. . . And the Chance for Hope
By Baopu Liu. The Washington Post. Sunday, February 6, 2000; Page B07
When I was 7 years old and growing up in China, I was ordered one day to go out in the street to "support the removal of Deng Xiaoping from office." A few years later, I was instructed to "celebrate Deng's powerful political comeback."
But all the outside political forces that drove me one way or pushed me another, while they have had great effect on the course of my life, have had little to do with my inner sense of myself. Perhaps the same is true of Elian Gonzalez.
As I read about his case, I couldn't help remembering my own experience of being separated from my family because of politics. When I was 22 years old and newly graduated from college, the seemingly stable life I had lived was abruptly turned upside down. My father, Bao Tong, was taken away in
1989 by unidentified men who called him to a "politburo meeting." He was not to return home until eight years later.
At that time, my father was the director of the Political Reform Office directly under the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee. As his family, we knew he had committed no crime. His only offense was that he was siding with Zhao Ziyang, the former party chief, in opposing the government's
plan for its bloody crackdown on students at Tiananmen Square, which was carried out a few days after my father was taken away.
For a long time, we knew almost nothing about my father's whereabouts, and yet we could take no action. There was nowhere to complain and no one to whom we could turn for support. Not one person I met believed that my father's imprisonment was justified, and yet, faced with such injustice, no
one thought there was anything that could be done, either. Experience had generated the common perception in China that if one puts up a fight, things can get even worse.
Leaving my family behind at such a time of uncertainty to come to America was not an easy choice for me. My aging mother, my dear sister, my loyal friends and my every memory of achievement and joy--how could I exchange all this for a future of uncertainty? Hope was perhaps the only thing that
made all this worthwhile. It was what, in the end, impelled me to leave China.
When I came to this country, my foremost impression was of its remarkable openness to people like me. Learning English from scratch, going to graduate school and working part-time, I knew that every day I was getting one step closer to being able to bring a little help to my family trapped in
hopelessness.
But there was never good news when my phone rang in the middle of the night. One call was to tell me that my father had been formally "arrested" after two years of detention without charges, and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment for "counterrevolutionary incitement."
Fighting against this sort of injustice, calling attention to the Tiananmen Square outrage, may not have been too effective at such a distance, but at least it was possible, and it is what kept me going. With enormous support from people who work in the human rights field, I successfully
publicized the case of my father.
Looking back now, I realize the extent to which growing up in an authoritarian society discouraged individuality and fostered an extremely narrow definition of what a good citizen is. I still blush to remember an essay I wrote in fourth grade claiming that my "most beloved man" was "Chairman
Hua" (a transition leader between Mao and Deng)--an essay I wrote with a certain degree of sincere conviction in my 10-year-old mind, as did 50 others in my class.
Because I came to America as an adult and by my own choice, I had developed a sense of identity. But no one caught between two nations can avoid feelings of confusion and inner conflict. On the one hand, I opposed the Chinese government's continued civil repression; on the other, I took pride in
China's economic and technological progress.
My most precious reward has been experiencing and recognizing that there is hope for friendship, cultural interaction and change.
Whether Elian Gonzalez grows up in America or Cuba he has a particular sense of identity that will be affected by the differences between life in an authoritarian state and a democracy--but by no means determined by them. He will be the product of forces beyond politics and ideology.
The writer is founder of futurechina.org, a policy discussion forum.
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