[robwwilliams]

Agreed. In my opinion, too much strange embodied experience in this engaged and engaging Part 1.

If I told you stories from my childhood as an 10-year old child of an undercover operative in West Germany in 1962-1963 I think many would claim “fiction”. If I did not have my sister as an independent memory backup, even I might have doubts. She was lucky and unlucky and had a big brother.

[seanmcdirmid]

There was a lot of weird stuff going on in China in the 70s and 80s (and perhaps into the early/mid 90s). Any Gen X Chinese adult will have a lot of stories to tell, like how it was like to join the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989 (my gf in college was from Beijing). I wouldn't discount this story at all based on its contents, and it just wouldn't be worthwhile at all to make it up, so let's give him the benefit of the doubt.

[the_af]

There was a lot of weird stuff in the 70s and 80s in the US too, no surprise there.

[seanmcdirmid]

As an American Gen X, I don’t think very exciting things happened in our youth. We were kind of rich, kind of broke, we had recessions but not upheaval, not hardship, not a society that was more similar to North Korea is today liberalizing at a rapid clip. I could be romanticizing it as an outsider, but I think Chinese Gen Xers have much better stories to tell than we do.

[the_af]

From someone neither from the US nor from China, you sure did your share of weird things too. So I think that yes, you are romanticizing it as an outsider.

Almost all of the stories we get told in the West are from the US perspective, so there's that: anything from China feels fresh in comparison.

[seanmcdirmid]

As an American, the US perspective is pretty dominate in the US. But still, I never went through a protest that ended in a massacre before, I never had to apply for travel permits to leave my town, nor did I need an exit permit to travel abroad. My first trip to China was in 1999 and things were pretty trippy even that late in their development.

The US...what sort of stories do you get told? Are they experiences that Gen X had in general, or just outliers that perhaps were glamorized by Hollywood? Let me tell you, we really didn't have much going on in general.

[the_af]

> But still, I never went through a protest that ended in a massacre before

Yet these happened in the US. Bizarre and secret government projects also happened. Executions also happened.

That you didn't witness them doesn't mean much. I'm sure most Gen X Chinese, as you call them, had pretty uneventful lives without any massacres either. I do think this is a case of laser-focusing on those who had more "interesting" lives, much like focusing on US antiwar activist who got shot or imprisoned during Vietnam war protests, or KKK activity: interesting, but surely not the norm.

> I never had to apply for travel permits to leave my town, nor did I need an exit permit to travel abroad.

Doesn't seem too exciting to me. It does reinforce the narrative that China = bad, US = good (though this is harder to believe in the Trump era). But it's not something particularly interesting to read about, plus every HN reader "knows" this is life in China, they are authoritarian, etc etc.