Commie Girl

Freshman year. First semester. PL SC 170 - Intro to International Politics.

It was our Communism unit. Somebody asked what it was. Somebody else talked about Russia. Cold War. And, inevitably, China. The general feeling was that the big bad "C" word was the short answer to China's problems.The professor smiled and let the discourse flow its increasingly hostile course.

I wore a forest green top, with a thin ribbon that tied at the back. I felt feminine. Felt like a college student. Felt the appropriately awkward freshman mix of confidence and insecurity. So I raised my hand, in hesitant increments, and got called upon.

"I am probably a little biased because my grandparents and relatives were involved with the People's Liberation Army, but as bad as Communism was, I believe that it was the best thing for China at the time." I rattled off how this ideology, although ultimately misguided and manipulated for factional power struggles, united a country that had been torn apart by wars for a whole century. I listed off a series of other justifications.

The room went quiet. The professor moved on. At the end of the class, as I picked up my lavender purple binder, I heard a psst and a whisper, "Look. There's that Commie girl."

And that was how I started getting random high fives by closet Communist sympathizers in the school food court.

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My friend Jonathan, a fellow BYU student interning at our company, doesn't quite call me Commie girl. Instead, he vigilantly catches all my absentminded references to "we" - meaning Chinese people - and schools me on being an appropriate American. If he had my US passport in hand, he would be waving it as a flag to warn me against being too cozy with my Chinese identity and too comfortable with the way of life in Communist China.

The truth is, I have loyalties everywhere, and therefore, by default, loyalties nowhere. I am, what us Hong Kongers affectionately dub, a "third culture kid" - having been born Chinese, raised American, but educated British.

In an American classroom, with classmates determined to re-win the Cold War with their textbook rhetoric on Communism, I merely tossed out another view. I was not volunteering to be a standard bearer/ martyr representing "the other side" in an ideological debate.

Communism is so much more than Marx, censorships, or good vs. evil. It has a human side, the encouraging and the horrifying.

Communism is three generations of China, juxtaposed, with the old comrades oddly accepting of the modern bourgeois which they fought against, the middle aged vocally angry about rights and corruption, and the young apathetic and distracted by marriage and financial pressures. It is honest people who bled and suffered for a cause, dispensing forgiveness with casual shrugs to the violent students who smashed up social order in their Red fervor. It is pig-faced officials who pulled strings to obtain a position where others pay them to pull strings. It is an increasingly capitalist China, allowing the dollar sign to replace the hammer and the sickle, where the farmers are shut out of the cities and its benefits because they lack the proper urban residence passports.

As for me, Communism is the backdrop of my grandparents' epic life stories ("Female comrades used cotton pieces from military coats as sanitary pads. Many men's coats were picked clean by the time they reached North Korea!"). It is the dream for which they sacrificed for, because they believed in the good of their country and their people.

So it's more out of a respect for my grandparents and their sacrifice, and a need for people to understand the rationale of the flip side, that I raised my hand that day and every day since then.

Psst. Commie girl coming through.