Abstract
Motherhood functioned as a channel of propagating China’s official ideology for Zhang before she became exposed to alternative lens about social reality while studying overseas. The communist ideals of equality and justice, which appealed to an older generation living in artificial egalitarianism and scarcity, are losing allure to a younger generation. Moreover, it also became disillusioning to observe prevalent social phenomena of injustice in today’s China that go unchallenged by the deflating ideals of radical socialism. Zhang describes her mother’s schizophrenic tendencies as she was unable to straighten her logic consistently to reconcile these realities. After Zhang’s conversion, she was even able to analyze the Chinese reality afresh through this new faith and to detect the systemic evil behind fragmented social phenomena.
Narration by Zhang (age thirty four, foreign firm manager)
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Notes
- 1.
Two of China’s Four Great Classical Novels.
- 2.
CCTV stands for Central China Television, the Chinese regime’s biggest media outlet.
- 3.
Global Times is one of China’s Party-state media that propagates anti-foreign sentiments.
- 4.
Little Pink (xiao fenhong) refers to nationalistic young people in China who are easily offended by allusions to problems in China.
“The Rise of Little Pink: China’s Angry Young Digital Warriors,” South China Morning Post, May 26, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2095458/rise-little-pink-chinas-young-angry-digital-warriors
“The East is Pink,” The Economist, August 13, 2016, https://www.economist.com/news/china/21704853-online-mobs-get-rowdier-they-also-get-label-east-pink
- 5.
It was a violent anti-foreign, anti-colonial and anti-Christian uprising in late Qing between 1899 and 1901.
- 6.
It is a spiritual practice that combines meditation and qigong exercises with a moral philosophy centered on the acclaimed tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Around 1998, the Chinese government launched a national crackdown on its members.
- 7.
missing footnote?
- 8.
Roughly 1200 dollars.
- 9.
Xianglinsao means the wife of Xianglin, a fictional rural female figure in Lu Xun’s novel Blessings. Have experienced many tragedies in life, including her son being eaten by a wolf, Xianglin always appears babbling and wailing about her son.
- 10.
Henry Chiu Hail, “Patriotism Abroad: Overseas Chinese Students’ Encounters with Criticisms of China,” Journal of Studies in International Education 19 (4), January 12, 2015. Zhonglu Li, “Does Studying Abroad Make Chinese Students Less Patriotic?” Sixth Tone, May 4, 2018. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002214/does-studying-abroad-make-chinese-students-less-patriotic%3F
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Ma, L. (2019). “Schizophrenia”. In: Christianity, Femininity and Social Change in Contemporary China. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31802-4_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31802-4_10
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