I purchased Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung one summer in Hong Kong.  Now living in America, I wanted it as a reminder of my family’s history through the period called the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  The central stage of that national upheaval took place just decades before on the ground I walked on as a little girl every Sunday in Beijing to see my grandmother.  Few of my classmates and I knew this history.  When I asked my mother, I learned she was a part of it.  She was a “little red scarf girl” who carried her own little Red Book of Mao.  She told about her countryside labor and the communist propaganda. She told me about books and instruments that were burned, the professors and upper-class citizens who were criticized, and of when her mother and father were taken away from her.  I learned that my grandfather was thrown into solitary confinement for nine years.  The Cultural Revolution, my mother explained, nearly tore apart our family.   After hearing her stories, I appreciated my mother as a person beyond being a caregiver.  I understood why she works so hard in China for me to have a good life in America.  The Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong remind me of the moment I learned who my mother really is. 

By Kassia

– Gabriella Chu, Seoul Foreign School, 1882 Foundation Me + 3 Fellow

Relationship:  Im/migrant who arrived as a child Im/migrant who arrived as a child