Motherland and Chinese Diaspora (1H Paper‪)‬

In 1975, Chiang Yee took a trip to China from April 15 to June 15. It had been forty-two years since he left China in 1933. Upon his return to New York, Chiang gave public speeches, showed slides at gatherings, and discussed the unprecedented changes he had witnessed in China. Simultaneously, he quickly recorded his thoughts and experiences, which came out in a book entitled China Revisited, posthumously published in 1977. On the dust jacket is his Chinese painting of Mao Zedong, sitting on top of the mountains and appreciating the surrounding beautiful landscape of the country. This China visit seemed to have been a transforming experience; Chiang appeared like an entirely different person after the trip. His close friend and colleague at Columbia exclaimed: "Chiang Yee has become a revolutionary." Indeed, Chiang Yee's viewpoints and his description of the experience in China in the book China Revisited are unusually candid and emotional compared to his earlier works. Now that thirty years have passed since the publication of the book, it is apparent that some of his views and understanding of China were not accurate for epistemological and historical reasons. Still those drastic changes after his visit prompt us to ask these questions: Had he really been converted to communism after the trip? How should we explain those sudden changes in him? What had been the cause of those changes, and what are the conclusions we may draw from that? All these questions are important because the answers may help us understand not merely the changes in Chiang himself only, but also some fundamental issues related to Chinese diasporas in general concerning their indissoluble bond to the motherland.