My Family’s Story

I still remember those weekends and late nights spent huddled over the one shared computer in our house, completely absorbed in Google searches and Wikipedia pages about Chinese dynasties. The rise of the Tang, the golden age of the Song, the Mandate of Heaven changing hands from the Han to the Mongols- the history all felt so interesting. I was hooked. That is, until someone picked up the phone and knocked me offline (it was the early 2000s, after all).

I was scratching the surface, beginning to learn about a history of a civilization that stretched back 5,000 years. My eyes glued to the glowing texts. At school, we were learning about the American Revolution, but at home, I couldn’t wait to hear my grandparents tell me stories about the Chinese Civil War. My grandfather was born into a landowning family, while my grandmother came from a family of peasants. Their memories of the civil war and their views on Chinese politics couldn’t have been more different. But somehow, their paths crossed, brought together, by the tides of history and the rise of Communism in China.

The story goes that my great-grandfather on my dad’s side, 林昭云, left Chang Le, a rural area just outside Fuzhou, as a teenager. Like many rural Fujianese young men during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they sought work and opportunities abroad. My great-grandfather ended up in Southeast Asia, working over a decade at a fabric -producing company in Indonesia. He never returned to Fuzhou, not until he had saved enough money to go back home, buy land, and find a wife. In that order.

He wasn’t born into wealth or had any formal education, but he was hard-working. Eventually, he acquired a large piece of land in Chang Le. For a few years, he got to enjoy the life he had worked so hard to build. But that all changed when the Communist Party defeated the Nationalists. Suddenly, landowners were expected to give everything up, for the state, for their comrades. My great-grandfather resisted. He didn’t want to let go of what he had earned. But the country was changing fast. And like so many others, he had no choice but to change with the times, or be forced to change.