12-14

My first year in China, 6th grade, I was suspicious of everything. My one friend that I still kept contact with during COVID was a history nerd, who seemed knowledgeable enough about it that I would have believed anything he said. You could have fully convinced me that the Chinese government was sifting through all my Discord messages to my friends in the U.S. or that there were government agents listening to every word I said. The first day of school in March, my gym teacher asked me if it was true that you could own a gun in America. It was the first of many times that I felt like the sole mouthpiece to “correct” the prejudices of my Chinese peers. I kept trying to explain things in terms of “Democrat” and “Republican,” that I didn't yet know the translations for in Chinese, things I knew nothing about — and yet I agonized over my unsatisfactory explanations every night in bed. My botched duties of righting all the ideological misconceptions of this new terrain, And then I remember I was eleven.

A year later, our 7th-grade class had a field trip to see a movie about the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War — a devastating, bloody victory of North Korea and their Chinese allies against the U.S. and UN forces. We were handed small Chinese flags before the movie started. The American soldiers were played by actors from other countries; I thought I could pin their accents as Russian. It was a war propaganda film. That much I can see now. Every time the Americans were shown onscreen it was to a chorus of jeers, taunting, swearing at them to die, while limbs were torn off bodies, blood freezing in the winter cold, the bombs that kept exploding, nonstop, in the background — and then me. I had not known my allegiance would be tested in this way. You might as well have tortured me. Growing up I was a rule-follower. Whatever American-watered sentiment about freedom and justice in that country, I took as law. The Chinese “lens,” then, the collective beliefs of that country that its people took as common sense, came as a series of shocks in a new life I was otherwise settling in. In sixth grade, one of my classmates wrote an essay about the U.S. boycott of Xinjiang cotton, deemed exemplary enough to read aloud in class, which he did and turned the classroom again into a zoo of cheering, yelling, screaming, swearing, chaos. In eighth grade politics class, one of my teachers implied that COVID-19 was started by the U.S. army. My ninth grade world history book glorified Stalin’s reign to the point of worship. These are the examples I reach for when I make jokes to my friends in America — for shock value. But in truth, most of it was systematic, details whose significance are hard to pinpoint to outsiders, until you are in the thick of it.

 

Even with my “history,” even with ten years of childhood in a different education system that was in many ways, the complete opposite of this new one — I still succumbed to the brainwashing. I had fully accepted loyalty of thought and identity to this new country. I didn’t realize until my seventh grade summer, when I fell down a rabbit hole of New York Times articles about “human rights violations” in Xinjiang — a knob that until then had been silent, now blaring at full volume, a slap in the face for my lack of vigilance. The 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre is purged from the Chinese Internet bubble — my mother had never even heard of it. Then it was back to what I thought I had outgrown, confused slogans of “freedom” and “liberty.”

Three years there — it all draws back to the conclusion that I am an idiot. I like to think I am more nuanced now, but the truth is just that I get angry for twice as many things. When at a dinner party with one of my father’s colleagues, they derail into talking about America’s international crimes, the country that “had always been a villain,” so much so that I made a loud outburst about its innocence in English, like that would show them; and then I fought with my American Discord friend about the glorification of the West in American history. It is a strange line to tread. There is barely mention of the Great Chinese Famine in my Chinese textbook and Mao Zedong’s hand in it. There is no mention of how Secretary of John Hay’s famous Open-Door Policy, toted as a pillar of diplomacy, was a power play by Western forces that stripped China’s autonomy by my APUSH teacher — you get the gist. There is nothing to ground me anymore. Even now, I don’t know what to make of it.

*

It was long overdue, last week when I finally asked my grandfather to tell me about his life. Oral history, and all that. I knew bits and pieces — that his family were landlords and entrepreneurs that were stripped to less than peasants during China’s land reforms after the Kuomintang were finally crushed after ten years of Civil War, by China’s Communist Party. He grew up during the Cultural Revolution — from 1966-1976, ten years of chaos in Chinese history stemmed largely from Mao Zedong’s paranoia of Western and Chinese feudal culture; hence a cultural revolution. The peasants, China’s proletariat class, were glorified, hailed, rewarded, and the government encouraged them to raid the homes of and kill Chinese intellectuals, scholars and officials. It began while my grandfather was in elementary school; the schools closed soon after that.

My grandfather never finished middle school, and yet he is one of the most brilliant people I know. He can make or fix anything with his hands, spends his days in retirement in his workshop and fixing the neighbors’ broken ACs or appliances. One year while visiting I found a book of classical Chinese scripture, the Chinese equivalent of Aristotle or Socrates’ teachings, bookmarked on his bedside table. Every Chinese New Year’s, strangers come to my grandparents’ door with bags of rice or gifts as offerings of thanks.

My grandfather is full of memories — he remembers them by the year, by the month, in surprising, diligent detail. In his twenties he lied to a friend that he knew how to drive and taught himself on the fly, in a time when cars were as scarce as gold in China, on a road trip of maybe a hundred miles. Ten years earlier, during China’s famine, he tells me of eating grass and leafless trees in the summer to keep from starving.

When did you get back from the military? “You might not know this,” he prefaced many of his answers, branching from his life story to explain the historical details, to his granddaughter that did not grow up there. “I was going to be promoted to a private — but the person against me was from a very powerful family in the capital. His father was a government official. He got promoted instead of me; by then I had stayed long enough, and I was angry, so I left.”

“I guess you wouldn’t know this,” he continued, “China’s bureaucracy was very corrupt, then. Nepotism.”

My grandfather’s paternal family had owned a textile company in Shanxi Province. When the Japanese invaded China during WWII, they had rented a train and fled to Shandong. Do you know how much it cost to rent a train back then? On the way there, the family wealth had bled dry from robbery and bribes; then during the land reforms, were reduced to less than nothing. The landlords were being targeted. It was during the land reforms. He spoke about it with such detachment.

My grandfather is part of the Chinese Communist Party. My first year in China, when I was finally old enough to recognize the small, red badge on his coat for what it was, in my days of American defensiveness and black-and-white thinking, I had caricaturized him as a “fallen” Chinese Communist. Now I can recognize it as hubris. With every “you wouldn’t know” — well-meaning, but also matter-of-fact like a knife’s edge — I tried to rile myself up only to find, every time, that it was true. Again and again. With every shock of submission the miles I have trekked and years across continents is reduced to nothing.

In “The Best We Could Do,” one of the biggest themes we emphasized is the myth of control, how individuals are at the mercy of political, historical forces far beyond their control. I wonder sometimes if my grandfather is angry about the strings of fate that twisted his life at every crossroads; the war-torn country he was born in, every hurdle to leap over only to end at someone else’s starting line, lost potential of a life crumbled to a regret taken to the grave. My mother and her siblings talk often about what might have happened had he been born in a time of peace. He only shakes his head — “What’s done is done.”

For all those differences between us — growing up poor, never even finishing high school, never having gone to another country, much less lived there — my grandfather is far greater than me. Made his peace with it—the forces of history that clench their hands around people and squeeze. When I go back to Shandong and we go to street vendors for breakfast, a family-owned restaurant my grandfather has gone to for over twenty years, he will explain that I am his granddaughter, that his daughter had a job in the U.S. where I was born. My mother, like Thi Bui’s, married early — my grandfather also nearly disowned her for giving up her education for her husband. I wonder what he thought when I asked to call him about his childhood, randomly, after nearly two months of no contact. I wonder if I will ever be able to fully explain what I have seen and what I want to tell him. This Chinese-American granddaughter who less than three years ago did not even consider herself Chinese. I wonder, often, what he thinks of me.

*

My father was, literally, the first in his bloodline, in his ancestry to set foot in the U.S, the first to even leave the country. He came in his twenties for graduate school on a scholarship to UT Austin. However many years later, when I was three, he accepted a teaching job at a well-respected university in China, and now lives there full-time, with my mother and my sister and I in the U.S.

In Austin, my father learned how to drive. My mother says he was the steadiest driver she had ever known, until he went back to China and ruined it all. Perhaps from the hordes of pedestrians and electric bikes, the traffic mazes, or the chaos of yelling and road rage of China's streets. From that to everything else, my father is the most Chinese person I know. Once he asked me why I was buying pens made in Japan instead of China. He watches anti-American news every day from a channel by two Taiwanese television hosts. I would have thought living so long in another country would have made him more nuanced; but instead of my ideological torment my father is confident, unchallenged, certain in his views.

My father was an immigrant. I never thought much of it, growing up; now I believe there is no trauma so deep-set. Immigrants are so often demonized in politics and the media. We are so convinced of how many “trespassers” there are that their struggle seems to be normalized by the quantity; and yet for each person the rite of passage is always a period, however long, of brutal change. I don’t know how to explain how it feels to try to reconcile clashing beliefs; the feeling of the ground uprooting beneath you. And for me it was just temporary and a place I was already connected to. I see myself in both Thi’s parents and Thi herself. The forces of history that seize us and toss us all over the place. Immigration — with the body and biology we were given, perhaps we were not made to traverse such distances in single lifetimes. However many thousand years ago when our nomad ancestors settled to become farmers, rooting themselves to the land — and now your history is starting over with you. It seems so simple until it happens. How much of our lives are broken edges bumping into each other.

*

 

When the new kid on the bus sits down next to me, dimly, I know what to expect. His voice is loud, broken pieces of English in an Asian accent. My first year back in the U.S. I trained myself to hear them. For at least six months I was desperate to speak the Chinese that had become my new default.

“Can I sit here?” the words are stuttered. Too loud. He must have moved here recently. Something clenches in my chest. Same skin, same color hair, I listen again for his accent again — if I could talk to him on his terms. For just a brief respite.

“Where are you from?” I answer that I’m Chinese. He stretches some English words too long, chops some others too short. I still can’t pin it. “I’m from Vietnam.”

It seems to suck all the air from the room. A crashing feeling of loss. So I couldn’t speak it. For a moment I can’t speak at all. If I was projecting, or not — I don’t know how to say I understand, to be searching for someone who knows your language. I did not have a single English conversation except with my sister for the three years I was in China. But every foreigner I saw in the cafeteria, on the street; should I talk to them? Could I? Unstick the English like bile in my throat. The childish mental crises of a grade schooler. But I stared at them from the corner of my eye. Tried to rein the desperation. I never approached them. Slinking back into the same homogenous crowd.

He asks, “Do you speak Chinese?”

“I do.” For the first time, I wish I had an accent in English. Some indication of solidarity. I don’t have an accent in either English or Chinese — but contrarily it feels like I have no stake of belonging in either place. An accent is solidarity. I feel more comfortable speaking in Chinese to my friends’ parents, than I think I ever will with an English-speaking adult. I like to think that in the moment I switch into Mandarin, some sense of relief washes over them. You can migrate and move all over the place. But you can only learn a first language once.

I try to talk about anything relevant. His voice is too loud. People in the neighboring seats turn their head; and yet I find that I can’t stop asking questions; he came from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam four months ago, a freshman at Troy High, his father came here for work. I want to pronounce his name correctly, and yet it slips from my memory the instant it leaves his mouth. This time I am the one butchering someone’s ethnic name. For a moment I feel crazed. I cannot be this American. Finally I can’t resist it — I pull out the book from my backpack. “We’re reading this book in English class. It’s about the Vietnam War.” I flip through the pages. I don’t know what to say. I want to laugh. I want to cry. Halfway through I realize this doesn’t mean anything to him. My half-apologetic, out-of-touch attempt at common ground. A flash of a self-depricating thought — don’t be such a colonizer.

“We learned a lot about the war in school in Viet Nam. Vietnam was bad before, but it’s better now.”

I look back at the page, Thi and her family escaping as refugees from South Vietnam. In China, we learned that Vietnam was one of the five Communist countries in the world. The Chinese narrative is that China had been in shambles (which it was) until the Communist Party came and made the country great again (which, to an extent, it did). I wonder if his education in Vietnam had been anything like mine in China.

In those brief ten minutes, he talks about Tet. About Vietnamese. “It’s important that we protect our culture.” That, too, was something drilled into us in China — we had an entire chapter in Politics about it. In China, I learned what nationalism looked like. I learned to breathe it. I hear the pride in his voice — we must preserve our culture, preserve our country; I don’t know how to separate it.

I am back in the movie theater getting everything I thought I knew stamped out from under me. I am in our school assemblies singing the Chinese national anthem. I remembered the things I had been taught about China and Communism even through the disorganized curriculum of U.S. elementary school. He had just gotten here. The things that he would learn in another year, two, three. The beginning of the turmoil. Always.

The snow crunches under my feet as I walk home from the bus stop. In China the leaves are just beginning to redden. To my Chinese relatives, peers, teachers, classmates, to have lived in the U.S. is an unbelievable privilege. But to be able to cross the planet to the other side, that there is even an other side at all, and we know it — is almost a fantastical notion, when you think of it. In the end everything seems to be governed on whim and pure coincidence. We drop into peoples’ lives at the start and endings of chapters, scramble everything up, live and live again — it is enough to just flounder around. I carry it home with me. I think — I am still reeling from the weight of it.