Three Part Series: My Mother
October 27, 2008 | Filed under Asian-ness, Family & Friends
Part two of a three part series. Read part one here.
My mother was born the eldest of three children at the height of the Cultural Revolution in a small village in the middle of nowhere. Situated somewhere between the cities of Ningbo (an industrial city) and Shanghai, her village has no name, known simply as “the village” to those native to it. Nowadays due to the spread of globalisation, it’s a lot more advanced due to the newly constructed highway direct to Shanghai (a two hour drive, as opposed to the former six hour drive), but in my mother’s day, it was nothing but a number of one-room shacks in farming land. The occupation was farming – from dawn to dusk, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.
Living as remote as they did, they were largely untouched by the atrocities that occured in China in the sixties and seventies. As a poor peasant in a poor peasant family in a small village far away from any substantial authority of the Party, she was immune to much of Chinese history of the sixties and seventies, though she can still remember the city youths sent down to the countryside for reeducation, as well as the public condemnations and executions of the few ‘intellectuals’ within a three kilometre region. These intellectuals were primarily schoolteachers or those with more than a basic peasant education – with the suppression of these people, the education of the country youth was stunted. Millions of people of my mother’s generation suffered a lack of formal education as a result.
The foodstuffs they had to eat was simple fare. Rice was the staple at all meals, with little meat as the one bull they owned was required to pull the plough for the fields, and an occasional fish whenever the children managed to catch one from the sparse stream that serviced an area a kilometre squared in area. Vegetables were limited to those from their fields that were unable to be bartered at market for other goods, so they were inevitably of lower quality, rotting or undergrown, hardly enough to provide enough nutrients for the growing family.
From a young age, she learnt to take a woman’s role in the household, as her own mother was occupied with the two younger children. Her childhood was noticeably much harder than my father’s – though both lived in poverty, she had additional responsibilities as an elder daughter than my father as a youngest son didn’t encounter in China’s patriachal society. With cooking, cleaning and toiling in the fields from a young age, education was a mere afterthought, with daily survival being the main aim.
Through the first decade and a half of her life, she watched as her parents worked day and night for simple subsistence, with no advance in the family’s material situation. With not enough money for a pair of glasses for her rapidly ailing eyesight, she knew that taking the examinations for high school study was an impossibility for her, and ended formal education at the age of fourteen. She chose instead to take the path that many daughters in China take – leaving the family home to earn money in the big city to send home.
By the age of fifteen, she managed to cross the border to Hong Kong illegally with nothing but a roll of bedding, a change of clothes, and a few steamed buns to get her through the long journey from the village to the city. Unfamiliar with the Cantonese dialect and speaking only the village dialect native to a handful of people, she had joined the millions of migrant workers within China and isolated herself in a city where she couldn’t adequately communicate with others around her. Finding a job in an assembly line manufacturing jeans destined for Western shores, she managed to find a small room with four other women in a boarding house. All her wages, minus her rent and board, was sent home to help her family expand their role in society to become more than peasants.
Until the age of eighteen, when she met my father, my mother had never owned more than two outfits, had never seen a movie, had never read a newspaper in its entirety, had never seen a foreigner, had never eaten anything more exotic than the perennial bowl of rice at each meal, and had had no experience with men, having self-segregated into being in groups of young women only.
For three years, from age fifteen to age eighteen, she had not seen her family once, instead spending ten hours a day, seven days a week, at the factory. She was all alone in a strange city, doted upon by the boarding house owner who saw her as a ‘good girl’, untainted by worldliness, though dangerously approaching the age of potential spinsterhood.
13 Responses to Three Part Series: My Mother
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Wow your mum is definitely a strong independent woman! At fifteen, crossing borders illegally, so young and working on her own and sending money back to her family! Amaaaazing. I cannot imagine myself doing that between 15-18…
Rilla on October 27, 2008 #
Your stories/entries about your parents are really interesting! I can’t wait for the third installment :)
Your parents are really something! Especially your mum.
Maggie on October 27, 2008 #
Wow, I DEFINITELY see where you get your work ethic from! Your mom is super admirable too, she worked so hard! This is really interesting, I could see your parents having a really epic romance, and escaping to make their fortune in Australia, etc.
Can’t wait to see how they meet!
Carmen on October 27, 2008 #
Both my parents were sent to rural farming areas for “reeducation”, even though both my parents, especially my mother, not only excelled in school before they closed down, but they both loved it. Sigh. :(
Belinda on October 28, 2008 #
Wow. It’s kind of amazing to know that your parents had lives before you. :| Or maybe that’s just me. :P
If that was my mother, I’d be so shocked though…She seems incredibly independent and brave.
Jenny on October 28, 2008 #
This series is so very interesting and insightful. I cannot wait to read the third part. Thank you for sharing their stories.
You know what would be a good tv show? A series where regular people where interviewed all across the globe and had one hour or so to tell their story of their life. To pull in viewers from across the world so that people who might never, ever meet, can connect even if only for an hour on tv.
That’d be a show I’d watch. Image how interesting and insightful it would be.
Erin on October 28, 2008 #
Wow, that’s so amazing. I’m fourteen and I can’t imagine illegally crossing borders or having such responsibilities in only a year!
I really love hearing stories like this. It’s amazing what ordinary people have gone through in their past.
Clem on October 28, 2008 #
I can’t imagine what it was like to live in a time like that, and have those hardships. You must have great respect for your mom, (and your dad). Heck even I have it for them!
Veronica on October 28, 2008 #
Wow, what a strong woman your mother is! I’m really enjoying this series. I can’t wait for part 3. :)
Caitlin on October 28, 2008 #
That’s amazing how your mother crossed the border illegally. I dunno how they have the guts to do that, my own grandparents/parents/uncles and aunts having done similar things to escape poverty and later war. Can’t wait to hear more =)
marilyn on October 28, 2008 #
My parents’ roles were switched from your parents’. My dad was sent to the country side for re-education and my mother worked in a factory, where she also rose among the ranks to be have a few hundred people under her.
I love learning about how people lived during China just a few decades ago. It’s always so fascinating to me to hear from my dad that during his time, he could only listen to the radio once in a while, and how he had to walk miles at a time to sell the produce he grew. It’s amazing how situations are so different nowadays.
Yingna on October 30, 2008 #
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