The Year of My Returning Home: Tell You the True China

By Joe Joy

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456880606

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Copyright © 2011 by Joe Joy.

ISBN:          Softcover                        978-1-4568-8059-0

                   Ebook                            978-1-4568-8060-6

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This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Chapter One

Back To Beijing

Chapter Two

At Home

Chapter Three

Thanks For The Authorities’ Concern

Chapter Four

Work That I Wanted

Chapter Five

Gala Celebration Of The Spring Festival

Chapter Six

Go To My Birthplace

Chapter Seven

I Wanted To Do Research

Chapter Eight

I Pay A Formal Visit To My

Ancestor’s Mausoleum

Postscript

CHAPTER ONE

BACK TO BEIJING

In the early winter of 1990, I stepped on the Chinese airliner and ended my advanced study in the USA. The plane took off from the San Francisco airport right in time. There were almost all Chinese in the passenger compartment. The flight attendants talked to the passengers in Chinese, and a kind of Chinese atmosphere surrounded me. I felt that I seemed to be in China at that moment.

However, my thinking still stuck on the USA. I looked all around and saw no one I knew in the adjacent seats. The bargain seat I took was near the door of the compartment and I didn’t have a good view. Perhaps it was just the proper time for me to review my American life.

I arrived in the United States on April 15th of 1989, which was the same day that a Chinese central leader, Hu, died. Following his passing, a surging student tide broke out. Each scholar and student abroad was vibrated by the one of the greatest incidents in modern Chinese history. Almost every political wave in China would meet with an intensive echo overseas. The hearts of students and scholars abroad were always tightly tied to the soil to which they were rooted, and they felt they shared the same fate and breathed in the same rhythm as the people of their homeland. Each student and scholar abroad seemed to be a member of the demonstrating students in Tiananmen Square. We were very angry, aroused by Premier Li’s not meeting with fasting students, and we were enraged and in despair when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army opened fire on the innocent students and Beijing civilians. While I watched the television pictures showing the bloodshed on the evening news of June 4th, I could not help crying almost involuntarily, knowing that many others abroad were also choked with tears that night. I had a kind of faint feeling that I might not return to the yellow land…

What kind of drink would you like? a flight attendant stood by my seat, bringing me back to the present. I was probably the last passenger she served.

After her soft question, she took the vacant seat opposite me and looked at me. Nearly all the passengers in the compartment were various delegation members from China. They dressed in well-ironed suits. Compared to them, I looked shabby. I was dressed in a faded, loose suit purchased at a garage sale for one dollar. The discolored jeans I was wearing were purchased in a Goodwill store and seemed to be a little short. And then there was my pair of very old and unpolished shoes. The flight attendant was obviously curious about me.

I beg your pardon. Did you go to the USA on business? she asked me in her soft voice.

I told her that I had actually been taking an advanced study in the US. She showed her perplexity.

Why do you come back?

I was unwilling to explain my reasons concretely.

Homesick, I simply replied.

Soon she began to chat with a young guy next to me. I understood the reason she struck up a conversation with me. She and the young guy talked very congenially. After several minutes, the girl left her seat and returned in just a little while. She passed two cans of Coca-cola to the young guy. I was very familiar with these kinds of things in China. I could see that trying to establish a relationship with someone and getting in by the back door was still in fashion in modern China. I felt disgust.

Yes, I would return to the surroundings of giving dinners or sending gifts. I began to regret my returning. The feeling had been in my thoughts even up until the moment of stepping on the airliner, where two close American friends saw me off at the airport. But I knew my wife was raising her head and looking forward to my arrival at the Beijing airport, and my children were anxiously waiting their returning father at home. I could not hesitate and must go back!

In 1942, I was born in a poverty-stricken, poorly located village. My ancestors had all been poor farmers. My father took care of my six sisters and me by raising silkworms. I was the youngest, a clever boy who wished to be somebody in the future. While I was in my junior school, just 15 years old, I had unfortunately been drawn into the political whirlpool of China’s anti-rightist. Because my so-called sympathy towards rightists, I was deprived of a right: my high school education! Relying on my own efforts, working hard to teach myself, and because of the loosening political climate of 1962, I passed the national exam and was admitted into a medical college. I studied hard as a medical student, dreaming of becoming a famous doctor in the future. Once more political changes made my beautiful dream vanish like a soap bubble. This time it was the cruel Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution(GPCR). Following this political windstorm, I was forced to go into the remote countryside and spend my precious youth in a small clinic which had only a few rooms and no modern medical equipment. I was there for nearly twelve years. After the Gang of Four left China’s political stage, the postgraduate educational system was resumed, and I passed another national exam and became a post-graduate. After I graduated, I had a chance to teach at a famous college. Also, because of constant effort, I saw an opportunity to go to the USA for advanced study. This was the peak of my life. For a common Chinese, I should have been satisfied after this, though I had walked a bumpy road to achieve this. Now, I should be happy to return to my homeland. I wouldn’t be like the old woman in the Story of the Fisherman and the Golden Fish: always unsatisfied.

Sitting on the plane, I wondered whether the China I returned to was still the same as the China I had left. Having experienced the Tiananmen turmoil, what was China like now? I began to be eager to see my homeland. Not only did I miss my wife and children, but also I found I missed my motherland, too.

The airliner landed at Japan’s Cheng-Tian airport first and stayed there for a long time because of some mechanical difficulty. It was several hours before the plane took off again. At last it landed at the Hong-Qiao airport of Shanghai at about eleven o’clock in the evening. I was in China! The passengers were allowed to get off and take a rest in the airport lounge. I sat in a soft chair in the lounge and felt a little relaxed. Now, however, the tiresome trip and an obscure drowsiness brought me back to uncertainty about my real return. Just at this moment I heard an English whisper between two foreign passengers next to my seat. They seemed to be complaining about something. I tried to listen to their conversation carefully, and I understood that they were complaining about the lack of toilet paper in the rest room. I knew then that I was in the embrace of my motherland. Even the report on a broadcast concerning an aborted hijack incident at China’s airport seemed to verify my final judgment: I am in my motherland now.

After a short stay in Shanghai, the airliner took off for her final destination: Beijing. It was two o’clock in the morning when the airliner landed.

I hurried to cross the airport lounge with a small bag in hand. My wife had caught sight of me from a long distance and shouted. When our lines of vision met, I found that my wife’s expression was not only happiness that she was meeting her husband again, but also a look of puzzlement. Under the bright lights, I caught sight of her bloodless face. She was dressed in a tight yellow suit, which made her figure thin and pitiful. My heart trembled a little bit, and I knew this was really my wife that I had yearned for while abroad. I saw my wife pushing against the crowd, coming to me for a good look. I told her that we didn’t need to hurry, and I needed to get my baggage first. Then we would walk out from the green passage.

A little while later, my two ugly parcels appeared on the transmission strap. The other people’s luggage was very good-looking and most of them were reinforced with wide elastic straps, forming a cross on the bags’ faces. My luggage consisted of two very poor bags with irregular shapes. One of these bags had even been picked up in front of a house on 17th avenue in San Francisco, apparently a discard (though I didn’t tell my American friends the bag’s history). I had originally had three bags, but I had heard that passengers were only permitted to take two bags so I had to take the third bag’s contents out and evened the junk into the other two bags. I had been worried that my American friends might feel uneasy about my shabby belongings while we took out the worthless junk from the third bag and stuffed it into the other two bags under many travelers’ looks. However, my two friends were noble-minded and well-educated Americans, I didn’t find any unusual expression on their faces.

Walking out of the green passage and having all my customs papers processed, I entered into the rest lounge, accompanied by my wife. Because I had landed so early in the morning, there were not any passengers there except a few policemen on duty. The Beijing airport was far away from the urban district, so we decided to stay in the lounge until dawn with a policeman’s permission. My wife and I sat in a corner and she leaned close to me, affectionately. We chatted endlessly until, unknowingly, the dawn light had risen in the east.

Soon, the public buses were doing business, and my wife and I got on one going to the urban district. I took a window seat and though the glass was very dirty, I could still discern all of the aged city of Beijing. The narrow roads, slow-moving vehicles and crowded bicycle flow were just as before. After getting off the bus, we went through the downtown hubbub, intending to find a hotel for a temporary stay. We had to take care of some matters in Beijing before going home.

I hadn’t had a formal meal since stepping