Year of the Snake

"One day in 1965, we were suddenly told to go out and start removing all the grass from the lawns. Mao had instructed that grass, flowers, and pets were bourgeois habits and had to be eliminated.... I was extremely sad to see the lovely plants go. But I did not resent Mao. On the contrary, I hated myself for feeling miserable. By then I had grown into the habit of 'self-criticism' and automatically blamed myself for any instincts that went against Mao's instructions."
--Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China.

About a third of the people in my high-rise, which provides housing for the elderly poor, are Chinese. They celebrate Chinese New Year with a huge party and variety show for the whole building, with food, songs, skits, excerpts of Chinese Opera, a Tai Chi demonstration, flag dances, and poetry reading. This year they even included a duet from that most decadent of all arts: Italian Opera.

Most are in their seventies and eighties and only left China in the last decade. They lived through the great hopes of the Maoists, the anti-Rightist Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, and its aftermath. Many of those who have succeeded in applying for citizenship here are the aging descendants of intellectuals: poets, teachers, musicians, and singers who were imprisoned, reviled, castigated, and forced into hard labor on farms for "reeducation." These elders are here because one or more of their talented children got jobs in the USA and were able to bring their parents over.

The entertainments they present to us were denied to them and reviled as bourgeois during the Cultural Revolution. Many of my non-Asian neighbors are ignorant of Chinese history. They have no idea what it means for our Chinese neighbors to perform their pre-revolutionary culture. I have a vague idea. I've offered conversational English classes and citizenship classes, and many of them call me "teacher" when we meet in the elevator. Most are guarded about telling stories. Their history with each other is charged with betrayals and hostilities. Cautiously, I am told that this one's father was a poet; that one's father was a farmer; this other one's mother was a medical doctor, but her husband was a factory worker. I must keep these secrets.

I wonder about their stories never told. Like me, they are filled with gratitude for the beauty and safety of their apartments, for the affordable rent, and for the ease of living in this elder-friendly city: where the streetcar stops at the corner by our building, where Powell's Bookstore has a huge Chinese language section, where the library will get us whatever books we ask for, and where tea shops and specialized grocery stores provide wonders for us all. Each year they put on a show, and each year some of the ones who performed last year have died, and a few new people have moved in.

More pictures here. I had a hard time picking which one to blip. I've changed it twice. Apologies to those who left stars for another picture.