Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [50]
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When I was growing up in America, my parents rarely talked about the past. There is a mode of exile that dwells on everything that was lost—the twilit boulevards of the capital city, the large house and the servants, the shaded garden with the persimmon trees where we will return one day when the regime falls and we reclaim what is rightfully ours. But the Chinese who fled the Communists seldom indulged in such reveries. Their way was to move forward and make a new life; to linger on loss was pointless. The migrants and immigrants I have known have shared this pragmatism, which seems so deeply ingrained in the Chinese character. The present is everything, and the past recedes.
As a child I heard only fragments of our family history from my father, and I turned them over and over in my mind until each fragment became its own story, mysterious and complete. The stories never connected, or they connected in a secret way I did not know.
The four best mining schools in America are in Michigan, Colorado, New Mexico, and West Virginia.
We carried the gold bars in our belts when we traveled.
We left our stamp collections behind when we fled the Communists. We left everything behind.
Every day I went to the American consulate in Taipei and waited for the officer to call my name.
China came in pieces, too. China was the sweaters that my maternal grandmother sent us from Taiwan, wrapped in mothballs and emerging from their cardboard boxes smelling like the insides of attics. Wearing one to school, I felt acutely that I looked different, smelled different, from everyone else. China was the Kuomintang newspaper that arrived in our mailbox from Taiwan, folded into tight bands that would spring open, as if in their eagerness to tell the news from afar. It was the Chinese Ping-Pong players with rubbery limbs and pasty faces whom my parents rooted for—to me, inexplicably—when the Olympics came around. China was, thrillingly, the vinyl records my father brought back from his first trip to the People’s Republic of China in 1975, when Mao was still alive.
The sun in the east is rising,
The People’s Republic is growing;
Our supreme leader Mao Zedong
Points our direction forward.
Our lives are improving day by day,
Our future shining in glorious splendor.
The song is called “In Praise of the Motherland.” When I first heard it I was six years old, and the sunny Communist paradise it celebrated had disintegrated long ago. Yet even now the song’s opening bars make me shiver.
I knew many of these songs by heart. Chinese was my first language, and its lullabies and ballads threaded through my childhood from its earliest days, like the memory of a life I had lived before this one. My father’s family was from Manchuria, the region that the Chinese call simply Dongbei, the Northeast, and many of my earliest songs came from there. I did not feel a strong tie to China when I was growing up, but I knew I was from Dongbei.
My home is on the Songhua River in the Northeast
Where there are forests and coal mines
And soybeans and sorghum over slopes and fields.
My home is on the Songhua River in the Northeast
Where there are my compatriots
And also my aging father and mother . . .
I have fled my home village,
Forsaken its inexhaustible treasures.
Wandering, wandering,
Wandering all my days inside the pass.
The pass was the Shanhai Pass, an imposing stone fortress on China’s east coast where the Great Wall runs into the sea. Built during the Ming Dynasty to guard China’s northern frontier, it marked the point at which civilization ended and Manchurian wilderness began.
To me, the saddest song was about the Great Wall, sung by a Northeasterner exiled from home after the Japanese invasion. The wall’s watchtowers and battlements had been constructed over centuries to protect China from its northern enemies. After the Japanese army overran Manchuria in 1931, the wall took on a different meaning—it delineated the lands that were under the Japanese yoke. The song