Bonsai Kids

About the Book

One evening at the campus in China, I was waiting at the main gate to the campus for a student to have dinner with me. It was a eureka moment for me because it was the first time I took notice of the two huge bonsai trees in elegant pots, one on either side of the gate. Suddenly, I saw something more than those two elegant potted trees. They reminded me of the young men and women under my care in my daily classes; their thinking, behaviors, mindsets, personal interactions, class participation, community activities, likes and dislikes, and habits were expected and predictable because of years of trimming, pruning, twisting, and shaping by their parents to be who they are today. They are the bonsai kids! Here are some of their voices. “Meanwhile, I got a five-thousand-Australian-dollar scholarship from the university that I applied to. I then managed to persuade my parents to support me. I was lucky because my parents said yes to me because they did not want to let me down. Now I am studying for a master’s degree at the Blue Mountains International Hotel Management School in Australia. In the words of Steve, “Do what you have to do to get where you want to be” (Jay Qi-long Han). “I studied very hard because I wanted to become a doctor. I wanted to help my mother because she is not a healthy person. I was able to enter Chongqing Three Gorges Medical College. I wanted a better future for myself and my family” (Michael Qiao Jia). “To me, the key to success is one’s ability and willingness to adapt to new possibilities in life and also to do what you have to do to get where you want to go, even if that meant giving up my PhD in transportation engineering and pursuing a new dream, leading me to Amazon in Seattle, Washington State” (Duan Xi). “Now looking back, I don’t know how I came along nor how I will go in the future. But I think it’s good to keep an active attitude. I went to teach in a college in Guangzhou after finishing my postgraduate program. And three years later, I successfully applied for the PhD program of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. This is where I am” (Minwei Ai).

About the Author

Stephen Ling’s grandparents emigrated from China to Malaya (now Malaysia) in 1903 because the Malayan government was looking for the poorest of the poor in Fujian Province, China, to establish an “agricultural colony” in a remote corner in Malaya, primarily to grow rice to feed a rising population but more to curtail their importation of expensive rice from other Southeast Asian countries. He was born in Malaya and adopted by one of these families. They blamed the Japanese occupation for their life of poverty and servitude. He grew up with a mother who wanted him to be a farmer. Throughout his early teens, he fought against her because he suspected, early in his life, that there was something better awaiting him beyond the farm. Growing up Chinese is a book about his struggles against a culture or mother that endeavored to control and define his life and his future. Eventually, he obtained a scholarship to study in America. Crazy Americans focuses on his American dream and the few crazy Americans he met on board a cargo-cum-passenger ship from Singapore to Los Angeles. Eventually, he pursued journalism and economics at the University of Texas. The seven years he spent as a visiting professor in China would forever change his life and thinking. With This Is China (his sixth book), he wants to share his experiences in mainland China with anyone who has a desire to know and understand the lives and dreams of ordinary people in China in the twenty-first century. Prodigal Son (2020) is his first fiction about the impact of the new wealth on the modern youth in China. After the publication of Letter to Fellow Immigrants: A Memoir (one Chinese way to become an immigrant), he embarked on writing a book about the generation of men and women born in China between 1979 and 2015, the children of the one-child policy, titled Bonsai Kids because most parents have raised many of them like a gardener raises a prized bonsai tree. These children, especially those coming from middle-class families, are also labeled as little emperors and princesses because of the excessive attention they get from their parents and grandparents and the whole society because many of them are the only child of a family. Once, they became more popular than the beloved pandas in China. Stephen Ling lives in a country house outside Seattle because he loves the peace and quiet outside urban America. He grew up in a farm. He is now working on his second fiction, Living with a Stranger.