10/9/2026
To my children and grandchildren, I want to tell you this piece of experience that you may find difficult to imagine.
I grew up in Tianjin, China, and I lived through the years of the Cultural Revolution. You grew up in America, in a very different time and place. I don’t expect you to fully understand what it was like to be a child growing up in China during those years. But I would like you to know a little about what I experienced personally.
When I was in middle school, “为人民服务” (Wèi rén mín fú wù), or “Serve the People,” was a very common and important slogan. It's very much like today's politically correct slogans. We heard it everyday, and it was part of the environment in which we grew up. People were supposed to accept it without question.
At the time, I had a simple question: Why should I serve the people?
I remember asking about it during one of the so-called heart-to-heart talks with a class leader, 班干部. The leader explained to me that farmers grew the grain that we ate and workers made the clothes and other things we used. Without them, we would have nothing.
I argued that my parents bought our food and clothes from stores. They bought what we needed. I didn’t see farmers personally giving us food for free or factory workers personally making our clothes for us.
Today, this may sound like a very ordinary question. But at that time, questioning the slogan was not taken lightly. I was criticized for it.
I don’t remember exactly what people said to me. What I remember is the feeling that my words didn't sit well with her.
Around that time, many of my classmates were becoming 红卫兵, the Red Guards, indicating one was politically progressive. I also applied to join. I wanted to be accepted like the other students. But I was never admitted.
To this day, I don’t know exactly why. I only know that I was excluded while many others were accepted. I remember this because it gave me a hard time then, especially because I felt strong pressure from my parents to become a Red Guard.
I probably didn’t fully understand the larger political events around me. I was still a minor, trying to fit in with my classmates, and trying to make my parents proud.
Looking back now, I don’t think I said anything wrong.
But that is how I remember those years: there were things we were expected to believe, and sometimes asking too many questions could bring criticism or make you stand apart from others.
I am telling you this because it is part of my life that you cannot learn from a history book alone.
