by Rob Schmitz
I passed 640…662…then I saw it on a bright green placard: Street of Eternal Happiness, Lane 682. I stepped into the alley. It was lined with cobblestones, filled with the dancing shadows of clothes hanging three stories above. I walked inside and searched for house number 70.
For the past three months, I had pored over the letters, one by one, translating them and putting them into chronological order. I delayed looking for their home on the street until I had finished reading through the letters. My goal was to piece together what happened to the family from what was just one side of a decades-long correspondence between husband and wife.
The crinkled, yellowed letters spanned thirty-two years, beginning in 1958 with Liu’s news that their youngest son was weaned, and ending in 1990 with a letter addressed from a cousin in Taiwan: “I heard from the news that the Communist Party intends to shape Shanghai into a prosperous Oriental city!” the cousin wrote. “I figure this might be good news, regardless of which party is in power. After all, as long as the Chinese people have the freedom to become rich and powerful, I am optimistic about their success.”
That’s it. The box of letters was now empty. An inauspicious beginning had turned into an auspiciously abrupt end.
What had happened to the Wang family? Were they still living at Lane 682?
I knocked for what seemed like a minute before I heard a movement inside. A woman with short gray hair opened the door.
“Sorry to bother you, Auntie,” I said, “but I’m looking for Wang Ming. Do you happen to know if he lives here?”
“Who?” the woman asked, a little startled.
“Wang. Wang Ming. He’s probably in his eighties now. I’m not sure…”
“Wang?” she interrupted. “Sure, I know the family. They’re my landlords. They’re not here now. They left the country,” she said in staccato bursts of Shanghai dialect.
“Left the country? Where?”
“New York! You’re talking about Wang Xuesong, right?”
“Yes. He was the youngest son,” I said.
“Wang Xuesong lives in New York City. He moved there a few years ago with his mother. What business is it of yours?”
“I’VE NEVER READ those letters. I don’t know anything about them,” Wang Xuesong told me over the phone from New York City. I had found Wang’s number by entering his mother’s name into a city directory. He spoke in Mandarin with a slow, gentle voice that stuttered a little when trying to recall past events. He patiently listened to my story of how I had come to read his parents’ letters. He was now fifty-six years old and baffled by how his parents’ letters had ended up in an antiques store. “I was the last to be born in the family, so I’m afraid I’m not going to be much help,” he warned me.
I asked Wang about his father. “He-he passed away,” Wang said. “I think it was a few years ago. I c-c-can’t remember when. I’d need to ask my older sisters.”
It seemed like an odd response, but Wang’s stutter signaled I shouldn’t pursue the matter further. Wang told me after his father served his full term at Delingha, he stayed on for another six years before finally coming home in 1979.
I asked him when he first saw his father: 1973, Wang said, when his father returned home briefly before being sent back to the labor camp. “I was a teenager,” Wang recalled. “I went with Big Sister to Shanghai Station to meet his train from Qinghai. I didn’t know who I was looking for. I was just a baby when he left, and after the Cultural Revolution started in the 1960s, my mother had burned all of his photos. It was a time when people were being investigated for their family backgrounds, and ours wasn’t good, so we were afraid of having any evidence of him around. I had no idea what he looked like. Big Sister was nine years old when he left home, so she had a vague memory of his face, but that was when he was in his thirties.
“When the train arrived, people scrambled this way and that, and we stopped an older man who we thought might be him, but it wasn’t. In the end, we missed him completely. Neither of us knew what the other looked like. When we got home, there he was—my father had taken a public bus, alone,” said Wang.
It was a vivid memory and his recollection of it was stutter-free.
“His hair was gray; about seventy percent of it had turned white. His skin was dark from working outside for years,” he said. “But he had returned empty-handed. He had no job, no income.”
By then, Wang’s older sisters had already started working in textile factories, quadrupling the family income. Each month, they would hand over their salaries to their mother so that she could manage the family finances. Wang said his mother knew how to save money and spend carefully. “Each night when she returned home from the factory, she’d patch up sweaters for a few fen [1/100th of a renminbi] each. Most nights after all of us children fell asleep, she would drag the lamp low and sit on a high stool, stitching sweaters into the early hours of the morning. Then she’d leave for work. She barely slept,” Wang recalled.
Wang told me by the time his father made his first return trip home from prison, the worst had passed. “My mother was someone who would submit meekly to maltreatment yet shoulder all the responsibilities herself to raise her children,” Wang told me. “She strongly believed that sooner or later, life would get better, bit by bit. She was a very traditional Chinese woman. She was only thirty-one when my father left, and she could have easily remarried, but she refused. There’s an old Chinese saying: ‘A heroic woman doesn’t marry twice.’ My mother believed my father would ‘improve his thoughts’ after he returned from Qinghai.”
“Did he?” I asked.
“Not really,” he said. “He stayed with us at home for a while and then he began feeling restless because he wasn’t making any money.”
I thought about the letters I had read from Wang Ming. They were filled with Communist propaganda, railing against his old capitalist ways. Two decades of laboring in the fields and a nightly brainwashing in Marxist, Leninist, and Mao Zedong thought had convinced Wang he had been right all along. All of these ideas may have sounded nice from the miserable confines of a labor camp in a forgotten corner of the Tibetan Plateau. But back in civilization among the busy streets of Shanghai, they proved no match for capitalism.
I had read several drafts of letters dating back to when Wang Ming was still in prison that showed he was eager to get back to business. In a letter dated April 30, 1981, Wang wrote to leaders in Shanghai’s Department of Commerce and Industry in an attempt to help them reestablish the city’s silicon steel recycling industry. “There are so many unemployed young men these days who we can hire to set up factories in the city’s suburban areas. These types of factories are labor intensive, low investment, and they produce high yields. We can build them anywhere,” he wrote the officials, mentioning Deng Xiaoping’s campaign to revive China’s economy before posing a final question: “Can I play an active role in contributing my energy and wisdom to the ‘Four Modernizations’?”
A year later, Wang Ming managed to find work through some old friends in the industry, paid on commission to help find new business for metal-recycling enterprises in his rural ancestral home outside Shanghai. He was fifty-seven years old, three years away from being eligible to collect retirement benefits. In order to do so, though, he first had to submit a petition to a local court to rectify his name, clearing himself of his crime. The petition was his final self-criticism, the last remnants of Wang’s submission to the Party:
If you examine the root cause of my actions, it’s clearly because my worldview had yet to be reformed. That is to say, I didn’t study enough at the time; I didn’t stand firm and I was too obsessed with my own selfish needs. I can only blame myself. If only I could have used my experience in recycling silicon steel and devoted myself wholeheartedly to the socialist cause after the public-private partnerships were formed, if only I could have built wealth for the country rather than for myself, then even if I were arrested, I could have explained my actions in the firm belief that I would be
treated fairly.
“The court rejected his petition,” Wang Xuesong told me over the phone. “His original crimes still stand today.”
I asked Wang if he thought the government had treated his father unfairly. I expected Wang to blame China’s government, the system, or the chaotic political atmosphere for what happened.
“Of course he didn’t think it was fair,” Wang said slowly, “but during each unique period of time, China’s government has unique rules. My father opened an underground factory. Underground factories were banned after the Communist Party took power. The government wanted tight control over raw materials, and forbade individuals from controlling them. That was the rule of the game. My father’s sentence wasn’t unfair. He was breaking the rules of that time. When you violate a rule, you’ll be punished.”
There was silence over the phone line. I didn’t know what to say. The Anti-Rightist campaign was madness, and his family suffered terribly because of it. How could he believe his father’s sentence was just?
Wang paused a moment and continued. “From my own perspective, my father had a clear choice,” he said. “He shouldn’t have done what he did. His life was good; his life was stable. He-he didn’t need to run an underground factory. He was earning one hundred and seventy renminbi each month after the state took over his factory. Th-that was a sky-high salary back then. But he wasn’t satisfied. He-he wanted more.”
Wang’s tone had shifted. Anger seeped into his voice. His stutter was back. Throughout his childhood, students and teachers had openly bullied him in class for being the son of a capitalist. His sisters were denied promotions at their factory. One sister had to be given up for adoption. The rest of his family nearly starved to death.
The Chinese had evolved into a people who had learned to detect the slightest ideological shifts in the ruling hierarchy so that they could quickly recalibrate their positions, protecting themselves and their families. Adjustment to ever-changing surroundings was a rule of life in China. Why hadn’t his father adjusted?
Wang continued. “It was a very big burden for my mother to take care of so many children. M-my father isn’t a kind-hearted person, either. He did something in the past. H-he did something that betrayed my mother,” Wang said, exhaling a sigh.
This kind of phrasing made it sound like his father had a mistress or possibly a second wife, which wasn’t uncommon for men of wealth at that time. I waited for Wang to continue, but he put the issue to rest. “Bu-buyong duo shuo.”
The phrase meant “No need to talk about this further,” and we didn’t.
“My father spent his last years in a nursing home,” Wang said. “I’m not sure what the specific diagnosis was. When he died, he was eighty-six or eighty-seven. I don’t remember, exactly.”
In a country with a tradition of worshipping family patriarchs, it was almost unheard of for a father with seven children to have to spend his final years in a nursing home. But if there was anything that was clear from reading Wang Ming’s letters, it was that he had become used to solitude. By the end of his life, he had adjusted.
Wang Ming’s ashes were buried in a family plot at a cemetery in his ancestral hometown in the countryside outside Shanghai. Neither his son nor his wife returned home for his funeral.
WANG XUESONG ARRIVED at JFK Airport on a China Eastern flight on May 12, 2008. It was his mother’s eighty-second birthday. Mother Liu and her son were underwhelmed. “It didn’t look much different from China,” Wang said. “Shanghai’s a big, modern city, and when we drove away from JFK, I looked around and thought it didn’t look as nice as where we had come from. When we got to Flushing, it was full of Chinese stores and everything was written in Chinese.”
After driving through blocks of Chinese storefronts, Mother Liu finally spoke. “Where in Shanghai are we?” she asked her son.
It was a serious question. Liu was suffering from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. “Her memory is gone,” Wang said.
It had taken Wang and his mother twenty years to obtain residency visas for the United States. Sister Five had moved to the United States long ago with her husband, a Chinese-born American citizen. Big Sister and Sister Two had followed. The three sisters were scattered throughout the borough of Queens.
Wang’s sisters helped him find a room in a duplex fifteen minutes away from the subway station. It was a two-story house crammed with five other Chinese families. Wang paid their Fujianese landlord $780 a month for a room on the first floor.
Prior to leaving for the U.S., Wang had worked as an engineer in a refrigerator factory in Shanghai. In New York City, neither this experience nor Wang’s engineering degree from a Chinese university would be worth much without the ability to speak English. Within a few weeks of arriving in the U.S., a friend of his sister’s helped him find a job that didn’t require language skills: a Korean-run cellphone-repair plant in Long Island City. For eight hours a day, Wang worked on an assembly line scanning labels of hundreds of broken cellphones. It was a mindless, robotic job typical of China, not New York. In the mornings, when Wang walked past Cantonese groceries and Beijing dumpling shops on his way to an assembly plant full of Chinese factory workers, he began to feel the traces of senility that were plaguing his mother—here he was, back home again. There was no escaping China.
Wang made seven dollars an hour, more than he had made at his factory back in Shanghai. Still, it was less than minimum wage in New York at the time. I asked him how he was able to make ends meet. “I’m Chinese. I can make it work,” Wang said over the phone. “We’re not like Americans. We never spend more than we make.”
He had never married. His six sisters had all wedded early and he had several nieces and nephews, but Wang was always too busy with other tasks—his studies, his work, taking care of his mother—to give marriage much thought. His mother had spent much of her life taking care of him and his sisters, and as the only son in a family without a father, he felt that once he became an adult, it would be his duty to look after her.
Wang Xuesong’s favorite place in Flushing was the neighborhood’s public library. He walked by the gleaming glass and steel structure each day on his way to catch the 7 train, and he soon came to learn that its role in the community was nothing like that of a library in China. In China, public libraries are scarce. For a population of 1.4 billion people, there are just 3,000 public libraries limited to the country’s largest cities. By comparison, 350 million Americans are served by 17,000 public libraries located in nearly every town in the country. In China, the public library’s role in the community is restricted to loaning government-approved books to residents. In America, Wang discovered, public libraries did much more. They were civic centers, learning centers, and in an immigrant community like Flushing, the library became far and away the single most important place in the residents’ lives, offering free English classes, free computer classes, free high school–level classes, and a variety of workshops that helped new transplants adjust to their new home.
Wang spent all of his free time at the library. The fifty-seven-year-old took English classes there twice a week. On Tuesday nights and for seven hours each Saturday he took high school courses. By the time he turned sixty, he told me, he would earn his GED, the equivalent of a high school diploma. After that, he’d move on to college coursework. Wang’s classmates at the library were some of his best friends. Many of them were from China, but he also had friends from India, Russia, and the Dominican Republic. Before he’d stepped foot inside the library, Wang told me, he didn’t have a clear sense of how America was different from China. But here among the stacks of books and halls of classrooms was a place built for the betterment of the community; a place where people could, free of charge, learn new skills that would help them find better work and improve their lives. China didn’t have places like this, Wang said. Each time he entered the bright and warm environs of the Flushing public library, he felt hopeful. He felt free.
I MET WANG on the steps of the Flus
hing library one rainy morning in May of 2014. It was the first day of the month—the Labor Day holiday in China—but in the U.S., it was just another workday. I was passing through New York on business, and I had called Wang the night before.
“I’m white, I’m tall, and I’ll wear a black jacket,” I told him over the phone.
“There are lots of tall white men at that library,” Wang replied. “There are a lot of black and yellow people there, too. How about I wear a bright green jacket? I’m really short, and I’ll wear a hat that says ‘New York City,’ okay?”
I arrived early. Despite the rain, the library was flooded with light. Downstairs, I peered inside the Adult Learning Center classrooms. Three classes of English were being taught. The rooms were full of Chinese immigrants. When I returned to the ground floor and walked outside, I saw a bright green jacket. Wang stood a foot shorter than me. He wore glasses and his small eyes often darted to the corners, as if scanning the area for any danger. On his black baseball cap, the Statue of Liberty stood in front of a Stars-and-Stripes-filled “NEW YORK CITY.”
We sat in front of tall shelves of books on a bench facing an angled window that was being doused with driving rain. Two women sat across from us, speaking Fujianese. When we began to speak in Mandarin, the women halted their conversation.
“Wah! The foreigner’s Chinese is good,” one of them told Wang. “Is he American?”
“Yes, but he lives in Shanghai,” Wang explained, turning back to me.
The woman looked confused. “How can a foreigner speak such good Chinese and here I am in America, and I can’t speak a word of English?”
Her friend laughed at the misfortune of it all.
“He studied Chinese,” Wang said. “You should study English. There are free classes downstairs.”