It wasn’t unusual in the 1980s and 90s for parents in China to leave their kids behind with grandparents in search of economic opportunities overseas. Anna Qu was one, and only reunited with her mother in New York at age seven after a five-year separation. A not unusual story then, up to a point: Qu finds that she was never going to be included in her mother’s successes. Her book Made in China: A Memoir of Love and Labor is much more about labor than love.

Qu’s father died from an unnamed illness in 1985 when she was only fifteen months old. It wasn’t easy to be fatherless in China, especially in a place like Wenzhou, where people were still struggling to feed their families. Qu recalls the only story her mother told her about the days soon after her father died. They went to visit her father’s family and instead of showing sympathy and kindness, the relatives spurned Qu and her mother.

 

There was a bowl of bananas on their table and I reached for one. They pulled it from my hands. We left with me crying and without being offered a glass of water, she always noted. My father’s death branded her a bad omen. Who would want to marry someone whose husband died within the first two years of their marriage? And even more to the point, no one would want to take on another man’s responsibility. Under China’s one-child policy, my mother had already had her child.

 

Thanks to a relative in New York, Qu’s mother was able to immigrate and build a new life in the United States. The plan was always for her to bring Qu over, once she had earned enough to support them. She found a job in a New York sweatshop and won the attention of the Taiwanese owner for her hard work. She also married him.

For most of the memoir, Qu tells of her Cinderella-like story, but instead of abuse at the hands of her step-parent, it’s dealt to her by her own mother. Qu is sent to work in the family’s sweatshop for months after school, forced to stay hours after her mother leaves by car for the evening. She must take a long train commute home, missing the family dinner with her half-siblings, mother, and step-father. She is treated as hired help, although the salary she earns all goes to her mother to cover her living expenses. Some parents threaten to send their children back to China if they don’t behave, and Qu’s mother makes good on this promise when Qu is in her early teens. Yet instead of sending her to her grandparents in Wenzhou, Qu goes to Xian to stay with the elderly parents of a worker in Qu’s step-father’s factory.

During the decade she lived with her mother, step-father, and half siblings—from the age of seven to seventeen—she tries everything she can to improve her conditions. Yet even the so-called justice system in the US fails her when she gives her guidance counselor permission to report her mother to child protection services. She also looks to Chinese opera to explain her circumstances.

 

In Chinese opera, all love stories end in tragedy and someone always dies. There are no happy endings because duty is more important. As my mother’s daughter, it was my duty to serve her, to obey and please her. I was aware of my fundamental flaw. My mother and I were at the cusp of being who we would always be to each other and there would be no happy ending for us.

 

Qu realizes that their troubled relationship goes back to the treatment her mother faced as a young widow. In order to shed that stigma, Qu’s mother felt she must free herself from everything that defined that time of her life. Starting over in the US meant finding work, but it also included re-marrying and building a new family. Qu, no matter how much she tried to please her mother, would always represent that old life in Wenzhou.

Made in China is difficult at times to read. Yet Qu is well aware that contentious mother-daughter stories are certainly not unique to her. The more she tries to understand her family background in China and the challenges her mother faced there and in the US, the more she finds a semblance of consolation in the way she was treated. Although she writes the following passage in reference to the child protection services report from her teens, it also seems the reason she wrote this memoir.

 

Fairness doesn’t apply to life. The expectation of justice is not a privilege with which I had been raised, and staring at the piece of paper, it occurs to me how black and white I have made my entire life out to be. I was going to get my justice; it was rightfully mine. How American of me.

---

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.