9/12

9/12 8:30am CST

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I woke up and groggily answered the phone. I was expected at the dim sum place next door. I shower and pack, and head downstairs to meet my dad, who'll walk me over.

Dim sum was with Lin Jin, some of my mom's other classmates, and one of my dad's friends. Basically all the people we knew local to Nanning. Dim sum was good. A lot of what you see in the dim sum places in the US, and pretty much the same quality. But also some specialty stuff that I took pictures of. My favorite was the pineapple bread. Somehow, they manage to infuse flour into a slice of pineapple and bake it into bread. It looks just like pineapple, has slight pineapple flavor, and has the texture of bread. After dim sum, we say our goodbyes and pack our bags into Lin Jin's Outlander. Or is it a Montero? I can't get my Mitsubishi SUVs straight.
Leaving Nanning, it's obvious how well developed this place is. It's one of the biggest cities in Guangxi, and rapidly developing into a clean and pretty city. I would say the architecture of the new buildings popping up is pretty Western. Unlike in Beijing, space is abundant and there's no fear of building tall. Recall that I said Beijing was not big on the skyscraper PR contest. One reason for that is because of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which registered 8.6. Obviously the quality of construction back then in a Chinese city wasn't that great, but the city was pretty much leveled, and 25% of the people died. Tangshan is about 90 miles outside of Beijing, and the fear has always been there than another quake could hit the capital. Because of this, buildings are constructed much more conseratively in the north. In the south, where there have never been earthquakes, buildings are constructed to take advantage of that. I'll demonstrate with pictures later.

Before we totally leave Nanning, we stop by a fruit shop and pick up some longyan (longan). These are the smaller sweeter counterparts to lizhi (lychee). There were some other exotic fruit on display and I snapped pics. Once we got a good amount, we bailed and traveled out of the city.

After getting on the highway, we go for a couple hours. This gives my mom and Lin Jin plenty of time to catch up, and natually, reminisce about the past. Here, I go into an essay on my thoughts on that part of my mom's life, largely from what I knew before, but also influenced by this recent conversation.
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I list October Sky as one of my favorite movies. When asked, I try weakly to explain that it's as close to my parents' generation's version the Chinese Dream as possible. Read up a bit on the movie if you're not familiar. Perhaps my whole life will be lived in reflection of what my parents went through, which is fine with me. When I say my parents' generation, I'm talking specifically about Chinese who were eligible to apply for the first year of college, which reopened at the end of the Cultural Revolution, which ended in 1966. My parents were 22 or so when they went to college. They had been sitting around not doing much during the Cultural Revolution, which is why they were older than the normal age. Their classmates were younger and older, since college was rebooted from nothing. It wasn't as though they had their hearts set on going, though. For the most part, it just sort of happened. The consequences of such a thing, though, were obviously profound and worth describing. Lin Jin and my parents agreed that at the time, college was an intriguing prospect but not a thing which was clearly worth pursuing. I think my mom has talked the most about it, so it's easiest to present her story as the example.

Growing up, my mom didn't really have any long term goals. Contrast this to the modern US primary school student, who is crushed under various regimes of proto career development. Back then, my mom was happy to play around. She managed to get the best grades all through primary school. My mom finished high school in the middle of the Cultura Revolution, a segment of history too complex to cover here, but one of whose effects was the banning of college. After high school, my mom volunteered to go to the communes to work and learn. After three years on a commune, she was done with her tour of duty. She had been hoping to be granted a job by the Chinese Communist Party for her efforts, but there was nothing happening. They simply said, "you can go back home and wait for us to call you up, or you could apply to go to college, which is starting back up again." Going to college would be a virtual free pass into CCP membership, which was at the time a very desirable thing.
So my mom was certainly interested, though not completely motivated. Her dad didn't think much of college. He wasn't like the blue collar coal miner dad from October Sky. In fact, he was even an administrator in the local school department! And yet, he and many like him voiced the opinion that getting a college education was a hoighty-toighty way to put off making a good honest living. My mom had doubts that this was the right thing, if so many were opposed to it. One of her high school teachers sought her out and basically forced her to get her application together. He went to mom's dad and argued in favor of college. He gave her a crash course in chemistry and had another teacher school her in political history. Going into the exam, my mom was really buzzing with confidence. The national college exam in 1977 was an extremely selective process. For every 10,000 applicants, one was accepted. The applicant was asked to list several disciplines they wanted to study. On the other end, the various schools tried to pick out applicants whose interests matched majors they offered. The more prestigious schools go to go first, so they scooped up the best scorers. The distribution of majors was more or less centrally planned, so obviously, in this melee, not everyone could get a major from their list. My mom listed math, meterology, and physics. She was called up by the Changsha Technical Institute to be a geology major.
When my mom got to Changsha (in Hunan province), she made friends with another woman in the geology department. Someone had joked to my mom that a geology major would be slogging up and down mountains looking at rocks, which didn't that glamorous to either of them. Her friend had serious doubts, and asked mom for some money, promising to return it. My mom realized that her friend was looking to return home, and wouldn't give the money to her. My mom insisted that if she went home, nothing she could do in four years be worth more in the eyes of the CCP to get her closer to membership. Her friend still wonders if that decision has made all the difference in her life. So my parents' generation faced so many obstacles and discouragements against getting into college. Making it in was no small feat, a combination of luck and talent.
The 28 people in my mom's class were like a microcosm. The college system at the time meant that all people in the major took all their classes together. Think about it -- if you'd gone to all the same classes with all the same people, you'd build up a much higher level of kinship with them. These were friends who were chosen for each other. This deep bond is, 30 years later, why my mom has enough sway with her classmates that we can enjoy an expenses-paid trip to Tibet, and why another classmate can offer to spend a couple days driving us around in Guangxi. These friendships obviously play into the whole Chinese construct of 'connections.' Things in China happen through connections. Using Tibet as an example: my mom is classmates with a senior engineer at a big mining company (geology majors, remember?), headquartered in Beijing. This person is high-ranking enough that he has several connections in Tibet. He asked one of the local managers to take care of planning a trip for his frieds. Doing this well would get that manager props in Beijing, and perhaps get him a promotion down the road. So the local manager knows a guy who manager tour guides. Between these two, the necessary paperwork is drawn up to hire a tour guide and driver, and the all costs are to written up as a business expense. When we get to Lhasa, we meet the manager and hang out with him briefly. He has the tour guide (Tsenam) and his underlings usher us around the rest of the way. This completely coordinated affair is ultimately all thanks to who went to college with whom, supported by a chain of connections. So on this trip and previous trips to China, we have greatly benefitted from a network of well-to-do or influential friends.
A related topic is the fact itself that all these original college graduates have gone on to such big things. Lin Jin, in addition to his day job, has a lot of real estate going on and bootstrapped himself from basically nothing. This is a reflection less on his specific aptitude at school and more on how strongly China was filtering talent in that first year. Many of mom's classmates in China have done very well for themselves. Compared to some classmates who went abroad, they are relatively much better off. I don't have any regrets about my upbringing in the US and who I've become through it, but I acknowledge my family is completely middle class in its attitudes and level of living. If one of mom's classmates came to the US, I could offer to drive them around Boston, but we couldn't shower our friends with that same level of affection we've been shown in China. They couldn't get a translator and Sam the Patriot walk them around the Freedom Trail, for example. Sure, some of that is cultural, in that in the US, you'd have to be very very important to get that kind of treatment without paying for it, but by and large it's because my parents haven't had the level of career achievement that their peers in China have. When thinking about an evil twin, it's most natural for me to think of him as the me who had parents who stayed in China and stuck it out. What would I have learned differently? What would I have done with my life?
At the end of the Cultural Revolution, my mom decided to go to college on more or less a whim. She decided to come to the US the same way. One day she said to herself that it would be nice to have traveled abroad, and that come hell or high water, she would accomplish it. My dad got the itch when he came back from a conference in the Philippines with some US dollars. Eventually, my parents got student visas and found receiving schools. They thought that they'd give it a go, trying to earn a degree in the US or maybe making some money doing work, and then heading back to China. When we arrived, my parents talked to other Chinese grad students, the consensus was that no one ever thought of going back. Someone told them, "I stopped thinking about returning home the moment I stepped on the plane." My mom was quite surprised at the gap between her thinking and that of the grad students already there. Bit by bit, she found incidents that shaped her thinking about America and convinced her to stay. My parents stayed late at school doing work and also worked at a Chinese restaurant on the side. To facilitate all this running around, my dad bought an old orange Datsun 210. He wanted to show it off to my mom and drove us around. Because he was still so unfamiliar with driving and the American road system, he managed to high-center the car on a road median. He broke the oil pan and the car started smoking. My mom's heart sank, as the only extra money they had in the their whole lives had just been burned up. Some other grad students walking by saw us stranded and tried to help. Because we couldn't pay for a tow, they pushed us a mile back to the grad school dorms. There, someone fixed up the car for close to free. So glad were my parents that the car was working again that we decided to go to the beach for my birthday. About a few miles out of town, one of the tires blew. We were dumbstruck by our bad luck. While eating our picnic on the side of the road, a stranger pulled up in a truck to see if we were ok. We didn't even know what a spare tire was. He asked to see it. It was flat. So he told us to wait while he drove to get it inflated. When he got back, he put it on for us. We decided not to risk going to the beach on the donut, but were of course very grateful. These and other incidents left an indelibile impression on my mom about American culture. She came around to staying in America. As for me, that was the first moment where I really appreciated cars and the culture surrounding them in America.--------

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edit: My mom gave me some input and corrections to the narrative I wrote above. That mostly covered her college phase, but this gives more background into the years leading up to it:
As my mom was about to graduate middle school, my grandmother became pretty sick. She had trouble doing work and at times couldn't even walk. Because of this, my mom's father was concerned about the welfare of the family. He was against my mom's going to high school in the face of this situation. I think I may have composited my mom's high school and middle school teachers. In any case, her middle school teacher made a strong case for her to go to high school because my mom was doing well in class, and my grandfather ceded. Fortunately, my grandmother recovered and could resume running the household. When my mother graduated from high school, she was dispatched to a countryside commune to work alongside farmers. Because of her excellent performance, she was promoted to a paid position, leading a drilling crew consisting of three men and eight women at the Tangshan Hydroelectric Bureau. It was a decent job, paying 32 yuan a month. Furthermore, she was honored by the province and city government, and carried some real potential to be promoted to a much higher position. This was right around the time that the Cultural Revolution ended and the colleges reopened. At this point, my grandfather was neutral to the idea of my mother going to college. Her position with the bureau was considered quite an honor and the income was nice (and ultimately, pretty competitive with my mom's post-college salary of 46 yuan a month). Still, my grandmother was healthy and did not present a reason to stay close to home. At the time, my mom didn’t think going to college was such a big deal, probably in the light of her current job. My mom's high school teacher heavily encouraged my mom to take the exam because of her highest academic marks. The teacher did not want my mom to waste her talent.

Another anecdote that came out of the conversation --
My mom went on a tangent about the few times her mother had to quit her job. Once was in early 1960s, during the national famine disaster. There were three consecutive years of flooding and drought, which resulted in agricultural land being very unproductive. On top of that, the Soviet Union required that the Chinese government pay back what it borrowed during Korea War. The end result was grim -- a lot of Chinese were hungry to the point of death, and maybe only “80% of population could only eat to 80% full.” There was simply not enough to eat. The stories from that time are really scary. The other time grandmother quit her job was when she fell ill before my mother went to high school. This time, she qualified for a monthly pension, but she decided to take an up-front lump sum because the family needed cash desperately. The one-time package was actually quite high, enough to buy a bicycle and other big items to support kids or family’s immediate needs. I think it's hard for people of our day to imagine the poverty people faced. At the time, my grandmother worked, and her mother stayed home to cook and take care of the kids. As my mom recalls it, her grandmother favored her daughters (my grandmother and my grandmother’s younger sister), her son-in-law, and the grandson whom she had raised. But she wasn't as attached to my mother or my mother’s two older siblings. My grandfather could see that these three children were being underfed, even though mom's grandmother claimed or even believed she was setting out fair portions of food, inevitably the portions were slanted away from these three. To excuse herself, mom's grandmother would call out if she ever saw my mom dashing around, "Look at you, running around. How can you not be getting full?" My mom said that, indeed, the three of them (her sister, her older brother, and her) learned to sit still more often, not just to avoid such accusations but also because of the very real hunger they felt. Finally, my grandfather had had enough. He could not let his own children starve, so he asked my grandmother to stop working and to stay home. The pay was so poor back then that the family didn't really miss the lost income. At least this way, my mom got an extra bite to eat.
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One of mom's classmates managed to do two more degrees after his geology major. At the time, you had to sneak back into school somehow, since the government was expecting you to put the first degree to use asap. One of his extra degrees was from the Lu Xun Institute for the Arts. I was surprised when I heard the name. That's because Lu Xun was a revolutionary era writer. China's revolution and overthrow of the empire happened in 1911. But in some ways, you'd think nothing existed in China until the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. After all, prior to 1949, things are arguably not canonized as supporting or espousing Communist ideals. Lu Xun's intellectual writings were anti-fascist and anti-imperial, and with the right interpretations, were subversive against a regime like the CCP. I think in all of the interegnum between 1911 and 1949, the CCP and KMD have shared very few heroes, among which number Lu Xun and Sun Yat-sen. If the tree trunk of modern Chinese political history is Sun Yat-sen, then the two branches are Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. It's a shame that it never quite worked out the way Sun wanted, but there you have it. Note that Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek are their Cantonese names, as that's part of their geographic identity. In Mandarin, their names are Sun Zhongshan and Jiang Jieshi.

10:45pm
I'm in my underwear and I'm sweating balls in my room. I'm sweating drops of sweat. The south is hot.