Family Portrait From 1975 in Hunan, China

I grew up in communist China from 1970 to 1979 before coming to the United States. This photo is a rare photo of our family together.  This is the time when China just opened their immigration policy to allow people to leave China.

My mom was a pediatrician, my dad was an architect. I have fond memories of a community who worked hard, all paid equal amounts (around $75 a year) and surround by people who were liked minded.

My vivid memories before I was 9 years old were

• walking to get breakfast with food ration tickets
• getting up early for a morning run with all my classmates at the crack of dawn
• doing morning exercise routines and eye exercises to keep our eyes healthy
• raising silk worms
• trying my first cigarette and choking and swearing I would never again
• huddle together with the family to try a rare pot of molasses and twirling it with chopsticks
• waiting for my dad to come back after a 3 month business trips, he was gone most of the time
• eating roasted hot peppers that my sister gave me as a prank
• cheering my sister on as she competed in jump rope competition
• getting my first red scarf after being induced into the little red army while holding the little red book of Mao
• making our annual coal blocks to burn in our cooking stove using a metal stamping tool
• huddle together with others in a dorm to watch the only TV in the whole building
• bringing empty toothpaste tubes to trade for candy
• bring a bowl of rice to a cart outside to get pop rice
• reading Chinese hand written letters in cursive from my relatives
• watching my dad do Chinese calligraphy
• looking at the hand drawn architecture plans my father finished that night
• running away from boarding school and crying until my parents took me out
• head lice, falling down into a sewer, falling flat on my back from an elephant shaped slide
• sleeping on bamboo beds and my mom fanning me to sleep

In the backdrop, my parents did struggled with their friends who were re-educated and committed suicide under enormous pressure from cultural revolution.  As a kid, the events of the cultural revolution just seem to be normal events that I hear my parents talk about.  They ultimately made a choice that my sister and I didn’t have a future in China and were able to come to the US through immigration because my grandmother was here since the 1960’s.