Bung Chan,
Ada satu bagian kecil tulisan tante saya (ayahnya saudara lain ibu dengan
kakek saya) di buku reunie famili Djie :
Later I joined my husband at the Chinese Embassy in Morocco, but the time
we retured, we landed in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, which had
nothing cultural about it. Soon afterwards we were sent to the countryside
to do manual labour in one of the "May the Seventh" Cadres School. Here we
learned all the farm-work, such as reaping the wheat, planting rice, even
making bricks and building our own dormitories. During this period, the
country did not make any progress. On the contrary, the economy was on the
verge of collapse. It was a time nobody seemed to be doing what they
should, everybody was engaged in "carrying out the revolution", which in
fact was wasting time on irrelevant political movements.
Fortunately things changed since the late seventies with the reform and
opening to the outside world. Today China looks completely different from
when I came here in the fifties.
Looking back, I feel I have lived through history. So many things have
happened in the country and in the world on the whole.
Di jaman Jepang tante diajari sendiri oleh ayahnya berbahasa Jerman.
Kemudian sekolah di Belanda, Inggris hingga lulus dari University of
London. Kemudian belajar jadi penterjemah dan tolk di Interpreters'
School of the University of Geneva.
Pulang ke Tiongkok, dipekerjakan sebagai docent di Foreign Languages
Institutes in Beijing. Mengajar oral Inggris dan Perancis di beberapa
sekolah kader, yang kadernya akan dikirim ke luar negeri. Tante bisa omong
lancar 7 bahasa. Kemudian kerja di Kementerian Luar Negeri. Gara2
pendidikannya lama di negeri Barat, dia dan suaminya dikirim ke desa.
Padahal suaminya dulu anggota TPR dan pernah jadi sekretaris dari Zhou En
Lai. Tante bersahabat baik dengan istri sultan Jusuf dari Marokko dulu.
Mereka omong dalam bahasa Perancis. Di usia lanjut tante diminta jadi
tolknya Hu Jintao kalau keluar negeri.
KH
