Several recent, retrospective pieces describe how various individuals have attempted to navigate the CCP’s repressive policies over time, and how that has impacted their family relationships. For many of them, their journeys have involved travel overseas and an intimate understanding of how political environments shape successive generations. While they interpret their responsibilities differently, they all testify to the bleak state of current affairs in China. As one netizen recently commented under Dr. Li Wenliang’s online Wailing Wall: “Dr. Li, no one is even trying to ‘represent a generation’ anymore. Instead, they’re turning their backs and packing their bags, getting ready to run, or just planning to lie low and wait things out.”
In an essay for ChinaFile, An’an, the pen name of a Chinese student at an American university, reflected on her relationship with her mother and their relationship to politics under the CCP. She struggled with the competing attractions of either pursuing a future of activism in the U.S. away from the love of her mother, or remaining in China with her mother while stifling her political passions. Unraveling her family’s past, An’an recognized how her mother’s complex and often contradictory attitudes towards these relationships is the product of cycles of generational political violence that burden daughters with impossible sacrifices:
Over and over, whenever we read a book or watched a movie about family or the Cultural Revolution, she would bring up this story [about how her own mother was forced to lead a struggle session against the latter’s father]. The Cultural Revolution was not a secret or taboo in our household, but rather, a lesson—that politics is a realm fraught with darkness, dirtiness, and fervor, that any individual when standing before the mighty state is powerless and fragile, that politics ruined anyone and their family who dared to taste it—so never, ever, get involved with politics.
[…] What happened, Mama? In 1989, were you just like me, did you also try to reconcile with yourself, with your mother, through a passion for politics that pointed at the Party, the cause of your years of misery? Were you too broken to act, to dream of freedom? Was I cruel for depriving you of a peaceful reality?
[…] I know I’ll be forever nostalgic for that week of protests [the White Paper Movement of 2022]. The hope and fever I once experienced and saw. Yet before I realized it, that week of protests slipped away from me as if it had never happened. What would I not give to go back to that week? I pondered. Perhaps, when I return to the U.S., I’ll find myself thinking, what would I not give to go back to this year with my mother.
[…] I want to believe that I’ve always loved my mother, but I know love is only possible when I think of myself as the daughter of my mother, the granddaughter of my grandmother, the product of modern Chinese history, and absolve her of her agency in being both the most caring and the most intimidating figure in my life. Sometimes I wonder if politics is the root of our brokenness or just an excuse, but if I must direct my hatred, my anger to something, I’d rather it be to the Party that has undoubtedly ruined the lives of many. Maybe the pain that binds us more tightly together is the result of politics, but maybe I’m just trying to pin significance to something that would otherwise be meaningless. [Source]
At The Wall Street Journal this week, Shen Lu profiled a former “little pink” who started questioning her patriotic education while studying overseas. Her journey from loyal nationalist to CCP critic was marked by pivotal moments that overturned what were once her basic beliefs. She, too, described the growing pains of this gradual transformation and the toll it has taken on her family relationships:
[Alex] Zhu describes herself as a little pink when she arrived in Europe with an undergraduate degree from a Chinese university and immense pride in her home country. She grew up during China’s economic boom and a wave of patriotic education in schools to prevent a repeat of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
[…] The arguments [over the veracity of stories about concentration camps in Xinjiang] continued after Zhu moved back to China with her boyfriend in tow. In 2019, when they were living in Shanghai, the relationship came close to collapse over the pro-democracy protests taking place in Hong Kong.
[…] The process of Zhu’s throwing out everything she learned growing up in China has been draining and painful, with each fact-check a shock to her belief system. “It was a process of breaking yourself,” she said. “Because you had to admit that you had been dumb all these years and you’d never questioned what you were told.”
[…] In the wake of what Zhu sees as her political awakening, a divide has grown between her and her mother. The two now have the kind of arguments Zhu once had with her boyfriend. Zhu feels she has to counter her mother’s growing hostility toward Japan and the U.S., countries Beijing portrays as bullies.
But she picks her battles carefully, remembering her own nationalist fervor not that long ago. “Look, I was there myself,” she said. [Source]
Similar dynamics have played out among Hongkongers as the city they once knew was dismantled by the National Security Law. Writing in The Guardian on Tuesday, Alan Lau described how growing up he had always dreamed of becoming a police officer like his uncle, at the time “a hero in my eyes.” But after Lau joined the mass protests during the 2019 pro-democracy movement, a rift grew between him and his uncle, who “seemed unable to comprehend why anyone would protest without being paid to do so.” A series of new terror laws have now forced Lau’s friends and family into silence. At the BBC, Tessa Wong, Grace Tsoi, Vicky Wong, and Joy Chang highlighted the complicated feelings of other Hongkongers about how the city has evolved over time and their attempts to process the change:
As a child, Kenneth would buy calligraphy posters from pro-democracy politicians at the annual Lunar New Year fair.
[…] Those vigils [for the Tiananmen massacre] have ended now. The politicians’ stalls at the fair are gone, protests have been silenced and pro-democracy campaigners jailed. Kenneth feels his political coming-of-age – and Hong Kong’s – is being erased.
[…] With friends leaving the city in droves in the last few years, he has lost count of the number of farewell parties he’s attended. Still, he insists on staying: “This is where my roots are.”
What irritates him is the rhetoric from those who leave, that the Hong Kong they knew has died. “Hong Kong continues to exist. Its people are still here! So how can they say that Hong Kong is dead?"
[…] These days Kenneth goes out less frequently. “The contrast is so drastic now. I don’t want to remember what happened in the past.”
Still, as he walked out of the park and headed to the Admiralty district, more memories unspooled.
[…] “I don’t believe we will forget what happened,” he said. “Forgetting the past is a form of betrayal.” [Source]
