Third Culture Kid(s)

Posting those pictures yesterday really got me to remembering the trip. There were about fifty of us students in the group, and a prerequisite for our visit was that we each had to be accompanied by a parent. My mom went with me, and it’s still neat to me that we have that memory together.

My nametag (to be worn at all times):

When we arrived, we were given maps of Guangzhou, which featured a very Red river view on the front panel:

All the long signs - horizontal and vertical - are variations on the slogan “Long Life to Chairman Mao.”

The pamphlet itself is a great leap back in time (little Communist joke, there):

Kwangchow is an ancient city, it’s initial construction dating back to the 8th century B.C. in the reign of Emperor Yi of the Chou Dynasty. It is rich in glorious revolutionary tradition. In the last century’s revolutionary struggle, people here fought heroically and unremittingly against aggression and oppression by imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism. In the period of the old democratic revolution, Kwangchow used to be one of the principal areas where the bourgeois revolutionaries carried out the activities under the leadership of the great forerunner of the Chinese revolution, Dr. Sun Yat-sen. During the First Revolutionary Civil War in the period of the new democratic revolution, Chairman Mao, the great leader and teacher of the Chinese people, came to the city on many occasions to guide revolutionary activities.

[exhaustive list of the many occasions follows]

On October 14, 1949, Kwangchow was liberated and thereafter a new life opened up before the people. For the past twenty years and more, the working class and the people of the whole city, guided by Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line, have gone in for socialist revolution and socialist construction with considerable success. Having come through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which smashed the three anti-Party cliques of Liu Shao-chi, Lin Piao and the Wang-Chang-Chiang-Yao “gang of four,” Kwangchow is well on the way to a new big leap forward, growing stronger and more prosperous with each passing day.

[…]

Under the leadership of the Party Central Committee headed by Chairman Hua, the people of Kwangchow pledge to hold high the great banner of Chairman Mao, carry out the line of the Eleventh Party Congress and work still harder for fresh successes in socialist revolution and construction.

This was in the period before Mao had been, if not ever disgraced, then at least brought down several dozen notches; his image was everywhere. We saw a giant alabaster statue

and signs like this all over the city:

It was then kind of what you’d expect North Korea to be like now: people trying to go about their lives under the very watchful gaze of the Great (albeit dead) Leader.