For the next six years I worked once again as a set clerk at the Shanghai Film Studio. I copied scripts, put up shooting boards, recorded sets in various locations, mopped floors and filled up hot-water containers in offices. In six years of severe loneliness and abandonment, my health broke down. I coughed blood and fainted on the set. I had tuberculosis. I was not allowed to take a leave. In the Party’s dossier I was executed permanently. At night I felt so defeated that I lost my courage. I missed Yan and the Supervisor. In six years I had become a stone, deaf to passion.
One day in 1983 an overseas letter came from a young friend whom I used to know in film school. She had left China three years before and was now living in Los Angeles. She asked me whether I had ever thought of coming to America. The idea was as foreign to me as being asked to live on the moon, the moon as my father described it-icy, airless and soundless. Yet my despair made me fearless. Though I spoke not a word of English, though I hated to leave my parents, my sisters, my brother, and to fight for permission to leave would take all my energy, I knew that escaping China would be the only solution.
I fought for my way and I arrived in America on September 1, 1984.
Chicago, Christmas 1992