Reflecting on My Father from China

When I first moved to China in 1996, I was a recent college graduate with just two suitcases with me for the journey. Space was tight in the suitcases, but I asked my father if I could bring one of the photo albums of his childhood in Shanghai. The heavy, leather-bound albums had long been tucked away on the bottom shelf of a bookcase in the living room. When I was a little girl, I had enjoyed perusing the black-and-white photographs, running my fingers over the thick paper that my grandmother had inscribed with the facts of their life in 1930s China. One such photo read: “Hangschow, Oktober, 1936.” In it, my infant father is wearing a white-cotton hat with a wide brim to protect him from the blazing southern-China rays. He is petite at just three years old, but in the photo I saw the same boyish expression still worn by my gray-haired daddy. In another photo, taken in their Shanghai apartment, he poses with all of his toys, including a dozen wooden fire trucks and sailboats neatly lined up like his most prized possessions. I sometimes would spend the afternoon studying the photos and thinking about who he was then, who my grandparents were, and what it must have been like to live in an exotic and mysterious land like China so many years ago.

When I asked my father if I could bring one of the albums with me on my own journey to China, he consented in his usual mellow and generous way. I packed it along with my favorite trendy American CDs and clothes, and ventured across the Pacific on a one-year teaching gig to Beijing. Sixteen years later, I am still living in China.

During my first year at the Beijing University of Science and Technology, having that photo album was a great comfort. I can remember sitting in my bare-walled apartment, flipping through the pages, and thinking about how it felt for my father and grandparents when they first arrived in their Shanghai apartment in 1933. Did they sleep under mosquito nets and drink soymilk for breakfast like I did? Leaving Hitler’s Germany was a wise choice in retrospect, but they left earlier than most Jews, taking a huge risk by

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traveling such a long distance with my father, who was only six weeks old when they set off. I admired their courage and optimism about rebuilding their lives. They had left everyone and everything they knew in Hamburg and were faced with new food, customs, and language, just as I was. My life felt like a blank slate, much like the empty walls in my apartment. I flipped to a photo of my infant father on his tricycle in a Shanghai park and decided to paint a watercolor inspired by the photo for my bedroom wall. New to China, I felt as helpless as an infant, but like my father on his tricycle, I could be playful and inquisitive with the assimilation process.

It wasn’t long until I became a journalist in Beijing. My online TV show Sexy Beijing is well known for my candid interviews with the average Chinese about everything from feminism to romance and sex. Over the years, American reporters from entities like The New Yorker and NPR have asked me the same question: “How do you get Chinese people to talk about this stuff?” The truth is, I have my dad to thank for my curious mind and my talent for connecting with people. My father is not a journalist, but he has one of the most important qualities that make for a great psychoanalyst and a great father: he is a good listener.

When I was growing up, my father saw patients in his home office. Anytime he wasn’t working with a patient, his door was always open. I can remember countless afternoons when I would get home from school and wander into his office for an aimless chat. No matter what paper he was busy working on, he would swing his great big desk chair around and offer me a warm smile and an ear. Sometimes I would glance at his bookshelf and ask him who Thomas Mann was or why he was writing about Otto Bauer. Other times I asked him about his childhood. Regardless, I never felt that I had to “get to the point” to be heard. I never felt hurried or judged. My dad is like that. He returns people’s phone calls and e-mails; he makes time for people. I am certain that it is this generous quality of the listener that makes him an effective analyst. Now that I am older, I appreciate what a boost that non-judgmental time and space was for the self-esteem of a little girl. During those afternoons, he taught me to trust my curious mind and my associations. Not only has this early-childhood experience helped me in my journalism career, but I also believe that it has been key to the

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development of my creative side.

By the time I had been living in Beijing for nearly a decade, my father began coming to China for the first meetings of the International Psychoanalytical Association here. He let me tag along to one of those early meetings, in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. By this time, I was fluent in Mandarin and haggling with our cab drivers during the entire trip.   Sitting in on the conference was all the more fascinating, because I was able to understand some of the banter that went on in Mandarin during the sessions, including the ambivalence of Chinese students about speaking candidly to foreign analysts. In my father’s recent paper, “Lost in Transmission—Studies of Trauma across Generations” (in M. G. Fromm, ed., Lost in Transmission, 2012), he recalls the scene: “I have seen and heard students in China filled with virulent hatred for Japan and the Japanese. They are moved to stand up in conferences, their eyes filled with tears, as they express their outrage at Japanese depredations in the Second World War…it is comprehensible in terms of their grandparents’ trauma and the Chinese national historical legacy” (p. 66).

Indeed, students at the conference were standing and speaking out with an urgency that made it seem they had never before had the opportunity to express these things. They also spoke about what it felt like to grow up at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution—a topic rarely discussed in public and never in front of foreigners. In Mandarin, I heard the Chinese translator and other locals warning students not to air this dirty laundry in front of foreign guests. Still, in the spirit of a burgeoning psychoanalytic field in China, students who hoped to become analysts went with their in-

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stinct to unload the burden of these traumas. Since then, with the help of my father, who serves as the chair of the China Committee since 2007, psychoanalysis has made great headway. Today there are 18 analysts in training in Beijing and Shanghai.

In concluding his “Lost in Transmission” paper, my father writes: “A person’s and a society’s effort to adapt to historical trauma and to restructure life in a compensatory, even reparative reality-changing effort might bring about positive, socially constructive change” (p. 67). I admire my father for venturing into this new territory for psychoanalysis. As a longtime Beijing resident and first-hand witness to the often repressed Chinese psyche, I think that giving Chinese individuals the opportunity to work through their personal and collective trauma is a worthwhile endeavor, and one that will benefit the entire globe. As Peter Loewenberg’s daughter, I can say that few people could wish for a better listener, role model, and psychoanalyst father.

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