Homesick: My Own Story

"This is also a semi-autobiographical story. Whereas Bette Bao Lord was a Chinese girl who emigrated to the United States, Jean Fritz was an American girl who was born and grew up in China and then emigrated to the United States. Jean Fritz was very prolific as a historical fiction writer for young people in the latter part of the 20th century. This is a bit of a departure for her. She said that she tried to write a chronological kind of diary story and it didn’t come out well, so she turned it into a novelisation. The author was born in 1915 in Hankou, where her parents were missionaries. There was a lot of history that I didn’t really understand when I read it as a teen, such as the territorial concessions which European nations, the USA, and Japan had carved out. When I reread this book I was stunned at the politics, because what I remembered most clearly was how this American girl was going to a British school and had to sing the British national anthem every morning and how much she hated it. Living in Jamaica, my best friends had been born in Guyana, of very mixed heritage. They knew the Guyanese national anthem and the British one, and we all knew the Jamaican national anthem, but I didn’t know the American national anthem, which is one reason why I really related to this story. Actually, most of the action of this book takes place during fighting between Nationalists and warlords and Communists and there is a lot going on in the background. Jean and her family are hiding in their house while American gunboats are shooting at people on the docks who are rioting, and they have to get out. The backmatter in this book is brief but very clear. There’s also a copy of a letter that Jean wrote to her grandmother, who I don’t think she’d ever met until she moved to the US. And there are a whole lot of photographs of her and her friends and the local people that she hung out with. It’s fictionalised, but it gives a taste of what it was really like. It’s really interesting to see that history from a child’s point of view. She doesn’t actually seem that scared. Rereading the book recently I was expecting there to be some sensibility issues that would keep it from living up to the higher standards that we have today. I was surprised at how sensitive the book actually is. She does understand, even as a 12-year-old in 1925, that the Americans aren’t supposed to be there. That’s why they have these gunboats sitting in the port in case something happens. It’s a weird situation, and she knows that. When she gets to the States, the kids in her school say “Chink Chink Chinaman” to her and she tells them not to use insulting language about Chinese people. She is like a little ambassador, because that is where she grew up. In In The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson , Shirley is told by her parents that she’s “China’s little ambassador” going to the school. So the kids’ perspective, having actually been in these places, is broader and more realistic than the perceptions that their contemporaries at home have. Again, when I was younger and read this, I did not relate to any of the panic and chaos of being shot at as you leave. But what I really did understand was how desperately she wanted to go to school in America, to roller skate and pledge allegiance to the flag and wear a winter coat, because growing up in Jamaica I wanted to do that too. I had an unreal vision – based on books – of what it was like to go to school in the United States, and I could relate to that desperate homesickness for a place you’d never been, and never lived in. It really is weird, but that’s because your parents are telling you about this place. I, too, had a grandmother that I wrote letters to when I was eight years old, who sent me books. You have this tie to your past, and some people have to break that tie and others cling to it because it does give you a sense of identity. I think she realises that as she’s leaving China. There’s a moment on the ship to San Francisco when she stands looking back at China as the land is growing more distant. She has this sense not that she’s steaming away from it, but that it is rolling away from her. She realises that this is the only place she’s ever known, and that there are people there that she loves. There is one woman who is a very close confidante. They give each other presents when Jean leaves and she’s thinking that she is never going to see her again. Jean is fluent in the language, it is her place. I think she realises that she’s got this home that she’s deeply connected to, even though she’s heading towards the place she thinks of as home. She has this sense of belonging to two places, and I don’t think that changes when she gets to her grandparents’ farm in Pennsylvania where she spends her teenage years. Right away you see in her interactions with the other kids in Pennsylvania that she has a different perspective on China to theirs."