Explaining a personal project in Poland

This story begins by killing two women. Maybe don’t read this with your breakfast cereal.

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My great-grandmother on my father’s side was bayoneted to death inside a kiln. She was trying to hide inside the family kitchen, but the Japanese found her and did what they did.

My grand-aunt, also on my father’s side, jumped off a bridge on her wedding day. She passed by some Japanese soldiers who then attempted to rape her. Apparently she decided it would be better to die, so she attempted to kill herself by throwing her body over a bridge. It sort of worked. The fall did not kill her, but it did break her legs, and she slowly drowned in the shallow river below. Someone must have seen this and told my grandmother, since my grand-aunt couldn’t have told the story herself¹.

My father told me these stories when I was in high school. It is one of the few conversations in my family I can remember. I do not remember the exact context for him bringing it up, but I remember the suddenness and the urgency in his voice, like he had been waiting years to say it.

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I’ve begun pursuing a project to learn about Poland’s 20th-century history and compare it with China’s 20th-century history². I plan on keeping it a relatively small, informal thing - I’m not looking to produce anything beyond blog posts / essays like this one. The subject is intentionally broader than something you could publish about, because I don’t know for sure what will matter to me. Tentatively I plan to focus on Polish family life in this time period and, more generally, how this historical gauntlet influenced the way that Poles treated each other - so I’ll be learning some sociology as well.

The project’s working title is “Hey Falcon, Hey Dragon” based on the traditional Polish song Hej sokoły, in which a cossack off to war says goodbye to his lover and his homeland³. The dragon bit is forced, and as far as I know, there’s no poem or song with a similar name in Chinese. For now, though, it’ll do.

It’s a strange project for an engineer. I’d like to explain.

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Most of what people say publicly about family is positive. Parents brag about their children’s accomplishments, children tease grandparents’ attempts to adapt to technology, orphans reminisce on how mom or dad used to react to the first snow of the year.

Of the remaining talk about family, most of it is starkly negative. Disownments, accusations, and deep-seated hatred burst forth all at once. I remember reading one father’s account of his psychopathic son and how the son’s actions led to the mother’s suicide and the father’s spiral into fathomless self-loathing. When skeletons come out of the closet, their teeth gape open and howl like the serrated jaws of wolves.

I cannot do either of these things because I do not know my family enough. In high school - in other words, by the time I developed enough intelligence and agency to start maturely reasoning about things - I mostly came to my house to sleep, occasionally to do homework too (most of my work I did during school or during breaks in extracurricular activities). I don’t think my family really knows who I am either, since I do not communicate most things with them except for logistical necessities. These things are my responsibility. There are many, many other things that were my father’s, mother’s, and / or brother’s responsibility; but in a setting like this where I am the author, it would be grossly unfair to discuss those things. Here, I may only reflect on my own character, as well as on what little I know.

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After the war comes another war, ending with red flags with hammers and sickles hoisted over Beiping. Then Mao⁴. My parents do not speak positively on Mao.

There is the Great Leap Forward, a few Five-Year Plans, the Cultural Revolution. I think my parents are born near the end of Mao’s life or soon after, placing them in the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. My father walks a mile and a half every day with the other village boys to bring back potable water. Both of my parents live as children of peasant families trying to survive off of the land.

Somewhere along the way, they meet. I cannot remember the exact dates they were born, but I can remember that they were born on the same year. Maybe they met in school, or maybe they were arranged to marry each other at birth. I don’t know. Either way, they get stuck together.

Both of them pass the 高考 (gāo kǎo). My mother completes an associate’s degree, even though she wanted more. My father completes a bachelor’s degree at a smaller local university, then moves on to a PhD (博士, or bó shì, in Chinese) at the University of Science and Technology, one of the C9 - the Chinese equivalent of the Ivy League. I do not know how he managed to get there, but based on the typical educational outcomes of Chinese peasant farmers, I can only assume it involved mountains and mountains of hard work.

It’s fair to ask why I know more of my father’s stories than my mother’s stories. That’s all I’ll say.

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Somehow it has become funny among children of immigrants to joke about what a hard time their parents had getting to school. Mom or dad tell their kid that they had to get up before sunrise and walk with a full backpack through snow or rain, and this becomes a subject for jest. On the one hand, this disgusts me - instead of spitting on their graves, it amounts to spitting on their memoirs. On the other hand, I can understand the underlying sentiment - why should it matter what the parents did? Why must the hardships of the father or mother dictate those of the child’s?

I can understand it, but ultimately I cannot agree with it.

It took until university, all the way until the final year of my master’s degree, to truly understand what my parents had given me. I had the privilege of teaching some of the best computer science undergraduates in the world, and some of those undergraduates came from abroad - Malaysia, India, China, and other places all around the globe. One of my duties was to communicate principles of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) to my students, and I wanted to include the international student experience as part of this discussion. In my research, I learned about the visa process for students and what they could expect if they wanted to find work in the United States. Take my word here with a grain of salt, as I am not an international student myself and will not be as familiar as they will on these topics.

Most international students come to the US on an F1 visa. This visa does not permit them to work outside their university and expires after their studies are completed. When a student graduates, a 90-day countdown begins during which the student must find work. If the student runs out of days, they are forced to leave the country⁵.

There are several ways for a student to stay, but the primary one is applying for an H-1B visa. Internationals cannot apply for an H-1B visa themselves but instead have to receive sponsorship by an employer. This severely restricts the potential companies an international student can apply to; most do not offer H-1B sponsorship because either they do not know how to navigate the paperwork or they can’t afford the fees. Even when a student finds a company they can apply to, they have to stand far above the competition to compensate for the paperwork and fees required to sponsor them. Keep in mind that an H-1B sponsorship is not the only option; however, it is one of the most common ways for a international student / employee to legally work, and without gaining employment from an H-1B employer or getting some other form of visa, it is not possible for an international to work outside their university regardless of how much they want to. In case you are wondering, getting fired means losing the H-1B visa and being put back on the 90-day countdown⁶.

I’m being careful with the wording here: having a company sponsor your H-1B application does not mean you get the visa. It gets sent to the government along with everyone else’s H-1B applications, and the government chooses which folks get to receive a visa⁷. So you might wonder: does the US try to give H-1Bs to the “best” workers? Is there some sort of work quota that an international worker has to achieve before getting the visa?

H-1B visas are granted by lottery. There is no rhyme or reason to the decisions. If an international worker does not receive a visa within a 2 or 3⁸ year period, they have to leave the United States. Even if they get the H-1B, the wait for a green card can last for years. If you’ve seen an international student classmate be more intense or more stressed about their academics than they “should” be, that might be why.

To the Americans in my audience, I’d like to ask: how much of that did you know? How much of that did you try to know?

And here I am, son of Chinese peasants, somehow getting to skip the line.

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It’s so alien to me that people can trust their parents. Sometimes I would ask people I trusted how they handled big life decisions, upticks in stress and downturns in mental health, or even basic problems like figuring out what cards to bring to the pharmacy. Every time the answer included “Well I asked my mom / dad / sister and they said…”, I would feel a swell of bewilderment and jealousy - it never stopped being shocking. A big part of me is angry for that, but the consensus I’ve reached with myself is that my upbringing was rougher because my parents’ lives were harder. The lives of Chinese peasants at the end of the Cultural Revolution were presumably harder than the lives of many of these sweet, doting parents showering their children with love and advice and affection⁹.

Is that true? Herein lies the central question for this project: how much of the feelings and experiences from the first 18 years of my life stem from the turbulence of Chinese history and culture in the 20th century, and how much of it resulted from the specific human beings who raised me?

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Close to 6 million Poles, or around 17% of Poland’s 1939 population, were killed in the Second World War. Imagine filling a room with all your classmates, coworkers, or the regulars at that one bar or coffee shop you like, and then imagine that one sixth of them are shot and killed. Repeat as many times as needed to kill 6 million people. That’s the idea.

Percentage-wise, China “only” lost 3-4% of their pre-war population¹⁰ (only one twenty-fifth or one thirty-third in that room). However, that 3-4% translates to somewhere between 15 to 20 million dead¹¹, which accounts for around one fourth or one fifth of all casualties in World War II.

In comparison, the United States lost around 419,400¹² people during World War II, which amounts to around 0.32% of the 1939 population. Additionally, the United States never experienced a full-scale land invasion during the war and hasn’t experienced one since the War of 1812¹³. I don’t think it’s good to compare suffering on a national level because that’s not the level at which suffering is felt; a dead Polish father hits with the same incomprehensible gravity as a dead Chinese father, as a dead American or Greek or Indian father. Still, it feels hard to find people in the country I was raised in who genuinely understand these stories.

My knowledge of post-war 20th century China is much spottier. I know the general outline as taught in American schools: the CCP seizes the mainland, Mao enacts reforms, lots of people die in economic and political strife, Mao dies, other CCP leaders take power and move away from his ideas. China opens up to the rest of the world and explores free market ideas in special economic zones; however, communism remains the political ideal, and the economy as a whole remains highly nationalized and controlled. At the turn of the century, China is still locked into communism under what the Chinese constitution calls a “people’s democratic dictatorship¹⁴”.

I’m similarly unfamiliar with Poland from 1945 to 1989. Under the Yalta agreement, Poland is given to the Soviet Union for Stalin’s continued military support in Europe and Asia¹⁵. It is not actually absorbed into the USSR - there was never a “Polish Soviet Socialist Republic” the same way there was a Ukrainian SSR, Georgian SSR, or Latvian SSR that was more directly under control by Moscow. Still, the resultant communist government establishes itself largely based on the influence of the occupying Red Army, and secret police maintain the communists’ control over a one-party state. The Solidarity movement of the 1980s¹⁶ eventually topples the communist government, and it is one of the instrumental instigators to the fall of communism in Europe.

Today, Poland is a western-style parliamentary democracy¹⁷ that little resembles the Polish People’s Republic of the communist era. When you discuss the past with ordinary Poles, the vitriol towards communism is palpable. By contrast, China has the same type of government as it had in 1952, with the same single ruling party in control. Political deviance is not accepted. It’s compelling to me that Poland and China have so many similarities¹⁸ in their history and yet have such starkly different outcomes.

When I applied to a Fulbright ETA position, I chose Poland over other European countries with university opportunities because I thought Poland had answers. Not for free, but I felt that if I dug in and searched, I could learn things about the past that I couldn’t learn on my own in America or China. I didn’t go into detail on my application because - well, one, because why would they care? They wanted good teachers and good “cultural ambassadors”. Two, it felt like a shameful thing to accept such a big-name position, integrate into a university and local community, then suddenly unload all this information and all these requests onto ordinary Poles who did not sign up for a dive into some kid’s family history.

So far, though, reception to my project by my Polish colleagues has been positive. More on that at a later point - but I’m hopeful for answers. Maybe the answer is in patterns stitched together by historians and sociologists who have made it their life’s work to remember. Maybe the answer lies hidden in a museum in Warsaw or Kraków or Gdańsk. Maybe the eureka moment will come from a Polish grandfather or great-grandmother who went through it all and can tell me what it was like. Maybe pieces come from all of these, and - I don’t know what I feel about this last one - maybe all they can tell me in the end is that there is no answer and it’s all meaningless patchwork woven from an uncaring universe. Still…

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I would not be doing any of this if I had a perfectly normal family. There are a few outcomes I could give if this were a formal history project: making the comparisons in the first place¹⁹, as well as providing a medium for Poles to learn about Chinese history and vice versa. But at the end of the day, the main reason I’m doing this is for myself.

Is it for my family? I don’t think it is; I don’t think I particularly care what they think about it.

I could have given this post a poetic ending by saying that this project is to write them a love letter. Or an attempt to reconnect, to journey 4,500 miles away from home and find my father, mother, and brother. Or something completely opposite - it’s me taking the chance to lay out the facts, condemn my past once and for all, and finally sever the fraying threads that tie me to my blood.

Honestly? I don’t know if any of that will happen. I just hope that at the end, there will be peace.

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Recommended music: Samantha Ballard - Castti, the Apothecary - Octopath Traveler II (Harp Cover)

1. If you are from a bloodline that did not suffer much in the Second World War, you might find this shocking and horrifying. However, if you read up on atrocities committed across China by the Japanese - and for that matter, German and Soviet atrocities committed in Poland - I don’t think that these two deaths are particularly remarkable. Per a famous American novelist, “so it goes”. ↩

2. Up to the victory of the Chinese communists in the civil war, the history of mainland China and Taiwan are intertwined. After that point, my focus will be on mainland China, as that is where my family is from. ↩

3. Could also refer to an uhlan, which is technically a different type of troop. Additionally, the song is about a Ukrainian soldier saying his goodbyes; it’s still a Polish folk song, and I think the reason for this is that modern-day Ukraine was part of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth at this point. Notably, Hej sokoły saw an uptick in popularity among both Ukrainian and Polish speakers following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022. ↩

4. Technically I’m a little out of chronological order here. Mao came to power long before the resumption of the Chinese Civil War and long before the Communists drove out the KMT. To my understanding, Mao became the de facto CCP leader after an event called the Long March, in which the military and civilian elements of the CCP retreated to Yan’an in northern China to avoid being destroyed by the Nationalists. ↩

5. This time is colloquially called OPT, though I think OPT technically refers to something more exact here. ↩

6. This paragraph refers to both internships and full-time work. Internships technically don’t require the H-1B, but usually companies will not take international applicants for internships if they are unable to sponsor applicants for full-time. This makes sense from the company’s perspective; why spend resources training someone if you’re unable to hire them afterwards? ↩

7. Note that the pool is more competitive the more people there are from your country of origin. As such, you are much less likely to receive an H-1B if you’re a citizen from India or China as opposed to say, Norway. ↩

8. STEM fields get an extra year, which is part of the reason there are so many Chinese and Indian students working on computer science degrees in the US (the other reason being relatively higher demand for workers, which makes it easier to find employment). ↩

9. I know some friends with healthy, loving families who had very difficult origins, but from my non-scientific observation these are exceptional cases. ↩

10. As I explain in the other footnote for this paragraph, this figure comes from Wikipedia because I can’t access proper sources at the moment. This is specifically the percentage of the 1939 population, which I’m not sure is a great figure to use here - 1937 was the year of the Marco Polo Bridge incident which is commonly used as the start of the Second World War in China. Intuitively with the size of the Chinese population, this shouldn’t affect the percentage significantly; however, note that several significant events with high casualty counts (including but not limited to the fall of Beijing and Shanghai, rape of Nanking, destruction of the dykes on the Yellow River) occurred before 1939. ↩

11. I have a US Department of State source for Poland’s casualty count, but I’m just pulling from Wikipedia for China’s figure. The page I’m citing includes citations to books that I do not currently have access to, and I can’t find quite find something in MLibrary’s online archives that gives me a concrete figure. There are some books and other secondary sources I am hoping to get next month²⁰ that I hope will fill in the gaps. ↩

12. About 405,000 military casualties plus around 10,000 civilian mariners and about 2,000 civilians in American colonies in the Pacific. I was surprised to see how few colonists were killed, although it’s possible that many of the dead from Japan’s expansion in the Pacific are being classified as e.g. native Filipino deaths instead of American citizen deaths. ↩

13. I think technically this is up for debate if you consider incursions into the United States during the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars. Regarding the former, the Battle of the Alamo occurred before the annexation of Texas, and from what I can tell Mexican forces never occupied significant amounts of American territory for significant amounts of time. Regarding the latter, I don’t know if Spanish forces even entered American lands (maybe territorial waters, but I haven’t looked too deeply into it). ↩

14. In the constitution I believe it is written as 人民民主专政 (rén mín mín zhǔ zhuān zhèng)。 ↩

15. You may know that the British had guaranteed Polish independence, which I think most Poles see in retrospect as a broken promise. A cursory glance over some sources suggests that Churchill did try to argue with Stalin about this. My understanding is that Stalin had decisive negotiating power because Stalin controlled how far the Red Army would go to defeat the Germans. Totalitarian allies are great for providing cannon fodder. It might not seem like China had the same experience there, but keep in mind that the US and the British were working with the Nationalist government. The casualties taken in the war by the Nationalists and their loss of mainland China can be seen as a result of the same flaky commitment by the west. ↩

16. I don’t like that there’s a 40-year gap in my understanding here. Like I said, this is part of what I want to learn about by conducting this project. ↩

17. If you’re plugged into Polish politics, you’ll know that PiS, the dominant party for 10 years, enacted a number of reforms that were regarded by western commentators as decidedly undemocratic. I wouldn’t put PiS on the same level as the CCP though, and either way it looks like a PO-led coalition has taken the reins away from PiS. ↩

18. It’s fair to ask whether the similarities are too shallow to count. I think this is something that requires more research, which hopefully this project can help with. ↩

19. As far as I know, there is no existing literature that attempts to make similar comparisons. ↩

20. The one that is the basis for most of my understanding is Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945 by Rana Mitter, who is currently the S.T. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. There are a number of other works by western scholars that also go in depth, but Mitter’s book is the only one I’ve read before this. I think there are important sources and perspectives that are only present in Chinese scholarship, but I don’t know how to access them, and my ability to read and search articles in Chinese is poor²¹. ↩

21. On a much lighter note, you can nest footnotes! ↩