Didn't know about your background original from the mainland. Did she tell you about the Culture Revolution and them Red Guards and all the screwups from the CCP/Mao that million and million of ordinary Chinese suffered from those decisions for years?
I never lived in the mainland. My very existence is in part due to the Commies forcing an exodus for people like her. I'm a late 80s baby. My good-for-nothing-but-his-genes father, if he were still alive today, would be 87.
The Cultural Revolution resulted in her educational advancement being ended. I do not believe she ever was one of the Red Guard, but was rather solely victimized because the extended family was actually well-off and had a substantial land holding in Shanghai. That would be parceled up wholesale and original family would get only a small apartment. And the government charges rent to this day for that space
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IIRC, my grandmother's sister(mom's aunt) was married to the tax collector of Shanghai in the old regime. Obviously, he bailed out of Shanghai as the there was a head on his target and ran off to Taiwan and got a new wife, leaving the ones in Shanghai behind. Not a really sympathetic guy, as he left his first wife out to dry after exile.
There was an internal argument within the family and apparently some neighbor snitched and basically detained the whole family. The pretense was listening to Western music. Her mother(My grandmother) and her sister(my aunt) were already in the hands of authorities when she came home. She went to the place of detention or somewhere, but because she wanted her mom to come home, they eventually detained her on the spot as well. It would be many months of being under watch. They only let her go because of health issues, as her belly ballooned up after a few months. The surveillance was non-stop 24/7. Not even when taking care of bathroom business did they cease watching.
The "music" you could be detained for would be to many of you, seemingly tame. Smuggling in Western goods was a thing, but the penalties were severe. Imagine my surprise when I bought Don Mclean's American Pie album solely for myself to hear the titular track again after 15 or so years and the she plays the CD and tells me she heard Starry, Starry Night way back when she was still in China. She also listened to Canadian Anne Murray. This is not what she would be listening to on radio; she actually tuned into country music station all the time when I was child.
For about the 20 years between her actual emigration and the start of the revolution, she said that she had tried to court a Japanese male to get out but he did not commit. She has made it clear that the conduct of the Japanese male infuriates her, and I believe that there is some justification and basis behind such an attitude.
When Nixon visited China in the 70s, the government issued instructions to the populace to say nothing was wrong about "our" conditions in China and it obviously was taken seriously as the government had the will to hunt down anyone who dared talk. The mode of operation for the government has not changed over time and if anything, technology has made it even easier to observe and intervene on the behalf of the government in charge.
Her landing here in the US is in part due to the large extended family having some immigrants already here. Namely, an uncle in New York would be her sponsor. She would work in a restaurant in Long Island for her brother or half-brother. Now, landing in the States is not some romantic happy ending. She would wind up dealing different forms of BS after landing here and marrying my dad.
The quick hitters for her post-States problems are:
lawyers sometimes do absolutely nothing even when you pay them.
Cops can outright deny something can happen if they feel you aren't a threat, via language barrier in her case. Sexual abuse, either by my dad or his son-in-law of my sister gets swept under the rug.
Putting your valuables in the same house as the husband means the husband can take them and give them to his favorite daughter from his previous marriage. The same with the money she herself made.
The state utilizes guardianship law for its own benefit. Namely to protect a nursing home from a lawsuit. And they tried to force my mom into a criminal plea bargain but my mom was acquitted in the jury trial. And there is no way that record would ever be expunged because they would let the state get away with it.
While the Communists there are on the whole, a totalitarian regime, there were a couple things that they were not entirely incorrect on. One spoken language is rather necessary for some degree of unity. To the outsider, the term Chinese implies a level of linguistic homogeneity that was simply not there between the provinces. The written language may be universal, but the so-called "dialects" are actually unintelligible langauges bound only by the written script. If you've dealt with a Spanish speaker who talks to you in English, but talks in Spanish with his buddies so you don't have a clue, that's exactly what happens when say, a Cantonese speaks with a Shanghaiese or any other language from a different province. The problem is there is active destruction of the local languages and cultural heritage to promote this "unity".
If there is a growing presence of Marxism anywhere, it usually means there are some actual problems the incumbents would be wise to tidy up by themselves before they actually takeover lest they turn into Cuba or China. Clean your room, or else they'll take a hammer to the drywall and utterly destroy it before "cleaning all of it up".