Cause and Effect - Yanfang Huang

 

A Journey

          People in Taishan City spend dollars instead of RMB. This saying is widely known in my hometown, Taishan, Southern China. This means that most families in Taishan have family members in a foreign country – mostly in the United States – and those foreign relatives often send money back. From the mid eighteenth century to the mid twentieth century, most people were in poverty because of wars and politics in China, and many people said the United States was full of gold. Many people went to the United States to work as laborers to improve their lives. My great-grandfather and grandfather were two of Taishan’s residents who went to the United States in the early twentieth century, and their choice affected my family for generations.

          One of the most affected people was my grandmother because my grandfather got sick and died very young in the United States. My grandmother had been a widow all her life. After my grandfather passed away, my grandmother did not remarry because this family could give her a better life. My great-grandfather often sent money back, so my family’s financial situation was stable in that period. She never worried about starving again. In addition, it was hard for a woman who had been married to find another good marriage. Many people thought it was bad luck to marry a widow unless the man was very poor or disabled. For these reasons, my grandmother preferred to live alone for the rest of her life. I cannot say my grandmother loved my grandfather because they only saw each other once after they got married. In my memory, my grandmother always talked to herself. In old China, marriage for women was like a transaction, a gamble, and it depended on their luck. Marrying a good man was the only way for women to get a better life.

          Besides my grandmother, another person affected was my father because he had a miserable childhood. My grandmother did not have a child, so she bought a boy who was my father to be her paper son. It was during World War II, and most people did not have enough food to eat or a place to live. My father’s parents had to sell all five of their children so that they could survive in those hard days. The villagers always bullied my father because he was not native to this village. This went on until my brothers and I were born and became adults. My father never told me about the abuse he had suffered, but I heard about it from others as I grew up. Maybe my father wanted to protect me and let me live with dignity. There was another reason my father lived a hard life. He had to take on the farm work because he was the only male in the family. When he was in primary school, he had to stop going to school to work in the fields when the farm was busy. As a result, he did not study well and discontinued his education after finishing primary school. I often saw my father looking preoccupied. Maybe he was thinking about his parents and siblings, or maybe he was thinking about his hard time in the past.

          Therefore, I will cherish my present life very much because of their past. Since I arrived in the United States, I have learned some history about Chinese people’s life experiences in the United States, and I realized how hard it was for my great-grandfather and grandfather. They did not speak English and lived in their small community in Chinatown. They worked the hardest jobs for minimum wage and were often humiliated by white people. Without a doubt, I am luckier than them. I can speak English, and I can apply to college and learn anything I want. Moreover, there are laws that protect foreigners from racism in the United States now. In addition, what happened to my grandmother and my father will not occur to me. Today, women do not need marriage to change their lives, and children are no longer commodities to be traded in China.

          My ancestors’ choice to leave their hometown had a profound impact on their family members. I cannot judge whether their choice was right or wrong because they had their difficulties. Life is like a journey, and everyone is a traveler. In the journey, there are challenges and benefits, losses and gains. Each traveler will make choices according to different situations. I choose to cherish what I have and enjoy life because I think the best scenery is on the path.