Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [55]
China still does not have a person who manufactures machinery. To have it begin with me in the future would be a most wonderful thing.
January 28
Today there was heavy snow and winds and the roads were almost impassable. My colleague Backland got married today at five o’clock . . .
Manchuria and Mongolia have become one of the world’s big problems. If we don’t handle this properly, it will be hard to prevent their becoming a second Korea. This is the homeland of my ancestors. How can I offer it up to someone else? I swear that I will take the defense of the territory and the welfare of the people there as my own responsibility.
March 4
My glasses were broken so I went to the eye doctor for a new pair. They cost twenty-four American dollars. So expensive!
Jilin’s forests are naturally suited for manufacturing paper, and Jilin exports large quantities of leather products each year and even more of fur, while its railroads are very convenient. I will look into working in the paper industry.
June 4
I did surveying at Mount Franklin today. The trees were lush and fragrant and the air fresh. The early mornings are very cold and at night my throat itches . . .
If China wants to become prosperous and strong, it must develop its steel industry; otherwise it cannot resist the encroachments of foreign nations. Right now its machinery relies entirely on imports. If a war begins and resources from the outside world are cut off, then China will surely be defeated.
November 12
I cleaned a coal-cutting machine today and took it apart. It was most interesting.
To govern a nation and teach its people, or to occupy a place, one must have good propaganda. To rely solely on military power will lead to defeat.
Thousands of Chinese students went to America during the first two decades of the twentieth century, the first large wave of people to go abroad for study. They saw Western learning as the best way to help China, and they gravitated toward practical subjects like economics, the natural sciences, and especially engineering—the chosen major of more than a third of the Chinese students in America between 1905 and 1924. My grandfather attended the Michigan College of Mines, in an old copper-mining region near the Canadian border. He graduated in 1925, thirty-third in a class of forty-four; apparently the New Learning was still giving him trouble.
I CAME UPON my grandfather’s diaries by accident. My father said that the family had abandoned everything they owned through the years of the Second World War, the civil war, the flight to Taiwan, and the trip to America. More than a year after I started researching our family history, I was talking on the phone with my father and I asked him if he owned anything that had belonged to his father. Unexpectedly, he said he had two diaries, one from my grandfather’s time in America and the other from when the family lived in Chongqing during the war. They ran close to a thousand pages.
“It isn’t very interesting,” my father said. “He just writes things like, ‘Today the Japanese army is closing in around the city.’ Stuff like that.”
“Actually,” I said, “that’s pretty interesting.”
Through the pages of his diary, I came to know the grandfather I had never met in life. He was a young man searching for a purpose, dreaming of a wide range of careers. He found and quit jobs about as often as the migrants did, quickly growing bored and anxious that he wasn’t learning enough. He was lonely and adrift.
July 14
In the factory when I have free time, I think of all kinds of troubles. I feel like a single boat floating on the great ocean. Even if the heart desires quiet, it cannot be.
November 18
I have worked almost two years. Sometimes I feel I am not interested in it. But you must handle work yourself even if it has no interest for you. Now with China’s situation so