Chinese Working-Class Lives by Hill Gates

Author:Hill Gates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2017-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

Zhang Zhengming: Air Force Loyalist

Zhang Zhengming, Zhang Xiuzhen’s husband, is a retired air force mechanic from south China. Now in his late sixties, he has served the Nationalist military since his youth and cannot even imagine another system of government or a Chinese who would want one. Anyone lacking in his kind of affectionate loyalty, he thinks, must be either wicked or absurdly ignorant. He points out that there are flaws in the operation of the sociopolitical system under which he has lived his life comfortably. Nothing is perfect. But with better education, the right men in charge—society would operate as well as anyone could wish. There are many men like Mr. Zhang who credit their rise from rural hardship to a modern occupation in a prosperous country to Jiang Jieshi and the Nationalists. What Mr. Zhang cannot understand is how, after all the social betterment he has seen during his life, young people can have degenerated so quickly. He represents a segment of Taiwans population—Mainlander career enlisted servicemen—who have not needed a place in the rapidly industrializing economy, and who cannot understand the difficulty their children are having in finding theirs.

Zhang Zhengming and I talked about his life through several long afternoons at his home of twenty years, part of a large complex of quarters for married military in southern Taiwan. The house shares walls with neighbors on each side, and more neighbors live across the 5-foot alley that passes the front gate. In winter this sunny corridor serves as a meeting place for little knots of knitting women and card-playing men, seated on the tiniest of stools, chatting in dialects from everywhere in China. In summer the trees that families have planted in their yards help cool the breezes that pass from door to door, carrying the smells of cooking, of carefully tended flowers, of the community toilet at the end of the row.

Mr. Zhang lives now, as he has throughout his life, in unavoidable intimacy with many other people. Two doors away, a family struggles with the burden of a senile old mother who, having gone blind, cannot tell night from day and loudly demands meals at inconvenient hours. Family rows erupt occasionally; everyone’s taste in television and radio programming is as public as their normally loud-voiced conversations.

His ties to many of these families come from the shared past, when the men traveled together on the China mainland, fighting the Nationalists’ wars. They know each other well, though intimacy does not necessarily mean liking. Some people pass in the narrow alley, or at the nearby vegetable market, with the curtest of nods or with no greeting at all. The burden of a life lived so publicly is an accustomed one, but Mr. Zhang feels it as a burden nonetheless.

Mr. Zhang, perhaps more than most, finds his position an ambiguous one in the world and in his family. While Taiwan enjoys unprecedented prosperity and the changes of affluence come ever quicker, his life, his possessions, his salary, and his opportunities remain the same.

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