My Family's History in Context of Chinese History

I think I am overdue to write up a little bit about what I learned while I was in China, about its recent history (and how it all ties with my family's history). Over the years my mother has passed down little bits and pieces of things to me, but during my most recent trip to Beijing, our fabulous tour guide put all the pieces together for me in a way that makes much sense.

China has had thousands of years of turbulent history. One of the causes of instability, but also of the richness of our culture, is that within the traditional borders of the country, there are numerous ethnicities. The most populous of these groups is the Han Chinese, which basically consists of people who look like me. This is over 90% of the country's population, but the country has historically been very diverse -- during our trip to the Great Wall, we passed by a Chinese group (wearing Chinese school clothes) whose students are fair-haired and light-skinned, and whose eyes are green or gray or light brown, with features that could have passed for Western. They were looking at our kids curiously because they had never seen real-life Westerners, but I was looking at them curiously because I had only heard about Chinese people who look like them, but never seen one in real life. In any case, little wonder is it that over the years the different people developed very different dialects and cultural beliefs.

Every few hundred years, there would be a new dynasty in China because one of the ethnicities would rise up against the emperor. When the new dynasties came in, the emperors were usually strong and had firm control of the country, but over the next generations, their heirs would be sloppy rulers and have much weaker control of faraway farmers, eventually overthrown by a new dynasty.

The last dynasty to be ruled by an emperor was the Qing Dynasty. In the 1800s, the Qing Dynasty was prosperous and exported many goods (such as silk, porcelain, and tea) to England. England was trying desperately to find something to balance out the trade, but China was self-sufficient, so England found opium as a viable export. This got everyone in China addicted, including the emperor. At some point there were well over 1000 tons of opium being exported to China per year. When the Chinese authorities began to seize and crack down on the trade, the British soldiers invaded, marking the beginning of the Opium Wars. In the 1840s, following the first Opium War, the Chinese government ceded Hong Kong to England, and Shanghai became jointly ruled by foreign forces and Chinese authority.

For various reasons, the Qing dynasty became weaker and weaker. When it was finally driven out by the Nationalist Party led by Sun Yat-Sen, the people were very grateful for the revolution. After Sun's death, however, the government again was weakened by his successors. When Japan invaded during WWII, the ruling Chinese government was so preoccupied by worries about the rise of the Communist party that they kept retreating instead of fighting the Japanese. My grandparents retreated (on foot, naturally) as the Japanese forces advanced, and every town they passed by they saw arms and legs in the trees after the bombing from the Japanese. The Nationalist government was so weak that they retreated all the way to Taiwan, where they still rule as the majority party. That was when my grandparents (on both sides) fled to Taiwan. For years, my maternal grandpa despised the Japanese and never bought anything made in Japan. My paternal grandpa worked on the force of the Taiwanese secret police that took people away who were heard speaking against the government. My paternal grandpa had a lonely end to his life, and my mother always said that it could be karma. (Compare this with my maternal grandpa, whose birthday is still annually celebrated in the family about 7 years after his passing.)

Eventually, the Japanese had to retreat as a consequence of Hiroshima. China fell to the rule of the Communists, led by Mao Zedong, who came into popularity because he was a viable alternative to the weak Nationalist government. Under his rule, kids were forced to "struggle" against their parents, which means that the parents were put on public display daily and their children needed to repeat everything their parents had said against the Communist government, following which their parents were publicly punished. Some parents were stoned to death this way. My cousins were forced to do this to their parents, and each night they went home, knelt at the feet of their parents, and cried for forgiveness. The "struggles" severed the ties between two generations and put an end to precious traditional values. My mom says that the reason why Chinese people throw trash everywhere now and have a poor sense of public manners is related to this. During a time when the kids ought to have been learning manners from their parents, they were taught to struggle against their parents. The Communist Party did this in order to ensure that no one could feel safe to speak out against the government, even in the privacy of their own homes. During the early rule of the party there was also rampant poverty. Each family was issued food stamps; even if you had money, you were not allowed to buy extra food, because extra food was simply not available.

As far as current situation in China, I think that Communism has led China to amazing improvements over the years, in a way that is not probable in a free society. I also think that the West can't possibly begin to understand situations in Tibet and Taiwan, without knowing the history that has led up to the way things are now. Yes, the Communist government has flaws, but it is hard to say what the country would have been like without the system that is in place now. 

That's what I understand. I tried to verify most of it via the web, but some of it is passed down via word of mouth through my family. At some point, I hope to be able to pass down what I know to my children, so that they can understand the recent history of China in how it has affected our family. I hope to also remember to tell them that my great-grandma (who was alive when I was a kid; my family has good genes to live until at least our 80s) still had bound feet, and that my paternal grandmother never learned to read because she was raised in an age when education for women was not valued nor common. History is as recent as you will let it be!

Hamburg!

We are in the middle of a 4-day weekend (Tuesday, May 1, is Labour Day in Germany, so we have a bridge holiday on Monday as well), so Geoff and I decided to take a weekend trip away. Originally we were planning to go to Rotenburg Ob Der Tauber, which is a walled medieval city in Bavaria, but because of some last-minute logistical issues, we changed our plan and took the train instead to Hamburg for two days.

The city of Hamburg is elegant and lovely; if you go, I highly recommend taking a free daily walking tour that starts at 11am in front of the Starbucks in the Rathausmarkt. (Since this tour is publicized by Starbucks, you can get flyers from any Starbucks in the city, that includes a city walking map.) The tour runs on tips only, but the tour guide we had was fabulous and weaved together all of the architecture of Hamburg with fascinating historical details for about 2-3 hours.

In Hamburg there is the former headquarters of the factory that produced Zyklon B, which was used by the Nazis to kill millions of Jews during WWII. The tour stops here for a bit as the tour guide points out the fact that the German government had to win a lawsuit against the current building owners in order to put up a plaque at its entrance to help people remember the crimes that took place.

Also, there is the St. Nikolai Church ruins that are a testimony to the 8 days of 24-hour nonstop bombing campaign that the Allies bought upon the city in 1943. The raids were ominously named Operation Gemorrah, which in itself is a name to make me shudder. At least 40,000 people died in the air raids on Hamburg, and the fire storms in the city grew to be three times the height of the St. Nikolai Church, displacing over a million Hamburg residents. Today, the scorched church ruins are left as a memorial to the damages done by war. (It's hard to gather unbiased information about this, but I think that Germans consider the raids an act of war crime from the Allies.)

The St. Michael's Church in Hamburg is also where Johann Bezenberg made his experiment to help prove that the earth rotates about its axis, using the observation that the object dropped from the top of the church does not land directly underneath but lands slightly "ahead" of the rotation.

Besides that, there is a very lively and touristy red light district to check out in Hamburg (prostitution is legal in Germany), where the Beatles had frequented/performed during the time that they had lived in Hamburg. There is also a Miniatur Wunderland, which boasts to have the largest model trains in the world, which Geoff loved. (I am not very interested in model train cars, as it turns out. The place was far too crowded for my liking; I did like their airport models, however, with planes taking off and landing on schedule, and I liked that they altered the amount of daylight periodically to show dusk, dawn, morning, and evening views of the various models.)

The city itself is surrounded by canals and waterways, and it is lovely to walk around, especially in this fresh spring temperature. We didn't eventually have time to do this, but there is also a water ferry #62 that is covered by your all-day metro tickets that you could ride around the city. I plan to return at some point to Hamburg to see their famous Sunday fish market, to try their famous local Hamburg fish dishes, and obviously to ride the ferries! So, till next time, Hamburg! :)

PS. We noticed that Hamburg -- or at least the parts where we were -- had few people drinking on the streets as compared with Berlin, even though technically it is still legal to drink in open air. Our tour guide told us that the city has been making a concerted effort to drive what it perceives as "bad" behavior out to the fringes of the city, by playing classical music on the intercoms near the financial center of the city. Hilarious. We did hear classical music being played everywhere from the intercom speakers; it is amusing that it is viewed as a deterrent for drinkers to linger around. Of course, our tour guide also thinks Berlin is "bombastic!" :) :)

PPS. Much to my disappointment, hamburgers (the delicious things they sell at In and Out) didn't come from Hamburg!

A History of Poverty

To help understand why things are the way they are down here, I think we need to talk briefly about the recent history of El Salvador. Some of this information I gathered from various readings on the internet; others came from word-of-mouth (ie. from talking to my principal, who has lived here for 3+ years).

In El Salvador, for many generations the country had no middle class. There were the land-owning elite, namely "the 14 families", who literally divided the entire country into 14 gigantic jigsaw pieces (after driving out the native Indians), and those who were landless and impoverished. To give an idea of how far-reaching the wealth is of those elite families, my principal pointed to the giant volcano that backdrops the city of San Salvador, and said that two-thirds of that mountain is still owned by a single board member of our school today! All of that land teems with coffee plantations, and one can only imagine how much money is associated with that volume of production.

As with any sort of wealth disparity comes social unrest. The country divided itself over time into two parties -- the same two parties that still exist today -- the Republican party, or ARENA, and the Socialist party, or FMLN. Locals simply refer to the latter as Frente, which literally means "Front" and refers to the idea that the FMLN came about as a coalition of smaller populist parties. Over time, both parties began to use violence -- torture, rape, and killings -- to further their cause, and by the late 1970s, the situation had boiled over to a full-blown Civil War.

Because the landless Salvadoreans were sympathizers of Fidel Castro and because this period in Salvadorean history corresponded in timeline to the U.S. fear of the spread of Communism, the U.S. administrations from Carter to Bush Sr. gave a total of 7 billion dollars in aid to El Salvador in support of the ruling elite. Sadly, since this choosing of sides was political in nature, whether it was justified remains questionable. An excerpt from Amnesty International's 1985 annual report states, "Many of the 40,000 people killed in the preceding five years had been murdered, by government forces, who openly dumped mutilated corpses, in an apparent effort, to terrorize the population." --This is not to gloss over the violence brought on by the opposing guerrillas, but simply to state that both sides were definitely violent to an extreme in this internal conflict.

In any case, in 1992 a peace accord was signed, partly because the guerrillas were running out of steam. For a period of 5 years that followed, parts of the land were re-distributed slowly to eligible soldiers on both sides under the supervision of the United Nations, and the guerrillas re-established themselves as a legitimate political party.

In June, the first ever Frente president took over in a legitimate election. It had been expected to be a landslide victory, ever since he had emerged as a popular, moderate, and charismatic candidate. But, the 6 months before the election saw a lot of rumors spreading fear that he was a Communist and was going to drive away all the business owners in the country. In the end, he won by a margin less than 3%. The jury is still out, since he is so new, but we can only hope for the best.

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Some worrisome news from a Salvadorean blog I read:

The online periodical Contra Punto reports the latest homicide statistics for the first 7 months of 2009 and they are troubling. Murders are up 37% in El Salvador for the first seven months of 2009 compared with the same period in 2008. So far in 2009, there have been 2428 violent deaths, compared to 1767 in 2008. These statistics come from the Attorney General's office who asserts that the majority of these murders are gang-related.

Speaking of gangs, supposedly the rampant gang activity down here is, again, closely tied to the history of poverty in this country -- and maybe surprisingly, also related to the Salvadorean immigration to/deportation from the States.

In any case, Geoff's and my neighborhood is relatively safe. Like most of our neighbors, we have 24-hour security guards who hold machine guns behind closed gates -- not that they actually would use the guns in a time of need, but as far as appearances go, I think they give off some sort of a protective vibe, anyway. And for now, Geoff and I have given up on walking home at night, just to be on the safe side. Cab rides are only a few dollars to get to anywhere in the city, so it's really not worth it to walk even 15 minutes in the dark...