There are two articles of clothing.
A hand-me-down white, collared dress shirt with the pockets ripped off, the frayed threads reaching upwards. A handmade cloth shoe (布鞋) made up of scraps of mismatched fabrics, the stitching handcrafted by wire. These articles of clothing are the clothes of Ba and woven into the fabric of both are the stories of his childhood.
When Ba was 11 or 12, he tore the pocket from his collared shirt. Trying to contain the smirk that tugged at the corner of his lips, he slapped the collared shirt down in front of his Ma, my Nainai. He must’ve practiced his speech countless times. His argument was simple: “The old shirt doesn’t have a pocket. I need a pocket because I’m student [sic] and need it to hold pen [sic]. So I deserve- I am justified in needing a new shirt.” (This argument was recited word for word over the phone; he’d practiced it so much that 37 years later, the argument was still engraved in his memory.) He was confident in this argument the way most 12-year-old boys are confident: boldly and unabashedly. He was confident that he had found a loophole in his Ma’s no-new-clothes rule.
As the youngest child of four siblings where two were older brothers, he rarely owned anything of his own. All his clothing – two pairs of khaki trousers and two white collared dress shirts – always belonged to someone prior to him. So owning his own set of clothes even if they looked the exact same was a twelve-year, life-long goal for him.
Imagine his surprise when his Ma informed him that they were too poor to buy him a new shirt with a pocket so he’d “need to deal with the old shirt without pocket [sic].” As my dad remarked in a boyishly sheepish manner over the phone, “I used to have a shirt with pocket [sic]. Now I don’t even have pocket [sic].”
Aside from the pocket debacle, Ba never had a single article of clothing to his name during his childhood with the exception of a pair of hand-made cloth shoes (布鞋). He received a pair of shoes like clockwork every Lunar New Year. The shoes weren’t anything fancy. The front of the shoes was made up of left-over scraps of cloth. The bottoms of the shoes were a stack of clothing scraps stitched together with wire.
The shoes were shoes made up of leftovers. But they were his shoes.
When talking about the shoe, Ba’s voice morphs into a dreamy satiness. Because he “can have one pair of shoes that’s new, that can be mine [his]”. These shoes were “new shoes my [his] mom hand-made for me [him] that’s the only thing new in my [his] whole childhood…even though it’s leftover from all clothes making.” These shoes were “the only thing new made for me [him], the only thing I [he] look[s] forward to every school year.” The shoes were the only thing he ever owned as a child. They were made with love by a Ma who was never the best at expressing love. The shoes were a language of love that was shared by Ma and son.
The clothes Ba wore, khakis and white dress shirts, were not a statement of how elite and fancy the villagers were in the 1970s. Rather, they were modeled after the uniforms of the Red Guards or the military suits of Mao’s Red Guards. In the winters, even the villagers would dawn the Red Guard’s military jackets. But the added benefit of his childhood uniform was that it was cheap, which was an integral deciding factor for a peasant farmer mother and a poor schoolteacher father. The five-button white collared dress shirts and khaki pants were easy to produce so they were incredibly cheap, cheap enough that my YeYe and NaiNai could afford one or two pieces of clothing for their four children. At the time, there were no jeans.
The lack of freedom in dress and fashion was largely due to the Liberation War (1945-1949), which forbade individuals from dressing freely. Mao and his Red Guards were focused on “eradicating the legacy power of the bourgeoisie, specifically those who owned private businesses before the liberation, and to build a completely new socialist country.” (Tsui 15) Clothing has always been a political statement for the Chinese people. Even during the Revolution of 1911, people divided themselves into two camps: those in Western-style suits who supported the new Republic and those in Qing dynasty costumes who supported the old empire. (Tsui 4)
Thank you for reading A Family and Country’s History Part 3 by Amanda Chen! Stay tuned for more works by Amanda in the future and read more about her here. The fourth part of A Family and Country’s History is scheduled to be published next Friday, July 22nd, 2022.