I would not be where I am now if it were not for the bravery and courage of my parents and grandparents before them to make the toughest decision of all to abandon their ways of life to move to a new country. Growing up in Canada, I had never realized how grateful I should be and have always disregarded my parent’s stories as part of their “nagging”. Now that I am older, I have come to see that they did struggle growing up and so did my grandfather.
In the mid-20th century, following the collapse of Germany and the emergence of Russia as a world power, their influence had begun to take hold immediately following the war. Their influence on Communist China resulted in the Chinese Civil War, in which my grandfather at the time lived directly across from Taiwan: the last stronghold resisting Communist China. With the Communists advancing, and the wealthy and intellectuals being targeted by farmers and other peasants, my grandfather fled as a teenager with his younger sister and mother to Vietnam.
The tale doesn’t end here, Communism crept southward and caught up to Vietnam in the 1950’s, when Northern Vietnamese guerillas were fighting U.S backed South Vietnamese troops. This ensued into a civil war in which the South collapsed in April 1975. My grandfather being a Chinese principal and my grandmother being a Chinese librarian were discriminated against harshly and stripped of their powers and given small food rations. Following this, my father saw no future for the family and fled in a boat bound for a Malaysian Island where he met my mother. In the early 1990’s he accomplished his goal of sponsoring the entire family to Canada and that was when me and my sisters were born.
In regards to Marxist analysis, I do hold a bias against communism, however I cannot ignore the inevitable truth that we as humans are living in a circle of the rise and fall of social classes. In my opinion however, at the end of the day, even if the poor do topple the elite, there will be someone who assumes full power and reasserts dominance on the people, thus reinforcing the circle of events.
Picture retrieved from: http://pandapirate.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/communism-would-you-really-rather-be-dead-than-red/
daviddtran 