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Before dad hurt his back, he loved gardening.
Interestingly, for most of his life, Dad didn’t like to work with dirt because of his life experience in China. He was born into a farming family, and his grandfather was a well-off landowner. Since the Communist Party took over China in 1949, dad’s family has endured endless political persecution because the Communists regard landowners as class enemies. Dad’s family lost everything they owned. Like millions of Chinese farmers living destitute, Dad’s family couldn’t feed themselves no matter how hard they worked. Even though they lived on the land, they were not allowed to decide what crops to plant, and the government took all their output and redistributed meager amounts to each person through a rigid rationing system.
Dad is not the kind of person who bows down to fate. He fought hard to change his life (I documented his heroic efforts in my book, Confucius Never Said). Dad found a way to become a student at a vocational school in Beijing, the capital of China. When the Beijing government decided to create a new university by merging several vocational schools, Dad became the first college student in his village.
It seemed Dad had gained the upper hand against fate for a while. Then fate struck him even harder. During the Cultural Revolution, Dad was sent to a labor camp and tortured because of his "wrong" lineage—he was punished for being the grandson of a landowner. Understandably, Dad believed that the land was responsible for his and his family’s suffering. He didn’t want anything to do with it for the rest of his life.
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