Other

I can’t remember how the scene really was. I only remember a dozen people crammed into the inner room of a dormitory suite, and even the doorway was crowded with people. I remember it was an evening, and it was already Time for the lights. One or two students talked about their past. We shared a cake from “Lao Mo” (Moscow restaurant in Beijing) and then dispersed. When I was walking to the girls’ dormitory, I heard some of the younger students behind me talking about how bad the 8-5 class was, thinking they could talk about something. Nothing. Another said that the cake was not bad. That was back in ’87 or ’88 in the student dorms. Now I don’t remember who started this party. The original intention was to get together on a classmate’s birthday to talk about their experiences and feelings. Some junior students heard about it and came to join in the fun.

In fact, no one really expects those students who went from school to school all the way to graduate school to have any intriguing experiences. Some of the older students in the class went Home, and some did not attend any such gatherings, lest the class teacher, who had a keen sense of smell at the time, become nervous that someone was going to “make trouble”. The class teacher was in charge of the classmates’ decision on where to go for graduation. I was one of the few people of my age, I think.

A classmate of my age recalls that he came from a working Family, with many siblings, and was often starving during difficult times. The most impressive thing he remembered was that he used to cry from hunger when he was young. At that time, he was full of envy and jealousy towards some children from cadres and intellectual families, feeling that their privileged Life was so unattainable. It seems that the audience was not particularly interested in his story. Perhaps to them, the feeling of starvation was too banal and not legendary enough. But it touched me deeply. Because I grew up envying children from working and peasant families, because their roots were so strong that they could hold their heads up as human beings. Although I knew that the economic situation of many peasant families might be worse than that of some intellectuals, it never occurred to me that a slightly better economic condition could be an object of envy. In fact, I should have thought of this a long time ago.

I didn’t say a word that day. Although I knew someone might expect me to say something. Perhaps because I am not good at speaking in front of people, and perhaps because many of the people in the room were people I did not know well, I did not want to say anything. Everyone dispersed with little interest. I didn’t feel anything either. I didn’t feel guilty until I overheard the lower classmates talking about the class of 1985, and I went back to the dormitory and cried a lot. I felt that I had ruined the meaning of the party. Perhaps no one remembered this incident among my classmates at that time, but I always remembered it.

About ten years later, in January 1997, two weeks after I first arrived in New York, I attended a vocational training course. It was a vocational training program run by a non-profit Chinese social service organization and the New York University School of Social Work. It was about because there was a growing need for social services for Chinese in New York, and many new immigrants were not allowed to enter and did not know how to get help from the government and some non-profit organizations. This six-month short course was created. There were about 16 or 17 participants. Two half days a week at NYU’s School of Social Work, a professor and an assistant professor taught the basics of social services and introductory counseling, respectively. The professor, M, is an adjunct professor and runs her own counseling clinic.

The students in this class were of varying levels. There was one who had a master’s degree in the United States and another who was born in the United States as an ABC (America Born Chinese). But most were new immigrants who did not speak English well. Although many of them have been in the U.S. for more than a decade, it is not too much to call them new immigrants.

In the SWI class, I was assigned to tell my story in two sessions. The ABC told how he was abused and physically punished by his father when he was a child. The American master told how he had two marriages, lost his restaurant, and was trained to find a job from scratch after 25 years in the United States. I always remembered the guilt caused by the silence in graduate school, not to mention the fact that everyone was talking about their own hurts, and I felt sorry for all of them if I didn’t talk about myself in the same way. My English was limited, so I only briefly told my father’s experience of being classified as a rightist in 1957 and later we were called “little rightists” and “sons of bitches” by the neighborhood kids. Although the audience was infinitely sympathetic, my own feelings were as painful as when I admitted in public at school and factory meetings that my father was a rightist and had wronged the Party and the people. I truly realized that I had done nothing wrong in keeping silent at the class reunion. I shed tears again. A classmate came up to me and gave me a hug, showing her sympathy with her physical gestures. I was grateful for her sympathy, but I vowed never again to talk about my childhood and youth experiences and feelings in public. It was simply unspeakable. To say it would be to lose the original meaning.

Professor M. talked to me alone for a while after class that day. He told me that I should tell people about my painful experiences whenever I had the chance, and that this would help me overcome the psychological trauma of my childhood and adolescence. At the time, I listened to him in a submissive manner. Later, I came to realize that this is the modern therapy of psychological recovery. The traumatized person is allowed to face his or her own trauma first. At first, it is very painful to talk about it, but gradually the pain is reduced to a minimum as you get used to it. I found that I didn’t really want to forget the pain. It was the only mark I had left from my childhood and adolescence. Maybe from a psychological point of view, I am self-abuse is pathological. But for me, if I forget them completely, what is left of that era for me.

A few days ago, I read an article “Remembering Sister Gu Hong” in “Two Leisurely Halls”, which mentioned an old mansion in Hutong, Dongsi, Beijing. That was the place where I lived when I was a child. We lived in a three-room house in the front yard, which was probably the house where the driver or maid of the mansion used to live. My sisters still remember the middle courtyard with the porch and the back garden with the moon gate where we used to play. They also remember when Gu Jie Gang’s wife invited us to have dim sum after we had a fight with the Gu children. I find it hard to believe that we had such a “glorious history” of fighting with others when we were young. My elder sister told me that Tian Tian, who was about ten years older than us, took us to do that. I’ll tell Tian Tian’s story later. I still remember that courtyard in a trance. My deepest impression is that there was a “sky-high” begonia tree in the yard. I still remember the sweet and sour taste of the little begonias. After I grew up, I never saw such a “sky-high” begonia tree and never ate such a good-tasting begonia again.

When I was four years old, my father was classified as a rightist, and we were expelled from the courtyard of Ganmian Hutong. We moved to a shed built for construction workers in the western suburbs. When it was built, it was a temporary structure. In retrospect, when we first moved there, there were flower beds, pine walls and some trees in the middle of the courtyard. The house was certainly not very good, but it was really not worse than the quality of the current permanent building. It also had three courtyards, but of course they were not the same as the courtyards in Dry Face Hutong. All of them are rows of bungalows. One courtyard was just a warehouse, and in the late “Cultural Revolution“, as the housing became more and more crowded, it began to be converted into very simple housing. There were dozens of families living in the courtyard. The main residents were handymen, cooks, and clerks of the lowest rank in the state organization at that time. Because many people had just moved from the countryside to the city, they could not help but bring their rural habits with them. So the pine walls and flowerbeds shrank and the chicken nests and woodpiles grew and grew. After the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, the last remaining pine walls gave way to temporary earthquake shelters in a national campaign to build earthquake shelters, which later developed into permanent self-built kitchens until the entire yard was demolished in 1988.

No matter how many times I dreamed of home, that later extremely ugly compound was the only home I ever dreamed of. The horrible communal toilet was also a nightmare that will never be forgotten. In this courtyard, we no longer had equal rights to fight with the “Gu family” or any children. Others saw us as deviants, and we eventually positioned ourselves as deviants.

Although we were “banished” from Dongsi, the “noble and good district” of Beijing, to the western suburbs, which were still desolate in 1958, for the first few years, we were too young and protected by “Auntie Tian”. In the first few years, I was too young, and with the protection of “Auntie Tian”, life didn’t seem to be that difficult. Auntie Tian is from Shaoxing. When my elder sister was born, my Parents were still in Shanghai, so I started to ask Auntie Tian to take my newborn sister. Because she had a daughter, Tian Tian, who was still young, she had to take her with her. It might not be easy for her to find a job that would let her take her daughter with her. So when her parents were transferred to Beijing and volunteered for the newly created factory in Zhangdian, Shandong, she gave up her big city life without a second thought and went along for the ride. Later, when her father was transferred back to Beijing, he returned to Beijing with his four children, Auntie Tian and her daughter Tian Tian. Mother, however, because the leadership did not release, one person to stay in Shandong, and there one person to work and live for eight years.

Auntie Tian herself is a hired farmer, not only the roots of the red seedling, himself is bitter. Better than many yards of street activists in the poor peasants under the middle peasants of the origin. Although her household registration was still in Shanghai, it did not prevent her from becoming the leader of the street group. She had never studied and could not read or write. She didn’t know much about the anti-right movement either. But she was very good at using her status as a hired peasant. Even though my father was sent to labor camps for being a rightist, she was not really a member of our family, so she continued to be the leader of her street group. I still remember her planting corn between the pine wall and the canal in front of someone’s house. At the time, I was just puzzled that she did this without seeing people protesting. Now that I think about it, she still had some authority in our yard. And she single-handedly brought up the four of us sisters. She treated the second sister a little differently and extra harshly, and my mother thought it was because she was still in Shanghai when the second sister was born in Beijing. And about because I was the youngest child, she loved me the most. Like an old mother hen, she spread her wings to protect us as an alien during the years when my father went to labor camps and my mother languished in Shandong alone as a rightist wife.

My mother finally returned to Beijing in 1962. My mother was gifted with intelligence and great talent. There was not a single job in her life that she did not excel in. At first her leaders did not agree to her transfer back to Beijing to be with her family. Later when she became the wife of a rightist, a ministry that used to lend her short-term jobs and desperately wanted to transfer her back to Beijing refused to accept her. Coupled with the fact that Aunt Tian did not like the second sister, as soon as the mother returned to Beijing, the second sister clung to her mother and refused to leave. We four children had never been beaten by our parents. Instead, she was beaten by Auntie Tian. When my mother saw that my sister had a tendency to be withdrawn, she took her to Shandong at one point. But my mother had to work herself and had no one to look after her, so she once locked her up at home alone. She would rather be locked up at home alone than go back to Beijing as long as she could be with her mother. But this was not a permanent solution, so she was finally sent back to Beijing. In addition, my mother mentioned many times later that when I was five or six years old, she went back to Beijing to visit her family, and I refused to call her mother anymore. She bought a large loaf of my favorite bread and told me that she would give it to me if I called her mother. As a result, I dropped the bread I was already holding in my arms and left. This incident was so irritating to her. She recalled that scene countless times. So her mother, who had always regarded work and independence as her second life, saw that there was no hope for her to move and made up her mind to quit her job and return to Beijing. In fact, if she had delayed two more years, she would not have been able to register for the Beijing account.

My father was a man who did not ask about common affairs, especially when he later went to reform through labor, and had limited time to return to Beijing. During the eight years when my mother was away from Beijing and on limited annual family leave, Auntie Tian had already become the head of the family and was in charge of the “financial and administrative” power. My mother later found out that during the difficult period, Auntie Tian had many people from the nearby “institutions” who had ordered milk due to hepatitis come to our house to warm milk during work exercises. My mother speculated that she received tips or other benefits at the expense of the health of our four children. At one time, Auntie Tian was also at our house to look after a young couple’s newborn baby in our yard. In the former case, I now presume that my mother was allergic. In fact, those people who came to warm milk were all “official wives”, and hepatitis was just a cover for privilege in those days. Perhaps my mother was aware of the “hepatitis” trick of those official wives, but some of the things that Auntie Tian was “trespassing” on, she didn’t want to get angry, so she held back. I think my mother had a long history of dissatisfaction with Auntie Tian. She once said that when she was in Shanghai, a colleague told her that your mother-in-law looked very powerful. That colleague was referring to Auntie Tian. In fact, in the absence of supervision, anyone can develop to the point of “powerlessness”. No one is immune to this, so how can we blame Auntie Tian?

Auntie Tian has repeatedly said she wants to go back to Shanghai to bring up her grandchildren. By the time her mother resigned to go back to Beijing, Auntie Tian also resigned to go back to Shanghai. Because Tian Tian had already graduated from college, she left with peace of mind. Auntie Tian came back for a short time soon afterwards because of disagreement with her daughter-in-law. But she left again soon. It was around ’65 when I came home from the “May Day” tour and saw Auntie Tian. She missed the children she had brought up and came back to see us. At that time, her daughter Tian Tian was already married and she was living with her daughter. Her daughter didn’t want her to have any contact with us. “After the Cultural Revolution, my father’s old classmate told us that she had seen Auntie Tian several times in Zhongguancun, and every time she mentioned us, especially me, her eyes were teary. She was especially happy to hear that I had gone to college after years of being out of school. One summer in the early 80s, my third sister and I finally went to the Zhongguancun police station and actually found her daughter’s home. When we appeared in front of Aunt Tian, she cried. Told her little grandson we were relatives and told him to go out and play. The little grandson went away in doubt. Auntie Tian was already very old. But to me, it seems that not much has changed. She never seemed younger as long as I can remember. She told us not to go back to her. We didn’t want to put her in an awkward position in our daughter’s house and never dared to go to her again. My father’s old classmates who lived in Zhongguancun speculated that they stopped seeing her in the mid-eighties and were afraid she had passed away.

Speaking of Aunt Tian’s daughter Tian Tian. I searched my memory and couldn’t remember what she looked like. And there is actually not a single photo of her at home. Rather than following her mother, Tian Tian followed our family from Shanghai, to Beijing, to Zhangdian in Shandong, and back to Beijing again. When my mother mentioned Tian Tian, she was always very upset with her, saying that she treated Tian Tian like her own child. She said that if she bought anything for her eldest sister and second sister at that time, Tian Tian would get a share. The two of us younger ones often just picked up the clothes that our sisters wore smaller. My mother said that Tian Tian was not good at language when she was in middle school, and her mother was still in Shandong, so she had to write an essay every week and send it to Shandong, and her mother changed it and sent it back to her. But I think it must have been painful for Tian Tian to be completely passive and carried around with her mother as our family moved around. No matter how my parents treated her, she probably felt a sense of humiliation at being patronized. What’s more, when my father became a rightist, she was 17 or 18 years old and revolutionary as hell. Not to mention her aunt’s daughter, is there any less of her own daughter to draw the line? I’m afraid that’s why she lived in school after high school. She went to university for teacher training. After graduation, she never interacted with us again. But I still think that it was not easy for her to bring people to raid our house during the “Cultural Revolution”.

Our situation in the courtyard changed subtly after Auntie Tian’s sheltering wings were gone. We were called “little rightists” when we played with other children, and later we became “doggies”. At that time, I didn’t know what a rightist was, but I was not a good person anyway. The only strategy my mother had was to forbid us from playing with other children. Only one child, whose nickname was Dengdeng, was not forbidden to play together. Her mother was also an intellectual, and my grandmother was a fellow Fuzhou resident of my mother’s. Until a few years ago, I suspected that the fear of us being bullied by our children’s playmates was the public reason. And privately, the fear of us being tainted with some foul language or vulgar behavior was not known.

Although play among children cannot be completely forbidden, the feeling of alienation is ever present. Children playing together may have dissonance, but eventually it may rise to a political issue. And for those kids who call us little right-wingers, is anyone really having class hatred? It’s just human weakness. Knowing that once this was said, no matter how justified it turned out to be, we would no longer have the ability to talk back, only to cry and go home. So they went back to the dynasty with a victory.

And when it came to the “Cultural Revolution”, I couldn’t even play with the lights together. Because of each other’s families, they were all under surveillance. If someone with ulterior motives implicated our parents with her mother and grandmother, I don’t know what bad luck it would bring.

However, after my mother came back and Auntie Tian left, we had one more scenery. My youngest cousin took us to do something “amazing” in the yard. My younger cousin was my aunt’s child. I’m afraid my aunt was the only relative we had at the time that we visited often. And they lived in Zhongguancun, which wasn’t too far from us. Although my aunt seemed to have more serious problems than my father, what with his “historical counter-revolution” and all. When he was first liberated, he was demoted from professor to associate professor as a punishment. Frankly speaking, I didn’t even know my aunt had historical problems before the Cultural Revolution. But maybe he was born differently. I never saw my cousins have any inferiority complex, instead they all seemed to feel very good.

My mother, who was not a good housekeeper at that time, had to take care of the Food and living of a family of six in addition to working after my aunt left. This was the first time in her life. Because she could not seal the coal-burning stove, she often had to build a stove to cook when the stove went out at home. I don’t know how many times my mother said that one day she had just entered the yard gate after work. Someone said, “Go home and cook. Your little nephew made a sign and paraded your four daughters around the yard, “We want milk, we want bread”. I don’t know which foreign movie my little cousin saw the anti-hunger demonstration in, but because he was hungry, he took us four to march in the courtyard. It happened to be a difficult time, and the government was sympathetic to everyone’s hunger, so it was a relatively relaxed political climate. Fortunately, no one came to investigate. If later on, although children were naughty, it was enough to cause a big trouble.

“After the Cultural Revolution began, all of our friends and relatives who had escaped the anti-rightist movement in 1957, none of them escaped the revolution. “Once the Cultural Revolution began, my mother lost her job as a temporary editor at the China Bookstore. My mother was devastated mentally. Not only did she lose her job. A historian whom my mother knew very well committed suicide shortly after the publication of the May 16 Notice. As my mother said many times later, it was difficult to buy a toolkit she needed for her work. The historian suddenly said he would give her his set. My mother was still wondering why he was suddenly giving away a book that he could not live without. Within a few days, the news of his suicide came. My mother said that he had written “History of the Northeast”, which inevitably dealt with various land-related treaties between the Manchu and Russia, and was therefore classified as a rightist in 1957 for sabotaging friendly relations between China and the Soviet Union. Even after the Sino-Soviet rapprochement, his situation did not improve. Once the “May 16 Notice” came out, he already knew what his fate would be, and did not wait for the new round of humiliation to come, so he made his own end.

My mother had told us to prepare ourselves mentally for the raid. In fact, the family has four walls, in addition to a few pieces of public rented tables, chairs, beds and stools, the family has only a few bookshelves. What is there to copy? But it was a time when anyone who thought he had the right roots could copy his family. Soon there were half-grown children from the courtyard who brought the Red Guards from school to copy the “old Chinese woman” in the courtyard. I don’t really know her history. I don’t know if she came back from the South China Sea, or if it was just her children in the South China Sea in Hong Kong. I don’t know why she lives in the dormitory of the institution as she doesn’t have a job. She relied on her children to send money to her to sustain her life. She always dressed better than the people of that time. Seems to be not badly maintained. The girl who brought the Red Guards from her school lived next door to the “old Chinese woman”. During the raid, there was a traffic jam of spectators. At that time, we only dared to stand in front of our own house to take a peek, only to see a group of people gathered around the door of the sufferer. We didn’t know exactly what they had found. In fact, we were always worried if we were the next target. Afterwards, we heard that the “old Chinese woman” was beaten with a belt with a metal head by the Red Guards and had her head shaved. After the Red Guards left, a girl in the courtyard who was only in the sixth grade beat the old woman again, following the Red Guard’s method. It is also said that the KMT mandate was copied from under the mattress of the old woman’s mattress. As to what kind of letter of appointment, the person who made it up didn’t make it up himself. In fact, her crime was that she was different from others in those days, she had a Simmons bed, and she had foreign currency to make a living. I suspect that the trigger for all this was just jealousy and personal anger. But it was all in the name of “revolution”.

In fact, it seems that the most frightening thing in the world is not that the most frightening thing has already happened, but that one is always in fear and waiting for the most likely thing to happen. The most terrible of all terrors is the terror of the unsettled, and in 1966 the streets of Beijing were marked with the slogan “Long live the Red Terror”. Indeed, the days were spent in the terror of not knowing every day if there would be a catastrophe. Perhaps there were so many homes to be copied in Beijing that a dead tiger like my father did not mean much. Perhaps we were always very aware of our rightist status and did not put up enemies in the courtyard, and finally only the rebel faction from my father’s unit came. One day, when I came back from school, I heard my mother say that there was no copy. Just came to check and let myself hand over some things. Indeed the house was not in disarray.

After the horror of the raid, it was time to “clear the squad” (clean up the class ranks). My father attended daily study classes at his unit. My mother was ordered to join the street committee to “clean up the squad” because she was out of work. Mother soon became a “special suspect” (suspected secret agent) because our grandmother and several uncles were in Taiwan. Our parents were also transferred from Taiwan to Hong Kong and then back to Shanghai after 1949. My parents never told us about these things, probably because we were too young. I only vaguely knew that my grandmother and my uncles were in Taiwan. There was a beautiful children’s song “Listen to Mommy Tell the Past” that was forbidden to be sung in our house. My father said that when we sang this song, my mother would think of her own mother and shed tears.

One of the street team leaders in our yard was a classic “Red Guard Woman”. She wasn’t just mean to those of us from bad backgrounds, she also seemed to hate people from good backgrounds. So no one liked her. No one respected her. She had her own name, of course. But no one called her by her name, everyone in the courtyard called her “Xiao-so’s mother”. I have the right to call her “Xiao Hong’s mother”. In fact, in those days, such a name may be very common. “Xiaohong” can be Xiaodong, Xiaobing, Weidong, or Zhenxi, Zhendong, are some of the names branded with the characteristics of the times. I don’t even remember seeing this figure smiling in our yard. I often wonder how a person can accumulate so much hatred. I once told a colleague about this “little red her mother”. The colleague, whose own father had spent four years in Qincheng prison for special suspicion, immediately asked me if she was ugly. I asked him how he knew. He said he felt that these people were ugly and had been discriminated against and treated badly since they were young, which is why they have that kind of hatred for all people. After listening to this colleague’s high opinion, I really have some sympathy for this kind of Red Guard women. However, it is fortunate that our “little red mother” is one of the dumbest people in the world, otherwise her venomous energy would be terrible. Whenever the street group met, she said that Chairman Mao said that the history of the class enemy should be told every day (she couldn’t learn the words “the class struggle should be told every year, every month, every day”), so she forced my mother to tell her history and her family’s history. When the street committee met, my mother had to go to the committee’s meeting to speak to a couple of hundred housewives. Throughout her life, there was nothing more humiliating to my mother than this.

Then my elder sister and my second sister went to join the army in northern Shaanxi, my father went to the “May 7 Cadre School” in Henan, and my third sister went to the Northeast Construction Corps. Around 1970, my mother and I were the only ones left in Beijing. Later, war preparations became increasingly tight. My mother and I were told to get ready to go to my father’s cadre school in Henan. The schedule was set. We sold everything we could. Books were sold at the price of 7 cents a pound for scrap paper. But it turned out that the army had requisitioned the train we had reserved to take. We couldn’t leave. Later, my father’s cadre school was moved to Hunan. We went to Henan with the courtyard people, and we were forgotten by mistake. There were only a few families left in the large courtyard. Most of them were families whose jobs were transferred to Beijing units, but still lived in the courtyard. There were almost no children in the courtyard at that time.

The details of the “Qing team” investigation were amazing. It was so detailed that even my mother had her picture taken in a photo studio in Beijing in the 1940s. If she had really joined any party or group, how could she not be found out? But the conclusion was still long overdue. With most of the people and their families leaving Beijing for cadre schools, the “clearing of the team” seemed to end in a tiger’s head and a snake’s tail. It seems that around 1974 or 1975, people who had gone to the cadre school began to return. “Xiaohong’s mother” started to watch everyone again. And our family was her main target. Until the end of the Cultural Revolution, no matter where I went, I always felt that there was a pair of eyes …… “Xiao Hong’s mother’s” eyes… I felt a pair of eyes watching me from behind. When I had the chance to read George Orwell’s 1984, the ubiquitous “Big Brother” made me wonder how profound Orwell’s insight into modern authoritarian society was in the late 1930s.

In fact, my mother was a very optimistic person. After all the hardships she went through, she always lamented her and our family’s good fortune. She always said that if my father had not been on a business trip in the south during the Great Explosion in 1957, he would not have been just a demotion in rank and salary and sent to Hebei and the suburbs of Beijing for labor reform. If he hadn’t become a rightist in 1957 and become a dead tiger, with his stubbornness and refusal to turn back to the south wall, the end of the Cultural Revolution would have been even worse. She was glad that we were still in Beijing when the Cultural Revolution began. People in the big city were used to seeing all kinds of people. If we had been in a small city or exiled to the Northeast, Xinjiang or Yunnan as many of my father’s old classmates and friends had been, the mere fact of having family and friends in Taiwan would have been a death sentence. My mother had been a strong person all her life, and the pain of losing her job made her almost unbearable. But she considered it a blessing that she resigned from Shandong and returned to Beijing. One of the “38 old cadres” was my mother’s superior and always appreciated her talent. “During the Cultural Revolution, he was falsely accused of harboring her as a “rightist’s wife” and had his arm broken during the rebellion. He was put in the hospital and put in a cast, but the rebels chased him to the hospital and smashed the cast and twisted off his arm. My mother said that if she had been there, she could have been killed alive.

Living in such an environment, and being overprotected by our parents, it was inevitable that our personalities would not be distorted. My second sister had a few “hysterical” episodes during the “Cultural Revolution” and had generalized spasms. The third sister was a happy-go-lucky person from childhood. According to my mother, the first thing she did when she opened her eyes as a child was to sing “White clouds floating in the blue sky”. Life in the Northeast Corps almost completely crushed her. After returning to Beijing, first the account, then the many worries about work, the whole person’s temperament has changed, as if expecting bad luck every day. And I knew I was afraid of everything. I would always walk along the wall with my head down, afraid of attracting anyone’s attention. Even going to the store would scare me. I don’t want to stand in line when there are too many people, and I’m afraid to go to the counter when there’s really no one there. Because I wanted to change my timid nature, I went to study journalism instead. I wanted to find a job where I could change my temperament by always being in contact with people. However, the temperament that was set during my formative years was true to the words of Mao Zedong, “It is difficult to change. The fear of others had reached a pathological level. Later, when I went out for an interview, I would pray that the interviewee would not be there. Later, I heard a classmate say that she, too, always prayed that the interviewee would not be there. It seems that I am not the only one who suffers from phobia. Another time, I published a miscellaneous article under a pen name at the newspaper where I was interning. My mentor asked one of my classmates to give me a message, saying that the newspaper was full of talented people and it was not easy to become famous with a real name, let alone a pen name. Although he himself is a rightist, he may not know that I have the desire to publish, but I do not want to be noticed.

Mao said that the bourgeoisie always wants to express itself tenaciously, but in fact the proletariat also wants to express itself tenaciously. It was not until I arrived in the United States in the 1990s and saw how competitive and aggressive Americans, especially New Yorkers, are in their daily lives that I realized that it is in the nature of human beings to express themselves tenaciously. It is just that we have a special cultural background and we have been forced to change our nature.

In 1998, I returned to the classroom and went to New York University. I watched those American students speak in class or give book reports, without shyness, without stage fright, with their mouths agape. Some of them held a coffee cup in one hand and made gestures with the other hand to strengthen their tone. Some even sat with one leg across the professor’s table, and their body language showed that confidence and ease. It really made me feel ashamed of myself. English is not my native language, so it’s not surprising that I can’t express myself like this. But even if I were to use Chinese, would I be able to do what they did? Although I now feel that not all Americans who have this kind of commanding presence have real talent, the unrestrained freedom that comes from growing up in a free environment is something we Chinese cannot do.

I once walked with an elderly American woman on the campus of New York University. New York University does not have its own campus in the strict sense. Its colleges are scattered all over New York City. Washington Square, located near Soho and Greenwich Village, is the heart of the university. The 50 or so buildings surrounding the square are the University’s academic buildings and various facilities in Downtown. It doesn’t look any different from an ordinary street community in Downtown. This old lady has nothing to do with NYU, but she walks around the area all the time. She was much more familiar with NYU than I was. The old lady was in a hurry, so she said she was going to the neighboring law school to use the bathroom. Because I had never been to the law school, I unconsciously showed my student ID to the door guard when I entered. The door guard just nodded his head. The old lady said, “You don’t need to show your student ID. No one cares if you’re a student here. Afterwards, she had a few words of wisdom. She said she had noticed that students from China, the former Soviet Union and some Eastern European countries had this fear of guards and this eagerness to identify themselves to some kind of authority.

This sentiment gave me pause for thought. Did my cowardice come from the larger context of Chinese Culture, or from my own family background. I think it was both. However, the innate superiority that some cadres’ sons and daughters feel will not change in the United States, even though no one eats it anymore. They were not born and raised in China.

When I graduated in 2001, the School of Social Work at New York University, where I was studying, hosted a cruise along the Hudson River to see Manhattan at night. I invited a friend I had known since I was a student in Beijing to go with me. When the boat left the pier on 42nd Street in Manhattan, one of the student representatives told everyone to be quiet and then just said “We did it. Naturally, I know how hard I’ve been studying these past few years. And I also know that even though there is no language barrier, most of my classmates are studying for this master’s degree while working. Everyone knows how challenging this field is and how hard the work is. Many students have families and children to take care of. Some even live in New York, New Jersey or Connecticut, a five or six hour round trip by bus to attend a class. Many students cried tears of joy and shouted their hearts out. For the first time in my life, I seemed to want to shout like them, but I found that I couldn’t make a sound even though I was shouting. The years of habit choked my throat.

The friend who went with me is a quiet girl. The DJ’s provocative tone and the wild dancing of the colorfully dressed students seemed to have nothing to do with us.

I was reminded that a supervisor at my workplace used to want to invite everyone to a small bar on Fridays. I don’t know if she thought it was a good way to relax after a stressful day at work, or if it was her way of bonding with everyone as a leader. I went there a few times with my head in the clouds. In the high-decibel strong rhythm of the Music, people talk to the people next to them have to shout at the top of their lungs. The bar was crowded and smoky (no longer the case now that smoking is banned in all New York bars and restaurants), and many people couldn’t find a seat, so they stood and talked, smoked, and drank. My colleagues were mostly women. They talked about their favorite baseball teams, the new Hollywood movies, planned vacations, and even a few ambiguous jokes. I didn’t understand all the slang jokes. Once again, I felt like an alien. We were sitting very close together, but our hearts were far apart. I could feel the loneliness and isolation in the midst of the noise, just like on this cruise.

The boat started to turn back when it approached the Statue of Liberty. The boat cuts through the lights of Manhattan reflected in the Hudson River. I remembered that New Yorkers who have a view of Manhattan from their offices or homes call that view a million view, meaning it is worth a million dollars. What a typical capitalist value. Although I think it is a bit ridiculous, but also envious of the New Yorkers feel good about themselves forever. Compared to the Seine River in Paris at night, the Hudson River in Manhattan is not enough? Of course, I dare not say this to Americans. Americans especially can not listen to say what is better in France than the United States.

The friend who went with me is a few years younger than me, but also experienced a lot. We were reminded of our childhoods, what happened to our parents, and what their experiences brought to us. Born in that land, growing up in those days, we all had similar stories and fates. And we are far from being the ones who suffered the most tragedy. Fortunately, the boatload of revelers, regardless of ethnicity, color, gender and age, were enjoying their fun, and no one would notice us two aliens: talking quietly and wiping away tears secretly. When other boats on the river crossed our path, people shouted excitedly, as if greeting from across the boat. It seemed they were also looking for joyful kindred spirits. I envied them from the bottom of my heart, so unrestrained, so free to put away. I knew that I would never be able to reach their level of happiness in my lifetime. In New York at the end of May, the evening breeze was brisk and the night was cool as water. I desperately wrapped my trench coat tightly, regretting that I did not wear more cold clothes. I think from now on, I can openly accept the role of an alien that I can’t change even if I go to the end of the world. And I won’t try to change it anymore.