From the current issue of Newsweek: Melinda Liu on her 30-year journey in China:
My eldest brother was 7 years old when the Communists seized power in China. Our parents, who named him Guangyuan—"Distant Light"—had entrusted him to relatives in Suzhou
while they visited America in the 1940s. Papa and Mama expected to be
gone only long enough to complete their university degrees, and they
didn't want to uproot him. Perhaps they also didn't fully appreciate
what was happening to their homeland. Then Mao Zedong marched into Beijing in October 1949, and the world changed. Returning to China became too dangerous.
Guangyuan
grew up in the care of our mother's parents in Suzhou, a city
celebrated for its elegant gardens where emperors, courtesans and poets
once dallied. I was born and raised in the American Midwest, along with
two more brothers, and I dreamed of one day meeting the sibling the
communists had stolen from our family.
My chance
finally came on Jan. 1, 1979, the day Washington and Beijing restored
full diplomatic relations after 30 years of hostility. No one could be
sure the honeymoon would last, so I wasted no time in getting a visa.
On the evening of Feb. 20, I lugged a heavy suitcase (filled with gifts
for long-lost relatives) aboard Train 119, heading south from Beijing.
Through the gloom and swirling cigarette smoke of a no-frills "hard
sleeper" carriage, other passengers peered at me in wonderment. Many of
them had never seen an American before. They carried their belongings
in cheap travel bags and squares of worn, patched fabric. Some had only
old-fashioned cloth slippers to protect their feet from the icy
weather. A People's Liberation Army
soldier lay snoring in a nearby berth, bundled up in a military
greatcoat. It's funny, the things that stick with you; I remember he
had sacked out without removing his mud-encrusted combat boots. "Maybe
he just got back from Vietnam," someone joked. A border war had broken
out less than a week earlier, and thousands of casualties were reported
on both sides—tens of thousands would die before it was over—but no one
in the carriage seemed to care. Everyone clamored to hear about life in
America.
The
train took more than 21 hours to cover the 700 miles from Beijing to
Suzhou. My brother, then 37, lived on Jade Phoenix Lane with his wife,
two daughters and mother-in-law. The 5-year-old began running in
circles as soon as she saw me, whooping that Auntie was "a foreigner."
Their home was a single rectangular room, divided by a massive wardrobe
into two areas, each 12 feet square, and their toilet was a chamber
pot. But Guangyuan, a bookish, soft-spoken optimist who worked the
graveyard shift at a silk factory for the equivalent of $26 a month,
considered himself lucky: his home had a wooden floor, a ceiling
overhead and a small courtyard where he could keep a few chickens. His
big regret was his loss of the family library during the
anti-intellectual rampages of the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution.
Now
Mao was dead, and the strongman reformist Deng Xiaoping had unleashed
forces of a different sort. The previous summer, party bosses had
invited foreign reporters to a groundbreaking ceremony just across the
border from Hong Kong, where I was working as a reporter. Shenzhen
had been a tiny fishing village, home to only 17 original families. But
Deng chose it to be his laboratory for a vast experiment: Shenzhen
would become a quasi-capitalist, export-oriented "Special Economic
Zone." Western journalists with me that day looked askance at the patch
of mud that was supposed to be China's future. Many thought the idea
was a joke. Thirty years later Shenzhen is a metropolis of 12 million
people, and still growing fast. The huts have been replaced by rank
upon rank of office blocks like the 69-story Shun Hing Plaza, currently
the world's seventh tallest building at 1,260 feet. Townspeople say
another high-rise is coming soon that will top it by more than 50 feet.
Now
try to imagine such explosive transformations happening all across a
country of 1.3 billion people. The China that will appear on the
world's TV screens in 2008 may (as the Chinese never tire of telling
you) be centuries old, but it's been made anew in just the last three
decades. Thirty years ago China was an immense ruin of enforced
ignorance and abject poverty, the psychic rubble that remained after
Mao's misconceived attempts to reshape Chinese society. The distance
from there to the present is even greater than it seems, since the
trajectory has been anything but straight. That journey is usually
described in hard figures: dollars and cents, millions of people, tons
of concrete. But the changes are even more startling when you look at
them in human terms.
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