The Beijing she knew is gone; in its place, the Beijing she loves
A Times reporter who returned to her homeland after 20 years in America found her city, and nation, transformed.
By Ching-Ching Ni
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 3, 2008
BEIJING — I was born in a Beijing that has vanished.
The way my mother tells it, I forced my way into the world a month
early so my birthday would forever be associated with the biggest
political festival of the year.
It was the early autumn of 1968, and as revelers shouted "Long live
Chairman Mao," my parents raced to a hospital during a massive parade
commemorating the birth of communist China. As my mother screamed in
pain, fireworks lighted the sky over Tiananmen Square.
Forty years later, in the transformed capital of a transformed
country, the only thing that seems constant is Tiananmen Square itself,
with its giant portrait of Mao looming over the Gate of Heavenly Peace.
Like a ghost, I had returned to the land of my birth after 20 years
in America, not as a comrade but as a correspondent for an American
newspaper. Officially, I was a foreigner dispatched here to tell the
story of a changing China. In my heart, it was also a homecoming, a
time to recapture memories of my childhood in a lost world -- and a
time to start a family of my own.
It could have been easy to forget that I grew up in Beijing. So
much has gone the way of the wrecking ball. No trace left of the
Soviet-style apartment where I lived, the classroom where I unknowingly
snitched on my mother, the sports school where I trained as a diver but
failed miserably to serve my country.
As I come to the end of my eight-year tour here and watch the
country gear up for the first Olympic Games on Chinese soil, my mind
swims with the tales of people I have met and what they tell me about
China as a nation. But rarely have I paused to consider my own story as
part of the tapestry of change.
My memories of Beijing feel ancient. But I am writing this story
now so I won't forget, so my children won't forget, that I had a past
here and it is part of who we are.
The first time I left Beijing I thought I'd never go back.
Not that I didn't want to, but because it seemed impossible.
Chinese people rarely traveled in the 1970s. Going abroad was like
flying to the moon. Even if it could happen, you had to be prepared to
be gone forever, leaving behind the people you loved.
My father couldn't join us on the journey to America. My mother had
been granted a student visa to study music in California. I was later
told that someone in the U.S. Embassy took pity on her and allowed me
and my sister, 11 and 6, to go along as family.
For me, it felt like we were fleeing a sinking ship and my father
had given us the only life raft, with room enough for just three.
My parents had married out of political convenience. It made no
sense to my grandparents that their daughter, a concert pianist trained
at the finest conservatory in China, should be interested in a soldier
from the People's Liberation Army marching band, the son of an
illiterate widowed peasant so poor she sent him off to be a child
soldier. But my mother considered herself marrying up because his
proletariat background could help elevate her from the
counterrevolutionary upbringing of her U.S.-educated parents.
On their wedding day there were no rings, no white gown, no walking
down the aisle. My mother and father bowed three times in front of a
portrait of Chairman Mao and passed out hard candies to their guests.
Their marriage seemed doomed from the start. Soon after the
wedding, my mother was sent to a labor camp along with her entire
school of elite musicians. Luck would have it that she became pregnant
with me during the first annual conjugal visit. She was forced to go
back to the countryside three months after giving birth, and my father
and I visited her only once or twice in four years.
The rest of their marriage was defined by long physical separations
as well as emotional distance that grew with time. So it probably was
no surprise that my mother jumped at the chance to start her life over
in America knowing it could not include her husband.
As a child, I blamed the family breakup on President Nixon. His
historic 1972 trip to the Middle Kingdom set the stage for the
normalization of relations in 1978 between Washington and Beijing. With
that came the opening of China to the outside world, and we were among
the very first to bolt.
It was the winter of 1979, and few Americans had ever met someone
from communist China. My mother made sure we didn't look like we were
fresh off the boat from Beijing. She dressed us in homemade
bell-bottoms and down jackets that she bought at a state-owned
"friendship store," which welcomed foreigners but not Chinese, unless
they had passports to travel (which most ordinary people did not). In a
sea of drab Mao suits and shapeless padded coats, we stood out as
walking symbols of fortune and freedom.
But it didn't take long for the country bumpkins in us to be
exposed. We might have been the only local Chinese on board the flight
from Beijing to San Francisco. None of us spoke English or had ever
flown before -- our most familiar mode of transportation was the
bicycle. We threw up during the entire flight and didn't know what an
air-sickness bag was until a Chinese speaker came to our aid.
For a long time, I resented being sent off to a foreign land to
live the life of struggling immigrants. My father was able to live a
blessed life of normality, remarrying and having a coveted son who is
the pride of his new family.
We managed to see each other several times in the two decades we were apart.
My mother raised us by herself in Northern California, where she
gave piano lessons in our living room and drove her beat-up Pinto at
night to play Chopin and "Send in the Clowns" at restaurants and hotel
lobbies to supplement our meager income. A trip to China once every
four years for her two kids was all she could afford. But she wouldn't
come along -- she refused to set foot in China again until the 1990s.
One day after I had gone off to college, my mother packed up and moved to Europe in search of the land of Mozart and the man of her dreams (A WHITE COCK NO DOUBT).
My sister, who inherited my parents' musical genes, also went to study
music in Europe and later returned to Asia as a pop music star (I WONDER WHAT COLOR IS HER COCK).
In 2000, I came back to China as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. The country had changed beyond recognition.
While I was gone, China had morphed from a closed communist society
with few material comforts into a market-driven economy in which
anything seems possible, and purchasable. A new generation of wealthy
Chinese jet-sets around the globe, drives its own cars to work and owns
apartments or villas with names like Palm Springs and Orange County.
They shop at Hermes, sip coffee at Starbucks, play golf on the weekends
with former Red Guards-turned-millionaires. Their children drink
imported infant formula, play at pricey Gymborees, listen to music on
iPods and blog on the Web.
Of course, lurking beneath China's amazing growth is a world of
contradictions: poverty and inequality, political repression,
environmental degradation and, sometimes, moral bankruptcy. As China
gets ready to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, the world will see the
country in all its glory, with as much of the dark side tucked away as
possible.
When I was in first grade, scouts from the communist sports
machinery came to our school to hunt for future champions. The event
was diving. Never mind that I couldn't swim and had no desire to be an
athlete, I was told I had the right physical proportions and good feet.
Chosen from a field of thousands to train at a state sports school, I
was supposed to be thrilled to serve my country.
What I hated the most about our training was the repetition. One
drill was to jump from the edge of the pool, feet first. One hundred
times facing the pool. One hundred times facing away. And another 100
times head first. Like piano scales, these were the basics of diving.
We called them Popsicles, bing guer, because they required a tight,
streamlined entry.
I managed these robotic leaps from the sides of the pool, fudging
the numbers as I went. But when the coach ordered us to do the same
jumps from the 3-meter platform, I showed my true colors.
I was terrified of heights.
I stood for what felt like an eternity on the diving board. The
coaches were yelling. I couldn't do it. With the shame of the world
upon me I closed my eyes and saw the end of my suffering. Instead of
taking a leap of faith I literally stood my ground and crawled down the
stairs.
Coming back to China after all these years, I was glad to see that
my old sports school and the hallowed pools had all been demolished
into history and replaced by luxury real estate developments.
My late grandparents would be surprised to see that, like my
mother, I have married a Chinese man from humble beginnings (even
though, unlike my mother, I had more options). I think even my own
parents are surprised to see me following in their footsteps, knowing
the broken outcome of their union.
Maybe I wanted to show them that it doesn't have to be that way. Chinese men are worth loving, just like China is worth coming home to (WOW).
If only they could see that times have changed, that women today
don't need to bank on marriages to move up in the world. I want to tell
them that the man I love is so much more sophisticated and full of
surprises than the stereotypes suggest.
When we visited Paris while I was eight months pregnant and had
difficulty walking, my husband pushed me around the Louvre in a
wheelchair. While the other tourists flocked to the tiny painting of
Mona Lisa, he gave me a leisurely tour of magnificent Mesopotamian
sculptures, opening my eyes to a new world of art.
In return, I wanted to show my husband, who was born and raised in
a small town in eastern Shandong province, something of China that he
hadn't seen before -- the China of my childhood. But my old walk-up
apartment is gone, replaced by a residential complex that bears no
resemblance to the neighborhood I knew.
My children would have to imagine where Mommy was a youngster not
much older than they are now, begging with all the other neighborhood
kids for a chunk of ice from the industrial fridge kept by the local
bus mechanic. Those were days long before the invasions of the
Haagen-Dazs cafes and Cold Stone Creameries. It was even before the
arrival of refrigerators, air conditioners and running hot water. All
summer long you could hear children pleading, "Tong zhi, gei wo men
diar bing!" Comrade, give us some ice!
In the early '70s, after we had moved into that sturdy four-story
apartment, life was on the upswing for my family. My grandparents had
just returned from doing manual labor in the countryside and my mother
had gotten a new job playing the piano at the Central Ballet Company.
My grandfather, a Caltech-educated hydroelectric engineer who helped
build some of the largest dams in China, had begun collecting a fat
paycheck after his "rehabilitation" -- the equivalent of $50 a month.
Compared with most of our neighbors, we lived like real bourgeoisie.
My grandmother, who had married my grandfather in New York City,
still had a soft spot for Western indulgences. She loved butter. And
once in a while she would manage to snag some from a store for
foreigners. Making do without an icebox, she would put it in a plastic
bag and drop it into the water tank of our toilet to keep it from
melting too soon.
Thanks to my grandfather's salary, we were the first in our
building to get a TV -- a black-and-white set. Even though it was well
into the '70s, television was such a new phenomenon that the state
broadcast lasted only a few hours a night, and half of it was
propaganda. Still, we treated the magic box like a shrine. By day we
covered it with an embroidered cloth and by night we opened our small
living room to neighbors who brought stools and sat three or four rows
deep.
Class struggle permeated every aspect of our supposedly egalitarian
society. Even as a child I was branded a capitalist because of my
grandparents' education abroad. I envied my classmate who lived a floor
above me. She was the daughter of factory workers and had also been
chosen to train as a diver. But she was always better than I because
she worked harder and never complained or tried to quit. I thought she
was a true patriot. Instead, she told me later she stayed so she could
make it to the next level and win a new jumpsuit.
That was a great motivator: Children got new clothes only once a
year. Sports offered a step up for those who were really poor and
didn't find poverty fashionable, even if it was politically correct.
I wish I knew what became of her. Or her brother, a popular
neighborhood pingpong player who lost four fingers in a factory
accident when he was a teenager.
I wish I could show my husband where my parents slept and where I
heard them whisper in the night about how I might have inadvertently
sold my mother down the river.
I was in first grade when the teacher asked us one day to tell the
class the names of people we knew who had visited Tiananmen Square
during a counterrevolutionary gathering. It was a spontaneous people's
movement to commemorate the death of Premier Chou En-lai and considered
a precursor to the 1989 pro-democracy protests that led to the bloody
crackdown. I was only 8 and I had no idea that my teachers were trying
to trick me. So I raised my hand and volunteered my mother's name.
When I told my parents, they panicked. My mother went into hiding and I had to live with the guilt of betraying her.
As these stories come back to me, I realize what a great thing it is that China has changed as much as it has.
Now that this born-again Beijinger prepares to take off again, I
want to tell my children to take a good look around. At 4 and 1 1/2 ,
they are too young to understand why I can't promise them that what is
here today will still be here tomorrow. The only thing I can tell them
for sure is that we are not leaving Daddy behind and we will not be
gone forever. We are not going to the moon. They can come back whenever
they want, so they can collect their own memories of life in Beijing.
Comments (2)
this was a good article!
Enjoyed your post
, and yay for the Asian male, we're not going into demise afterall, there are still plenty of Asian females that appreciate us 
.....