Stories of China
(these are some probably unused notes/snippets from my not-at-all-autobiographical interactive fiction/dating sim project that might or might not be published in any way. this is not at all indicative of most of the game, just the backstory for the main character. if this is at all interesting pls tell me because i need motivation to work on the project lol)
At dinner, in between bites of steamed rice and stir-fried vegetables and meat, your parents like to tell stories of the past. They say that they want you, and your brother especially since he was born in America, to understand your culture and heritage or something like that. The stories are repeated over and over, sometimes with new variations.
Your father starts telling the stories of the cold and starving winters of Jilin Province in northeastern China. On the day Chairman Mao died, he remembered crying and hugging his brothers. The younger children were too young to understand, and their parents quickly shushed them when they asked what was the big deal, who was this Chairman Mao anyways, because children’s loose lips were what got families arrested.
In those days there was no paper or pencil. Instead they wrote on stone tablets. The first characters they learned to write were Chairman Mao’s name. They practiced writing it on their stone tablets until their hands were sore. Your father tells you of how he learned to write the character “Mao”: the hook points at the door at the classroom, the teacher yelled while hitting his hand with a ruler or something. Somehow your father always remembered that. He asks if you know how to write Mao Zedong. You don’t, and he smiles while shaking his head.
Your mother tells you of the queues. They had to queue up for everything and everything was rationed. The rations were never enough. When they didn’t have enough food they would save and eat the hulls of peanuts and the rinds of watermelons.
During winter all they had to eat were potatoes and yams and maybe a few grains of millet and sorghum. That’s why he doesn’t like potatoes, dad says. Meat was once a year. Cabbage was once a week. Or was meat once a month? Either way, they had half their yearly meat at Chinese New Year’s when they made dumplings filled with fatty pork. It was the most delicious thing dad ever ate. You stare at the pieces of meat left uneaten on your plate.
Your father’s father was a Communist. He had fought in the People’s Volunteer Army against the Americans in Korea, and he was a member of the Communist Party. During the Cultural Revolution he somehow escaped being purged. Probably too minor of a figure to bother with. He died of lung cancer a few years ago. Was always a smoker. You have no memory of him but you still feel bad when your parents stare at you, expecting you to have some emotional reaction.
Your mother chimes in. In Shaanxi during the Cultural Revolution the Red Guards went to her family’s house and beat her father until he admitted to being an illegitimate son of a minor landlord. Back then family was everything. You could be sent to the back of the rations queue if you had landlord blood. Your father makes some joke you don’t understand about capitalists or something like that. This grandpa is still alive, living on the sixth floor of an elevator-less building in Xi'an. Climbing the stairs made you tired. You liked him, you think. He’s a nice person, and he wants to live to see his great-grandchildren (you tried to smile, to make your face neutral. you were good at that).
Mom tells you about the first time they got a television, in the 1980s. The first program they watched was some Russian program, an adaptation of Anna Karenina. She and her three sisters glued themselves to the screen, probably looking at the first white people they had ever seen, probably the first time they had a live view of anything outside their province or maybe even their county. They were enthralled with the glamor of it all, the beautiful dresses, the lights and crystals that were so far away from their house carved out of dirt.
You think about yourself. How the fuck does being a fucking closeted queer matter compare to this? How the fuck can you say that you’ve ever suffered a day in your life? How can you say that you know anything about suffering when you’ve never even been malnourished? How can you be so ungrateful, so ungrateful as to even think about not perpetuating your parents’ wishes when they’ve suffered so much for you?
You start to hate yourself, a bit more than usual.
