When I was a kid, China did not actually exist, because the government did not recognize the People's Republic and because it was run by Commies, no teacher or school board thought that there was anything to say about Mao's China, or OUR China, ie the Republic of China, Chang Kai-Sheks's China on the small island of Taiwan.
There were only a couple of Chinese restaurants in Kansas City, and not being Jews seeking a special occasion to perhaps taste something that might be pork, my family never visited either of them. Paggliaccio's Italian Restaurant was as exotic as my father wanted to go.
Then years passed, and there were rumors that China really did exist. In 1977, I moved to Miami, and frequented Cantonese restaurants and reveled in Sweet and Sour Chicken, Yakamein soup, battered shrimp and such. In 1990, my friend Ying joined the faculty of my college and we became friends. He was born and raised on the Peng Hu Islands, otherwise known as the Pescadores, off the southern coast of Taiwan. His father was some sort of officer, and his mother, a local belle from the Islands. We went to lunch together often, because he knew all the best places for Chinese food, and I knew a lot of good Latino (Cuban, Argentine, Colombian, Peruvian., Mexican) places.
Eventually, at the age of forty, he married a woman from TsingTao, a city on the mainland settled by Germans, and famous for a Pilsner beer that bears the town's name. Here is where it gets interesting. His wife has one sister, because she was born before the one child policy was put in effect. Ying's in-laws are now in their late 70's, and were formerly factory workers. and they have been retired, on a liveable pension, since they were FIFTY. They were not bureaucrats, not even party members, and they have a modern apartment that has all the conveniences except AC. They earn enough to pay Ying and his wife a visit and to pay for food when they visit.
I think the average American perception of retired elderly Chinese was they they worked pretty much until they dropped and lived out their golden years tending swine, ducks and geese in a village with a lot of mud and rice paddies. But no, this is not the case.
They retired at fifty, with health care, an apartment and pretty much what they might have been able to afford at Red Button's Century Village in Margate.
How about that? Who woulda thunk?
