Poor Man's Son

My father, settled, successful, content — and stingy. My mother puts them together for the juxtaposition — laments this contradiction of a man. My father is not poor; by China’s standards, not by a long shot, but growing up with him you would think you were. The Chinese middle school I went to was attached to USTC, the Chinese equivalent of MIT, that I only had the chance to attend because of my father; and even in those circles of USTC legacies and rich kids my classmates and teachers revered him. One, for being a professor in physics, one of the toughest departments in one of the most prestigious universities in the country, and two for having lived in America. At lunches with my parents’ friends they jokingly ask him to “bless” their kids in their academics. When we go back to the countryside village where my father grew up the residents greet him like he is still seventeen and the first in his family to go to college. I say this not to brag but because all I hear reading back on this passage is the cold, hollow rattle that resumes have; external, this halo he has that I only half-believe.

As the daughter of one, my understanding of the perception of professors is that they are generally more enlightened, sophisticated, noble than the general populace. But perhaps I can’t fully say that, either — I did not grow up the daughter of a professor but a poor man. I firmly believe you cannot be both; or rather, you never really lose what you once were; you accumulate more labels and they just trap the undergrowth from squeezing out. In some moments my father sheds twenty years off his skin back to the original rotting, stingy core that he was first molded from. Sometimes, like when he bargains ruthlessly with a street vendor selling sugar jujubes on the side of the road for a deal never offered to him, raises his voice yelling for minutes, then throws back dark looks as we walk away. Or when we book the cheapest hotels on vacation and he insists he can sleep on the couch. When he scrapes our leftover food onto his plate, saying with a sort of kicked pride, “Look at me, I’m the trash can of the family.” I don’t want to complain but I guess you don’t grow up in that shadow without contorting yourself somehow. Price tags make me anxious and I cut coupons compulsively from newspaper ads, that I say is “for fun” but I don’t even know anymore. Even now that I have my own money, somewhat, I never learned to reach for things. I see my father’s face and the two dark notches between his eyebrows. Put it back, put it back.

My father grew up poor. All his ancestors and mine were peasants in the broiling rice fields of Shandong, China. My grandpa grew up in the decade of the Cultural Revolution and never finished elementary school. Every year for Chinese New Year’s, we go back to Qin Zhuang, the village that bears my surname, where my father grew up. It is a village of dust. As I said to my mother when we drove through the Ohio countryside, Chinese poverty and American poverty do not look the same. In America there are still paved roads, structured houses, at least a skeleton of dignified civilization, only crumbled; there was something there to be ruined in the first place. The villages of the Chinese countryside are like clusters of flesh that never grew skin. The buildings rose up, smarting, from the dirt. Despite the progress in the last twenty years everything there still looks dirty and washed out, like there is a layer of dust that lingers no matter how many times you scrub it, that permeates and rots through the walls, a membrane of amoeba eating away the color.

My parents don’t talk about it. My grandparents are the ones who have threatened us with tales we only half-believed, about starving, and more vividly eating grass off the ground after the horses, the dogs, and the leaves on the tree branches were all gone. In China you are never more than two degrees of separation away from poverty. Either your parents, or your grandparents, or your friend’s parents, or your friend’s grandparents; it is so widespread that it is what I tend to assume for every Chinese person of my parents’ generation. Concession: Taiwanese immigrants were usually well-off, but I digress. It is strange, now, to think that most of the people I am surrounded by, and especially most of the adults as strangers in my life were not like this. I don’t think about it consciously but when I do it jostles me momentarily out of my default settings. It’s funny that now, we never associate Chinese people with poverty, as they mutated into doctors and engineers in the New World. When for a great number of them it was the mold of their childhood.

My father never antagonized me with anecdotes about hardship. I don’t remember that he ever held it over my head to shame me for being lazy or complacent. My father is not a bad person, but sometimes apparently his past seizes him and I am reminded that it will always be a part of him. 

The last chapter with James Gatz’s self-improvement journal crushed me. I thought about it some more and Jay Gatsby and my father are what I would describe as high-achieving poverty. My father got out because he was a physics genius, enough to be the first in his village to go to college, to be the star student of his high school, to get a scholarship and come to America with two thousand dollars in his pocket and nothing. There is a basis for the model minority myth, the stereotype that is not representative of the general population of China, just because the Chinese-American immigrant subset had been self-selected already. Either you work hard and create some miracle for yourself or you rot in the chains of your own destiny.

Jay Gatsby and all the poor men’s sons raised on the brittle, infertile soil of their own poverty. I say that word so many times, speculating, fascinated, not understanding, because it just is the incarcerating sort of trauma that I feel comfortable talking about just because it is close to me but that I can’t even begin to try to understand. I remember my history teacher in China spouting some nonsense anecdote one day about walking through the professors’ dorms on the USTC campus and seeing that they even wear the same clothes every day; for all their money and strange, noble status in their profession they have not been corrupted by it. So valiant. Living so far below their means. My father’s apartment in China is just a bare-boned arrangement of furniture, and okay, I don’t know if this is because he is a man living by himself or else, but I’d wager it’s not nobility but that they are still poor on the inside. I guess good for Gatsby that he had a flair for interior design. My mother talks about someone who was the most moral person she knew, born with nothing and started an organization raising money for poor kids in China to go to school, but for all his philanthropy he couldn’t get past his partner’s spending habits and now drifts quietly alone, noble, in his thirties. In Chinese they call it qiong ren qi gai — poor man’s, aura, I want to say, or some veil, something in the air that clings to them.

My father lives in China full-time; growing up I never saw him for longer than a month at a time outside of the summer. I never understood why; my mother told me he was offered his teaching position and accepted it in part for fear of losing an opportunity like this for good. And a year dragged into ten and now here we are. Family vs. work; every socially-trained person and Disney protagonist would know the right answer to this. But then my mother told me at that time I was almost born and his salary couldn’t support a three-person family. Couldn’t? Well, it ran the risk. And the option was the past knocking at the door or to flee from it. Nip it dead and stamp it down for good measure. There are some things you can sacrifice to feed that trauma. For Gatsby it was morality. For my father, well, some things that we all just live with now.