Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [51]
The Great Wall is ten thousand miles long
Outside the Great Wall is my hometown.
The sorghum is fat, the soybeans fragrant
Gold is everywhere, and calamities rare.
Ever since the great catastrophe started suddenly
Rape, plunder, and capture, miseries too bitter to bear
Miseries too bitter to bear, fleeing to unknown lands
Family pulled apart, parents dead
Remembering all my life the enmity and hatred
Day and night thinking only of returning home . . .
Let four hundred million compatriots rise together:
The Great Wall of our hearts will be ten thousand miles long.
My mother and father learned these songs as children, just as I did. The songs told the story of their parents’ generation, living far from home and cut off by war from parents they would never see again. In the Chinese tradition, poetry conformed to a tight schematic pattern—at its best, the self disappeared inside the experience of the poem. Compressed in the verses of these songs was an emotion that was never spoken.
AFTER YEARS OF FRAGMENTS, snatches of song, and pieces of memory, I finally sat down with my father and asked him to tell me everything he knew about our family history. He told me about our family’s rise from humble origins in the waning years of the Qing Dynasty. He described how badly my grandfather had wanted to leave home and see the world. He remembered the chaotic retreat from the Japanese army and the air-raid sirens that meant there would be no school that day. But my father’s story was full of gaps: His memories of China were the memories of childhood, couched in a child’s apprehension of the world.
We were playing hide-and-seek. My father was taking a nap. I hid in the bay window on the other side of the bed from where he was sleeping, and I was afraid to come out. But he discovered I was hiding there, and he said, “Come out,” and he played with us. That was my only memory of him.
I spoke with my father’s brother and sisters, all of whom had emigrated to America in their twenties. An incident from half a century ago would be recalled differently, with each person’s version fixed and distinct—pieces of China they carried with them that had hardened over time, like precious pebbles worn smooth. I met the part of my family who had stayed behind in China, including my father’s cousins and distant relatives who had never left our ancestral village.
A few were trying to make sense of the past, but most were not—whether you had left China or stayed, it hurt less to let it go.
My relatives did not like telling their own stories. They often began by insisting they had nothing to say. Their narratives frequently opened with ignorance, a denial, even a death, as if to end the story before it could properly begin. Not one of them, it seemed to me, had faith that their memories mattered. In fact, my experience of China was very shallow was the first thing my aunt Nellie told me. We don’t know much about family history, said my uncle Luke, because we never had a chance to talk about it. My father’s story began with absence: My grandfather’s father. Nobody knew his name. They brushed over details and they downplayed drama. Sometimes when they were relating something particularly painful, they laughed. Perhaps in a world where so many people had suffered, one person’s story did not matter. Suffering only made you more like everyone else.
The young women in the factory towns of the south did not think this way. In a city untroubled by the past, each one was living, telling, and writing her own story; amid these million solitary struggles, individualism was taking root. It was expressed in self-improvement classes and the talent market, in fights with parents and in the lessons that were painstakingly copied into notebooks: Don’t lose the opportunity. To die poor is a sin. The details of their lives might be grim and mundane, yet these young women told me their stories as if they mattered.
* * *
Sometime during the reign