Abstract
The three-generation history of Fang’s extended family spanned across the Republic of China, a turbulent Mao’s China and a post-market-reform China with exciting opportunities. Entering the profession of commercial journalism, Fang immersed herself in a culture of achievement and materialism. After a failed marriage and career exit, Fang’s worldview went through dramatic changes, from treasuring her childhood faith to embracing materialism with certain moral reservations, then to disillusionment with self-fulfillment, lastly back to deepening her spiritual allegiance to God. She went full circle like a prodigal daughter.
(Narration by Fang, age forty five, journalist)
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Notes
- 1.
The Twenty-Four Histories are also known as the Orthodox Histories in China, covering the period from 3000 BC to the Ming dynasty in the seventeenth century.
- 2.
Around mid and late 1990s, people in China had access to the Internet. Online chatrooms and forums emerged as active virtual communities, especially among college students and young professionals in urban centers.
- 3.
China’s communist regime categorized people into different “class elements” (jieji chengfen) or “class status” in society. The class status of the head of a family is the categorization of all directly related family members in that household. Its purpose was to differentiate the politically reliable classes (e.g. poor peasants) from the unreliable ones (e.g. petite bourgeoisie). For example, middle-school and elementary teachers were categorized as the latter. This method of classification remained in place until 1983. See Guocheng Li, A Glossary of Political Terms of the People’s Republic of China (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1995), 190.
- 4.
The Nationalist Party of China was founded in 1912. Its leadership included Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek.
- 5.
Communist transformation of ownership in land and industry proceeded slowly after China recuperated from the Civil War. Urban collectivization included confiscating privately owned estates and relocating people into collective housing units.
- 6.
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao identified groups as enemies of the Revolution, including landlords, rich farmers, counter-revolutionaries, bad-influencers, and Rightists. When the head of a household falls into such categories, children in the same family suffer social ostracism.
- 7.
The “sent-down youth” are also known as “educated youth” (zhiqing). They were young people, generally in their late teens, who willingly or under coercion left Chinese cities to live and work in rural areas of China. This sent-down reversed migration from richer to poorer areas lasted from the 1950s to the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). It resulted in truncated education, family separation, adaptation issues for this generation.
- 8.
Because of social discrimination, young people whose family backgrounds were classified as among “Five Black Categories” usually found it difficult to find marriage partners.
- 9.
The design of tube-shaped multi-family dormitory-style buildings was a product of China’s central-planning economy. Its use lasted for half a century, shaping the collective memory of a few generations in urban work units.
- 10.
This term refers to middle-school graduates in the three years of 1966, 1967, and 1968 from urban China. Most of this generation also participated in the Cultural Revolution as Red Guards. In the 1990s, this term popularized as part of a popular nostalgia. See Edward L. Davis (ed.), Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005), 440.
- 11.
Chinese Memorial Day in the spring according to traditional Chinese lunar calendar. It is a public holiday when Chinese people practice rituals of ancestor worship, such as burning fake money, incense, and kowtowing at the tomb.
- 12.
See Li Ma and Jin Li, Surviving the State, Remaking the Church: A Sociological Portrait of Christians in Mainland China (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2017), 22–27.
- 13.
In the 2000s, traveling to Tibet was considered as a spiritual pilgrimage among Chinese young people coming from a majority atheist background.
- 14.
The annual Spring Festival, also known as the Chinese New Year according to Lunar calendar, usually falls between late January and mid-February. It is the biggest occasion for family reunions in China.
- 15.
Since the Chinese regime blocked Skype, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the super-app WeChat, which was designed for easy monitoring by the government, filled the void with over 938 million monthly users in 2017. See Li Ma, Religious Entrepreneurism in China’s Urban House Churches: The Rise and Fall of Early Rain Reformed Presbyterian Church (London: Routledge, 2019), 11.
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Ma, L. (2019). Prodigal Daughter. 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_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31802-4_2
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