It Occurs to Me That I Am America by Richard Russo & Joyce Carol Oates & Neil Gaiman & Lee Child & Mary Higgins Clark

Author:Richard Russo & Joyce Carol Oates & Neil Gaiman & Lee Child & Mary Higgins Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria
Published: 2018-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

HA JIN

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Finally I Am American at Heart

I have often been asked two questions. One is: What was the most surprising incident when you served in the Chinese People’s Army? The other: What surprised you most in America?

To both questions my answers are rather personal and internal. I served in the Chinese army for five years and saw terrible accidents. Soldiers got killed in military exercises and in collapsed constructions, but what surprised me most is something that none of my comrades might remember. A fellow soldier in our company was a wonderful basketball player, handsome and agile and six feet two inches tall. His parents were both senior officials in Beijing, in the Ministry of Railways. By contrast, most of us were from remote provinces, and many were sons of peasants. Toward the end of my third year in the army, word came that the basketball player’s mother was dying in Beijing and left him her final words. We all knew she was a revolutionary, and thought her last words must be wise and edifying, so we were eager to learn about them too. Then her final words for her son came: “Don’t ever give up your Beijing residence certificate.”

Without a residence certificate, one couldn’t live in Beijing permanently. But if you were not born in the capital, the only chance for you to get such a certificate was to find a permanent job in an official department or company that could help you get it. I was shocked by the mother’s last words, because they suddenly revealed to me that people in China were not born equal. Her words stayed with me and went deeper and deeper in my consciousness. For decades afterward I carried the bitterness, not just for myself but also for tens of millions of people who could never have such a privilege of living in the capital and who, by birth, were citizens of lower class, although China’s constitution guarantees equality to all its citizens. This inequality in residential status among the citizens actually contravenes China’s constitution, which has become meaningless in the eyes of the public.

As for what surprised me most in America, it was also a personal moment that turned out to be charged with meaning, but mainly for myself. When I came to the States to do graduate work in 1985, my family couldn’t come with me, both my wife and son having to remain in China, because at the time the Chinese government didn’t allow families to go abroad together. Like my compatriots, I accepted this rule without questioning it because it was made by the country. Among my fellow graduate students at Brandeis, some were from other countries. They knew I was married but was here without my family. Sangeeta and her boyfriend, Chuck, were from India, living one floor below me. At a party one evening, she asked me why I’d left my wife and child behind. I told her because the Chinese government did not allow them to come with me.

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