The Write to Remember: On Transnational Fear and the Inevitability of Breaking Silence

I had spent my entire life resisting the temptation to write.

In the mid-80s, I was left in the care of my long-widowed grandmother every evening, freeing my parents to attend “Night University”—a chance to reclaim the education stolen from them during the decade-long Cultural Revolution. My father, a stubbornly avid reader even when books were supremely dangerous, chose Chinese Literature as his major. Post-graduation, he dedicated years to crafting stories worthy of publication. He’d take long walks and compose tales in his head. He’d return to his writing desk hollow-eyed and in a trance, pouring the brewing sentences out onto the page. He tried submitting his stories too, but quickly learned that whatever pieces he thought worthy could never pass the censors. By the time I was nearing graduation from high school, my father had all but abandoned his writerly dream. Xia Bei Zi Ba, he’d murmur to himself, boxing up his manuscripts. Wait until the next life.

(How Asian Americans Can Stitch Ancestral Stories Into Personal Narrative.)

I was due to choose a university field, and Dad realized what a bad influence he had been on me. I had ploughed through tomes of Chinese and Western classics, and written and rewritten multiple short stories, clutching my portfolio and harboring the same foolish, futile ambition. To undo the damage, he took me to visit a friend from his literature program, the only one who had succeeded as a full-time writer. Not so subtly, Dad asked his friend how he made his living. The answer was a snicker and a sigh, followed by his secret formula—toiling in advertisement and writing the occasional soul-sucking scripts for the nascent rom-com TV industry. At the end of the visit, he showed us his closet-sized office and pulled open a bottom desk drawer overflowing with paper.

“My reject drawer,” he announced. “Though, truthfully, most were never submitted; I already knew the verdict.”

“So what’s the point…” I blurted out thoughtlessly.

“Of writing them? Ha, your dad understands.” He clapped my father on the back. “Once in a while, you’ve got to let your instincts take flight, or you’ll burst, right?”

Dad nodded: “Xia Bei Zi Ba.” Then they both let out a quiet chuckle.

Six months later, I entered a sensible STEM major at a Shanghai university.

The sensible major landed me on a straight and narrow path that pleased my parents. It led me to North America and eventually to a busy but stable job that paid the bills. Caught in the fast-paced daily grind, I was put on autopilot, the unceasing demands extinguishing my once-burning itch to read and write again.

Ten years ago, after I became a Canadian citizen, a non-profit organization founded by a former Governor General contacted me. Their mission was to engage new Canadians in their political rights and responsibilities, and they wanted to do a focus-group study to find out why naturalized Chinese Canadians had one of the lowest voting rates compared to other ethnic groups. Twelve of us were ushered into a small, faintly smoky conference room in the heart of Chinatown to discuss our voting experiences. I was the only one at the table who had ever voted.

“What made you all want to come here today?” a young intern shadowing the group facilitator piped up, a touch of frustration in her voice.

A beat of collective silence.

“I heard you give out Canadian Tire gift cards,” one replied finally, prompting nods from several others. The facilitator, undeterred, cleared her throat and posed her next question: “What factors have prevented you from voting?”

Busy raising kids. Juggling two jobs. An ailing parent.

As the young intern, herself a Canadian-born Chinese, smiled and poured chrysanthemum tea around the table, the participants began to relax. “It’s best not to get involved in those things beyond our control,” a woman of my parents’ age whispered. “You never know who’s watching you.”

“What do you mean by that?” the facilitator pressed.

“You don’t want to be seen as political in any way,” a middle-aged man added. “Puts a target on your back.”

“But we are talking about Canadian politics,” I interjected. “Why would that put us in danger?”

Several shook their heads at my naivety. “Politics is politics. You pick a party to vote for here, but maybe someone on the mainland don’t like the party, and you end up in the crosshair. You never know.”

“Anyone can take a picture of you and send it through WeChat. I have a friend who went to a protest with her white boyfriend; she found her pictures online. Weird calls and email hacking followed. Canadian police won’t lift a finger to help.”

“Politics can get ugly so fast.”

“Best keep our heads down.”

“Haven’t we seen it all before we came here?”

But you DID come here! Escaped! We can’t all live in fear forever! I wanted to say, but I bit my tongue. The facilitator nodded nonstop, scribbling notes in a blur. She posed a few more questions, but nothing she said swayed the participants’ opinions. Time passed, marked by yawns, darted eyes, more conspiratorial remarks, and a few quiet scoffs commonly directed at well-meaning but clueless white folks. Finally, Canadian Tire gift cards were distributed, and the focus group was dismissed to everyone’s relief.

On the Chinese National Day that year, I was returning to my downtown office during lunch break when I suddenly found myself thrust into a jungle of opposing colors. On my left, an ocean of blazing red; on my right—a deep black sea that swallowed all light. My anxiety kicked into high gears, months of media onslaught reeling through my mind: the apologist Chinese mainlanders vs. the heroic Hong Kong protestors. Caught in between and caught off guard, I was ready to flee. But it was the national day after all; my urge to belong, somewhere, was overwhelming. I wanted to embrace the red and the black, each soul a should-have-been fellow tribesman. Give their cause a listen, I imagined saying to the red, we are all fighting for the same ideals. Turning to the black: Respect their rights to mark the day, to celebrate their birth identity as normal human beings; don’t fight the wrong enemy. I pivoted to the left, “Communist pig,” someone’s shouting. I pivoted to the right, “Don’t be a traitor,” a stern voice hurting my ear. Then I saw the Union Jack carving into the sky, clashing with a five-star red flag. I felt an ancient, primordial heat rising in my blood. I turned around to take a big gulp of air, only to have a large mic shoved in my face. A reporter’s blue eyes sparkled with anticipation. A loud expletive leapt out of me like a lightning strike. “I can’t wrap my head around this!” It must have sounded like a wail. And that was it, the reporter had moved on, leaving me with my five seconds of infamy.

Click to continue.

Shortly after, I enrolled in a part-time humanities graduate program. I spent the year immersing myself in Franz Fanon, colonialism, multiculturalism, and above all, Chinese history and politics. Growing up in Shanghai in the 80s and 90s, I was often puzzled by the adults around me, by their hidden ire and pain, their daily debates that unveiled old grudges from a tumultuous time barely traceable in my history books. Now I had access to the tabooed past of my birth country, but it wasn’t easy to understand. In Chinese politics class, the avuncular white professor struggled to piece together a cogent narrative about a country that was full of contradictions. A country that lifted billions of people out of poverty. A country that targets its own flesh and blood, quashing those who demand more freedom and rights. A country that still brands itself “communist.” A country’s powerful state capitalism and years of free wheeling and dealing has helicoptered some to the top of the world and sent others down the chute. A country whose name conjures up a Party and an autocrat, but also a land, a people, a culture, foods, sounds, and smells that, like Proust’s madeleine, could instantly resurrect the vivid world of a past life, sending waves of nostalgia through the diaspora.

During office hours, the same professor confided that he was barred from conducting fieldwork in mainland China. His attempts at remote research faltered too, as friends in China grew silent. “Luckily I secured tenure before they tightened the controls,” he lamented, weary. “I don’t know what the kids in the pipeline could do, if they’d ever have any kind of academic career.”

Xia Bei Zi Ba. I heard my father’s voice, traveling from my youth.

I developed a depression whose intensity ebbed and flowed, accompanied by a physical ache each morning. I tried psychotherapy but only made my roster of therapists sigh and shake their heads. But one beneficial outcome emerged: I began to journal. Later, reviewing my entries, I saw the incongruence, the prevailing fears, the lack of a coherent narrative of who I am and where I came from. Humans possess an innate drive to make sense of their history and experiences, and the ongoing collective amnesia had, piece by piece, taken away my humanity.

Then, on July 13, 2017, Liu Xiaobo died. I recalled my ignorance about the man when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize seven years earlier. I had never heard of him in China. I did some digging on the outside of the Great Firewall then. I learned he was one of the “Four Gentlemen” of the 1989 protests, who risked their lives negotiating with the Army to prevent a larger bloodshed. He was in and out of prison numerous times for political “crimes” and yet repeatedly refused the asylum offered by Western governments. I read his prolific writings on political reform in China—his love for his country palpable on every page—and how, with a few sick twists, those words could be used against him.

Above all, I learned that he belonged to a near-extinct breed, those few men and women in the entire history of humanity who were willing to give up everything just to be able to live truthfully. In Xiaobo’s case, he had so much to lose—a promising academic career, his first marriage, contact with his only son, friendships and reputation, and the freedom of himself and his loved ones. And yet, in an interview he gave shortly before his arrest in 2008, he told the reporter that he felt freer than ever—unlike his subservient and thus successful former colleagues, he was living entirely by his conscience.

I called my father in China the day after Xiaobo died a political prisoner. Dad was unaware of the death. After listening to my ramblings about the man, Dad sounded stricken with worry. “Don’t get yourself worked up about this,” he cautioned. “There’s nothing you or I could do. Give it time. Be patient and focus on your own life.” His raspy voice scraped my insides. I could see the blank look on his grooved face, the aged man who once taught me the importance of free speech, who had wasted his writerly talents and waited in vain for the tides to shift. I heard defeat and utter resignation in his voice when he hung up.

Unwisely, I called a Chinese friend in my sorry state and told him about a vigil for Xiaobo that night. The conversation quickly went off rails. “Why does this matter to you? To us?” he asked. I lost it. Like an idiot, I yelled on the phone, about our generation’s indifference to our history and future, how easily we were dazzled by materialism and subdued by censorship. “We’ve lived in fear for too long! It hisses in our ears and follows us wherever we go—even a passport change won’t stop it from inflicting on our minds. Is this dignity?” My friend mumbled a few words of sympathy and a lame excuse to get off the phone.

That evening, I stood among dozens of mourners in a candlelit vigil. As pink streaks of clouds turned to a bruised purple, we paid tribute to Xiaobo before a banner depicting the now-iconic “empty chair.” Tears obscured our vision, but a rare clarity struck me. Merely a month earlier, I had stood at a breathtakingly futuristic intersection in downtown Shanghai, wondering aloud why I had to live a self-exiling life in a foreign land.

Write, I heard a firm voice in my head now. No more Xia Bei Zi Ba.

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