"Dad, tell me about communism." My father looked up from his newspaper and gave me a puzzled look. "What for?" he asked. "I have this assignment," I told him. "Where I have to write about where we came from. And I thought it might be interesting to write about communism because you always talk about how bad it was and how grandma and grandpa were teachers but they had to work on farms because of the Cultural Revolution and all of that stuff." My father sighed and took out a yellowed book from a shelf of journals, letters, photographs, and history books. The yellowed book was one of the history books.
I was in fifth grade when I had to do that report on my family's background. Every year, I manage to get an assignment where I am forced, by the will of the assignment or by my own curiosity, to ask my father about his past and my grandfather's past, and then write about it. Growing up, my father would occasionally bring up our family's plight during Mao's purge of the bourgeois. He would talk about those crazy collective farms and how mad the country's leaders were to suggest that everything, from cow pellets to the cows themselves, could be shared. He was even more angered at the fact that the government really thought that peasants were the future of the country and attempted to do away with intellectualism in the country.
