Seeing Outside Your System

Throughout this memoir, I was impressed with Di's very sober and balanced take on growing up under the Chinese Communist system. There's a sense of the author emerging from childhood ignorance whenever he refers to the ways he used to see things, yet I was intrigued by the author's tone in such instances. He does not seem to claim that he was duped as a child, rather it seems more like the older "I" has widened his perspective. While Di experiences plenty of disillusionment and his family suffers through the Cultural Revolution and still after, the narration maintains a balanced tone. Rather than devolve into a bitter take down of Communist China, Di does not ignore "the positive values," both in the system and in his own experiences, and his analyses of the negative values are measured and thoughtful rather than vindictive. 

I was particularly taken with a passage in which Di jumps ahead to graduate school, and he recalls hearing American classmates remarking on the differences between the history they study now and the histories they were fed in middle and high school. Di realizes that his American contemporaries "had been taught mostly about the glorious part of American history and the advantage of its political and economic systems" (33). We can look back even further to a sort of indoctrination-lite in elementary school with the cheery, patriotic stories of the first Thanksgiving, George Washington and the cherry tree, etc, etc. We are told as children that America is the greatest country in the world and that capitalism and our brand of democracy are the only way to go, in a fashion not so dissimilar from the picture book propaganda that taught Di and other Chinese children that Communism was the only way to go, and that their heroes were doing constant battle with American and Japanese villains.

We extricate ourselves from these easy histories by exposing ourselves to worlds beyond our system. Much of the pain caused by the Communist system came because the Communist leadership was to insular. It sustained itself on the simple narrative that it had created, and leaders from Mao to Deng brutally repressed dissent or even ideas that didn't fall into line. Di does not fall into that line because it obscures the world beyond, and his father instilled in him the values that allowed him to grow outside of the narrow psychological plot provided by the state.