Postgraduate paper revives mother's hope

By Wu Jin
0 Comment(s)Print E-mail China.org.cn, July 10, 2014
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A postgraduate dissertation, written by a girl focusing on her mother's recovery after she was laid off caused professors' tears in thesis defense.

A girl who wrote her postgraduate dissertation on her mother's recovery after she was laid off has gained considerable attention.

A girl who wrote her postgraduate dissertation on her mother's recovery after she was laid off has gained considerable attention. 

"This is the most vivid paper I've read in this year's dissertation defenses," Guo Jianbin, a professor from the Journalism School of Yunnan University wrote on his Weibo (China's equivalent to twitter).

Jiang Yicheng, the author of the paper, revealed a generation's helplessness and difficult recovery following one of China's most vibrant market reforms, when numerous factories closed and millions of workers were laid off, through a portrayal of her mother Li Guizhen.

In Li's vivid memory, she was a proud broadcaster, who often worn fashionable slim trousers and loose suit jackets, in a uranium factory, tucked in a mountainous area 500 kilometers from Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province.

Li was born into a family in Guizhou Province, and her father took the whole family to suburban Yunnan in response to a national call to support the construction of less developed areas. With the migrant influx, the mountainous village soon flourished with grain shops, groceries, dancing halls and cinemas. But the prosperity only last a few decades.

The transformation of the economic model in the 1990s changed the destinies of the 2,000 workers in the village, most of whom had been laid off before the factory went bankrupt.

Li and her sister, sister-in-law and brother all lost their jobs.

Li's father died of silicosis in 1998. When he was dying, he told his children: "I brought you here, but now I can't bring you out."

Li recalled, in his late days, her father wanted to buy a 300-yuan (US$48) watch for her mother but eventually found he could not afford it. Nobody in the family could pay for the luxury.

The bitter memory pushed Li one day to tell her daughter, who later became a graduate student in the Journalism School of Yunnan University, "This major requires you to write well. Someday, you may write something about your grandpa and the uranium factory."

"Our factory was contributing to China's atom bomb test," Li said.

And Jiang bears her mother's words in mind, even though she was sometimes irritated by her repetitive talking. But when she worked on her paper, she started to understand her mother's constant nagging about her sacrifice and family austerity and her high expectation for her daughter's achievements. They are the results of a generation's regret for lost time and opportunities.

Li would have been able to receive a higher education but she gave it up for Jiang who was then only seven months old. A letter of admission to university could completely change Li's destiny after being laid off, but the opportunity slipped.

Having lost her first job, Li opened restaurant, grocery, and worked as a saleswoman in a bedding store, but none of the jobs lasted for a very long time. When her daughter became a postgraduate student, Li got a job as a dormitory keeper. She was not used to the laborious job at the beginning, because she had spent too much time at home. When she complained to her daughter about the job, Jiang gave no personal opinion but just encouraged her mother to follow her instincts and care little about gains or losses. Since then, Li has worked harder.

"Without a diploma, she has been despised and her interests have been ignored," said Jiang. "That's why she pays lots of attention to my education and hopes that I can enter a higher class through my educational background."

But before climbing her own social ladder, Jiang started to pick up her mother's past for her postgraduate paper. According to Jiang, her mentor recommended "Mind, Self and Society" by Gorge Herbert Mead to Jiang after hearing her mother's story.

To understand her mother's "self", Jiang lived even closer to her mother during her vacations, accompanying her whenever she was at work, at home or meeting friends.

She took the opportunity to understand her mother and her choices. "Choices are not easy to make because life is often filled with complicated causes and contexts," Jiang wrote in the appendix to her paper.

To complete her paper, Jiang visited the former uranium factory several times. Once she sat at the old site covered with weeds and mud, where there are several dilapidated buildings dotted with broken windows, and she imagined her mother's reverberating voice from the broadcast room which no longer exists.

"My mother is a powerless individual, like an oblivious particle in the big world. But at that moment I felt my mother was particularly strong. However vulnerable and helpless individuals are when facing the social tide in a particular era, we can defy, change and adapt to it," Jiang wrote in her paper.

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