“Are you going to stay in the United States or go back to China after graduation?”
When my classmates, my professors, and my colleagues in the newsroom during my summer internship learned that I was originally from China, they always asked me this same question. I told them I didn’t know. “My heart is in China and I want to report on China,” I explained, “but it’s hard to do that in China because of the censorship and in the U.S. because I don’t have a green card.”
They would then nod in sympathy, as if they had expected this answer, and say something like “Yeah, you probably don’t want to go back.”
* * *
Two things motivated me to come to the U.S. for college in 2021. I believed in the fourth estate and wanted to become an investigative journalist, and I knew China had no space for speaking truth to power. I also wanted to run away from my family, especially my mother.
And yet, in the fall of 2023, I found myself returning to China on a gap year.
* * *
At the airplane terminal in Beijing, I was met with a gigantic billboard emblazoned with the words “Prosperity, Democracy, Civility, Harmony, Freedom, Equality, Justice, Rule of Law, Patriotism, Dedication, Integrity, Friendship” written in bold, red characters, across an image of the People’s Republic of China flag billowing in the wind.
I snapped a photo, congratulating myself on having already identified a piece of blatant propaganda, and then turned around to find my parents already waiting for me at the exit with a bouquet of white and pink China roses, blue hydrangea macrophylla, and eucalyptus in their arms. My mother was wearing her favorite light purple eyeshadow. A fresh wound on the right side of her face hadn’t yet scabbed over.
“I was knocked over by a bike two days ago,” my mother explained as I pulled her into my arms, “and I thought to myself, now that I’ve suffered this bad luck, there shouldn’t be any bad luck left for my daughter, and she’ll get home safely.”
My father stood aside, holding my bag and the flowers. It had been two years since we’d last seen each other. He pinched my arm. “You look like an American girl now, with your tank top and . . . you’re tan and look . . . stronger.”
On the ride home, I dutifully answered their questions. “I’m not sure if Americans eat more meat than vegetables and fruit, mom.” “Yes, Mom, most of them are friendly to Chinese people.” “No, Dad, just because it’s legal to own guns in the U.S. doesn’t mean all my classmates have guns.” “Yes, Dad, there are many black and brown people in my city. No, Dad, that doesn’t make it dangerous; that’s racist.” “No, Mom, I don’t feel unsafe, I actually feel much freer in the U.S.—I don’t just have freedom of speech, I have freedom of tank tops.”
“Let’s hope you can still get used to life in China, American girl,” my mother said.
“America is great but not as great as our home,” my father added.
“Don’t be stupid,” my mother snorted. “Our daughter’s going to stay in America. No one wants to come back to China.”
* * *
“Just come back for winter break,” I’d tried to persuade a friend from high school I’ll call Lenny when we met up over the summer in California before my return. “Don’t leave me alone in China for a year with no one to talk to.”
“If I could, I’d never go back to China again,” he said. “The two months I spent in China this year made me so sad. Everyone from drivers on the roads to restaurant owners I know was so full of hostility toward one another, because they can’t make money in this economy. I know a taxi driver who walked his way from Central America to the U.S. border, all the way through the forests and gangs on foot because he couldn’t make a living in China.”
“You don’t think it’s your responsibility to do something to change China?”
“To change China?” He gave me a bitter smile. “Speaking of change, did you see the guy who made ‘Sunny, Happy Kong Yiji’ got his video censored and himself in jail for two weeks?” “Sunny, Happy Kong Yiji” was a sarcastic song written by a Chinese netizen reimagining Kong Yiji, a character in a famous 1919 story by Lu Xun, ridiculed for his failure to pass the civil service exam, as a present-day youth facing unemployment and poor working conditions. “I keep my face clean, but my pockets are empty / So I put on my gown and scribe for the powerful ‘n’ wealthy / I thought work would be easy, but it’s working six days a week, twelve hours a day / Optimism’s my armor, but tears flow behind this mask / I’m sunny, happy Kong Yiji; sunny, happy Kong Yiji.”
Since moving to the U.S., I have kept in touch with a few friends from high school who now study in California, like Lenny. Whenever we’ve seen each other, we’ve spent most of our time wondering how to get work visas to stay in America after we graduate and whether we’ll ever move back to China. We’ve talked about the zero-COVID policy—people who ran out of food at home under lockdown, pets killed by health workers during “disinfection” after their owners tested positive, Foxconn workers who walked 25 miles to escape lockdown—and I have told them that many nights, at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. when the campus had gone to sleep and I had wrapped up my schoolwork, I cried over videos like “The Voice of April” that documented people’s struggle for food and medical resources under lockdown.
“I didn’t even dare to watch those videos,” Lenny said. For those of us who had been out of the country when these things went on, there was a kind of survivor’s guilt, born of having escaped the collective suffering of the people we’d left behind. “I don’t know who’s happy in that country, and if I want to be happy then I can’t think too much about China. I’m sorry, I know I’m being selfish.”
“I love my country,” Lenny often said, “but my country doesn’t love me back.” While dreaming of freedom for China, in the end, we’d all chosen our own freedom in the U.S.
* * *
My mother insisted that I should see the COVID testing station outside our neighborhood. It looked like a one-person security booth in front of every neighborhood, and was now covered in dust.
“We used to line up here for two hours every day,” she trailed off. “You couldn’t get on a bus or into a mall without a negative COVID test result. There were people who were turned away and died in front of the hospital because they didn’t have one. . .” she trailed off. “Oh, why am I telling you this? Young people should be happy, live without burdens.”
“It’s okay, mom. I already knew this.” I assured her. “Let’s talk when we get home.”
We sat on the bed in her bedroom for the entire afternoon. I told her that I no longer wanted to take the trip to Xinjiang we had been talking about taking because of the ongoing Uyghur genocide. “At our publishing house, we’ve always been so careful not to publish anything that might offend Muslims, you know how scrappy they can be,” she replied. “Why would the government try to provoke them?” I showed her the trailer for Revolution of Our Times, a documentary made by filmmaker Kiwi Chow that followed seven teams of protesters during the 2019 demonstration movement in Hong Kong, and said “some of my friends from Hong Kong haven’t been able to go back since 2019,” and she teared up. I said that I supported Taiwan independence because I didn’t want more people to live under the Chinese Communist Party regime, not when I knew how unhappy I had been in China. She said she wished for nothing other than peace.
Her willingness to talk about politics surprised me. “I don’t object to your interest in these issues. Just don’t get into any trouble, don’t get involved with any organization,” she warned me. I told her not to worry. After all, I’d made it back safely this time.
“What do you mean ‘this time’?” she asked, sounding suddenly alarmed. “What did you do when you were abroad?”
Mama, I thought, I did more than you could imagine.
* * *
I hardly ever discussed my activism in her presence. Despite the depth of her love, my mother would sooner disown me than see me become what she called a “political warrior.” The only time I’d mentioned my politics to her before now was in November 2022, when I came back to my dorm one night from a protest on my college campus to show solidarity with the White Paper protests in China. Still drunk on the passion of the evening, I chose the least provocative picture I’d taken—candles, flowers, and a poster that read “Freedom for China”—and sent it to her on WeChat.
Viewpoint
12.12.22
In China’s Diaspora, Visions of a Different Homeland
Her reply came immediately: a crying emoji followed by the words “we shouldn’t have to let the kids do this for us.”
Two days later, upon learning that the police had started to interrogate potential participants in the White Paper protests in Shanghai, she changed her tone. She called me at night: “I ask you to forgive me. I’m as angry as you are. I am an intellectual who still knows what courage and conscience are. The fervor and pain these young people feel now, we went through it during our time. But we never anticipated having to endure the same heartbreak again, only this time, even more painfully, for our children. But I’m your mother, first and foremost, and I ask you to stay safe for me.”
She begged me to prioritize my own safety and to never engage in political activism. “Or at least until you secure a green card and never want to see me again,” she added. Later she texted me: “There won’t be an end. Only control. The faint flame will be put out—we’ve been here before.”
* * *
What I didn’t tell my mother was that in October, I had been the first person in our school to put up posters calling for the end of zero-COVID and Xi Jinping’s rule. My inspiration had been Peng Lifa, a man who stood atop Sitong Bridge in Beijing on October 13 and unfurled a banner calling for freedom, criticizing Xi Jinping and urging onlookers to “Be Citizens, Not Slaves.” In November, I hadn’t merely participated in the vigil on campus, I had helped organize it. More than 150 people had shown up, and together we sang “Do You Hear the People Sing” and chanted “Be Citizens, Not Slaves!” That night, for the first time, I had shouted out “自由！民主！” (“Freedom! Democracy”). I’d felt freer than ever before. Free to imagine a free and democratic future for China. Free from my own fear and apathy. Free from the hereditary tragedy in our family.
By the spring, the fever of the movement had waned, yet I found myself unable to let go of what I had tasted. A friend connected me on Telegram with a Chinese journalist who participated in the protests in Beijing, and while taking an investigative journalism class in school, I saw the chance to write about her road to dissent. Meanwhile, with fellow Chinese students, I petitioned Western universities to take a stance and pressure the Chinese government for the release of arrested protesters. Thus began my double life as a college student and a novice dissident, a path I could never have envisioned when I’d arrived in the United States two years earlier to start college.
During my initial days on campus, I’d joined the college newspaper and simply reveled in practicing journalism free of censorship. The notion that I could attend city hall meetings and candidly question the mayor about plans for the homeless community in winter blew me away. I never considered writing about China a possibility, but a question kept turning itself over in my head after the protests, and I knew I needed to write to begin to answer it. How could it be that after 33 years of silence since 1989, people my age, our generation, had overcome our fear and apathy and taken to the streets once again?
A mutual friend introduced me to an exiled student leader of the 1989 Democracy Movement, and I became a regular guest at his dinner parties. Every week or two I would hop on the train to New York to gather with like-minded Chinese students and Chinese dissidents for workshops, food, and drinks. Gay people, feminists, human rights lawyers, kids of the 1989 pro-democracy movement participants, and most of them were now affiliated with privileged, private universities like mine. One week we passed around the final issues of the Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily, which had been shut down the previous year, and the next week we held in our hands blood-stained flags salvaged from Tiananmen Square. I did my schoolwork on the train to New York: reading Herman Meville’s Moby Dick, writing a five-page-long paper on Plato.
After one dinner, when we were all drunk, we climbed on the back of a pickup truck to smoke and deliberate on how to extend the influence of the White Paper Movement overseas. “We should do more stand-up comedy to deconstruct politics.” “A book club on banned books in China!” “More movie screenings?” “Let’s do picnics at Central Park when it’s warmer!” “We must seize this opportunity to educate the Chinese diaspora about Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Uyghur issues.” “I want to write about people in China as specific, nuanced individuals,” I announced my ambition to the group. “Aren’t you tired of how the Western media always portrays us as poor, oppressed people, or ignorant patriots, or dissidents?” I asked. Someone cheered me on, “Yes, we need literature. Words have power, they change minds.” Amidst the haze of smoke and alcohol, I felt like this wasn’t my real life. It was as though I were in a movie where I was part of an underground organization plotting to overthrow the government. I often returned to my dorm from these gatherings around 2:00 a.m. Six hours later, I’d get up for my 9:00 a.m. seminar on Renaissance English.
I reported none of this to my mother. And yet, her partial acceptance of my political views made me start to dream of being completely honest with her.
Notes from ChinaFile
02.06.23
‘I Wonder How the Protesters Felt When They Heard Their Own Voices’
Of all the people I know, my mother is the one who takes most to heart the idea that steering clear of politics is the best way to ensure safety. Still, she has always spoken to me about her frustration with the ever-tightening censorship imposed on the publishing house she works for. She finds the increasing propaganda and nationalistic sentiment on the Internet appalling. When people flooded social media with their indignation over the death of Li Wenliang, a doctor who had been punished by the authorities for trying to warn others about COVID-19, she knew those posts would be censored in no time. “The government doesn’t want citizens, it wants sheep. It only cares about its own interest. It only cares about stability.
When I’d read her jokes mocking the Chinese Communist Party, she’d enjoy a good laugh. But then she would always rush to shut the conversation down. Sometimes she would say, “Little bugs like us shouldn’t be talking about national affairs.”
I grew up fearful of my mother. Beginning in elementary school, on most school days I awoke to the sound of her screaming at my father that she wished he would die on the road. For many long years, night after night, when I failed to strike the correct piano key, when my math homework bore more than five errors, or simply, when she was upset, she would corner me and whip my arm with my slipper, thrust at my leg with her heels, and hit my head with my sheet music, and I would scream, hoping beyond hope that the neighbors might hear and rescue me.
She seemed to be in pain too. The worst part was when she would slap herself, pound her chest, her face turning as red as though she’d just had an entire bottle of wine. I couldn’t fathom why my mother, who always appeared in public with elegance in her Max Mara trench coat and professional short skirt, was now stomping her feet, saliva from a string of curses hanging from the corners of her mouth and shirt, emitting beast-like howls. It was as though she were possessed. Utterly stunned and helpless, I would hug her, using my body to calm down hers. “Hit me, Mama, please,” I would plead, “just don’t hit yourself. Please.”
I spent my entire childhood and adolescence trying to make sense of the world I grew up in. I was once obsessed with philosophy. Free will and determinism. Was determinism enough to absolve my mother’s agency in creating the insecurity and dread I felt?
* * *
Almost two months after my return to China, one day my mother casually began complaining at dinner. “The censorship at our publishing house has gotten insane,” she began. “We’re not even allowed to mention privilege, class difference, or totalitarianism anymore. If you saw the manuscript I just edited, you’d be appalled.”
“Have you ever tried pushing back?” I asked. “Maybe you could save a few sentences, or just a few words.”
“You think I’m a coward?” she suddenly erupted and threw her chopsticks. “You're right. I can’t do anything. I’m just a regular person trying to get by, and I’m in shackles. My colleagues and I are all cowards.”
Protestors hold up white pieces of paper in a rebuke of censorship during a demonstration against China’s strict zero-COVID measures, in Beijing, November 27, 2022.
“Every citizen has the right and duty to resist an oppressive government,” I replied. “If it hadn’t been for the White Paper Movement, China might still be under lockdown and I might not even be here now.”
She disagreed: “I’m old now. I will no longer take to the streets. I will only look from afar toward the crossroads. And even if we don’t march, there will always be those who rise up. I’m not one of them. With or without us, the streets will remain the same. I’ll be content with leading a quiet life and I will not be judged by you for this.”
“I’m scared of politics,” she reiterated repeatedly. “We’re nothing but slaves, contented slaves, slaves who are afraid of not being able to be slaves, slaves who are so good at being slaves we don’t know how not to be slaves.”
I was disgusted by her cynicism, and decided I would not offer her any sympathy. I said, “How am I supposed to enjoy a family reunion in the comfort of your home, while girls my age spend months in prison for fighting for people’s freedom, including mine and yours, Mom. Why do we have to be brave, while you remain apathetic and at ease?” She gazed at me as if awakened from a long dream—nearly despondent. Seconds later, she erupted into a fit of sobs. “Why is my life so bitter? All I’ve ever wanted is a simple, warm family, with nothing to do with politics, so why is it so hard?”
“Life has been too easy for you,” she continued. “If it had kicked you around a little more, you wouldn’t have the energy to philosophize about freedom and democracy. We’ve worked our asses off to give you everything, and then you attack us for not taking enough responsibility as citizens. That’s not fair. That’s hypocrisy.”
* * *
A month earlier, I’d attended a music festival to see my favorite band, No Party for Cao Dong, an indie rock band from Taiwan whose songs about loss and despair resonated with many Chinese people my age. On a late summer evening, I’d stood among tens of thousands of people on the muddy ground, singing in unison, “What I want to say, the people who came before me have already said. What I want to do, the people with money have already done. The justice I want is just an invention of the unjust.” I spotted a flag with “Love and Liberty” boldly written in red characters, waving in the air. I wondered if this was the reason people had traveled from all corners of the country to be part of a two-day music festival: When achieving real freedom seemed daunting, we all needed the occasional illusion of freedom.
Or perhaps, for many of us, the motivation was simply to put on a leather dress or fishnet tank top and take photos for social media. Maybe we just wanted a good time. It could be that my wishful thinking unnecessarily politicized the experience. Maybe what I should have been considering was the high cost of crafting this illusion—transportation, accommodation fees, all for the pleasure of my personal illusion.
A few weeks later, a taxi driver from Inner Mongolia struck up a conversation while driving me back from the airport in Beijing. “When I was in the countryside, I thought life was good, our country was good,” he told me. “After I got to the big city I wised up. I’ve seen and heard a lot. Many of my passengers are highly educated, and I’ve learned a few things from their conversations. But now, I don’t know. Every day I spend 14 hours in this car and only earn less than 200 yuan [less than U.S.$30] at the end of the day. You can’t earn any money unless you work yourself to death. I can’t say our country is bad, but . . . I just feel the future is grim.”
I started writing this piece, thinking that upon my return to China, what saddened and frightened me the most was not the censorship, surveillance, or nationalism, but the apathy and cynicism displayed by people like my family—individuals who had firsthand experiences of political trauma—towards those who can still dream. But I should ask myself: who has the chance to leave China and dream, and who must stay and live in reality?
* * *
I was born and raised in what people in China would call “an intellectual family.” Both of my grandfathers attended college, with one specializing in Russian studies and the other in Chinese literature. My mother, a graduate in the 1990s of one of China’s top literature departments, has worked as an editor in a state-affiliated regional publishing house ever since. My father, a graduate of the same university my mother attended, was the only one in our family who chose to engage in business; I only saw him once or twice every two weeks, and we didn’t really talk much. He sometimes tried to strike up a conversation about my studies, but it always ended in awkward silence when he couldn’t remember which class I was in or who my Chinese teacher was. After high school, as international education was even stranger to him, we talked about almost nothing other than my mother’s mental condition.
As a college student in 1989, my mother didn’t go to Beijing, but she participated in the protests at her college and in her own city. I can’t recall exactly the first time she mentioned the events of June 4; it might have been when I was a young teenager when she let it slip that, “A writer I had worked with before told me her boyfriend never came back from Tiananmen Square,” and upon my questioning, told me that rumor had it that on June 4, 1989, tanks entered Tiananmen Square. During my first year of high school, a friend introduced me to a VPN, which one afternoon I used to search “June 4” on YouTube. I watched a 13-minute BBC News video, stunned and terrified. Nothing looked the same, my room, my city, the whole country felt like a strange lie that I couldn’t recognize. Since then, every time I tried to talk to my mother about that year, she would only mention that she and her classmates tried to stop armored cars from going to Beijing. She wasn’t willing to disclose more details about her experiences in 1989 to me: “Young people should live without the burden of history.” But from what I knew about her and her college life—the all-night dancing, the theater, the reading of Sartre and Milan Kundera, the passionate love affair with my father, and the abortions—I imagined she was like Yu Hong, the protagonist of Lou Ye’s film Summer Palace, a romantic, sensitive youth who got caught up in the vehemence of politics before understanding it.
Sometime before junior high, when once, after my mother had slapped me and shouted at me for hours as usual and then decided to forgive me, she asked me, “Will you hate me for beating you?” Out of fear, I said I would never hold a grudge against her. Perhaps to win my sympathy, my mother told me about her childhood:
“I was an indirect victim of the Cultural Revolution,” she began. When she was little she shared a bed with my grandmother, each facing opposite directions. She always wanted to hold onto my grandmother’s feet for a sense of security, but my grandmother, in her sleep, would instinctively kick her away. As she grew up, whenever she made any small mistake, my grandmother would drag her to the yard and make her kneel down and then she would beat her with a thick, wooden stick. She was so malnourished, she told me, that my grandmother would lift her off the ground just by pinching her cheeks. In elementary school she often went to bed with an empty stomach, and one night when she hid some sugar in her pocket, rats chewed a hole in her trousers. For this she was beaten by my grandmother to the point that she couldn’t get up for days. In junior high, when she wrote in her diary that she thought her new Chinese teacher was charming, my grandmother threw a notebook at her face and called her a whore.
“But I didn’t hate your grandmother,” she said. “Not after I understood what she had been through.” She told me my grandmother was an elementary school teacher when the Cultural Revolution engulfed China. The day before a denunciation rally, her principal announced to her that her father, a renowned teacher, would be “borrowed” for a demonstration. He also gave her a role: “You must show your political awareness aligns with the Communist Party and enthusiastically lead the rally against your father.”
The next day, my grandmother delivered her speech, trembling in front of her father, whose hands were tied. Later, he told her, “I was glad to see you condemn me. You didn’t go crazy or faint. I was relieved. At least you are still sane enough to protect yourself. That’s all that matters.”
My grandmother’s father was imprisoned for three years in what was known as a “cowshed,” a kind of temporary prison hastily built across China to house inmates undergoing “labor reform.” He made several attempts at suicide. When my grandmother walked through the village, people would point at her and say, “That’s the daughter of that reactionary academic authority.” She used to be a smart and proud girl, but she carried the burden of never having attended college throughout her life, because her father and her uncle had gone to Taiwan to study medicine in 1948. Her mother and sisters found solace in Christianity, but she couldn’t bring herself to believe in God.
Over and over, whenever we read a book or watched a movie about family or the Cultural Revolution, she would bring up this story. The Cultural Revolution was not a secret or taboo in our household, but rather, a lesson—that politics is a realm fraught with darkness, dirtiness, and fervor, that any individual when standing before the mighty state is powerless and fragile, that politics ruined anyone and their family who dared to taste it—so never, ever, get involved with politics.
* * *
In October 2023, the morning after our fight, my mother asked me to move out and live however I want, or to stay in our house and never talk to her again about politics.
I chose the latter, and she appeared relieved. “That’s what I thought. Why do we have to make our lives, our mother-daughter relationship, so political?” she said.
A year later, I’ve kept to our agreement. I have not brought up politics with her since. Instead, I made hot oil noodles for her and she cooked chicken soup for me. We played mahjong together and I teased her when she lost all her chips, watched indie movies like Only The River Flows and critiqued the abstractness of contemporary art films, and shared tips on the best foundation and contouring techniques. On autumn nights, we’d go for walks and share a Marlboro menthol. She loved hearing me rhapsodize about postcolonial literature I was studying in school, and I looked forward to taking her to Broadway to see Hadestown when she comes to my graduation ceremony. We both loved Yu Hua and Madame Bovary, and had to have hairy crabs on the table in November.
It seems like without the freedom and democracy that I advocated for so strongly abroad, I could still lead a content, apolitical life in China.
To live as a free citizen, to practice democracy, is not what my mother wanted. During our morning tea, during dinners, and her many fights with my father, she always mentions how envious she is of happy families. Her colleague Wang, when she was a child, used to cry and refuse to go to kindergarten, and her mother would indulge her, saying, “If you don’t want to go, then you don’t have to” and take her to work and keep her by her side. Nowadays, every time Wang’s mother makes dumplings she still packs some up and takes a two-hour bus to bring them to her door, and Wang still feels natural resting her head on her mother’s shoulder just like when she was a child. Wang told my mother that out in the world, she might be nothing, but it didn’t matter because at home, she would always be cherished.
In the past few months, there were moments when I contemplated abandoning my ambition in politics and literature altogether, and simply returning home and letting my mother have the family she always envisioned. For she was, when there were just the two of us, a weak woman who tried to be a good mother. She hated doing chores, but she always took them upon herself so that I had more time for reading and writing. She knew she would never move to the United States, but she hoped the best for me in achieving my dream of being a writer in the English-speaking world.
“There’s no future for literature in China,” she told me. “You should stay in the U.S. Don’t worry about me. I won’t hold you back. I just hope when you’re in your 30s and settled down, I’ll still be alive and healthy enough to cook you a meal and look after your cat.” Her generosity, her understanding almost made me forget all the fear I used to feel around her. Every time she told me, “I love you, and I’ll support whatever you do, as long as you’re safe and happy,” I felt guilty for harboring any grievance against her. What right do I have to portray her in that light? At times, I felt like giving up this piece altogether. Would my readers understand that my mother is not a bad person, that my mother is not a bad mother?
But this little mother-daughter utopia could not tolerate the existence of a third person, not even, and especially not, my father. It’s hard to summarize my parents’ 30 years of marriage and the reasons why it failed, but I felt it was in part because in it my mother wanted to create the perfect family, the perfect, unconditional love she didn’t have when she was a kid, and my father was simply an ordinary man who tried hard but made many, sometimes hard-to-forgive, mistakes—extramarital affairs, poor business decisions—and indeed, my mother hated him for it. The presence, or even the thought of, my father would turn my mother into the tyrant I was too familiar with. I was fearful when my father was on business trips. In the middle of the night, I’d hear her sobbing. One night, I got out of the bed and found her standing in front of the window in my father’s bedroom, alone, sighing, recounting her unhappiness since she married him. “Your father is not a bad man,” she said to me, “but he did ruin me.”
Many times, when my father was home, she would burst into his bedroom and they would fight all night.
“But have you given me a happy family life?” my mother shrilled. “No! I stayed in this city for you, 30 years away from my hometown, my parents!”
“Don’t put this on me,” my father sighed with resignation and suppressed anger. “30 years ago you told me you were happy here, you told me you wanted to escape your mother and that you were happy here.”
I stayed in bed, pretending to be asleep and playing my part in not disrupting the false harmony they tried to sustain in front of me.
I couldn’t fathom how my mother, who could be so tender and loving, was also capable of harboring so much rancor. It chilled me when people complimented me for inheriting my mother’s beauty, saying “You two are so alike!” and “You are exactly what your mother was like in college!” as if pronouncing I would end up like her. I don’t know how she ended up being the bitter yet vulnerable woman she is today. In fact, I don’t think she knows.
What happened, Mama? In 1989, were you just like me, did you also try to reconcile with yourself, with your mother, through a passion for politics that pointed at the Party, the cause of your years of misery? Were you too broken to act, to dream of freedom? Was I cruel for depriving you of a peaceful reality?
My mother had told me, “My relationship to my mother is my relationship to the world, and I cannot reconcile with her. I cannot reconcile with myself. I cannot reconcile with the world. We will always love each other and hate each other until we leave this world one after the other. The fear I felt in childhood, the nervousness, our broken relationship are like an unbreakable curse. They will haunt all the generations to come.”
What my mother didn’t know, where the cruel irony lay, was that when I was growing up, and even now, she was often the catalyst for my desire to escape. I didn’t want to hate her, but I didn’t have the ability to love her either. I found out about my father’s extramarital affairs in elementary school. In junior high, I discovered that my mother was in the abyss of bipolar disorder, something my grandmother and uncle shared. I learned in high school the concept of generational, political trauma. Good people got messed up by politics. Since junior high, I simply wanted to run as far as possible away from my family and this toxic, twisted country that made my family this way. Entering high school, I realized my best option was to go abroad for college. The better education I received, the better prepared I would be to live independently and cut off from my family. Alexander Hamilton sings, “In New York you can be a new man,” and so I came to the United States in 2021, full of hope, expecting to start afresh and leave my past back in China.
Yet I have never taken off the ring my mother bought me the week before my flight to New York. A thin, rose gold ring, with a circle of tiny sparkles and a wave-like arc on my right middle finger. That night she came back from walking through the pouring rain, all wet, and as I put the ring on my middle finger she gazed at me so hard that I could feel a piece of me was taken from my body by her eyes and engraved on her heart, and what carved on her heart cut on mine as well.
* * *
“I really don’t think, at the moment, returning to China is a good idea,” advised a friend in August, “even if it’s only for a year.”
“I just want to do journalism about China and be on the ground,” I responded.
Conversation
11.29.22
China in Protest
There was another reason that I didn’t mention: The week of the White Paper Movement, during a FaceTime call with my mother I could so clearly see the bags under her eyes and the age pigment at her temples. I had never seen my mother so old and haggard. She looked softer as she aged. More vulnerable. That week, I decided that I would return to China in the fall of 2023 and stay for a year. If one day we would part ways because of our different political pursuits, then before that day I wanted one extra year with her. Weeks before my return I started to have the same nightmare over and over again, that I would be arrested the minute I got back to China, that my parents would get a call from the police, that I would have to abandon them out of protection, and Mama, my Mama, a tiny woman who always tries to whip up different dishes for me, who always struggles through life, would be left alone in China.
* * *
In December, when I gingerly proposed my plan to find a journalism internship and move out in the spring, my mother said, “Will you miss your mama? Probably not, right? I know you were unhappy in this house and you stayed just trying to cheer me up. It’s okay, I understand that you need to think about your future. It would be selfish of me to not let you go.”
With my mother, I wanted to leave when we were unhappy together, but once she gave me the permission to leave, I would be washed over by an overwhelming sense of guilt, and only want to stay and continue being unhappy together. This is also how I feel about staying in and leaving China.
* * *
The first anniversary of the White Paper Movement has passed. I sit in my home in China, waiting for the outbreak of the next wave of protests. The people who once stood next to me at the vigil have retreated back to their frats and sorority houses, back to their art galleries, their Goldman Sachs. The protester in Beijing I interviewed before had informed me that she wished to leave China with her boyfriend in the summer of 2024. And though I still talk about liberating oneself through involvement in civil society, through speaking up and writing, during Halloween in Shanghai I didn’t dress up as a COVID-protocol enforcing “Da Bai” or glue pieces of white paper to my body. Someone else did. I remained in my comfortable hotel room, sipping sparkling wine with my boyfriend.
I know I’ll be forever nostalgic for that week of protests. The hope and fever I once experienced and saw. Yet before I realized it, that week of protests slipped away from me as if it had never happened. What would I not give to go back to that week? I pondered. Perhaps, when I return to the U.S., I’ll find myself thinking, what would I not give to go back to this year with my mother.
In mid-December, our city had its first snow. While my mother and I went downstairs to feed the cats in our neighborhood, I saw four three-foot-tall snowmen in the yard. They looked so childishly high-and-mighty, with their purple flower or cauliflower hair, and their thin, twig arms stretching and embracing the sky. Around them were five kids throwing snowballs at each other. They didn’t seem to mind the coldness from the snow, as none of them wore gloves, and they didn’t seem to worry about tripping, either, as they ran fast on the ice.
How nice, I thought, the innocence and vigor of these kids. How untainted. I recalled what my mother always said: “Young people should be happy and live without the burden of history.” At that moment, I wished the same for these kids.
I want to believe that I’ve always loved my mother, but I know love is only possible when I think of myself as the daughter of my mother, the granddaughter of my grandmother, the product of modern Chinese history, and absolve her of her agency in being both the most caring and the most intimidating figure in my life. Sometimes I wonder if politics is the root of our brokenness or just an excuse, but if I must direct my hatred, my anger to something, I’d rather it be to the Party that has undoubtedly ruined the lives of many. Maybe the pain that binds us more tightly together is the result of politics, but maybe I’m just trying to pin significance to something that would otherwise be meaningless.
I feel everything when thinking of my mother—rage, pity, fear, and tenderness—and I still want to love her.
My mother is in the kitchen, preparing steamed egg custard and scallion oil noodles. May she never open this article, never discover the hatred and despair I once held towards her. May we see each other again next year. May she always live in my love, free from fear, forever.