Wang Yuanyuan

    cheekywang@hotmail.com

    WHEN “A Native of Beijing in New York” first aired on TV in 1994, viewers were moved by the characters’ life in the Big Apple.

    Twenty years later, another book, “Soaring Over America,” once again evokes Chinese people’s memories about those earlier tales of struggling days in the United States.

    The book, recently published in China, is written by Chinese-American Mandy Hu. It explores America’s immigration law by following the lives of Chinese-American immigrants.

    Highly regarded in Chinese literary circles, well-known Chinese author Jia Pingwa introduces the Chinese edition published by Chinese Writers Publishing House.

    The book is told from the point of view of a Chinese-American lawyer called Ji Shaoli, who settled in America around the year 2000.

    While working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, Ji meets an American woman and with the woman’s help Ji gets a full scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. After gaining her PhD degree in law Ji becomes a lawyer in New York.

    In love, Ji moves to Philadelphia and opens a law firm to help Chinese people get green cards. Ji hears stories about people’s hopes for immigration, including some she “can not understand at all.”

    Meanwhile Ji’s friends have different experiences of America, some marry good husbands and enjoy a great life, some run into trouble and struggle with whether to stay in the States or go back to China.

    “Stories told in this book are very real,” said book critic Ren Mengshan, a teacher with Communication University of China. “During my short stay in the United States, I met a lot of Chinese people living in Philadelphia, from top professors and well-known doctors to restaurant owners and poor kitchen workers. All of these people can find themselves in the book.”

    A book of sharing

    After graduating from Nankai University in Tianjin, Hu worked at the Tianjin Daily for three years. In 1995 she went to study in Singapore and published two books there. At the end of 1998, Hu got offered a job in the United States, and started a new life in North America.

    She met a growing number of Chinese people hoping to emigrate to America or stay in the country after graduation. She founded a company in 2001 helping Chinese people get green cards.

    “I heard a lot of Chinese-Americans’ stories, and they became a burden in my heart. I think I can set myself free only by telling these stories to others,” Hu said.

    Most Chinese-Americans Hu met were not as lucky as her. Hu heard about people who crossed through 30 countries, people who borrowed large loans to be smuggled and people with fake passports that flew to the United States by hiding themselves in luggage compartments.

    “I didn’t know why people want to pay so much to get to the United States, so I wanted to discuss this issue in the book,” she said.

    In Hu’s opinion, there are only two types of Chinese people in the United States, the well-educated elite and others who can not make a decent living.

    “I think many Chinese people have a misunderstanding about the United States. They think that things that cannot be solved in China can be solved in the United States, so they would like to give up everything to go to the United States. This is not right, and this is the advice I want to give to Chinese people in the book,” she said.

    For every Chinese family in the United States, the first-generation immigrants all pay big prices. “Because of the differences in language and culture, it is impossible for them to get into the mainstream of American society. Even the most successful ones still have the feeling of being outsiders,” she said. “Life in the United States is about lifestyle. If you choose this life, it means you have to live in other people’s home country and face everything on your own. I don’t want to deliver personal opinions through this book. It is just a literary work recording the true life of Chinese people living abroad.”

    Another book for

    young Chinese

    With the success of “Soaring Over America,” Hu is planning new books. The first, about Chinese people’s lives after settling down in the United States, the second about Chinese students and immigrants who migrated to America after 2000.

    “This new book is about Chinese students who were born after 1980. Most of these people came to the United States when they were teenagers and had quite a different life to us,” she said.

    Over recent years Hu met a lot of these newer immigrants in the United States, learning about their different stories and backgrounds. “They are quite different to us. Firstly, they have better financial support and don’t need to work part-time to survive. They come to the United States for university but enjoy more than sharpening their minds,” she said. “Moreover, their values and cultures are greatly affected by the United States. What kind of challenges they will bring to China after they return is something worth investigating.”