Merry Christmas!  Happy New Year!!!  Go Horns!!  Whoo hooo!!!

...just catching up...

Well, this semester is THE semester...the semester to kick ass on my MCATS, the semester to make all A's, and the semester to meet my weight goals.  No, i'm actually seriously serious about these goals.  And to ensure that these are met, i am going into hiding.  I'M EVEN CANCELING MY XANGA SUBSCRIPTIONS.  No mas until June, so until then... 

bye

Our lives in writing

By

Shuang Li

            It is hard to imagine my stern father as a young boy standing in front of my eighteen-year old grandmother.  His shoulders were burdened with a heavy backpack while dressed in a standard issue military uniform just like the hundreds of other boys in the Chinese military.  “He didn’t want to go; he wanted to stay with the family, to protect us.  But he had to or else they would send him to work in the rice fields,” recalled my grandmother.  The Chinese government was undergoing a radical change now known as the Cultural Revolution as my father joined the navy and my mother was taken out of high school and sent to the rice fields.  The whole country was put on hiatus as social class was turned upside down and the country was investigated, interrogated, and flipped inside out.  Yet as everything in their lives changed, my grandparents found strength, my parents found love, and I was born into a world full of new beginnings.

            “One day I was studying for my next big exam for school, the next soldiers had busted in the door to our home and was dragging my father and mother away,” said my mother, painfully recalling her earliest memories of the revolution.  She did not understand what was going on, and perhaps nobody did.  The lower class and middle class of students and workers of China led by Communist party chairman Mao Zedong rose against the Chinese Communist Party in 1966 to eliminate political opposition and secure Maoism as a dominate ideology in the country.  The world watched in fearful suspense as China waved the communist flag in the aftermath of World War II.  My mother sat crying in an empty home with three sisters while her parents sat in separate cells in prison.  All upper class teachers, government officials, statesman, or anyone who held a position of power and influence was imprisoned and interrogated for anti-Maoism ideology.  My mother’s father, a lifelong heart-surgeon and valued dean of a prestigious medical school sat in prison longing for the embrace of his children.  “Everyday I snuck to my father and mother, I brought them food underneath my clothing and I spoke to my mother the words of my father and to him her words as well,” said my mother.  As the youngest, my mother’s education was cut off at middle school.  She was forcibly sent to the countryside to work in a rice fields.  She recalls, “Nothing is as bad as working in that hot field, your whole body soaked with dirt and mud planting those tiny rice seeds, nothing, nothing.”  She shared not only a home with fifteen other girls living on that farm but also the scarce food.  “I got through it only because there was no other choice, I lived to see my parents, I lived in defiance, I lived so I can tell you now,” explained my mother.

            As unexpectedly as it came, the Cultural Revolution became less and less chaotic; my mother’s parents were released to resume their lives without an apology or an explanation.  Very few even knew the political battles that caused the revolution and even less understood what had happened.  From 1966 to 1969, many were killed and millions were imprisoned and China’s economy was halted and perhaps damaged permanenetly.  My father was still at sea serving out the minimum term of four years unwaveringly staring at a radar screen while teaching others about electrical engineering and radar tactics that he had learned since he left my grandmother.  My mother’s father returned to his hospital where he was welcomed warmly into the reception hall and quickly resumed his efforts to bring the country back on its feet.  My mothers’ mother went back to teaching chemistry and physics at the local university.  My mother was finally released from the dreaded rice fields to resume her studies.  Fearful of what had happened; my mother joined her father at the medical school and quickly began practicing. “My father begged me to chose any other profession, he told me that devoting your whole life to medicine will only make you suffer like he had when jailed during the revolution.  “In China, things are very different, only the weak studied to become doctors.  Those who couldn’t be engineers settled to become doctors, and doctors got the worst of it during the revolution,” said mother.  She had nothing of it, she loved her father so much and was so inspired by his dedication to the people that my mother quickly adapted and learned the trade.  “One of the first things I learned was how to perform vasectomies on the men, the country was facing overpopulation and that was the most popular treatment. When I was eighteen, I had performed vasectomies on more than 500 people,” she tells me this story every time I complain to her about getting into medical school.  The lack of order during those times and the dire need to curb the population allowed my mother to work under the direct supervision of her father without having a medical license.  “A few years ago, I was at an airport and a random man came up to me, he greeted me and said that I had performed his vasectomy back in China. I was so scared that he was going to yell at me for a mistake but apparently he came to thank me,” recalled my mother.  She graduated medical school without ever attending high school and was a doctor at a hospital in Beijing learning cardiology and performing open heart surgery. Her father looked on with a smile that could not hide the immense feeling of pride in his daughter. “My father never told me that he was proud, but I could see it in him and I never regretted a moment of it. One of my happiest memories is of working side by side with my father,” recalls my mother.

            When I asked my grandmother about how my parents got together in the midst of such chaos, she noted that “Your father never stopped talking about her, the girl he wanted to marry but wouldn’t say yes until she made something of herself. She wanted to be educated, she wanted to have a profession, and she wanted to be somebody. She told your father that until she succeeded in life, she would not marry him.”. The end of the revolution saw the country in a revival as the economy finally started to pick up.  By this time, my father had returned to FuZhou and was helping his family move into a new home. My mother had moved north to Beijing to work with her father in a newly built hospital.  My grandmother continued talking about my parents, “The disaster of the cultural revolution split those two classmates apart, sent one to the ocean and sent one to the rice fields. It is only fitting that a disaster pulled them back together.”  During one of my mother’s long shifts at the hospital, the ground shook.  The lights overhead blinked randomly and people looked at each other with terror.  An earthquake struck and collapsed the hospital where my mother was treating patients.  “When I woke up, I remembered being very dizzy and someone helping me to a hospital bed.  I saw a nurse take out what looked like medication and injected me with something that made the pain go away.  I had no time to protest and the next thing I remembered was seeing your father,” my mom said when trying to remember the earthquake.  No one could find my mother after the earthquake; no one knew where she was or whether or not she was alive.  Her parents searched the entire hospital, her sisters searched the city, and my father heard news of the earthquake.  Like something out of a fairy tale, my mother says he walked, he biked, he hiked, he ran through cities to find her in the basement of that hospital.  The earthquake reunited my parents and soon they were married.  “It was meant to be and a story like that proves it,” says my grandmother.  “My son is very lucky to have found your mom that day; I don’t think she would have married him had he not fought so hard to find her.”

            I was born August 13, 1985 in the town of Fuzhou in southern China.  My Chinese name means carefree and my parents saw to it that my life would be free of worries.  My mother was an established heart surgeon; my father had served in the Navy and continues to teach engineering. “Life was difficult, being a doctor doesn’t pay anything and serving in the navy only lets you survive,” said my mother and father. We had to do something and the opportunity came when my mother’s father was invited to America as an international doctor.  My mother left me for America only three months after I was born, my father followed six months later.  My first birthday was spent in the loving arms of my grandparents surrounded by my two older cousins and their family. My grandmother who raised me until I was six years old said, “The one thing I wanted you to know the most of all was that your parents loved you, and that they were doing their best to secure your future but at that time you were too young to understand,”  she continued tearfully, “The country was still in political turmoil and the economy was struggling to keep up with other countries.”  Despite my grandmothers’ efforts, I remember feeling confused as I looked at pictures of my parents without any memory of actually being with them.  At age six, I boarded a plane and flew two days to Las Angeles where I met my mother for the first time.  “We were lucky,” said my mother, “I was a visiting doctor with an expiring visa that needed to return to China when the students raised up against the corrupt government officials at Tiananmen Square.  The students were asked to go home and refused in defiance against corrupt officials and this sparked international attention.  The United States government declared us as political refugees and allowed us permanent resident status.”  The political turmoil in China had actually facilitated my movement from China to the United States and secured the future of our family.  It is incredibly ironic to look back now and realize that there are always two sides to every story. What would seem to be a political catastrophe as martial law was set against Chinese students actually served as a blessing to my parents who were struggling to ensure their future in America.

            My mother commented on her early days in America with a reference to her work as an assistant to an American doctor and my father’s job as a delivery person:

I practiced night and day under the supervision of an American doctor; I performed all the surgeries while he received credit for it. As a foreign visitor, I did not have an American license and could not practice on my own. They said I would have to go through medical school again and compete with young Americans for jobs. Your father works delivering goods off trucks in New York City earning immigrant wages and working harder than anyone else. But we were happy to do it, whatever we earned in America was way more than we could have imagined in China.

 It is incredibly hard to imagine that my parents arrived with less than twenty dollars in New York City. Living with a friend of the family, my parents spent ten years working dawn till dusk to save up money. “I remember cutting your fathers’ hair and then closing my eyes and biting my lip as I let him cut mine,” said mother. It is funny how every time I complain about something like my haircut that my mom chooses reminds me about how much worse she had it. In 1991, my parents saved up enough money to bring me over from China.  We moved into their first apartment in Houston. My mother was lucky to have the guidance of one famous doctor named Denton A. Cooley who is perhaps one of the world’s most renowned heart surgeons. He allowed her to keep her medical degree and set her up with a job as a cardiologist at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston. My father had a strong engineering background with his days in the navy as a radar specialist and picked up micro processing very quickly. His first job in Houston was to build computers for a local company and sell them. My early fascination with computers came from him as we sat together and built computers from scratch. “You can thank me for all that skill and fascination that you possess with the computer,” says my father, “Sometimes I thought about sending you to work and me staying home to rest.”

            With very few memories of my early childhood in China, I feel as if I grew up as an American just like all the other students sitting in my classes around me now at the University of Texas.  However, my earliest memories remind me of who I am and the stories from my parents remind me of where I came from.  I can remember that in first grade, some kids teased me about my lack of English and I can remember being beat up and missing a few days of school.  I can also remember crying in the third grade because my teacher wouldn’t let me take the TAAS test with all my other classmates because I was an ESL student.  However, that is the extent of my memories about being different. English comes naturally and easily to a young child.  I speak it fluently and have no trouble articulating my thoughts.  I pride myself in my ability to use words effectively.  The ridicule that I experienced as a child may have driven me to excel in the language.  Since elementary, I have been a fluid member of American society absorbing all aspects of culture and language.  The problems that I faced as a young adult had little to do with my adaptation to American culture.  The conflicts I had while growing up were more a reflection of the gap between my own generation and that of my parents mainly because subconsciously I still felt resentful about being left in China after birth.

            My parents and I have never been very close emotionally. Our relationship was very rigid and strictly defined. They disciplined me on my behavior and my academics. I listened to their words or faced severe punishment for disobedience. I never fully understood why they didn’t bring me to America with them in the beginning and, truthfully, I have always held a grudge inside my soul for their abandoning me after I was born. Children are naïve and once they come up with a set of ideas it is almost impossible to deal with criticism. I remember feeling betrayed and believed that my parents thought of me as a burden. I asked them why they could not bring me to America. I blamed my mothers’ impatience and my fathers’ strictness on their never having to have dealt with me as a crying baby. In one heated argument I remember saying to my mother, “You don’t know how to raise a child, and you didn’t raise me. When I have children, they won’t have a grandmother because I won’t let them see you.” I only recently shed my childish concerns and thankfully have begun to understand my parents and their decisions. My parents’ devotion to bring me out of near poverty and a stagnant lifestyle into the land of opportunity was something I could not understand as a child who watched television shows like Full House and Family Matters. I was jealous of the relationships others had with their parents but only when I started college did I truly understand the meaning of what they did and appreciate it as I should have done all along. As a child, I listened to their stories and let them flow in one ear and out the other. As an adult, I treasure the family stories and add them to my own life experience.

It was difficult to ask my parents and my grandmother to relive their stories with me for this project. My grandmother relived the memory of watching her oldest son leave her side and go off for years at a time to serve in the navy.  My mother cried when she remembered being torn away from her parents at such a young age and watched them deteriorate slowly in those dark dirty prisons.  My father remembered the pain in my mothers eyes as she lay injured from the earthquake. It was difficult for all three to recall the details of their lives and I realized that only those that caused strong emotions were remembered.  All memories are influenced by the feelings that we have at the time of the remembered experience. It was difficult to place dates in the story as dates were almost irrelevant and details almost absent except for the climatic moments when a striking memory was so overwhelming that it was burned into our minds. Talking to my grandmother proved difficult as they had to be long distance calls to China and my language skills in Chinese are regrettably poor. Oftentimes I had to have my father on the other line helping me to translate and ask the right questions. My grandmother was very happy to be asked these questions and even more delighted that I was taking the time to write this paper. She wanted me to thank Dr. Zamora and Alan for helping me truly appreciate my family’s story. Interviewing my parents and my grandmother felt like reliving their lives with them. Oftentimes I forgot to take notes and found myself just eagerly listening. Many of the stories I had heard before but hearing them at an older age changed how I felt about them. I was more than eager to write this paper and I plan on sending it to all my relatives. After hearing other stories in class from other students I realize that truly amazing stories are around us everyday. My family story chronicles the lives of two people who struggled through important historical moments such as the Cultural Revolution and then Tiananmen Square massacre. The story then takes the great migratory path from China to the United States as the cultural gap between Asia and the Western world is crossed. Lastly, my parents and I as immigrants took on American culture and fought to succeed as Americans. However, the most important result of talking with the three of them is their realization that I have grown up and become an adult. My parents’ story finally falls on a warm and eager listener and my grandmother’s early intentions to explain my parents decisions are finally met with understanding. To this day, my only surviving grandparent in China whom I interviewed via four telephone conversations and my two parents in Houston still tell me stories of their past, present, and hopes for the future. This opportunity to record their stories, to record their lives makes me feel more alive and unique.

• The University of Texas at Austin has shut down for two days now because of the weather. 

• At least 3 people i know have slipped and fell because of ice patches.  And no, Bi is not one of them.

Lesson???  Us longhorns do not like ice...unless the word cream follows it.

Random ish for the day:
My glasses fog up everytime i go from outside to inside.  Haha. No.