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ink, jeering at them, and in some cases torturing them, forcing them to eat excrement or kneel in ground glass. Soon marauding bands of teenage Red Guards were burning books, destroying artworks, defacing monuments, and assaulting scholars and intellectuals. It was a bizarre, dystopian interlude in China’s history, a bout of state-sanctioned madness in which the young indulged in a destructive kind of
Clockwork Orange
frenzy.
    Sister Ping was not an especially political person. But she was anatural leader, and before long she had donned green, military-style work clothes and a red armband and become a leader of the Red Guard. No record exists of her activities during these cataclysmic, often violent years, and in later life she would be reticent about discussing it. “That was the trend. I had to go with the trend” was all she would say of her participation. “Gone with the old to welcome the new.”
    M ao had always been suspicious of Fujian, for reasons that perhaps were understandable. It is one of China’s smaller provinces, a mountainous sliver of coast far from the official influence of Beijing and directly across the strait from Taiwan. It has always been one of China’s most outward-looking regions, home to seafarers and traders, smugglers and explorers: a historic point of embarkation. Over a millennium of isolation from the rest of China and exposure to the outside world, the region and its people developed an adventurous, somewhat maverick sensibility. In the thirteenth century Marco Polo visited the port of Fuzhou and remarked on the great quantities of its chief exports, galangal and ginger. (He added that the people of Fuzhou were “addicted to eating human flesh, esteeming it more delicate than any other,” but Marco Polo was not famed for his accurate reporting.) According to legend, a seven-foot-tall admiral named Zheng He set sail from Fuzhou a half-century before Columbus with an armada of 3,000 white-hulled junks and some 30,000 sailors, and ventured deep into the South Seas and as far away as Africa. By the 1570s, Fujianese merchants had established trading posts in Manila and Nagasaki. Seed communities of Fujianese traders were established throughout Southeast Asia, and today, centuries later, vast numbers of ethnic Fujianese are scattered throughout the region. Eighty percent of the Chinese in the Philippines can trace their roots to Fujian, as can 55 percent of the Chinese in Indonesia. Taiwan was a mere hundred miles across the strait, and the Fujianese settled there as well. So many made the crossing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that modern Taiwanese speak a dialectsimilar to that spoken in the southern Fujianese port of Xiamen. Well over a million Chinese in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan have roots in Tingjiang commune, which contains Shengmei village, where Sister Ping grew up.
    It was from Fujian that the second great wave of Chinese came to America, in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, even
Fujian
is too broad a description of the point of origin of this explosive population displacement. It was really just from northern Fujian that they came, where the regional capital of Fuzhou sits, 30 miles from the ocean, on the edge of the coastal plain, hemmed in on three sides by mountains and on the fourth side by the sea. When the Fujianese talk about Fuzhou, they tend to include not just the city but the main population centers of the surrounding countryside: the nearby city of Changle, the historic port of Mawei, and a string of townships along the northern banks of the Min River, where it flows into the ocean and meets the Taiwan Strait and the East China Sea. The mountains surrounding Fuzhou have preserved a subdialect, Minbei, or Northern Min, which differs from the language spoken in Xiamen and Taiwan; it’s not so much Fujianese as Fuzhounese. Minbei was Sister Ping’s mother tongue.
    This peculiar type of population displacement, in which the people of a handful of villages