This time it all began with Wu Mei questioning her future. Her parents felt as though they couldn’t keep her any longer and were wondering where they were going to send her next. She went to school the next day feeling ashamed and scared. She was afraid of what the people would think of her and her new position and was wonderfully surprised when she noticed how friendly and kind they were being toward her. But everything didn’t always turn out good for Wu Mei. When she came home she saw the maid packing up all of her clothes. Her Aunt Baba came home early that day to say goodbye to Wu Mei and to remind her that with excellent grades she could become anything that she wanted to and promised each other many things before they set out into their own directions.
Wu Mei was send to an orphanage in Tianjin. When she was on her way there she noticed that the airport was unusually crowded and all the people were flooding into one direction. Since there is a war with the communists, all the people are leaving Tianjin and are heading to Shanghai which is where they just came from. When the nuns heard this they thought that she must have done something very bad for her parents to punish her like this, but they didn’t know the truth. Week after week the people in the school were getting smaller and smaller until it was only Wu Mei left alone by her with the teachers in the now abandoned school. One day one of Wu Mei’s Aunts Reine came and took her out of the school and told her that they were taking her along with them to Hong Kong because Tianjin was no longer safe. During the Journey with Aunt Reine and her family Wu Mei felt very welcome. She described it as being as their third child. Since she was always used to being put down and not being treated equally, she was very appreciative of the family giving her the love and care that she always wanted.
When she came back home, she was ignored by everyone except for her grandfather, Ye Ye. She put her stuff away in his room before Niang changed her mind again and sat with her grandpa and started reading the newspaper to him. She forgot some of the Chinese words and her grandfather became surprised. She replied by telling him about how she didn’t want to learn Chinese and thought that the only thing she needs to succeed was English. He then gave her a lecture about never forgetting her culture and where she came from, because however much English she knew wouldn’t change the fact that she was always going to be a Chinese girl. Afterward, she was sent again to another boarding school. She hated the fact that everyday people got eggs and their families came to visit them and no one ever came to see her. She hated being the only one who was alone reading a book in the library while everyone else was having a good time with their mothers, but she always remembered that she was the daughter that nobody wanted.
“You may be right in believing that if you study hard one day you might be fluent in English. But you will still look Chinese, and when people meet you, they’ll see a Chinese girl no matter how well you speak English” (Mah 151).
This quote by Grandfather Ye Ye demonstrates to us that no matter how hard or how bad your life may be you can change it to become a better one for yourself, but you cannot erase who and what you are to begin with. You can try to become someone that you aren’t, but when people look at you their going to see the real you not what you pretend to be.
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