Sonia's Journey: from Chinese Communist to American Polyamorist

By Sonia Song

Polyamory, one form of open relationships, is rapidly entering mainstream consciousness. Among the many books on polyamory, Sonia Song’s story is unique in that it is the first one that has been written on this subject by a new immigrant from another culture. A contemporary of New China, Sonia’s amazing journey, from Beijing to Berkeley and to Hawaii, with the massive backdrop of historic events in China and the U.S. over more than half a century, unfolds like a scroll, depicting how these two vastly diverse cultures shaped her way of thinking and choices. Sonia’s book is warm and engaging. Reading her fascinating memoir feels like sitting down with a new friend who invites you into her most intimate and vulnerable moments over a cup of tea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781977232601

Sonia Song

From the Author:     My core values and strongest desires in life are: to learn, to serve, and to share, be it a new idea, a new skill, or a new lover. Polyamory, sharing romantic love in an honest and ethical way, is not only my conscious choice of an alternative life/love style, and for me, it is also an evolutionary manifestation of more ideal human relations; it is my spiritual path, and a soul-satisfying way of being.            About the author:      Sonia Song, originally from Beijing, China, is a graduate of UC Berkley law school, now happily living and serving the community on Kauai, the Garden Island of Hawaii. 

Book preview

My Journey from Chinese Communist to American Polyamorist

All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2023 Sonia Song

v3.0

The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.

This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Cover Image © 2023 Joshua Zahn. All rights reserved - used with permission.

Outskirts Press and the OP logo are trademarks belonging to Outskirts Press, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Disclaimer:

Don’t be confused by the form. This is neither poetry nor prose, but my own unconventional free style chosen to express my own unconventional story.

Live your life from your heart. Share

from your heart. And your story will

touch and connect with some other souls.

Melody Beattie

Table of Contents

Chapter I: A Poly Seeded in a Different Land

Donkey Baby

A Bolt from the Blue

Down to a Village

The First Kiss

The Undeciphered Mystery

Goddess Had Other Plans for Me

Troubled Waters

Chapter II: Searching in a New World

Acquaintance Rape

Divine Intervention

Point of No Return

U.S.-China Friendship

Passport Confiscated

Looking for New Directions

Mid-life Crisis

Chapter III: Poly Awakening

Another Kind of MBA

Testing the Water

Compersion vs Jealousy

Jealousy vs STI

Wedding and Dying

Sea Bear

Love and Politics

Chapter IV: Thriving on the Poly Path

Pass the Baton

China Calling Me Back

My UN Mission

Change of Guard

A New Chapter of My Life’s Adventure

Chapter V: The More Poly the Merrier

Farewell, My Beloved

New Challenges

Online Dating

Chapter VI: The Best Time Is Now

Gratifying Community Services

The Poly Journey Goes On

Soul Searching

Acknowledgments

Open-Relationship Themed Bibliography

Reference List of Movie/TV Shows Related to Open-Relationships

Map of Hawaii

Chapter I

A Poly Seeded in a Different Land

So, here I am.

In paradise Kauai,

The Garden Isle of Hawaii.

I’ll celebrate my 75th birthday soon.

Very young at heart,

I’m savoring a joyful and meaningful life

In every way I can:

A dedicated court and community volunteer mediator,

An on-call legal self-help navigator,

An empathetic ear for the free listening service – All Ears Hawaii,

An ever-available court and hospital interpreter,

A trustworthy friend of many,

A keen student of Gu Zheng –

An ancient Chinese zither instrument,

A zealous member of several dance groups:

Ballroom, country line dance, African drumming and dancing,

Balkan folk dance, Japanese Bon dance, and of course,

Hula, the native dance of Hawaii.

And above all,

I have been relishing a mindful polyamorous love/lifestyle ¹

For over 30 years!

So far,

I have had five major intimate relationships:

One semi-open marriage ended in amicable divorce;

Three beloved poly partners passed away peacefully

Due to old age or cancer;

And one current lover,

Still going the poly way

With interesting challenges.

Born and raised in China,

Greatly influenced by deep-rooted traditions,

I went through various political upheavals

Including the notorious Cultural Revolution².

Then just finished high school at age 18.

Thereafter, I labored in a commune village;

Served in the army;

Studied in Britain as a government-sent exchange student;

Returned to China and worked in the tourism administration for a decade;

Then in 1987, came to the U.S.

to attend law school in Berkeley,

The stronghold of free speech, novel ideas and varied alternative choices.

A curious soul looked around,

Tried out different things,

And consciously chose polyamory

As my way of being

and my spiritual path.

From a card-carrying communist

To a committed polyamory activist,

What a journey!

Filled with joy, sorrow, and learning,

The quest compels me to share my story with the world

With the hope of a better future for us all.

Donkey Baby

On the eve of the founding of New China,

At dawn of a June summer day in 1948,

In a cave dwelling in China’s Northwest Loess Plateau,

Where the People’s Liberation Army

Under the leadership of Mao Zedong,

Had established as a revolutionary base.

A woman soldier went to labor,

And brought me, Xiao Nü (little girl), to the world!

Soon after, the Army began its march towards Beijing

To establish the new government.

The Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek

Were losing the civil war,

And eventually driven to Taiwan.

A basket load across the back of a donkey

Carried my three-year old brother and I,

With a big rock by my feet to balance the load.

And hence my nickname: Donkey Baby.

The journey took about a year.

Weeks before October 1, 1949

The birthday of the People’s Republic,

The donkey baby entered Beijing

Amid a triumphant, clamorous, festive atmosphere.

Donkey Baby arrived in Beijing, 1949

My parents before the Cultural Revolution, 1965

Bloated with the military and political victories,

And guided by the Marxist-Leninist theory of

never-ending violent class struggle,

The new regime launched large-scale maneuvers one after another,

And some almost simultaneously.

In the rural Land Reform (1950-1952)

Agricultural acreage confiscated from landowners

Was distributed to peasants for a short period,

And later taken back to the state-controlled collectives.

Meanwhile under Moscow’s directive

China joined the Korean War (1950-1953),

The first showdown between the socialist and capitalist camps after WWII.

A tie-result boosted China’s morale against the American paper tiger³.

The nationwide crackdown on counter-revolutionaries (1950-1951)

Wiped out any Nationalist Party’s remnants and bandits.

In the cities, the drive against the three evils and five evils⁴ (1951-1952)

Targeted corruption and inefficiency of government agencies and officials.

In 1954, the government took over all privately-owned businesses.

In 1955, another round of elimination

Of counter-revolutionaries was carried out.

These continuous purges had 710,000 people killed⁵.

Seeing the protests against the communist rule

In Poland and Hungary in 1956,

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sensed an urgency

To eradicate all potential threats,

They encouraged intellectuals to voice their grievances in 1957,

Initially, as an attempt to let people vent and be appeased,

But scared by the sharp criticisms they heard,

The CCP turned its well-sounding campaign of

Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend

Into a sneaky tactic of drawing a snake out of its hole, and

Some 550,000 of the naïve and brave

were labeled as Rightists ⁶ and exiled.

The huge population of China

Made the concept of people not as living flesh, blood, and soul

But sheer cold numbers.

When calculating the risk that if China joined the Korean War

The U.S. might drop another atomic bomb,

China’s then supreme leader Mao said,

Even if half of our population died

We would still have more than that of America.⁷

As a sharp contrast of what was going on outside,

During my formative years from one to seven,

I lived in a most privileged boarding kindergarten,

As the precious first generation of New China.

Mom and Dad, veteran communists,

Were busy making revolution and building up the country.

Dad worked for the National Planning Commission,

Mom was the principal of a prestigious high school.

Our kindergarten occupied a corner

Of the former Royal Imperial Garden near the Forbidden City,

Surrounded by swaying willows trees,

Red walls with yellow glazed tiles,

And a calm lake.

In the kindergarten hairdo, age 6

My kindergarten revisited with Lionel, 2005

Shielded from the tempest revolutionary storms outside,

We, the first blossoms of the liberated motherland,

Lived in a sunny greenhouse.

Everything provided was the best,

And all shared:

Living space, food, toys, clothing,

As well as loving attention and care

From specially selected young and pretty aunties.

We went home one day a week,

The family of origin seemed far away.

My entire universe, through a rosy lens,

Was of a shared existence in an ideal world.

Thus, the seeds of idealism and shared love

Sowed in a fertile breeding ground in my subconsciousness,

Which later found an intrinsic connection with polyamory.

When asked,

Are you poly by nature or nurture?

I would say both.

Sharing is in my DNA from my upbringings,

And later it becomes a conscious choice.

Research shows that children

Growing up in tribal or communal living situation

Such as a kibutz,

Tend to be more receptive to polyamory

Or other open relationships.

My peaceful early childhood in Utopia

Continued when I went to the best elementary school in Beijing

Followed by the best middle school and high school.

An obedient star student with perfect scores

I was used to being submissive to my teachers whom I adored,

Or any authority figures including my parents.

The middle and high school that I attended

Had the reputation of being the best single-sex girls’ school in the country.

Being in an all-girls environment in my adolescent years,

I had no opportunity to have natural interactions

With the opposite sex,

And naturally, or unnaturally, sex was a taboo subject.

When I was about 14,

My extra-curricular sailing group at the Children’s Palace

Joined a performing arts troupe

Traveling to a naval base near Beijing for a special visit,

To show our gratitude for the gate guards of the nation’s capital.

One night, on the deck of a huge navy vessel,

The Beijing Song and Dance Troupe presented a wonderful show.

The full moon and glittering stars on a velvet canopy of night

Set a perfect stage.

We, the Young Pioneers,⁸ chatted happily with the sailors

Sitting next to us.

Upon returning to Beijing,

A letter greeted me from a sailor whom I had met on the ship,

Along with a picture of him in his handsome navy uniform.

Full of admiration, I wrote back

Enclosing a picture of myself in a pretty dress

With my Young Pioneer red scarf and two long pigtails.

Young Pioneer, age 12

I proudly showed the letter to Mom,

She shook her head with a stern look.

Later the coach at the Children’s Palace told me clearly

That the trip was over,

There should be no further contacts with the sailor.

Always the good little girl and model student,

Mother’s and teacher’s words were law.

My first romance ended with no drama

But sweet memories.

Unceasing political upheavals

Began to intrude into my innocent school life.

The Great Leap Forward (1958-1960)

Reflected a frenzied attempt to show the world

That the socialist system was superior to capitalism,

Not only for its social welfare with

Full employment, free housing, free education, and free healthcare,

But also, in agricultural and industrial productions.

The goal was to grow so much grain and make so much steel to

Surpass England and catch up with America.⁹

Nobody knew how sparrows were assumed guilty

Of eating too much grain being grown,

But they quickly became the number one enemy.

For weeks, people of all ages and occupations

Stopped their normal activities,

Grabbed any device at hand to make so much noise

That the poor birds had no place to eat or rest

But dropped dead to the ground out of total exhaustion.

Happy to be out of class,

I and my schoolmates jumped up and down frantically on the playground,

Making noises with pots and pans,

Shouting at the top of our lungs to scare the hapless birds.

Every dead sparrow we could find

Would be proudly placed on the teacher’s desk.

Every school, every factory, every neighborhood

Had its chart of combat success,

And the tallies were reported daily in local and national newspapers.

The uproarious success turned out to be a big disaster.

Sparrows were the natural enemies

Not of the revolution, but of locusts.

The near genocide of sparrows upset the ecological balance,

Causing a nationwide plague of locusts.

The counterproductive policy of the Great Leap Forward

Encouraged exaggerated agricultural output,

Resulting in more grains taken from the farmers to the state.

The ridiculous zero-tolerance to sparrows farce

Over 60 years ago

Had a repeat performance lately.

Under China’s policy of zero-tolerance to Covid virus,

If only a few tested positive

The entire district or city would be locked down.

The test-positive people and close contacts

Were not allowed to quarantine at home

But taken to makeshift hospitals,

Even separating young children from parents.

People could not go grocery shopping

Or visit the hospital for regular treatments.

This caused extreme hardship to the people’s livelihood

As well as to the country’s, even the world’s economy.

Then the sudden U-turn of reopening

Totally unprepared for,

Brought a tsunami of mass infections and deaths.

This 180-degree policy change

Was due to mounting economic decline,

Widespread political protests,

The so-called white paper revolution,¹⁰ and

The Party chief Xi’s certainty that he had gained full control

After the Constitutional change which secured his life term.

Yet just like before, no matter how absurd it is,

In an absolute dictatorship

One person’s quirk becomes a nightmare for millions.

That exceptional famine lasted a couple of years,

Taking over 30 million human lives.

Sadly, the communists with a conscience

Who dared to say the famine was man-made

Rather than a natural disaster

Were branded as Right-Wing Conservatives,

And paid with their lives for speaking the truth.

The father of my future husband was one of them.

He was the vice chancellor of Peking University, China’s Harvard,

And led a team of faculty and students of Economics

On a field study of the newly formed rural People’s Communes.

They were shocked to see the poverty and suffering of the farmers.

Many starved to death, not due to bad harvest

But rather, boasted false grain output,

Which local officials turned over to the state as taxes

To keep up with the production quotas of the Great Leap Forward.

Upon returning to Beijing

He wrote a report to the central government

Expressing his doubts over the party’s erroneous policy,

And was thus labeled an "die-hard conservative

In the circle of higher education".

Too much for him to bear the disgrace

He took his own life

Leaving behind his 35-year-old wife with five children.

His widow, party chief of the School of Economics,

Then became the target of numerous criticism meetings

Where she was forced to listen to harsh accusations against

Her late husband and herself.

His suicide was interpreted as the final act of defiance against the Party.

Ashamed and exhausted

She fainted in the school bathroom.

My future husband, Ming, who was a third grader then, around 10,

Instantly turned from his teacher’s blue-eyed boy

To a black sheep in the class.

Subject to discrimination in many ways,

This family tragedy deeply traumatized his young heart,

Which also affected our married life later on.

Ming, silently and subconsciously

Made two promises to himself:

Under no circumstances would he take his own life

And under no circumstances would he let his children be fatherless,

Which made our divorce drag on for years.

When we first met, Ming told me that he wanted to write a satirical book

About the fate of several chancellors of Peking University,

Epitomizing the life of intellectuals in contemporary China.

One of the chancellors, John Leighton Stuart,

Was the son born in China of American missionaries.

In 1919 Stuart became the first Chancellor of Peking University

Which was partially built with American funding.

After WW II, in 1946,

President Truman appointed Stuart, then 70,

As the U.S. Ambassador to China.

His arduous efforts to prevent a civil war in China were futile.

With the communists’ takeover

And Mao’s article Farewell Stuart

He was kicked out of China as a symbol of failed American imperialism.

Stuart had not worked in the U.S. to earn the required 40 points

To qualify for social security benefits.

With a modest support by a non-profit organization

He lived humbly and died in 1962 in the U.S.

His dying wish was that his ashes be buried next to his beloved wife

By the Wei Ming lake inside Peking University.

It was not honored.

Ming’s father was a vice chancellor of Peking University in 1957-59.

Ming once peeked from behind the curtain in the family living room

By that Wei Ming Lake.

His father was talking with an outspoken student

Who later was labeled the first college student anti-party rightist.

Two years later,

His father himself became a fatality of the ruthless Party mincing machine.

I hope Ming has not given up the idea of writing such a satire.

My own mother was also a victim of the 1959 Party purge.

As a principal of a famous high school in Beijing,

She complained that too much time was assigned to political study

Not enough for academic learning.

She and eight other principals who shared her view,

Were singled out as the nine-principal anti-party clique,

And demoted to work in a factory for two years,

Which was regarded a very lenient treatment.

This was not the first nor the last time

That my mother suffered political persecution by her own Party.

Both of my parents

Came from politically undesirable landowners’ families.

They had not yet met when the Japanese invaded China in 1937,

But both individually abandoned college education

And hastened to the revolutionary base area

To join the communist resistance force.

The Party never fully trusted its intellectual members.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), formed in 1921,

As a branch of the Cominter¹¹, the Communist International,

Had always been under the influence and control

Of the Russian Communist Party,

Trailing Lenin and Stalin step by step.

Following Stalin’s grand purge

The CCP launched Yan’an Rectification Movement in 1941.

Many CCP members were accused

Of being special agents for the Nationalist Party.

My mother’s then husband was one of the suspected.

Unable to endure torture, he admitted that he was one

And had also recruited my mother.

Later, the Party leadership realized that the drive had gone too far

And damaged the morale of the revolutionaries.

A special task force was dispatched to

Redress those who were wronged.

That’s how my father, a member of the task force, met my mother.

My mother divorced her husband and married my father.

Thinking that I too was outspoken like