This Is Not My Father’s China
The country I returned to was nothing like the place that had formed my tough, resourceful parents
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…
