to either remain or return to Beijing, So my boyfriend, as an only child, was allowed to move back to Beijing after 4 years in the countryside – but I had to go somewhere else to work (in a county hospital – in another part of Manchuria)

I remember that last trip I made to Mom’s village to pick up my belonging to move them to my new assignment. He was there to help me – and we put everything on the top of a tractor, and he accompanied me to the train station. Since we were all sitting on top of the luggage, we had to hold each other tightly in order not to fall off, and I was so happy to have his arms around me the entire trip! When we got to the station, we finally said goodbye.

Then he went to work at a shoe factory in Beijing and I started my new career as a nurse in Manchuria. For the next year or so , we kept writing to each other, but as time went by, fewer and fewer letters arrived. I thought maybe things would get better after I moved to Beijing, but it took me 2 years to get there, and by then it was too late. He had already met a girl at his factory, she got pregnant – and we broke up our relationship.

. The last time I met him was a few days before I left China for the USA. That was 21 years ago – after he had become a lawyer by taking the entrance examinations in 1978 – the first year that universities had returned to normal. After graduation, he stayed at that university for seven years as an instructor himself – but then what happened to him ?

I just had to know – so while I was in Beijing last November, waiting for my mother’s funeral, I decided to do a little investigating.

I knew he was a lawyer, so I asked my cousin, a judge in Beijing, if he could help me. At first the answer was no – but when I tried an alternative spelling of his name – the answer was yes – so soon I had my old boyfriend on the telephone – and we were making a date to meet each other at a very popular restaurant in my sister’s neighborhood. (as it turned out , his firm handles the legal affairs of this restaurant, all the waitresses knew him, and he never has to pay for his meals)

And when we both got to the restaurant -- we couldn’t recognize each other !

It’s true.

He had called, telling me that he’d be late – so I got there first – took a table facing the front door – and waited for him to appear. But he never did – until he phoned me again – and turned out to be the man who was walking right past my table.

Had I really changed that much ? I just think he never saw me among all the other people. But I had seen him – and he truly had changed completely.

Where was that tall skinny boy with a shock of black hair and a narrow, dreamy face ?

Completely gone.

Now – he was just as tall – but somewhat wider as well – his hair was mostly gone – and his face had puffed out like a big, pale balloon.

He wore a polo shirt and a pair of jeans which had been washed so many times its grey color looked like an unwashed rag. That was a surprise too, because when we were dating, he paid a lot of attention to his appearance. Now, he didn’t seem to care at all. His attitude towards to me was as if we had just seen each other last month. There was no surprise in either his face or his tone of voice.

But Oh my goodness ! I was completely surprised. He even asked me “are you sure that I’m the person you’re looking for ?” – but then he smiled – and when I saw that smile – I knew it was him.

Well --- it had been a long time – and we had a lot to catch up on.

But curiously – he wasn’t all that interested in what had happened to me. No questions about my life in America – no questions even about my mother who had just died the previous week. The only question he really had was “what is your salary?” -- and after I told him (I hide nothing) – he then told me all about himself – his career, his father, and especially his daughter – his first and only daughter – whose conception had sent us in different directions all those years ago. And the more he talked – the more I doubted – that even if we had married 30 years ago – we would still be together.

I asked him about his mother (also an attorney) , and he told me that she is 86 years old now, still very independent, and living with a maid.

He was now on wife #3 – and the pride of life was his tall, athletic daughter – who had been a professional volleyball player and was now living in America. His proudest moment had been standing on the Golden Gate Bridge with her in San Francisco –and realizing that both of them had finally “made it”.

After graduating from law school, he was a professor for several years. before finally opening his own practice. He assured me that he was very good at courtroom advocacy – and he had won many cases – but he had lost many too – because, as he put it, he refused to pay off any judges. Was he really exceptionally honest – or was he only making excuses – I really couldn’t tell.

He also told me that he had great plans to write a novel. He had always been a good writer – that’s how I fell in love with him – indeed, since we hardly ever got to see each other back when we worked in the countryside – all that I really saw were his wonderful, imaginative letters. He hadn’t actually begun to write this great, new novel yet – but he assured me that it would win a Nobel prize and be turned into a popular movie. But honestly – I have my doubts about all this, too.

And he told me – that had developed some special skill -- that no matter what he does, he can do it well.

He also told me more about his father – who had been on track to becoming a very high official – when he was black-listed and sent to live in a remote, western province. That’s why his mother had to divorce his father – and ended up raising her son by herself. In the seventies -- his father was finally reprieved - and now is retired, enjoying what life he has left.

During the 2-3 hour meeting, his cell phone rang off the hook. One time he got up walked away to talk with the caller, who turned out to be his mother. Finally, as we were about to leave, his phone rang again, we walked to his car. I told him that my sister’s apartment was about 5 minutes away and I did not need a ride. I said goodbye – as he was still holding his cell phone, and waving back at me.

So … I’m not sure how much I want to see him again – he seems like such a different person.

But he’s been organizing a reunion among all the kids who went up to that northern farm 40 years ago – and maybe I’ll join them all when it finally happens. So much has happened to all of us – and our country – since those sad and difficult years.

Part Thirty Six

2008-03-06T10:52:00.000-08:00

With mom’s recent death,
I’ve been thinking more about her early life in Hebei province,
in the village of 安国市 (pinyin: Ānguó Shì ),
not far from the city of Baoding,
about 140 km southwest of Beijing.
(and coincidentally, the city
where my father went to school)

The color of dirt in that area is light yellow. When I first visited the family home, I remember it had mud brick walls, a dirt floor, and the windows were mounted with rice paper instead of glass. It was a summer, some of the paper was torn, and there were millions of flies buzzing around the windows. My great grandma was 95 at that time, and it was the same place where many generations of the family had lived. Water was fetched from a nearby well and then stored in a huge pottery jar by the kitchen. There was a wind box next to the stove, and you had to pull it back and forth whenever you put twigs or tree branches into the stove. ( I thought it was a lot of fun to do -- but after a little while my arm got very tired.) In my uncle’s bed room, there was a loom. Uncle told me that my grandma and mom used it everyday when they lived here. It was still being used by my aunt and cousins (this was 1967). I tried my hand –but it was not so easy -- you had to coordinate both hands and feet.

I also joined my cousins working in the cotton fields -- picking up the fluffy, white cotton from the cotton plants. It was a lot of fun, but at the end of the day, I realized how a little cotton I had picked compared with the other girls. The village credited you according to the weight of cotton. My bucket looked full but it weighed almost nothing. Later, my cousins showed me how they packed their buckets very tightly. They made fun of me as a city girl who would never be as fast as they were.

My country relatives were all fascinated by my Beijing accent, which they associated with singers from the the Beijing Opera. Most of them had never been to the great city, and I felt like a foreigner among them. I was 14 years old, and this was my first visit to the countryside. Growing up in the city, I could not imagine what a hard life my uncle, aunt, and cousins must have had. My uncle spent all day along working in the fields, while aunt stayed at home cooking all the family meals. Cooking was no easy matter, since you constantly had to feed the stove while pushing the wind box to keep the fire going. She also had to grind the grain and carry the water from the nearby well, as well as gathering and preparing food for the family pigs. It was a hard life indeed.

Mom had left this village back in the ‘40’s, but she still had some of her village accent until she died. Since that time, she only went back to the village twice – first, when she gave birth to my older brother, and then a second trip with my younger sister in the early 1960’s (this was when my sister caught the skin disease that kept her out of school for a while)

It’s not an especially wealthy area –but it’s not as remote and desperately poor as the villages to which city folk were sent during the cultural revolution, and my grandfather’s family was prosperous, at least by local standards. They did not have enough to be called landlords – but just enough to keep a few hired hands.

My grandmother had married the oldest of 5 sons – so this was a large family – and a lot was expected of her. She cooked for the entire family, and, of course, was expected to give birth to boys.

The family back then consisted of Mom’s great-grandmother; both her grandparents – and their family of 5 sons and 2 daughters (the youngest daughter died young)

The first son was Mom’s father. The second son became teacher and moved to Beijing . His first wife died, and later he married a Manchu woman who caused much strife with his step daughters. The third son remained in the village as a farmer. The fourth son went to college in Beijing, and became a high official. He divorced his country wife, and remarried a high official in Beijing. The fifth son died in the war.

Mom was the first child (born in 1919) of her generation – and there would have been serious trouble if grandmother had kept on having girls – like the women who had married her husband’s brothers.

The first two children of the second-brother’s wife were both girls – and one night, as they were sleeping on the kang, the baby girl was shoved up against the wall and smothered. In the morning, they found her dead. The baby’s grandmother gave the appropriate expressions of anger and sorrow --- but everyone knew it was not an accident – and the same thing happened again when another one of the wives had given birth to two daughters instead of sons.

But fortunately – Grandmother’s next child was a boy – and all her remaining children were boys – giving her three boys and one girl (almost the ideal Chinese family of 5 boys and 2 girls).

As told earlier – Mom’s father – too ill to work – had died when Mom was 15 ---so Grandmother and all her children were considered something of a burden to the rest of the family. They got fed last when food was put on the table, and if noodles were ever added to the vegetables, they never saw them.

With her father gone, and her mother working hard in the kitchen all day, Mom had to care for her infant brothers as soon as each was born – and had to provide her share of the family income. She was trained to spin yarn and weave cloth as soon as she could learn– and became quite skillful at an age when American children would be entering elementary school. She didn’t spend a lot of time in school – but everyone in the family was at least given the basics of literacy. She was a hardworking and serious little girl.

And then the Japanese came – followed by the civil wars that would embroil the country for the next 15 years, the years of her adolescence and young adulthood.

It seems as if every Chinese family has its stories of Japanese atrocities – and ours was no different.

As Japanese soldiers were approaching mom’s village, everyone fled to more remote areas – but Mom’s grandmother was too old and feeble to join them. She was 73 years old by then, and as family matriarch, had not been working the fields for a long time. What possible interest could young Japanese soldiers have with such a feeble old woman ? And yet – attack her they did -- shoving a wooden stick up her crotch and twisting it to torture her. Three days later, she died.

A group of soldiers also caught my mom and some other girls hiding in a barn – but this time the outcome was quite different.

One of the soldiers unpacked a small device that Mom recognized as a camera – and then told the girls to line up against the wall and smile as he took their pictures. Mom recognized the camera, and secretly told her cousins to close their eyes. Nobody got hurt – but I don’t think very good photographs got taken either.

After the Japanese had left, the civil wars began, and all the young males got recruited by one army or another. One of the Mom’s younger uncles (the 4th son of her grandparents) joined the staff of a top general in the PLA – and eventually he would rise to a high position in the financial ministry of the People’s Republic. (level 7 – where the first 13 levels were all considered to be “high officials”)

When land reform came to the village in 1947, this uncle tried, but failed to use his influence to protect the family – which although not rich – at least had some small property that could be taken away from them. Grandma’s mother-in-law was beaten and tortured to reveal where she had buried her wealth – even though there wasn’t any. Grandma was spared this abuse, however, because everyone knew she had a hard life living in that family without a husband.

After the revolution, a movie director, who had grown up in the village, made a propaganda film about bad officials who try to help their families instead of the revolution– and , though not identified by name, everyone in the village knew that it was the story of my mother’s fourth uncle.

Part Thirty Five

2008-02-24T09:51:00.000-08:00

Requiem for my mother.

Most of the major events in my story
happened many years, even decades ago,
but recently, our mother just died,
and what could feel more important than that ?

I suppose there had been a few premonitions.

When I visited last Spring, she told me that I would probably never see her again. I didn’t believe it, because she was in good health and as active as ever. And then there was the dream she had described to her maid earlier in the year. In that dream she saw my father and many other people who were no longer living.

On December 11th , I got the first text-message. It was from my youngest niece. “Grandma is sick, dad is at her apartment, and you should call my mother.” But it was so late at night, I thought I'd wait until the next day. But by the end of the next day, I had forgotten all about it.

Two days later, I got text messages from two different nieces -- and then I knew something really serious was going on. So I phoned my sister right away , and she told me to come to Beijing as soon as possible.

24 hours later I was in the Beijing hospital -- and how I got there so fast is a story in itself.

First -- we had to find a ticket -- and my husband and my boss finally found one for me on a Korean airline that was leaving Chicago at 1 am the very next morning. That was lucky -- because it was the only seat available on the plane -- it was very reasonably priced -- and the service on that airline is great -- and, shall we say -- colorful ? (the stewardesses wear funny tri-corner hats with a white feather in back). I also had to get a visa on very short notice -- so we raced downtown, and got an emergency visa in a matter of hours. Then -- I even managed to avoid the long layover in Seoul by trading my ticket there for an earlier flight to Beijing. The universe was definitely cooperating with me that day ! Even when I got Beijing -- and didn't have cash to buy a phonecard -- a passerby let me use his cellphone -- and soon my brother-in-law was picking me up at the airport. (he's not retired - but he's been a policeman so long - he pretty much gets to spend his day however he wishes)

So there I was -- the next morning after I got the call -- standing at the foot of my mother's hospital bed.

She looked terrible, her swollen face and labored breathing made me so sad, I was trying to hold back my tears, but how could I? I cleared my throat quietly, and tried my best to talk without crying out.

She knew I was there - but with the oxygen mask on her face, she couldn't speak to any of us – just mumblings that none of us could understand.

She was still alive - hooked up with all kinds of tubes -- and a monitor was hung above her bed. My sister and brothers were all there. They briefly described her condition, and showed me how to read the monitor. The blood-oxygen number up on the screen was not looking good.

Everything had gone down hill so quickly. At first, she had a low fever, My sister and brother-in-law took her to a hospital to have it checked out, and they dismissed her with some medication. But over the next couple of days, the fever would not go down – so my brother-in-law found this hospital through a physician whom he knew. She was admitted immediately to the emergency ward, and from there, her condition continued to get worse.

(and by the way – this was the first time Mom had been admitted to a hospital in 40 years)

The whole family was there -- and we had a consultation with our doctor friend -- who he told us that the chance of her recovery was zero.

Maybe this is a good time to describe care in the Chinese medical system – because it’s quite different from America – even in this special hospital that my sister’s husband got us into.

Everything is ala carte – so hospital staff solicits family approval for every procedure and medication. That’s because the family will have to pay for them – on a long itemized bill that is presented every other day. (insurance, if there is any, gets paid later to the patient) The cashier only accepts cash – and if the bill isn’t paid – the patient has to leave – and indeed – the patient can’t even get in until a deposit has been paid.

There’s no such thing as a “living will” – the extent of care is completely up to the family – so, for example, we were asked whether we wanted to put a breathing tube down my mother’s throat to extend her life a few more days. It’s not that we couldn’t afford it – and we would do EVERYTHING possible in the hope for a “miracle” to pull her through. But – we had done this with our father – it was very painful – and what had those few extra days of misery been worth to him ? We even asked the doctor “would you do this if she were your mother?” – and he said “off the record…. No”. So --- we opted out of this procedure.

(actually -- when she was still conscious at the beginning, Mom heard the doctor talking with us about this procedure, and she waved her hand to reject it – but her wish would not have counted had we wanted to go ahead with it)

We were also queried about the use of each expensive (and maybe useless) medication – and in every case – we agreed to it. But the curious thing was – in some cases – it was medication which the hospital did not stock

One medication was made from human blood, so it was in very short supply. Fortunately, my sister-in-law knew someone who knew someone – and the back-door connection served to locate a vendor and have it express mailed overnight to the hospital.

So the family must make the decisions – pay the daily expenses – locate some medications – and also is expected to provide some of the care. We stayed with mom 24/7 --- all of us during the day – and one of us all through the night – and we hired her maid to be there as well.

We not only had to take care of mom’s cleaning and diaper changing, but we also had to monitor her IV drip. We informed the nurses whenever the IV had ran out and sometimes had to adjust the intervals of the drips. Mom’s maid had never even been to grade school or learned to read and write, and I was not too happy about relying on her to make technical adjustments – but what could I do ? I could not change the situation.

And if a job were too unpleasant for the nurses – we were expected to do it – like placing an anal suppository or obtaining urine samples. I was so angry when the nurse wouldn’t even take the urine sample that I had collected –but told me to follow her down the hall until we reached the samples rack, where she pointed to the receptacle where I should leave it (so she wouldn’t have to touch it) I was so shocked and angry – but what could I do ? Mom was still under her care.

And so the family – with the occasional help of hospital staff – cared for mother during the last week of her life – carefully watching the numbers on the monitor above her bed – as they recorded her recovery or decline.

The second night I was in Beijing, I stayed the entire night with her at the hospital. Every two hours I fed her -- either freshly squeezed orange juice, milk, or water -- or a special drink that my niece brought on the recommendation of the doctor. Feeding was difficult – since we had to lift the Oxygen mask and let her suck through a straw. But I could tell she was really longing for food –and was using all her strength. She looked so weak -- but her desire to live was so strong.

I do not remember the last time I had hugged her.

Maybe I was 12 or 13 years old, as I was returning from school in the middle of winter. My cheeks were red from the cold , and my younger sister and I took turns letting mom warm our little hands under her arm pits, and our faces on her chest. That was the closest contact I ever remembered. We Chinese (especially my family ) simply do not hug each other.

Now, as I was at her side, -- I saw her hands trembling -- sometimes reaching out, as if she were looking for something. That’s when I would hold that hand -- so soft and tender – with beautiful long fingers (she had done a lot weaving with those hands back when she was a child) .

Mom was in high fever the entire day and night I was there – and I tried cooling her down a bit by massaging her legs with my cooler hands. Had I ever done this before ? I can’t remember.
I changed her and cleaned her, and each time, we tried to turn her body to the side, you could tell that she was in a lot of pain.

The 4th night, my second brother volunteered to be at hospital with his wife, even though it was my older sister’s turn – while I was sleeping at my younger sister’s apartment.

That’s when our brother at the hospital called us at 5 am to tell us that the end was near. The numbers on the monitor were dropping off the chart.

How can I ever forget entering that hospital room –and looking up at the life-signs monitor – which now had gone blank. I can’t remember how my siblings reacted – but I couldn’t even stand up – and someone helped me to a chair in a small adjoining room where I could weep.

Now it was time for the family to perform its final function – to dress our mother for the next world. We sent for her special funeral clothes -- which she had been preparing for several months.

She had chosen the hat, the shoes, and the gown – without buttons -- of black silk – beneath a pattern of a single, red Chinese character (the one that stands for “happiness-longevity”), That’s how she would be dressed for the visitation - and her traditional trip into the next world -- lying beneath a sheet of silver cloth, and above one of gold. Money is very important for this journey - and her ankles were supported by a special cushion that looked very much like a sack of gold cash.

The hospital staff offered to dress her (for a small additional charge) – but my second brother declared “we will dress our mother” – and so we did. Her body was still warm.

One last thing that’s different about Chinese hospitals – is that they also serve as funeral homes – i.e. there is no funeral industry in the People’s Republic. Bodies are sent to the hospital morgue – where they are kept in a large cooler until moved out into a small room where receptions are held continuously throughout the day – in one-hour increments. It’s customary to wait for 3-5-or 7 days before the reception – and we chose 5 days – to give us enough to time to notify the 50 or so people who would be attending the wake.

My younger brother-in-law turns out to be an excellent calligrapher – and he wrote the names of each guest on a banner – all of the banners being then attached to a large floral wreath. The body was prepared for display – the face looked very peaceful -- and when the hour was over, we drove in a long procession, the fifteen miles out to the crematorium on the west side of Beijing. (there’s no such thing as burial any more – that’s the law)

Under the advice of one of our rural cousins –we brought along all my mother’s favorite clothing (what she would want to wear in her next life) – and it was all burned – along with strings of phony-money -- in a separate furnace at the facility. (I thought I would take a piece of phony cash home as a memento – but then thought better of it).

Eventually – the ashes would be destined for a place next to our father in a special mausoleum dedicated to high officials – but that niche could not be unsealed and resealed until the temperature had risen several degrees above freezing.

And so – our mother’s life was over.

A new job had to be found for her maid – and she was no ordinary maid. Mother had been a difficult person in her final years – and this was the only maid who was willing – and was invited – to stay. Our well-connected brother-in-law found her a position with a wealthy family that needed three maids to begin working the following month. In the meantime, she was put up in a big hotel – but in the meantime – she had second thoughts about working with two other maids – and she walked out, never to be heard from again.

And a place had to be found for our mother’s beloved Pekinese (the one who had wept when mother told him that she was leaving)

My younger sister is the animal lover – so she adopted the little fellow – but problems soon followed. To begin with – the animal was shedding its long hair all over the apartment – so my sister had him shaved at a pet salon. Now the poor creature only had hair left on his neck – so he looked like a lion with a mane. Then – he got into trouble with my sister’s cat – many fights ensued – many messes were made – and my mother’s sad prediction eventually came true: “when I am gone, there will be nobody left to take care of you”

And so it was – the favorite pet was given away to owners unknown.

It’s a sad ending – but what ending isn’t ?

Part Thirty Four

2008-02-15T05:55:00.000-08:00

July 18th, 1980.

The birth of my first niece
was a major event in our family

On that day , we all crammed into father’s car to go to the hospital. Well actually – it wasn’t really all of us – only my parents and me could fit – and it wasn’t really my father’s car – it belonged to the university of which my father was vice-president – so it was driven by a professional driver – and it should only have been used for official business ( except for special occasions like this one !)

Due to the Cultural Revolution, all of our marriages had been delayed – and my older sister was already 30 year old when this first child was finally born. All of us were so anxious and excited to see her and take her home. I cannot imagine how my parents must have felt. They must have been so patient – waiting for this day.

We picked up the new mother and daughter at the hospital and drove them to my parents’ apartment. .

It was a very hot day in mid-July – but we had to keep the windows rolled up in accordance with a strange Chinese custom that requires new mothers to be kept indoors – with windows shuttered – for 30 days after giving birth. Very strange – and very uncomfortable for all concerned.

My older sister, had been very large with child, but my first niece only weighed 5 pounds – and as soon as we got home – we put this precious treasure in the middle of the bed for all the family to admire. She really was soooo beautiful ! (but I do have to mention that her head was a bit longer than normal and there was a big red dent on the right corner. My sister told us that she had a hard time with the delivery, and the hospital used a sucking device to get the baby out. Later on the dent disappeared -- and the long head was rounded up on its own)

Soon she impressed us all with a great sneeze. My oldest brother had remained quiet throughout the event – but finally he spoke the word that all of us were thinking: “Success”

Soon, she’d be given two names. My father thought she was so pure, he named her after the Chinese word for “ice” (Bing Bing –which we’ve always used at home) – while her other grandfather gave her a more formal name that meant “getting ahead” (Chao – which was used at school)

She was a very good baby. She ate – she slept -- she quickly gained a few pounds – and she liked to be around people, smiling at everyone who was present. She could recognize all kinds of facial expression, so if you smiled at her, she would smile right back, but if you showed her a sad face, she was ready to cry. She loved to be held and loved to be touched – and she loved to play seek and hide games with you over her mom’s shoulder as early as 2 months old.

We all loved her dearly, and I could not wait ‘til the weekend to see her in grandma’s apartment. Later, we learned that she did not sleep like other babies. Most babies sleep 20 hours a day, but Bing Bing slept only 10 -- , so the rest of the time she expected us to entertain her.

Her mother had trouble putting her to sleep, but I was the one who figured out a way to do it – and here’s how it happened:

She loved to be held – so I carried her from room to room – and noticed that whenever there was a loud noise, she would hold me ever more tightly. One day I discovered that she was really afraid of tractor noise, so when she refused to sleep , I would tell her quietly that “the tractor is coming”. Then, she would bury herself in my arms, and a few minutes later, was sound asleep. (should I feel guilty about pulling this trick on her ? Is she still afraid of tractors?).

Since my sister had to return to her job in the local police station, grandma was asked to do the babysitting – which she consented to do – at least for the first several months. We didn’t know anyone who used a crib, so baby was kept on the bed. That worked for a while – until she learned how to crawl - but eventually she fell off and raised a great bump on her head – which was a subject of much concern for everyone in the family.

The problem was that none of us – even grandma – had ever spent that much time with infants (we had all be raised by nannies/wet nurses or eventually boarding schools.

Feeding became a problem because my sister fed her too much – figuring that if she grew fast with 1 tablespoon of nutritional supplement, she would grow even faster with four – until eventually the child refused to take any food at all, and had to be fed by putting a bottle in her mouth whenever she was sleeping.

My sister still feels responsible whenever Bing Bing has a stomach ache, and jokes about her being the family’s guinea pig in our experiment in child raising.

But what we lacked in knowledge – we made up for in love and enthusiasm – and all of us would gather every week – put baby in the center of the room – and enjoy her company. None of us had ever gotten that much attention when we were that small ! She was not only the first child for her parents –she was the first grandchild for my parents – and the only child of the only son of her father’s grandparents.

And … she was the first child in our family to grow up with color television – which fascinated her. At first – in the early eighties – it was only a few hours every night – but soon we had a full schedule of programming – including commercials (though nothing like commercials on American television. When I first came to America, the commercials were my favorite part of television)

Developmentally – she was ahead of her age – in beginning to talk (at six months) and to walk ( at nine months) – and need I say, that whenever we took her out in public, people would comment on her beauty and her smile. She was a very good and very happy baby!

At the age of two, she entered her first pre-school, and I remember the time I went by bus to pick her up and take her home for the weekend.

I arrived during lunch – and there she was, happily giving her food away to whomever would take it. (I guess she still didn’t have much of an appetite). ) She was always dressed very nicely, and if my sister could not find anything pretty enough from the department store, she started sewing the clothes herself.

But perhaps all of this attention and adoration made her just a little bit lazy – she was a good student, she just wasn’t driven to excel in school the way that our generation had been.

So her grades were not tops – and when it came time to take the examinations that would qualify her for placement at the next level of education, there was a great deal of anxiety.

Every day, before her university entrance exam, her mother would wake her up at five in the morning to study with her –and this went on for months until the examination was taken.

And she had some help from grandpa, too --- who began to teach her calligraphy at the age of 3 – so she was well prepared for later schooling and won some major competitions. (unfortunately, she has not continued to practice –and I hope she picks it up again when she gets older)

She always passed her examinations – but only by the skin of her teeth – so back-door, family connections were usually needed to get into the best schools.

She had a very good friend whom she had first met in grade school – and after college, her friend’s Mom got them both into a program in England.

Concerning boyfriends – well --- she has been very picky. Who could ever be good enough for her ? She would say “this one looks like a monkey” --- etc.

Big changes can happen quickly in a young person’s life – but as of this writing, she is back in Beijing, living at home, though she does have own apartment, and using her degree in event management to work on the preparations for the Beijing Olympics.

She is a smart, good-hearted girl – she has no enemies, she is a friend to everyone she knows and I think she is going to have a good life.

Part Thirty three

2008-02-07T05:20:00.000-08:00

As the youngest child, my younger sister
had a special place in our mother’s heart,
and that special relationship continued
right up until the end.

Like the other girls in our family , she excelled in school, both in academics and athletics. Her specialty was the vaulting horse, and even though she was two years younger than I, she could vault just as high.

When the family moved to the Friendship Hotel complex in the early 1965, both of us went to the same primary school, so we played together a lot – and believe me, she was very competitive.

One game we played together was called “catch”: one girl would sit on the top of the double bars, and one girl was on the ground trying to catch her. As soon as she was tagged, the players would change positions – and both my sister and I were very quick and hard to catch. (which might explain why we wore our pants out so quickly). The other game was jumping the elastic rope – so that our shoes got worn out very fast too, especially the soles, so mom had to mend them all the time.

Once in a while we had a fight, mainly quarrels. One time, I had something in my hand and it touched my sister’s face. I felt very bad when I saw the red marks it left, and I was scared to see her crying. Mom scolded me and said that I had a cold heart – but that was not true. It really was just an accident.

Like me, she was sent to a boarding school at a very early age (two)

She was in a different class, but we saw each other all the time in the courtyard or hall way. Every Saturday afternoon, a bus picked us up and dropped us off at the gate of our father’s work unit, and then dad would take us home. One time dad was so busy at work, he forgot all about us. We waited and waited but he never came. Since it would soon be dark – I made the decision to follow a neighbor who had come to take his son home, (the neighbor didn’t know us, and he didn’t notice us following him either). We walked behind him until we reached our house – which was a quite a distance for a 3 and 5 years old -- plus we had to cross a major street. When mom saw us without dad, she was scared -- but she was proud as well and gave me a lot of credit for that brave and quick thinking

When the rest of her class advanced to grade school, she was kept out of school by an illness she picked up when my mother had taken her to the countryside to visit her grandmother. When she recovered, it was too late to join her classmates, so she went to a day school close to home, and lived at home thereafter. (I had always wondered why I was the only child who went to boarding school from age 2 to 11 --- and early last year, Mom told me about my sister’s illness)

She also lived at home with mother all through the cultural revolution – although that home moved from Beijing to a small village in Henan province.

Their village was very poor – and there weren’t even enough warm clothes to go around in the winter – so people had to take turns going outside. There was also barely enough food – so the farmers ate three meals of steaming hot cornmeal porridge every day – just to fill their stomachs. (which led, unfortunately, to high incidence of throat cancer).

While there, my sister attended a rural school, where she scored top marks – and even though her father was in prison, she participated in all the school activities. She even got to play a role in a revolutionary opera.

Upon graduation, she was given a job as gardener in the Fragrant Hills recreational park, just outside of Beijing.

Being two years younger than me, she had always been a bit shorter and smaller than me -- but after she became a gardener, she got really strong – I suppose from carrying all those heavy pots up and down the hills in the park. She also grew to be an inch taller than I am – and soon people thought that I was the younger sister – since she had grown into a young adult much earlier.

That was where her hard work and good attitude got her nominated to become a member of the Communist party – and although she was the youngest sibling, she was the first to join the party.

As told earlier, that was also where she caught the eye of a young officer who began dating her for the next five years. But for reasons never explained, she eventually broke off that relationship, and ended up being matched with a co-worker of my older sister’s husband, and they would move to Beijing and start a family.

She got a job working in the offices of the Beijing public school administration and then began attending night school to get her college degree. After that, she got one promotion after another, and eventually rose to become director of the eastern district, overseeing all the high schools in that area.

Unlike me, my sister is not a trouble-maker ! She knows how to say the right things and work her way up in a bureaucracy to a higher position than any of our other siblings have ever achieved. She writes very well, and just like traditional scholar-officials – she has beautiful hand writing. She gets along with everyone, but still she stands up strong for her own opinions and beliefs.

Her husband’s father held a high position in the steel industry – and this gave her husband many opportunities as the Chinese economy began to expand. He was the one, for example, who managed to give my older brother the opportunity to purchase a factory for the window manufacturing business that he and his partners began.

He’s had many business projects over the years – making, and also spending, a lot of money. More recently, he’s been managing the sale of properties in a shopping mall in Tienjin – so he lives in that city and commutes back to Beijing on the weekends in his BMW.

They have been a very successful, post-Mao Chinese family.

Over the past 10 years, my sister has done a lot of official traveling outside the country.. One time, she joined a delegation sent to visit the public schools of Taiwan – and she has been the only one in our family to visit our uncle who lives there. Her job has also sent her on several trips to Europe and various neighboring countries.

And remember the cat she tried to keep while living with our mother in the countryside ? Ever since she was very young – she is the one who loves animals – while I am the one who’s afraid of them. Now she has a huge tank of very fancy tropical fish that she cares for every day – while still attending to various cats and dogs

But although her life has been a good one, it has not been especially easy for their only child, who like many other children of that generation, has had a hard time finding a direction for her life, even though her parents could afford to send her to schools all over the world.

But my sister never gave up on her – and now it seems her daughter has finally gotten back on track -- working in a high school, and going back to evening school to get a higher degree.

Finally, I have to mention all the time my sister spent with our mother – visiting her almost every day during her lunch hour – since her office was only five minutes from Mom’s apartment All of us are very grateful for that – especially me, who lives so far away

I am very proud of my sister.

Part Thirty Two

2007-12-06T06:11:00.001-08:00

My older sister suffered a near-disaster as very small child,
but after that, she has lived as “normal” a life
as anyone from our generation could expect.

She was just beginning to walk when she knocked over a large pot of hot water and nearly got boiled alive ! Well – of course – that’s an exaggeration – but when her hysterical mother immediately yanked her up off the floor, mother’s hands left a permanent mark on the skin beneath baby’s arms – which she still shows to this day.

My sister was good in school and had a real talent for both writing and drawing. Her essays were often recognized as exemplary, and her pencil drawings of elegant ladies were recognized by the official art critic of our family, our father, who promised to send them somewhere for publication (though I fear that never happened)

She was also a top athlete in field sports like running and jumping. Recruiters from Beijing’s special university for athletics asked our parents if they would consent to her enrollment , but my mother was firmly opposed.. She wanted her children to be well educated, not just professional athletes.

Since I was three years younger, and sent away to boarding school, I didn’t really get to spend much time with my sister – but when she was going out with her friends, she sometimes took her little sister along – especially because I was always the bold one – the one who would speak up and stick her neck out.

I can remember that when I was 7 or 8 years old, swimming got very popular after Mao swam the Yangtze. There was a small swimming pool in our complex, so we all started learning how to swim that summe. It took me 2 or 3 afternoons to figure it out, but it took my poor sister forever, because she was too timid to bury her head under water, and if a little water splashed on her face, she would immediately stand up in the shallow pool. (Eventually she did learn how to swim, but she never put her head under water until today.)

I also remember the time when mother sent the two of us out to gather elm leaves during the famine years of the late fifties

(We were among the lucky few who never went hungry – but there were some changes in our diet. At my boarding school, we got
dried yams for lunch or dinner instead of steamed bread – and actually, we liked the dried yams better because they were chewy and sweet. I once overheard our teachers say that we children knew nothing about hunger or good food.)

Mom believed that we needed green pigment in our diet, and since there was a shortage of green vegetables during the famine, she asked us to pick up some elm tree leaves to augment the 2-3 ounces of vegetables which each of us were rationed every day.

The elm bushes were growing on the roof of a bomb shelter that had been built in the foreign embassy district back in the thirties. My sister was a little shy or embarrassed about gathering leaves in a strange neighborhood, so I took the initiative.

That evening mom made steamed elm leaves with corn meal in garlic sauce, and I loved it. It was so delicious, I even offered to pick more elm leaves, but we never went back.

Things were getting better towards the end of 1962 more and more food and vegetables were showing up in the market without a need for coupons – and it was our job, by sister and I, to wait in the line for hours to get what we wanted. My sister usually pushed me forward in the line to do the ordering – but I was only 9 years old back then, and I often made mistakes in certain vegetables, like confusing green onions with leeks.

When we went to the meat market, sister always asked me to tell the shop assistant that what kind of meat we wanted. But most of the time there was no choice, the butcher just cut whatever he had, and we always ended up with a very unsatisfactory piece of fat. So sometimes we would just go back to the end of the line , hoping that next time we might get something leaner. This happened to us all the time, and sometimes we spent all day in the market, since there was nothing else to do anyway.

The two of us were especially busy in the days before Chinese New Year, since it’s bad luck to prepare food on the holiday itself.
(If you do work on the holiday -- that means you will have to work hard for the rest of the year.)

During the weekends, when my sister was old enough and my father had been sent to prison, she would help mom wash the clothes by hand on a wooden washing board, and sometimes I helped her to rinse or hang them outside our apartment. There were 6 of us at that time, so there was always a huge pile, and she spent the entire morning washing them. (Many years later, Mom noticed that she had large arms because, she said, of her years spent washing. Whether or not that was true, she still did not like her usually large arms.)

My old sister did a lot of cooking at that time, too. (this was the year when all the schools had been closed) She had learned some new recipes from her classmates or friends, and she would try them out. Roasting peppers over the fire was one of them, and I thought it was very strange, but now I have been using that method all the time. Another dish was home made mayonnaise, using raw egg yolk whipped with oil until it became thick and creamy. That was very strange in our Chinese cuisine, but she often tried unfamiliar dishes that mom had never cooked for us.

Years later, she also began to learn sewing. Mom called her a very daring “tailor”, since it would not take her a long time to cut the fabrics, but a lot of time to fit together the pieces whose measurements had been wrong. She really learned how to sew by making mistakes, and she used up a lot of old fabrics saved by my grandmother and mom. She even learned how to make shoes, but the shoes she made looked kind of strange look, and I felt embarrassed to wear them.

And did I mention that my sister had a very sensitive nose and aversion to anything unclean. If she came across a spit or anything unpleasant on the ground, she always jumped away and would cover her nose and eyes to avoid it. Imagine her horror when she had to live in the countryside, where animal droppings were everywhere. It took her a long time to get used to it, and maybe she never did.

I’ve already told you about her brief career as a red guard – how she threw a pebble at her teacher – how she soon regretted it – how she traveled around the country with the other red guards –and how she joined her school in being sent to small, impoverished village in western China, out by the silk road.

As the Cultural Revolution was winding down she was sent to the nearby city of Da Tong , a famous stop on the Silk Road, and adjacent to the “Caves of Thousand Buddhas”. But she wasn’t there to study art history – she got a job with the local police department, thanks to our father’s connections. Since she was now eligible to get married, she began dating – and her second boyfriend was the man she married – a fellow student from Beijing who was also the child of a high ranking official. She managed to swap jobs with a police official in Beijing, so soon both she and her fiancé, who also worked in the police department, were able to return to Beijing.

Her husband was a tall ( 6’4”), wonderful guy. He has a very big heart, helps everyone he knows, and our family has benefited a lot from him over the years. I think my sister is very lucky to marry him.

When she was 30, she gave a birth to my lovely niece. My sister had a problem handling diapers (and Mom always laughed at her about it) but she was very proud of her beautiful and adorable girl.
Later, I learned that she kept a diary about her daughter for many years, and after my niece had learned how to write, she kept it going for a while too. I do not know when they stopped it.

One day, my niece did not come home after school, and my sister went crazy. She finally found her later that evening in her classmate’s home, and she yelled at her daughter for the first time. My neice was not used to such scary treatment, and after she went to sleep that night, she cried for grandma’s help while she was dreaming, waking my sister in the other room. My sister felt so guilty that she began crying too, and even I cried at the other end of the phone line when my mom told me the story.

As party members, both she and her husband rose up through the ranks to become mid-level officials and retire at the mandatory age of 55. Or, actually, she retired four years later, since her writing skills had made her indispensable to the boss, and he had begged her to stay.

Now she spends her time reading visiting with her friends, one of whom I remember from all the way back when they were school children. She remains close to all our family – visiting our mother once and week and chatting with me for hours on the telephone.

Part Thirty One

2007-11-22T13:01:00.001-08:00

All of the kids in my family were hard hit
by the events of 1966-1976,
but my second brother seems to have been hit the hardest,
because he, among all five of us,
had shown the most promise as a child.

He was mom and grandma’s favorite child. He was not only smart but handsome, too.

Mom was very proud of him, and when I was growing up, I was kind of jealous , because I felt like the least favorite child in the family, even though mom always told us that her five fingers were the same length, she did not favor any child over another.

My second brother had that extra spark of intelligence that drew everyone’s attention – and I admit – that as I began to think about boys – he was the kind of boy who attracted me the most –not because he was athletic or his face was wide or narrow – but because he was so bright.

He and our oldest brother shared a room – and they collaborated on everything – especially their gadgetry and mechanical projects. (they even tried to make a television set, but I’m not sure that they were successful) The surface of their desk was completely covered with junk, tools, springs, wires, screws, tubes etc. My mother was forbidden to enter their room and disturb it

Once in a while I slipped into their room, and asked them questions, and sometimes they gave me answers, but most of the time they either ignored me or drove me out. My oldest brother was the one who would neatly cut all the wires and make all the connections – but my second brother was the one who designed it.

He was accepted into the top high school in Beijing (Number 4 boys school – which is still one of the best, but no longer just for boys) – and even among those top students, he was at the top of his class. When the cultural revolution began, he wore the red armband like everyone else, but rather than attacking landlords or other class enemies, he and his comrades attacked the library – and took a bunch of foreign books home to read.

He was a good story teller. After he read an exciting book, say, like “The Adventures of Sherlock Homes” , he would begin to tell us the stories, and he would make it so dramatic, soon we were screaming and begging him to stop. In 1966, all the schools were closed, but we had plenty of interesting novels to read at home, thanks to my brother. Later mom ordered him to return all the “stolen” books, but he claimed that it had been his friends who had taken them, so eventually he handed the books over to them.

Of course, after our father was denounced as a state criminal, my brother’s career as a red guard was over – and as the son of a “black family”, he would have been shunned by other students when they were all sent to the countryside. Revolutionary theory required that students from the best schools be sent to the most
backward areas of the country – so that’s where he went – to a very poor village in a coal mining district, where the villagers lived on the edge of starvation.

This was where he nearly died from liver disease. The following year, when he visited Mom in Henan province, she noticed that he was very think and weak – and he could barely walk or speak. The barefoot doctor in the village helped her to nurse him back to health. But he would continue to have health issues throughout his life.

As the Cultural Revolution ended, he had a chance in 1974 for
higher education at a university in Shan Xi. But when the school started, he was never given notice, and was later told that his position had been taken by the child of a local official. In exchange, he was given the opportunity to attend a school of traditional medicine, but he turned that down, and was never given another opportunity for higher education again.

When he finally got to relocate to a more urban area, he got a job at a power plant in a county near his village, about 600 miles from Beijing. That was where he met his wife, a lab technician who had also come from a high official family.

Both of them worked there until 1992. Their daughter was born in 1982, and when she was 2 and half years old, I convinced my mother to bring her to Beijing. Mom did not like the idea at first, but eventually she agreed, so I set off to Shan Xi to bring her back. She was a beautiful, and well behaved little girl, but even though I was her aunt, she did not know me very well. But after I had stayed with the family a few days, she agreed to go with me. After we left her parents, she never cried even once, but she held very close to me , all the way during that 12-hour trip to Beijing.

She slept most of the night on the train. As soon as she woke up the next morning, she started singing, and she sang surprisingly well. I asked who had taught her the song, and she told me that her mom did. She was holding back tears as she continued to sing, but she never asked to go back to Mom, and I was very relieved.

My intention was to help my brother a bit, because the education for his daughter was much better in Beijing, and she could grow up among her three other cousins. I’m not sure whether I helped him or not, but I do know that this was something of a burden to my parents, especially my Mom. My father ended up taking a lot of care for his granddaughter, and the child slept with grandpa for the first few years. Later, grandpa took her to school, and grandpa took her to saxophone classes after school.

In 1992, my brother finally got to move to Beijing, and the following year he made his first attempt as an entrepreneur, borrowing money from our father to open an electronic repair shop – since he knew how to make radios and every mechanical thing.

But he wasn’t so good at customer service, so the shop closed within a year.

Then he worked for a relative for five years – but he never got a raise in salary and simply could not keep up with inflation to pay for necessities.

This was also the time when he lost his documents of party membership and then neglected to have them renewed

In 1998, our younger sister’s husband got him the opportunity to purchase a small factory. He didn’t have the cash – but he found two partners to put up the money, so the three of them went into business making windows for the skyrocketing building market. My brother did all the product design work – and the business made a good profit the first year. The partners shared their profits three ways – and my brother took home 40,000 Yuan – a tidy sum which he immediately used to purchase an apartment. But then his excessive life-style caught up with him – smoking, drinking, and eating at the good restaurants – he ended up with an attack of gout. He was out of commission for almost six months – and by the time he went back to the factory, his partners had made the unfortunate discovery: they could be quite profitable without him. So the partnership was dissolved (it had never existed on paper) and he was out of a job again.

His next, and possibly his last, entrepreneurial project came four years later.

My older sister, with whom he had been very close, invested her life savings, nearly 200,000 Yuan, with him to begin a restaurant in new residential district that had just been built in Beijing. It was a three-story building, and they hired about 10 people from the countryside to work the kitchen and the tables. This was in March of 2004, and since I had been laid off in April, I took 6 weeeks off to return to Beijing and help them get the business started. Every morning, I would go to the fresh food markets to buy the provisions for the day – then I would train the staff to work the floor and keep the place clean.

I am proud to say that while I was there, we at least managed to break even.

But over the long haul – he just couldn’t overcome his lack of training and experience in the restaurant/hospitality business. My brother would have been a brilliant engineer, product designer, or scientist in a research facility – that was the kind of mind that he had. But managing the petty day-to-day details of a restaurant – putting on a big smile and greeting all the customers – hiring, firing, and training all the staff – that just wasn’t him. The business failed after 6 months – and my sister lost her entire investment.

After that, I’m afraid that my brother’s entrepreneurial dreams were over – and now his main problem was just making ends meet – for unlike his other aging siblings, he didn’t qualify for a retirement pension or hospital coverage from the government, and he still had medical issues. But his wife, and our family, have continued to stand by him. Family loyalty is one feature of old-school Chinese life that still hasn’t disappeared.

But I do worry about him.

Without a pension or other source of income – and with the health issues that accompany his heavy smoking and drinking.... his future looks difficult.

Tianamen Protests

2007-11-14T17:11:00.001-08:00

Coming in 1989, the Tianamen square protest
was something of a postscript to this story,
but since my family is from Beijing,
I thought I’d include my connection to it anyway.

I was living in Chicago at that time, my family had told me about how university students had been organizing and protesting.

On June 4th, an American friend called and told me to turn on the television. That’s where I saw the fire balls, heard the gun shots, and saw people running around and yelling. I could not believe that this was really happening on the streets of Beijing – and when I realized that Chinese soldiers were shooting people with real guns, I was screaming and crying.

I felt so helpless and hopeless about the whole situation, and I called my parents immediately – because they lived so close to all the action, but the phone line was busy, and I could not get through for the rest of that sleepless night.

The next day, I got through and found out my parents and every one else in my family were fine. Mom told me that they had stayed at home, and tried not going out at all. The streets were all empty, and once in while you could hear people shouting or running. Their building was hit by a couple of bullets, since they were very close to the Changan (long peace) street where the soldiers and fighting were. Halfway through our conversation, mom told me that she did not want to say too much about what was happening. I asked why, and she said the line was bugged.

The sister of her son-in-law’s husband had been on the phone with her sister who lived in Australia, and when she started talking about how many people had been shot, an anonymous voice broke into their telephone connection and asked:

“How do you know that ? Did you actually see anyone killed?”

So it wasn’t really a good idea to say anything over the telephone.

And actually, my family was not involved – since this was mostly a demonstration by students – and my generation was already out of school and working (mostly for the government) – while my sibling’s children were still in grade school.

But we did have our opinions – and my two sisters were very outspoken in support of the demonstrators. When my older sister was talking with my uncle, a general, he told her that the students should stop their demonstrations and he supported the military to move in and restore order – to prevent the kind of chaos ensued from the student demonstrations at the beginning of the cultural revolution.

My older sister started defending the students and got very upset with our uncle, which was very unusual for her, since usually she is reserved and respectful of the older generation. Even mom was surprised by my sister’s reaction, and she stepped in to calm things down.

One of my girlfriend’s sisters was on the street that day when the soldiers were shooting people. She was a nurse, and she tried to pull an injured person to safety. But she saw that his head had already been blown open – and she realized that there was nothing she could do to save him.

Being 20,000 miles away, there was even less that I could do, but I did join a group of Chinese expatriates who marched around the Chinese consulate in Chicago chanting “Down with Deng Xiaoping” (which was the only time I’d marched in a public demonstration anywhere, China or America )

Part Thirty

2007-11-06T05:14:00.000-08:00

The oldest brother is a very important person in a Chinese family
– my oldest brother being no exception.

He was born before the liberation of 1949, back when mom and dad still served in the army. The military sent mom back to her village with an allowance, and she had to stay in my uncle’s house. (she could have given a birth in my dad’s village, but she felt more comfortable with her mom nearby.) She was 28.

After the birth, mom took the baby to visit her mother-in-law. It was during the land reform, and since her mother-in-law was from poor family., she got an extra parcel of land for herself and for her grandson.

But like most Chinese wives, Mom never cared for her mother-in-law. She always complained that grandma was not clean. Mom was a very clean person, and she always said that a bathroom and kitchen reflect whether you are a clean person or not

My brother was an unusually large and happy infant, and he provided much entertainment for the extended family in Beijing, including my father’s brother who was then attending a Catholic high school , which had not yet been forced to flee to Hong Kong.

As the first child born, he was also the first to attend school – a school that had not yet been transformed by revolutionary ideology – so like all the other students, he was subject to beatings and physical abuse if he did not behave. One time, his teacher used a needle to prick his arms, and another time he had caused so much trouble, his teacher locked him in a closet and everyone forgot that he was there.

Eventually, the teacher remembered to let him out, but one child was not so lucky, and he died of starvation in the basement. That caused a lot of concern among the parents, and a new policy was formed that forbid the teachers to beat or physically abuse the children.

The rest of my brother’s educational career was not that dramatic. He was not an especially good student – only qualifying for the second-tier of high schools.

His real enthusiasm was for making things – radios, cameras, dark-room equipment, anything mechanical – and he liked to draw things – especially cars. I think the family still has some of his automobile fantasies – cars that have never existed anywhere but in my brother’s mind.

He was very creative and sometimes he could be funny too.

It must have been in 1963 when the daily newspaper published a picture of President Kennedy riding in a convertible and waving to the American people. My brother cut out a picture of himself, and pasted it over Kennedy’s. He showed the picture to us, and told us that he could be the US president someday !

During his school years, he shared a bedroom with his younger brother, and the two were very close – always conspiring on their various projects – until something caused his younger brother to hit him (was he about 12 years old at the time ) This created a great rift between them – and they wouldn’t speak to each other for a full year (a difficult achievement since they shared the same bedroom) But finally my older brother relented and broke the ice, so their collaborations could continue.

Neither of my brothers were bullies – but my oldest brother was always especially nice to his younger sisters. . I remember he used to carry my younger sister on his back when she was just a toddler – and she really enjoyed it. ( they were about 8 years different in age) . Sometimes, I hit my brother to let my anger out, and he always let me. He never hit back, but sometimes, he would say, “do it again, that didn’t hurt at all.” (I always wondered if that were true, because I did use all my strength) He always had such a mild temperament.

He also helped mom with house chores, such as making noodles. In those days, we did not buy ready made noodles, not only because they were a bit more expensive, but also because they were hard to find in the market. My oldest brother made them from scratch. First he used water and wheat flour to make a dough, then, after letting it sit a while, he rolled the dough into a big thick sheet and carefully cutting it into very thick noodles. We had freshly made noodle soup almost every dinner – and even now, I still love noodle soup!

The one thing my brother hated was shopping. During the 3 years we lived at the Friendship Hotel, he never went to the local grocery. Indeed, he did not even know where it was located., and Mom or I did most of the shopping, sometimes having to carry a bag of heavy rice or wheat flower.

After he transferred to a boarding high school, he only came home on the weekend. He did not make a single friend in our huge living complex. During the beginning of the Culture Revolution, after dad was condemned, my younger sister and I were often chased by other mean children who lived in the same complex. But that never happened to my older brother, because nobody recognized him as his father’s son. He had been shy in his early teen, but he was totally withdrawn from social crowds from then on.

The big disaster in my oldest brother’s life was the Cultural Revolution -- which hit just as he had graduated from high school. So instead of going to college, he spent the next ten years in a very damp and dark cave Yes, it was quite literally a cave – dug out by him and his classmates from a hillside near a remote village in the countryside.( and while they were building their “home”, they even dug out a coffin.)

Dirt walls, dirt floor, no heat, not much food, poor nutrition, no health care, and since he came from a “black family” near isolation. (i.e. everyone knew his father was in prison)

One of my best friends’ brothers was sent to the countryside as well, but during the first a few months when he was building his home, a huge log fell off the truck and killed him instantly.
I also once met a man whose son was injured when excavating a cave. A corner of the room had fallen down, hitting him on the head, and blinding him immediately

So I guess you could say that, by comparison, my brother was very lucky.

When he finally could return to the city, he was too old to go to university and prepare for one of the technical professions in which he would have excelled. He had spent those years in the cave reading ancient Chinese literature (something which I could never do) . But when he got out, what kind of a job could he hold ?

First, my father got him a job driving a tractor in an agricultural research facility – and when my father became acting director of the new spy school, he was permitted to get his son a job there too – as an electrical technician, He never had formal training in electronics, but he was considered one of their best technicians, able to fix everything from TV sets to tape recorders. But since he was so introverted, his co-workers or boss took advantage of his skills and would claim credit for his work. He was not happy about it, but he did not do anything to prevent it.

Later on, he started not going to work at all since , as he told us, that there was not enough work for him to do. When he reached the age of 50 the school asked him to retire, and by then, our father was no longer the vice president of the university.

This does not sound like much of a career – but as the son of a high official, my brother was still a very desirable candidate for marriage – and nearly 70 families sent pictures of their daughters to him. Sometimes he didn’t like her picture – sometimes she didn’t like his – and most of the time the blind date didn’t work out.

He was very picky and this was a big headache for mom, who was worried about her oldest son’s marriage. For a long time, every evening, the entire family got together after dinner, trying to help my brother analyze the available girls. But he always told us that he did not need any help – and he would rather be left alone.

One very tall and attractive woman was quite persistent. My very-picky mother actually liked her – and she was recruiting all of us to help her with her courtship. But my brother was even pickier. They dated about six months – and nothing came of it.

Eventually he met a woman – and it was love at first sight -- he was so enthusiastic from the very beginning. Her family was of appropriate status (her father was a general) so the match was made, the wedding was held, and a year later my new niece was born.

Now they are both retired, and they spend their time reading or exercising in the park. That’s the thing about working for the government – you get health care – and a pension after 30 years – and that included the 10 that he spent in a cave. Since government workers can retire before the age of 50, many of them choose to begin second careers – but not my brother. He has what he wants, and he is quite content to be a gentleman of leisure.

I never really got to know my sister-in-law very well, since she is also very shy and quiet person. But I got to know her sister who happened to be in Chicago in early 1990s with her husband who was working for the Chinese Consulate. We became really good friends, and whenever I visit Beijing, I always stop by to see her.

Part Twenty Nine

2007-10-17T19:00:00.000-07:00

In Chicago – I faced two problems that just would not go away.

One was finding a roommate to share the expense of an apartment
-- and the other was getting help with my university studies.

Switching over to the Masters program in Computer Science at DePaul University was a rather daring thing to do, since I had zero background in computers – indeed, due to the cultural revolution, I had zero high school education, and Beijing Foreign Language Institute #2 taught me nothing but English.. I used to be really good at math – but that was way back in grade school. I knew about binary numbers – but had no idea they were applied in computers.

So I was in big trouble in my classes – and I couldn’t really afford to pay for private tutors in addition to the $7,000 / year tuition I was borrowing for tuition – where, by the way, I was the almost only student from mainland China in my class (yes, there were plenty of Chinese students in computer science - but they were Chinese from Taiwan, or Hong Kong, or the United States. The students from the mainland weren’t there because they couldn’t afford it – even if they came from good families, the Chinese economy was just too poor back in the early eighties)

Once again, I looked within the local Chinese community for help, and soon I found a small, young Chinese girl to be my roommate. She had come to the US in her teens, completed high school here, and was about to graduate from college. When I first interviewed her, she said that she could help me with my math – but it soon became apparent that she knew less than I did ! Still – we got along pretty well – so she moved into my apartment (just west of Chicago’s Chinatown)

But what was I going to do about tutoring ? I desperately needed help – and eventually I found it – but it got me into trouble as well.

The young man who helped me was a real computer whiz. He was a typical Cantonese –i.e. he was very thin but he loved food, eating all the time, but never gaining an ounce. He was in his last year of the program. He knew everything – and he was more than happy to share that knowledge with a desperate young woman like myself. He really helped me get started in my studies.

His grandfather had come to Chicago from Canton at least 50 years earlier – and had a cleaner shop in Chinatown. His wife was finally allowed to join him in the 1960’s , and both of them got by without ever learning English.

But his parents had stayed in China, and had been separated when the border with Hong Kong was closed. His father ended up taking a second wife while the first one stayed in Hong Kong. Polygamy is traditional in Chinese culture, and was still legal in Hong Kong at that time –but it was strictly forbidden in the People’s Republic, so when local officials got wind of this arrangement, his father was stripped of his position (at a university) and given a strong incentive to leave the country. Fortunately, his father had already moved to the United States, so he had a sponsor, and he ended up working as a cook in a Chinese restaurant in Chicago.

Had his father really been a university professor ? I don’t know – the whole family certainly seemed to be very blue collar to me – but that was his story, and at least it served to make me more comfortable with marrying him, which is where this relationship was going. I met his family –but kept our relationship to myself for a while. I did not know how to tell my family that I met someone at school. His family background made me very uneasy and I did not have a strong feeling for this guy, even though he was helping me with my studies.

But I eventually I sent pictures of him to my family in Beijing. My family did not say anything about him to me, I knew that my mother was very critical of each of my dates. If she liked one, she would let me know, but she did not say a word about this one in my dad’s letters. (My mom very seldom to wrote to me - usually it was my dad who wrote all the letters)

My sponsor, the priest, was very bullish about our union – and made me not a little uncomfortable with his blunt frankness about the exchange that was taking place. I would get the tutoring that I wanted – and citizenship by marrying an American citizen, and the tall, skinny computer whiz would get a woman that he wanted – and I surmised that the priest would get what he wanted too: to have me establish a family in Chicago, where he could be included..

I didn’t really love this man – but we had begun dating –and soon we were making plans to live together. Once again, just as with my first husband, I was a bit fatalistic about it: perhaps this was my destiny.

Meanwhile, he graduated from DePaul and got a job with AT&T Bell Labs with a fine starting salary of $40,000 a year. In fact, I think both his sister and younger brother were already working there as well. Where would American technology be without all the smart, hard working Chinese ?

Since his job was out in the suburbs, that’s where he wanted to live, so we bought a house in Aurora for $70,000. Where did we get the down payment ? My sponsor, the old priest, offered me $20,000 to encourage us to buy a townhouse together.

But now, the real problems began – because Aurora is about 45 miles from my school in Chicago, and I didn’t have a car. So every day I needed to be driven back and forth to the train station –and then, of course, take the train, or actually, two trains to finally get me, 2 hours later, to school.

And now that we were living together, my prospective husband had no more interest in tutoring me. He had enough to worry about with his new job –and what he really wanted was a traditional Cantonese wife who would make a home, have children, and cook a lot of good Cantonese food for him.

So it soon became apparent – that I had made a big mistake – and we began to have some furious arguments – culminating one night with him putting his hands around my throat. That was the moment that I decided to leave him.

This had never happened to me before – and it was never going to happen again – so even though it was late at night, I called up the old priest, and we drove into the city, that very night, to sort things out.

The three of us talked things over – it must have been midnight – and we agreed that we’d both go back to Aurora and try to move forward. But there really was nothing to work out – and after a few weeks had passed, we agreed that I would move back to the city. I called up my last roommate – the little Chinese girl – and soon we were back together, a few blocks from Chinatown.

(it would take me 18 months to get back the money from the down payment for the house --- and eventually, all I got was $15,000. The priest didn’t want it back, so I used it to begin my first savings account. It was painful and humiliating, but I guess it wasn’t a disaster after all. Nobody’s heart was broken, and my never-to-be-husband soon took a trip to China where he found and married a peasant girl who would be the kind of wife he really wanted)

But meanwhile --- how was I going to get my diploma in computer science ? Who was going to help me ?

I finally connected with a group of fellow Chinese students who had been diligently collecting tests from each of the DePaul instructors for several years, and I begin to follow that age-old process of studying old tests to cram for each examination. . I never really learned the principles of programming – I just learned how to pass the multiple-choice tests – i.e. I had become an ordinary American college student. I didn’t learn much – but I would get my degree – the university would get its tuition – and everyone would be happy.

Not that it was easy, though.

I really had to work at it – and I had to take the final test twice before I could pass. (which was a very close call – since students were only allowed to take it twice – and if they failed both times, they would never get that master’s degree from DePaul.).

Back at the apartment, my roommate had graduated and gotten her first job. She was so happy ! She was mainland Chinese, just like me, and she had an uncle in America who had sponsored and paid for her education.

She was in her twenties, for some reason, she always dated older guys. One time her fat, older boy friend called me, and asked me for a date. I don’t know why, but I felt really insulted, got very angry, and began screaming at him over the phone, calling him a pig, and telling him that if he dared to call me again, I would report it to the police.

Meanwhile my Cantonese boy friend was trying to get us back together. I firmly rejected him. Then he secretly started calling my roommate. One time, when I was playing back the messages on our answering machine, I heard a message that he had left for her. I didn’t like her sneaking around with him, and I asked her to move out. Eventually she did – so once again, I was looking for a new roommate.

Actually, I found a pair of roommates, two girls from DePaul University who had come from Taiwan – and we were all jammed together into my small apartment. Both had fiancés who were PHD students at the University of Wisconsin, so during the weekend, I had the apartment to myself, and that worked out very well. And since we were all in the computer science department, we could study a lot together.

We got along alright – but I never really respected their behavior with men, since they had no problem with being engaged to one while sleeping with another. Indeed, they gave me the impression that every office girl in Taipei was sleeping with her boss. I know that I am no angel – but somehow, having grown up in the rather puritanical Peoples’ Republic, I just found this behavior unacceptable.

Remembering My Father

2007-10-17T09:20:00.001-07:00

I love my father so much that as my own story
is drawing to an end,
I’ve just got to tell you a little more about him.

He was born Nov. 5th 1915 into a poor peasant family in Hebei province about 500 kilometers west of Beijing. He was the oldest son, and had 2 younger brothers. He was a smart boy, did very well in schools. Since his family was Christian, he probably went to a Catholic grade school – which would have been free, and would have prepared him to be accepted into high school. He scored 14th of over 100 students who were enrolled in Baoding high school, but his family was too poor to keep him there.

Public schools were not free in those days – and his parents would also have to pay for his room and board.

He had to drop out and go back to his village, but he did not like farm work, so he left the village and went to Tienjing where he had learned enough at school to find a job working in a lawyer’s office.

He was a gentle, modest, hardworking man – who was probably completely hopeless at office politics –but who could be relied upon to get a job done –in his case, an administrative job within the Ministry of Public Security .

He rose up pretty high in the ranks, but that’s probably because the communist bureaucracy had such respect for seniority, and he joined the party way back in 1938, when even a pencil pusher’s job could be a dangerous one.

He once told us the story about how he and two comrades were trying to escape from an enemy patrol in the middle of winter. Snow had covered the barren ground, making the three of them easy targets. Several shots rang out – the man to his left fell face down in the snow. More shots were fired, and the man to his right hit the ground as well. My father was the only survivor.

On another occasion, he was on a mission by himself, when he came upon an “enemy attack” and was arrested. He thought for sure he would be killed, but after they started talking, they realized they were all working for the same side. Nobody wore uniforms during many of these special operations. .

And speaking of military uniforms, he was never really happy wearing one, according to my mom. He wanted to wear civilian clothes, although he had to wait until the late 1980’s to dress in the western style suits that he really liked. In the early 1950’s, the government provided Russian style clothing for government employees, and even when he attended banquets with high officials and foreigners as the vice director of Foreign Bureau, he always wore Mao style jacket suits.

He didn’t know it at the time, but his career had really peaked back in the fifties when he was working directly in the security ministry, joining the teams that investigated officials left behind when the defeated Nationalist regime fled to Taiwan. Joining him on those teams, were some of the highest ranking party officials – and among other work, they compiled a history of the Nationalist Regime that was published serially, in a very limited edition to subscribers from the higher ranks of the party.

In 1965 he was promoted to be the security minister for Friendship Hotel – where visiting foreign experts stayed -- but as he later learned, this was really not a promotion at all. With a brother living in Taiwan, he had always been under suspicion, and eventually it was decided to move him away from the security ministry – and of course, a year later the Cultural Revolution broke out and he was sent to a high-security prison for almost 6 years.

Upon his release, he returned to the Foreign Bureau , but was soon swapped out, trading jobs with a vice-president at the Beijing Foreign language institute (where – luckily for me, he was able to help me overcome the bad recommendation that accompanied my application to language school)

But he was hardly a specialist in foreign language education - he had never taken a class himself -- though he had studied English with an older American woman for 12 months before his arrest .

The following year, he was transferred again – this time to become the acting president of a newly organized university for foreign agents – i.e. spies. He purchased the property, supervised the construction – and was the overall manager of that institution (the second spy-school in China) He was vice president of that university until 1982, the year of his retirement at the age of 67. But he was never formally recognized as president – so neither his salary nor his rank were improved – and this was a cause for some disappointment and bitterness in his life.

During those 5 - 6 years, he worked very hard to established his university. It was located on the south side of Beijing, and he had a small apartment there, only coming home on the weekends. Towards the end of his career, he had a stroke that paralyzed one side of his body, but he eventually recovered. I think he was very happy with that job. Even though he was not president, he was the man who made all the decisions. In his whole career, this was the only time he had the power of decision making.

I visited him a few times when he was working at the school and I could tell his attitude was completely different than before. He sometimes could be impatient. But everyone who worked for him thought he was a good hearted man. He was definitely not a person to flaunt authority, and he cared about their working conditions. (I’ve already told how he ordered winter coats for all the car drivers in his agency – though, incredibly, that was held against him during the cultural revolution). My mother had bought him a fine, wool suit –but he only wore it on official occasions – otherwise, he dressed no different from the rest of his staff.

When he died a few years later, over 200 people turned out, on very short notice – for his funeral.

He really believed in communism and his contributions to the country and the Party. (But at the end of his life, I am not 100% sure that he was still so convinced)

I do not know how much my mom loved him. They were married over 50 years, but Mom was never happy about being a housewife, and she always complained that dad did not know how to educate us, or pay enough attention to us. One time, they had an argument, and mom locked him out of their bedroom so that evening he had to sleep with my brother. But my brother’s single bed was too narrow for the both of them, so next morning, I found my dad sleeping half on the bed and half on two chairs covered with a overcoat. I hated that my mom did that to him, but on other hand, she did care about him. During the early days of the Cultural Revolution, dad had to go to work, not in his office, but cleaning the hotel bathrooms or emptying the trash bins. Every morning, mom cooked three eggs with milk and sugar into a custard -- only for dad. Mom told us he needed the food to keep him healthy for the long days ahead of him. We all understood. She kept doing that until dad was arrested on May 6th of 1968.

My mother also bought everything that he wore - she had complete control over family finances. On the 10th of every month, dad would get paid, and he would hand the cash envelope over to my mother (it was always cash – the government did not pay with checks). If he wanted something – even bus fare to get to work – he would have to ask for it from mother.

He was always busy at work but once in a while, on the weekend, he would take us to the nearby parks or museums. I don’t remember he ever took us for shopping except once.

It was when I was in second grade, and some of my classmates started using the fountain pen. I told my friends that my mom had promised to buy me one, but several weeks had passed, and each time I asked mom about it, she always found some excuse to put it off until the next weekend. Finally I burst into tears, and told her that she would never buy me the pen. It was a few hours before our school bus would take us back to the boarding school on Sunday night, and Dad immediately took me to Wangfujin shopping street, and asked me to choose whatever fountain pen I would like to have. I got the one with the see-through part in the middle, and went to school a very happy girl.

And each year before school started, he would find some nice large, colorful used magazine pages or brown paper to make book jackets for each our text books, and then he would carefully write his beautiful calligraphy on it.

He was a very simple person, and did not have any expensive hobbies. He was a smoker until early 1960’s when the doctor told him to quit due to his liver problem. He loved books, but only assembled a small collection. He loved calligraphy, but he never had a set of expensive brushes. He loved drinking tea, but as I as remember, he always bought the cheaper (but not the cheapest) ones. Once in a while, he would buy one or two ounces of good tea, and from his facially expression, you could tell he was really enjoying it . He also enjoyed drinking Chinese liquor (very strong) a small cup every day. But in 1981 he had a stroke, and he stopped right away on the doctor’s advice. Sometimes I wish mom had given him more money, so he did not always have to live at the edge.

He liked to walk the ten blocks or so to work every day (regardless of the weather) – and he even walked when he was in that tiny prison cell for 6 years – walking in hundreds and hundreds of small circles until he had gone a certain distance.

He continued his walking until his 80’s. He fell on to the ground a few times, and it cut his face or his hand, but he never gave it up.

He also had a daily regimen of mental and physical exercise that that included his practice of calligraphy and chi-gung. Towards the end of his life, he worked every day on the hand written book of poems about his life that he had begun back in prison, trying to edit a bit here and there. He really wanted us to help him to publish it, but sad to say, his wish did not come true.

In Chinese cities, the public parks are a kind of open university of recreational activitees, and that’s where my father picked up some of his exercises.

After his mandatory retirement, he had much more time for poetry, brush painting, calligraphy, and physical exercise.

I didn’t see him so often after that, since I had already moved to America, but I know that during this time, he often found it difficult to live with mother. She had complete control of the home and finances, and she was always a little bitter about her life , especially after she was sent to the countryside. Many women, like her, who had joined the party back in the mid-forties had careers and risen to positions of importance – but my mother had to resign her commission in the army to join her husband in Beijing.

When my father asked for spending money, he didn’t always get it – and sometimes that really hurt – like when she kept him from buying the very last volumes of that history of the Nationalist regime that he had helped to compile.

I think that in his final years, his main joy was in his children and grandchildren – including that wild child who had moved to Chicago ! (myself)

In 1990 – after I had finally finished my education and was beginning my first job, he came to Chicago with mother and lived at my apartment for three full months.

Since I was working every day, they had to spend all that time by themselves in my apartment – and he spent it making calligraphy and paintings (his specialty was the rooster)

And that’s when we all got a visit from the FBI.

I suppose the FBI had good reason to be suspicious – after all, my father had retired as the acting director of a school for foreign agents – but now he was just a small, frightened, old man (he was pale as a ghost after his interview with them) They also interviewed me – and my former husband who was living in New York at this time. It was just a little chilling that these people from the other side of the planet knew so much about our personal lives.

I don’t think I was my father’s favorite daughter, but he certainly had made me feel loved – even in the limited time that we saw each other (I spent most of my childhood in boarding schools)

I remember once how once, as a small child, I had gotten a terrible stomach ache, and my father had me lie on my back, with my knees up, so he could massage my stomach. He moved his hand in circles – 36 times clockwise – then 36 twenty times opposite – and when he was finished, my pain was all gone. He was very patient with us, he was even more patient with his granddaughters. He always wished that he had a grandson, unfortunately, it did not happen.

Three months before he died, I had a great urgency to go home, so I did. During those 10 days, I did not go anywhere, but stayed home and spent that time with my parents. Dad acted very different this time. He could not remember what he had for breakfast by lunch time. He could not remember who had visited him in the morning of the same day. When he walked, he dragged his feet on the floor He could not see well, but he never gave up reading – reading the daily newspaper with his head turned on one side so he could read it with his one eye. Mom told me that sometimes he washed his hands in the toilet, he was very confused, and he looked very tired.

He died in Feb. 5th. 2001, and even now, more than 5 years later, whenever I think about him, tears begin rolling down my face.

Dad I love you! (But I never told him that, we Chinese just do not express LOVE in words to our loved ones.)

He was a caring and humble man.

That’s how I like to remember him.

Part Twenty Eight

2007-09-22T06:57:00.000-07:00

The irony about coming to Chicago…
is that I spent more time with Americans back
when I was a tour guide in Beijing.

In Chicago. I felt confined to the small community of expatriate Chinese, mostly my age (or younger) who had come to the land of opportunity.

They were not , of course, ordinary Chinese. They all had the smarts, the persistence, the personality, the whatever it took to get a visa – and they were mostly among the tiny percent who had gotten a college education. They were all go-getters, and maybe a little self centered.

When my sponsor (the priest who was my uncle’s friend) returned to the city, he got me a place to stay in a much nicer neighborhood – upscale Lincoln Park – in the Chinese Friendship House, a building owned by yet another Chinese Catholic priest, Father Fu. It was a large building on a major thoroughfare, and served as a kind of boardinghouse for Chinese students who were attending adjacent DePaul University.

Young men slept on the second floor, young women on the third , and we shared the kitchen and living areas downstairs. There must have been about 20 of us altogether – and it felt like I had never left China.

Many of us were from the mainland, and one girl I met was accompanied by her mother and brother (he lived on the second floor). I thought how lucky they were to be here as a family, and it made me homesick. As soon as I said goodbye to my sponsor,
I felt so lost. I was sobbing in my own room for a while, and finally, despite the late hour, I knocked on their door. We talked for a while, but she had to get up the next morning to clean someone’s house. I returned to my own room, and did not sleep for several hours. . A few days later, she asked me how many siblings I had. I told her I was one of 5, but she said, the way I was crying the other night, she was sure that I was an only child.

The old priest , Father Fu, who was our landlord had a rather tragic past. He had been a priest back in China, and during the Japanese invasion, he was arrested, tortured, and castrated. America had been good to him. He had managed to buy a spacious town house in a declining neighborhood back in the fifties. Now the neighborhood had gone yuppie, he was the owner of some prime real estate, and he was helping the next generation of Chinese enter into American life. But he was, well, a little strange. He helped himself to the food we kept in the refrigerators – but he didn’t tell anyone about it – so we all suspected each other of taking each other’s food, and that did not make for a communal life of peace and harmony. We already had our share of gossip and bickering –so soon I was again looking for a way to live somewhere else.

But before I left, I met a woman who would end up changing my life – an artist from my parents’ generation who was temporarily serving as a kind of house mother for the women’s floor of residents. She was a professional, traditional brush painter from a distinguished family (her father had been a provincial governor) which fled to Taiwan after the revolution. She had been sent to Rome for an art education, where she had fallen ill and been nursed back to health by an order of nuns which she considered joining after she got better.(she became a lay member) That was when she got involved with the religious Chinese Catholic community in Rome – which included my father’s younger brother (remember him ?) who had become a priest and been sent to Rome for further study.

In a way, I think she had fallen in love with my uncle -- not like romantic lovers, but like young people who admired and cherished each other. Whenever she talked about him, it was with the most glowing words , and when she learned that I was his niece, her face lit up and her attitude towards me changed completely. She had come to Chicago several years before to teach brush painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, but after eight years, her contract was not renewed. She kept her town house in Chicago, but she leased it out and spent the winters back in Taiwan where she found a better market for her paintings. She was staying at the old priest’s house during this visit to Chicago because her home was still under lease to others.

She taught a brush painting class in Chicago, and when I expressed an interest, she was happily to offer to me private class in her room. She did not charge me for the class and I was very grateful.. Slowly I felt a bit closer to her, then I started to share own life story with her. She offered to introduce me to her marriageable students – and a few years later I would meet one of the who would eventually become my next husband.

But for now, I still needed a place to live, and my first opportunity came from a nearby family in Lincoln Park. At first, I just worked for them as a baby sitter to pick up some extra cash – but after their daughter injured her leg during a ski trip, they needed someone to live with them, and I became a live-in nanny and housecleaner. They were very nice people, and I was paid very well – but --- but their daughter needed more attention than I could give, and I didn’t leave China to become a domestic worker. Working/living with them was too time consuming for me to get my homework done.

When I told them that I had to leave to spend more time on my study, they were very sorry to see me go. I told them I would introduce them to another Chinese girl, and I kept in touch with them for a few years. They always told me that I was the best babysitter they ever had. I loved their kids.

So once again – is this the fourth time already ? -- I had to look for somewhere else to live – and this time the Asia Student Association helped me find a roommate in Chinatown – a young woman from Shanghai – the first of my many Chinese roommates in Chicago.

I’m sure this is a terrible thing to say – but did I tell you that I don’t like Chinese ? We’re just not honest – nobody could be honest and survive in the over-politicized world of the People’s Republic. And I especially don’t like people from Shanghai – they’re just so materialistic. So even though it probably wasn’t her fault, I just didn’t like my roommate – and I didn’t like the way she treated her devoted boyfriend, holding back sex to get whatever she wanted . I didn’t like her – so once again I moved out..

Just about this time , my brush painting teacher’s nephew showed up. I had met him at the Chinese Friendship House. He seemed like a nice guy and he told me that he was looking for a place to live, he was so fed up with father Fu’s place. So together we found a two bedroom apartment not to far from Chinatown.

He was about 8 years younger than myself, and he had gotten an engineering degree back in China – but this was before the Chinese economy had opened up, and he came to America for better job opportunities. He was also from Shanghai, but I thought he sounded honest.

At beginning everything was fine with us. He worked at a Chinese restaurant in the evenings, so we had a very limited time to chat, and when we did, I began to notice that our limited conversation was always how many tips he had gotten -- who were the good tippers and who were the bad ones. I was just hoping that when school was open, we would eventually talk more about our studies.

I liked and respected him – but there were no romantic feelings there -- and it’s not especially easy to share a kitchen and bathroom with a man to whom you’re not attracted. I can never be just “one of the boys”.

He seemed to have some good ideas about how we could get ahead – and he convinced me to drop my Business major at Roosevelt University and join him in a computer science program at DePaul. Yikes ! – I suppose that I was beginning to change careers almost as often as I had been changing roommates – but it made sense. I had only signed up for the Business major because I needed something, anything to get a student visa, and I really didn’t need just another bachelor’s degree. But I was attracted to the idea of learning a new technology, as a marketable skill where I could really use my mind, not just my smile and talk English.

So we both joined the program together, and the plan was to study together – or, actually, for him to help me study since he was already quite advanced – but something else I should have mentioned about Chinese students is that most of us don’t have enough money to stay in school. I was quite lucky – I had a sponsor, the friend of my uncle – who ended up paying $50,000 for my three years in school – but usually a Chinese student is desperate for funds, and this roommate was no exception. He was constantly applying for scholarships wherever he could – and suddenly he got one – a full scholarship to a university in Indiana – so suddenly I was left alone – without a helpmate for my new line of study – and without anyone else to pay half the rent on the apartment.

I hope, dear reader, that I’m not making this all confusing – or maybe too boring – since isn’t all this confusion just ordinary student life ?

The roommate that followed was also male – also Chinese – and also too broke to stay in school without some kind of scholarship – which did not seem to be forthcoming. He had studied photography at the Art Institute, but could not afford the tuition to graduate, so he was doing odd jobs like waiting on tables.
He was older than me – about the age of my older brothers – and I thought he was very knowledgeable, just like my older brother. whom I admired so much. I enjoyed his company, but again, there was no romantic feeling there. Maybe I am something of an extremist when it comes to affection – either I feel a lot – or I feel nothing at all.

I wasn’t in love –but one night, when both of us were feeling lonely and had drunk a few glasses of wine, we made sex – and that made for big problem the next morning when he wanted to do it all over again, but I was not interested.

Things started getting bad between us. Then he moved out without telling me and he owed me for the phone bills and rent, He became very nasty when I asked him for the money. What could I do? I just had to blame myself.

So my life was in upheaval yet again -- but the one thing that was constant during these times was the support I got from my sponsor, the old Chinese priest who was my uncle’s friend.

Every week he brought me a grocery bag full of chicken legs or whatever else was on sale and could be used for Chinese cooking, and I made him a big, old-fashioned Chinese dinner with noodles. (he loved Chinese food – but was too frugal to eat at restaurants)

Part Twenty Seven

2007-09-12T19:08:00.000-07:00

When I first arrived in America,
even though I had nothing in my wallet,
I lived like a queen,

... or at least like a queen’s best friend.

Indeed, during those first few months, I have never lived so well, before or since.

There was wealth – there was romance – it was just like life in the airport novels that the American tourists used to leave behind on their bus seats.

But first, let’s get me on the plane.

I spent my last night in China in my husband’s apartment (it was still OUR apartment) but the entire night, he never came home. I had hoped that at least he might show a little bit support or something, but no, he was spending yet another night with another woman. My older sister showed up early the next morning, and the first thing she said was “what had happened to you ? you look terrible !” I told her that I could not sleep at all --but I did not tell her why.

Then I went to the airport -- in the two-piece polka dot dress I had bought in Hong Kong, with my hair cut short and permed (so I could save time and money on hair care when I got to America. Money would tight there – because every dollar I spent would have to be borrowed)
.

My entire family joined me at the airport, and since we were a little bit early, we started talking. They were all telling me to be careful -- you will be all alone a strange country -- please take good care of yourself.

I was holding my tears back so hard, I was speechless.

All my young nieces were bouncing around, so happy to be somewhere strange and different. Then my oldest niece, Bing Bing, came up to my side, and asked me, “ Auntie, why were you crying?” As soon as she said that, I could hold my tears back no longer. I told everyone I had to leave, and I was the first passenger to get on the plane.

Everything ahead of me was unknown. I was 33 years old, and I had to start my life all over again.

When I was preparing to leave China, I had written letters to some of the American tourists whom I had met as a tour guide. I had shown them around my country, and maybe they would be kind enough to give a cheerful, sincere person a place to stay until my American school started in the Fall ? I sent three letters – and got two invitations.

Both came from San Francisco, and when my plane finally landed, I was met at the airport by a wonderful lady in her mid-forties.

Her name was Meg, and when she and her husband had visited China on a private tour, I had been assigned to be their private guide. They must have just come from a beach in Hawaii, because they were both very tan. (our driver thought they had come from the countryside) . They enjoyed their Beijing tour very much, and we enjoyed each others’ company, so we had promised to keep in touch. Back then, I had not been 100% sure that I would go to the U.S., but since I was already in the process of applying, they had been expecting me to come.

Meg and her husband lived on a hilltop just outside the city – well, actually, they owned the entire hill. They had a tennis court, swimming pool, guest buildings, and magnificent gardens that provided fresh flowers that were cut daily and placed throughout every room of the house.

Did I say that were wealthy ? Was this a lifestyle that every American could enjoy ? I was so glad I had come here ! (I knew this was not a normal Americans life style. But I did not know how much separated the poor from the rich.)

(and I have to mention their neighbor’s dog – a black, fluffy poodle that was the size of a small pony. At first, I thought it was some kind of statue – but when it began to move I shrieked. I had never seen a dog that large)

My hostess had been a school teacher, but after marriage to her wealthy husband, she retired to a life of shopping, traveling, and regular visits to the psychologist. She was a very thoughtful and generous woman, and it was a wonderful vacation for me to spend almost a month with her – tooling around the surrounding hills in her white, 1930 Mercedes convertible (which drew attention wherever it was parked)

Her husband was a wonderful and very gentle man – and very successful in business. When his oldest son , from a previous marriage, had gotten married, his wedding gift to him had been a $300,000 house.

Among his investments were 10 restaurants in Napa Valley – so they were into food. Every evening he came home and fixed us dinner.

Much of the food was unfamiliar to me – soft shell crab ? I had never heard of that before. How did I handle all this gourmet dining ? Somehow, I survived – including visits to what must have been some of the best restaurants in the world. I’m sure they were expensive – but for some puzzling reason, the waiter didn’t always bring her the bill , but sometimes she would just stand up and then we would walk out.

I think my hostess may have been a little lonely – she was pretty much on her own throughout the day. She told me that she had a college girlfriend with whom she kept in close touch. She hinted to me that they had been lovers, but I told her this was a concept I could not understand. This was a very different world for a girl who had grown up in the puritanical Peoples Republic !

Eventually, my hosts had to travel – so I had to find another place to live – and I accepted the second invitation that I had gotten from one of my tourists – a single man in his forties who also lived in the San Francisco area.

He was not as wealthy – but he had enough money to live without working. He had a large, hillside residence with 2 or three bedrooms and a newly built library - and he graciously offered one of those bedrooms to me.

He was also in his forties, and though not Chinese (he was Jewish) – he was a true Mandarin scholar who had never worked a day in his life. He lived on a trust fund – indeed he managed the accounts for the charitable foundation established by his parents – and he devoted his life to scholarship. He had degrees in literature and history from Harvard, Yale, and Oxford. His library was enormous, and every day, without exception, he closeted himself with his books for further study, filling the margins of selected pages with his thoughtful notes. He was truly a gentleman, and we had the kind of dreamy romance that fantasy books are made of.

He often arranged short trips for us – like to the redwood forest, or a winery. One day he drove me along the ocean to a very large, nice beach area. We did not swim, but we strolled along the beach, hand in hand , and we walked up to a famous lighthouse, with a small, historical museum on the top floor.

It displayed some old weapons and exotic things that had come from other countries, and I spotted some old-style Chinese characters on the top of a lacquered box. They looked to me like the Chinese characters for ‘hair’ ( but later, I realized they meant ‘silk’. I’m afraid that traditional Chinese learning had not been part of my education)

Even if we didn’t go out for a trip every day , we were at least hiking nearby. He showed me some raspberry bushes, and we picked and ate them right there on the spot. ( this was all very strange to me – since we had always washed everything before we ate it).

After a few days of settling into his house, I offered to cook for us. He really liked my cooking -- and so did I, since I missed Chinese food so much. We went to the supermarket, but I had difficulty finding Chinese ingredients (I did not know that they could easily be found in San Francisco) . I missed having my typical Chinese breakfast: i.e. porridge with salted vegetables. Toby did not cook, but whatever I made with the limited ingredients I could find, he always liked.

We had become lovers, but I never really fell in love with him. He was just too --- too self absorbed.

One time he asked me if I would like to bear his child –but I declined.

Before I left China, I had promised my family to call them as soon as I arrived, but I felt awkward asking my new friends to help me place a phone call to Beijing. After a couple of weeks, I finally I had the courage to ask for help, and my first call was received by my oldest brother. Everyone was worried about me and I wanted to talk to my parents, but they had gone to Tianjin to visit my uncle. I told oldest brother that everything was OK and that I would be all right. But after I hung up, I cried uncontrollably. I missed them all so much.

As you can tell, I was having a wonderful time in San Francisco -- but now the summer was ending, and I was supposed to be going to school in Chicago. Was I still sure that I wanted to go there ?

San Francisco was so beautiful – I was living the life of a fairy tale princess –and Americans were so nice to me. (this was something that really amazed me when I first arrived – people on the street are friendly in America ! Even on the bus, they smile and say “hi – how are you?” If someone did that in China – they’d be known as crazy.

Where would I live in Chicago ? The only person I knew there was the old priest who had gotten me enrolled in the university. He was my uncle’s good friend, but I didn’t really know him very well. So I made some inquiries – but it was too late for me to enroll in a California university.

So I was off to Chicago – and my kind friend from the hilltop mansion made all the arrangements – buying me a plane ticket and finding me a room in Evanston.

I was very grateful for that room – but it soon became apparent that it would not work out.

My landlady was a psychologist who had her office in the same building. Whenever she had clients, I was required to stay in my room and not leave until the client had left. But Chicago can get very hot in the summer, and my top floor room didn’t have any air conditioning. I felt trapped and very uncomfortable. The landlady was nice, but she was much older than me. I did not feel that we could become friends.

So I was desperate to find another place to live.

The Chinese student association set me up with a Korean girl who had a studio “garden” (i.e. basement) apartment in the Uptown neighborhood. Her current roommate was leaving, so she would have a vacancy – but the roommate still had a few weeks before she left. I was desperate to escape from my room in Evanston, so finally they let me join them – though I had to sleep on the floor.

For those of you unfamiliar with Chicago – the multi-ethnic Uptown neighborhood is a rather rough place to live. The rent can be cheap – but the neighbors can be very tough. I will never forget the first night that I spent there.

My two roommates were fast asleep on the bunk bed , and I was sleeping on the floor – when I felt something crawling over my covers.

It was a big rat and I swear it was a foot long !

I may have lived with millions of mosquitos and mice back at the big farm, but certain animals, like rats and snakes, continue to terrify me.

I bolted upright – the rat scurried off – and I stayed watchful and awake the rest of night.

The next day my roommate complained to the landlord. He gave us a trap, and we caught the frightful rodent.

I felt much better after that – but still -- everybody here had his or her own life.

For the first time in my life, I felt completely alone and did not know what to do. I was waiting for classes to start – and I was waiting in that dark basement room , with one, single window,
about two feet from another apartment. I felt scared and depressed.

This was quite a change from the romance and palatial splendor I had been enjoying just a few days earlier !

Part Twenty Six

2007-09-02T06:55:00.001-07:00

This is not last chapter of my life –
but it is the last chapter of my life in the People’s Republic.

*I wanted a different kind of job
*My marriage was dead
*I didn’t want to live with my parents (I could afford to live on my own, but apartments were simply not available in Beijing)

I wanted to divorce, but meanwhile I did not know how to tell my family. My family was very close , but we did not share all our feelings, and I especially did not want to share my sadness and tragedy with them. I was ashamed that my marriage failed and embarrassed that I would be the only one who was divorced. I was spending more and more time with my parents and nieces, and finding all the excuses not to stay at my own home. All my neighbors in that small guarded complex knew about my failed marriage. I felt so trapped and helpless. I shared these feelings with my closest friends, but nobody could give any better advise than the Chinese proverb: Out of 36 methods, leaving is the first choice. I did.

I had two choices at that time. One was to marry the man I loved and then wait 7 years to move to Hong Kong. The other was to go to America and start over again. I was 33 years old. I was not too old to start from zero, but it would not be easy.

I took the second choice because I knew it would be better for me in the long run. I never wanted to become a housewife like my mother, who was very bitter after she lost her government job. I did not want to be in her situation.

I was ready to move to America – if only an opportunity ever presented itself.

And then it did – thanks to an old friend of my father’s brother (the Catholic priest who had fled to Hong Kong in 1948, and who ended up leaving the church, getting married, and living in Taiwan.)

Since he lived in Taiwan, my uncle could never visit his family back in China. But he had a good friend – a fellow priest – who ended up in Chicago, and beginning about 1982, this friend began to visit China on an annual basis – looking up his own family – and visiting our family, on my uncle’s behalf, as well.

The first time I heard about my uncle’s friend was 1983, when my cousin from Tianjin came to Beijing to visit him. Usually there was a reason for our cousin to visit us, and at first, he did not tell us why he was in Beijing, But then, when he asked me to help him to find the hotel where overseas Chinese would stay, he had to tell me whom he was going to meet. I went to the hotel with him, but we were a day late, and my uncle’s friend had already checked out.

We did not get in touch with my uncle’s friend that year, but in 1985, the priest from Chicago returned, and I got a chance to see him. He was very happy to meet me and my family., and it turned out that his visit was perfect timing.

For many years, he had tried to bring his relatives to America . He was a lonely man in Chicago. How many other Chinese Catholic priests could there be in Illinois ? And who else could understand his life – from the desperate poverty of a peasant family during the revolution – to the hope for some kind --- any kind --- of redemption offered by the church – and then the exile from family and homeland after the revolution. His only family was in China – and he was desperately trying to bring a relative home to live with him in Chicago.

But none of them spoke English -- and the American embassy would not approve their visas.

So I asked whether he might sponsor me instead – and fortunately for me – he agreed.

He got me enrolled as a business major at Roosevelt University in Chicago – and he footed the bill for all three years of that education – nearly $50,000. (After I got a job, I wanted to pay him back, but he told me that was not necessary. I was very grateful for that.)

Before I went to the embassy to apply for a visa, I asked around to make sure that I had all the required documents. My biggest problem was that I already had a bachelor degree in China, and I was told that most likely I would be denied a visa just to get another bachelor’s degree. But I wanted to give it a try anyway since my second degree would be totally in a different field.

The day for the interview finally came. I dressed nicely and sat in the waiting room for hours, waiting until my name was called.

I remember my interview very well !

I greeted the official with a good morning, and then handed all of my documents to him. He was a young fellow and not very chatty. He begin reading the documentation, and then I asked him if I could tell him something about myself. He told me to go ahead, so I started telling him how I was an English speaking tour guide – how most of my tourists were Americans -- how nice Americans were, and how lucky I had been for the opportunity to work for American people. Meanwhile I was closely watching what he was doing, and it took him less than 2 minutes to get a blue form out and started writing on it. I knew at that moment I was granted a visa. (I had learned that from the guy sitting next to me that morning. He told me if the officer got a yellow form, that means you are denied – but a blue form that means you are going to the America.)

At the end of those very, very important 5 minutes, my interviewer handed me back the documents and said “Have a nice trip”

Coincidentally, the embassy was nearly next door to the office building where my soon-to-be ex-husband was working. (He had left China Daily, and moved up in the world to become assistant to a very important publisher who was the son of the one of the top 10 military commanders in China) I had never visited his office before, and though we were separated, I wanted to share my good news with him. So I called up to his office – he came down to escort me up – and later I learned that by coincidence, his new mistress happened to be in the elevator with us.( at the time, I did not know about the new mistress – only about the previous one who had been a photographer at China Daily.)

A few years later, when I was living in America, I got a letter from an unknown woman – reminding me of our meeting in the elevator – and telling me that she never knew my husband was married back when they first started dating. She was in her mid-twenties , ten years younger than my husband, and she asked me for advice concerning their relationship. She felt that she was working very hard to make their relationship successful.

She must have heard good things about me from my husband's friends to ask me for advice, but what could I tell her ? I just told her to use her own judgment – and then I sent a copy of her letter to my ex-husband’s parents. I had been very close to them when we were married – and I felt badly about ending our relationship – especially since my ex-husband had never admitted to his adultery. This letter was proof that his affair had begun many years before our divorce.

In response, I got a 4-page letter from my former father-in-law. He wrote that he still thought I was the best daughter-in-law they had ever had, and that if his son continued to have extra-marital affairs, he would disown him as a son. He also wrote that my demand for a divorce was one of the saddest days in my ex-husband’s life ( the other saddest day being when he learned that his father was diagnosed with cancer) His letter made me so sad --- I cried on and off for the next few days.

Part Twenty Five

2007-08-25T15:31:00.000-07:00

Before long, I had found an extra-marital romance for myself –

on a boat cruising up the Yangtze river through some of the most scenic landscapes in the world. I was the national guide accompanying a group of American tourists – and he was a photographer on assignment from a Hong Kong travel magazine.

The 4 or 5 day trip upstream from Shanghai to Chongqing was one of my favorite trips during my six years as a tour guide. This time, we had a new ship and the crew were all from Chongqing, a place well known for its small, beautiful women. How attractive they were in their new uniforms !

During evening dinner on the second day, I noticed a new passenger who had just boarded that afternoon. He looked very shy and quiet, sitting at the dinner table all by himself. He was Chinese, but didn’t look like someone who had grown up in mainland China. When I passed his table, I said hello and he politely greeted me, but the conversation ended there. After dinner, my co-worker and I decided to visit the sitting lounge up at the bow of the ship, and as we were chatting, the newcomer walked in and took a chair opposite ours. I had been wondering about this person was ever since we first met, so I walked over to introduce both myself and my co-worker to him. You could tell from his face that he was delighted (and he told me later, that he was wondering about us too – but was too shy to start a conversation)

After that evening’s introduction, we were all looking forward to the next opportunity to chat or share a meal together. He did not speak Mandarin very well, so our conversations were a mixture of English, Cantonese and broken Mandarin. But we all enjoyed the company very much. We had some good conversations and ended up exchanging addresses at the end of the trip.

A few weeks later, as he was passing through Beijing on his way to an assignment up north, he stopped at Beijing for a few days since I had volunteered to show him the city. I invited him up to my room, and after a cup of tea and we headed to a park. It was raining, but neither of us minded. We strolled around the lake, and he got very serious about taking a lot of photographs.

We spent a whole morning and afternoon together, talking about that Yangtze river trip and a little bit about ourselves. You could tell he was a very shy, reserved person. He loved China, but during his trips to the mainland, he told me that he came across so many unthinkable incidents, and he did not know how mainlanders could survive in this kind of system. Unbearable and unreasonable restrictions and rules; he hated them so much, sometimes he wanted to never set foot in China again , but the beautiful country was so irresistible – and, of course, visiting and photographing it was his job.

When he was in my apartment, he told me that he was amazed at how well we lived. That was the first time that he had ever been invited into someone’s home on the mainland. That day went by too quickly, and as he was leaving in the evening, I stood on the platform at the station, waving until his train disappeared out of sight. I admit that I felt a bit lost.

A few days later, I received a long letter from him – and fell in love. We arranged for me to visit him in Hong Kong – and soon we were talking about marriage.

How to describe him ?

He was not too short, about 5 feet 9 inches, with a small structure, thin but not skinny. He was very near sighted, and always wore a pair of glasses. He looked well educated, but not like a professor. He was a very serious person, but he could also be very funny. He enjoyed food, but was never wasteful – and it was only after we met, that I, too, discovered that food could be enjoyable --- not just something to fill an empty stomach. He did his job with a great deal of passion, and saved every penny he could throughout out his life. He was a gentle, sincere, and rather old-fashioned person; definitely a gentleman, and also very romantic.

He did not talk about his family that much with me before I went to Hong Kong.

I knew that both his parents had died, and he had a brother and sister. His parents had joined millions of others from Guangdong province who came to Hong Kong after the revolution – arriving in the early 1950’s – soon after it was announced that the Hong Kong border was going to be closed. His parents were poor and lived in the Kowloon district, one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

In late 1984, I was able to get the special visa to visit Hong Kong. No passport was required, but getting permission to cross the bridge to other side was no small matter. Again, I used my backdoor connections – this time, my brother-in-law could help me since he was in the police department. Once approved, my gentleman friend bought me a 10 day tour Hong Kong package. The first 6 or 7 days I stayed at hotel with my tour group but the last three days we were on our own, so I moved into his apartment.

The living condition of his family shocked me.

Their tiny apartment opened off a second floor balcony that hung over Tung Choi street (or “Ladies’ Market”) . – a street that was filled with shoppers and vendors until 3 am. It was always hot – it was always noisy – and I have no idea how anyone ever got to sleep.

And this limited space was shared by his brother and sister who was married with two small children. His sister and brother-in-law were very friendly and their hospitality made me feel at home very soon, but I never got a chance to meet his older brother, because he worked at night and only came home during the day.

My friend offered me his bed while he slept in the living room. None of his sister’s family spoke mandarin, so we had a very hard time communicating with each other. The next day, while he was away at work, he asked his sister to take me to a restaurant for dim sum – and that was my first time to have real dim sum. I loved the food, but did not like the noise in the restaurant, since Cantonese people speak very loudly, and I have no idea what they’re saying.

The bedroom was basically a closet – with just enough space for a single bunk-bed (above a desk) – on which he and his brother slept in shifts – and they both shared a kitchen with their sister’s family.

He was the only member his family to get a college education - thanks to a community college (he had qualified for Hong Kong’s more prestigious schools, but could not afford to attend them) – and after graduation he began working as a photographer for a travel bureau, which, like many Hong Kong businesses, was eventually bought by the People’s Republic.

So in sense, we both worked for the Chinese government – except that he wasn’t a Chinese citizen – indeed, he wasn’t a citizen of anywhere – since Hong Kong did not automatically grant citizenship to the people it took in during the fifties. He was a resident alien – with a green card.

He was very hardworking – and more frugal than even my family had been. He wouldn’t even pay for small storage locker to stash his heavy luggage when we went off on a date – but he was not cheap when it came to buying us dinner. That’s one thing about the Cantonese – they spare nothing for good food.

During my 10 day visit to Hong Kong, my observation was that Hong Kong was a good place to visit, but not to live , except for the very rich. . I was not longing to be rich, but I was also not ready to join the poor. I was much better off back home.

We saw each other over an 18-month period – but since were both working and traveling, we’d only get together every three months or so – so just as with my first romance – much of our communication was by letter – and I wrote some very long ones – seven or eight pages of heart-felt feelings.

But again – the letters I sent could never match the letters I got– because regarding the Chinese language, I only had an elementary school education.

We were getting pretty serious about each other – and I remember how when we were together one evening in Shenzhen– just at sunset -- I began to cry. There was no special reason – it was uncontrollable – maybe it was just the anxiety that I’ve always felt when the sun is going down – but he was certainly puzzled – and taking my hand he addressed me as his wife.

But how could I become his wife ? Where would we live ? Being so over-crowded, Hong Kong had strict regulations about the immigration of Chinese – and we would have to wait seven years after marriage before I could live there. And even after I did – what kind of job could I have ? I never wanted to be a housewife.

Meanwhile – how could he live in Beijing – he could barely speak Mandarin . And poor and crowded as people may be in Hong Kong – nobody there wants to join the teeming, impoverished billion on the mainland – with its periodic waves of political turbulence.

And I’m not sure that he could ever adjust to life in the People’s Republic – as exemplified by the following incident the occurred during our trip to a small town near Canton.

He was supposed to travel there and write an article about the area. It was one of those untouched areas undiscovered by tourists. It was a beautiful small town that didn’t yet have any modern, updated hotels, so we stayed in a local, old fashioned hotel, and we were the only visitors..

We rented two rooms, and they put us far apart, so he stayed all the way at one end of the hotel and I stayed at the other. . The shower did not work in his room, so he came to my room to shower, and then we spent the evening together in my room talking. At 10:00 pm, he told me that he should go back to his room, because the floor boys had seen him coming to mine and they had been looking at him strangely. But we were having such a good time , I did not want it to end , so I begged him to stay a bit longer, and he agreed. Then half an hour later, somebody began pounding loudly at my door. Mr. Hong Kong got up and immediately opened it , then a group of people came in, and began to question us. They accused us of adultery – but they could not prove it since we had opened the door immediately. Nevertheless, they kept us both in the room and continued with the interrogation. . I was so mad, and angry! They threatened to report me to my travel agency, and then threatened him to send him back to Hong Kong and forbid him to return. They tried very hard to have our confession, but we had nothing to hide. Finally, I began to threaten them. I told them, that my father worked for the Security Ministry, and I would ask minister X (I mentioned his name) who was the number 2 boss in security to investigate this hotel. I told them they would be in big trouble. After that, their attitude towards us changed and eventually they let us go. I never heard anything from them again – and my boss never got a letter from them either. ( I think they had nothing to do and waited to catch us in bed. , but they did not get what they wanted.)

My Hong Kong friend was so in love with me, that for a while , he even talked about moving to the mainland. But after that incident, he never mentioned it again.

During the last three months of our relationship – all we talked about was how could we make a life together. We were no longer young enough to throw caution to the wind and sacrifice everything for love. But we could never figure out how to work things out.

Part Twenty Four

2007-08-18T07:17:00.000-07:00

We worked hard during the week – and we partied hard on the days off.

Maybe it was all that sex and scandal airport fiction that we were picking up from the bus seats of American tourists (like Arthur Haley’s “Hotel”)– but for whatever reason, my group of friends, most of whom knew English, were much more like young Americans than like the Chinese of our parents generation.

(For so many years, ever since 1949, we had been forbidden to listen to BBC or Voice of America, all the shortwave frequencies had been blocked, and there was hardly any current event reading material to be found. We knew almost nothing about the rest of the world. The first time I saw a foreign product was in the early 1960’s when my father’s co-worker bought a transistor radio from Japan. I was amazed that you could hold it in your hand while listening to it. Foreigners were rarely seen on the streets of Beijing . In the early 1960s. we ran into a group of foreigners on the shopping street. I did not know where they were from, but a couple of them were black, and one of them was very tall and thin, with long fluffy hair. Now I realize that maybe they were black hippies, but it was very strange to us at that time. They must have been high status since there were some government officials with them.)

Both my husband and I were often on the road. As a journalist, he made several long trips every year (once he visited Peru – and brought me back an alpaca wool sweater) While working as a tour guide, I had to stay at the hotel with my groups – whether we were touring Beijing or Nanking.

When we had some time at home, we often threw big parties for our friends.

I did all the cooking – and then everyone did all the dancing, dancing, dancing --- sometimes all the way until daybreak, when we would cover the windows with blankets to keep out the daylight. Some people got tired and fell asleep on the bed, but when they woke up, they’d go back to dancing, and as you might imagine, alcohol would be involved.

We were some high-energy young Chinese ! We were party pioneers – and my husband and I served as “party central” for our group of friends – because we had our own apartment (many of them still lived with their family). We also didn’t have any children, and my income was sufficient to buy all the food (in China, the hostess provides everything – no such thing as “pot luck”)

Whenever we had too many people for our party room, we would take the bus or bicycle over to a friend’s place. He had a new, completely unfurnished apartment. (so there was no furniture to get in the way)

Regarding my income, it had started as only 43 yuan/month – like every other college graduate. But within a few years I was getting bonuses from the shops and restaurants where I took the tourists – and eventually I was making more money than even my high official father.

Regarding children, we finally tried to have one, but it ended in tragedy.

When my husband and I had first become lovers, we were eager but also very naive about sex. We didn’t want to have children right away, but we also didn’t know how to prevent that from happening. We had a “barefoot doctor” manual on birth control, but it turns out that it had the fertility cycles all wrong . We had condoms, but often they broke. So I ended up with two pregnancies – and two abortions. Abortions, even late term abortions, were easily available – but that didn’t make them any less painful and humiliating.

Then, later, when we were ready to have a child, I miscarried at 7 months. The doctor said that in America the child would have lived – but Beijing, at that time, had no facility to care for premature babies.

And that was the last time we tried. I was told by the doctor that we should wait for a couple of years before trying again, and being on the road all the time, I really did not have time to take care of children anyway ( meanwhile my sisters and brothers all had their baby girls between 1980 -1982, and I was just as happy to be an aunt instead of a mom.)

Instead of having children – we had parties.

For music, we had a small tape recorder – and cassettes of mostly Russian music – of the kind we could dance to – like waltzes.

For my thirtieth birthday party, we had 15- 20 guests, and we ate, drank, and danced.

Most of the party goers were my husband’s friends– while I had a few friends from the office and a few more from my student days – including that short, wild girl with whom I once broke into a movie theater back in high school.

Many of our partygoers were couples – but we had many singles as well –and sometimes singles would become couples. Over the course of many parties, one of my friends found a lover – broke up – found another lover – and later broke up with him as well.

Like me, all of my girl friends soon got married --- but within a few years, all of them got divorced as well – and as it turned out, none of them got remarried either. Why should they ?

And one of the couples that met each other at one of these parties --- was my own husband and the wife of another man !

Ever since we’d first met, I’d felt that he was never completely open with me – but now disturbing evidence began to appear that raised a lot of questions.

Since I was housecleaner and laundress (without the benefit of washing machines), nothing much happened in our apartment that could escape my attention.

One day, after I got home from a two week trip to somewhere, I found that something very odd had happened in our bedroom. The bed sheet had been washed, and was recovering the bed, but not in the way that I had always done it.

Why did I find black hairs on the pillow that were longer than mine? Why had the transom window above the door to our (office building) bedroom been covered in black paper ? Why was my husband receiving extra money from his mother – what was he spending it on ?

And it was very hard to hide anything from the neighbors, since we lived at the end of a long hallway and someone visiting us had to walk past every other single room. Plus, when you entered the courtyard, you had to pass the doorman. Strangers were not allowed to enter, unless they were visitors and then they had to mention who they were going to visit. There was almost no privacy at all.

I began talking with the doorman and my next door neighbor (a high school girl) – and I learned that everyone in our building (except me) knew that my husband was seeing another woman.

I confronted him – but he denied it – so I moved into our second room (our apartment had two rooms – but each was in a different part of the building) – and that’s how we lived for the next year. I told him that we could get back together, if only he would be open about what he had done – but he always denied it. He didn’t want a divorce – and I didn’t want to tell my parents about it – so we were in something of a stalemate.

Part Twenty Three

2007-08-01T06:31:00.000-07:00

I began my first post-graduate job in late ‘79
- just as China was opening up for foreign tourists.

There was only one tourist company, the state run China International Travel Service and I worked in the Beijing branch as a local English speaking tour guide.

There were only three hotels for foreign tourists at that time, the Friendship Hotel (where we used to the live), the Front Gate Hotel on the south side the city, and the Beijing Hotel in Tiananmen Square – which was the preferred destination since it was in the center of the city and close to the Forbidden City.

The original Beijing Hotel was built in the early 1920’s and a new building was attached to its east side in the 1970’s. Originally, plans called for this new wing to reach taller than its current 17 stories. But according to rumor, the high officials who lived in Zhong Nan Hai were afraid that they might be seen from the top of the building, so the building had to be re-designed. ( For hundreds of years, ever since Ming dynasty, houses in Beijing were only allowed one story – since the emperors didn’t want ordinary people to see them.)

New tour guides, like myself, spent our first weeks memorizing the script and following the senior guides around until we had proven ourselves capable to take groups on our own (which were groups that the seasoned guides didn’t want.)

Some of the guides preferred large groups (so they would get larger commissions from restaurants and shops) – and some of them tried to avoid tourists from New York, since they were known to be more difficult and demanded more attention. The guides were the only English speakers the tourists would ever meet, and were available for complaints 24 hours a day.—even back at the hotel, where we would sleep in an adjacent room.

But I was just happy to be around American tourists , not only to improve my English but also to learn about that part of the world. I learned that American people were often kind, simple and honest. They believed what you told them.

I don’t like it, but in China, a person who tells 100% truth is known as “stupid” - and sometimes we had to lie to tourists about where they might stay that evening, because no place was available (the hotels had been overbooked) It was very hard for me to keep the truth from them.

Many times, their hotel rooms were not ready for them at the end of the day, so we’d have to keep them on the bus or take them somewhere else until the rooms had been vacated and cleaned.

Sometimes, we even had to put the tourists into ordinary Chinese hotels which must have been quite a culture shock . The tourists in those years were mostly quite prosperous, and they were not used to shabby accommodations.

In one instance, I had to separate husbands and wives into different rooms. One older couple came to me with very sad and angry tones --- telling me that they have been married 40 years and had never slept in a different room. But what could I do ? I felt very bad, but they still had to be separated.

We took them to the four major sites in Beijing: The Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and the Temple of Heaven.– and then we’d also take them to some special shopping districts. In the early days, the guides were not allowed to accept cash tips from the tourists or kick-backs from the shopkeepers –but over time, that changed. Tourists would often leave us small gifts, like perfume – and all these gifts were turned in to the agency and then equally distributed as gift packages to the guides at the end of the year.

On Chinese New Year, we drew lots , and that’s was how the gifts were distributed among us. Little by little, tour guides stopped handing the gifts in, and unofficially we were allowed to keep them. Over the years, I had kept some the novels that were either given to me or left on the bus. I read some of them, such as “Coma” by Robin Cook, and “Stranger in the mirror” by Sidney Sheldon.

As I gained seniority, I was allowed to pick the kind of tour groups that I wanted – which were small ones – because it’s so much easier to keep track of 6 people instead of 60 – and you had a chance to get better acquainted with the people, most of them Americans , and a few of them of Canada, England, or Australia.

Within the Beijing Branch, there were several offices. The Japanese office took care of Japanese tourists, The European office took care of all the Spanish and Italian as well as Australians. There were about 30 – 40 tour guides in each office, but later that number grew ( I was there from late 1979 through June 1986 ).

I liked the Canadians the best because they were very well disciplined and complained very little. No special requests, not a lot questions -- they were very quiet people and easily pleased. Australians were also good, but usually our office didn’t handle them. Over the years, I made a few close friends, a couple of them are still in touch with me.

We were only supposed to talk about the news or information that had been printed in the “Peoples’ Daily”.

If a group had more than 30 people, two local guides would be assigned to it, plus the one national tour guide who accompanied the group throughout their entire tour. So in that situation, you’d better not say anything politically. Who knows what would be reported after the tour?

Even though I was an outspoken person, I had to hold my tongue in the presence of other guides. Once, I was challenged by the American tour guide, who was trying to please his group to get bigger tips – and he asked me many questions on economy and politics which I had a hard time to answer.

Back then – and even now – I do not know how China’s economy works. We Chinese never paid taxes before the 1990’s, so I had no idea how the government got money.
And there were also certain things we just could not share with them even if we knew the answer. He made me feel so small and ignorant. That was one of tours I felt very bad about it.

But on the small tours, I would sometimes be the only guide present – so I could talk about my own life – and every time I talked about the Cultural Revolution, I cried.

Then, as now, my English was not perfect – but I have a talent for figuring out what people are trying to say, even if I can’t understand all the words – so I think I took good care of my tourists – and I was also popular with the tour bus drivers, making their jobs as easy as I could.

One time, a tourist asked to take my picture next to one of our buses – and then, the following year, one of the guides showed me a magazine article that included a picture of me standing next to the bus door – and describing one “Miss Wang” who was a “ pretty girl who spoke English very well”. I was very proud !

Since we accompanied the tourists all through their stay in Beijing, we also attended their banquets – and this was first time I had ever eaten like this in my life – Peking Duck every week ! But to tell the truth – I didn’t really appreciate it. I had grown up in boarding schools where you ate whatever was given – and it would be many years later until I learned how to take pleasure from good food.

Especially when I companied the tour to small cities, and the tour was served with 10 – 20 different dishes and delicacies The tourists were stunned with how they were treated, but sometimes they would not appreciate the food at all. For example, there is a famous dish served in the Summer Palace. I was told that it should only take 4 minutes from when the fish was caught in Kung Ming Lake until it appeared on a table in the Summer Palace. The fish was fully cooked, but the fish mouth was still moving, so it scared most of the Americans.
That dish always ended up at the bus drivers’ table.

But at least I was beginning to take pleasure from good clothes. Ever since I was a teenager, the approved clothing for women was shirt and slacks – but now I was discovering the world of long or short colorful, flowing dresses. But you could not find them in any of the department stores in Beijing. In order to have them, friends from the travel agency showed me where to shop for fabric and then take it to a good tailor.

The first time when I was visiting my new in-laws in Sheng Yang, a big city in Northeast of Beijing, I walked down the street dressed in my new long dresses, and I swear, everyone was looking at me. I felt like a beautiful peacock in the Zoo !

But makeup was an unknown concepts when I grew up, and
I still didn’t wear lipstick or eye shadow – does a pretty young girl really need to ?

One time, much later in my career, I even got a fur coat, thanks to some wealthy Americans who were connected to the Reagan administration. There were five of them – and unlike other small groups, each one had to have his own hotel room. One day, when I was taking them through a market, they stopped to look at some furs made from various exotic animals – and asked me whether I liked the one made from wildcat. I was polite, and agreed with them that it was beautiful –not knowing that when the tour was over, they would give it to me as a gift.

And now I must report that one time I did break the “law”.

As tour guides, we did not have access to the Friendship stores which were only for the foreigners. Unlike other Chinese, we could enter them, but we were still not allowed to buy anything. One time when I was in the Shanghai Friendship store, I really liked a pair of shoes on the shelf. A nice American tour leader offered to buy them for me and then I would pay her back later at the hotel. We did not want the store find out that it was for me, But I had to try them on to see if they fit. The store manager did not say anything at the time, but he sent a letter to my office, and my boss did not let it go easily. I had to write confession and apology to the entire department. I was so sad, and regret that over a pair of shoes, such a big deal had been made..

Fortunately, there were never any great disasters on any of my tours. Sometimes a person might lose track of time while shopping and miss the bus –or someone else might trip on the curb and break a bone – but at least none of my customers ever died ! (although I did hear of some who did – travelers who were ill to begin with – like one man who was dying from AIDS. (we had never heard about AIDS back then – and we certainly weren’t prepared. Chinese hospitals sterilized but they did not dispose of used needles)

Eventually, after working for a year in Beijing, I began to be offered positions on national tours – where I would accompany groups all over China. Local guides would give the tour, but I would serve as interpreter – and over the next five years, I got to visit every tourist destination (except for the Silk Road – which I’d like to see eventually, as a tourist myself)

I even traveled to Tibet – where the locals figured that I was just as foreign as the foreigners we were guiding.

During my six years as a tour guide, I was known for my straight forward and honest personality. Sometimes, I got into trouble for that, but I also made some good friends who could trust me. One day, one of the guides who was a party member approached me and closed the door behind him. He was a nice guy from worker’s family who had joined the party while at college. He had been one of my school mates. He sincerely asked me if I were interested in becoming a party member myself. I was surprised and then I laughed a little about it. He was puzzled, since usually people feel honored to be asked. Then I asked him if he really wanted to know what I was thinking at that moment. (I trusted him) and he said yes. My answer was even if the gate to the party membership was widely open, I would not step in. He was shocked and then scared, and he begged me not to mention it to anyone else: “ I am sure you would be in a big trouble if another person in this office heard you say that” . He never reported it to our boss, and he never approached me on that subject again.

Being a tour guide was great fun and these were some of the happiest years of my life – but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing it. I was beginning to have other plans for what to do next.

The following is the report of an American woman
who traveled to China during that time.

Let me say right off that this was the trip of a lifetime – way back in 1983 – soon after China had opened up, and it was my first trip to Asia. I was single, 38 years old, and had been working hard for several years as a sales rep in telecommunications (though I had a degree in Fine Arts) . I deserved a big, special treat - and this was it: a three week swing around China, organized by a San Francisco organization, the China-America Friendship Society.

First, we flew from Japan to Beijing – staying 5 days in a newly built hotel that was about a 25 minute ride from the center of the city. It didn’t really seem like a permanent structure –there were some design peculiarities – like unventilated restrooms in the center of the building . But clearly, great efforts had been made to accommodate us.

Our group had 16 people, and our guide was a very well educated young Chinese woman. Her English was impeccable, and with a troubled acceptance, she shared the story of her life during the Cultural Revolution – how family members had been arrested and how she had worked on a farm.

The food was terrible – but you know, that’s not why we were visiting China.

There was no shopping – except at the state run “Friendship shops” – where we paid with the scrip we’d been issued . We couldn’t purchase regular currency- so we couldn’t even walk down the street to buy a soda – which we could hardly do anyway since nobody spoke English and we couldn’t read street signs.

My main complaint was that other than tea, all we were offered to drink was Tsing Tsao beer and some kind of orange drink that seemed to be nothing more than orange colored sugar water. Beer gives me a headache – so I was always feeling thirsty. (and when we finally crossed the border into Hong Kong, my first purchase was a big bottle of tomato juice. Why tomato juice ? I don’t know – but for some reason it’s what I craved the most)

We did get a large, fancy banquet one night in Beijing – with a very impressive, colorful display -- but the food was much better seen than tasted. The Peking Duck, for example, was just bones – the bones of some poor duck whose flesh must have been eaten somewhere else. Mostly I remember eating rice – lots of rice mixed with some kind of very tough greens.

And I remember the kind of people we saw:

*the young and old factory workers hand knotting rugs, doing meticulous cloisonee work, or working the silk making machines. They were so focused ! … some were very young … and there was so little joy in the air. (All these products eventually went to the Chinese Friendship Shops where we tourists were herded in every city visited.)

*the men and women as they pulled those large, heavy wheel barrels down streets, whether paved or not. In the cities, bicycles were everywhere, hardly any cars, and people dressed in dark Mao pants and jackets. They just stared at us --- never a smile or wave.

*Grandmothers attending the children.; Pre-school children harnessed together in straight lines. (I think we have adopted that system here.)

* Old women standing very precariously on bound feet.

There were long, comfortable train rides, where tea was served, and the windows had crisp, white lacy curtains. And plane trips .........ooooh, … they could be scary and noisy,. It felt like the fog was blowing in from outside the plane.

Magnificent things: The Yang Tse River barge trip through the Three Gorges, ,The Great Wall, The terra cotta figures of Xian...being just a few yards and looking down on them. (Okay, awesome) And of course, the Winter Palace

I loved that trip ! It was a real adventure – and very affordable, too --- costing no more than what I might have expected to pay for a modestly priced Alaskan cruise.

I’ve taken a few other foreign trips in my life – and a few years later I went to Japan and Singapore – and especially enjoyed Autumn in Kyoto.

But this trip to China was special – like some kind of special moment in history – and I was there to share it.

Part Twenty Two

2007-07-24T19:13:00.000-07:00

And now, within six months after graduation, I found myself a husband.

I was 26 years old then , and this was really the first time in my life I could be together openly with a man.

Graduation was in early Spring, - the new job began late in the Summer, --- and during the time in between, I was introduced to several young men by various mutual acquaintances.

I realize that in other countries, young, urban people may spend several years dating and playing the field in high school, college, and beyond – but I left the field almost as soon as I had entered upon it.

Once word got around that a young person was available for marriage , the volunteer matchmakers would get busy and eventually invite the lucky couple over for tea.

I remember meeting one young man that my sister had found for me – and I remember how he was not too tall, but also not too short. He sounded smart, he looked kind of handsome – and I would have liked to meet him again. But his call never came – which did not improve a self-confidence that was not so great to begin with. I just never felt myself to be especially attractive, even if people often told me otherwise.

(Believe or not, but many years later I met this guy again, on an outing organized by my husband’s work unit in a newspaper company called “China Daily” which was the only English news paper in China at that time. He and my husband were both journalists. He looked so surprised when our eyes met – and he was still single. I knew several people in the crowd, and I think my popularity and laughter that day put him in a very quiet mood. Or… at least I hope it did !)

Then my family was paid a visit by an “uncle” I had met when I was working as a nurse up north in the provincial hospital.

He was in my father’s generation, but not really related to us. ( He was a subordinate/friend of my mother’s uncle - the general who had helped me so much at the hospital). He knew the family of another high-level military officer who had a son about my age who was available for marriage and he jumped on the opportunity to do all these important people a favor.

So he invited me and the boy over to his place for a blind date, and the three of us spent 90 minutes making small talk.

My date had been late, and his appearance definitely did not impress me . He was short, average looking, overly casual, and wore a military green overcoat which may have been fashionable among the Red Guard ten years earlier, but was definitely backward in 1979.

But there was no question that he was smart, ambitious, and especially witty – and I guess that’s why I got interested in making a second date.

And of course, he came from a family background commensurate with my own. His father, like my father, came from a peasant family, and then joined the People’s Army in the late 1930’s, rising through the ranks to become an officer. But unlike my father, he stayed in the military after the revolution, and met his wife while serving in the Korean War. She had been one of the many teenage volunteers who were sent to the front to boost the morale of soldiers in those days.

By the late 70’s, his father was the #2 commander of Liaoning Province (bordering Korea) and he lived in Shengyang, its capital city of 7.2 million. Even though his rank was similar to my father’s, since they were in local government, they lived much more luxuriously in a single family, 10-room house. They had three sons and a bodyguard who lived with them and did all the household chores.

(One time, when I was visiting, the guard had just finished the dishes and was sitting down with the family, when all of sudden, it began to rain outside. Mother-in-law immediately ordered the guard to close all the windows, but there were so many , he could not close them all at once. The sons were doing nothing at the moment, but none would join me in getting up to help. There was a younger brother who lived at home. And I often saw him ordering this guard to do this or that for him. It seemed to me that the guard was serving the son more than the father, and I complained to my new husband who agreed that his younger brother was spoiled and abused his power.)

Being military, the family was untouched by the Cultural Revolution – except that since all the universities were closed, my boyfriend had to spend three years as a recruit in the People’s Army. But as soon as a few schools began to reopen in 1971, he enrolled in Shanghai University where he got a four-year degree in English language. He then spent another 18 months studying French at my school , Beijing Foreign Language Institute #2 ( but I don’t remember ever seeing him there.) He had also gone to the Foreign Language middle school before the Culture Revolution for two years. So his English was quite good by then.

When I met him, he worked as an interpreter for a manufacturing business – but he had many plans for further advancement –and unlike me and almost every other young person our age – he had his own apartment – which is where I was invited for our second date .

On that second date, he invited me to meet his two friends who lived in the same complex – and I really enjoyed their company. They had all grown up together, so their families knew each other. They were smart – high spirited – and we were all at the threshold of our new , exciting lives. What did young people like us talk about when we got together in those days ? Politics, of course ! Bemoaning the corruption everywhere in government – but certainly not as idealistic communists. Even though we were all the privileged children of high officials, we did not like our party and did not like our system. We were curious about the freedoms found in the West – especially those of us who had learned Western European languages.

Following that, I came over to visit every week, and eventually was given a key to the apartment.

Regarding my family, father, as usual, had no opinion about my new boyfriend, but mother was very opinionated – and she asserted strenuously that I “could have done much better” She thought he was too short (she and her siblings were all tall) – as well as ill-mannered and too full of himself. But as usual – the more I was told what to do – the stronger I felt the urge to do the opposite

I wanted to go ahead with a marriage – but it wasn’t as if I didn’t have some misgivings.

One day, I paid a surprise visit to his apartment – let myself in with the key – and waited all night for him to return. (note: there was no telephoning ahead for such visits – since telephones were still very rare – and the only phone in his entire building belonged to the doorman.)

Where had he spent the night ? Could I believe that it was “just with a few friends” ? I felt that I had been very open with him about my life – while he shared very little about his.

So, yes, I had some reservations – but I also had this feeling – I guess you’d call it traditional – that he was now my man, for better or worse.

I also badly needed to move out of my parents’ house. There were only two bedrooms for all six of us, and there was no privacy at all. And being so cramped, the conversation among us was always turning unpleasant. We endlessly talked about how to change our living conditions, but nobody could do anything. For 30 years, the Chinese government had not built any residential housing, so it was impossible to get a larger apartment. Even after dad’s name had been cleared and he was entitled to a bigger place, no such place was available. All we ever got were promises, and it wasn’t until 1986, that my parents finally moved into a 3-bedroom apartment. (My mom is still living there now, while they allowed us to keep the old two bedroom apartment, and eventually my older brother purchased it.)

Within six months of our first meeting, we applied for a marriage license, and six months later we got married.

The wedding itself was not big deal. It wasn’t that huge ceremony one associates with traditional weddings in the countryside. It was really just a big dinner. Stubborn until the end, my mother refused to contribute to the trousseau or other expenses – but that was OK – since his family could easily afford everything. She wouldn’t even contribute that kind of comforter/quilt that Chinese mothers usually give to daughters when they get married –so I had to grab the materials from her trunk and make the quilt myself.

After the wedding, we spent a week at a lakeside resort (with his two younger brothers !) and then moved into his apartment – to which another room had been added – only it was on a higher floor in the same building. It wasn’t much – but it was way more than almost any other newly wedded couple could expect in China at that time.

Part Twenty One

2007-07-17T18:53:00.000-07:00

I graduated from Beijing Second Foreign Language School in 1979,

after 3 ½ years of study. (actually – much less – since almost a year was lost to political action and the aftermath of the Tangshan earthquake)

Back in the early sixties, university programs ran for a four full years, and the salary of graduates started at 56 yuan/month (while the salary of a new factory worker was at 18)

But after the Cultural Revolution, the time required for a college degree was trimmed by six months --- and the beginning salary of graduates was trimmed accordingly –down to 43 yuan/month.

Over the course of those years in college, I made several friends, and other than that trouble-maker that I hung out with in high school, everyone whom I still keep in touch with was met at college, and everyone whom I met at the big farm or at the hospital has drifted away.

(Sometime I regret that I never wrote a single letter to the hospital co-workers after I left there. I did promise them that I will keep in touch, but I broke my promise, and I felt bad about it for a long time. Those people elected and sent me to college, and changed my life forever. I was very graceful for that, but meanwhile I also wanted to leave my life in the country behind me. After I graduated from my college, there was a visitor from my hospital to my new home. I did not know how she got my address, but she managed to find me in Beijing. I was very happy to see her. She was a doctor with whom I had worked very closely, and sometimes she would ask me to sign her signature to prescribe medicine for patients when she was too busy to do so. We were good friends, but she was about 10 years older than me, so we did not share the same interests.)

And all of those friends, except one, came from the same high-official background that I did – i.e. one of their parents was at least a level-12 government official. (the single exception being a girl whose father only got to level 16)

But this is not to say that all of the students at the school came from our social class – many of them were workers or even peasants – and in some ways these peasants became better students because they couldn’t go home to visit their family over the weekends – they had to stay in the dormitory where there was nothing to do but study.

The smartest kid in the class turned out to be one of those peasants – with a very thick accent that came from someplace very far from Beijing. He had a big, ugly head (his nickname was “big head”!) and he liked to flirt with girls in a very obnoxious way. He never did master the sound of English – but his memory – and thus his vocabulary – was incredible. He went to hold a very high position in the foreign service.

My college friends ended up with various careers related to their language skills in English (but I was the only one who ended up living in an English speaking country )

One of them became a translator in the office of a large chemical facility in in Beijing. Then she managed to switch to the Finance Ministry which sent her to London to got a masters degree in finance. She eventually worked for the World Bank, as well as other big financial institutions. Obviously, she is a very smart and extremely capable person.

Another friend worked in the International Travel Agency, Beijing branch where I worked for 6 years. A few years ago, she retired from that company, and started working for an Import and Export Cargo business.

Another went back to work in Tien Jing at the company where she had come from. The last time I saw her was in 2004.

All of these friends are retired now- since government workers receive a pension after 30 years of service –and all them, like me, began working for the government as teenagers. The pension can be quite substantial, depending on whatever salary level you reached – and this, combined with a post-retirement occupation can lead to a very high standard of living (almost enough to pay for health care !)

By 1979, my siblings had also all left the countryside and were beginning their careers.

My older sister had gotten office work in a provincial police station. There she began to date another man who worked in the same office, and he eventually used his connections to get himself – and then her – transferred to Beijing. Getting to Beijing was not easy – because someone else from Beijing had to be found who was willing to transfer to their small, provincial township.

Their relationship was still not presented to our parents, when I happened to see them walking together on the street (young couples had nowhere else to go, since each one lived with the parents in small, crowded apartments)

I was happy to report to our mother that he was tall and nice looking – but there was something wrong with one of his eyes – he was just a little bit crosseyed. My mother was surprised, and actually, so was my sister who claimed that she had never noticed ! But by the time they got married, he had a successful operation on that eye, and he looks quite normal now. He is a very good, caring man, and my old sister is very lucky to be married to him.

Later, my sister’s boyfriend introduced my younger sister to one of his co-workers – and shortly thereafter my younger sister was also engaged to be married.

My younger sister, as you might recall, had worked as a gardener in the Fragrant Hills recreation area west of Beijing ,and some of early boyfriends had not worked out. But this young man, just like the eventual spouses of all of my siblings, was the child of high officials – so one and all (soon to include myself ) we married within our social class.

In 1979 my oldest brother was finally able to return to Beijing, after an incredible 10 years of living in a cave. My parents were able to get him a job an Agricultural Science Institute, where he repaired tractors – and everything else for that matter. He never ended up in college, but in some ways he was the best educated, since he had spent a lot of time in that cave reading – and he is the only sibling who can read traditional Chinese texts.

He had almost finished his senior year at high school when the Cultural Revolution interrupted his chance to go to college. Then when it was over, he was too old to be admitted (remember – I just barely got in under the wire). However, he did manage to get a college diploma through evening school many years later.

My second oldest brother had ended up working in a power plant in Shan Xi – and my parents worked hard to get him a slot at the university. He got accepted, but while he was visiting my parents in Beijng, and awaiting the official announcement, some local official’s son took his position at the engineering school.

In exchange, he was offered a slot in a school of Chinese herbal medicine – but he refused to go, since he had no interest in that subject. So despite his high intelligence, he was not going to have a university degree – and he even lost his membership in the Communist party when he lost all of his documents while moving back to Beijing.

Instead, he applied his abilities to private industry where he began several unsuccessful operations. The engineering ability and inventiveness was there – but the social skills and political connections to make things happen were not.

Now he is back at the power plant – just making a living.

Part Twenty

2007-07-12T04:31:00.000-07:00

So then I spent the next three and half years
attending the Beijing #2 Language School,

which was something like an American undergraduate liberal arts program except that there were no classes in mathematics or any of the physical sciences.

Of course, the emphasis was on foreign languages – and there were about 400 students in my English department, (100 in each of the four graduating classes), while there were other, usually much smaller, departments for German, French, Cambodian etc.

But we also took classes in history and political science, writing, and physical training. and these classes were all taught in Chinese – so it really wasn’t an intense foreign language emersion.

There was only one native English speaker in the entire English department, a humorous, overweight fellow who presumably could not find better employment anywhere else (his salary and living conditions were not spectacular – and neither did he seem interested enough in Chinese civilization to learn the language - but he did end up marrying a Chinese girl and moving to Hong Kong)

Every morning we got up at 6:00 AM, and after washing up, everyone tried to find a spot outside to read aloud in English. We were told this was the only way we could master English pronunciation . So everywhere you looked, you would see students reciting – and it sounded like monks reading scripture in a monastery.

I wish I could say that my experience at this school, after all of my previous mishaps, had been a happy one – but this was not the case -- for once again, I just had a hard time fitting in.

To begin with, I had gotten a head start on the other students by following English lessons on the radio broadcasts for several years, so I started out at the head of my class, making me an object of jealousy.

This being a communist university, the idea was that students were supposed to learn as a class, not as individuals, so it was the job of the best students to help the worst., and I’m afraid that I did not appreciate being teamed up with a student who couldn’t speak any English at all.

Having spent so much time as a farm laborer and then as a low-level nurse, I wanted nothing other than to excel in English and begin a real career -- but this eagerness just made me enemies and the topic of malicious rumors.

Then, during our evening meetings, students would stand up and accuse me not helping others. At first, I could not understand why only I had been targeted, but soon one of the male students told me that they had talking about me all along, and that was why he could not study with me.
(I had wanted to study with him because he was a top student – not because I had romantic feelings about him or anyone else)

And then to compound the problem, the entire country was moving into another tumultuous period with the decline of the old guard, culminating in 1976, with the death of Zhao En-Lai in January, the horrific Tangshan earthquake in July, and finally the death of Mao in September.
There was much unrest concerning what would happen next – and our school was assigned to publicly denounce Deng Xiaoping on a daily basis.

(Note: regarding the Tanghan earthquake, perhaps readers in the West are not aware of just what a enormous catastrophe this was. Over a quarter of a million people died in Tangan, and since it wasn’t that far from Beijing, we felt the tremors ourselves. I remember how the doorway to our classroom began to weave back and forth, as we waited for it to quiet down so we could all run out of the building. Then, we spent the next three months living and studying in covered trenches dug into the earth near our buildings which we were afraid to enter)

Very little serious studying was done in that year – and much of our time was spent in political meetings and demonstrations in Tiananmen square.

Meanwhile, I had very little incentive to remain at the top of my class – it only got me into trouble – and I had already been criticized many times for being too self centered. So for better or worse – my grades began to decline, I became a mediocre student, and I did not care any more.

Being a bad student wasn’t all that serious – since almost nobody got thrown out school for test scores. But I do remember an attractive young woman being dismissed when she became pregnant (and her boyfriend was thrown out as well)

Still, it did sting when a special class was assembled of the best students, and I did not make the cut.

Fortunately, the rumors of my romantic entanglements were just that – rumors . Even though I had already broken up with my boyfriend from the farm, I had no interest in anyone else. There was one boy, from an older class, who was interested in me, and he asked an intermediary to arrange a date for us before he graduated. He was a smart, attractive young man whom I had noticed when he was playing action roles on a local stage. I would have loved to know him, but I politely refused his date. ( Believe it or not, but a year later, after my graduation, on the first day of my new job, I sat down at my desk and noticed a young man sitting across the room – and it was him. I didn’t know what to say so I pretended not to recognize him – for by then I had already begun dating someone else)

The Language Institute was a boarding school (like every other school I’ve ever attended) so I slept in a dormitory room with 6 or 7 other young women, and then went home to visit my parents on weekends, just like I’d been doing almost since I was born. During these years, my younger sister was the only sibling who was still living with them – but eventually, my older siblings were allowed to return fom the countryside and stay with my parents again, even my oldest brother who had spent 10 years living in a cave. He finally got back to Beijing in 1978, and then he then spent several years living in my parents’ apartment.

(perhaps this is a good place to talk about some unusual details of residential property ownership in the People’s Republic. Officials were assigned a certain square-footage of apartment space based on their official rank. My father qualified for enough space for two apartments – and that’s what he got before he was arrested. After my mother returned from the countryside, she was given a single apartment, then in the mid 80’s the family got a second apartment, but it still fell short of the square-footage to which we were entitled. Then, five years after my father’s death, the government paid my mother a lump sum of cash to make up the difference. So, in a way, the family now owns two apartments, but there's a 70-year limit regarding everyone’s property, and sometime around 2050 there are going to be a whole lot of people who lose ownership of their homes)

Meanwhile, my father had resumed his career, not at the Friendship hotel any more, but with a similar, high level job with the Beijing Foreign Language Institute (which, as already told, helped me get into language school)

When it came time for me to graduate, I was assigned a position as language teacher in Beijing People’s University, but I refused to go !

I had never wanted to be a teacher. In the distant past, teachers had been highly respected, but during the Culture Revolution, I had seen them get treated very badly.

In the final year of study, all students had done a residency at one of the various jobs for which graduates would be qualified, and I had done my residency at the foreign tourist bureau. Tour guides got to travel all over the country – they got to talk directly to foreigners – and so they also got a lot of extra experience in perfecting their language skills – and that was what I wanted to do. So I went to my father, and he helped me to get the assignment that I wanted.

I suppose that some readers may see me as a spoiled little girl who will never do what’s she's told (beginning with the time when I walked away from elementary school) and who relies on the indulgence and prestige of her parents to get what she wants.

But I’ve always just wanted to excel and enjoy doing whatever I can do best.

Who doesn’t ?

Part Nineteen

2007-07-05T05:21:00.001-07:00

I spent two years as a nurse. I liked my job.

I liked all the doctors and nurses – and my head nurse was a very nice and patient woman. She taught me all her tricks and skills, like how to inject the needles without causing a lot of pain, and how to clean the wounds and sew them together without leaving a big scar.; I was even given some training in acupuncture,

But I didn’t really want to spend my entire life with sick or injured people and their distressed families – I just couldn’t handle all that suffering – especially with small children. When they were crying for mom, I was crying with them.

There’s plenty of sad stories, but one I remember most was the student worker who was injured while working on the railroad. He was carrying one end of a large wooden beam, when he fell and the heavy beam crushed his head against the steel tracks. When he was carried into the clinic, his head had swollen to twice its normal size and his face was blue. The doctors managed to save his life, but his mind never recovered.

And I wasn’t always proud of the job I was doing.

One of my patients was an infant – and every day his mother took him to clinic for his shots. The baby knew what was coming – he knew the shots were painful – and he was kicking and screaming all the time – making it a real challenge for the nurse (me) to administer his medication. I had to move quickly and firmly – and one time I may have moved too firmly –because the next day, when his mother brought him in, one of his legs was curled up and he refused to walk on it. Later, the nursing supervisor asked me quietly whether I had administered the shot – and I felt very bad. (but don’t worry – the little boy made a complete recovery)

So though I wanted an education and a professional career – I really didn’t want a career in medicine – and I talked about this with my mother’s distant uncle – the army general who was in charge of our area (including the hospital) – and the man who had gotten me the nursing job in the first place.
( I called him grandpa, but he was closer to my mom’s age which was about early 50’s)

In those days, entrance to university was no longer by competitive examination – but by popular election conducted by groups of workers all over the country. (all the universities had been closed in 1966. A few began to reopen in 1970 and most were reopened by 1975. The percentage of college students at that time was 3%.)

Each district or working unit was allotted a certain number of openings from each of the professional schools – and workers within each district would elect the student candidates from among themselves.

Since my workplace was a hospital – it was only reasonable that all of our student slots would be for a medical school – and everyone who worked at the hospital, from the janitors to the clerks to the nurses were eligible to run for election.

But I didn’t want to go to a medical school – I wanted to go to the language institute – to study English and enter the diplomatic corps.

I had wanted to study English ever since 1966. That’s when my second brother told mom that his teacher wanted him to go to Middle school of Foreign Language in Beijing which was very difficult to enter. You had to not only pass the normal high school exams but also pass the layers of oral exams and appearance tests. Only a few students were carefully selected from the entire school to enter that college, and usually only one would be chosen. Mom asked my brother what he wanted to do, and he replied that he did not want to be a “butt follower bug --- i.e. an interpreter who followed the VIPs and did not have an identity of his own. That was the image he had in his mind, so he refused the opportunity.

A few years later my younger sister applied for the position, and she passed all the tests except the last one. Later her teacher told mom that she did not fail that test either, but the school needed more boys than girls.

These two events stuck in my mind, and I wanted to take the challenge – so
I raised this issue with my mother’s uncle, the general.

I guess you might say that I had gone from the bottom of the social order (as the daughter of a “bad family” at the farm) to the very top – since now my father was out of prison – and I had family in many high positions. When the Cultural Revolution began, most of the country was placed under military control – so my mother’s uncle, the general, had complete authority over the district in which I was working – and I often visited him and his wife for dinner during the week. (his poor wife, by the way, was a terrible hypochondriac – to the point of nearly being an invalid – though as it turns out – she lived into her 70’s)

I told the general my dreams about going to language school and he promised me nothing – but later that year, when the student elections were announced for our district – the hospital was given four slots at the medical school – plus one slot at Beijing #2 Foreign Language Institute. Hurray !

This was very good news for me – but of course, I still had to get elected by my peers at the hospital – and I worked very, very hard to be a popular, model worker. For example, I dedicated myself to cleaning the floors of the clinic. Country people had been tramping muddy shoes over those wooden floors for so long that the wood was nowhere to be seen – but once I spent an entire evening digging them out – and everyone was quite surprised when they saw those wooden floors for the very first time the next morning.

I felt that my campaign was proceeding quite well – but the day before the election – a poster went up on the hospital bulletin board denouncing me as a “back door candidate” (i.e. everyone knew all about my uncle) – and I ended up being elected #6 for the 5 open student slots – which put my future in serious jeopardy – since the age limit to apply for university was 23 – and I was already 22.

Nobody signed this denunciation (nobody ever does) – but I’m sure it was a group of workers from Shanghai who were trying to improve the chances of their own candidate.

But as destiny would have it – one of the five elected candidates had second thoughts about leaving her family. She was a local girl who had never been out of the area, and she was a bit scared of moving to another city for school. So she resigned her election – leaving me with the #5 slot. Hurray again !

But I still had to win the approval of school representatives who had to interview and recommend each candidate. Since language school leads to a career in international relations, students must be able to speak and present themselves accordingly – and I managed to pass that qualification. But the news about my “back door connections” was attached to my file -- and this file was carried to Beijing by the person who had interviewed me and was hoping that I would be rejected by those ultimately in charge of education for the foreign ministry.

And this is where incredible fortune smiled on me yet again – for my father worked for the foreign ministry – and now that he was out of prison, he was temporarily assigned as a director at the Beiing Foreign Language Institute #1 – and my file ended up on his desk – where an associate showed him the negative report about me, and then tore it into little pieces.

So I guess “back door connections” really did have something to do with my career – but they had opened only a very brief window of opportunity – since my father was only working at the Foreign Language Institute for about 6 months – and the following year, civilian control was reinstated in our hospital district, and my mother’s uncle, the general, was no longer in charge.

So finally my dream was coming true !

Back during those first miserable weeks at the farm, I had promised myself to get out and get myself a real life in five years – and now, six years later, I was finally on a train going south to Beijing – ready to begin my new life – meeting both of my proud, happy parents at the train station – and riding home with them in a (very expensive) taxicab.

This was the first time in my life that I felt I was also important and paid attention by my parents. The next day, I had a high fever – coming from all the excitement and exhaustion of the previous few weeks.

(and I think I’m going to cry again)

Part Eighteen

2007-06-28T07:25:00.000-07:00

Getting back to my own life, mother and I moved back to Beijing,

following my younger sister who had graduated from her rural high school and was allowed to return and take a job as gardener. Half a year later, toward the end of 1972, mother was allowed to join her, and she was given a two bedroom apartment in a building attached to the same complex from which we had come – i.e. the one built to accommodate the employees of the Friendship Hotel where my father had been a security director before his arrest.

Most of the hotel staff had been sent to the 5.7 cadre school for two years, and all their old apartments – including ours - had been reassigned. But since almost all the foreigners had fled China during the Cultural Revolution, the hotel itself was almost empty, and two of those Hotel buildings were converted into residential buildings for the returning former residents –
and a wall was built to separate our two buildings from the rest of the complex.

Our new apartment was not as spacious as the double-apartment that we used to have –but at least we had a kitchen, toilet, and bath – which was a dramatic improvement over the dirt-floor sheep barn where the three of us had been living for the past two years.

As she returned to Bejing, mother’s life was restored in many ways. She could finally visit our father in prison – she was living near her old friends and neighbors, and she was even given access to her bank account – although visiting the bank was, again, an event that caused much anxiety. She was afraid to go herself, so this time my aunt and I made the trip – handed the account book over to the teller – and waited nervously while the matter was discussed in a back room out of our hearing.

Finally, the account book was handed back, along with the several hundred Yuan we had requested, and we were no longer living hand to mouth. Actually, during his imprisonment, my father’s salary had continued to be credited to our account – after deducting the 24 Yuan/month that were given to sustain us in the interim.

My sister had been at the top of the class in her rural school ( it was a part-time school, with students working the fields in the morning and attending school in the afternoon) – but the best job she could get was as gardener in a recreational park west of Beijing. I think she enjoyed her job – she cultivated the flower beds – and it was certainly an enjoyable environment – but even a factory worker in the city had a higher status, and mother wished a better job had been offered to her.

The park was located near an army facility, and many soldiers visited it for relaxation or exercise – including one young lieutenant who noticed this pretty girl carrying a heavy pot of flowers up the hill everyday and soon fell in love with her. He was a tall, handsome, and very pleasant young man – and even though he came from only a workers’ family, my mother adored him --- we all liked him. But after they had been dating for about four years, and expecting to be married, my sister came home from the park one day and announced that their relationship was over.

No reason was given then – or ever – and everyone was disappointed – especially the young officer who came to us many times asking us for help to get her back. He was even given permission by the army to postpone his next assignment, so he could stay in our area to pursue his flagging courtship. I don’t know whether iron-willed stubbornness is unique to our family – but that’s often how we are – and my sister would simply not be moved – nor would she ever explain her decision --- and soon she declared her love to another man.

But now it was the rest of us who objected to the relationship – since the new boyfriend was nowhere near as handsome as the last one – and worst of all – his father had been convicted of political crimes back in the fifties.

Since our own father had spent many years in prison, maybe we should have been more open minded – and certainly this young man had had suffered a quit a bit in his life. He was very young when his father went to prison, and his mom had a very hard time making ends meet. Every day had been a struggle for them ever since he could remember.

My younger sister had pity on him. She knew that our family would never approve their relationship, so she never brought him to see us. It was her secret. Soon she was losing a lot of weight and started looking very fragile and pale.

But this time we dug in our heels – we had family meetings – and after many evening of tears and talks, she finally she gave up her second boyfriend. Soon thereafter, my old sister’s new husband introduced her to his co-worker, and soon after they met, they got married.

Perhaps the non-Chinese reader of my stories is wondering how China ever came to have a billion people – since sex outside of marriage is so discouraged – and marriages themselves seem almost impossible to accomplish – and yet, somehow new generations manage to be born.

So my mother and sister were beginning to lead something like normal lives – but I was still a displaced person – without a job – without an education – and not really supposed to be in Beijing. But I wasn’t completely indolent – for I had discovered the English language lessons given two hours daily on the government radio --- English was the ONLY foreign language being taught in this way – and I was a very eager student. The fact is – I love English ! I listened every day – and I did all the exercises.

But still – I was over 20 years old – I needed to have my own life – I needed a job – so my mother sent me to one of her old army comrades, now a general, to help get me into the People’s Army.

Unfortunately, the army was not accepting recruits at that time – so next my mother reached out to another contact – a second cousin who held a high position in that same far northern province where I had been sent four years before – and he found me a job as a nurse in a hospital.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Chinese medical industry –– there were no nursing schools during the Culture Revolution– so nurses received only on-the-job training. During those years, China produced a lot of “bare foot doctors” who worked side-by-side with farmers, but who were also functioning as “doctors”

I took that 1,000 mile train ride back up north – even further north (and west) of where I had been – and moved into a room above the hospital.

What an improvement over life at the farm !

Instead of 60 roommates – I had one – a very nice young woman from Shanghai who had been a nurse for many years. We became good friends, and she helped me learn the ropes of my new job.

First, I worked as a receptionist – getting the patients to sign in as they lined up outside our outpatient clinic. But after proving that I was a quick study, I was taught how to give shots (practicing on a pillow), to sew up wounds, and to sign the doctor’s name on prescriptions. Isn’t that all that nurses ever do ?

Actually, the physicians at our clinic were well trained –some of them had been sent to this location back in the late 1950’s. They had been accused of being rightist, but never denounced as criminals, and since our location was so remote – there hadn’t been pressure to turn our doctors into farmhands during the Cultural Revolution. But I’m sure they all wished that they could be living closer to civilization.

Perhaps this is a good place to talk about the Chinese medical system.

The only people who don’t have to pay for health care are government workers – and even back in the first decades of communism – 92% of the population were peasants and they were not included. In the 1980’s, as the government began to cut back, fewer and fewer people qualified for health benefits, and even those who could afford coverage still had to pay 20% out of pocket.

My father, for example, as a government employee, had complete health coverage – but this did not extend to his wife – so after she quit her ministry position, mother had to pay for her own healthcare. She has been very lucky and very healthy, but now that she is 88 years old, health insurance is big a problem for her. Government insurance will not cover her, and private health insurance is too expensive due to her advanced age. They may take her in, but it would cost her a fortune.

This is why so much of the Chinese economy goes into savings instead of consumer spending. Everyone needs to protect both themselves and their family.

When one of my uncles came down with a liver disease in the 1990’s – he had to come up with 18,000 Yuan for an operation. That’s a fortune ! His son told him that they did not have the money, and he would have to go home without an operation.

Only by pooling their resources could his siblings afford his health care. (he got the operation – but, unfortunately, died a year later).

(The last time I saw him was in 1992, during that year after his operation. When we visited his village, he was very thin and his back was bent low, but he was very happy to see us, and he made a great effort to put a smile on his face while bustling about trying to help his wife cook a meal for us. He showed us the flowers that mom had given him a few years earlier, and he told us that some of them had been stolen by villagers. He had such love for beautiful things. Before we left the village, he asked us to take at least five long strings of garlic with us. They almost filled the entire trunk of our car. He knew mom and dad would appreciate his garlic – and he also asked us to take a pair of Ming Dynasty tea pots with us to give to mom. They were very precious to him, and many years earlier, antique dealers had offered him 400 Yuan for them, but he had refused to sell. Then, while he was busy carefully wrapping them, I had a feeling I cannot describe. I knew it would be the last time I would ever see him. Now, whenever I make dumplings I remember him. He made most beautiful and fast dumplings I have ever seen. )

Part Seventeen

2007-06-20T08:22:00.001-07:00

It was in 1967, while I was on the big farm, that my mother’s mother died.

Like the rest of us, she had recently been sent to a remote, country village. Mom sent my oldest brother to attend the funeral, but it turned out to be a very difficult trip.

Like everyone else, the bus drivers were embroiled in revolution. There was no longer any bus service to the village, and due to gunfire in that region, it was also difficult to hire a pedicab.

The driver had demanded a fee commensurate with the risk, but as they were approaching the village – the sound of gunfire was heard and the driver refused to go any further.

After walking the final miles by himself, my brother saw a large group of people at the cemetery. The funeral was already over, and all he could do was throw a handful of dirt on the coffin – a sad ending for a life that was so different from the lives of her children and grandchildren.

My Grandmother had married into a landowning peasant family – substantial enough to hire three peasant workers – but her own birth family was very poor.

When she was a child of three, she went blind in one eye. The story goes that she had been helping her mother in the kitchen, when she dropped a plate, began to cry, and by rubbing her eyes, one of them became infected. Health care was minimal for poor people, and eventually that eye went blind.

When she grew up, that handicap did not prevent her from getting married – but it did mean her bride price was very low – so she was something of a bargain for the husband’s family who purchased her for their oldest son.

Was her new, young husband thrilled about taking this bargain as his wife ? She gave him four children – but apparently love was never involved. He went into a business that kept him constantly traveling all over China – and she became more like a servant to her mother-in-law than a wife to her husband.– a situation that is rather common throughout Chinese society, from top to bottom.

Their relationship got worse when illness forced her husband to return home in his early thirties. Though undiagnosed, he probably had liver cancer – and he was always in great pain and unable to work.

It became one of my grandmother’s jobs to care for him – which meant preparing the opium to relieve his pain – but still, he took out his misery by beating and yelling at his wife.

The money for that opium came from what she and her young daughter (my mother) earned by weaving cloth and selling it at the market. In order to make enough cloth, they often worked throughout the night, but her mother-in-law begrudged her even the oil for her lamp – and she either had to buy the oil herself or cover the windows to conceal her lamp.

During the day, she had to cook three meals a day for the entire extended family. She had to grind the grain, fetch the water, feed the pigs and chickens, and do all the other household chores, while constant verbal and physical abuse were part of her daily life. She must have been a very strong woman to live through all that, and several times, mom woke up to find her mother crying --- with a rope in her hand ---- but she could not do it -- she had a sick husband and 4 small children to care for.

When her husband finally died at the age of 35 – my grandmother stayed on – for the next 15 years -- as a servant in her mother-in-law’s house.

That was a woman’s life in pre-revolution China – even at the top of the social pyramid (as described in the popular 18th Century novel, “Dream of Red Chamber”, which, like many Chinese women, my mother read over and over again)

I remember once asking her “What is your name, grandma?” – and she explained that she didn’t have one – since after marriage, a woman’s name became the combination of the names for her birth family and her husband’s family.

But after the revolution – it was a different story – especially since several of her children, both boys and girls, became cadres who rose to higher positions within the new society.

So in the early fifties, grandmother came to live with us in Beijing – where she helped mother with babysitting and other chores (since both my father and mother spent every day at their jobs)

Being away all week at boarding schools, I was only home on the weekend, and I didn’t get very close to her. And she preferred boys anyway – getting very close to my older brothers – and always made a point of giving them special treats when she served us food. (but I loved her anyway!)

She also served as babysitter for my mother’s brother’s children – and eventually this got her into trouble with mother – who came home from work one day to find my young sister asleep on the curb outside our compound. My sister was only 2 or 3 three years old at the time, and anyone could have snatched her while grandmother was attending to my infant cousin.

A domestic storm ensued that left my grandmother in tears – and soon she went to live with my uncle’s family instead of ours.

In 1963, after our family moved into the complex next to Tiananmen Square, grandmother moved back with us and shared a room with my younger sister.

But when the Cultural Revolution began, and father was getting into trouble, mother thought it best for everyone if grandma went to live the countryside.

She had been a poor peasant woman her entire life. She was illiterate, blind in one eye, and since her feet had been bound as a child, she was barely able to walk..

But since she had been married into a landowning family, she was considered a landowner, and this was problematic for her sons who were cadres in the city. None of her successful sons could accommodate her. The only son who could take her was the impoverished one who had stayed on the farm (I’ve already introduced you to him: he was the uncle who came to the city a few times every year to bring us vegetables and pick up some cash)

Grandma really didn’t want to go – and many times she told mom that she would not mind dying in the city and being cremated. Mom promised to bring her back as soon as the troubles were over -- but that day never came for her.

So that’s where grandmother went to live – and as those familiar with Chinese family politics might understand – this created a huge problem with her son’s wife who would never stop resenting the presence of her mother-in-law – even though her other sons contributed money to the family.

One time – when I was 13 – I was sent to take her some cash as well as provisions from the city, including a string of sweets, some cakes, and specially selected pieces of her favorite salty belt fish that my mother had spent all evening to prepare. It was my first trip outside Beijing, so I was very excited, I went with my granduncle who was a retired school teacher. Mom paid for the trip but she dared not to go herself, because dad was still in very bad situation.

When we arrived, Granduncle handed the heavy bag of goodies to my uncle. Grandma, living in the opposite room, came out to greet us and see what we brought for her. That’s when Aunt got very upset, started shouting, and threw the bag down, scattering everything, including the cooked fish, all over the dirt floor.

The swearing continued, as Grandma went back to her room, closing the door behind her.

The next a few days, we spent a lot of time together. She followed me everywhere and was so happy to see me ( even if I was not her favorite grand child.) She asked me to tell mom that when things got better in Beijing, she would like to return.

She did not tell me how she was treated by her son and daughter-in-law, but she did refer to them as "animals".

One day she sent me to the farmers’ market (it was only open a few days a month) , and asked me to buy her some fruits and various cooked meats like sausage. The moment she received it, she began wolfing it down – and as soon as she finished, she began searching for something in her room.

Finally she found it – it was a piece of cotton -- and she lit it on fire to smoke the room and remove the aroma of the spicy meats. I did not understand, so I asked her what she was doing. Her brief answer was: “animals have sharp noses”

Her life there was not happy.

The neighbors later told us stories about the loud arguments – and when she fell ill, no one would care for her and she was left to lie in her own filth. At mealtime, they would bring her a bowl of food, but if she asked for more, it never came.

She recovered from that illness, but one day as she was reaching for a chicken out in the yard, she fell off a ladder and went unconscious. She never woke up and 10 days later she was dead.

She had lived for 73 years, but only a few of them were happy.

I missed her dearly.

Part Sixteen

2007-06-14T06:01:00.000-07:00

We’re nearing the time when we finally re-established contact with my father, after four years of captivity.

He had been imprisoned in the special prison, about 60 miles from Beijing, especially built to hold the top political prisoners. Its first inmates had been officials from the Guomintang – but now it held my father and all the other ministers denounced by the Cultural Revolution. It featured a maze of high walls that kept any prisoner from meeting another, and ironically enough – inspecting it had been one of my father’s duties when he worked for the Security Ministry. (As you might recall from an earlier episode, he took some of us kids for a holiday there to visit the scenic surrounding hills while he was working at the prison. On the way home, our driver baked delicious, sweet yams on the engine block of the automobile)

But now, of course, he was prisoner, not administrator, and that very same driver who had baked us the yams later accused him of taking advantage of his job to give his children leisure.

Every prisoner had his own cell – 6 feet on a side – just enough space for a bed, a toilet hole , and a sink – and each prisoner lived in total isolation beneath an electric light that burned 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Once a day, prisoners were carefully led to the prison yard– one at a time – in such a way that they would never meet each other. In the yard they stood for one hour in a cell just like the one they had left – except that it was empty and had no ceiling. It was their daily chance to see the sky.

Those early Guomintang prisoners had been given pen and paper, so that, in ancient Chinese imperial tradition, they could write the history of their previous regime. ( Dad had been one of the few party officials who could subscribe to their publication. Unfortunately, over the years, many have been lost. We still have 30 – 40 of what were once 80 – 100 volumes.)

But these new prisoners were given nothing: no pen, no paper, and only one book: Chairman Mao’s little Red Book – which my father memorized word-by-word, cover to cover.

The prisoners were sufficiently fed. Once a day, a tray of food was shoved beneath their door – and the higher ranking inmates were even given a cup of milk.

But this complete isolation had to be a real challenge to mental health.

My father practiced a regimen of mental and physical exercise that included some Chi-gung and martial punching exercises that he had learned in his youth – and walked several kilometers every day through the 2 meters of his cell Lacking any sound to break the quiet, he made his own, by drumming on his sink with his chop sticks ---(a daily practice that he continued -much to our dismay - for several years after his release ) And lacking pen and paper, he memorized his own poetry as he wrote it. Over the course of those six years – he wrote 250 poems about his childhood – which he would eventually calligraph with brush on paper after he had been released. (a detail of which is shown at the top of this post)

The prisoners were not tortured or beaten (unless their shouts angered the guards) – but over the course of many years – complete isolation is torture enough.

After four years, our family was finally notified of his imprisonment – and just as I was returning to Beijing with my mother, we got to pay him his first visit.

All six of us gathered in Beijing and were loaded into a van that drove us out to the prison.

What a tearful reunion that was !

My father looked terrible – and we even had a hard time recognizing each other . His head was shaved, and he wore the prison uniform of black pants with a black cotton padded jacket. He had gained some weight, and his eyes were sunken in a face so pale and swollen.

I began sobbing – and could not stop until later that evening – after which came a very bad headache that lasted throughout the night. We had gotten very close during those six months we’d spent together after I transferred to the school near his work – and it hurt me so much to see him suffering like this.

And he had difficulty recognizing some of us – my younger sister and I – as the previous four years had changed our adolescent appearance as well.

We spent three hours together with him in a special visiting room – telling him our stories – and I suppose that I especially remember his reaction to mine: he wept to hear that I had been sent north to the Russian border – because he knew that this had been the destination of all kinds of criminals, and he feared for my safety.

The family would make many more such visits over the next two years – about one every 8 weeks -- but since I would soon be sent to another part of the country, I only saw him a few more times before he was eventually released.

And when would he be released ?

There had never been a trial – there had never been a sentence – there had only been an order for incarceration –and since Chou Enlai had signed that order, nobody wanted to countermand it. As it turned out – neither Chou nor anyone else would ever sign for his release – but two years later – after nearly 6 full years in solitary confinement – my father, and all the other prisoners of the Cultural Revolution – were set free.

There were quite a few stories like ours – like my father’s former boss who was arrested soon after he had remarried following the death of his first wife.
His new son never met his father until he was six years old.

Later, of course, the prison received a new generation of prisoners, including the Gang of Four in 1976, shortly after Mao’s death. One died of cancer - Madame Mao supposedly managed to kill herself while in hospital – and one of them, the young radical who had been chosen as Mao’s successor, went mad and was kept in prison until his death in 2005.

Part Fifteen

2007-06-06T07:18:00.000-07:00

My life at the farm ended as soon as I got a chance to leave.

Every student was eventually given the chance to go home for a visit – but we had to take turns – and my turn didn’t arrive until two full years after I had arrived.

Of course, we students were also expected to return after that visit was over ( usually about 2- 4 weeks) – but I had suffered there enough – and I became something of an illegal immigrant to the rural village where my mother and younger sister had been sent a year earlier– about 600 miles south of Beijing in Henan province. (Many cadres from Beijing were sent there to be educated by the farmers. It was called the “May 7 Cadre School”)

As I traveled south to her village, I passed through Beijing, and that’s where I joined my older sister who had traveled from her village to purchase supplies for mother (since so little, like toiletries for example, was available in her remote area). Both of us stayed with our aunt (mother’s cousin) for several days as we made our purchases from a list mother had sent -- and I should mention that I had lots of money then (200 – 300 Yuan) – which I had scrupulously saved. (wages at the farm had been good, 32 Yuan/month -- and meals only cost 10 Yuan/month)

Mother’s shopping list ended with a warning not to show it to her cousin – since it contained certain items – like fancy baked goods – that our aunt might consider rather luxurious – but much to our embarrassment, auntie managed to read that letter over our shoulder. Very embarrassing !

Mother still had a taste for urban luxuries – but she certainly lived a Spartan lifestyle out in the countryside.

Her home was a sheep barn, 12’ on each side, and you can imagine the dirt and the smell – especially until she dug out the sheep-dirt floor and replaced it with fresh soil from the fields. She covered the walls with newspaper, doing her best to make it comfortable. The room was very dark - with only one small window - and the smell was so bad, that eventually she dug a window out from the opposite wall so that air could circulate.

And mice were a big problem for mom. They not only chewed everything they could get, they also carried disease, and when I first got there, I noticed that there were all kinds baskets or buckets hanging in the middle of the room. Later that evening I discovered that they contained food - trying, with little success, to keep it away from the rats and mice (who managed to scamper across the ropes anyway)

This was the space that mother, myself, and my younger sister had to share for two years – and during the Summer holiday, it was also home to my two brothers and older sister. That’s six people in a 12’ X 12’ room !

We had a double bed for mom and the three sisters, and my two brothers shared a single small bed (they added a piece of wood so they could both fit) The sewing machine also served as a dinning table and desk – and there was no room for anything else. It was crowded, but we were happy to be together and happy to be alive.

And for a while, our tiny, crowded room also had a cat.

My younger sister was an animal lover, and back in Beijing, nobody was allowed to keep cats or dogs.(that was government regulation) . But here, she finally she had her chance, and she adopted a black and white kitten. The little kitten helped somewhat with the mice problem, but when all my brothers and sisters were visiting, the little kitten was always being stepped on. Eventually we convinced my younger sister to give the kitten up, and she did so in tears.

When my second-oldest brother visited, we were shocked by his appearance – so thin, so yellow – he had come down with hepatitis A – and healthcare in this remote area was minimal – especially for us, the family of a known criminal. But as luck would have it – there was a “barefoot doctor” in the village who had once worked as a door guard at our compound in Beijing. He recognized mom – he liked us --- and primitive though his medicine was – my brother’s condition began to improve.

He may also have been helped by our healthy diet of carrots – which were more easily obtained than the grain that required food coupons for purchase (and Mom was only receiving enough coupons to feed two people)

Mother purchased a bushel of carrots – and carrots were in every meal eaten that winter.

I had become a permanent resident there, but my older siblings only visited temporarily – whenever they had a few weeks off – and then they had to return to their own remote villages in other parts of China.

My oldest brother had it worst – since the people in his village didn’t even have houses – they lived in caves – so when my brother arrived, he had to dig his own cave out from a hillside. His life was cold, damp, lonely, and depressing. Many days he refused to work –so he was also hungry – and thirsty – since water had to be hauled up in buckets from the valley below. He wasn’t taking good care of himself – and failing to brush his teeth – his gums became infected and he lost several front teeth. He was 22 years old.

I remember the first time he visited us – because he missed his train (and, of course, there was no telephone to advise us of that fact.) He missed it because he had tried to carry too much grain to the station – 30 miles from where he lived – and he could not bear to abandon any of it along the way – so he had to walk all the way back to his cave with the excess that he could not carry.

When the train arrived without him, my sister and I had then had to walk the 5 miles back to our village without him – and since it was late at night – we were very scared to be walking alone through the field rows – having heard stories of girls our size being recently attacked by a mountain lion. I know it sounds crazy –but these two, small teenage girls were very frightened --- and our worried mother was out looking for us. After we finally got home, I came down with a bad fever that lasted for several days.

Most of the two years I spent in my mother’s village – I spent doing practically nothing

My mother and sister worked the fields in the morning – and my sister also attended half-day classes at the rural school – but I wasn’t supposed to be there –and I just did nothing – except for some knitting. Mother had brought several of father’s books with her from Beijing – but they were the old-style Chinese literature, and I couldn’t read them.

Maybe you could call these my lost years – all I really did was stay alive.

My second oldest brother wasn’t quite so isolated – but as the months passed – most of the city students assigned to his village were retrieved by their parents who found new ways to work the system and get them back. But my brother’s father was still in prison (if he were even alive) – and he was left in his village with only one other student, a girl from the top high school in Beijing.

He got to know that student very well – maybe too well. They had bought some food and liquor to celebrate Chinese New Year together, and both of them drank a little too much. Eventually she became pregnant – which became – of course – a serious problem.

The girl had grown up with her grandparents, and the grandfather (an army general) was opposed to her marriage into a family like ours. He had already chosen a husband for her: one of his bodyguards ( but she never loved him.)

She told my mother that she loved my brother, and a few months later, when mother had gotten permission to move back to Beijing, this girl stayed in her apartment while they arranged for an abortion at a local hospital. The fetus – aborted at 5 months – would have been my mother’s first grandchild..

Part Fourteen

2007-05-31T06:33:00.001-07:00

My first love.

Many times it felt like I was despised and shunned by everyone up on that miserable farm -- but the truth is , I did have several girl friends.

Two of those girls, like myself, were from the elite families of high officials or intellectuals – but my best friend was from a worker family – and often we conspired to help each other out.

One time she got very sick, and I spent 5 days in the hospital to be with her. Many of the girls had come down with the same thing: a severe rash that ran up the arms, accompanied by a very high fever, and several girls died from it. The group leaders must have understood how we felt about each other, because I was allowed to take all those days off from work.

But the big event was my first real boyfriend -- a student from my own high school ( though I didn’t know him back in Beijing, since he was one year senior) . He was tall (6 feet), handsome, and witty. He was so perfect, I never looked at another other young man for the next six years!

His parents had divorced (an unusual event) when he was two, and he had grown up with his mom (he really hated not having a father).

His mom was a law professor at Beijing Peoples’ University. She was short and dark and spoke with a strong accent, but she was very down to earth – so I ended up being very comfortable with her – and I think she liked me very much, too.

He had been sent to a village about 6 kilometers from mine – and he first noticed me when I was going to visit a good friend from my grammar school who was also staying there.

One day, I was stopped by a group of boys who usually bullied and harassed me – but this time they stopped to gave me a letter – his letter – and I had never read a letter written so well. It was like a novel – filled with stories and imaginative descriptions. I read it a dozen times -- no, more like a hundred times -- trying to find the real meaning behind each and every word.

I was in love ! And thus began a correspondence that would last for six years.

In the beginning, we wrote to each other every day. No matter how tired I was, every night I spent hours trying to write him a letter at least as impressive as the ones he was sending to me.

How to describe his letters ? Sometimes he wrote about the things that happened at the farm – but mostly he wrote descriptive scenes – like, for example, a white-haired old man catching fish from a small boat on a river -- beautiful imaginative scenes -- like those found in the many books that he, but not I, had read.

We only got to see each other a few times a month – when I had a day off and could walk the 6 kilometers over to his farm. Usually these meetings were secret and we tried to hide where no one could see us. But even then, we never kissed. It was all very romantic – but physical affection was strictly forbidden – and all we did was hold hands.

I was very happy to see him each and every time. He was my whole world, I enjoyed so much his company, and I truly believed that he was the smartest young man I have ever met, and that he was the man I was going to marry.

Once, when we were together, I noticed that we were wearing the same wool long scarves: the same color, the same brand. So then we exchanged them – and when I put his on my neck, I could smell him. Even though that scarf became quite dirty, I never wanted to wash that smell away ! (but don’t worry -- eventually I washed it).

One day, a villager saw us beginning to embrace – and I was so afraid that we would get into trouble. But the villager gave me a knowing look – and later invited me to have dinner with his family at the village. He and his wife were so kind – and I appreciated their efforts – but I was not comfortable sitting on their kang and eating dumplings made with such dirty hands just a few feet above their dirt floor. In gratitude, I gave one of my blouses to his daughter – and they were very pleased to have it. This was the first time anyone had invited me home for dinner. (local villagers got to know some of us very well and they often invited students into their homes - but since I was considered to have such a bad family background, no one had ever invited me before.) I was touched under this special circumstance, and neither of us mentioned this incident ever again.

Most of our relationship was by correspondence – and letter writing was important to many of the girls in the dormitory because – let’s face it – the rest of our lives were misery. .

There was that 12-16 hours/day of hard work – the cold in winter – the insects in summer – and that ever-sensitive, unavoidable issue of sanitation.

We sixty girls had one outhouse : a pit with two boards, sheltered by four walls and a roof.

During the winter, the waste would freeze (probably even before it hit bottom) – and gradually the bottom of the pit rose higher than the ground – so we would be squatting on a raised mound of frozen waste. The earth was too frozen to dig another pit – so farm supervisors had some of us (like myself) dig it out it with a pick axe. Not a pleasant job – but as the daughter of a “bad family”, a job often reserved for me.

But even when the pit was dug out again – who really wanted to walk fifty yards through the sub-zero cold of a winter night to use it ? Most of the girls found a more convenient place to squat --- so soon the outside walls of the dormitory were encircled by a ring of frozen feces.

In the summer, the job of a special someone (often myself) was to carry off buckets of liquid waste. It was quite a challenge for me, because I wasn’t very strong, but there I’d be, with a long pole straddling my shoulder, and a heavy bucket of crap on either end.

By then, my group of students had been on the farm for a couple of years, and many of them had made new friends from different parts of the country, but I was still alone. Because of my family situation, no one wanted to be my friend, except for a couple of girls who either had pity on me or needed a friend as badly as I did. But even then, our friendship was never open to the public – everything had to be shared under the table.

Perhaps this will help explain why I jumped on the first chance I had to leave the farm – even though it meant leaving my boyfriend behind. After my second summer, I was given a holiday to visit my mother – and I never returned.

Our correspondence continued another 4 years --- the entire period of my life outside of Beijing. In the beginning, we were writing every day – but when he was transferred to a fire-fighting station, mail delivery became more sporadic.

I remember how I cried the day I got his letter announcing his departure for that trip, and I was so anxious to get his first letter after he got there. It took at least a week for that letter to reach me – and that was a very long time to wait !

Some days I would get none of his letters at all – and other days I would get five letters at once. Gradually our letters became spaced more widely apart –though I never lost faith in our future together.

But how can a long-distance relationship last forever ? I still felt committed to him – but he was taking longer – and then longer – to respond to my letters. Eventually I got a letter that seemed to darken the hope of a future together – or, at least, that’s how I interpreted it.

In the sixth year, as his mother’s only child, he had gotten special permission to move back to Beijing with her where he got a job in a shoe factory. (he was very smart – and eventually he would go to school and become a lawyer – but back then he was working in a shoe factory)

Sometimes I got to visit Beijing, and we would get together for a date – but it was always temporary – and I’d soon have to leave.

He lived with his mother in an old office building – their two rooms were on either side of a long hallway – and on my last visit there, he was gone when I arrived, so I had a chance to chat with his mother (who really liked me). Usually she was very upbeat about her son – but this day she was very critical – disappointed about his dead-end job at the factory etc.

This was a surprise visit – and I wanted to surprise him with the news that I had just become a college student, studying English in the Beijing Second Foreign Language Institute. I wanted to tell him that I was back and would never have to go away again.

But he had a surprise for me as well.

When he finally arrived home, he sat down and we chatted for a little while. He seemed very uptight, but he was still friendly, happy to see me and happy for me.

Then -- after a little while -- while we were still chatting, – to my complete surprise – another woman entered the room. She did not say anything to me and soon she left.

“Who is this woman? ” I asked.

“I have begun a new family for China” he replied.

I was stunned ! I did not know what to say. I never thought that he could get married that soon – since it was against policy, though not law, for a man and woman to marry at such an early age. (he was 23 years old—and I was 22 at the time) My whole world was turned upside down, I did not remember what I said to him, I was totally lost and very very sad. I still don’t remember how I got home that evening (and believe it or not – a big patch of hair fell off my head over the next few weeks)

Many years later, we ran into each other, and we got together at a café to talk about what had happened.

Then he told me how he had met a woman at the shoe factory and she happened to live nearby.

Before he could continue, I interrupted and said “let me finish your story”

Then I told him how what began by walking home together eventually became sleeping together. She had gotten pregnant – then had an abortion – then gotten pregnant again – at which point they finally decided to get married. (even though, at age 23, men are usually considered too young to marry)

I told him that he did not love her, but he had no choice except to marry her. He was shocked - and he told me so.

I had guessed correctly !

And that was the end my first true love.

We kept in touch a little after that – his daughter would be over 30 by now -- but he left his wife after a few years. They really had very little in common.

And now I’m going to cry.

Part Thirteen

2007-05-23T19:58:00.001-07:00

More about life at the farm

Maybe I didn’t make clear the location of this place: it’s nearly 1000 miles due north of Beijing – at the northern tip of Manchuria – 50 miles from Russia (i.e. Siberia) –and like Siberia, it was cold, desolate, and had recently been used as a kind of penal colony for the rehabilitation of criminals after they had served their time in prison.

Some residents were army veterans whom the government had relocated after the Korean war. It was a remote and uncultivated land, but some of them were happy, because they had a better life here than in their home land and I think they were also being paid by the government.

A strange thing we noticed when we first arrived: all the girls and boys started smoking at the age of 7 or 8. I was used to see grown men smoke, but not children, and especially not young girls. Later I learned that it was to protect themselves from all the biting bugs and flies which I was told hate the smell of the smoking. But unfortunately, so do I, and I never got the habit.

Each village (which still included some of those former criminals) received an allotment of young high school students like us. The village had to feed and build shelters for us – and we had to work for them – under the supervision of the village leaders - who then selected our student leaders to be in charge. Overall, the region was administered by the army – so all of us were issued green coats, similar to a military uniform.

Everyone in the village was Chinese, but there was one half-Russian – the adult son of a man from a village just over the Russian border who had been abandoned by his Chinese mother. He was borderline retarded, and people would tease him. “Hey – we have found a wife for you – just wait here and we’ll send her over” – and he would wait there all day.

Though the growing season was short, the soil was black and fertile, and during the summer and fall, we harvested crops of winter wheat, soy beans, and corn.

There was still a lot of good, uncultivated land there, but for some reason local people were discouraged from using it. One day, during my first summer there, the village leader named Liu took us to a small vegetable field filled with huge Chinese cabbages almost ready for harvest, but we were ordered to destroy them. I was puzzled and asked for an explanation. Mr. Liu told me “we do not encourage capitalists in our society. Let the cabbage rot just like the Capitalist society ”. No argument from us -- we destroyed the entire cabbage patch. (but what a waste!)

Early in the planting season, we worked three shifts to put seeds in the fields with machines. On windy days, we came back from work covered with dust a—but still each of us had only half a basin of water to wash ourselves..

Every day, we had to stand in the line waiting for that water—and hopefully it was hot – but some days, nobody remembered to turn the heat on, or someone took too much hot water before every one else got a chance. Those were the days we washed ourselves with icy cold water!

In mid-summer, our day began before 4 am – just as the sun was rising – and we’d begin by walking two to three miles to the fields. Then we’d spend the next 12 – 16 hours walking down the field rows picking the crops (each row could be several miles long) – and throwing the harvest into piles that ran along each row – to be picked up later by the carts. We’d all line up – one to a row – and work side-by-side – with a kind of pride in moving ahead of the others in line.

In the beginning, I was slow and always got left behind. Usually, those who finished first would pick a line from the other end to help the slow person get to the end of her row, but nobody ever helped me. Later, I learned to choose an inner line, close to the pile, so I could be the leader of that line, and it really saved me a lot of time. I also got faster, and eventually I had time to rest as well as pick and choose those whom I would like to help.

We got a break for lunch – when freshly steamed bread was brought out to the fields – but often there was nothing to drink – and we’d get so thirsty, that we would drink from the puddles in the cart tracks if we had the chance (straining it through our neckerchief)

One time, the farm’s bad girl (I’ll talk about her later) told me that she had found a pond where we could drink and swim. I followed her into the brush, but as she walked into the pond, she sank into mud, almost up to her waist. I tried pulling her out – but it wasn’t easy, since I was getting sucked into the swamp as well. (After that – I stayed away from open water).

Back at the buildings, there was also work to be done: preparing the grain for shipment. This was hard, dirty work and the floor was swarming with mice, hundreds of them. (I had nightmares about them, and still don’t like mice, to this day). We tied strings around the cuffs of our pants to keep mice from running up our legs.

One day, a mouse ran into a girl’s pants and she was so terrified, that she was screaming and grabbing it for almost 10 minutes. Finally, as she let other people help her catch it, the mouse dropped out from her pants. It had been squeezed flat.

Life was hard, but the young people tried very hard to please – and there weren’t any serious discipline problems – though once in a while, people noticed that things were missing from their pocket or from the trucks stored in the shed, and sometimes there were fights among the boys or quarrels among the girls.

One area of contention, was the spot on the chimney that could be used to dry our wet shoes which had been specially designed for the people of this area. The tops and the soles were of rubber, while the insides were cotton padded, and if you did not dry them out , they could be hard as a rock to wear the next day, but not every one could get a safe spot on the top of the chimney every night.

So, almost every night, someone’s shoes got scorched, and we were often woken by clouds of black smoke accompanied by much crying and swearing.. The smell of burning rubber shoes was almost unbearable --especially during the winter, when all the dormitory windows were kept tightly closed.

I was not lucky enough to get spot on the kang, but at least I was not one of those who slept close by the door, and who were always yelling whenever the door swung open during the winter.

I remember once that I was bullied by the girl ( mentioned above ). She pushed me down to the floor from my second level bed. But no one helped me because everyone else was afraid of her and I was so unpopular due to the arrest in my family. I felt so bad, sad, and helpless.

But on the whole, there were no serious crimes, nothing that couldn’t be handled within the criticism sessions we had at night.

I never saw students get beaten – but one time we caught some young men from the village who had come to steal our grain. The village leader had them tied up – and then instructed our young men to give them a beating. It was a terrible – I remember their screams – and one of them was nearly killed (it took him a month to recover)

And even though there were so many adolescent boys and girls working side by side – in the entire two years I was there – only one girl got pregnant – that bad girl I mentioned earlier – who slept near me on the shelf above the kang. She was overweight, and not very attractive, and had a reputation of being available for any boy who wanted her. An older couple from the village adopted her child, and eventually, she married and moved into the village herself.

During the harvest months, we were too tired to do anything at night – but otherwise, we would have political meetings – many of which concerned preparing us for an impending Russian invasion. One time, we were loaded up with packs, and got to practice our own “long march” throughout the night.

Regarding food, I should mention that since we were paid a salary, we had to purchase our own food at the cafeteria – but the offerings were rather minimal: steamed bread and “soup” – where the soup was hot water that had been politely introduced to a few slices of turnip.

One day, when I took my usual breakfast meal of hot soy milk and steamed bread back to the dorm., I spilt the soy milk on my little finger. Within a few seconds, my finger had turned white, and it was so painful, I almost dropped everything in my hand -- but I held on – because otherwise I would have had to go back to buy the meal again. I was in tears.

Being a cook was the best job anyone could have (since you could eat whatever and whenever you wanted) But being a blacklisted person like me, almost everyone treated me badly, and every time I was buying my meal, I noticed that I was given the smallest portions. Nor could I complain, because I knew that if I did, I would be treated even worse.

An exception was New Year – our one, big holiday – where we all got together to make dumplings – using our own wash basins as pots. One of the offerings at the cafeteria was soy milk – and this is what I bought every day – not because I liked the taste – but because it was the only offering that had serious nutritional value. (who knows what went into that bread –one time it was filled with sand and mouse droppings – as if it were made from floor sweepings)

Due to poor nutrition, I was among the first students from our group who got night blindness. I could not see anything at night except for the flame of the oil lamps, and I got scared. I wrote to my mom and friend in Beijjng, and both of them sent me a few bottles of vitamin A. When I opened the package, only one bottle was left – but that bottle was enough, and soon my vision had recovered.

The water from the wells was yellow – so all of our towels turned the same color. We survived it, but it must have affected the people who grew up here – because all of them had swollen joints – and rather than walk straight , they seemed to waddle from side to side.

Regarding my life among others, it had been immediately announced (by a blabbermouth who knew me) that my father was in prison – not the ordinary kind of prison where so many people were detained for questioning in those days – but in a special high security prison – with walls 30 feet high – that incarcerated the very worst political prisoners. So being friendly with me was not a wise path to follow – and that’s why nobody would ever help me.

Our group leader especially hated me (she was 2 years older and came from Tienjin). It was policy that all working women got a 3 day rest during their period – but this policy was not applied to me – and I had to work everyday, regardless.

I had never imaged that I could end up like this. All my dreams were gone, and I was facing a grim reality – not only of physical labor – but of missing my mom and everybody else I knew, ---as well as the mental torture inflicted by my peers. I just could not handle it any more. There is a Chinese phase like “ calling the sky, the sky will not respond --calling the earth, the earth will not answer” . I felt helpless, I was so sad, and I could not imagine spending my whole life there.

I made a pledge that I would get out in 5 years. I did not know how I would survive until then - or where I would go --but I was determined.

And in the meantime, I became a fervent writer of letters.

One day, my oldest brother was staying with mother when she received one of my long, whining communications – begging her to help me get me out – telling her that I could not stand my miserable life any longer.

When he saw how mother wept to read it - he sent me a reply – gently asking me to take her feelings more into consideration. I think I grew four years older on the day I read his letter – and I never shared my misery with mother again.

But I also wrote letters to everyone else whom I thought might possibly return them – including – and especially – my first real boy friend.

Yes ! -- amazingly enough -- I had fallen in love – for the first time in my life – with a student who was working on a nearby farm.

Part Twelve

2007-05-16T17:42:00.000-07:00

I go to the countryside

With my older siblings dispatched to the countryside, I spent the next year in the Beijing apartment with my mother and younger sister.

I was supposed to be attending my first year of high school at this time.

But when high schools reopened after Red Guard chaos, it was a completely different system. There were only local schools now – no more schools ranked by student ability – and it turned out that what had been the lowest school ( with the lowest ranked teachers for the lowest ranked students) – was now my local school. It was a disaster – I hated it – I learned nothing the entire year – and I skipped classes as often as I could , so I could hang out with my friends.

My friends were like me – children of high officials – whose parents had been arrested or sent to the countryside – so they were often under their own supervision, left alone to live on their own with money left by their parents,

One time, I was invited to a friend of friend’s house.

She was a very pretty girl, about 15 years old, and she lived alone with her brother, age 7. She was so mean to this poor boy ! She forced him to do all the chores – constantly beating and slapping his face. He had to cook for her, and if she didn’t like the food, I saw her shove it into his mouth. He was in tears, but dared not to cry out, because the more he cried, the more she beat him. I felt so bad that there was nobody to stop her.

We were so-called hooligans – but of the genteel sort. Breaking into movie theaters was our worst crime. One time, my best friend stole a tomato off the window sill of a security office -- but that was the most outrageous thing we did (and I remember running like crazy to get away)

This wasn’t the 60’s in America – we rebellious youth had no drugs – no sex -- or even any rock n’ roll. (sometimes we played recordings – but the only records anybody had were Russian)

There was some dating among us – where someone would introduce someone else to a brother or sister – and we had some neighborhood boys on bicycles who liked to chase young girls. They especially liked to chase the girls who wore a military uniform or blue Mao jacket (since that could identify us as children of high officials)

I went out with a few boys --but I never had any special feelings for them. All of our behavior would have been quite appropriate for a church social.

But as I said – my high school was hell – and I especially hated the principal teacher who supervised my class. He knew that my father was arrested , and he used it against me before the other students. He was a peasant who had worked his way up to teach in a Beijing school.

One time he took a few students with him to visit our apartment – to berate my mother for having such an awful daughter. When I heard what he was doing, I raced home – but he was already there – and my mother was so upset by his attack, she went into a kind of fit – falling on the floor and clenching her fists. It was something I had never seen her do before – but it would happen several more times over the next 5 years.

I was furious ! And I ran out of the apartment to where the teacher had left his bicycle – and I stomped it – jumping up and down – going kind of berserk. Seeing his bicycle destroyed, he ran up to me and punched me full in the face, knocking me down.

I saw stars ! – yes, I actually saw stars, just like in the cartoons.

I was 15 - he was over thirty – I was a small, skinny girl from the city – he was a large, country man, strong as a horse – but I jumped up and slapped him twice on the face – leaving red hand prints on both his cheeks. (Well -- I’d never done that before - and I never did it again)

So as you can see, I was probably more eager than anyone to leave town and go to the countryside – and indeed, as summer came, all the students my age were being organized to leave the city. At first it seemed that my family’s bad record was going to keep me from going – and since my school was going way north – up near the Russian border – somebody like me might well try to escape to the other side.

But eventually – in October – the orders came for me to join them – and I was really looking forward to it.

For one thing, the students got paid 32 Yuan a month – a real salary. And for another – I so longed to get away from the neighbors ( who spied and accused us) – and, of course, away from that hellish school. Working with a bunch of boys and girls my age – out in the fresh air - among the valleys and streams – it all seemed very romantic – and I was eager to go.

Our destination was a large farm , formerly used to rehabilitate political prisoners –way up in HeiLongJiang province (Manchuria) –in a village about 50 miles from the Russian border.

We were on the train for 36 hours – and when it finally stopped – it was the middle of night – and in the middle of nowhere.

It was very dark – and there were no lights.

There was a very small train station—but nothing else.
No buildings - no trees - no nothing – just shoulder-high grass – and several tractors from each village that were waiting for us.. We were loaded into wagons – and the tractors pulled us for another four hours down the dirt road that led to the farm – where we were greeted with a great banquet upon our arrival.

I’m calling it a great banquet – it was only stir-fried cabbage and steamed bread. But compared to what would become our usual meals – it really was a banquet – even though we were eating in candle-lit darkness. (there was no electricity – and by the way, we never saw candles again)

And it did I mention that it was cold ? The newly built dining hall had windows – but they hadn’t yet been glazed – and this was October in a rather high latitude.

Yes, there was a lot of crying during the first week at the farm (and not just by me)

In preparation, my mother had used some of my uncle’s money to purchase a new, large wooden trunk to carry everything that might be needed in a place where nothing could be purchased—all my clothes – toiletries – bedding – water basin etc. It was probably the heaviest trunk taken to the farm – but that’s as far as it got – as it split down the middle while being loaded off the cart.

The boys and girls lived in two separate dormitories – that were like long tunnels with a long bed – called a kang – on either side – that were like horizontal chimneys that circulated hot air within them from the fire that burned at one end. That’s how homes have been traditionally heated in northern China for thousands of years. The room itself isn’t heated, but the bed is – though there wasn’t much warmth for those sleeping at the far end of the dormitory.

That autumn, we worked 12 hours a day – first in the fields, gathering brush/scrub to serve as fuel – and then in the barns winding rope out of hemp – a regimen that left most of us in a very bad mood at the end of the day.

We got a half-basin full of hot water every day. First we drank a little – then we used it for a sponge bath – and all of us had fleas.

I was meticulously clean and kept the fleas away as long as I could – but basically we were all sleeping in the same bed – and the fleas had a field day.

It was especially tough as winter wore on – as the snow piled up and the temperature sank far below zero. We used to say that if you spit – the frozen spittle would shatter when it hit the ground. And foraging for fuel became much more difficult as well – because several feet of snow had to be cleared off the top.

But the summer was not necessarily a holiday either – as we had great, black clouds of mosquitoes – and walking along –we continuously had to flail our arms to brush them off.

To relieve the monotony, we had singing (songs from the 8 operas approved by Madame Mao) . Occasionally, we got to see a movie, but they were all the same - and usually just more propaganda. Sometimes we had to walk many kilometers to a nearby village to see them. At other times , the headquarters would send some local entertainment team to perform shows for us (shows that were all about praising Mao and down with the rich. )

The only thing kept me going was letters from my family and friends. I cannot describe the joy I had whenever I received a letter.

It was at this time, that I became such a fervent correspondent – written by the light of a simple, oil burning lamp I had made. I wrote letters to anyone-everyone I ever know or hoped to know – and was, of course, so happy to get letters in return. One day, at mail call, I got 5 letters ! This was my greatest achievement – and one of the happiest moments of the two years I spent there.

Part Eleven

2007-05-09T20:14:00.000-07:00

Needless to say , with father gone – the rest of us spent a rather unhappy summer (of’68) in that Beijing apartment.

On the evening of the day following the arrest, mother was dragged out to the street, where a platform had been hastily erected. Our belongings were piled up on long tables, and mother was publicly bullied into making a confession. The slapping and shouting and accusation went on for several hours into the night – but mother was stubborn and denied everything – and we had to watch.

My second-oldest brother was very upset, since he and mother were very close, and many times he began to move toward the stage to help her – but the rest of us pulled him back – what could we do ? There were five of us, and crowd numbered several hundred – and sometimes people were beaten to death in these situations.

Finally, my mother stopped disputing the charges – and she just hung her head in silence.

Thank goodness that was the only time we had to endure such a trial.

But our next problem was getting enough to eat – since Monday had been my father’s payday – and the previous paycheck had already run out.

Mother was frugal and had always believed in saving money – so she had opened several bank accounts – but this was, of course, the kind of thing that our interrogators were looking for. They found some of her smaller account books – but she had one very large account (of 30,000 Yuan – a fortune) and she sewed the account book into a pocket in my sister’s underwear.

So we had a lot of money in a bank – but the problem was how to get it.

As a known criminal, my mother was afraid to go to the bank herself – so she sent me and my older sister on this important errand – to withdraw some small amount, like 150 yuan – that would feed us for several months, but not enough to attract attention.

We had never been to a bank before – and had no idea what to do.
My sister was more timid than I, and she pushed me forward to talk with the teller, but I was not coached enough by mom, and I didn’t know what to say. So there we were, standing by the entrance, pushing each other forward to get the money.

The Banks teller noticed what was going on, and as soon as we handed her the precious account book, she took it to one of the rooms in back --- where she stayed for a very, very long time.

When she returned – she handed the book back to us – but it had been stamped “Closed due to suspicious activity” – and we would not see a single yuan of that money for many years.

This made the family’s situation rather desperate – and at first we went to visit my mother’s brother, a military officer stationed in Beijing. He wanted to help us – but even he was threatened by having any connection with the family of a spy. He did not want to come to our apartment, so we made arrangements to meet him near the Beijing Zoo secretly. Each time he give us 50 – 60 yuan – enough to last us a month. (as a military officer, he made about 230 a month.)

Eventually, our lives were saved by the new military administration of the hotel at which my father had worked. The military had taken control of all institutions whose leadership had been arrested – and the officer in charge of the hotel assigned us the 6-yuan/month stipend given to the destitute --- and since there were 6 in our family, we got 36 yean/month to stay alive.

Which left us with two concerns for the rest of the Summer – first – what happened to father ? and second , what would we do for clothing come next winter (everything had been locked into one of the bedrooms and then sealed so we could not get in)

The challenge was how to remove the seal without breaking it –and with great care, my older brothers accomplished this trick by steaming off the paper seal – and then re-dusting the tracks they had made over the dusty floor.

Unfortunately, finding my father was not so easily accomplished.

Every day, one of us went somewhere – visited someone – trying to get any information at all – but ended up with nothing. Nobody could help us – even if they wanted to.

Meanwhile, the whole country was chaos --nobody was working – and we were stigmatized with enormous lettering on the wall beneath our windows (the calligrapher must have used a mop) marking us as the enemies that we were – and making it dangerous for us to go outside. (my younger sister was once chased and stoned by neighboring children)

Our apartment door was constantly hit with stones thrown by all the people (the “rebellious”) who hated us (or by children who thought it was fun) And then there was all that loud door knocking – whenever someone wanted to search the apartment. Eventually, we all had a fear of door knocking, -- even years later, when it was only friends who came to visit.

Next door – newly wed couple moved in the apartment that had been taken from us – and ever after we had to share the kitchen and bathroom with them. They never cleaned up their mess – and mom hated it -- but she dared not say a word.

We analyzed that situation: why did they want to move in with us?

Yes, they needed a place to live, but meanwhile they could also spy on us. Fear that the couple would report whatever we said, we soon spoke in a low voice and used some secret codes among us. So even if they heard us, they could not tell what we meant.

Then, one day the couple moved out – and in their place came one of the many new political action groups that used the apartment as an office – where they would meet to decide who should be denounced – and broadcast the results from a loudspeaker aimed out the window. This was happening all over Beijing – and it was like a madhouse.
As the family of an “American Spy” we were, of course, one target of their displeasure – and as the comrades visited the office, they often grabbed a handful of stones to throw up against our door.

But it wasn’t only comrades who visited the office – we also began to notice that a parade of neighborhood girls (aged 12 to 16) were spending time there with one of the fellows. As a group leader, he had access to things girls might want – like treats or tickets to shows– and eventually, one of them became pregnant.

As I may have mentioned before, we lived in a somewhat puritanical society – and sex outside of marriage was a serious offence. The parents of the pregnant girl complained to the police, and the young revolutionary was brought up on charges. No laws, no lawyers, no litigation was involved – but the young man spent the next 2 or 3 years in prison.

During this summer, I had my own scrapes with law –but nothing that serious – because I had begun to hang out with a group of what might be called “young hooligans” What else was there to do ? I became best friends with a very short, but very feisty girl my age from the neighborhood (I still know her ! she lives in New York now)

One of our projects was to break into movie theatres to see the movies for free –maybe to save a little money – but mostly for the thrill of it.

We would rush the ticket counter all at once – say something a little threatening – and then find seats in the theatre. Sometimes it worked – and sometimes it didn’t – and one time we heard the theatre doors being bolted shut behind us as the police entered the room and rounded up all the miscreants.

So there I was –hauled off to the police station late one night. I must have cried so pathetically, they let us off with a stern warning – but by now it was midnight and neither my friend or I felt we could go home --- so I had the idea of visiting my uncle again – the one who had helped us before.

I’m sure we were not a welcome sight at 2 am when we finally got to his compound. The soldiers at the gate wouldn’t let us in – but they phoned up to his apartment. He wouldn’t let us stay – but he gave me ten Yuan – which was enough for bus fare and breakfast. (note: I forget where you ended up sleeping that night)

Often our adventures were not that risky – we would just manage to sneak through the fence of a neighboring apartment complex on movie night.

As winter approached, arrangements were made for high school students, like my older brothers and sisters, to be sent to the countryside – and this was happening across the country in every high school. The higher rank the school -- the more primitive the area to which their students were sent.

My siblings were going to remote places with no electricity, no plumbing, dirt floors, and very little food. Where my oldest brother went, there weren’t even houses – but the people lived in caves dug into the hillsides. Where my sister went, the food was corn porridge --- that varied throughout the day from watery to more watery. The local people have been living like that from generation to generation. They seldom went to bed with a full stomach.

My old sister and her classmates had to build their own house to live. (When she was sent to the roof to work, she was so scared, she hardly dared to stand up.)

And I remember so well the day they left for the train station – because we had to borrow a cart and it took all day dragging it back and forth for each of them.

What a dark, bleak, cold December day that was !

Part Ten

2007-05-02T18:54:00.000-07:00

Sunday, May 6, 1968 --- I remember this day very well.

For more than a year, posters had been going up on the wall of our compound, denouncing my father as one of the criminals against the people’s revolution.

So we knew we were in trouble (my parents often talked about it - in hushed voices we could not hear) -- but what could we do ? We had tried to eliminate the most incriminating evidence from among our collection of books – and I remember that “1001 Nights” was especially problematic, so mother took it apart, one page at a time, and flushed it down the toilet. (one time, the toilet got jammed – but we had a friend in building maintenance, and he fixed it up without reporting us)

She also destroyed her father’s portrait since he had come from a rich farmer family and had attended the Military School founded by the Goumingdang. (the Nationalist regime). For many years, she had kept a large portrait of him in a picture tube, and I didn’t know it existed until the day mom was ready to tear it up.

Before she tore it, she told me that it was the only photo of her father that she had. It had been drawn from a group photo of several soldiers .

(I think my third uncle still has that photo - Grandpa was standing in the middle of the back row. He had gone to Huang Po Military School, but did not graduate, since he was dead from liver cancel at the age of 35. He had been the oldest son of 5 brothers and 2 sisters – and he was a very tall, handsome man.)

She also tried to get rid of two small bullets that dad had kept all of the years since his military service. He had been given a pistol in the military, but in the early 50’s he had to turn it in to the government since nobody was allowed to own one. Mom asked my old brother to throw the bullets in the river or somewhere, and my old brother was so afraid that it took him a whole day to throw them away. He did not get home till late night. Mom was worried and really regretted that she did not do it herself.

The schools were closed, and all us children were living at home – or actually – half our home (since the other half had already been taken away) – and on this Sunday, – with nothing better to do --- the family took a trip to the zoo.

Thank goodness the Zoo was still open ! The monkey and elephant must not have heard about the need to criticize Mr. zookeeper !

But even as we left the apartment to board the bus, father turned to mother and said “we are being followed”

And we were followed – at a respectful distance – though we still had a good day at the zoo – taking photographs of the animals – and having lunch at the zoo restaurant. Father’s payday wasn’t until the upcoming week, so we were too short on cash for everyone to get a meal – but there was enough for the kids to have bowls of rice and a couple of dishes. Father took one or two bites himself.

When we got home, my mother went to the kitchen to prepare dinner. It was twilight now – oh, how I hate the twilight ! – and there was only one small bulb to light the kitchen. My mother grew her own mung bean sprouts – and she and father worked together in the dim light, picking the roots and cleaning them for a stir fry. It was a dark, ominous evening – and soon after dinner, we went to bed.

It was 2 am when mother came weeping into our room “Get dressed – your father has been arrested!” And I remember so clearly how frozen – how terrified I was. What would happen to me ? What about our future ? I struggled into clothes and came out in time to see my father in handcuffs being lead downstairs to a jeep that was waiting at the front door. Then there was the sound of the jeep doors shutting – the engine starting, and the jeep driving away. We heard nothing more about my father for the next four years.

What was happening ? I was so terrified – my tongue was too frozen to ask.

That’s how it was – we heard nothing. We didn’t get letters – we couldn’t visit – we didn’t know where he was – we didn’t know if he had been tried or convicted – we didn’t even know whether he was alive. You would think that we might still have friends somewhere high enough in government to know what was happening --- but my father’s only personal friends were comrades from the old days – and once someone had been arrested, it was not wise to have anything to do with their family.

There was nothing to do the rest of that night but stay awake and be miserable.

In the beginning, the Red Guard had been students (like my brother and sister), but now they were mostly workers – and the ones who arrested my father were workers in his own ministry . Several of them stayed in our building for the rest of that night –and then began to interrogate us – one by one – the next morning. “Did you ever notice anything suspicious about your father ?” “when did he become an American spy ?” These were the kinds of questions we were asked – and when my younger sister (age 12) had been in the interrogation room for what seemed like a very long time – mother told me – as the boldest one – to go in and see what was happening to her.

So in I went ! (I was 15 at the time – and yes, I was a bold, though small, person) – and I told them that we weren’t spies and we didn’t know if father had done anything wrong.

I recognized the interrogator as being from my father’s ministry – and I remember his home-made pipe – the kind that was quite fashionable among the Red Guards of that period. It was made from a certain kind of tree root found in the country – and he liked to continuously oil its smooth surface by rubbing it against his cheek and both sides of his oily nose. I wanted to punch him when I saw my younger sister in tears and scared to death.

After the interrogations, they went through everything in the apartment – looking for evidence of criminal activity and/or luxurious living. They had never seen anything quite like my brother’s photographic equipment – for he had managed to mount a lens in an old tin can to build his own adjustable optical projector and he could do many of the things done in a professional darkroom. More seriously, they found my mother’s coats and my grandmother’s collection of fabric – as Chinese have collected since the days when cloth almost served as currency. Good fabric, such as the linen for summer clothes, or silk or velvet or even wool sweaters or nice long scarves – all this was considered luxurious.

It was all gathered together and locked into a bedroom – then the doorway was sealed with a great sheet of paper -- so that the accused could not tamper with evidence. Unfortunately it also kept the accused away from any of their winter clothing – which would be sorely missed when the summer was over.

I said that the arrest was not all that unexpected because my father had been hounded, humiliated, and denounced on a daily basis over the previous 18 months.

Every morning, a fresh set of posters were inked up and pasted on partitions in public areas. In the beginning, they were made by students accusing their teachers – and I made a few myself. It was fun – and good practice for my brush work. But for the targets, of course, it wasn’t any fun at all – as their life history – either real, distorted, or completely fictitious -- was posted up for public contempt.

The bits about my father being an American spy – that was, of course, completely fictitious. The accusation that he wasted the ministry’s money buying hundreds of winter coats was partially true – but, of course, the coats were not for him – they were for the drivers who often had to stand out in the cold waiting for the officials they shuttled around to meetings. And it was quite true that he worked closely with the top men in his ministry – all of whom had also been accused/condemned as spies and traitors.

But a lot of controversial family history was also put up on the wall (the Chinese keep meticulous records). Often it was true – and usually I had never heard it before.

This was when I learned that my father’s parents were Christian, that my father had a Christian name, and that his brother was a Catholic priest who had lived in those two centers of world evil: the United States and Taiwan.

And this was when I learned, (incredibly enough for the first time), that both of my parents had been in previous marriages and that my father had a son by his first wife. (unfortunately, the boy had died in childhood) My father had gotten married in his village before joining the army. It was a marriage arranged by his parents and he never felt close to his wife. So he divorced her and never came back. Meanwhile, my mother had gotten married to a man from her village, but this marriage produced no children, and her husband died from illness.

These details were written on large colored paper and posted on the wall where everyone would read them. There were many “crimes” listed on these posters, starting with the 10 big crimes that included my uncle (who lives in Taiwan) and my father’s old boss (accused as being the biggest spy in China). My father had an American teacher to help him with his English – that was a crime. We lived in a big apartment – that was a crime. We had bath tab put in for us -- that was a crime, too.

And as my father’s crimes were piling up – people who held grudges against him were showing up and making trouble.

One was a young man who had attracted police attention by brushing Chairman Mao’s name on dozens of inflated condoms. Now, it seems like childish prank – but what’s a state security chief, like my father, supposed to do ? The young man was punished by being sent back to his home village – and when the cultural revolution turned everything upside down, he came back to Beijing to accuse my father of reactionary activity. (by the way, this young man went on to a career as a nationally known fine artist. I guess China and America are not that different after all!)

Another vengeful spirit was the daughter of a woman who had been accused of stealing. She thought that my father (who was in security) had a profile of her mom and she wanted him to destroy it – but my father would not

She showed up at our apartment one day to confront my father in person. She was a large, strong woman and she slapped my father across the face, knocking him to the ground. (A few years later, her husband became a leader of one of the many political organizations, but when that organization was accused of anti-Maoism – he committed suicide by hanging himself. She slapped his face too -- even after he was dead. !)

In addition to these indignities, my father was made garbage man for the Friendship Hotel - it being his job to scrub the garbage area on his hands and knees every day.

But it still took a direct order from Zhou Enlai to have my father arrested – and eventually, this is what happened. Perhaps there was so much pressure from below that Zhou had no choice. Perhaps throwing him into prison saved my father’s life (since some top officials had been killed). But whatever the reason , I do not believe Zhou deserves the respect he is still given – and I will never forgive him.

I think he was a coward. He knew the Culture Revolution was wrong, but he would not stand up against it.

Part Nine

2007-04-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

I was too young – but all my three older siblings joined the Red Guard right away – in those first enthusiastic months (1966) of cultural revolution.

There wasn’t any formal organization – and it wasn’t a branch of the “young pioneers” or the other groups that led up to party membership – it was it’s own popular movement – begun in the Beijing university and then spreading down to the high schools – across to other cities – and eventually to other classes beyond just the educated elite.

To join, you wore an armband with the three Chinese characters of “Red guard” – that’s all you had to do – and then join in the excitement of making revolution against the “old ways”.

For students, that mostly meant rebelling against the educational system – that strait-jacket of memorization, testing, and subsequent hierarchies. The teachers – but especially the school principals –were at fault – and they were humiliated, beaten, and sometimes driven to suicide or beaten to death. There was so much excitement in the air (just like among American youth of the time).

My siblings were in the thick of it – but they were too shy to take leadership roles. They just followed their peers and usually watched others to do the yelling and beating. Besides physical violence, Red Guards also did a lot of debating among themselves.

A frequent topic of debate was the assertion that “if you were born into a good family then you would be a good person.” I remember how one response ran like this:

Dragon gives birth to dragon
Phoenix gives birth to phoenix
Mouse knows how to dig holes at birth

We all agreed that this theory is 100% correct, since we were considered from a good family. (but this was before my father was arrested!)

Overall, my Red Guard siblings had our parents’ approval – because this was just another movement – like the “Great leap forward” – that had periodically marked my parents’ life since they first joined the red army 20-30 years earlier. But my mother was not happy about the hard language – the swearing language – that her suddenly tough little daughter brought home on weekends – and , of course, she opposed the beating of teachers.

I don’t think any of my siblings actually struck a teacher – but once my sister took her turn in holding back a teacher’s arms while she was forced to confess her crimes against the revolution. And recently she just confessed (for the very first time) that in the course of that interrogation, she picked up a small stone and threw it at the teacher’s face – breaking the skin. My sister is usually a quiet, shy person – and this teacher had been notably kind to her students, sometimes even feeding them. But when the teacher refused to confess: “I have done nothing wrong!” , my sister joined the others in venting their righteous frustration.

Very quickly, the schools were closed – and then these bands of these inspired youth roamed throughout the city to scourge the remnants of the “old rich” still cowering in their homes. My sister ran with a band of girls – my brother with a band of boys – and first they would visit the local police station or neighborhood committee to get the addresses of appropriate targets for punishment.

How were these lists compiled ? Were they based on family history – or personal grudges – or rumors of bad behavior ? Probably all three --- and once they had the address, the righteous children would smash down the door – dragging the occupants out for a beating and their possessions out for a burning.

The Red Guards were looking for gold bars, other valuables, and deeds for land or properties owned before the Party took over. This was hardly ever found – but they were beaten anyway and forced admit that they were enemies of the people. Then everything they owned was burned or destroyed – and and I saw many such bonfires in the streets of our neighborhood (in these first idealistic months, nothing was stolen -- but eventually that changed.)

The next step was to spread the revolution to other cities – and like everyone else in the movement, my siblings got free train rides to wherever they wanted .

My sister’s group took a train all the way west to Xinjiang (on the Silk Road) – where they were put up in school buildings and fed by the community. She remembers how the non-Chinese local people thought she was one of them (since she looks a bit different from other Han people) – and she remembers that the food was different, but very good – this being an area known for its tasty lamb stew. They stayed there two months – but this turned out to be her only trip. Meanwhile, my second oldest brother ended up making three trips --- to distant places like Shanghai and Canton – where language was a big problem since the dialects were nearly incomprehensible to students from Beijing.

Before they left Beijing, mom gave each of them about 15 to 20 Yuan for pocket money – while their food, and boarding were provided by the local government. I remember how my sister brought raisins back from Xinjiang, just like dad, who had brought back 10 kilos when he went to the same area on a business trip a few years earlier. We had raisins for a long, long time.

Similarly, students from other areas came to Beijing in mid-1967 –and after my parents were forced to abandon half of their apartment, the other half was assigned as temporary housing for up to 30 students. They had come from less developed areas of the country – and made a terrible mess . They had never even used a modern toilet – they were used to squatting not sitting -- so you can imagine in what condition they left the lavatory ! —and they had gotten far too accustomed to spitting on their dirt floors back at home.

We helped mom to wash down the staircase with hot water from our bath room.( She was afraid that we’d track all their spittle back into our apartment and get sick.) . The smell was horrible. Mom even had to teach them how to use the toilet.

During this time – nobody that we knew personally got killed – but still we saw some horrible things.

One day, as my mother was walking home from market, she heard a heavy sack crash to the pavement just behind her. Well, it was no heavy sack, it was a woman --- and looking up, she saw the open fourth floor window from which she had jumped. Frightened, my mother rushed home and told what happened. She told me to stay inside – but I have always been stubborn and curious – so I went down the block to take a look – and there was that poor woman crumpled on the pavement – still breathing. That was the first time I saw a person die, and I was scared.

Another time, we were at home, and heard terrible screams coming from an apartment in an adjacent building – their second floor balcony could not have been more than 20 feet away – and we saw a beaten, bloody man stumbling out to the balcony and try to lower himself over the side. There he was, grasping onto the railing, while his tormentors were kicking at his hands until he let go and fell. Then he got up and ran – but they were right behind him, and cornering him up against a wall ,continuing with his terrible beating.

All of those men were in their twenties – advanced engineering students living in a special dormitory for technicians – but we later learned that the victim was Korean – and his attackers accused him of being a spy. (or maybe he just talked funny ?)

It was autumn of 1966, when my sister began to take her second trip – and after a lot of pestering, she had finally agreed to take me lalong with her.

Beijing was full of student travelers, and it took us several hours to squeeze into a bus – but suddenly we heard someone calling our names just as the bus door was closing. It was my oldest brother, who told us to please get off at the next bus stop.

It turned out that my father’s ministry received the message from Chairman Mao that the time for the Red Guards to travel was over. This communication was only sent to high officials and the rest of the country would not be affected for several months.

I was so mad, and sad, because I never got a chance to travel with my sister again. But I think mom and dad were relieved, since some students had been killed during all this massive traveling – and I was only 13 years old.

Part Eight

2007-04-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

There’s no avoiding it any longer, the big event in my life – in my entire generation’s life – was the cultural revolution.

It began in 1966 when students from Beijing University petitioned Chairman Mao about the need to overcome “the old ways” that the earlier revolution had not yet eliminated. Mao approved of their complaint – possibly because he was losing power and needed to re-establish his authority over other top leaders.

And so the cultural revolution began among the top 3% of Chinese youth – i.e. those who had been admitted to university – and enthusiasm soon spread to high school students as well – including my older brothers and sister – each of whom attended the top, or next-to-top, high schools in Beijing.

I was too young (still in my last year of grammar school )– but my older siblings were caught up in the excitement – especially after their schools closed – and all schools, at every level, soon closed – and would stay closed for two years. ( universities stayed shut for five years !)

It was a youth movement – and just like the hippies in the West – it had its own dress code – so my sister cut her hair short (like a soldier) and everyone from a good family background (military, officials, workers, or intellectuals) had to wear old military uniforms – showing that they were not from a bad family background (landlords or merchants).

My parents’ old uniforms had long been discarded – but some uncles and aunts were still military, so mother asked to borrow their old clothing on behalf of her daughter and sons,

So that was the fashion: old army jackets with red arm bands – and except for the short hair – they would have blended quite well on an American college campus of the late ‘60’s. But there was certainly none of the “make love not war” mantra of the young Americans . My sister was 16 – but dating and romance were unthinkable among her generation (where boys and girls attended separate schools) , and she made a very beautiful arm band for herself:
red silk that was embroidered with three Chinese characters in black silk thread. (Mom has kept it all of these years, for what reason I do not know)

My oldest brother was a very quiet person – but my second brother (who was among the top students at the best school for boys – ominously called “Number Four”) was something of a ringleader – and many times he would bring a band of student red guards (5 to 10 strong ) to stay in our apartment over night – and mother would welcome them.

During the early days when the school had just closed,, they broke into the school library and picked their favorite books to take home. (My brother claimed that he did not participate in the break-in, but he did bring some books home, and later mom asked him to return them to whoever took them.)

They were well behaved, smart and handsome young fellows, and I even had a secret crush on a few of them (but I’ve never told anyone until now!)

(I was talking with my sister recently – and we agreed that mother enjoyed the company of boys much more than girls. They picked up her spirits – while girls, like my sister and I, usually just made her cranky, especially me, since I hardly ever lived at home. Plus she was very bitter about how little attention she got while growing up, even though she was the only girl in her family. Girls were not appreciated in her time – and that’s probably still true in the many areas in China.)

One time, the boys talked about beating their teachers – yes – amazingly, this kind of thing happened: students criticizing and beating their teachers – but my mother firmly reminded him that a teacher had once saved his life –so he should never touch them.

It had happened back in my brother’s first year of middle school – when the class took a trip to the nearby countryside to work with farmers for a week. Rural hygiene being what it was, my brother caught dysentery and eventually passed out. No transportation was available, so one of his teachers carried him unconscious, late at night, on his back for several miles to the nearest medical facility, where he was unconscious in the hospital for the next 7 – 10 days. Doctors had declared that if he had arrived even a few hours later, he might have been dead.

And you may notice that my mother was the only parent involved with our lives – since my father worked so late and was hardly ever home.

This was, by the way, one of the few times that I lived at home with my family – since all the boarding schools were now closed. We spent the time reading many of those books that my brother’s friends had liberated from the school library – including many Chinese translations of European literature. He enjoyed reading each book and then telling us all about it. It was fun not going to school –especially since my recent change of schools (the one I ran away from) had left me straggling behind the rest of the students.

Part Seven

2007-04-11T06:31:00.000-07:00

Expanding a bit on my mother’s family:

Her oldest brother, the farmer, took the train to Beijing once a year, around New Years, where he visited us and the rest of the family, loaded with things he had grown.

There were beans, peanuts, and my favorite: long, sweet yams, which we in Beijing could only buy in late Fall.

( Then, yams were cheap: only 2 fen for a half kilo. Mom boiled them in a big pot, and the best (very sweet) kind had an orange-red color and were not too dry inside. But my sisters liked the ones that were white and dry inside.)

My uncle would watch us eat his potatoes and outspoken person that I am, I once asked him why he didn’t eat with us. He told me he didn’t like potatoes at all, since he had to eat them every day during harvest season. He did not own the farm where he lived, but was given a very small piece of “self kept land” where he could grow anything he wanted and keep it all.

In return, my mother and his other siblings gifted him with cash whenever he visited, maybe 15-30 Yuan (an ordinary month’s wage) which was a significant source of income for his family. He stayed with us about four or five days, and I remember how he chain smoked, rolling his own cigarettes with newspaper that my mother had collected for him.

I don’t know if anyone ever took a bath in the countryside. They only had an out house, (and underneath it, the pigsty) . When he visited, Mom always had him bathe or shower and she washed all his clothes, sometimes needing very hot water to kill all the fleas. He was a big eater, managing two or three large bowls of noodles, enough to feed our entire family. (Mom always said that he could even eaten even more, but he was too shy to admit it.) He was very tall – just like all my uncles - about 6 feet high.

Mom’s second brother, the general, also lived in Beijing, and had been an artillery officer in the Korean war – where a nearby explosion had left him deaf in one ear. When he returned from the war, he enjoyed something of hero-status , and that’s when he met his young wife who was a very pretty, high-school aged patriotic volunteer from Wuxi (a location near Shanghai, known for it’s small, delicate, and very beautiful women)

They soon had four children, three boys and finally one girl, and had their own courtyard in Beijing, to which they also invited his mother (my grandmother) to live (my grandfather had been dead almost 20 years by then)

The oldest son was two years younger than me – a very tall, handsome fellow, who is now a judge in the Beijing Supreme Court. The number two son was even taller ( 6’5”) and was recruited for the military basketball team. His military career did not go anywhere, and he ended up working in a Beijing factory, married to a tall woman basketball player. ( they have a daughter, and you can imagine how tall she must be, but so far I’ve never met her) The youngest son lived with us for a few years, since mom did not work any more, and she could baby sit. He was a normal boy, but at the age of two, a high fever left him with a disorder on one side of his face. It took him a long time to find a wife, but finally, at the age of 40, he married a country girl who lived in Beijing. They have a beautiful daughter.

My uncle had a good life, but his career often took him away on duty -- and a beautiful young wife does not stay lonely forever. Eventually she began to entertain a young soldier, about seven years her junior. My grandmother, living at home, saw the young couple meet behind the closed bedroom door – but as a guest of her daughter-in-law, she felt she should say nothing.

A Chinese proverb tells us that “paper cannot wrap fire” – and true enough, eventually my uncle discovered the affair. Adultery is a very bad thing in China – but so was divorce – so it put my uncle in a tough position. I remember overhearing the hushed conversation he had with my mother about these troubles – how he felt like such a failure – and how my mother told him to divorce her.

The divorce was processed and my uncle, who was 38 at the time, was given custody of their three sons, while the two lovers were severely punished by losing their rank, their jobs, and their residency in Beijing.

Residency in the big cities was no small privilege – and it was nearly impossible to come by for those who didn’t have it. In the countryside, people eat what they grow – but in the big cities one needed food coupons – and nobody got them unless they were official residents.
I think the coupons system started in late 1950’s or early 1960’s., and some of the coupons, like those for grain and oil, lasted until early 1980’s.

Different cities had different types of coupons, and they were not interchangeable, which was one reason why very few people traveled during those years.

One year, dad traveled to Shanghai to investigate a major anti-party crime. Unfortunately his team was not able to solve the crime, and he had to stay a few weeks longer. There was one special coupon that converted coupons from one city to another for those who had the documentation of an official business trip, but dad had run out of Beijing coupons, and he wrote a letter to tell mom asking her send some. She sent him enough coupons to last for a month, but he never got them. It turned out that she had used a regular letter, and, of course, a hungry mail man kept them. It took my family many months to recover, and Mom had to cook with elm leaves or vegetable leaves from our front yard. I remember how my older sister and I climbed to the top of an old bunker in our complex to reach the elm bushes, and we picked the new tender leaves as mom had instructed. Mom then cooked them with corn meal, and I loved it. Mom laughed at me and said that I always enjoyed poor peasant food.

So the two adulterers were sent back to their home villages – with no prospects for employment.

My uncle’s ex-wife got piece-work assembling match boxes at home – on a starvation wage – with the assistance of her young daughter of whom she got custody. The daughter was a beautiful young girl – just like her mother had been – and it truly pained my uncle to lose her – but there was nothing he could do.

Eventually, her lover, the young soldier (now a hometown factory worker) was able to send for – and marry her, but my uncle’s daughter had to stay behind where she was cared for by extended family until she was old enough to marry another orphaned boy in the village – just in time to upset the plans of her desperate father, who had finally gotten the paperwork to get her residency in Beijing. But it was impossible to get residency for her new husband as well -- and so it goes….

The daughter’s young husband turned out to be abusive and the marriage didn’t last very long – but eventually she settled down with a factory job and second husband and things were looking much brighter for them.

Meanwhile my uncle’s ex-wife and her new husband were unable to have children – so they adopted a son – which occasioned the somewhat bitter remark from my mother that “having abandoned four children – why adopt another?”

My uncle soon found another wife – this one a college professor who had never been married – and she became the mother in his family, eventually bearing him another son.

My mother’s third brother was a great favorite with us children because he was very generous and always brought gifts whenever he came over, including some enormous pears we always kept on top of the armoire. He was very close to my mother - since she had played a maternal role in his life. My father helped get him get a good job with the army – and later he entered an industrial bank, where as level-17 cadre he served as a bank manager.

Among my mother’s uncles, I’ve already mentioned the ones who were traditional doctors – but there was also one who rose up to cadre-7 in the finance ministry.

That’s very high – he got his own courtyard in Beijing – the government provided his family with a cook and maid, a private driver and a car. In the late fifties, he owned among the very first television sets in China. These were Russian made devices that picked up the two hours of programming available every day – and there were, needless to say, quite expensive – about 800 yuan –which would have been about two years of ordinary factory wages. ( My family did not own a television for another twenty years) Making an annual visit to their home reminded me of the comical Granny Liu visiting Prospect Garden (in “Dream of Red Chamber”) – i.e. we felt like country bumpkins. (even we were much better off than most Chinese people.)

And then there was an uncle’s daughter whose husband moved to Texas to work in a plastic bag factory. The owners were Chinese, and they got him a green card to come to Texas to fix their machines. He was a professional engineer , but he was paid about $15/hour. He was quite frugal, and saving his meager wages, he brought his wife over in 4-5 years – and finally even had enough cash and credit to purchase new machines from China, bring them to Texas, and open his own factory, employing Mexican workers. Sort of an American immigrant success story, I suppose – as each wave of immigrants rises to the top on the backs of those who come next.

Still another uncle moved to Canada (he is a couple of years younger than me, and I never called him “uncle”) – and he is the family expert in traditional behavior – knowing all the proper forms of social interaction between generations. His family had lived in Beijing for many generations, and they speak a Beijing accent that even I don’t use.

Part Six

2007-04-04T19:07:00.000-07:00

Some more regarding my parent’s life at that time–

My father was a quiet, studious man - and he was always reading those old books with old Chinese characters that I couldn’t understand. He liked calligraphy and practiced an hour almost every day. And he liked to walk – an hour every morning until his eighties.

He didn’t socialize much with peers at the ministry. His friends were old comrades from the army – and several times a year they would come over for visits. We entertained their drivers in one room, while I served tea and candies or fruit to the officer and his wife. (it wasn’t the custom for visitors to stay for dinner – since all food was rationed – but sometimes my father would insist “stay, please stay” Unlike today, children stayed far in the background when adults were getting together – but I was more outgoing than my siblings, so I got to serve the guests – and it was my special skill to peel an apple so carefully that apple and peel could be reunited for presentation. Liquor was never served – except when dinner was offered.

As for my mom, I remember when she quit her factory job -- or actually my dad called the factory and told them we had moved to the complex next to the Tienanmen Square, so it was too far for her to come to work. This wasn’t exactly true, since it was only a 20 minute walk - but dad wanted mom stay at home to take care of us. – and he didn’t tell her about it. So when mom showed up at the factory the next day, she was told that her husband had already announced that she had quit.. This was second time my dad made a major decision for Mom without consulting her – and again, she was not happy about it. She had a lot of free time, so she started reading “The dream of red chamber” -- and she read it 4 times!

( she told us that a lot of it reflected her own family when she was growing up) I don’t think either of my parents were exposed to the Western literature at all..

After mother left her government job, her party membership got her elected supervisor of the neighborhood clothing factory – a kind of participatory entrepreneurial project – where local women got together with their sewing machines and made clothing whose sale would provide them all with a little extra income. For some single mothers, the 10-yuan a month they could earn was all they had – and they lived on the edge of starvation. To give you some idea of relative incomes, my mother, as supervisor, made 30 yuan, while my father as a level-12 cadre made 180 – so we were very well off – and mother contributed cloth as well a big pots of noodles to the workers in her shop. At 5’6” tall, , she towered over the rest of them – but like everyone we saw, she was thin --- all Chinese were thin (and when she visited America 30 years later, she was very surprised by American girth. There was only one fat Chinese I had ever seen – a three hundred pound cook at the hotel – and we children danced around him shouting “monster, monster!!” – to which he would obliging respond by chasing and trying to grab us)

We hardly ever socialized with our extended family – and maybe it’s time to talk about what they were doing.

My father had two younger brothers – and the older one lived in Tien Jing. But 100 miles was a long trip back then, and I didn’t take the train to visit that uncle until I was a teenager. He worked as a store clerk, and had a very low income. His entire family lived in one room – with curtains separating the beds – and when I went to visit, I slept with my aunt. This was the brother who had gone home to help my grandfather work the farm, while my father went into the army. It wasn’t until many years later that he moved into a larger apartment – purchased with cash sent by the third brother who ended up in Taiwan.

That third brother’s story is very different – because he was sent to a Catholic school in Beijing (which was more affordable). Just before Bejing fell to the Communists in 1948, the school took its students and moved to Hong Kong.

It was a very sudden and secret decision by the school. My uncle was 18 at the time, and he mailed a letter to my father – the first line running something like:

“Dear big brother: by the time you get this letter, I will no longer be in Beijing”

My father was shocked and felt betrayed. He handed the letter over to the Party and disowned his brother – but even though he tried to be loyal to the Party, this relationship would haunt him throughout his career – and especially during the Cultural Revolution.

(note: he later told me that he even offered to shoot the traitorous brother himself -- but despite his many years in the army then the security ministry -- I don't think he ever fired a gun at anyone)

Eventually this brother was selected for the priesthood, and a higher education in Rome. Catholic schools at that time taught their students English, and my uncle eventually became fluent in several languages. He was sent to Australia as a priest , but felt that Asians were treated poorly there, and he ended up in Taiwan after a stint at Loyola University in Chicago to take a masters degree in education. In Taiwan, he became involved in the life of a young Chinese woman who was the daughter of the housemaid at the rectory. Years later, when she was old enough to marry, he resigned from the priesthood, and took her as wife while working as a professor at university. After retirement, he continued to work as a government educational administrator --- assembling the annual tests for English proficiency. He’s still there – and his wife is about my age -- but I have never met them.

(In 1989, after more 40 years, he was finally allowed to come back to Beijing and meet his brothers.)

Meanwhile, my mother had three younger brothers. One became a general in the PLA, marrying a very beautiful young woman who had clerked in his office. Unfortunately, though, she soon ran off with another officer, and my uncle had to find another wife. Another brother became the financial officer of an investment bank – becoming a level 17 cadre --- and the third returned to farming after dropping out off the army during the revolution. He had gone home for a visit – and his wife convinced him to stay. So he spent his life in rural poverty.

But my mother also had several uncles – and some had distinguished careers – one of them as a prominent physician of traditional medicine who specialized in setting broken bones. His income in the 50’s was over 300 Yuan/month from the Navy hospital – and before the Communists took over, his services had required 3 silver coins just to make a house call. His son and grandson also became physicians at Beijing University –but none were as renowned as him – and he invested a fortune in that most traditional object of eternal status in China: an expensive coffin of rare woods.

Unfortunately, however, his great reputation served him poorly with the Red Guard. They broke into his courtyard – gave the old man a beating – and smashed his 2000 Yuan coffin into pieces. The next day he died.

( the family courtyard was taken and many other families moved into their courtyard, After the Cultural Revolution, many years later, the government returned the entire courtyard back to the family.)

Part Five

2007-03-28T18:42:00.000-07:00

As we approach the end of my primary education– big changes were taking place for me, my family , and the entire country.

For me, the change was quite simple: I walked away from the June First school and never went back.

Here’s how it happened:

As already mentioned, I did well in sports: running , ping pong – but also in that acrobatic exercise that Chinese girls do with a long rubber band – so well that my teachers selected me to represent the 12-year old girls in the competition with other schools. I was soooo proud – because I was only 11 – and I was not only the best girl in my class (40 children) but also in my age group (60 children) and even the next age group as well (total of 120 children) and here I would compete against the best girls from all over Beijing. So I began to practice very very hard (and my grades began to slip from straight-A’s – but just a little)

One day, as I was out in the yard practicing – I noticed, through the window, that my teachers were looking at me and talking – and next day I got the bad news: I was not going to compete for our school after all ! (no reason was given -- but I’ve always felt that it was because I was practicing too much by myself and not playing with the other children)

I was heartbroken ! I felt so, so bad – and I just decided to leave that school and never come back – which I did during recess – by walking right beneath the window at the gate (I was short enough not be noticed)

But now I had a problem – getting home ! --- because June First school was outside the city gates – it was 10 miles from home – and I’d never walked home before (the school bus took us back-and-forth once a week). So I followed the route of the school bus – and after walking all afternoon, I finally made it to Tiananmen square – which on this day was filled with people at some kind of public event. I was such a small child – they just ignored me – but I was very frightened – especially because the sun had begun to set – and this time of day always makes me gloomy. I also had to get past the guards at the gate to our compound – and since I was only home on weekends – the weekday guards were different and might not recognize me.

But I made it home – sneaked into home, actually – and hid in my brother’s bedroom – while I could hear my mother in the kitchen preparing dinner.

Then the phone rang ! “We can’t find Yen Ming – have you seen her ?” Mother had no idea where I was – but I rushed in, grabbed her leg from behind, and began to wail.

Looking back at it – maybe I was just a little spoiled – because my parents agreed not to send me back to June First School – but where could I go ? It was the middle of the semester, and the neighborhood school was already filled. But fortunately for me, my father had just gotten a very big promotion – where now he would work for the Foreigners bureau – and the family would eventually have to move into a different compound. He would be in charge of security – and his promotion was signed by Zhou EnLai, and announced in the People’s Daily

The Foreigners bureau managed the lives of foreign nationals in Beijing’s Friendship hotel – so we eventually had to live next to the hotel – and for the first few months, father and I actually lived in the hotel – in an 8-Yuan room – very expensive ! very elegant ! !

( The hotel was built in 1950’s with help of Russian experts, but from the outside, it appeared to be Chinese – with glazed tiles over the roof, and decorated pillars. For many years only foreign and distinguished guests could stay there. )

I felt very lucky to have father all to myself for every evening dinner at the hotel restaurant.

I had already eaten at my new boarding school, so I just sat and watched dad eat in the cafeteria. He never bought expensive dishes, the choices ranged from 5 to 25 fens, and he usually picked either the 10 fens or the 5 fens dish. He was known for living like a common worker, and he was proud of it. (but incredibly enough, later on that was counted as a crime: he was accused of pretending to be a worker !)

Once in while, dad would buy me a 4 fens piece of corn bread. (It was not common to find baked food in China since all the breads were steamed.) I loved it: it was sweet and crusty on the outside, but soft and moist within. Most Chinese hate corn bread because it was part of the daily food ration and they had no other choice. (But I still like it – even today)

After dinner, my father and I would go for a walk.

I remember how people were so friendly to us on the street, always greeting my father with his title instead of calling him by name. (that’s how Chinese people do when they run into higher ranking officials) . And many times I was flattered with nice words as well, such as “ how beautiful your daughter is ---- and how smart she is too”

Eventually, the family was moved into a Russian designed, newly built administrators’ residence – where we were given two adjoining apartments – giving us five bedrooms, two kitchens, and two bathrooms with showers.

(before we moved in, my father had also asked to have a bath tab installed in one of them. Most Beijing residents had to use public restrooms – or if they had a private restroom, it had no hot water)

The rooms had nearly 10 foot ceilings and hardwood floors. Here, finally, after an entire childhood spent at boarding school, I could live at home and attend the local ministry school – where I quickly fit in quite well – made friends – continued my study – preparing for the big examination. In this educational system – grades meant nothing – it all depended on the examination – and the stupidest little questions could sink your ship. For example, for some reason, when my sister had to answer “how many seasons are there in the year?” – she answered ‘three’ – which was the only answer she got wrong – but was enough to knock her out of the top school.

But it was now 1966 – and big changes were coming to the country.

At home, we noticed that something was wrong with father’s job – he was coming home later and later – some nights, not at all – and when he came home, he was worried – and my parents had conversations that we were not supposed to hear.

Then the big posters started to go up on the walls and over the windows in our district – posters that named enemies of the revolution – posters that named all four directors of our ministry – posters that named my own father ! And it didn’t even use his name as I knew it – it used his Christian name – and this was the first time that I know that, as a child, my father had been baptized a Christian.

All these posters were made by the people who worked in our ministry – the support staff – including the lower ranked cadres, the drivers, hotel room cleaners, cooks etc. – and the same thing was beginning to happen all over Beijing and eventually, all over China.

The Cultural Revolution had begun !

Part Four

2007-03-22T07:06:00.000-07:00

Just to fill in more details of life before the Cultural Revolution:

There were 24 levels of government service for Cadre (members of the Communist Party) – Mao was level one – Zhou Enlai level 2 – top generals level 3 etc. The upper 13 levels were considered “high officials” – and throughout these years my father was level 12 (eventually he made it up to level 11) , while my mother was level 22.

Each level had it own privileges – for example the highest levels got a red ration book that allowed them to purchase a certain amount of meat, eggs, shoes etc every month. Our family got the blue book – which was one rung lower – so we, for example, were allotted two pounds of eggs, 2 pounds of sugar, etc. every month – quantities that became very important during the three years of hardship (1958-1961) when drought and floods created such severe shortages and even starvation in the countryside. (this was also the period when Mao asked us to “tighten our belts” so China could pay its debt to USSR)

In the regular stores, you could not buy any food without the coupons distributed to residents each month by the local government, so it was impossible for people to travel to Beijing and live there.

For many years our mom wanted to buy a leg of famous ham - but that required two full years of meat coupons. Her plan was to save a few every month, but by the time she nearly had enough, the coupons rations were no longer being used.

One of our special events was to go shopping with mother. She would load all the different ration books into a large purse, and with kids in tow, we’d all go to the shopping district. It was great fun ! On one of the those trips, mother assigned us the job of carrying the purse – which was too heavy for just one of us – so we teamed up – and switched off – and shared the burden – and avoided the burden – and well, when we finally got to the market, the purse could not to be found. Nobody had it ! Ohhhhh was my mother angry ! That was an entire year’s worth of clothing ration books – there would be no new shirts or shoes until next year. She raised her voice and cuffed me on the head – and I felt very bad.

The only time my father ever hit me was the day I kept him from sleeping. I was playing out on the long front porch – while he was trying to take a nap inside. Several times he’d asked me to quiet down – but I just had to keep playing loud – so after at least an hour of sleeplessness, he came out and hit me – which provoked a terrible argument with my mother – and I, of course, again felt very bad.

Our parents hardly ever hit us – but they really pushed us to study-study-study at school .

Since mom never got a chance to go to university, she always hoped that all five children would – and she often told us “ if you are accepted into university, I will sell everything I own to support you.” But her dream was crashed by the Cultural Revolution.

I was the only one who eventually got a university education, but all of us did very well in school – especially my oldest sister and my second oldest brother who were admitted to the top middle schools in Beijing.

You have to realize what an incredible achievement that was for a 12-year old ---- because the 100 students in their classes had scored in the top 1% of all 12-year olds in the entire city. There must have been at least 20 levels of school with admission determined by test scores – with the bottom school taking everyone who couldn’t qualify for the others. That’s why we had to study so hard – and my mother was always urging my father to make my older brothers study harder.

In my first grade, I got sick and stayed in the hospital for a month, then I was released from hospital and sent straight home, I had to rest at home for a month. And in my second grade I got the same hepatitis-A again, this time even worse. I was in the same hospital for two months and stayed home another month, So basically, I did not attend school for the first and second year. My teacher was so concerned, she suggested that I repeat the second grade, but my mom told her to wait until final exams. Amazingly I passed them with a double 100 points. After that, my concerned teacher did not argue at all, - and I went on to the third grade and was always among the a few top students in my class.

My brothers studied hard – but they also liked to tinker with their radio. One day my father got very angry at them for wasting so much time – and he went into their room, took their beloved radio – that they had built from scratch – with from parts purchased by every penny they could save – and slammed it on the floor – crushing it with his foot. Needless to say, this made my brothers very, very unhappy.

Discipline at the boarding school was perhaps a bit lighter – but I do remember what happened to a big, strong girl who was a terrible bully. She would threaten –pinch – and take things from other girls – and they were all too afraid to tell the teacher. (she was not in my class) . She would torture girls by forcing making them to sit on the hot radiator – and make girls do her chores (like carrying the urine bucket out of the dormitory) – and even made some girls drink her urine. Oh – she was terrible ! But one day – finally! – the teachers got wind of this abuse– and all the children were assembled and asked to write down every bad thing this girl had ever done. The accusations were then posted up on all four classroom walls, and the long table was covered with everything she had taken from others. Her career as bully was over.

I also remember a similar event with an abusive boy – but here the teacher held the boys arms while all the students – including myself – were invited to step up – one at a time – to hit him. (I hit him, too, but not very hard, because he was already crying by the time it was my turn)

We had four classes in the morning – 45 minutes each with a 15 minute break between each class., and then a long break for lunch and nap – then three more classes in the afternoon and a study hall after dinner. Somewhere in there, we had about 2 hours to play – running, jumping, stretching – and of course, ping-pong --- at which I was very good – at least among my fellow 10-year olds. Two people would play – and the winner would than face the next person in line – so it was a question of how long one could keep on playing.

Every Thursday night we had a big dinner (with that special treat: meat-filled dumplings !) and a movie. We had plenty to eat that night – and one poor boy ate so many he couldn’t stand up ! (the teachers were very worried) Once or twice a year we were taken by bus for an outing to the “Fragrant Hills”, about 15 miles west of Beijing – where there were rocks to climb and gardens to see – and somewhere, hidden from curious eyes –the vacation home of Chairman Mao.

We went to Fragrant Hills in late October to see the red leaves. . This was a big event for us ! We were allowed to bring some pocket money, so when we were in the park, and hungry, we stopped for snacks. My mom usually gave me 20 to 50 cents. At that time, a popsical cost 3 cents, the better ones which were made of milk cost 5 cents. A sweat bread with nuts cost 15 cents. Orange juice cost 15 cents and so on. We seldom had any pocket money. However since I was the only one who went to boarding school, every time I got on the school bus, my mom put some candies or other goodies in my pocket, or else she’d give me 20 cents to buy something to take to school. I never went to school empty handed !

Sometimes, when there had been trouble with teachers (after I had been naughty or disobedient) -- I tried to find all kinds of excuses for not going back to school – and the school bus would leave without me. Then mom had to take me to school by public transportation. Since my school was in the suburbs, the city bus didn’t quite go that far – and we had to walk a certain distance through a grave yard. And every time that happened – my mother was scared to death !.

I just talked to mother about this period of my life --- and she corrected my story about the transition from pre-school to grade-school: my entire pre-school class was transferred to the newly built grade school --- and my sister would have gone too, except that she had gotten a terrible rash during a visit to the countryside with my mother – and she missed several months of school – so she ended up never going. That’s why she didn’t join me –not because of the expense, which my mother says was not that bad.

She also reminded me of when I got very sick – back when I was 12 months old – and they took me to hospital where the doctor said that I was beyond treatment. My mother said something like “please take her in and treat the dead horse like a live one” and they gave me a bed. But my mother was very worried – and she made a special ornamental frame for my 100-day-old photograph (taken for every Chinese child whose parents could afford it). Every day she went to hospital and left a huge bag of fruit for me at the gate (she wasn’t allowed in except during visiting hour) –but I’m sure that no one ate that fruit except for the door man.

Part Three

2007-03-15T06:14:00.000-07:00

We had a 2 month vacation every Summer, but all my classmates spent the first (or last) two weeks furiously writing all the homework we’d been assigned. We were supposed to study two hours every Summer day -- but like bitter medicine, we wanted to get over it right away – and then – at last ! – we’d get the remaining 6 weeks to ourselves.

Maybe my sisters remember it different – but I don’t recall our family ever traveling on a vacation – my parents were too busy. Nobody had a car – but my father had access to one from the government garage to use on official business.

Once in a while, – when he was on a long distance trip or outside Beijing, he would allow us to ride with him and we played outside while he was engaging in some serious meeting

I remembered one particular business trip when dad brought my younger sister and me along for the ride. It was a couple of hours outside Beijing, in an area called Qin Cheng where political prisoners or POWs were kept. It was close to the mountains. It was late fall, all the crops had been harvested, and there was only bare land with a few brown leaves left on the ground. My sister and I began to climb a nearby hill, and found some delicious wild sour dates.

We ate lots of them right on the spot, and took the rest back home for mom and the family. In the afternoon, the driver found some sweet potato fields. They had already been harvested, but we were lucky enough to dig out the few still left.. The driver put them on top of the car’s engine and told us we’d have baked potato by the time we got home. Only a few potatoes survived the long bumpy road home – but still we had a hot sweet treat.

There was no summer camp – but every year the school organized a few day outings to the parks or hills near Beijing.

Most of the Summer, kids just played with each other – and best of all – we had a swimming pool next to our apartment ! Maybe I should make clear that in 1960 the family moved out of the old-style-mansion (about a block from Tiannamen Square) and into a special compound (adjacent to Tianmenen Square) for the Security Ministry. ( Chinese civilian government had 8 major ministries )

The compound contained several city blocks – enclosed by a wall with four gates – each of them with armed guards. ( we had to show ID cards to get in)

It was a section of the city that used to be the foreign diplomatic quarter – so many of the buildings, like ours, were of European design – and we lived on the second floor of a very elegant embassy, with high ceilings, hardwood floors, and a long outdoor corridor (or porch) that ran the length of the façade, with many tall glass doors opening onto it.

We had a small bedroom for my oldest brother, and two large bedrooms with a big, beautiful fireplace in the center and a tall mantel with silk flowers in a blue glass vase. The windows facing north were huge, and in winter, my mom always sealed them with newspaper strips. One winter my brother made a small hole at the buttom , and pushed through it any coin he could find or borrow. The coins got trapped between the window and screen, and when my mother removed the paper at the end of winter, there was a big pile of coins. My lucky brother claimed them all – as his own personal piggy bank.

I should mention here that in China, children lived with their parents until they got married (and even then, sometimes, they had to wait a very long time to get an apartment) Due to the shortage of housing, my bother lived at home until he was 34! (but now things have changed)

And yes, the compound did have a swimming pool (on property that had recently served as a pig pen - back when meat was in shorter supply)

But there really wasn’t any other kind of public recreational area – other than a playground with some parallel bars for kids – so on cold or rainy days, the only place to be was home – where we might play cards, or chess, or mahjong ( my parents had an old family mahjong set. It was forbidden – since gambling was forbidden – but we played anyway – without money). But the game of go ? No – that was more for intellectuals.

My two brothers were some of the first among their peers to have the hobby of making crystal radios. They saved their allowance to buy the tools and parts, including an an iron which cost 8 Yuan. (which was a lot of money back then – when apprentice workers only made 18 Yuan per month). They saved many months and eventually convinced mom to chip in half the cost. They were so happy ! They spent many late nights making radios. The best and smallest one fit into a match box, and left it next to my parent’s pillow to impress them with their achievement.

My father once told my oldest brother to study more when my mother complained that my oldest brother was spending too much time making radios and not enough time studying. He ignored the advice and then my father got angry and stepped on one of the radios, crushing it. My father seldom punished us and that was the only time I saw my brother cry. (My mother never forgave my father for that and for years to come used that incident to criticize his parenting skills.)

Once a week, the compound showed movies – most of which were propaganda melodramas – but I clearly remember the animated version of “Journey to the West” (a folktale fantasy about how Buddhism was introduced to China –full of incredible monsters and strange heroes.) Occasionally we’d get a big song and dance show – like the big shows at the People’s Congress Hall – not very far from the compound. But tickets there could not be purchased – they had to be gifts from the government – and if my father got any – he only got one or two.

I remember one time we had two tickets and my mother took my younger sister. But I wanted to go too ! So I followed them to the auditorium and wheedled my way past the smiling guard.

I don’t remember neighborhood children playing sports – but if a girl showed exceptional athletic ability at school – she might be offered a place in a special sports academy – like my sister was , for example. (my mother, however, turned down this proposal – thinking that she would get a better education in a more traditional school. (Sports and entertainment had low status in China when I was growing up, especially opera singers, dancers and actors who were considered servants of the rich)

And the same thing with music --- I don’t remember my childhood friends having a special interest in music – with private lesions in musical instruments. We had Music class at school – mostly singing – and once I was given a set of gongs to use at a special performance on New Year’s Eve.

The “New Year’s old man” (Santa Claus) came out from back of the stage, and we were supposed to welcome him with our New Year’s music, but we forgot all our instructions – and the end result was total cacophony !

I don’t remember any big trouble when we lived in the compound. One time, the signal from my brother’s crystal radio was detected by security – but it’s not like he was arrested or anything. Another time, my brother came home one day and threw himself face down on the bed without talking.

Thirty minutes later we got a phone call from authorities telling us that his bicycle had crashed into a soldier’s motorcycle, breaking the very expensive windshield. But my father talked with the man in charge who said “we are all comrades” and we did not have to pay.

I should mention here, that not everyone in Beijing had a telephone. The phone book at that time was a few centimeters thick (with Mao’s number listed first) – and the telephone poles on our street stopped in front of our house. We were among the first families to have a phone – and a gas oven – and I completely agreed with the little school songs about the happiness of Chinese children (as opposed to those poor, hungry black children who lived in Chicago ! Yes ! – I actually learned a song about poor black children in Chicago – and how sorry we felt for them.)

All of which was true –we WERE better off than poor kids in Chicago – but we were also better off than 99% of poor children in China as well.

There were roughly three kinds of children that we would meet: the children of high-officials (that’s us) – the children of intellectuals (people who taught at university)- and the children of blue-collar workers ---- and as soon as a young person opened her mouth – I could tell which was which.

I don’t remember having close friends from that time – and the kids I met at boarding school were not the same as the kids who lived in my parents’ neighborhood – so mostly I played – or fought – with my brothers and sisters –and my life was kind of different from theirs --- since I was the only one who went to boarding school. The school hadn’t been built when my older siblings started grammar school – while illness had kept my younger sister out of kindergarten for six months, so she ended up in a more local school. (She had gotten insect bites during a trip to the countryside – giving her rash that became more serious)

Part Two

2007-03-08T06:12:00.000-08:00

School Days

And more about my birth – it really was a dramatic event !

It was around sunset when mother felt I was ready to arrive, but father was working late at the office (as usual) , so she had to get to hospital on her own, and being frugal, she took a pedicab. You can imagine the poor driver pedaling furiously for an hour through the dark streets of Beijing while mother was begging him to hurry. On arrival, I didn’t waste any time entering the world – but the hospital staff were so eager to go home for the night, they forgot about mother, and she was left to spend the night in a delivery room. It was winter – and neglecting to leave her with a blanket, my mother needed several months of acupuncture to restore her health.

Mother spent the next six months recovering at home – and I spent the next 18 months living with a wet nurse.

That’s how it was done for government cadres – the government provided a subsidy – but the parents had to recruit their own nannies – so my mother’s brother sent her a young woman from his village – who moved to Beijing and lived with the me in the nurse’s dormitory. I was, of course, too young to complain about all this – but apparently my country nurse was not completely candid about the other children she was feeding --- so I was not growing as quickly as babies usually do – and she also managed to give my mother many other things to complain about: she flirted with the cooks, she didn’t change my diapers, she let me ruin my clothes, she slapped me around. Eventually, some neighbors told mother how badly I was being treated, the nanny was sent back to the country, and I was put into daycare.

At the age of two – I was sent to my first boarding school – which was another mansion, nearby, that had been converted into a facility that fed, housed, and pre-schooled children 6 days a week (we were sent home every Saturday night, and came back Monday morning ) The school was closed for two months during the summer but you can see that I hardly spent any time with my parents at all !

Our pre-school even had a zoo ! -- a little petting zoo – to which, one day, the principal added a few monkeys that he brought back with him from the south. We loved those monkees ! And you can imagine our excitement when a baby monkey was born --- and all our eager little faces pressed up against the window to see him. You can also imagine our terror when one of the monkees escaped and ran wild in the courtyard. We started running too – and it was right in front of me that wham! -- one of the kids and the monkee knocked each other over..

In my entire life, I only lived with my parents for four years – but I was the only child who spent so much time in boarding schools. So, living at home, my siblings had stronger bonds between each other My two older brothers made a team, and my older sister protected my younger sister. For some years I felt like I was an adopted daughter, an outsider. (happily, that is no longer the case.)

Then at the age of seven – I went to grammar school – and since it had just been built, I was the first of my siblings to attend. It was right outside the old Beijing city walls – in a cemetery, in fact, so the school grounds encompassed the monumental tomb of the Dowager Empress’s favorite eunuch. ( I remember this monument quite well because whenever father dropped me off at school, he always stopped to read the text carved into the two plinths on either side, detailing the achievements of that notorious figure in 19^th C. Chinese history. In front of the tomb was an enormous stone altar – which served us quite well as a ping-pong table !

This is now 1960 – and the country has just passed through the “Great Leap Forward” – where government workers, like my parents were now on salary – but had to pay for services --- and many of them, including my mother – were laid off – to cut expenses and save money to pay back debts to the Russians. (being a good cadre, however, my mother was soon offered another job – this time as the manager of a local clothing factory)

My grammar school, called “June First” ( “International Children’s Day”) was one of about seven special schools in Bejing built to educate the children of government officials.(each one was named after a some special day, like “May First” (labor day) for example.) The “June First” school took the children of (and was supported by) the Internal Ministry and the PLA, and though our lives were very regimented (by American standards) the teachers were strictly forbidden to hit us.

(That was Mao’s new policy for all of China: no physical punishment – but there could be verbal punishment or humiliations, like standing in the corner or the revoking of privileges.)

We did group exercise ( including eye exercises between classes) and some wore badges of rank on our shoulder. The well behaved children got to join the Young Pioneers and wear a special red scarf – like the young pioneers did in the Soviet Union ( which provided so a model for so much of Chinese education ) – but I didn’t get to wear one for several years.

I was a good student but I was too independent or strong headed , so I was not allowed to join until my third year. ( and even then, I had to pretend to be good for two weeks)

One time, I remember we had a young teacher whom today might be called “manic-depressive”. One morning she began class singing and smiling ---in a very happy mood -- but suddenly that mood turned dark – she began to yell and made us all write something a thousand times in our little notebooks. I wouldn’t stand for it! – and I shouted back “I’m not going to do it!” – at which point the teacher removed the penalty from everyone else – and gave it only to me ! But soon she relented, and the punishment was stopped..

Another time, when I was a new student (about age 7), the teacher said something I didn’t like. She then continued teaching , but I wanted her to stop – so I began to cry and scream so loudly that the principal could hear me from the other side of the school.

He took me away to his office -- but he was a very kind man – and I remember, after I settled down, climbing up on the chairs in his office to nose around the panoramic picture of the school hanging up on the office wall.

We all had to go to bed in the dormitory at 9 O’clock – but some of us liked to talk – and I think that this was what got me in the most trouble.

I was never severely punished, but several years earlier, my oldest brother had not been so lucky – and one day a teacher got so angry with him that she stuck him in the arm with a needle and locked him in the cellar. My mother was very upset – a meeting of the parents was called – and the teachers agreed that they would never do this sort of thing again. The worst punishment that I ever saw was making children stand in a corner.

But it’s not like I was a bad student – indeed, I was such a good student I was often spared the punishment or humiliation that my head strong behavior well deserved. (perhaps you could call me a “teacher’s pet” ?) I was also a popular student since I was the fastest runner, a good dancer, and was active at acting – and even directing – our little plays.

We studied math, and Chinese, and music. Most of our classes were memorization and recitation – with the teacher calling on each student to stand and recite, by memory, various pages of text. We students got to elect a class monitor – usually a very well behaved student – whose job was to announce the teacher’s entrance to the classroom and command us to stand or sit. I just saw a film, “Au Revoir Mes Enfants” about a French boarding school in the 40’s, and it all seemed so familiar.

So I think I had very good time in school – although we did have bullies now and then. One time my father took a special trip to Sin Jiang (on the silk road) – and when he returned he brought us all raisins – which were a special treat. My little sister was stingy with hers and wouldn’t share them with other children – but soon she came crying to me after bullies had dumped her bag of raisins on the floor so all the other children could pick them up. I shared some candies I had with her (which she remembers to this day!)

We had two places to keep our personal things: inside our desk – and shelf space in a dormitory armoire. We could really keep anything in that desk – and the little boy who shared the other half of our two person desk was really, really dirty ! He kept worms, frogs, pine resin balls, and who-knows-what else inside that desk, and it really irritated me. I drew a line in the space between us – and whenever he crossed that line – ouch ! -- he got a swift, sharp elbow in the side !

That’s how we sat in class: boy-girl-boy-girl – but there were separate bath houses for each – where once a week we all went to soak in a large warm pool, get scrubbed, and then walk through a shower. One time, I remember, some boys -- who were approaching that age when girls began to interest them – broke into the girls bath house to satisfy their curiosity. I think they were all punished – but I don’t remember how – probably letters were sent to their parents.