Real Americans

Although family dynamics remain at the forefront of this novel, Khong engages with several key historical moments from the history of 20th-century China to explain the impact that Mao and his policies had on Chinese immigration to the United States. Both Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution shape the early events of May’s life and are ultimately responsible for her choice to leave China and pursue a life and a career in the United States.

The Great Leap Forward

Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958-62) was a social and economic campaign meant to rapidly move the People’s Republic of China from an agrarian to an industrialized economy. Although launched as an improvement campaign, the Great Leap Forward resulted in a disastrous famine that claimed the lives of millions of Chinese citizens. It is one of the largest famines in human history. During this period, Mao introduced agricultural collectivization, creating state-owned, conglomerate farms that were saddled with massive production quotas. Mao hoped that the quotas would encourage increased agricultural activity and that the new collective farms would be both self-sustaining and an important source of grain for China’s major cities. Because farmers were required to send so much of their state-owned crops to urban areas, food shortages became common, and the kind of hoarding that May describes in her community became the norm. Mao additionally began to limit freedom of movement, persecute intellectuals, and abolish long-standing peasant traditions. He ignored economic expertise as it pertained to agricultural policy and set quotas that did not take into account the actual production capacity of the collective farms. Khong’s depiction of Mao’s campaign to kill sparrows and other pests that regularly consumed crops is also historically accurate: The Four Pests Campaign sought to eradicate flies, mosquitos, rats, and sparrows in hopes that pest reduction would stimulate crop production. The result of this campaign was the complete disruption of rural ecosystems, which actually increased pest populations and was one of the key factors in the lead-up to the famine.

The Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a sociopolitical movement that took place within the People’s Republic of China between 1966 and 1976. It sought to bolster Chinese communism by purging Chinese society of its capitalist, counterrevolutionary, and traditionalist elements. These purges were characterized by extreme violence and brutality and were perpetrated mainly by China’s Red Guards, an army of youthful, ideologically motivated soldiers who sought to transform Chinese society by replacing old, established power structures with new revolutionary committees. Khong’s depiction of May’s cousin’s role in the Red Guards reflects the actual makeup of the brigades, and her willingness to denounce and subject her own family member to violence is also historically accurate. The Red Guards targeted academics, intellectuals, government officials, scientists, and other members of the country’s ruling class and intelligentsia. Millions of Chinese citizens lost their lives, and even more were subject to persecution. Many of the nation’s schools and universities were shuttered, as it was believed by the Red Guards and their supporters that universities were sites of indoctrination that kept reactionary ideology alive within Chinese society. These universities remained closed until 1972. Museums were pilfered, and China lost countless cultural artifacts to marauding bands of Red Guards.

The gains of the Cultural Revolution included lower-level education such that nearly all children received primary and middle school education. This included new educational opportunities for rural children in particular, though children in urban areas lost pre-revolution opportunities. Poor, rural Chinese communities also gained access to cultural productions like opera and films, though many traditional productions were considered bourgeois and were banned, and artists who produced work that was considered counterrevolutionary were persecuted. In 1981, China’s Communist Party publicly acknowledged the failures of the Cultural Revolution and admitted to the extrajudicial brutality of its practices and the adverse impact it had on Chinese intellectual and scientific communities.