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This Is Not My Father’s China

The country I returned to was nothing like the place that had formed my tough, resourceful parents

Lucy Tan
ZORA
7 min readJul 10, 2018

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Credit: Yongyuan Dai/The Image Bank/Getty

My first trip to China had been billed as a family homecoming — a way for my parents to reunite with their mother country and for me to see it for the first time. I was seven years old, and the only country I’d ever known was America, and when I stepped off the plane on the other side of the world, everything seemed louder and more chaotic. Cars wove in and out of traffic, stirring up dust in the streets. I met relatives and in-laws whose relation to me I quickly forgot. We stayed in their homes, where I was quietly horrified by the lack of clean water and vocally horrified by the squat toilets and showers that drained into the middle of the bathroom floor. I ate almost nothing but suffered from fever and diarrhea in a weeklong bout of illness. Shui tu bu fu, my mother called it, a short way of saying that a certain place didn’t get along with your digestive system.

My parents grew up during the Cultural Revolution, when food was rationed and saying the wrong thing could get a person sent away, never to be heard from again. They slept in clay huts where rats fought in the rafters; it was common to be woken from sleep by a rodent landing on your chest. Most immigrant children have heard some version of…

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ZORA
ZORA

Published in ZORA

A publication from Medium that centers the stories, poetry, essays and thoughts of women of color.

Lucy Tan
Lucy Tan

Written by Lucy Tan

Author of the debut novel, WHAT WE WERE PROMISED, in stores 7/10/18. Find her at lucyrtan.com

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