True, there are thousands of Chinese graduate students at Columbia, and more than a billion Chinese people on Earth. We come from the core of a political machine, the Chinese Communist Party, that deeply influences the Chinese people. Yet we, the Chinese elite, are fundamentally unable to communicate with them. There exist two realities; an impermeable line separates us Chinese elite and the Chinese students from different-class families.

Fundamental differences in our upbringing––differences in wealth, in the ways we access information––erect difficult barriers of communication between us. How can we understand the hardships they overcame to make their way to Columbia? How can we understand the pragmatism of their career goals, when we have these four years to find some fulfillment and escape before we return to the belly of the Communist regime? How can they understand the pessimism and the depression that results from this expectation when all they might see of Chinese politics is what the party allows them to, while we witness the tragedy and self-deception of high society?

Even as the free flow of information in the United States exposes many Chinese people to the realities of our country’s horrific past, they seem to show little interest in publicly discussing the crimes––like the Tiananmen Square Massacre or today’s proliferating organ harvests––that have been hidden from them, and they fail to understand the crosses that we, the beneficiaries of the Communist takeover, must bear.

When the glimmer of our lifestyles dulls for a bit, it is not as if we do not wish to be them. It is not as if, in those moments, we don’t long for the ordinary epiphany, the static exhilaration, the popular revelation of being one of them. However, the fact is that most of us have long given up on that hope. Discarded to boarding schools at early ages, we see the political lives and the arranged marriages that our families will prepare for us, and we resign ourselves to our fate.

In other words, Columbia is a utopia. As with all utopias, we cherish it for its transience.

Our dissatisfaction stems from a clash between our inherited Chinese values and the Western ideals to which we were exposed at boarding school. The values we inherit from our homeland are values of conformity. The “model worker” is ready to work selflessly wherever he is sent, never thinking of reward, treating natural human emotions as nothing more than an unavoidable irritation. It symbolizes the official ethical ideal and is, in fact, the highest decoration given by the Chinese Communist Party.

How can this ideal, in which even our parents do not fully believe, not be shattered by the individualistic thinking we encounter at boarding schools and Columbia? The three essential currents of Western civilization we study in Literature Humanities at Columbia are foreign to the basic demand of Communist conformity: the classical world, the Church, and the emergence of national states through war and conquest. We are caught between the worlds of Socratic seminar methods that encourage students to question and Chinese blind obedience. All of the West’s ethical, social, and legal concepts are imprinted into our elite Ivy League education.

At boarding schools and Columbia, we live with amazement that we have been mistaken about nearly everything having to do with China, its history, its people, its faith, the roots of its culture, and the imprints—still visible, still warm—of that culture on the Chinese past and on the mind and character of the people. It is therefore natural for us to develop a strong favoritism toward Western civilization. The numerous lies in Chinese textbooks and newspapers have made it nearly impossible to trust any official ideology in China anymore.

So we reject our Communist values and do our best not to associate with the system. As a matter of fact, we try not to think about it at all. In public we continue to speak of the importance of “personal sacrifice for the sake of social welfare,” but do not practice it. We seek as much as possible to avoid all bureaucracy, all “social work.” In short, the defensive statement released in the Harvard Crimson three years ago by Bo Guagua, a son of deposed Communist Party leader Bo Xilai, is not a rare case. We use every honest and dishonest means at our disposal to protect our private lives from the cumbersome intrusion of the so-called Chinese totalitarian system.

The ideal successors of Chinese Communism are prepared to offer themselves up to the cause of Communist triumph, and they belong to the past. They are dead, undone by the visible gap between word and deed, between ideology and reality. While studying abroad in the Ivy League, they are dependent on the regime, and use it as a kind of feeding trough for money. What they love in their country is their family’s connections to the ruling Communist Party, which overrules their pride to be Chinese. After becoming better acquainted with the works of Western literature studied in Literature Humanities, they refuse to even look at a single Chinese book. They excuse themselves on the grounds that the Chinese language is crude and unpleasant. This excuse is worse than the refusal itself.

They think that “ideology” and “identity” cannot be expressed in their mother tongue, and that it is not worth the effort of mastering it. Equipped with the elitist mindset they acquired while in boarding school, they regard their compatriots much as Rome regarded the cities that surrounded it: equally ready for alliance or war with the Chinese political machine, they choose one or the other on the basis of self-interest.

However, you would be mistaken to think that this change of heart is permanent. In the end, this newfound individualism and defiance of ours will crumble like those selfsame Roman walls as we graduate and expectations and simple familiarity draw us back into the Communist system. In the end, our denunciation is an charade, a lie to others and ourselves, and the certainty of our eventual capitulation hovers over our lives. We will continue to benefit from the exploitation we now find so repulsive, and praise in high tones the Communist tropes we find so hollow as they issue from our families’ mouths.

We still fight back when we can, though. Rebellion comes in many forms, such as Jang Kung-song, the only daughter between Jang Song-thaek, a former leading figure in the North Korean regime and his wife, Kim Kyong-hui, the current North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un’s aunt, who killed herself by overdosing on sleeping pills in Paris. Rebellion also comes in the form of my cousin Fabian, a graduate of Andover and Dartmouth, who also committed suicide.

Yet how can I understand a person driven to suicide by the demons of individualism, asceticism, or despair, when I myself am in love with asceticism and individualism? When in myself there is nothing that I love more than my own individualism and privilege of studying the humanities and social sciences at one of the most prestigious American universities, when I, and almost everyone I know, am trailed by a gnawing shadow of similar allure?

The New York Times columnist Ian Johnson translated a popular blog post on Chinese social media immediately after a deadly train accident in 2012. He pictured China as a flying train and urged, “China, please stop your flying pace, wait for your people, wait for your soul, wait for your morality, wait for your conscience! Don’t let the train run out off track, don’t let the bridges collapse, don’t let the roads become traps, don’t let houses become ruins. Walk slowly, allowing every life to have freedom and dignity. No one should be left behind by our era.”

Yet there is no clear response from Chinese political leadership, just a recorded train station announcement. The rattling of the wheels, growing louder every year, is nothing more than the nearly unnoticeable sound of political reformation. The train, around which “the rent air thunders and becomes wind,” is racing straight at us. When the people rush to us, the highly Westernized Chinese elite who are presently still students, we are struck by certain death under the train’s mad wheels.

The author is a first-year in the Columbia/Jewish Theological Seminary joint program with prospective majors in ethnicity and race studies and Jewish history. Originally from China, she grew up between her hometown and boarding schools, and is of mixed Chinese and Jewish heritage.

To respond to this op-ed, or to submit an op-ed, contact opinion@columbiaspectator.com.