Dear Baby,

June 4 is always a special day for me. Every year on this day, I would read lot of articles online. I used to post myself, but since I came to America, I hav not written much. It has been 19 years now. I remember at the time, I regret that I didn't get the chance to participate, to really make contributions. My friend told me not to worry, because it seemed every 10 years there was a big event in China. At the time I thought, 10 years, that's so far, far away.

It's 19 years now. 19 years. Many people choose to forget. The young generations has no idea what June 4th is. However, to us, the generation who went through the event, no matter how hard we try, it keeps coming back. The wound is covered up. You can't see it, but you can feel the pain. It hurts, and will always hurt.

Every time I write about June 4th, I feel I have so much to say but always end up saying nothing. I don't have confidence I can accurately describe what happened and how it forever influenced my life. I read the diary I kept during that time. It sometimes still makes my eyes watery. I was naive, but I was young and passionate. I was so eager to do anything for my country at any price.

Maybe I will try another time, but for now, I just want to write down the lyrics of two songs. The first one is what happened 19 years ago. The second tells you what has changed in this 19 years.

Fernando

(By ABBA)

Can you hear the drums fernando?
I remember long ago another starry night like this
In the firelight fernando
You were humming to yourself and softly strumming your guitar
I could hear the distant drums
And sounds of bugle calls were coming from afar

They were closer now fernando
Every hour every minute seemed to last eternally
I was so afraid fernando
We were young and full of life and none of us prepared to die
And Im not ashamed to say
The roar of guns and cannons almost made me cry

There was something in the air that night
The stars were bright, fernando
They were shining there for you and me
For liberty, fernando
Though I never thought that we could lose
Theres no regret
If I had to do the same againI would, my friend, fernando............

(You can hear this song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ohr4P8E_io)

Another one is a Chinese song. I translated it into English. This song described exactly what happened to those who cared (those who were sad and lonely until they chose to forget and live a materialistic lifestyle)

Song of a Consumer

Everything is meaningless
His past is gone

That summer, his first girlfriend was shot with her classmates
Before he had chance to tell her he loved her
He tried to find the killer, until
Many year later he realized the gun was not in the hand of the killer
Nobody killed anybody. Nobody.
Although his friends, along with their big dreams, were forever erased

Everybody was trying to forget it,
The dark event he thought may change their lives
To forget what happened people would forget about him
He is lonely, he is sad
He thought he would be lonely forever
Until the day he found his freedom, freedom of conscience
He will never be sorry to anybody or for anything

He felt he was born at the right time
This is the time for him
He has no soul, no conscience
He has learned how to become a consumer
He owns big house and luxury cars
He knows how to enjoy service because that's the only thing
He can buy with money
But he is tired...
He is tired of rich people, he is tired of angry young men
He is tired of women who have sleep with him, he is tired of those who serve him
He is tired of anybody who tells him there are things meaningful in this world

Above all,
He hates anything that reminded him of the past
Of what happend in that summer

You can hear this song at http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/nfw1ZfT1y5I/.

Dear Baby,

I've stayed home for two days. If you have lots of free time, your thoughts start to wander. I seem to have lost interest in everything, food, shopping, my job, bigger house… Nothing seems to be appealing to me. Your Dad said it was just hormones. I don’t know about that, actually I often ask myself what I really want, but never have a real answer. Maybe that is why your Dad thinks the stars are lined up for me, but I just don’t know how to be thankful and still ask for more from my life.

I read a story long time ago. Once upon a time lived an unhappy king. Needless to say, he had everything, money and women, but he was still unhappy. So he promised to reward anybody who could make him happy. One day, this guy showed up, told the king he knew where the happiness was, but they had to walk across the desert to get it. The king said he was willing to do anything to be happy. The two of them started walking in the desert. After a while, the king wanted to pee. The guy told him not to pee the happiness away. So the king held it. As they continued to walk, the king got thirsty and started to drink water. He had to pee badly. The guy told him if he peed, there was no point to keep walking, because the happiness would be gone. So the king held it. This happened several times. Finally the king almost cried, he begged the guy to let him pee. The guy told him to go ahead. After he peed, the king sighed deeply with relieve: “This feels so great.” The guy bowed to him, said: “Congratulations, your highness, you found your happiness.”

Does that mean the real happiness is physiological? That’s probably not the point of the story. I guess the point is to appreciate what you have, a kind of cliché. Unfortunately the king’s happiness is short lived. Happiness is always short-lived. Say first you want love, once you have love you want money, once you have money you want power, once you have money and power, you probably want lust, once you have all that, you either want more money, more power, more women or you may start taking drugs or make it easy, jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.

So far in my life, I have never been near to having everything I want. Thank God for that so I have no desire to jump off the bridge or anything. However, I think I did taste the emptiness of that kind of life once.

In China, once you get into school, it’s very unlikely you will not graduate. There was no academic pressure whatsoever. So when I was in graduate school, I had an easy time in school. I had 3 close girlfriends who I was always with: DY, WC, DSC. We always went to class and leave at the same time. We went dancing, drinking, partying. After we got half-drunk, we would walk back to the dorm on the main road and laugh loudly and stupidly. I was the only one smoking. I would smoke in public which was very rare at the time. We would wear similar colorful jackets, riding bicycles down the street, yelling and laughing with each other. We had guys wait in line to buy us dinner. It’s hard to not pay attention to four young fearless, blatant, arrogant, intelligent yet silly girls. DSC was married, but her husband was working at a different city for a year. As for us three, we had guys who liked us, but we just pretended we didn’t know. We would go out with them but never really gave them the chance to go on a date. At the time, none of us tasted what it was like to love somebody but not being loved back. We enjoyed being the center of the attention.

One day, we were singing Karaoke at DSC’s apartment. It was so cold so I stayed under the blanket. Oh, by the way, four of us would often sleep in one bed because if we came back too late at night after the dorm closed, we had to go to DSC’s apartment. All three of them were singing and eating snacks. WC started to sing a folk sang “Walking on the road of the village”. I was smiling and eating with them, but all of a sudden, tears welled into my eyes. I was shocked myself. It’s still hard to describe what happened. It was like I was happy, I enjoyed that life but at the same time, I felt something was missing, I felt sadness and emptiness. I felt I was floating in the air. I couldn’t touch the ground. I was not holding onto something real. My life was like a dream. I remembered the laughter, but if I look back, there was nothing in it.

Soon after that, WC and DY both started dating seriously and eventually got married. I was attracted to someone too except I didn’t have a good ending. It was the first time I tasted the bitterness of love or infatuation or whatever. However, years later when we looked back at those times, we did agree that was one of the happiest times of our lives.

Dear Baby, when I was in high school, I really liked a Buddhism poem I read. It was about taking happiness, sorrow, life and death lightly, about having a peaceful heart and mind, and accept what fate bestows on you. It took me so many years to realize I am way too ordinary to be like that. I can’t really see life so wisely. I am still confused and have no clue what I want, but for now, I just want you to be healthy, to come to this world safely. That’s what happiness means to me right now.

Dear Baby,

Today I was browsing on the Internet and came across a book written by one of my old internet friends LDL. LDL is a famous newspaper editor now. He wrote this book for his daughter. It is a very beautiful book, but I was having a hard time connecting this loving father with the LDL I knew. I guess everybody has to grow up, especially when they become parents. After all, it was about 10 years since I chatted with LDL and other friends in an internet chat room.

In 1999, my college days finally came to an end. I started working for an American company in Changzhou before I came to this country in July 2000. During that one year’s time, I spent all my spare time chatting online with my internet friends. We all met in a forum called "Reader’s Life." Everybody was in their mid to late 20s, intelligent, talented but extremely arrogant. Most of us were pro-western and pro-democracy, and largely affected by the 1989 incident in Tiananmen Square. Around June 4th, we became very emotional. The threads we posted were usually deleted by the Website moderators in less than one minute because of the sensitive topics, but we kept trying to post and save the articles before they were deleted. I will probably talk about 1989 in another time.

Rye is my first true best friend. At the time, I was in love with the book The Catcher in the Rye, and that’s obviously where Rye got his nickname from. I exchanged pictures with Rye before I left for America. That was one of the pictures ZB took for me. ZB is a photographer. He told me he wanted to capture the most beautiful moment of me on his camera. I don’t know if he was successful, but I did send the picture he took of me to Rye. Rye said on the forum: lala (my nickname) smiles like sunshine in California. After that, everybody started to call me Pretty Girl Lala. I met Rye in 2002 when I was in Beijing. Rye had a big party for me. When he saw me, he said I looked so different. I laughed and told him that the California sun was too strong for me. Rye is a CEO of a website now.
That year was the one of the most memorable times of my life. People who I talked to now are famous editors, journalist and book publishers. I obviously never read as many books as they did, nor was I a good writer, but I was able to pull some tricks once in a while. We used to talk to each other by writing poems. It is really not too hard, all you need to do is remember some classic lines. One night I used Ezra Pound:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.
That was considered a classic flirt for a long time. I am sure Pound would jump out of his tomb if he knew I was using his poem in this way.

Dear baby, I will tell you more stories about them later. It’s always a pleasure to talk to people who have the same interests and passions and who are at the same intelligence level as you, but in the end, it’s very hard to maintain friends with them because when you start arguing and fighting over things, most likely over stupid things, you know the worst way to hurt each other because you are all so much alike.

Getting back to Catcher in the Rye. I remember the first day I arrived at Changzhou, a strange city with no friends and family of my own. It was a rainy day. I walked 15 minutes to find a small noodle soup restaurant around 8pm at night. I was the only customer. Everybody was staring at me as I was finishing my soup as quickly as possible. Then I walked back to my apartment. I stood at my balcony, smoking my cigarette and drinking my wine, looking at the apartment complex like 50 feet in front of me. There were hundreds of windows, all lit up so you could see people walking back and forth, and you could hear the sounds of the TV, a piano, parents yelling, kids crying. Every window was like a movie screen, showing the story of the family behind the window. As I was drinking more and more, the screens became shaky, all I could think of was the ending of the Catcher in the Rye:

It began to rain like a bastard…All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carrousel, so they wouldn’t get soaked to the skin or anything…. I got soaked…I didn’t care though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden.. I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why…God, I wish you could have been there…

Dear Baby,

When I saw the dark line on the stripe, I went to get your dad. He was buried in the big couch watching the Lakers game on TV. I told him to come with me. “No no no no,” he didn’t move his eyes away from the TV, “Only one minute left in the game.” He was struggling with me as I dragged him to the bedroom: “Only one minute left. Please, just one minute!” I showed him the test result. “Oh, you are pregnant! I told you so!” before he uttered the last word, he was running back to his Lakers’ game.

Next, I called the doctor’s office. The lady told me I was pregnant in a monotone voice, after putting me on hold for about 5 minutes. I hung up the phone and called your dad. He said, "Oh, yeah, of course, I knew you were pregnant." Then I sat there, staring at the screen for a little bit. For the whole week, I felt nausea, dizziness and fatigue. I became a little annoyed at you. “Come on, be a good baby,” I touched my belly, “don’t be too hard to your mom.” Obviously you didn’t hear me, ‘coz I didn’t feel any better -J

My mom, your grandma was the happiest person to hear the news. She sighed with relief: “It’s about time. I had you when I was thirty, and you are the youngest.” Then she asked me what I wanted to eat. I really had no appetite at all, but out of nowhere, I remembered a flour bun soup I had when I was a kid. So I told her I wanted that.

At the dinner table, I tried one sip of my soup and complained it was nothing like what I had in my memory. “Maybe we don’t have the right type of flour,” my mom said, apologetically. I turned around and looked at her. Suddenly I was hit by sadness. She looked so old, standing next to the sink, waiting nervously to hear my comment of the soup. Her face was filled with deep wrinkles, and the hair color dye couldn’t cover all of her gray hair anymore. I had remembered when I was so sad that my mom was getting old as I grew up, now I am so used to seeing her as an old woman. I told her she cooked terrible food, puts too much salt, and she was always forgetful. I hate that she used an old wash rag to clean the countertop instead of a clean sponge or paper towels. I used to love my mom like she wass the only thing in this world to me! I looked at my mom. Memory brought me back to that Spring afternoon when my mom took me to my grandparents’ home. That was one of my happiest memories I had when I was living in the village. Yes, many many years ago, when my mom still had smooth, glowing skin, when she had long black hair flowing like a waterfall, when she was an attractive young woman, in a sunny, warm, breezy Spring afternoon, she held my hands, walked to my grandparent’s house.

It was such a beautiful day. The birds were chirping, the flowers were blooming, the chicken, ducks were aimlessly roaming around the road. The villagers greeted each other from far away, laughing together loudly. My mom and I walked along the river, across the bridge, climbed the hills, and passed several villages. My mom waved at the peasants who were working in the fields. “Busy?” She raised her voice and smiled at them. “No, busy doing nothing.” They would stand up, wipe their faces with the sleeves and greet her back. When she stopped to talk to somebody, I would grab the corner of her shirt and look around. My mom said I was always a curious child. One time her friend pointed at me, “Is this your youngest? She is so big already!” My mom looked down at me. She touched my head. “Yes,” she said, her voice was so gentle and sweet, “this is my favorite baby. She is big now! Time flies!” She messed up my hair a little. I felt her big, warm hands. I giggled, leaned closer to her. I don’t know why I remember this, but I just remember it, remember in that beautiful Spring afternoon, I was the happiest 5 year old girl, held my mom’s hand, talked and smiled to the people in the whole world.

Dear Baby, someday I will be old, just like your grandma. I will be nagging and annoying. Baby, I just want to you know, at one point of time, your mom is a pretty, lovely young woman. She talks a lot, she laughs, she is mean sometimes, but she is true to her friends. She is clumsy, she breaks stuff all the time, she is lazy but she is fun and playful. She enjoys annoying your dad, but she kisses him while he is sleeping. Oh, before I forget, she does curse and cry sometimes-J

I came to Los Angels from P.R.C about 8 years ago. I have never felt I am "different" in this ethnic melting pot until I joined the bureau.

One time I was chatting with a US attorney. I told her my mother never used any pain killer for her three kids. She delivered me at home in a small village in China. I never even had a birth certificate. The attorney looked at me, "A village in China? How did you end up becoming a special agent for the FBI?". I laughed, "well, I am sure the bureau was wondering about the same question."

Another time my squad mate, a Chinese-American, asked me if it was true that Chinese people sleep in the same room with pigs. He had that I-got-you smile on his face as he was waiting for my response. I answered his question with all seriousness. "Yes, " I said, " when I was living in the village, we did have the pigsti in the same room, right behind the bed. However, I don't believe it is common anymore." I was not offended. Why should I? It was not my fault that I had to live like that. Other than chicken eggs, those pigs were all we had to sell for food.

My son Michael was an ABC (American Born Chinese) too. He is very lucky to come home from a great hospital to his own well-decorated room. However, I feel the need to tell Michael how his mother, his grandparents lived their lives in a very different country. I hope he, or his children, would never talk to anybody, no matter where the person comes from, in a condescending way.

Yes, I am an American citizen now, and this country has my one hundred percent allegiance, however, I am still a Chinese in many ways. It was the Chinese history, culture and literature that shaped my personality. My life principal is heavily marked with a mix of confucius and daoism.

This blog is about me, my generation, my parents and above all, about China.

If you like what I wrote and wish to read more, please help me by using the amazon search box when you make a purchase on amazon.com. You can also visit my amazon store (mainly products relate to the topics I wrote or going to write) and my ebay store (just started. still under construction)by clicking the links right under the blog title. If you have any questions, or want me to write certain subjects, please leave me a message. Thank you for your help!