Coming home

The Zhang Yimou-Gongli tandem that combined talents as director and actress in films like Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern, joined forces again in a film titled Coming Home. The movie is set during China’s Cultural Revolution, an era in Chinese history that still invites polarity in the political divide.

The story of Coming Home is adapted from a novel, The Criminal Lu Yanshi. Lu Yanshi was a professor sent to a labor camp, escaped, and tried to rendezvous with his wife. Their daughter was a budding dancer who cannot play the leading ballerina role due to her father’s “outlaw” status, so she betrays the details of her parents’ plan, leading to her father’s capture and she getting the dancing role.

Released after the Cultural Revolution, the father finds the daughter as a mere textile factory worker, and the wife developed amnesia as a consequence of the sexual harassment she suffered from an officer’s misuse and abuse of power. Unhappily, the wife mistakes and identifies her returned husband as the officer. The husband continues to write his wife to forgive their daughter’s betrayal and to expect her husband’s return. The movie ends with the wife waiting outside the train station while the husband faithfully stands by her side as the taxi driver.

I am not suggesting that my coming home to Dong Bei is tragic. However, I must say that it is difficult to remove certain bitter aftertastes of my U.S.-Canada experience of the last 50 years. A recollection of two is enough.

My primal wife and I, while still courting in Chicago in ‘67, were walking by Madison Ave. on her way to the train that will take her to a suburban home when a wino grabbed me by the cuff, pulled me against a wall, and asked: “What are you doing with a white girl, boy?” The law has change much; the sentiment has not!

Not too long ago, a colleague in Edmonton came to Calgary for a job interview. The appointment was made on her married Caucasian name, but when the interviewer saw her, he declared that his secretary made a double appointment and he was sorry he could not see her. He abruptly left his office while she was left holding her application form, stunned by what she felt was a blatant racial prejudice in the encounter. Asians staff menial jobs while the white collars stay white!

The prejudice against Confucian teachers was clear during the Cultural Revolution, for like the illuminati of Bavaria and the illustrado of España, the learned Confucian master tended to be aloof and powerful in ze control of the learned elite. They held the coveted gates of party leadership. Mao in the Cultural Revolution wanted to return to the raw energy of workers and farmhands rather than the disciplined rationality of the motivated petite bourgeoisie and confident national capitalists among the four groups identified in China’s revolution. A decisive move placed CPC intellectuals closer to the proletarian People’s Liberation Army.

I saw as a university teacher how this structural haughtiness of teachers and school administrators in China was displayed in our school dining room where the first three floors were for students, tiered according to the price of servings with the first floor being the cheapest; and then the fourth floor exclusively for teachers and administrators with the price of lunch heavily subsidized by the school, and the floor equipped with an elevator exclusively for their use.

I come home to China without much illusion. I am no Sinophile but I affirm without being patronizing the clear trends that I live with. Here are some:

1. As the percentage of high school graduates attending college increases (10 years ago, it was at 25 percent; in 2010, 62 percent), the China market is saturated with degreed personal that cannot find the desired white-collar jobs. Parents are dismayed that their child can only get factory-line work, while children who spent a fortune for their education stay as far away as possible so they can be in denial, maintain a proper “face” for themselves and their family, while doing piddly labor elsewhere.

2. A majority in China cuddles Western consumerism and the domestic market is measured by expenditure on non-essential consumer products, on youth cosmetics and well-publicized but overpriced pharmaceuticals for weight loss.

3. Many Chinese see the grass as always greener on the other side, so they deeply and extensively borrow funds for the chance to permanently live in another country, a major source of heartaches for those who fall prey to unscrupulous recruiters on false promises. (There were plenty of these in the Saipan textile industry.)

4. Ostentatious lifestyle maintains social standing. Prodigious spending is not unheard of in the Chinatowns around the world, and many Chinese leaving the country strive to join their tribe.

My challenge remains to be human in globalis. A new Zhongguoren (Chinese) can choose to be culturally centered, balanced, and ever harmonious in a new planet strained by humanity’s folly to self-destruct in the trappings of fame and fortune that overcomes ze sense of selfhood.

China in a new earth is where I make home.