Factory Girls 书摘:华裔眼中的“中国”
(2012-06-06 21:27:47)
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杂谈 |
When I tell my family story to American friends, they ask me how my father could go back to China and spend time with officials from the party that murdered his father. When I lived in Prague, I met the American-born children of Czech emigres, who were so opposed to the Communist regime that they had refused to teach their children to speak Czech growing up. The Cuban exiles are so virulently anti-Castro that they will not return as long as he is in power. But Chinese immigrants are different: No matter what terrible things happened to their families in China, they go back, on whatever terms the government allows. This is in part the pragmatism that runs so deep that it excuses the past, but it is more than that. China to them is not a political system or a group of leaders but something bigger that they carry inside themselves, the memory of a place that no longer exist in the world. China call them home--with the weight of its tradition, the richness of its language, with its five thousand years of history that sometimes seems to be one repeating cycle of tragedy and suffering. The pull of China is strong, which is why I resisted it for long.
——Leslie T.