well, my mom’s side of the family was urban and educated. my great grandfather apparently went to school in france at some point, and he was a professor. so my grandfather and his siblings were all very educated. my grandmother was as well. then mao came around and did shit that fucked everyone over (great leap forward, etc). and then he started targeting people like those in my family. the biggest thing is that when my mom was young, her dad did work for mao. during the hundred flowers campaign, he was the one who wrote down and recorded all the complaints and improvements that others had. unfortunately, he got fucked over because all of those were interpreted to be HIS complaints. he was shamed, fired, publicly humiliated. honestly i dont know a lot of the details here but i know because of that my mom and her sisters were targeted by their community. then when my mom was 15 she was sent out to the country to be “reeducated” for 3 years (my dad as well). neither of my parents finished school. my family went from educated, pretty well-off and established to dirt poor and having nothing in a matter of a few years under mao. as for my dad, family on his side was driven out of their village because of mao’s rise to power. my grandpa on his side was a village official and therefore had the biggest house and most power, but when mao started to rise they were all driven out. same shit happened to my dad when he was a teenager as my mom. mao was the reason my family left china.
and yeah, we went to china on vacation. i hadn’t been back since i was 10, and my family has never all gone back together. so we went to china and did the tourism thing - beijing, guilin - and also visited family in guangzhou/foshan. spent a little time in hong kong, where my sister was born, too.
