The Cupertino Courier

Cover Story

Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer

Memories: Emily Wu's book, 'Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos,' was published in 2006. Wu's given name, Yimao, means 'feather' in Mandarin.

Innocence Lost

Writer recalls arduous childhood in China

By Joanne Griffith Dominique

Emily Wu lived in a treehouse in Los Altos in 1983, the year she began writing her book. She could barely afford the $150 monthly rent. She survived by working five part-time jobs and eating peanut butter.

"I was so hungry. I'd eat a spoonful of peanut butter to keep me going," says Wu, wrinkling her nose. "I can't eat it now."

Wu began writing her story about growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution while earning a bachelor's degree in English from the College of Notre Dame in Belmont (in 2001 the school changed its name to Notre Dame de Namur University).

In 2006 Random House published her book, Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos, co-authored by Larry Engelmann, a professor of history at San Jose State University. Wu's given name, Yimao, means "feather" in Mandarin.

"I was determined to tell the world the story," says Wu, 48, while having afternoon tea in the living room of her Cupertino home.

When she began her book, Wu had been in the United States just two years. Memories of her childhood and youth in China--a period she describes as "a time of revolutionary upheaval, brutality and inhumanity" --were still fresh and raw.

During the 23 years that Wu worked on her book, she traveled five times to China, earned a master's degree, married, bore two children, developed a career, moved to Cupertino, divorced and was featured in a documentary film about her youth.

Wu wants her memoir to serve as "a reminder and a memorial to all of the children lost in the chaos and to all of those who, even though they survived, were robbed of their birthright, innocence and happiness."

'Educated youth'

Wu was born June 3, 1958, in China. When she was 3 her mother took her to visit her father, Ningkun Wu, who was in a concentration camp. He had been imprisoned because he was an intellectual and a popular professor. He had earned a doctorate degree in English literature from the University of Chicago in the 1950s.

He spent most of Emily's childhood in and out of prison. For his "crime," his family was punished by getting smaller housing, fewer food rations and more distant medical care.

Wu also received less because she was a girl. "The best food, the best everything, in our household and others like it, was for the boys first and for the girls last." Wu had two brothers: one older, one younger.

On June 4, 1966, a more violent phase of the Cultural Revolution began with a Communist Party policy of eradicating the four "olds:" old thought, old culture, old customs and old habits.

Soldiers came for Wu's father, the Red Guards initiating the Red Terror. The sins of the father were visited upon the children. She was tormented at school. She found a dead rat in her desk. Children stalked her and beat her up.

Soldiers burned books or used them for toilet paper. Sometimes Wu would find a book that lay outside a bonfire or outhouse. She saved them, carrying them home in secret.

In 1968, Wu's mother, Yikai Li, in a program of cleansing class enemies, was sent to the countryside. The children were left behind to live at the state-run school. "I became a parent to my 5-year-old brother and a guardian of my 12-year-old brother. What remained of my childhood was over. I was 10 years old," Wu writes in her book.

They had no hot water, and soap was rationed at one cake per month per family. "Whatever happened to the Five Haves they promised us?" Emily's mother wondered: have a house, have a stove, have a water jar, have food, have a salary.

Once Yikai Li was settled in the countryside, Emily's brothers joined their mother, and Emily was left alone. "I'd been taught to believe about Chairman Mao and the Party. It dawned on me that it was all lies... I saw the unhappiness of everything and everybody," Wu writes in her book.

In 1969, the Wu family, without their father, was sent to Gao Village. Emily went to school by day and then to work: collecting animal waste for fertilizer. They lived in Gao Village for almost five years--"a long nightmare,'' says Wu.

Back in the city she was sent home from school because she was barefoot. But the family had no money for shoes, so Wu found a man who would buy her braids. "Thick and heavy, very good," the vendor said. She received five yuan and bought a pair of black plastic shoes for four yuan and fifty fens.

Their new home was a church they shared with seven other families. There was one public latrine for 200 families that was a five-minute walk uphill from the church. Water came from a single faucet outside the church.

School alternated with working four weeks in a factory. Wu was excited to be assigned to a factory that made flavored ice on a stick. She thought she'd be able to all of the treats she wanted until she learned that her job was to pick the rat droppings out of the red beans used to color the finished sticks. She never ate a single one. After four weeks, it was back to school and classes in math and chemistry.

After finishing school on March 23, 1976, Wu was shipped to the countryside with other "educated youth." She was dropped off at the end of an all-day truck ride. Then she had a two-hour climb up a mountain trail to a remote area.

From the 1950s to 1980, when the "educated youth" program ended, the Chinese government sent more than 17 million urban middle school students "up to the mountains and down to the countryside" to become peasants and farm workers.

Wu and her roommate, Dongmei, lived at the school where they taught, a four-room building: two classrooms, a kitchen and their room. "We were lonely and homesick... Our childhoods had been stolen," Wu writes.

Wu fell in love with Yiping, another "educated youth" teaching in a nearby village. "We sustained each other. We gave each other hope," Wu says.

But a letter came from Wu's aunt advising her against marrying Yiping. "With a married life in the mountains... there will be no hope for a return... Do not waste your life!"

Her aunt also told Wu that her parents were like "feathers in a storm, blown from one place to another without any control over their lives." Emily broke off her relationship with Yiping.

Mao Zedong died in September 1976. The 10 years of social chaos and political anarchy were coming to an end. There was a new policy of college entrance exams. There had not been any for 10 years so there was a huge wave of students--the lost generation--wanting to take the test. Only the top 2 percent would be admitted to college or university.

Wu and the other 300 "educated youth" from her commune studied frantically for the two-day exam. Study was the only way out of the countryside, Wu says. She was the only one who passed. Many then lost all hope. Dongmei jumped off a cliff near their school.

The book ends with Wu on a bus, leaving the countryside.

A new life

Just a semester shy of graduating from college in China, Wu was offered an opportunity to study in the U.S. A friend of her father's from his days at the University of Chicago offered to sponsor her. They had already sponsored her older brother, who got a full scholarship to Stanford University. People in China advised Wu to get her degree before leaving for America.

"But I saw what happened to my father. I had to go now or be stuck there the rest of my life. I gave up everything to come to a free country. I came with $30 in my pocket. It was very difficult,'' says Wu. It was 1981.

The first year Wu lived in Palo Alto with her sponsoring family. The next year she lived in Redwood City as a nanny. She was learning to speak English and was going to school. She graduated in 1983. Even though her parents both taught English, it was a crime to speak English at home in China.

Wu wanted to stay in the U.S., but she needed a special skill. So she enrolled in Golden Gate University, where she earned her M.B.A. in 1985.

"I was the luckiest and the unluckiest, both," she says. In business school, she didn't know how to write a check. She needed a computer but had never worked on one. She had no marketable skills and didn't know how to go about getting them. And her student visa was coming to an end.

While in graduate school, she lived in the treehouse in Los Altos, "my little bird's nest." The owners ran a wire out to the treehouse from the main house. They put a toilet, sink and shower in a little shed in the backyard. In another little shed there was an oven and refrigerator. "Incredible, isn't it?" Wu says of the arrangement.

Then she got a postcard from Great Expectations, a dating service. She got on her bike and rode to its offices. She bargained their price down to $50.

There she met her future husband, an engineer with Hewlett-Packard Co. They were married in 1985. With marriage, a green card is automatic. The couple had two children, Erik, now 18, and Jasmine, now 16. The marriage lasted 14 years. In 1990, Wu became a U.S. citizen.

Wu worked for several big companies, including H-P, Apple and Sanmina. She stopped working to finish her book.

Before she finished it, Chris Billing, a documentary film maker in the Washington, D.C., area, contacted her. He wanted to make a film about the "educated youth" of China.

Billing featured Wu and two others in his film, "Up to the Mountain, Down to the Village." In 2004, for the film, she and her two children returned to the village where she had spent her seven years as an "educated youth."

"I cried the whole time," Wu says. "People are still living substandard lives, in the country and the city. There are no jobs."

Wu took her children with her because "I wanted them to see that there is another world than their luxurious life here in the U.S.

"This is where I survived," Wu says in the film as she looks around the village. "My kids would die before they would spend a night here."

Erik liked his mother's book. "It was easy to read, but really sad, living as she did. It sounded so awful. I don't think I could hang... What amazes me is that my grandpa can still be so positive when he lived in a concentration camp where most of the people who lived with him died."

Today in the Bay Area there are about 300 members of the American-Chinese Educated Youth Association, said Nancy Zhou, chairwoman of the organization. The group formed in 1998 on the 30th anniversary of the year many were sent to the countryside.

"Almost everybody (in the association) is very successful. They work hard and can deal with anything," Wu says.

And, if an obstacle comes up?

"Big deal. We've been to the bottom," says Wu.

For more information about the film, "Up to the Mountain, Down to the Village," visit the film's website www.uptothemountain.com or e-mail info@uptothemountain.com Currently Billing is selling DVDs of the film only to libraries and universities. But he said he is happy to put names on a list for future sales.