In Newsweek, Beijing bureau chief Melinda Liu has a long essay about the changes in modern China as viewed through the lens of her family and her work as a reporter. It covers everything from the separation of a brother due to Communism’s rise to the return of first- and second-generation Chinese-Americans who want to be a part of the boom. It begins:
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. [Full text]
