"If you can find a place to stay in your hometown, if you can have a job to support your family, who wants to leave your hometown?" This sentence is most appropriate for the original generation of American overseas Chinese immigrants.
In China's turbulent and mournful era, being able to travel to the United States to earn dollars, send money home to support a family and buy a house and land is extremely tempting for the Chinese who are out of prison and hungry and cold.
On this trip to another country, it is the greatest consolation to be able to return home, and if not, it is also a great honor to be able to make a home in the United States. However, behind this, it is necessary to pay the unbearable pain and bitterness of ordinary people, and even have to pay the price of life for it.
This is the fusion of the East and the West, the first generation of American overseas Chinese immigrants, and the joy and sorrow of the Feng family in Lin Yutang's "Chinatown" for decades.
The Chinese who worked outside the country were discriminated against, burned, and treated as second-class citizens, doing the dirtiest and most tiring work in New York, doing cooking and laundry workers that Americans despised and did not want to do, getting up early and working in the dark, day and night, just to earn that little bit of hard work.
Father Feng's hands were soaked white in the laundry sink, and the narrow basement was the hope of the family's future. Every day I get up at dawn and work until midnight. The next day, before dawn, he got up and went to work. There is no vacation, only the friction and labor between the hands that cannot be stopped.
Thrifty and business-oriented Chinese eventually relied on his diligence and wisdom to gradually gain a foothold in the United States and around the world, accumulating considerable wealth.
During the period when China was invaded by the Japanese and Kosovo, these Chinese people who were far away in the United States did not hesitate to donate to the motherland the savings they had accumulated over the years and every penny.
Because they know that only when the motherland is strong can they really gain a foothold in the United States, and at that time, weak China suffered from war and chaos, and could not be their strong backing, but this did not affect their patriotic heart.
"Although I wear a dress, my heart is still Chinese."
Chinese wherever they go, they are so united and fraternal, in Chinatown, clan settlement is a common thing, they support the same surname of the elderly, they spread the unique wisdom of the Chinese to the United States, their thrift, thrift, peace-loving ideas scattered on the United States.
The combination of old and new cultures, the integration and conflict of tradition and modern civilization, are vividly reflected in the Feng family. However Chinese treat the people and things around him with a unique tolerance, and finally create wealth with his own hands and win the respect of the world.
At that time, the Chinese who were working outside the country were really hard, doing the dirtiest and most tiring work, only trying to feed themselves, and the character of patience and restraint was their way of doing things.
I am thinking that now that the motherland is stronger, the Overseas Chinese and overseas Chinese can live better and straighten their waists in front of foreigners. Because the motherland will always protect them, we have the same blood in us, we are all Descendants of Yanhuang, just like Mother Feng, teaching our children that you are Chinese and cannot shame Chinese.
Even if it is far away in the United States, they are always Chinese in their bones.