Xia Meili: 老家
In the Mandarin language, there is an untranslatable term especially familiar to diasporic families: 老家 (lǎo jiā). Perhaps the closest English word to this phrase is home, though it doesn’t capture the depth of what 老家 is to a family. As I’ve heard it said, 老家 is where one’s soul lingers.
For my family, 老家 is Anqing. I find 老家 most in my grandmother.
My grandmother is Xia Meili. Like many Chinese girls, she is beauty’s namesake.
Meili was born in Anqing. Specifically, in the tiny and mostly unknown Xiaoshizhen, a locality within Huaining County, to her mother, Li Yuye, and her father, Xia Denren. When Meili joined them on September 11th, 1953, her already overflowing family of two brothers and one sister was still haunted by the memories of twins who had died in infancy a few years prior.
At some point, Meili’s family — her mother’s side, at least — had been wealthy. Yuye, the daughter of a respected teacher, was what some might call a “lady.” Meili’s maternal grandparents still occupied the remnants of those riches: a siheyuan, a classic courtyard house. The nobility hadn’t touched the following generation, however, after the war and reconstruction had ravaged the Chinese people, and Meili belonged to a struggling farming family.
A portrait of Xia Meili, 2025.
Rural Chinese families during the mid-20th century were as large as they were hungry. Having more children meant more hands working the land and praise from the pro-natalist Chairman Mao, but it also entailed more mouths to feed when there was no food. When one of their neighbors, an adopted cousin of Yuye, revealed her obsession with the “adorable” Meili, Meili’s parents gave her away easily. Then, perhaps, none of their children would starve.
Meili’s new mother’s house was four miles from 老家, in another tiny locality called Sanqiao. It bordered a river and contained three bridges, as its name suggests, but not much else. Meili made her first trek there on tiny, three-year-old feet, struggling to keep pace with the woman who had claimed her.
The new mother had her own children once, but they had long since been sent away or married off; Meili was their replacement. After divorce, the woman had become harsh and cruel, even and especially towards her newly adopted daughter.
To Meili, the most memorable part of the new house was the tiny stool tucked in a kitchen corner behind a cabinet full of dishes. Her new mother ordered Meili to spend her days on that stool. But no matter how long Meili sat there, no matter how long her legs ached from being curled under that stool, no matter how silently and obediently she watched the world pass by from her corner, one thing remained constant: punishment.
Every night, when the new mother returned from who-knows-where, her enraged gaze would land upon toddler Meili, still crouched upon her stool. Every night, her temper turned monstrous at the sight of the child she had once begged for. Every night, she would grab Meili and hit her. Again and again and again. When the new mother’s kin or housemates took pity on Meili and tried to pry the woman’s hands away, the new mother would screech and scratch at them, nearly draconian, only gripping Meili tighter.
Some days, Meili was bolder than others. The new mother’s family was on the more fortunate side, even during the famine. They never lacked food or clothing. In fact, they had even had clothing tailored in Meili’s size when she first moved in. On those days when Meili was especially bold, she would sneak into the room where the clothes were held after her new mother left the house. She would pull her fresh clothing made from a silky floral fabric over the raggedy underclothes her new mother forced her to wear and feel whole, feel “girl” rather than toy, for a moment. But her fantasies were impermanent. The new mother returned at night like a whirlwind, yanking the lovely clothes off of Meili and penalizing her with vitriol and bruises.
Those brighter hours, when the new mother was gone or when Meili was sent to have dinner at a kinder neighbor’s home, were not enough to quell the deep unhappiness of her Sanqiao life.
The rice fields of Xiaoshizhen, 2024.
Meili and Jincheng with their children and grandchildren, 2016.
A year or so into her stay there, Meili was sent back to 老家: Xiaoshizhen. She made the 4-mile pilgrimage on her toddler legs again. She returned to starvation, to a too-full home that could hardly fit another child. But the starvation was relief to Meili. It was joy. No one hit her in Xiaoshzhen. No one despised her as deeply as the new mother did. Still, like her previous fantasies, Meili’s return to 老家 was painfully temporary.
Meili’s second-oldest brother, desperate and angry from hunger and blaming her for it, coined a new nickname: Flowered Sanqiao Girl, for her new clothing and her new house. A reminder of her alienation, he screamed the name at her everyday. “Flowered Sanqiao Girl! Go back to where you came from,” became his new mantra — as if they weren’t born from the same people.
Though they weren’t as vocal about it, the rest of her family was not as willing as she was to bear starvation either. Five days after she was saved, Meili was sent back to hell. Her oldest brother carried her to the new mother’s house on his back, his expression pitying and somewhat guilty. As guilty as he may have felt, he still gave her to the new mother easily enough. And Meili was bruised once again.
During sweet potato season, when Meili turned five — her third year at the new mother’s house — the new mother was reengaged. She declared that she would be leaving Sanqiao, as she had her previous marriages. She would not be bringing Meili with her. Meili was to be sent to 老家 again.
This time, there was no older brother to carry Meili back. She was dragged along by her former mother to her grandmother’s house, the siheyuan. The two took a path bordering a deep pond walled off by a dam. Each time Meili complained that her feet were aching, that she needed a break, the former mother would grip her arm tighter, spitting out, “If you don’t walk, I’ll throw you into the water.”
By the time the two made it to the siheyuan, Meili was exhausted. She collapsed on one of the stately chairs in her grandmother’s living room, shaky hands gripping the armrest. The former mother scoffed at her. “I don’t know what she’s doing. I carried her the whole way.”
Meili spent the night at the siheyuan and returned to 老家 the next day: Xiaoshizhen. She returned to a too-full hut, the name “Flowered Sanqiao Girl,” and hunger.
At 老家, Meili spent her years working. From five to seventeen, she was one of her family’s laborers, like the rest of her siblings. But as she was delegated to lifting bamboo and chasing around skin-and-boned cattle all day, Meili watched her brothers walk to school. She watched them read. She watched them write. While they did return to afternoons of labor, they never had to spend the entire day on farmland. Boys didn’t grow up illiterate like Meili and her sisters.
Still, Meili persisted. She found her community at 老家 in her neighbors. Girls her age, older, and younger. All condemned to the same fate of uneducated, worked-near-to-death, and married-early by Confucian, patriarchal values and traditional families.
When she turned seventeen, Meili knew it was time for her to step upon that third stage. Though child and arranged marriages were declared illegal by the 1950 Marriage Law of China, such a statute was more theoretical than binding in remote areas like 老家. No government official could save the rural girls. In fact, Meili had been prepared to marry a man from a neighboring household a year prior, but her older brother had stopped the arrangement, asserting that sixteen was certainly too young.
The second man Meili’s matchmaker declared Meili would belong to was an unmarried son from a nearby Li family. Conveniently, though Meili was a year underage to be a bride, Li Jincheng was twenty-three. Three years above the age mandated for grooms in the 1950 law.
The Li family was poor — perhaps even more so than the Xia Family, and certainly more so than the man Meili was engaged to at sixteen. Jincheng lived with his mother and older brother in a decrepit, two-room home. His father, the former village schoolmaster, had died years ago from starvation, having given the little food peasants were left with after the Revolution to his children rather than himself. Jincheng’s mother was sickly as well: nearly blind, but still pushing to take care of her son and what was left of their home, as any woman was expected to do.
Meili met Jincheng at the insistence of her sister, whose house was a few minutes away from the Li family, in the springtime. She and her future husband first met eyes on her sister’s straw mattress. Neither of them spoke, but he handed her a jar of petroleum jelly. An engagement gift.
Jincheng, accompanied by their matchmaker, visited Meili’s home to meet her family next, crossing their threshold to share a meal with them and receive their blessing. Though the two didn’t see each other then, he came bearing his meager dowry: two vests for Meili, made of a floral print like her clothing from Sanqiao.
An offering to ancestors at Xiaoshizhen, 2024.
Customarily, Chinese courtship and matrimony includes the woman’s family travelling to the man’s house as well after his visit to hers in order to observe her future living conditions. Meili and Jincheng’s relationship did not include this step, Meili already familiar with the impoverished state of his family. Meili moved on to making her new clothes: a physical mark of her transformation into a wife.
Alongside her sister-in-law, her matchmaker, and Jincheng, Meili traveled from Xiaoshizhen to the nearest city. Floral fabric flowed through the three women’s fingers as they traveled through the market, each dreaming of the new life Meili would have.
But when Meili arrived at the Li House with a village tailor to begin making her clothing, they were alone. It was her first true meeting with his home, and she encountered a straw mattress and a lack of everything — even firehood. Jincheng himself was out, journeying to a faraway water well. His near-blind mother buzzed around like a ghost.
8 months into courtship and still 17, Meili was wed to Jincheng. The new year’s winter became spring and the only thing Meili kept of herself was her last name.
Xia Meili the wife had a life no easier than Xia Meili the maiden. She continued her farm work, their small family needing all the hands they could get to support themselves during a time of such high poverty. Her labor continued in the house as she took over domestic tasks from her ailing mother-in-law, who navigated rooms with her hands at that point, her eyesight near faded. Her mother-in-law returned the favor with angry, loud, mocking words. Her new husband, in his rare spurts at home and not at work, did the same and spent much of his time screaming at Meili. Meili refused to return either of their yells, pitying their hearts made hard by starvation and grief and fearing what their neighbors would say if she fought back. She shouldered her new family’s blame and soothed their anger.
Jincheng and Meili’s first child was an accident — a result of a lack of access to contraception. Still a child herself, Meili carried their daughter with her through nine months of morning sickness. By the time Li Xiaoping — a tiny, quiet child — was born at the end of 1971, Meili had turned 18.
In the famine-struck countryside, there was no time for leave after maternity. Fearing the onslaught of verbal abuse from the supervisors of their people’s communes and a decrease of their family’s share of the crop, mothers like Meili returned to work the shared farmland as soon as they were physically able. She left Xiaoping in her makeshift, rickety cradle during the day, crawling on the floor in hopes that her daughter wouldn’t see her leaving. Xiaoping saw anyway, but simply tilted her head at her mother’s actions, as if silently communicating that she understood why Meili couldn’t stay.
The interior of the now-abandoned house where Meili raised her children, taken through a window, 2024.
Meili’s days were consistent: work outside, work in the home, screaming from her husband and mother-in-law, starvation and silent resilience. Her routine was broken by two more children, both boys. Li Xiaobin in 1974 and Li Xiaolong in 1977. Both were to be laborers for their growing family.
However, more children did not mellow Jincheng’s mood. Xiaobin quickly revealed himself as a boy with a fiery temper, as the one in their family most willing to push back against verbal assault. Meili found herself the mediator, though often unsuccessful, between her husband and her first son.
While Jincheng was vituperative and mocking towards everyone, he only physically abused Xiaobin, perhaps hoping to repress his son’s boldness. Jincheng had hit Meili a single time during their marriage, during an argument. But he had done it with the door to their tiny house wide open and a neighbor peering in from across the street, so Meili had done what she always did and remained silent. She didn’t respond to the yelling nor the slap. Jincheng never raised a hand against her again.
Each time Meili kept herself up at night despite a day’s work ahead to fan her children to sleep in the summer heat and the crowded bed they shared, each time she watched her son receive a beating from a man so much taller and stronger than she was, each time her husband banged furniture and pans out of anger, each time she stared out at the melancholic fields from her lonely house with tightly braided hair, teary eyes, and a sinking heart, she thought to herself I should leave. But each time, she would think about her children and how her leaving would condemn them to a life of abuse without her there. Even if she took them with her, all that her children would receive would be further struggle under a single mother in poverty. She thought about all the other mothers and children in their village with far worse husbands than Jincheng. She thought about the man with a good heart who she knew hid under her husband’s aggressive exterior brought on by trauma. And she stayed. Each time, she thought to herself, bear it. Just bear it. And have hope.
So, for years, she did.
Cattle in Xiaoshizhen, 2024.
Her children grew as she resisted.
Her daughter, Xiaoping, like Meili, was functionally unschooled, having dropped out before she reached double digits in favor of helping around the house, making meals, and working for their family. She, like her mother, was seemingly condemned to the usual fate of rural Chinese women.
Her first son, Xiaobin, channeled his fiery temper and clever mind into academic ambition. He excelled in school and adored learning. Even when he was eating maggot-filled meals in a dilapidated boarding school dorm, he kept pushing to be the best, as he always had.
Her youngest child, Xiaolong, finished schooling as well. Though he didn’t have the same desire for academics as Xiaobin, he was still skilled, and moved onto technical school.
Her husband remained angry and abusive, but hardworking.
Her family struggled and stuck together.
Xiaobin, perhaps, was the first one to get out. He had always been desperate to escape their circumstances — to leave 老家, leave the singular bed they all shared, leave the daily abuse he faced, and leave the most probable outcome for boys like him (a life of hunger, manual labor, and shattered hope). He wanted to leave and bring Meili and the rest of his family with him. His pathway to escape was university. At 16, Xiaobin took the gaokao, China’s national entrance exam. His score, unbelievably high in comparison to his rural upbringing, got him into one of the top colleges in China: Tsinghua University in Beijing. He moved to Beijing at the same age Meili was when she got engaged. Meili cried herself to sleep every night he was there, terrified of what his peers or teachers might do to her child, but, at the same time, praying for the better future a Tsinghua chemical engineering degree could promise.
Xiaoping got married far later than Meili, a matchmaker having arranged her and her husband’s relationship when she was already 21. Her husband, unlike Jincheng, came from a wealthier family than her and was more gentle. Her marriage was her escape rather than her cage. The two moved to Suzhou, a city over 300 miles away from 老家. Xiaoping managed to break free from her lack of education as well, in a way, eventually teaching herself how to read and write Mandarin.
Xiaolong finished technical school and ended up in Beijing with his own wife, having found work in the city at the same time Xiaobin began his master’s program at Tsinghua.
Xiaobin (left) and Xiaoping (right), 2016.
Their family, tightknit and stuck to Xiaoshizhen and 老家 for so many generations, had suddenly become diasporic.
Meili and Jincheng expanded their horizons as well, moving past the seemingly neverending rice fields and oxen pastures they had worked for decades to city life and childcare. They began splitting their time between Suzhou and Beijing as their grandchildren were born. Where the next day’s food would come from was no longer their worry.
When Xiaobin left China to pursue his studies further across the Pacific in the United States, he met his wife, who had been studying in Canada. Meili and Jincheng first set foot outside of China in suburban Pennsylvania, visiting their newlywed son and daughter-in-law.
As her late adulthood progressed, Meili watched her family grow on both sides of the planet. She watched all her grandchildren receive an education she hadn’t even dreamed of. She watched Xiaoping’s daughter graduate from college — the first woman in their family line to do so.
A few years ago, Meili and her husband set their roots in Pennsylvania, moving in with Xiaobin to care for their youngest grandchildren: the son and daughter of Xiaobin — my younger brother and myself. Meili and Jincheng progressed from temporary residency to green cards. Meili found friends, many also the parents of younger Chinese immigrants living in America for work, and visits back home became just that: visits. Jincheng became a good and gentle grandfather and husband, truly having mellowed after aging and escaping a lifetime of poverty. 老家 became a place Meili saw every few years for a month or so. America, a land of Opportunities and Dreams that Meili’s language literally termed “beautiful nation” (meǐ guó), became home. In many senses of the word, Meili and her family had moved on: moved on from poverty, from famine, from farmwork, and from the tiny town they expected to be buried.
Jincheng and Meili in Pennsylvania, 2013.
老家 is a complex thing to many families. It is an image, a memory, an emotion, and of course, the possessor of one’s soul.
When Meili left for America, she left 老家 and the life of trauma and anger and sadness that existed there behind. Yet she also carries 老家 with her. She carries it in her language, in her children, in her husband who accompanied her, in her phone calls home, in the food she makes, and in the stories she tells others. She passes 老家 down to her grandchildren and allows them to make it their own, despite only having visited the place once. She misses 老家. Everyone misses home. But she has also grown beyond it.
Meili’s story, in all its facets, is not a unique one. 老家, home, exists to everyone. Young women across the world are married lovelessly and have children young. People around the world have faced abuse, starvation, and hardship. Many remain in those circumstances, oppressed by bad fortune, historical inequity, and despair. Others get lucky, like Meili and her family, and their hard work transforms into upwards mobility — into escape from where they came from. Meili’s story is not necessarily probable, but that does not make it impossible.
Meili told me that the reason she was able to move beyond the worst of 老家 was hope. Her story reminds the world to keep looking forward. To keep pushing. She reminds the world that they can bear even the worst moments and forever dream for the better.