A Day When You Wake up From the Dream

By Holin Xue / Spring 2022

I come from a small rural town on the east coast of China. My mother came from an even more backward rural area around the township. As the second oldest of four children, my mother only attended a specialized school after graduating from high school and was fortunate enough to work in a bank as an accountant afterward.

When I asked her why she didn’t continue to college later, she replied she wasn’t that good at her studies, but I knew that was not the reason. Because, in all honesty, I am able to study today solely due to the importance my mother placed on my upbringing. Only someone who loves school and understands the value of education would put so much effort into their children’s education. When I was growing up, my father’s role was always absent. He doesn’t care or get involved in my upbringing. So, from the time I was born until now, my mother has been responsible for the family, education, and the majority of financial obligations. Our family, however, appeared to be doing well to outsiders, including relatives and friends. They were also envious of my mother’s job at a bank. It was an “iron rice bowl” equivalent to a government employee because the bank was controlled by national assets and thus would never go bankrupt. Most people wanted my mother’s job, especially in the 1980s, when China’s state-owned heavy industries were restructuring and transforming, resulting in a slew of layoffs. In addition, I used to think my family was well-off because whenever I wanted to buy something, all I had to do was ask my mother, and she would hand me the cash. So there was never a time when I didn’t have money in my pocket at school. Looking around at my classmates, who sometimes chose to eat cheap boxed meals because they didn’t have enough money, I was grateful for my family’s situation.

There is, however, always a day when you can wake up from a good dream. As I grew older, I realized that my family was not as prosperous as it seemed. When I discovered my mother had a dozen bank cards, I started asking questions. It was then that I realized what appeared to be a good job was actually very low-paying. Also, in order to compete, the bank required its employees to become salesmen, selling the bank’s side business to customers, such as commemorative stamps. Furthermore, if the employee did not sell a certain number of stamps, the amount not sold was deducted from the employee’s pay. It was similar to what I witnessed at the Triangle factory, where workers were required to work hard; also, the factory deducted money from their daily use of machines, which is merely capital exploitation. Regardless, my bubble of abundance was shattered at the time because the reality was that we were living on borrowed money. As much as I despised it, I was the last person to blame my mother. Because she took out a loan to buy a house that was closer to my middle school; she took out a loan to buy a car so that I could sleep more in the morning since she would drive me to school; she took out a loan for me to travel abroad to broaden my horizons and enrich my life experience. Even now, despite the fact that the majority of my relatives are vehemently opposed to my studying abroad, my mother insists that I do so. I understand my mother’s predicament and am working my way up the ladder. Simultaneously, just as I realized in my township that I was better off than the people around me, I was acutely aware of the disparity between myself and the majority of Chinese international students from major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Apparently, similar class barriers exist in the Chinese student community at school. Most of them are friendly, yet, the gap in my life from childhood, the different exposure to things, and the quality gap in my education made it difficult for me to have common topics with them and thus unable to integrate. So I’m used to being alone, learning to handle all my big and small things myself, and learning to compromise with my environment than integrate hard into others. But I also know the importance of getting along with the group, so I joined the Warren College Student Council and ran for Vice President Internal. Although I will be stepping down this quarter, I cherish the moments I spent with my peers.

My mother assures me that we will have the best of both worlds soon. Indeed, all of those years of study are coming to an end. My mother’s comments about the difficulty of paying tuition, as well as my father’s cross-country phone calls urging me to drop out and questioning the point of studying for girls, are now history. I know that my relatives at home are as envious of my current study abroad as they were of my mother’s stable job back then. After all, it all sounds fabulous on the surface. No one knows the stresses of my mother’s job, no one knows the problems in our family, and no one will ever know the difficulties I have faced while studying in a foreign country alone. But I don’t bother to waste time dwelling on the past. Now I’m graduating from undergrad and will most likely go to New York to continue my graduate life. I can’t change the invisible class I was born into, and I’m unconcerned about the subconscious speculation about an international student’s life. I just know that I’m going to do my best to live a good life. Who knows, maybe the small chance that someone will have a better life on their own someday will happen to me.