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6 The Stele with No Name
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The parents of migrants had terrible instincts. At every stage, they gave bad advice; they specialized in outdated knowledge and conservatism born out of fear. Some initially forbade their children, especially their daughters, from going out at all. But once a migrant got to the city, the parental message shifted dramatically: Send home money, the more the better. Some parents pressured their daughters to marry, though only someone from their home province—which seemed as unreasonable as telling a person living in New York to date only natives of Ohio. On the job front, their advice was invariably bad: They warned against jumping factories, which was usually the best way to get ahead.
Migrants learned quickly how to deal with their parents: They disobeyed, they fought, and they lied. They kept their distance; Chunming did not go home during her first three years in the city. The girls were matter-of-fact about such transgressions. “They don’t know how things are outside, so I do something first, and then I tell them about it,” Min said. A new life began the day they arrived in the city, and they would do what they needed to protect it. The past did not matter, and the present was everything. Family was a trap that would pull you backward if you weren’t careful.
After I moved to China, I had always resisted the pull of my own family, and perhaps some of the reasons were the same. My parents’ China was fifty years out of date; the Chinese have always respected scholars and disparaged merchants, they had taught me as a child, but the people I was meeting now contradicted all of that. I didn’t try to find relatives who were still living here. I wanted to learn about this country on my own terms. And family history seemed like a trap—a ready-made way to see China in tragic terms, a view that had little to do with how things were now.
Around the time I started meeting migrant workers in Dongguan, I began to investigate my own family history. Initially these were separate projects, a study in contrasts—there could be no common ground between the teeming chaos of the south China factories and the sober gray cities of the Northeast, with their steel mills and stone monuments aging and proud. I enjoyed the rhythms of these journeys as I shuttled south and then north, from the future to the past and back to the future again.
But the more I learned, the more I saw connections. Almost a hundred years ago, my grandfather had been a migrant too. He had left his village, changed his name, and tried to remake himself for the modern age. In his youth, China was emerging from a long, self-imposed isolation to rejoin the world—and so it is again today. My grandfather left home for good when he was sixteen years old—although he probably did not know it then, just as today’s migrants might not know it now. Chuqu, to go out: This is how the story of my family also begins.
* * *
When I was growing up in America, my parents rarely talked about the past. There is a mode of exile that dwells on everything that was lost—the twilit boulevards of the capital city, the large house and the servants, the shaded garden with the persimmon trees where we will return one day when the regime falls and we reclaim what is rightfully ours. But the Chinese who fled the Communists seldom indulged in such reveries. Their way was to move forward and make a new life; to linger on loss was pointless. The migrants and immigrants I have known have shared this pragmatism, which seems so deeply ingrained in the Chinese character. The present is everything, and the past recedes.
As a child I heard only fragments of our family history from my father, and I turned them over and over in my mind until each fragment became its own story, mysterious and complete. The stories never connected, or they connected in a secret way I did not know.
The four best mining schools in America are in Michigan, Colorado, New Mexico, and West Virginia.
We carried the gold bars in our belts when we traveled.
We left our stamp collections behind when we fled the Communists. We left everything behind.
Every day I went to the American consulate in Taipei and waited for the officer to call my name.
China came in pieces, too. China was the sweaters that my maternal grandmother sent us from Taiwan, wrapped in mothballs and emerging from their cardboard boxes smelling like the insides of attics. Wearing one to school, I felt acutely that I looked different, smelled different, from everyone else. China was the Kuomintang newspaper that arrived in our mailbox from Taiwan, folded into tight bands that would spring open, as if in their eagerness to tell the news from afar. It was the Chinese Ping-Pong players with rubbery limbs and pasty faces whom my parents rooted for—to me, inexplicably—when the Olympics came around. China was, thrillingly, the vinyl records my father brought back from his first trip to the People’s Republic of China in 1975, when Mao was still alive.
The sun in the east is rising,
The People’s Republic is growing;
Our supreme leader Mao Zedong
Points our direction forward.
Our lives are improving day by day,
Our future shining in glorious splendor.
The song is called “In Praise of the Motherland.” When I first heard it I was six years old, and the sunny Communist paradise it celebrated had disintegrated long ago. Yet even now the song’s opening bars make me shiver.
I knew many of these songs by heart. Chinese was my first language, and its lullabies and ballads threaded through my childhood from its earliest days, like the memory of a life I had lived before this one. My father’s family was from Manchuria, the region that the Chinese call simply Dongbei, the Northeast, and many of my earliest songs came from there. I did not feel a strong tie to China when I was growing up, but I knew I was from Dongbei.
My home is on the Songhua River in the Northeast
Where there are forests and coal mines
And soybeans and sorghum over slopes and fields.
My home is on the Songhua River in the Northeast
Where there are my compatriots
And also my aging father and mother . . .
I have fled my home village,
Forsaken its inexhaustible treasures.
Wandering, wandering,
Wandering all my days inside the pass.
The pass was the Shanhai Pass, an imposing stone fortress on China’s east coast where the Great Wall runs into the sea. Built during the Ming Dynasty to guard China’s northern frontier, it marked the point at which civilization ended and Manchurian wilderness began.
To me, the saddest song was about the Great Wall, sung by a Northeasterner exiled from home after the Japanese invasion. The wall’s watchtowers and battlements had been constructed over centuries to protect China from its northern enemies. After the Japanese army overran Manchuria in 1931, the wall took on a different meaning—it delineated the lands that were under the Japanese yoke. The song was a tacit admission that the Great Wall had failed, because the enemy was already in Dongbei.
The Great Wall is ten thousand miles long
Outside the Great Wall is my hometown.
The sorghum is fat, the soybeans fragrant
Gold is everywhere, and calamities rare.
Ever since the great catastrophe started suddenly
Rape, plunder, and capture, miseries too bitter to bear
Miseries too bitter to bear, fleeing to unknown lands
Family pulled apart, parents dead
Remembering all my life the enmity and hatred
Day and night thinking only of returning home . . .
Let four hundred million compatriots rise together:
The Great Wall of our hearts will be ten thousand miles long.
My mother and father learned these songs as children, just as I did. The songs told the story of their parents’ generation, living far from home and cut off by war from parents they would never see again. In the Chinese tradition, poetry conformed to a tight schematic pattern—at its best, the self disappeared inside the experience of the poem. Compressed in the verses of these songs was an emotion that was never spoken.
AFTER YEARS OF FRAGMENTS, snatches of song, and pieces of memory, I finally sat down with my father and asked him to tell me everything he knew about our family history. He told me about our family’s rise from humble origins in the waning years of the Qing Dynasty. He described how badly my grandfather had wanted to leave home and see the world. He remembered the chaotic retreat from the Japanese army and the air-raid sirens that meant there would be no school that day. But my father’s story was full of gaps: His memories of China were the memories of childhood, couched in a child’s apprehension of the world.
We were playing hide-and-seek. My father was taking a nap. I hid in the bay window on the other side of the bed from where he was sleeping, and I was afraid to come out. But he discovered I was hiding there, and he said, “Come out,” and he played with us. That was my only memory of him.
I spoke with my father’s brother and sisters, all of whom had emigrated to America in their twenties. An incident from half a century ago would be recalled differently, with each person’s version fixed and distinct—pieces of China they carried with them that had hardened over time, like precious pebbles worn smooth. I met the part of my family who had stayed behind in China, including my father’s cousins and distant relatives who had never left our ancestral village.
A few were trying to make sense of the past, but most were not—whether you had left China or stayed, it hurt less to let it go.
My relatives did not like telling their own stories. They often began by insisting they had nothing to say. Their narratives frequently opened with ignorance, a denial, even a death, as if to end the story before it could properly begin. Not one of them, it seemed to me, had faith that their memories mattered. In fact, my experience of China was very shallow was the first thing my aunt Nellie told me. We don’t know much about family history, said my uncle Luke, because we never had a chance to talk about it. My father’s story began with absence: My grandfather’s father. Nobody knew his name. They brushed over details and they downplayed drama. Sometimes when they were relating something particularly painful, they laughed. Perhaps in a world where so many people had suffered, one person’s story did not matter. Suffering only made you more like everyone else.
The young women in the factory towns of the south did not think this way. In a city untroubled by the past, each one was living, telling, and writing her own story; amid these million solitary struggles, individualism was taking root. It was expressed in self-improvement classes and the talent market, in fights with parents and in the lessons that were painstakingly copied into notebooks: Don’t lose the opportunity. To die poor is a sin. The details of their lives might be grim and mundane, yet these young women told me their stories as if they mattered.
* * *
Sometime during the reign of the Kangxi emperor, maybe around 1700, a farmer named Zhang Hualong left his home on the crowded North China Plain for the Manchurian prairie, where virgin land was so plentiful that anyone could make a fresh start. In those days, every village in north China seemed to have someone who had migrated; then as now, it was often the younger and more enterprising people who went out. Zhang Hualong had two sons, who traveled farther north to settle in a village called Liutai, in the Manchurian province of Jilin. The site they chose was known as Pauper’s Valley because of its poor climate and swampy land. Fourteen generations of Zhangs have lived there. I am of the eleventh.
As with Chinese migrants of the 1980s, the journey of my earliest known ancestor was not legal. In 1644, the Manchus, an ethnic group living on China’s northeastern frontier, conquered China and established the Qing Dynasty. Soon after, the Qing rulers declared Manchuria off-limits to the Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group of the rest of the country. Their aim was to monopolize the region’s natural resources and to preserve their homeland: As long as the frontier remained intact, they believed, their people would retain their vitality and forestall the corruption and decadence by which dynasties inevitably fell. To seal off Manchuria, the emperors ordered the construction of a two-hundred-mile mud wall planted with willow trees. It stretched from the Great Wall northeast through most of present-day Liaoning and Jilin provinces, with fortified checkpoints along its length.
The border was called the Willow Palisade, and it was even more porous than the Great Wall. It was completed in 1681, and perhaps twenty years later my ancestor breached it to settle in Liutai, which means “sixth post”—one of the fortified towers along the border that was built expressly to keep out people like him. The Chinese who entered illegally to farm were called liumin, wanderers. Over the next two centuries, my pioneer ancestors farmed—planting sorghum and soybeans, and living in log cabins surrounded by primeval forest.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Manchuria’s population began to swell as farmers from north China fled drought and famine. This migration, of twenty-five million people over the next half century, would be the largest in the country’s history until the present wave. The region’s economy boomed, new railroads linked the interior to coastal and foreign markets, and foreigners spouted prophecies as breathless as those heard today. In 1910, the British consul-general posted in Tianjin wrote:
There is little doubt that Manchuria is to become, in the not far distant future, a competitor of America in supplying agricultural products for the markets of Europe. The flour mills of Harbin . . . are placing their products upon the local markets at prices with which it is impossible for American mills to compete . . . What the United States may lose through diminished sales of farm products must more than be made up through increased trade in manufactured goods.
My family rose to prominence in this economic boom. My greatgrandfather, Zhang Ya’nan, bought an oil press and a flour mill and used the money from these ventures to become the biggest landowner in Liutai. Around 1890, Zhang Ya’nan oversaw construction of a family compound with five central rooms and eight wings. The ancestral tablets and portraits occupied the central rooms, while the living ate, worked, and slept along the sides. That was how a Chinese family lived—the dead intruding on the living, and filial devotion built into the very architecture of the houses. The compound was named Xinfayuan, which means “New Origin.” It was surrounded by high walls, with Mauser pistols mounted at each corner and an armed militia to protect against bandits. The measure of a family’s prosperity was in the food they ate, and at Xinfayuan even the hired hands dined on steamed buns filled with sweet bean paste. Portions were so generous that they inspired a song whose lines my father would recall a century later.
Xinfayuan, a fine place
The dogs lead the way, the people bring the food,
Two and a half jin of bean-stuffed buns.
In the last years of the Qing Dynasty, my great-grandfather was awarded a degree in the imperial civil service and given three hundred taels of silver by the imperial court to build an ancestral temple. This was standard practice: Once someone became an official, he had to observe the proper Confucian respect for his ancestors. My great-grandfather took four wives—also standard practice—and set up a school inside the family compound for his nine children, both sons and daughters, to attend. Perhaps because of my great-grandfather’s rise, the court awarded his own father an imperial military title, general of the third rank of the Qing Dynasty, and gave the family money to build a memorial arch praising his filial piety. Thus was created an illustrious family pedigree out of nothing at all. A farmer became a general, and a mill owner a government official: Here on the frontier, molding a new life did not take so long.
My great-grandfather fulfilled the other duties of a Confucian patriarch. He oversaw the writing of a family genealogy that stretched back to the ancestor who had migrated to Manchuria. And he laid out a sequence of names that his descendants would carry for the next twenty generations, which together formed a poem.
Feng Li Tong Xing Dian
Hong Lian Yu Bao Chao
Wan Chuan Jia Qing Yan
Jiu Yang Guo En Zhao
The phoenix stands in the palace of prospering together
The swan connects and nurtures the dynasty of treasures
Ten thousand generations pass on the continuing family celebration
Nine ornaments display the favor of the nation.
My family prospered late, coming into glory at the very moment the Qing way of life was ending. The estate, the temple, the tablets and portraits and relics would all be destroyed in the tumultuous century to come; many lives would be cut short. But not everything was laid waste. My Chinese name is Tonghe: The first character in my name was decided a century ago by a great-grandfather I never knew.
* * *
In the village where my grandfather Zhang Chun’en was born in 1899, almost everyone shared his family name. As a child he attended the family school, where he memorized long passages from the Four Books and the Five Classics dating to the time of Confucius. That he did not comprehend a word of these texts was unimportant; education was intended to shape a child into proper behavior, imprinting him early with the virtues of obedience, respect, and restraint. The ultimate aim of learning was to pass the civil-service examination and become an imperial official—a system that had persisted, virtually unchanged, for a thousand years.
But this world was already breaking apart by the time my grandfather was a boy. The nineteenth century had seen traumatic encounters with the West; following China’s defeat in the Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1850s, the monarchy was forced to sign a series of “unequal treaties” that opened ports to foreign trade and gave legal and economic privileges to the Western powers and Japan. Reformers blamed traditional education for China’s humiliating decline. Their efforts led to the abolition of the civil-service exam in 1905 and the spread of schools that taught modern subjects. In 1911, when my grandfather was just entering his teens, the Qing Dynasty collapsed and a republic took its place.
Even as a child, my grandfather was determined to leave home—then as now, all paths to success led away from the village. His older brother, whose name was Zhang Feng’en, would someday run the family estate. But as the second son of the first wife, my grandfather was in a privileged position: He could go away. In the spring of 1913, he enrolled in the Jilin Provincial Middle School. It was the first school in the province to teach what was called the New Learning, which dispensed with the classics in favor of mathematics, history, geography, and the natural sciences. He left home three years later to attend Peking University, the head of a national network of modern schools.
Most of the students there came from the wealthy merchant families of the coast; my grandfather was an outsider, like a scholarship boy from a Colorado mining town showing up at Harvard. But as a center of progressive learning, the university also attracted other ambitious young people from the provinces. One contemporary of my grandfather who worked in the school library was Mao Zedong. My grandfather likely struggled with the New Learning. In the Peking University archives, I found a book bound with string that listed, in spidery calligraphy, the exam results for pre-law students in 1917. Foreign subjects were not my grandfather’s strong suit.
WESTERN HISTORY: 70
ENGLISH LITERATURE: 70
CHINESE LANGUAGE: 80
LOGIC: 90
BEHAVIOR: 100
If the traditional value system had been intact, my grandfather would have obtained the highest university degree and gotten a job in government. But the New Learning was taking him in unexpected directions: My grandfather won a provincial scholarship to study in America, so he quit school after his sophomore year. He married a young woman named Li Xiulan who had been chosen by his family—three days after the wedding, he boarded a ship for America.
My grandmother was then studying at Peking Women’s Normal College, one of the first colleges in the country to accept female students. She majored in physical education and music; she marched in student protests and smoked cigarettes and chose a new name, Li Xiangheng, because it had more unusual characters than her old one. After graduation she taught high school in Jilin City, the provincial capital.
For seven years she wrote letters to America, the land that had consigned her to spending her twenties alone, and the land that would later claim her children, one by one. Her letters have not survived. All that remains of the young woman she was is contained in a few terse sentences in my grandfather’s diary, like the bright flash of a forest animal glimpsed through the trees: her solicitude, loneliness, sparks of ill temper.
Xiangheng plans to return home because my mother is sick.
I bought a pair of shoes to send home for Xiangheng.
In Xiangheng’s letter she creates an uproar, saying she has suffered a great wrong.
I got three letters from Xiangheng, all urging me to go home. Because my own plans are not finished, I cannot return yet.
My grandmother wished to go to America too, but my great-grandfather laid down the law. Foreign countries were not for women, he said. A woman should stay home.
* * *
January 1, 1926
China’s internal chaos is a cause of much worry. China will surely have one day when it is prosperous. I will see this in my lifetime. Every person must work hard for the coming of this day.
My personal conduct must be honorable and in my dealings I must be more frugal.
I had lunch with my landlord, Harry Weart. His neighbors, an old couple, like to play with dogs and birds and they spoke of their pets. I am disgusted by this kind of talk.
My grandfather arrived in America in 1920. It was the era of bathtub gin, petting parties, and Al Capone, but he barely noticed. In the pages of his diary, he wrote about his search for a proper course of study and about the political situation in China. These two subjects were connected: By acquiring the right skills in America, he would learn what was necessary to help his homeland become a modern nation. He flirted with literature and economics before settling on mining engineering: Industrial development would be China’s salvation.
During his seven years in America, the situation back home deteriorated. The national government basically ceased to exist, as warlords with personal armies fought one another across the country. In my grandfather’s American diaries of the 1920s, the people who loomed largest were the Chinese warlords Wu Peifu and Zhang Zuolin.
January 26
Zhang Zuolin has already set free Ivanov [the Russian director of the Chinese Eastern Railway], so the Harbin question is temporarily resolved. The cause of the incident in Harbin was directly related to Feng Yuxiang’s return to the North-east. One man favors an alliance with the Russians and the other with the Japanese, but each is pursuing his own interest.
China still does not have a person who manufactures machinery. To have it begin with me in the future would be a most wonderful thing.
January 28
Today there was heavy snow and winds and the roads were almost impassable. My colleague Backland got married today at five o’clock . . .
Manchuria and Mongolia have become one of the world’s big problems. If we don’t handle this properly, it will be hard to prevent their becoming a second Korea. This is the homeland of my ancestors. How can I offer it up to someone else? I swear that I will take the defense of the territory and the welfare of the people there as my own responsibility.
March 4
My glasses were broken so I went to the eye doctor for a new pair. They cost twenty-four American dollars. So expensive!
Jilin’s forests are naturally suited for manufacturing paper, and Jilin exports large quantities of leather products each year and even more of fur, while its railroads are very convenient. I will look into working in the paper industry.
June 4
I did surveying at Mount Franklin today. The trees were lush and fragrant and the air fresh. The early mornings are very cold and at night my throat itches . . .
If China wants to become prosperous and strong, it must develop its steel industry; otherwise it cannot resist the encroachments of foreign nations. Right now its machinery relies entirely on imports. If a war begins and resources from the outside world are cut off, then China will surely be defeated.
November 12
I cleaned a coal-cutting machine today and took it apart. It was most interesting.
To govern a nation and teach its people, or to occupy a place, one must have good propaganda. To rely solely on military power will lead to defeat.
Thousands of Chinese students went to America during the first two decades of the twentieth century, the first large wave of people to go abroad for study. They saw Western learning as the best way to help China, and they gravitated toward practical subjects like economics, the natural sciences, and especially engineering—the chosen major of more than a third of the Chinese students in America between 1905 and 1924. My grandfather attended the Michigan College of Mines, in an old copper-mining region near the Canadian border. He graduated in 1925, thirty-third in a class of forty-four; apparently the New Learning was still giving him trouble.
I CAME UPON my grandfather’s diaries by accident. My father said that the family had abandoned everything they owned through the years of the Second World War, the civil war, the flight to Taiwan, and the trip to America. More than a year after I started researching our family history, I was talking on the phone with my father and I asked him if he owned anything that had belonged to his father. Unexpectedly, he said he had two diaries, one from my grandfather’s time in America and the other from when the family lived in Chongqing during the war. They ran close to a thousand pages.
“It isn’t very interesting,” my father said. “He just writes things like, ‘Today the Japanese army is closing in around the city.’ Stuff like that.”
“Actually,” I said, “that’s pretty interesting.”
Through the pages of his diary, I came to know the grandfather I had never met in life. He was a young man searching for a purpose, dreaming of a wide range of careers. He found and quit jobs about as often as the migrants did, quickly growing bored and anxious that he wasn’t learning enough. He was lonely and adrift.
July 14
In the factory when I have free time, I think of all kinds of troubles. I feel like a single boat floating on the great ocean. Even if the heart desires quiet, it cannot be.
November 18
I have worked almost two years. Sometimes I feel I am not interested in it. But you must handle work yourself even if it has no interest for you. Now with China’s situation so bad, this is precisely the time for men to make a firm resolution to establish their own enterprises. I must try hard 120 percent.
Self-improvement was a constant theme in the diary. After he finished his schooling, my grandfather spent two years doing practical training at mines and factories in the Northeast and the Midwest. He enrolled in a Chicago night school to study electrical machinery. The diary entries bristle with alien English words he was trying to learn: Goodman Standard Shortwall Machine. Ratio of cement sand and slag. Pyramid Pump Open Hearth Mixer Blast Furnace Corrugated Underframe Door. He copied down inspirational advice from the titans of American industry.
Marshall Field’s Ten Things Worth Remembering
1. The Value of Time
2. The Success of Perseverance
3. The Pleasure of Working
4. The Worth of Character
5. The Dignity of Simplicity
6. The Improvement of Talent
7. The Joy of Originating
8. The Virtue of Patience
9. The Wisdom of Economy
10. The Power of Kindness
From afar, his family pressured him to come home. Reading my grandfather’s response in his diary—My desire to return home is strong, but my studies are not finished yet—reminded me of Chunming, who had expressed an almost identical thought in hers. Who knows why I am not going home for the new year? The main reason: I really do not want to waste time. Because I must study!
But at heart these journeys were different enterprises. The factory girls go to the city to improve their lives; my grandfather left home so he could return one day and better serve his country. You could say that my grandfather left home for home, while the girls leave home only for themselves. Chunming in her diary never stopped circling her favorite subject, which was herself: how the city was changing her, how others might see her, and the minute details of her physical appearance: My eyes do not have double eyelids, she wrote, but they are not too small. Their being single-lidded has not affected their vision. I don’t have thin lips but my mouth can speak persuasively. I speak loudly and boldly, not gently, but this has been my nature from birth. Through hundreds of pages of his diary, no such selfportrait of my grandfather ever emerges. The entries read like classical poems—terse and controlled, the individual implied but never visible.
During his time in America, my grandfather changed his Chinese name. The chosen characters of the new name, Shenfu, appear to come from an ancient phrase, shenshenzhengfu, which translates as “many diligent men drafted into service.” That was what my grandfather aspired to be: an army of men, dedicated to service, the self disappearing inside the name.
* * *
My grandfather returned to China in the summer of 1927. On his first day home, his father organized a celebration in the village for his favorite son, who had brought honor to the family by going all the way to America. On the second day, the patriarch took out a wooden rod called a jiafa—used in traditional households to discipline children and servants—and beat him with it. In America, his son had switched from studying literature to mining engineering without parental approval, never mind that his father was seven thousand miles away and understood nothing of the American university system. In a Chinese family, a father’s word was law. The beating was so severe that my grandfather could not sit down for several days.
His father wanted him to stay home and help run the estate, but the young man resisted: He hated the entanglements of life in the family compound and he was glad to escape. He took a job as head of mining affairs at the Muling Coal Mine near Harbin, in the far northeast of the country.
In 1931, the Japanese army marched into southern Manchuria. Within six months, the military had seized the entire region and established the nominally independent state of Manchukuo, which was essentially a Japanese colony. As the Japanese moved in, my grandparents fled “inside the pass,” south of the border that divided Manchuria from the rest of China. In 1937, the Japanese army invaded China proper, advancing along roads and railways to capture cities in the north and the east. Unoccupied China moved inland, and my family with it. Home in Manchuria became a distant place that the children would know only in stories and songs.
I have fled my home village,
Forsaken its inexhaustible treasures.
Wandering, wandering,
Wandering all my days inside the pass.
THE WAR SET IN MOTION a million migrant journeys. During the eight years of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, as the Chinese call the Second World War, the nation’s capital moved twice—from Nanjing to Wuhan, and in late 1938 to Chongqing, deep in the southwest, so far beyond the reach of modern communication and transport arteries that the Japanese army could not follow without endangering its supply lines. From its mountain stronghold, the Chinese government held fast and waited for the Allied armies to defeat Japan.
When the war broke out in 1937, my grandfather helped ship equipment from a coal mine in the province of Henan, where he was factory manager, more than five hundred miles inland to Sichuan Province. As an official with the National Resources Commission—a government agency charged with building up the country’s industrial base for the war—he was sent to far-flung mining areas to oversee the production of strategic commodities. He usually went first and wrote to my grandmother when it was safe to follow.
Each of their five children was born in a remote mining town. Nellie, the oldest, was born at the Harbin coal mine where my grandfather worked after returning from America; my uncle Luke and my father came into the world in a coal-mining region in central Henan Province. Coal in Sichuan, my aunt Irene; mercury in Hunan, my uncle Leo. The isolation of these places traced my grandfather’s idealism. Most students returning from abroad lived in the big cities, but my grandfather thought his work might matter more in the backward parts of the country.
Personal ties fell away—in the confusions of war, the easiest thing in the world was to lose touch with someone. The family might arrive in a new place, enroll the children in school, then leave a few weeks later. In his six years of elementary school, my uncle Luke told me, they moved seven times. Communication with family back in the village was difficult; letters home to Manchuria had to trace circuitous routes behind enemy lines. More astonishing was how people found each other again. One day toward the end of the war, a handsome college student named Zhao Hongzhi walked into a canteen for mining bureau employees in Chongqing and recognized my grandfather. His family and mine had been friends a decade before in the Henan coal mines. Zhao was invited home to dinner and began to court my aunt Nellie, whom he had known as a child.
Family also reconnected in the course of the war. While my grandfather’s older brother had stayed home to manage the estate, his son, whose name was Zhang Lijiao, went to Beijing to attend school while my family was living there. In traditional Chinese families, brothers and paternal cousins are regarded as equally close. My grandparents gave Lijiao a home and paid for his schooling; from the time they were children, my uncle Luke and my father looked up to “Big Brother Lijiao.” When the family moved to Chongqing to escape the Japanese advance, Lijiao went with them.
The war was a frustrating time for my grandfather. War caused death and ruin but also missed appointments, work stoppages, and broken-down buses. Occasionally he wondered whether his work was worth the effort.
July 17, 1940
These few years have passed quickly without much meaning. First, I have no friends, because I have lived so long in the mountains, separated from the outside world. Second, I have no ideals in life, knowing only about mines and mining work. What is the ultimate aim of life? I have not decided yet. Forty-two years have passed in this way. This is worthy of pity and regret.
In the summer of 1939, my great-grandfather Zhang Ya’nan fell ill and returned to the family homestead from Jilin City, the provincial capital. The patriarch of a prominent family could expect a grand funeral, but my great-grandfather left instructions to be buried in a white cloth robe, a white hat, and straw sandals—the austere garments of a monk. The hat was to be inscribed with the phrase baohen zhongtian: “holding regret until the end of time,” expressing sorrow that his homeland was still under Japanese occupation. My grandfather did not learn of his father’s passing until the next year. Ensuring the proper burial of one’s parents was a chief duty of a filial son, but war had made a return home impossible.
March 24, 1940
I was surprised to learn that my elder had passed away on the fifth of the month. Last summer he developed a stomach tumor. During the three months of winter, he could eat only milk powder substitutes each day. In his illness, he longed for us. This year he is seventy-five years old. He was always in good health and could have lived to be eighty or ninety. Only because of our country’s calamities, his spirits were unhappy and hurried his end. We can live no longer under the same sky with this enemy . . .
After September 18, 1931, I left home. It has been nine years already. Both my grandfather and my father have passed away. My life has seen so much change. To be a son and a grandson, how can I repay my country, how can I repay my grandfather and father!
Already forty-five years old when the Qing Dynasty fell, Zhang Ya’nan had lived long enough to see the world he knew disappear and be replaced by one where daughters wished to travel and sons left their aging fathers to work in strange places. He had not agreed with these choices; perhaps when his son left home there had been anger or bitterness between them. But the traditional Chinese diary was not the place for personal revelation, and the son did not write about these things.
* * *
My family was living in Chongqing when the Japanese surrendered in August 1945. A top priority for the government was regaining control of Manchuria’s well-developed industrial infrastructure; my grandfather and a friend and colleague named Sun Yueqi were appointed to oversee the return of the Northeast’s mines into Chinese hands. The region’s chief asset lay beneath a remote town called Fushun—the country’s largest coal mine and the largest open-pit mine in the world at the time.
It was a dangerous assignment. The war was over, but another one was just beginning. The conflict between the KMT government and the Communists—barely kept in check during the war years—was coming into the open, and the Northeast was shaping up as a key battleground. The Communists had the upper hand: Aided by Soviet troops that had entered the Northeast in the final days of the war, Communist guerrillas moved quickly into Manchuria to seize territory and war matériel left by the departing occupiers. On the other side of the country, the KMT soldiers in their wartime base of Chongqing could not get back fast enough.
Sun Yueqi was initially named to handle the return of the Fushun mine, but he made excuses, claiming business elsewhere, and recommended that my grandfather go in his place. The assignment must have felt like destiny to my grandfather. Here at last was a task that would redeem the disparate roles he had played in life: overseas student, mining expert, Manchurian exile, Chinese patriot. My grandfather accepted the assignment, although he did not tell my grandmother where he was going. On his way out of Chongqing, he stopped to say goodbye to his daughter, my aunt Nellie, at the high school where she boarded. She was fifteen years old, and she didn’t think much of it; all her life, her father had been leaving to go somewhere for work.
He arrived in Shenyang, the Northeast’s largest city, on January 7, 1946—his first time back in his homeland in fifteen years. An old friend named Dong Wenqi, who was now the city’s mayor, warned my grandfather to be careful. “You are coming from Chongqing,” Dong Wenqi said. “You don’t know what things are like here.” My grandfather was also cautioned by a contact from the Soviet side. The Russian told him to wait until the security situation in Fushun improved, and for a week my grandfather lingered in Shenyang.
Then the rumors began: He was afraid to go out, people said; he had come all the way to Shenyang to do nothing. On the morning of January 14, his boss at the Northeast Economic Commission telephoned to inquire about the stalled mission. Angry at the implication of cowardice, my grandfather set out for the mine that day with about six mining engineers and some guards from the local railway. At the mine, they became virtual prisoners, watched over by Soviet soldiers and Chinese Communist police. In two days they accomplished nothing, and then they were told to leave. On the evening of January 16, my grandfather and his team, still under guard, boarded a Soviet train back to Shenyang. At nine o’clock that night, armed soldiers boarded the train at a deserted station west of Fushun. They ordered my grandfather and his colleagues off the train and marched them to a nearby hillside. In the dark winter night, surrounded by Manchurian wilderness, the soldiers stabbed them to death with bayonets.
My grandfather said a few words as he was dying, according to a newspaper account of the time. “I am from the central government,” he said. “To die for my duty, I have no complaints.”
* * *
In Chongqing there was no news. One day, my grandmother went to the temple to inquire about the fate of her missing husband. A temple visitor would throw two pieces of wood until they fell in a certain combination, and then draw a bamboo stick printed with a number. That number corresponded to a fortune, expressed in a poem whose meaning was often ambiguous. The fortune came with a ranking, ranging from “very best” to “very worst.”
On that day, my grandmother’s fortune turned up “very worst.” And the meaning of the poem was so clear that my father, who was ten years old, would remember and recite it to me sixty years later, word for word:
In past days while sailing the rudder was lost,
Today still searching in the middle of the sea.
Even if the original thing could be found once more,
It would cost much effort and weary your heart.
In Shenyang, rumors spread that my grandfather and his six colleagues had been killed. Dong Wenqi, the mayor and my grandfather’s friend, received a phone call from the Soviet military commander in the area. Dong Wenqi visited the headquarters, and forty years later in his memoirs, he recalled the scene:
I saw a truck parked in the middle of the yard with a coffin inside, wrapped in black cloth. I jumped onto the truck and opened the coffin; without a doubt, it was Shenfu. He was still wearing the dark-blue Zhongshan suit he and I had had made together in Beiping [Beijing]. His body had been stabbed eighteen times.
My grandfather’s body was washed and photographed; the pictures showed multiple bayonet wounds and rope marks where his arms had been bound. His coffin was brought to the Temple of the God of War in Shenyang, where it was put on display for three months. The bloodstained clothes in which he had been stabbed eighteen times hung in the temple for people to view, Dong Wenqi wrote, in order to strengthen their feelings of bitter hatred for the enemy. Photographs of his corpse were widely disseminated, also for propaganda purposes. When news of the assassination broke in February 1946, student demonstrations in major Chinese cities demanded the evacuation of Soviet troops from Manchuria. In Chongqing, an estimated twenty thousand students protested the killings and the Soviet presence in the Northeast. Half a world away in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, Winston Churchill gave his famous Iron Curtain speech and cited Soviet actions in Manchuria as an example of its hostile intent.
The murders were never solved. The KMT maintained that the Communists had killed my grandfather and his team, as a warning to the government to stay out of Manchuria. The Communists, in turn, said the KMT had staged the assassination to turn public opinion against the Communists. The Soviet Union blamed the act on local “bandit gangs.” No one claimed responsibility for killing a group of unarmed civilians—a cowardly deed that also seemed a distinctly Chinese political act. The purpose was unstated but the message was clear just the same: The old war was over, a new one had begun, and my grandfather’s death was the first of many to come.
THE CHILDREN REMEMBER how they heard the news. On a winter afternoon, their mother was called away to the house of a friend. When she returned, she went into her bedroom and began to weep so loudly that the children could hear her. Then she came out of the room, gathered her children around her, and told them their father had been killed. “Don’t worry,” their mother said then. “I am here.” She told the children they would never see her cry again.
After my grandfather’s death, my grandmother entered public life—in some ways, the broader stage suited her strong-willed personality. She was selected to serve as a National Assembly representative and spent much of her time in the capital city of Nanjing. At one point, she set up a coal distribution business to supplement the family income. She had spoken the truth: The children never saw her cry again. But her hair turned gray and she started smoking heavily; overnight, it seemed to the children, she became old. The prophecy at the temple had been right in that too. Even if the original thing could be found once more, it would cost much effort and weary your heart.
My grandmother always believed that the Communists had killed her husband. She said that Sun Yueqi, my grandfather’s friend who had not gone to Fushun, should have died in his place. But Sun Yueqi was a survivor. He ended up defecting to the Communists in 1949—a banner year for defections—and heading the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang, a toothless party that existed to maintain the fiction that China was not a single-party state. Years later, my father told me, he heard from him again.
After I was in America, working at IBM, Sun Yueqi sent me a Christmas card. He said he wanted to see me the next time I came to Beijing.
I never saw him. I refused to see him.
Sun enjoyed a long career in government, and he lived to be 102 years old.
* * *
The funeral was delayed for more than a year. After the civil war officially resumed in the summer of 1946, battles raged around the village of Liutai; the area changed hands three times in the first year of the war. Finally the government decided to bury my grandfather in a Shenyang park that housed the tomb of the first emperor of the Qing Dynasty. Only the three boys got to attend the funeral, a fact my aunt Irene would recall with indignation sixty years later. The journey to attend their father’s memorial service marked the first time my father, Luke, and three-year-old Leo traveled “outside the pass” to Manchuria. The boys’ cousin Lijiao, who had become a lecturer at Peking University, also accompanied my grandmother.
The funeral procession had an armed escort. It was rumored that the Communists wanted to extinguish the entire family, a punishment from imperial times known as miemen. More than ten thousand people lined the route, pressing close to pay their respects and look on the heavy sandalwood coffin. My father, who was ten, remembered being thrilled at the crowds. In the imperial park at Beiling—which meant “northern tomb”—my grandfather was laid to rest near the “spirit walk,” a path lined with giant stone statues of human and animal courtiers that were to serve the emperor in the afterlife. A small piece of black marble inscribed with the words TOMB OF MR. ZHANG SHENFU was the only grave marker. To the right of the tomb was erected a tall slab of stone known as a stele, which traditionally would be carved with the story of a person’s life, praising his talents and deeds.
The government had drafted an inscription for the stele that blamed the Communists for my grandfather’s death. But my family rejected this official judgment. Lijiao, like most young intellectuals of the time, was a fervent Communist supporter who disagreed with the government version of his uncle’s death. My grandmother also opposed the official history, though her reasons were pragmatic: She believed the Communists might win the war. A tablet accusing the Communist Party of political assassination would not fare well under the new regime. Better, she thought, to say nothing at all.
After the funeral, in late 1947, my family moved to Beijing. The next year, the Communists would capture Shenyang and with it the Northeast, but by then my family would be fleeing to Taiwan. After the Communist victory, Lijiao would be transferred to Harbin and the country would be swallowed by political movements that would rule out independent travel. There would be no family left in Shenyang to look after my grandfather’s northern tomb. And the stele next to his grave would remain blank for close to half a century. Over the years, the people in Shenyang who knew its story moved away or passed on. City residents came to refer to the tomb as wuming bei: the stele with no name.
* * *
The Communist revolution swept into Liutai in the summer of 1946. Party organizers fanned out to villages across Manchuria, evaluating every family’s “class status” and confiscating land and livestock from rich households to distribute to the poorest ones. A second wave of land reform, the “Dig Out the Cellars” movement in the fall of 1947, sought to root out additional property that families had hidden away. Party activists taught villagers to denounce landowners in public meetings that were known as “struggle sessions”; their chosen targets were cursed, humiliated, and beaten. The third wave, in the winter of 1948, was the most extreme and ended in the deaths of countless “enemies of the revolution.” The escalating violence was seen as essential to breaking the old system. In correcting wrongs, Mao Zedong wrote in a 1927 essay on peasant revolt, it is necessary to go to extremes or else the wrongs cannot be righted.
In Liutai, Communist activists and villagers attacked our family estate of Xinfayuan. They tore down the wooden eaves of the buildings and set fire to the books in the library; they took my grandfather’s collection of mineral samples from his student days and threw them in the river. The new village government commandeered the east wing of the estate’s main hall for its office, while the west wing was turned into a storehouse and a place for grinding rice. Several poor families moved into the west wing and the back hall, where members of my family had formerly made offerings to their ancestors.
Zhang Feng’en, my grandfather’s older brother, fled the village when the attacks began and went to live in Beijing with Lijiao and the rest of the family. Feng’en had been the firstborn son and the lord of the manor all his life, but in Beijing this status was meaningless. My grandmother criticized his backward ways and his idleness; she railed at his habit of spitting on the floor. He suffered these rebukes in silence. In the capital, he knew his place: He was just an old man from the countryside who had outlived his birthright.
The children liked him, though. When they were alone, he would tell them stories of a grand family estate they had never seen.
“Did you have many concubines?” the boys asked eagerly, but only out of their mother’s hearing.
“No, only my father had many concubines,” the old man answered with a touch of regret.
The coming of the revolution to rural villages like Liutai set the pattern for the mass movements of the Communist era. Political campaigns would come in waves, each one more extreme than the last; acts of violence were applauded as proof of revolutionary purity. History does not say much about the 1940s land reform and the lives it ruined, perhaps because later movements played out in the cities and claimed more prominent victims. And historians have not paid attention to people like my great-uncle, who was forced to flee his home and live out his days as a guest in someone else’s house. His wife fared worse. When her husband escaped to Beijing, she stayed behind in the village. That was as it should be: A woman should not travel. A woman should stay home. My great-aunt was beaten to death, most likely by people she had known all her life, in one of the surges of revolutionary violence that engulfed my family village in the late 1940s. I don’t even know her name.
* * *
My father’s map of Beijing is different from mine. Several years ago, he and my mother visited me there and we drove into the countryside northeast of the city. In the car, my father smoothed out a road map and read aloud the names of towns: Gubeikou, Xifengkou. These had been famous passes on the Great Wall built by the Ming emperors; I knew them as tourist sites that were overrun on summer weekends. To my father, these were the places that surrendered without a fight, one by one, as the People’s Liberation Army tightened its net around Beijing when he was twelve years old.
“There was no battle for Beijing,” my father told me. “Do you know why? The generals stationed here had never been loyal to Chiang Kai-shek. They went over to the Communists without a fight.”
It was the autumn of 1948, and my grandmother was right: The Communists were winning the war. As the military defeats and the defections piled up, people looked to the peripheries of the country for escape. The island of Taiwan, one hundred miles off the coast of China, was one possible refuge; the Shanghai merchant families favored the British colony of Hong Kong. Some people talked about a retreat to the southwest, which had saved China during the war against the Japanese: From mountain bases in Chongqing and Guangxi Province, on China’s border with Vietnam, those who fled there might one day fight their way back into the heart of the country.
Families splintered before the Communist advance. A father might depart with the older children while their mother and younger siblings stayed behind, or a family would leave its youngest child in the care of grandparents while the rest went on ahead. These separations were thought to be temporary—everyone expected the KMT to regain the military initiative before long. My grandmother agonized over where to go. Again she visited the temple, and the bamboo sticks told her: Go to Taiwan.
In the autumn of 1948, Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Soong Mayling, went to Beijing. They toured the Summer Palace, a vast park on the city’s northwestern outskirts that had been built by the Qing emperors as a refuge from the summer heat. Zhao Hongzhi, the boyfriend of my aunt Nellie, happened to be visiting the Summer Palace that day. He took a photograph of the president of China and his wife as they walked for the last time through the gardens and pavilions and beside the lake lined with willow trees. The next year, with much of the country already lost, Chiang Kai-shek moved the nation’s capital back to its wartime base of Chongqing. Many families moved with him, and then the capital was shifted once more, to the nearby city of Chengdu. Finally in December of 1949, Chiang Kai-shek boarded a plane for Taiwan, where he would set up a new government, leaving behind many of the people who had followed him to the end.
NOT EVERYONE WANTED TO LEAVE. My grandmother invited Lijiao and Zhao Hongzhi to accompany the family to Taiwan, but they both turned her down. Zhao was a college student and Lijiao a professor; like many intellectuals of the time, they supported the Communists and looked forward to building a new nation. My father and my uncle Luke were too young to have political views. Zhao and Lijiao were old enough, and that maturity sealed their fates.
My aunt Nellie, according to family lore, wanted to stay behind too. A junior in high school, she was torn between the wishes of her family and her Communist sympathies. She was also in love—her boyfriend, Zhao, believed in the revolution and planned to stay. But he convinced Nellie that she must leave, to help her mother with the four younger children. The two of them agreed that wherever they ended up, each would place a “Seeking Person” advertisement in the biggest newspaper in the city so they could find each other again.
“That is nonsense!” said Nellie, when I related this version of the story to her recently. “He wanted me to go to Taiwan with the children and then come back to China.”
As the oldest child in the family, Nellie had always been her father’s favorite. She accepted that exalted status as her birthright, but she had learned to keep her own counsel. When I asked her if she had wanted to stay behind that autumn of 1948, she brushed me off. “I didn’t care whether I left or not,” she said, “but I had all this responsibility to take care of the younger children.”
One summer afternoon in Beijing, I visited Zhao Hongzhi, her old boyfriend. He was eighty years old and he had just moved into an apartment complex down the block from my own. His wife was home and I met her for the first time. No emotion showed on her face as she greeted me: the niece of her husband’s old girlfriend, arriving to talk about that long-ago love affair.
In the living room, Zhao spoke carefully about his childhood and his acquaintance with my family. His wife moved through the apartment and finally settled down at the adjoining dining room table to read the newspaper. Occasionally she rustled its pages to let us know she was still reading. The air conditioners in the new apartment had not been hooked up yet, and the place was sweltering.
“Was Nellie involved in Communist activities?” I asked Zhao.
“No,” he said. “She was still in high school.”
“But I had always heard she didn’t want to leave China.”
“She didn’t want to leave China.”
I ventured a look at him. Zhao sat perfectly straight on the couch—as stiff-backed as a young cadet, and arrogant in this knowledge. Silently he pointed to himself, his thumb aiming at his chest like a dagger that has found its target. In the next room, the newspaper was silent.
THAT AUTUMN OF 1948, the National Assembly was still in session. My grandmother was in Nanjing, trying frantically to spirit her children out of Beijing as the Communist troops moved on the city. Boat tickets to Shanghai were sold out, and the municipal airport had closed. My grandmother paid a visit to a general in the air force name Zhou Zhirou, where she played the only card she had. “My husband died for our country,” she said, “and I need to get my children out.” The children left Beijing for Nanjing on a DC-3 military transport plane, which took off from a city street that had been converted into a makeshift runway. That was one of the last flights out of Beijing in October 1948.
Zhao Hongzhi went with my family to see them off. He was riding home on his bike when the DC-3 roared overhead, carrying away his love like the last scene in Casablanca. Years later, he wrote in an essay:
I saw off my childhood sweetheart, who was then attending Tianjin Nankai Girls’ Middle School. When the plane took off and passed overhead, I was just returning from the airport, passing the Beijing Zoo on my bike. I had told her I would go to the liberated areas in one week. At the time, I thought this behavior was heroic and handsome.
Zhao received one letter from my aunt, from the island of Taiwan. Nellie had decided to major in foreign languages, a subject that Zhao had deemed suitable for women. He did not hear from her after that—there would be no contact between Taiwan and China for four decades. After Nellie left, Zhao quit college and traveled with fellow students to the “liberated areas” outside Beijing that were already under Communist control. He changed his given name to Lisheng, which meant “establish a life”: It was common during the revolution to take a new name that symbolized a break with the past. The following winter, the students marched alongside Communist soldiers when they entered the capital. Zhao found a job in the city education bureau. During the Anti-Rightist movement of 1957, which targeted intellectuals critical of the regime, he lost his job as a college professor and was sent to the countryside to do manual labor. He stayed twenty years. He was already in his fifties when he regained his job and his Communist Party membership. By then he no longer wanted to be in the Party, but he didn’t dare turn it down.
I never heard Zhao say that he regretted staying in China. It was not the Chinese way to speak of regrets—there would be too many, and there was no point. In an obscure way, he seemed proud of this choice that he had made, and its memory remained golden, unsullied by everything that happened afterward. “I wanted to stay, to help China,” he told me. “We were very idealistic then. Who can say we were wrong?”
* * *
The ship that brought the civil war refugees to Taiwan was called the Prosperity. Nellie went first with the three boys and a family servant who had been my father’s wet nurse, whom the children called Mama Wang. The voyage took two days and two nights, and almost everyone was seasick. When the ship arrived in the harbor of Keelung in Taiwan, Nellie could see her father’s former colleagues and students who had come to meet them at the pier. But nobody was allowed off the ship without a proper identification card—even during the chaotic final moments of the civil war, the Chinese bureaucracy churned on—and none of the children had paperwork. Nellie was frantic. Then she noticed some of the ship’s crew carrying luggage off the ship from a side exit, and she took the children that way. Mama Wang hung back; she had bound feet and was afraid of losing her balance on the narrow walkway. “You have to walk, or we will go back,” Nellie commanded, and Mama Wang obeyed. The ship actually returned to China with many of its passengers still on board—they became residents of Communist China, having come within a few feet of Taiwan. My grandmother and my aunt Irene made it to Taiwan two weeks later.
The island was never home to them; from their perspective, it was only a way station until the day they recovered the mainland again. The refugees from China were called waishengren, people from the outside provinces. They lived apart from the native Taiwanese and never picked up the local dialect. In school, their children learned by heart the mountains and rivers of China and sang songs about a Great Wall they might never see. The Great Wall of our hearts will be ten thousand miles long. The country of their childhood and their ancestors became the province of memory, a place to be re-created in the imagination.
My father lived in Taiwan for eleven years, almost as long as he had spent in China. When he told me the story of our family, China took several hours; he dispensed with Taiwan in three sentences.
We lived in Taipei for about six months, then moved to Taichung. We ate chicken only at the lunar new year and two or three watermelons in the summer. My mother was a legislator when she died.
One by one, we came to America.
The government had set up a donation fund to support the family after my grandfather was killed. My grandmother had used the money to buy gold bars and Chinese government bonds; the bonds became worthless, but the gold sustained the family for years. We carried the gold bars in our belts when we traveled, my father would remember. Because they were children of a national martyr, the government covered their college tuition and even paid for school uniforms.
On the fourth anniversary of her father’s death, Nellie, who was then a college freshman, wrote a poem that was published in the Central Daily News, the newspaper of the KMT:
Four years now, Father,
The grass on the grave is taller now,
The plains of the north country are once again covered in snow,
Ah, your child wandering on the island in the sea
Is sending her heartfelt longing to you.
The things that have been lost
Can be found again,
But what I have lost
Is my father’s love,
Clothes that are torn can be mended,
But, ah, this is
A heart that is torn!
January 16, four years ago today,
That day when people sang the song of victory,
You became the first sacrifice of the handover,
Liaoning, the Fushun Coal Mine—
The place where no one dared to go,
But you . . .
Perhaps it is just as you often said,
“To live, you must live with strength,
To die, you must die with purpose.”
“A road is made by the steps of man,
Success depends on your hard work” . . .
Yes,
The tears that will never stop flowing,
The telling of bitterness that will never end,
The blood debt that will never be washed clean,
The wound that will never be healed,
Turn suffering into strength for living then!
But I hate it!
Father.
Many people wrote her letters saying they were moved by her poem. One young man who called himself “Wastrel” sent Nellie several verses of his own. His poems passed over her own grief; her father’s killing, he wrote, should inspire everyone to the task of building the nation. The young man didn’t know Nellie’s address, so on the envelope he wrote simply: Zhang Ailei, Taipei City, National Taiwan University.
To shout out is madness
Only silence is strength
To roar out grievance is to lose heart
Only the iron in the furnace can become steel.
On the eve of the storm
There are no waves on the sea
In deep places
Running water makes no sound
Gather up your suffering
Even a pen can become a gun
It is hatred
It is a blood debt
Oh, what a debt!
It is not only yours
It is not only his
It is not only mine
It belongs to everyone
Who has bones
Who has flesh and blood
Who has human shape, and a heart
Who has a soul
It belongs to all of us!
Nellie saved the poems; she thought they were better than her own. The next year, the young man came to National Taiwan University as a freshman and the two of them met. His name was Zhao Yanqi, and he eventually became her husband.
* * *
These were bad years for my family who stayed behind in China. In 1950, the year after the Communist victory, my father’s cousin Lijiao married a nurse named Zhu Shulan and they moved to Harbin, where he worked as a professor at an agricultural college. They had two sons and a daughter. In 1957, Mao Zedong gave a speech inviting intellectuals to criticize the performance of the Communist Party. Lijiao, who was then the head of the college dean’s office, publicly suggested that the Party should value intellectuals for their skills and knowledge. A person’s level of education, he said, was not a measure of his revolutionary commitment.
It was a modest statement—but in the context of the times, it was poison. The country’s leaders, surprised by mounting critiques of the Communist Party and even of Mao himself, turned against the very people they had encouraged to speak out. More than 500,000 people were labeled “Rightists” and fired from their jobs or sent to do manual labor in the countryside. Lijiao lost his dean’s position and had his salary cut. His crime of candor was compounded by his origins: His father and grandfather had been landowners in Manchuria, and his uncle’s family had gone to Taiwan. This family history would make Lijiao forever suspect in the eyes of the Party.
By the time Lijiao’s children started elementary school, they already understood that their bloodlines were bad. On every form they filled out in school, there was a blank for “class status.” The children would write “Landlord,” conjuring a phantom family estate that had disappeared long before they were born. Teachers bullied the sons and daughters of landlords; children taunted one another in the vocabulary of class struggle: Your father is a Rightist! Your family are landlords! China under Mao was an aristocracy in reverse: Pedigree had always been a national obsession, but now the higher a family’s standing had once been, the worse off it became.
The Cultural Revolution, which began in the summer of 1966, completed this overthrow of the established order. For more than a century, Chinese leaders and thinkers had wrestled with how to fit their traditions into the modern world. The Cultural Revolution proposed a simple answer: Throw everything out. Over the decade that followed, radical student groups known as Red Guards beat, and sometimes killed, their own teachers. Seventeen million students went to the countryside to labor on impoverished farms, a life that rural Chinese had been fleeing for centuries. Education, long the mark of achievement and the path to mobility, was deemed “counterrevolutionary.” The Cultural Revolution took everything the Chinese people had long held sacred and smashed it to pieces, like an antique vase hurled against the wall. It finished off the world of moral certainty and Confucian values into which my grandfather, and countless generations before him, had been born.
And what took its place? For a while, radical fervor was enough. But when the Cultural Revolution finally ended and pragmatic leaders like Deng Xiaoping took over, the Chinese would find themselves living in a vacuum—stripped of all belief and blank as newborns, looking upon a ruined world they must somehow make anew.
In 1968, Red Guards came to my grandfather’s tomb in Shenyang. They dug up the coffin and scattered his remains; they smashed the tomb and the grave marker. They beat the base of the stele until it cracked, but they left the stele itself intact. No one seemed to know what it was—its blank face revealed nothing.
* * *
One after another the children went to America, as their father had before them. But my grandfather had gone overseas in order to someday return and help China. His children left home to develop their careers—and there was no China to return to anymore. The money for emigration was partly borrowed from friends, partly paid for in slices of gold, the money that had been donated to the family after my grandfather was killed. His death was transmuted into the journey to America.
In those days if you wanted to come to America [my father told me], you needed $2,400 to be in a bank until you graduated. My older sister went without much problem. We gathered together $2,400 through savings and borrowings. She spent some of it, but she made up the money and returned the $2,400 so Luke was able to go to America with the same money. They were four years apart. But Luke and I were only two years apart, so when it came time for me to go, the money had not been replenished yet . . .
There was a yellow box where we kept the gold bars, and gradually everything was gone. We went to borrow money from friends, but no one wanted to help us. My father was already gone: Why should they help us?
I was the one to go out and borrow the money. I remember going to one family friend’s and sitting in their house. They ignored me. Finally, they said the father is not here, but I knew he was having lunch.
After the money was in hand, the next task was getting a visa. Anyone leaving Taiwan had to pledge to the officers at the American consulate to return as soon as his or her schooling was finished.
I graduated from college in 1957 and did a year and a half of military service. I finished the military in January 1959. Every day I went to the American consulate in Taipei with a novel and waited for the officer to call my name. Then around five o’clock he would call my name and say it’s too late. After six months, I got it at last.
My grandmother pushed her children to leave. She felt that Taiwan was too small; America was the only place for further education. But the journey by ship across the Pacific Ocean was too costly to be taken more than once. Every time she said goodbye to a child, she knew it was for the last time.
An ocean away, her children continued to do what was expected of them. The girls had more freedom to study what they wanted; Nellie majored in education and Irene in English. My father, who had the sharpest tongue in a family of fluent talkers, was drawn to politics and the law. But the boys were expected to study science and engineering, like their father, and like all the best students who went abroad. When Luke graduated from high school, his mother said to him, “What do you want to study? I hope you will follow in your father’s footsteps.” Luke agreed that he would. His mother gave him a book called Field Geology, a thirty-year-old textbook that his father had used when he was studying in America. And that ended the only conversation Luke ever had with his mother about his future.
My grandmother knew her children’s strengths and weaknesses and she told them so. Nellie was smart but lacked persistence for the medical profession she wanted to pursue. Luke was stubborn and would be good in academia. My father was smart but talked too much for his own good. Irene was diligent but a crybaby. Leo was a poor student, but he would be good in business. All of these divinations turned out to be true. Nellie gave up medicine and became an elementary-school and special-education teacher; Luke grew up to be a geology professor and department head at the University of Maryland. My father studied electrical engineering and later switched to physics; he did scientific research at IBM and served as a dean and vice president at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Irene, who cried often as a child from the teasing of her older brothers, toughened up and became an executive in the pharmaceutical industry and later headed a biotech company. And my youngest uncle, Leo, became a successful and wealthy entrepreneur in Taiwan. In this way, my grandmother decided the fates of all her children.
MY GRANDMOTHER DIED of emphysema in 1965. Irene was visiting her in Taiwan that summer; her brothers and sister had pooled their money to pay for the trip back. On her deathbed, my grandmother called Irene to her. She had saved all the money her children had sent from America, and she wanted it to go to her youngest son. Leo was the only child who had not gone abroad. Because his four older siblings had all broken their pledges to return to Taiwan, the American consulate had refused to grant him a visa. My grandmother told Irene where to find the clothes in which she wanted to be buried. “Dress me in them now,” she said, “because it will be harder after I am dead.” She had managed everything, all the way to the end.
* * *
My father returned to China for the first time in 1975. He was a member of a delegation of physicists selected by the U.S. Academy of Sciences—one of the first American delegations to China, at a time when the two countries did not have diplomatic relations. Science was seen as neutral ground, with no need for government involvement—it was science that had taken my father to America, and science that brought him back. My father was thirty-nine years old. He had left mainland China when he was twelve, and it was a new country he was looking at now. At a national athletics meet, he was thrilled when the announcer called out “Jilin Province!” He heard the cheers, and it seemed as if all the anti-China propaganda he had been taught in Taiwan fell away at that moment. “I felt like this at last was really China,” he told me. “All those years they said that Taiwan was China, but this was really China.”
He saw remnants of the radical era that was now ending. My father’s delegation toured a commune—a fake one, he learned later, that had been set up to impress visitors. On visits to school campuses, my father was amazed to see students talk back to their teacher. This was a result of the Cultural Revolution but still, he felt, an improvement on the old ways. One day my father visited his old middle school, which was half a mile east of the Forbidden City. As he peered through the gate, a man wearing slippers and a T-shirt came out to talk. He was the head of the school’s revolutionary committee, a position akin to principal in those days. The man had a question: “How many hours is the train to America?”
My father requested to meet with his cousin Lijiao. He told his delegation’s handlers that his cousin had taught at Peking University in the late 1940s but he had no idea what had happened to him since. The answer came back that Lijiao had been sent to the remote northwest and couldn’t see him. It was a lie, my father learned later—Lijiao and his wife were living in the Northeastern city of Harbin—but it would have been politically dangerous for them to meet a foreign visitor then.
The Cultural Revolution was in its final stages, but it could still do a lot of damage. The country’s premier, Zhou Enlai, was hospitalized with cancer; the Gang of Four, a leftist faction identified with the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution, was in charge. One day my father was surprised to hear his government handlers say that Deng Xiaoping, the Party official most committed to modernization and reform, would soon be deposed. His handlers were so worried about their own futures that they let this slip in front of my father. The following April, Deng was purged from the Party leadership for the third and last time. In our house in suburban New York, we listened over and over to the records my father had brought back from China.
The sun in the east is rising,
The People’s Republic is growing;
Our supreme leader Mao Zedong
Points our direction forward.
Our lives are improving day by day,
Our future shining in glorious splendor.
My father returned to China for the second time in 1979. The United States and China had established diplomatic relations; Deng Xiaoping was firmly in charge, rehabilitating the millions of victims of the Cultural Revolution and launching economic reforms that would soon change the face of the country. My father again requested to meet with Lijiao, and this time Lijiao and his wife were brought to Shenyang to meet him. When my father’s train pulled into the station, he could see Lijiao waiting on the platform, and he saw that he was crying.
Lijiao wanted to know everything that had happened in the intervening thirty years. My father told him how hard life had been in Taiwan, how his mother had raised five children alone and most of the family friends dropped off after their father died. Lijiao talked about how much better life was under the Communists. He did not tell my father that he had been paraded through the streets as a class enemy when the Cultural Revolution began, and later sent to work on a rice farm near the Soviet border. He did not mention that his two sons were just then returning to the city after ten years of rural labor, or that neither of them had gone past the eighth grade. He did not say how his mother and father had died.
At one point, Lijiao’s wife asked my father, “Do you know what has been happening here in China?”
“Yes,” my father answered. “More than you do.”
My father returned to China often, as scientific exchanges between China and the West picked up. In 1982, he stayed with Lijiao’s family in Harbin; Lijiao’s younger son remembers my father standing up a few minutes into the evening news broadcast and saying, “I can’t watch this fake news.” In 1984, my father stood on the rostrum at Tiananmen Square during celebrations to mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Communist revolution.
After I moved to Beijing in 2000, my parents visited at least once a year. I sometimes felt that they had forgotten how to deal with Chinese people. They lacked patience for the endless small talk and petty courtesies that were the basis of social interaction, and they put off visits to relatives who I knew were waiting anxiously for them to call. Occasionally they embarrassed me: My father once referred to a friend’s cleaning lady as a yongren, literally “a person who is used,” an old word for servant that had not been heard since the Communist revolution. But they still knew everything about Chinese history, language, literature, and culture, and by some mysterious extrasensory ability they always knew which were the best restaurants in town.
When I tell my family story to American friends, they ask me how my father could go back to China and spend time with officials from the party that murdered his father. When I lived in Prague, I met the American-born children of Czech émigrés, who were so opposed to the Communist regime that they had refused to teach their children to speak Czech growing up. The Cuban exiles are so virulently anti-Castro that they will not return as long as he is in power. But Chinese immigrants are different: No matter what terrible things happened to their families in China, they go back, on whatever terms the government allows. This is in part the pragmatism that runs so deep that it excuses the past, but it is more than that. China to them is not a political system or a group of leaders, but something bigger that they carry inside themselves, the memory of a place that no longer exists in the world. China calls them home—with the weight of its tradition, the richness of its language, with its five thousand years of history that sometimes seems to be one repeating cycle of tragedy and suffering. The pull of China is strong, which is why I resisted it for so long.
* * *
The house was at no. 6 Fenzi Hutong. Face Powder Alley: During the Ming Dynasty, this had been one of Beijing’s red-light districts, named after the heavily made-up prostitutes who lived here. The house was now the Flourishing Garden Home for the Aged, a nursing home run by the local Communist Party branch. It was a one-story red building with yellow ceramic roof tiles, on an alley of crumbling courtyard homes. I opened the front door, walked through a dim hallway, and came into what was once the central courtyard of a traditional Chinese house.
Sixty years ago, my father had lived here. This had been his family’s last home before they left China in the autumn of 1948. And this was where, on a cold and clear afternoon in January 2004, I started my investigation into my family history in China. My guide was Zhao Hongzhi, the eighty-year-old man who had once dated my aunt Nellie. The courtyard was roofed over now, and the trees that once graced it were gone. A lattice of fake ivy and plastic flowers spread across the ceiling. Two old men sat under it reading newspapers; one was bent over with a humpback that gave him the shape of a question mark.
Zhao walked into the courtyard behind me. He pointed to a row of rooms on the left. “That’s where the kitchen was.” He pointed to the right. “Those were the bedrooms.”
“Please speak quietly,” a nurse urged us. “It’s their rest time.”
Zhao pointed again, as if tracing the ghostly imprints of people only he could see. “That’s where your grandmother slept. Sometimes I slept in the living room right outside her bedroom. I was her godson, you know.”
WE LEFT THE HOUSE at no. 6. A sharp wind was blowing, and Zhao walked fast with long strides. He was tall, with silver hair, a high nose, and well-defined cheekbones that had been drawn with a precise hand; at the age of eighty, with all the suffering he had endured, no one would begrudge him a long rest at the Flourishing Garden Home for the Aged. But he had other things on his mind.
“You know about my matters with your aunt?” Zhao asked.
I said yes, feeling embarrassed.
“She married Zhao Yanqi, your uncle. They have won many prizes for ballroom dancing. Me, I can’t dance at all,” he said, as if this single failing had thrown him off course.
We walked a few blocks to his apartment. His wife was out of town for a few days, and he was in an expansive mood. He took out a manila envelope of photographs. The first one was a black-and-white studio portrait of my father and his siblings on the eve of their departure from China. Zhao stood in the back row, handsome and serious in fine-rimmed glasses; beside him, Nellie looked very much a child with her round face and fuzzy sweater. My father, in front, had a skinny dark face and his head cocked to one side, wearing the quizzical look of children that seems to ask how they suddenly came to be in this world. Another photo: my aunt on the covered walkway of her house in Ottawa, already in her sixties, elegant in a formfitting Chinese dress in ivory splashed with red flowers.
“Does your wife mind?” I asked.
“She is very open.” As evidence, another photo: he and Nellie standing together. “She even allowed us to have our picture taken together.”
Zhao Hongzhi had failed to marry into my family, but he had become the guardian of my family history. When my aunts or uncles came to Beijing, they always paid him a visit. When a distant relative in our family passed away, he was the first to know. And when I wanted to see the house at no. 6, my father told me that I should meet Zhao Hongzhi, because he still lived in Beijing and only he would remember the way.
I think my family was the link to a life he could have had, if only everything had been different. Zhao had carefully protected that tie through decades of political turmoil. When he chose the name Lisheng at the time of the revolution, it symbolized more than his newfound political commitment. The character li was used by all the males in my father’s generation of our family. The political statement concealed a personal meaning: Zhao was reborn as a Communist and as a member of our family.
We acquired the house at no. 6 in a strange way. During the war, it had been used by the occupying Japanese army; later it was taken over by Sun Yueqi, my grandfather’s friend who had not gone to Fushun. After my grandfather’s death, Sun Yueqi sold the house to my grandmother at a low price. Perhaps this was his form of penitence, although he never said as much.
Twice my family lost this house. We lost it in October 1948 when we fled China, and we have lost it again to economic development. The old house was torn down and rebuilt as a restaurant, then a kindergarten, later a local Communist Party office, and now a nursing home. Residents pay one hundred dollars a month, and there is space for thirty beds where my family once lived. The current tenants will also have to go soon: The home is set to be demolished to make way for a subway line.
In the 1990s, my family applied to the city government to get the house back, under a law allowing for the return of homes seized during the Cultural Revolution. The city rejected the request but paid ninety thousand dollars in compensation. The family split the money seven ways: to my father and his four siblings living abroad, to Lijiao’s family, and to a great-aunt in Beijing. The money did not mean so much to us. But my great-aunt’s daughter was planning to go to America to study, and the money helped pay for her trip. For almost one hundred years, my family has been leaving China for America. My grandfather came back, and his death bought the house at no. 6; half a century later it was turned into yet another journey to America. And that was fitting, because the history of a family begins when a person leaves home.
