The Chinese Mother

I am reading a book "Street of Eternal Happiness" by Rob Schmitz, a foreign journalist who lives in China. The book gives accounts and life stories of several people living or working in the same street in Shanghai where the author resides.

One particular account is about a florist who migrated to Shanghai many years ago from a small mining town in the rural region of Shangdong and at such is a wai di ren  外地人 ie.not a local. Leaving her 2 sons in the care of her miner husband to seek a better future for the family, she started off as a factory worker. By the age of 32 she was retrenched because hordes of younger Chinese women were flooding to the cities. Fortunately she apprenticed under a kind elderly couple in a flower shop and eventually started her own florist.

When financial circumstances got better her elder son joined her in Shanghai and did extremely well in middle school which would have gotten him into an elite high school in Shanghai which was a stepping stone to top universities. Unfortunately when discovered that he was a wai di ren he was told that he could only enroll himself in the high school in the province where he came from and where he could sit for the entrance examination into colleges. Thus he went back to his province but was in for a rude shock. He had expected a breeze in the rural high school having been among the top students in the Shanghai middle school. Instead he found himself almost at the bottom of his high school class. It turned out that the provincial schools had raised the standard of their school syllabus and raised the level of difficulty of the school exams to sieve out the elite students from the massive cohort in the province. Demoralised after failing school exams the boy turned to computer games and eventually dropped out of school; and like his mother would return to Shanghai as a migrant worker.

Meanwhile the florist's second son had exhibited what was termed as "left behind children"'s symptoms, withdrawn and anti-social. It is estimated that China has 61 million of 'left behind children" and doctors are beginning to notice many psychological problems surfacing in these children. Rightly or wrongly the florist's second son was said to be autistic and was sent to a special school miles away from both parents.

The florist lamented to the author about feeling guilty for what she deemed as ruining the lives of her children despite her being definitely more well off  than  her friends and neighbours in Shangdong. The author described her as feeling responsible and worrying incessantly for her children. He  quoted her saying "Chinese people just can't let things go . We always live for others, for the next generation. It's endless......Sometimes I wonder whether if there will ever be a day when I start to live for myself."

For most mothers of Chinese origin I think the answer is 'No' whether they are in China or in other parts of the world. It is like some collective consciousness moulded into the DNA.