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11 The Historian in My Family
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In the spring of 2005 I went to my ancestral hometown. The Chinese call this huijia, returning home, even if you are going to a place where you have never been. My father was sixty years old before he returned to Liutai for the first time. I had already lived in China for seven years, and all that time I had resisted the pull of the village. But something about accompanying Min on her journey home made me want to see where my own family came from. It had been ninety years since my grandfather had left Liutai, and I wasn’t sure how his death had settled on this place. I didn’t even know what to think of huijia: whether returning home was a duty or a right, whether it would have any meaning after all this time.
The road to Liutai was lined with silvery birch trees, as in the setting of a Tolstoy novel, and fields of fertile black earth stretched to the horizon on either side. It was twenty days until the spring sowing. From the car window I saw farmers out with their oxen, turning the earth; others burned corn husks in the fields, the fires glowing across the plains. This was the Manchurian prairie that had drawn my pioneer ancestors, but I couldn’t envision their Qing Dynasty world. Instead I thought of the Little House on the Prairie books I had loved as a child—that was the image that came to mind, and it was false to the core. The rural Chinese of the Qing had never written such books. Even today, most Chinese would have no faith that the history of a pioneer family was worth telling.
The road narrowed, crossed a mud puddle, and appeared to stop abruptly at a broomstick stretched across the backs of two chairs. An old woman demanded payment. It was a common sight in rural areas—a makeshift tollbooth, operating under no greater authority than poverty and stubbornness.
“Let us pass,” my taxi driver pleaded. “We’ve suffered hardship today.”
The old woman was implacable. “I have a lame leg,” she said. “I’ve suffered hardship.” I gave her one yuan, twelve cents, and the broomstick lifted.
The first scattered houses of Liutai appeared. I knew only one name, Zhang Lige. When my parents visited in 1995, they had met this distant relative by chance and had been invited into his home. “Is Zhang Lige still here?” I asked a young man on the side of the road. That meant: Is he still alive?
“He’s not here anymore,” the young man said, “but his wife is.” He pointed the way. Two young women in their twenties answered the door; they were pretty in the northern Chinese way, broad-shouldered and big-boned, with their cheeks reddened by the wind. They brought me up the hill to the house of a great-aunt.
Shen Jingzhi was eighty-three years old, and she had lived next door to our family compound when she was young. As soon as she understood who I was, she began talking fiercely at me in a thick country dialect, her gums working silently in the spaces between the words. The woman’s face was thin and puckered, like parchment, with bright rheumy eyes. I didn’t understand anything she said. A younger relative, a man in his fifties with a handsome square face, translated from the dialect into Mandarin.
“The wall was here. I lived on the other side of the wall,” the old lady said, conjuring with her bony hands a compound that had disappeared sixty years before. “Even though your family were big officials, they would always greet us when they saw us, no matter how low the person or how ragged his clothes.”
I asked her if she remembered my grandfather, or his brother, or their father. Every time I said a name, she would listen and shake her head. “They were always in Beijing,” she said.
But the younger man, whose name was Shen Zhenfa, knew everything. He knew that my father lived in America and had worked at a university in Hong Kong, and that I had cousins in Harbin. He knew of a relative named Zhang Hong and said he would get his number for me. He knew about my grandfather. “He was a remarkable man,” Shen Zhenfa said. “He wanted to do something for China, and for this he died in the Fushun mine.”
I asked Shen Zhenfa how he knew so much about my family.
“When my father was alive, he spoke a lot about this history,” he said. “He did work for your family. He tended the pigs and the sheep.”
Shen Zhenfa also remembered my father’s visit. A decade on, the event seemed to have expanded in dimension. “He came with another person, I think from the government. He had big broad shoulders. Isn’t that right?”
“Not really,” I said. My father is a slight man; he has the shoulders of a Chinese physicist.
“Broad shoulders,” Shen Zhenfa insisted, “and large eyes. Right?”
That was true—my father had large eyes.
“After your father came, the ancestral temple burned down.”
The old woman said that government officials had come and taken away the genealogy, the book that traced our family back three hundred years. She was haunted by this loss. “Without the genealogy,” she said, “it is dangerous because relatives who are of different generations may marry by mistake.”
After my parents’ visit, the officials who had accompanied them had returned to the village, taken the genealogy, and mailed it to my father in America. I told the old woman I could get a copy back for her.
“There’s no need,” one of the younger women answered for her. “There are no more Zhangs here now.”
I HAD IMAGINED there would be a village of people with my nose and my eyes, and I thought that everybody would share my name. But all of them had gone out long ago. My great-grandfather’s grave, on a hillside overlooking the village, had been dug up and destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. The ancestral temple had been ruined by the fire, but Shen offered to take me to the site of the temple on his motorcycle. As we prepared to leave, the old lady stood up and clutched my arm, seeming agitated. She was still thinking about the proper relations between the generations. “But what will I call you?” she asked. “And what will you call me?” I took her hands in mine and said goodbye.
We sped through the village on Shen’s motorcycle. The houses of Liutai sat amid rolling hills, each one set apart from the next and facing a different direction, like a fistful of dice flung across the valley. Along with the mud-and-brick cottages were newer houses faced in white tile; many younger villagers worked outside or had moved to the city. “The village has changed a lot in recent years,” Shen said.
The houses thinned out. We climbed a slope to a field that was still ankle-deep in corn husks from last year’s harvest. The walls that had surrounded the family temple were visible on three sides of the field—the lower section built of stones, the higher part of mud. What remained of the walls was perhaps four feet high. Beyond the wall, stretching into the distance, were cornfields.
The site felt like an ancient ruin—Karakorum, the Mongol capital of the thirteenth century—and not something that had been built only a century before. This place had been no older than the turn-of-the-century house in San Francisco where my brother lived. Maybe it was because so much ground had been covered, and so many people gone so far away, that it felt so old.
I pointed to the husks. “Who planted this corn?”
“We let a neighbor farm this land,” Shen said warily, as if I might suddenly assert my hereditary claim to it. We looked at the windswept land in silence. “There used to be three courtyards,” Shen said. “The old people told me when it rained you could walk from the front all the way to the back without getting wet.” That was his way of saying how grand the place had been.
Maybe it’s impossible to write the history of a small place in China, because everyone with talent or ambition goes out. History happens elsewhere. When I returned to my family home at last, no one was there for me—only an old woman with a few threads of memory and a man whose father had once tended the pigs and the sheep. My family had been scattered all over Manchuria, all over the world. For the ones who had stayed behind, only fragments of the past remained. There was not enough to tell a story. Shen had told me nothing I didn’t know, only that he possessed the same pieces of history I already had.
I didn’t feel sad. I had waited a long time to come here, and now I understood something. Xinfayuan, a fine place: I was the embodiment of it now. A family is not a piece of land. It is the people who belong to it, and it is the events that shape their lives. Occasionally these events are collected—this was my role now. My family was a story, not a place, and here in Liutai I could see the purpose of writing it.
I had been in the village only an hour, but it was time to go. Shen Zhenfa drove me back to where the taxi waited for me. “In the future when you come back,” he said, “you just come straight to my house.” Left unspoken in his invitation were the words: Because you don’t have a home here anymore.
* * *
There are no more Zhangs here now, the young woman in my ancestral village had said. My closest kin in China were the family of Lijiao, the cousin my father had grown up with. That summer, three months after my journey to Liutai, I went to see them for the first time in Harbin, a Manchurian city two hundred miles from the Russian border.
They had stayed behind and suffered, and it was partly because of us. Our family’s landowning past made Lijiao a class enemy and condemned him, his wife, and their two sons to a decade of labor in the countryside. The departure of my father’s family for Taiwan had made things worse—during the Cultural Revolution, such connections made Lijiao’s family suspect as spies.
When I visited, the family gathered in the three-bedroom apartment of Lijiao’s daughter. Lijiao’s three children were of my generation but already in their fifties. The older brother was tall and stocky, with heavy black glasses that made me think of Jiang Zemin; the second brother was slighter, with well-shaped cheekbones that narrowed to a point at the jaw. I recognized those features—that was my father’s face. Both brothers met me in their undershirts and talked like workers; tamade, fucking, was an all-purpose modifier. They had been in middle school when the Cultural Revolution began, and during that decade they had been sent down to the countryside. When they first returned to the city, the older brother got a job at a factory that made springs while the younger brother worked in a lumber factory. Yinqiao, the youngest child, belonged to a different class: She had finished middle school in 1971, after the radical phase of the Cultural Revolution, and she had not gone to the countryside like her brothers. Eventually she got her college diploma; now she held a high administrative position at the university. As in so many Chinese families, birth order had determined the fates of Lijiao’s children.
Lijiao’s wife, Zhu Shulan, took me into a bedroom. Lying in bed was an old man, immobile, with one eye opened a sliver. He appeared bloated, with a smooth bald head and the flesh on his face and neck as soft and exposed as a hard-boiled egg that has just been peeled. His stomach rose like a mound under the cotton sheet. This was Lijiao.
“He doesn’t recognize people,” Lijiao’s wife said.
“He doesn’t know anything,” the wife of the second brother said cheerfully. She slapped the old man’s face lightly. “Do you recognize me?” she said loudly.
The eyebrow above the open eye flickered. Both women laughed. They treated him like an idiot child—he was just a responsibility now. They did everything for him, feeding him soft foods and cleaning his sheets and monitoring the level on his oxygen tank. He had been this way since he suffered an attack the previous year and almost died.
I asked Yinqiao if they could hire someone to help care for him.
“If he weren’t being cared for by family,” she said flatly, “he would be dead already.”
All that long day I spent with my family, the old man lay in bed. It seemed sad to me, but in fact the man’s life was a triumph. Lijiao had brought his family intact through the Cultural Revolution. In the 1980s, he had helped each of his children get jobs at the agricultural university where he worked; all three of them were still employed there now. This was Lijiao’s accomplishment, and at the age of eighty-nine he was fated to die peacefully in bed.
THE DINING TABLE OVERFLOWED with lunch dishes. Yinqiao had prepared chunbing, my favorite northern dish of floury pancakes stuffed with savory fillings that my mother always made for my birthday. I told them about my visit to Liutai—they were impressed that I had gone.
“None of us has ever been back home,” Yinqiao said. Their father had two sisters whom they had met only once, as children.
There were no family members left in the village, I said, but a neighbor had given me a phone number for Zhang Hong.
My cousins looked at each other. “What do you know about Zhang Hong?” the older brother asked.
“I think he’s angry at my family about something,” I said carefully. My father had mentioned something to me about this “crazy” relative.
“He has mental problems!” the second brother’s wife burst out.
Zhang Hong was my father’s first cousin. Lijiao and my father were descended from my great-grandfather’s first wife; Zhang Hong was from the third, and he had suffered for this connection. In 1957, his father had been labeled a Rightist and lost his university job in Shenyang. During the Cultural Revolution the family had been sent down to the countryside for a decade. After they returned to the city, Zhang Hong’s father spent years writing letters and filing appeals to clear his name. He wanted the Communist Party to declare that he had never been a Rightist. He demanded, and won, compensation from his university for lost wages. After his father died, Zhang Hong took up the cause. He researched not only his father’s case but also the history of my grandfather and our extended family; he spent all his free time reading old newspapers and copying files. “Everywhere he goes, he carries two huge bags full of documents,” Lijiao’s wife told me.
I had met this type of person—every reporter in China has. He was the protester, the petitioner, the person so focused on righting a wrong that the effort consumed his life and cast him into a separate universe where he lived alone. In China, such obsessive focus was necessary to fight a legal system designed to bury you with bureaucracy and delay. At a distance, such a person was admirable, but he could be insufferable up close. He spoke for hours about “the 3–7 Case” or “the 12–14 Decision”—people had a tendency to focus on specific dates on which legal judgments had been rendered. But the numbers had a way of overwhelming conversation; they sounded again and again, the petitioner tracing a time line of grievances whose meaning only he knew. At a certain point, you realized that this person was not listening to anything you said. You wanted to sympathize with him, but in the end you only felt numbed by the documents and petitions, the facts and the dates.
One by one, Zhang Hong had broken with everyone in the family. He sent an angry letter to Lijiao and no longer visited after that. He argued with my great-aunt in Beijing. He wrote venomous letters to my father and my uncle, which Yinqiao had saved and gave me reluctantly—she was embarrassed because the language was so hostile.
“He blames being labeled a Rightist on your grandfather,” Yinqiao said. “One million people were labeled Rightists. Is it all because they knew your grandfather? Even the country’s president Liu Shaoqi could not be protected, let alone a little commoner like you.” Her cheeks flushed as she spoke.
“He came to see my father many times,” the older brother said. “My father always urged him, saying, ‘So many people suffered, not just you. You must put this behind you and look forward.’ But he could not.”
Zhang Hong cast a shadow over that day. When the family spoke of him, it was always dismissively—he has mental problems!—but there was a touch of awe as well. Maybe the grievances he expressed were the same ones they nurtured deep in their hearts; maybe they had suppressed such thoughts in order to get on with life. Maybe they suspected that he was right.
“He feels that he deserves something from your father and uncle,” Yinqiao told me, over and over. “He suffered for so many years because of his association with your grandfather, and now he feels that the family owes him something. But we are happy just to be together with you again.”
Listening to them talk, I realized that it was amazing there were not more Zhang Hongs in China. Almost everyone you met over a certain age had lost years to political campaigns; many were still paying a price in poor health, or lost education, or family members who had died. But there was a surprising lack of bitterness. When you asked about individual experiences, people tended to retreat into the collective voice. So many people suffered—as if that rationalized everything. My cousins repeatedly invoked Liu Shaoqi, who had been China’s president and Mao’s heir apparent. He had endured two years of beatings and struggle sessions; despite his lofty position, he had died in a Henan prison cell in 1969. The importance of this man, and the ignominy of his end, had deeply impressed my relatives. They seemed to see him as a kind of Chinese Christ, with a perversely nihilistic moral: Because He died in such a way, how could your story possibly matter?
Zhang Hong was different. He was furious at what he had lost and he couldn’t get over it; he acted as if his individual sorrows were important. He dared to see his suffering as equal to that of the country’s president Liu Shaoqi. Zhang Hong’s story mattered and he was determined to tell it. I had always wondered why more people had not been driven mad by the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Here was one who had, and he was family.
AFTER LUNCH, I sat down with the older brother to ask about the family history. My other relatives jumped in and out of the conversation as they passed through the living room. What do you know about my grandfather? I asked.
The best person to answer your question—a silent motioning toward the bedroom where the old man lay, unable to speak, waiting for death.
What do you know about your own grandfather?
He later changed his name to Zhang Shengbo.
He went to Beijing for college. He worked in Beijing.
No, he worked in Harbin.
Over a long day—nine hours, with six relatives talking at me nonstop—I tried, but it was impossible. Every time I asked a question, we were sidetracked into a discussion over someone’s other name, or the correct year of his birth, or what someone had said about him once. We drowned in facts; we were lost in a thicket of dates. Nobody could bring it together, combining these details into a coherent story. It was difficult even to figure out what my relatives had gone through, year by year. They glossed over their individual stories; they omitted long stretches and they seemed to have forgotten key events. In a world where so many people had suffered, one person’s story did not matter. Even the country’s president Liu Shaoqi could not be protected, let alone a little commoner like you.
Finally I gave up asking questions. Seven hours into our conversation, I learned that their grandmother—Lijiao’s mother—had stayed in Liutai and been killed during the land reform of the late 1940s. Over dinner, Yinqiao turned to me and said, “Our grandfather committed suicide. Did you know that?” I sat and let the conversation wash over me, leaving bits of what I wanted to know like pebbles deposited at the ocean’s edge.
* * *
Back home in Beijing, I read the letter from Zhang Hong that Lijiao’s daughter had saved for me. It consisted of two typed pages addressed to my father, my uncle, and my aunts. Even somebody who could not read Chinese would recognize it as a rant: The letter was entirely in boldface and marked by urgent underlining, oversize fonts, and multiple exclamation points, as if the typed characters in their neat squares could not contain his emotion. Chinese writing was not supposed to look like this.
You said many times that you would not meet with us . . . Instead you viewed our troubles with indifference and gloated at our misfortune.
A few years ago, I sent a letter that was virtually a distress call, hoping you would come forward and help my father and your own father at the same time. But you paid no heed, ruthlessly turning away from one in mortal danger.
The Zhang family of Liutai continues the evil practices of the past, riding roughshod over human rights and jockeying for position between the legitimate and concubine branches of the family.
My goal was to revive the tradition of filial piety and fraternal duty passed on from one generation to the next that our grandfather and great-grandfather founded. I never thought my father at the end would be victimized by you, my brothers!!
At the top of page two, he took aim at me:
Does Zhang Tonghe still want to write the family history? Will she write of these things, too? If she doesn’t, what sort of family history is that?
This letter, I learned from talking to my father, was the culmination of a series of exchanges that had been almost entirely one-sided. In the late 1990s, Zhang Hong had written to my father. He wanted to apply to the Communist Party to seek reversal of the political verdict on my grandfather; this process, known as pingfan, allowed people who had been criticized during the Cultural Revolution to restore their reputations. Zhang Hong seemed to think this would help his own father’s case, and he asked for my father’s support. But it was a bizarre request: My grandfather, my family believed, had been murdered by Communists, and now we should ask the party that killed him to clear his name? My father responded politely that he wasn’t interested.
Zhang Hong wrote back an angry letter to my father and uncle. A few years later, he sent another letter, accusing my father’s family of causing him hardship and ignoring his troubles. He vowed revenge and sent copies of the letter to my father’s and uncle’s colleagues at the universities where they worked. “I think Zhang Hong feels that we don’t care about him, that we don’t care about family matters at all,” my father told me. He paused and then added, “Which is probably true.”
Zhang Hong had spent years researching the family history. He had been sent to live in Liutai during the Cultural Revolution, where he met many relatives for the first time. He had visited Communist Party archives. He had interviewed the retired director of the Fushun coal mine, where my grandfather was killed. He possessed photographs of the ancestral temple before it burned and diagrams showing the layout of the buildings.
The more I learned about Zhang Hong, the more I realized I would have to talk to him. He was the true historian in my family, even if he was being driven mad by the past. He had the documents and the photographs; he had done the research. I was a latecomer and an amateur, and I would never know what he knew. The thought of meeting him terrified me.
Zhang Hong’s last letter to my family had been in 2004, when I was still a reporter in Beijing. I hadn’t visited my hometown yet, or thought of writing about family history. Yet in his letter Zhang Hong seemed to know my future.
Does Zhang Tonghe still want to write the family history? Will she write of these things, too?
* * *
The Chinese today have a troubled relationship with their past. On the surface, they take pride in it—China has five thousand years of history, one is constantly reminded as an American—but there is an aversion to going much deeper than the level of a Qing Dynasty television soap opera. Why did a great civilization collapse so rapidly when confronted by the West? What made people turn so readily on each other—in workplaces, in villages, in families—during the political movements of the 1950s and 1960s? And how could they pick up their lives afterward as if nothing had happened?
The last question is easiest: through forgetting. The Communist Party has not acknowledged the scale of catastrophes like the famine of the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution. In 1980, Deng Xiaoping ordered that the official history of the past thirty years should be “rough rather than detailed” for the sake of national unity. This approach has fed an aversion to going to the root of things. Thus the Cultural Revolution is commonly blamed on a handful of radical leaders, and the Tiananmen protests were the work of a few “black hands” manipulating the masses. “That is for history to decide,” people say when the subjects come up—as if speaking of long ago rather than events they witnessed and participated in themselves.
Forgetting is also a personal choice—a tacit agreement among a great number of people to put the past aside. For my family who left China, it was more beneficial to move on than to mourn the wasted promise of my grandfather’s life. For family who stayed behind, it was better to talk about Liu Shaoqi than to ask why their own best years had been sacrificed. The migrants have it easiest of all: Escaping the trap of family, history, and the past is as simple as changing a name or speaking a word aloud. How do you say “international trade”?
The past seemed to consist of only painful stories. A man was assassinated at a train station after the war. A woman was beaten to death in her village. A woman went to the temple and drew a “very worst” fortune. So much suffering suggests that there will be a historical accounting one day—but the instinct against introspection runs deep in this culture. Perhaps for a long time to come, China will feel the way it does now: a country that is at once tethered to history and unmoored from it, floating, free.
IN THE COUNTY SEAT near Liutai, I visited a ninety-two-year-old man named Guo Dehui. He had bright eyes, shaggy eyebrows, and long fleshy earlobes as curvaceous as question marks; in China big ears were a sign of good fortune. Guo Dehui had been a police officer during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and later a KMT legislator, and he had known my family. A local official had accompanied me and he explained to the old man that I was the granddaughter of Zhang Shenfu. Alert as a child, he asked, “Are you the daughter of Zhang Liyu or Zhang Ligang?
“I’ve been to your house,” he said. “It is in Beijing, Xicheng District, Fenzi Hutong, number twenty-five.” He rattled off the address, as if just this minute we might grab a taxi and head over. Later I discovered he was only three numbers off on the address—not bad for half a century. He recalled his visit to that house in 1947, the last time he saw my grandmother and my great-uncle. He and my great-uncle had been friends in the 1930s in the Liutai area, where he had served as police chief and my great-uncle had been mayor. “He was very friendly and liked by everyone. That’s why he didn’t have any trouble after the revolution.”
“He came back during the Cultural Revolution,” I said. “Did you see him then?”
The old man shook his head. “I didn’t see him after that.”
In 1954, Guo was accused of being a Taiwan spy during the “Elimination of Counterrevolutionaries” campaign. In the northwestern province of Gansu, he was imprisoned in a shed behind a car factory. He spent his days reading newspapers and tending apple and peach trees—he stayed for twenty years. When he returned to the city in 1975, he was already of retirement age. “The country supports me now,” he said. I asked the old man his secret of longevity. “I eat meat, but I don’t eat the fat,” he said. “Before I turned eighty, I ran half an hour every day. Now I still go for a walk every day. But the most important thing is thinking: Your thinking must be open. When something is past, do not worry about it anymore. You must always think of the good side of things.”
* * *
That fall, I returned to my hometown again. The corn was ripening in the fields and taller than a man already; in a month, it would be harvesttime. I had come back because it wasn’t precisely true that there were no more Zhangs here now. After my first visit, a relative named Zhang Tongxian who lived in a nearby town had heard about me and got in touch. He met me in a market town near the village. Tongxian had a long handsome face and he wore a dignified black pinstripe suit—like a country preacher in an old Western, except for the tinted glasses and the red motorcycle. He taught elementary school.
Tongxian took me back to his house, where he and his wife farmed two acres of corn; their two daughters attended school in the city. I sat down on the kang, the traditional heated platform that serves as the bed in northern Chinese villages, and he placed a book in my hands. It was our family genealogy, compiled under the direction of my great-grandfather in the twelfth year of the Republic, 1923. The book was bound by string. It had water stains on its cover, and the edges of the pages were frayed and soft. “During the Cultural Revolution, my father wrapped it in plastic and buried it in the ground,” Tongxian told me.
The genealogy traced our family back eleven generations to the ancestor who had migrated to Manchuria. An updated version, from 1993, extended the coverage by three generations. Tongxian had taken part in that revision; that was the edition of the genealogy that had been taken from the village and given to my father.
I asked Tongxian what the purpose of compiling the genealogy was.
“It is to handle genealogical relations.” He lowered his voice. “Some of the people”—he named a village—“intermarried. This is not something for you to write.”
“Didn’t they know they were related?” I asked.
“They weren’t that clear about it,” he said, “and they weren’t educated. This is for the sake of educating the younger generation.”
He took out a cardboard box. It contained photographs, letters, and diagrams of our family compound and temple that he had drawn based on the recollections of the village elders. The diagrams showed the central rooms where the family had slept, and the sheds along the sides where the servants lived. Symbols marked where the washbasin had been, and the stone tablets, and the Mauser pistols posted at the four corners of the yard—so much detail, painstakingly compiled and put away. Tongxian also gave me a twenty-three-page history of the family that he had written, summing up everything he knew.
It was also on this day that I learned the fate of Lijiao’s father, Zhang Feng’en. Soon after the political attacks began, Lijiao had sent his father back to Liutai for safety—believing in the village as a traditional place of refuge. It was a miscalculation. Red Guards were arriving in rural China, and they brought their violent tactics of class struggle. Lijiao’s father had escaped such attacks during the land reform of the 1940s. Now he would learn that it is sometimes the people who have known you longest who have the most reason to hate you.
As an eight-year-old boy, Tongxian had seen everything.
During the Cultural Revolution, Lijiao was given a politically bad label and sent down to the countryside. Feng’en came back to Liutai and lived in the house of his niece.
In 1969, two work teams came to Qitamu. It was summer. They sent an order to have Feng’en brought there. The local saying was, When you throw a meat bun at a dog, it is gone forever. Feng’en was the meat bun, and the work teams were the dogs.
That night, he hanged himself from a tree.
Before that, he had already been struggled against. They paraded him around with a pointed hat. One of the people who criticized him was Zhang Lige.
I knew that name. Zhang Lige was the relative my father and mother had met when they visited the village in 1995. They had been guests in his house and they had bowed to him, as the only living representative of the family left. So this man had denounced Lijiao’s father and helped drive him to his death.
Zhang Lige was very lazy. He never did any work in his life. Feng’en had helped arrange his marriage so that he didn’t have to pay anything. Then during the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Lige accused him. You do something good for someone and this is how he repays you. Zhang Lige and the others shouted slogans: Down with Zhang Feng’en! Down with landlords!
I was standing on the edge of the crowd and I saw this. I was crying. Zhang Feng’en came to our house a lot, and I liked him. We called him Sixth Uncle.
I saw him crawling on his hands and knees in the schoolyard. The worst I saw was in front of the Liutai commune. He was beaten so that you couldn’t see a single spot of skin on his back—it was all blood. That was the worst day.
I was a child then. But none of the adults dared say anything. If you spoke up, you would have trouble.
Before I left, Tongxian said he had something to show me. He took me on his motorcycle to a plain brick house belonging to a farmer who was also a distant relative. At the base of the front gate were two uncommonly grand blocks of marble—stones from our ancestral temple. When the building was torn down during the Cultural Revolution, the old man who lived here had rescued and brought these into his house. Buried in the mud of a peasant’s yard was all that remained of my family home—two stones, smooth and snowy white as the columns of a Greek temple. Each was inscribed with the character shou, which means “longevity.”
* * *
In traditional Chinese genealogies, a family traces its lineage back to the shiqianzu, the “first migrating ancestor” who came from somewhere else and established himself where his descendants now live. Status-seeking families might claim a connection to a famous person of the distant past, but such spurious links betray themselves in the pages of the genealogy. Only the records after the first migrating ancestor are considered authentic. Migration fixes a person in place and time, and the history of a family begins when a person leaves home.
The Chinese genealogy, which started to appear widely during the Song Dynasty a thousand years ago, is a rigidly Confucian document. Its purpose is to record the merit and righteousness of a clan’s members; like Communist Party propaganda, it prefers to emphasize the positive. Widows who remarried after their husbands’ deaths—in violation of Confucian propriety—were often omitted from the pages of a genealogy, as were childless concubines and sons who became monks. The list of crimes leading to expulsion from the genealogy was long. According to one set of rules published during the Qing Dynasty, it included: violating ancestral graves, marrying in disregard of social classes, violent rampaging, whoring, joining armed rebellion, treason or heresy, withholding the truth from the emperor, strangling someone to death without cause, or marrying a prostitute, actress, slave, or servant. The genealogy reflected the traditional Chinese view that the purpose of history was not to relate facts or record stories, but to establish a moral standard to guide the living. History was not simply what happened, but what ought to happen if people behaved as they should.
First migrating ancestor
Hualong
Married Mrs. Liu jointly buried
in Fengtian Kaiyuan County graveyard
Two sons Yijun Yichen
In the Jilin Zhang Family Genealogy given to me by my relative Tongxian, the entry for our first migrating ancestor, Zhang Hualong, was five lines long. Most subsequent entries were equally terse. A man was identified by his name, his wife’s surname, the names of his sons, and the location of his grave. Those were the only facts worth knowing: whether a person had continued the family line, and where to pay proper obeisance. Later entries supplied dates of birth and death, and occasionally one would list achievements, though only those conforming to a narrow standard—degrees, titles, and awards. The vast majority of entries continued to list only name, wife, sons, grave. The absence of other details indicated that a man had achieved nothing notable in life: he was a farmer.
The longest entry in the genealogy belonged to my grandfather.
Chun’en
Casual name Xingfu, later changed to Shenfu
National Peking University
Graduated in the economics department
Went to America
Graduated from University of Chicago economics department
Graduated from University of Michigan mining department
After returning to China served as technical director in the Jilin Province Bureau of Industry
(a position higher than senior expert)
And director and chief engineer of the Muling Coal Mine
Chief engineer of the Jiaozuo Coal Mine
Taught at Tangshan Engineering Institute
To resist the Japanese, headed the national strategic metal production of mercury, tin, and tungsten
Born 1899
Died 1946
Wife Li Xiangheng
Graduated from Peking Women’s Normal College Sons Liyu Ligang
Of my father’s generation, there was only a single entry in our branch of the family: Lijiao. Born 1917. The rest of the page was blank.
But the genealogy did not describe individual members of the family so much as stamp out anything that made them different. Reading the Jilin Zhang Family Genealogy was like going through my grandfather’s diary: The individual was missing from the very place I most hoped to find him. So the entry for my grandfather—Died 1946—could mention his precise standing in the government hierarchy—a position higher than senior expert—but not that he was assassinated when he returned to Manchuria, or that his widow raised five children alone, or that those children would grow up and go to Taiwan and America but always be, like my aunt Nellie:
your child wandering on the island in the sea . . .
sending her heartfelt longing to you.
The entry for my great-uncle, Zhang Feng’en—Died 1969—remained silent on how he had died, by his own hand one summer night in the village after being beaten and denounced by members of his own family. It did not mention that Zhang Lige—of the tenth generation, listed on page fifty-five of the genealogy—was chief among his tormentors. Nor did it say that Zhang Tongxian—of the eleventh generation, on page thirty-seven—watched it happen as a child.
But maybe this was the secret of the genealogy, the reason this tradition of private recordkeeping had endured for a thousand years. By sticking to the essentials—name, wife, sons, grave—it imposed order and harmony on human existence. It kept at bay the realities of a world that was not behaving as it should, and perhaps never had. The sense of continuity was amazing: Fourteen generations after our ancestor came to Manchuria, the vast majority of his descendants were still named in the sequence set out by my great-grandfather six generations before.
The genealogy contained one hidden surprise. Our first migrating ancestor had left Wanping County in Hebei Province to go to Manchuria. When I looked this up, I discovered that Wanping is a part of present-day Beijing. My grandfather left Beijing in 1920 to study in America, so he could save his country. My father left Beijing in 1948 on one of the last planes out of the city, when the country was already lost. And from America I came to live in Beijing, the place from which our first migrating ancestor had gone out three hundred years before.
* * *
In the winter of 2005, I went to Shenyang to meet the man who had vowed vengeance on my family. Zhang Hong met me at the gate of the Shenyang University of Technology, where he taught computer classes. His face was long and pale, with a high nose and prominent creases tracing the sides of his mouth—a face like my father’s, though its deeper lines made him look more sad. He had improbably wavy teen-idol hair, and he wore dark pants and a polo sweater with an alligator on its chest facing the wrong direction. Zhang Hong shook my hand without smiling, his dark eyes regarding me steadily behind an intellectual’s glasses. I got the feeling that he didn’t smile very often.
He led me across campus into a deserted building and up a pitch-black flight of stairs. His office was drafty, with two wooden desks pushed up against each other.
You viewed our troubles with indifference and gloated at our misfortune.
I never thought that my father at the end would be victimized by you, my brothers!!
Zhang Hong took out a handheld tape recorder. “Do you mind if I tape this?” he asked. “My memory is bad.” I must have looked taken aback, because he quickly put the device away.
“From what point of view are you writing your book?” Zhang Hong asked next. “The Chinese people’s?”
I pondered the question, which was so distinctly Chinese. “I’m writing this book from my own point of view,” I said at last. He was also writing a book, he told me, about the history of our family. It would have three parts: Flourishing, Decline, Revival. He had been researching it for fifteen years.
In the two days I spent with Zhang Hong, he was unfailingly polite. He took me home to meet his wife and son, and he treated me to dinner one night and lunch the next day. Our conversation, he told me, was one of the most important things he had experienced all year. He did not mention the hate mail he had sent to my father over the years, and neither did I.
ZHANG HONG WAS THREE YEARS OLD when his father was labeled a Rightist, and even as a young boy he felt ashamed of that political status. If an adult spoke to him, he would immediately confess the family crime: My father is a Rightist. But when no one was around he would shout blasphemies at the top of his lungs. Down with the Communist Party! The Chinese revolution has been defeated! “I guess there were two sides of me,” Zhang Hong said. “There was the side that did that and the side that told people ‘My father is a Rightist.’ It’s hard to explain what goes on in the mind of a child.”
Zhang Hong’s father lost his job as a university professor and was sent to do manual labor in the countryside. His mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. “It was brought on by my father’s political situation,” Zhang Hong said; later his father was hospitalized as well. Looking back, Zhang Hong cannot remember who looked after him and his younger brother for long stretches of time. One semester, the boys boarded at school so their teachers could take care of them, and during a school holiday they were taken to live with the university security guards. When Zhang Hong was eight his parents divorced, and three years later his mother left for good.
When the Cultural Revolution began, his father was arrested and later held for six months on the college campus. In 1970, when Zhang Hong was sixteen, the boys were sent with their father to live in Liutai and work in the fields. Periodic denunciation campaigns alternated with peaceful spells when the villagers, many of them relatives, could be kind to them. Some of them gave Zhang Hong traditional Chinese books—rescued from the library of Xinfayuan, the family estate—and told him what they knew of the family history.
In 1979, the family moved back to Shenyang. Zhang Hong’s father returned to the university that had expelled him, and Zhang Hong was later offered a job there too. It is the same school that his son attends now.
AFTER ZHANG HONG HAD TALKED for three hours straight—at which point we had reached only 1968—we went for a walk around the campus. As we passed a three-story building, he pointed to an upstairs window. “That’s where they held my father when he was arrested.” A doorway: “That’s where I went in when I visited him.” Zhang Hong had had offers to work elsewhere but he had always declined. Fifty years on, he was rooted to the place where everything bad had happened to him.
More than anywhere else, the Cultural Revolution unfolded on school campuses. Its victims were beaten in classrooms and paraded around athletic fields, denounced by fellow teachers and tortured by former students. Traditional Chinese culture had always held learning in the greatest reverence. That schools became the sites of humiliation and torment was one of the things that made the Cultural Revolution so terrible.
Sometimes now on campus, Zhang Hong ran into people who had attacked his father; like him, they had stayed on. One man as a student had been famous for giving out brutal beatings. After the Cultural Revolution, he came to see Zhang Hong’s father and told him he was sorry.
THAT EVENING, I went to a hot-pot restaurant with Zhang Hong’s family. His wife had a round fleshy face and tightly permed hair; she worked in the finance department of a real estate company. His son was a junior in college, studying accounting. Over dinner, Zhang Hong spoke at me for two hours about the Communist Party and Confucius, using classical idioms and quotations I did not understand. Shakespeare made an appearance, as did Tolstoy and Beethoven. I remembered that Zhang Hong had had only a seventh-grade education.
The Communist Party is a party of gangsters and hooligans.
Mao Zedong said: If your army is left with just one soldier, then let that one soldier attack.
Beethoven said: There are thousands of princes, but there is only one Beethoven.
Zhang Hong’s wife and son did not join the conversation. They ate silently while looking into the middle distance, like people grown accustomed to a relative with an embarrassing medical condition. Zhang Hong’s wife spoke only once. When her husband asked if I knew a certain Confucian saying—I didn’t—she said quietly, “A person learns the culture of the place where she has grown up.”
Zhang Hong’s son didn’t speak at all. He was a nice-looking boy with round dark eyes and short spiky hair. Every time I met his eyes, he gave me a smile that was sincere but knowing, as if he understood that everything his father and I were talking about was nonsense but he was too good-natured to say so. Later I asked Zhang Hong if he thought his son would one day take up the struggle to clear his father’s name. He said no, and he related a conversation between them. “This is an economic era,” Zhang Hong’s son had told him, “and the Party cares only about business. Your problem is political. If you’re looking to the Party for an answer, you will never get it.”
______
NOTHING THAT ZHANG HONG HAD ENDURED during the Cultural Revolution was out of the ordinary. Even the more exotic details of his family story—the divorce, the diagnosis of schizophrenia—were common enough in an era when many individuals and families broke under the stress of persecution. In most ways, Zhang Hong’s experience mirrored that of Lijiao’s family—the Rightist label, the loss of a university job, the decade spent laboring in the fields. If anything, Lijiao’s family had suffered more: Both his mother and father had died violent deaths in their village, while Zhang Hong’s parents had survived.
Zhang Hong’s family was unusual in one respect: They fought back. When his father was called a Rightist in struggle sessions, he responded: “What crap!” If a Red Guard punched him in the face, he punched back. He wrote letters protesting his innocence, starting with the Shenyang Communist Party committee and moving up the hierarchy. By the early 1970s, Zhang Hong’s father was sending letters to Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing, and he traveled to Beijing to file petitions to clear his name.
In 1978, the Communist Party set up commissions to review and rehabilitate hundreds of thousands of victims from two decades of political campaigns. In the Party’s judgment, the Anti-Rightist movement had been “unnecessarily broad,” with many people “mistakenly” labeled Rightists. This followed the piecemeal approach to history laid out by Deng Xiaoping, allowing the reversal of individual verdicts without addressing whether the movement itself had been wrong. But the numbers said otherwise. Across China, more than half a million people had been named Rightists—all but ninety-six, it was eventually decided, had been labeled by mistake.
Zhang Hong’s father demanded compensation for his lost salary, and his university awarded him eleven thousand yuan—more than $1,300, a large sum of money in the mid-1990s. The school also enrolled Zhang Hong in a two-year computer-training program and gave him a teaching job upon graduation. It tried to remove the Rightist label, but Zhang Hong’s father refused. He wanted the school to say that he had never been a Rightist—an absolute statement that no official was willing to make.
The family’s rationale was a strange one. When someone was labeled a Rightist during the 1950s, it had to be confirmed by the city’s Communist Party committee: In China, even witch hunts were supposed to follow bureaucratic procedure. But in the case of Zhang Hong’s father, the label had not been formally approved. His argument was not that the verdict had been wrong, but rather that it had not followed the appropriate protocol. Confronted by one of the most chaotic periods in Chinese history, Zhang Hong’s father had chosen to tilt at a technicality.
On a 1985 trip to Beijing, Zhang Hong’s younger brother drowned in a canal on the city’s northern outskirts, an apparent suicide. After his father died in 2001, Zhang Hong pursued his father’s case. He wrote letters to the school and the city government, to the Communist Party’s history department and the courts and the prime minister’s cabinet. He told all of them that his father had never been a Rightist, because he had not been labeled correctly. A few of the offices replied that they couldn’t handle the case for one reason or another; most never responded. Zhang Hong was like a prisoner who continued to protest his innocence long after the door was open and the jailers had packed up and gone away.
BEFORE I LEFT SHENYANG, I had lunch with Zhang Hong and a friend of his who worked in the technology department of the Xinhua News Agency. The friend was about to go to Egypt on a three-year assignment. Most of the people sent abroad for Xinhua were said to be government spies, but I decided now was not the best time to explore that particular issue. I asked Zhang Hong how work on his book was going.
“I’ve written sixty thousand words, but I’ve only gotten to the Great Leap Forward,” he said. “The whole book should be six hundred thousand words.”
“The Great Leap Forward,” I repeated, suddenly feeling very tired.
The man from Xinhua said with surprise, “You know about the Great Leap Forward?”
I asked Zhang Hong, “Why haven’t you finished writing it?”
“My health is bad,” he said, “so I work on it when I can.” He paused. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know from what angle to approach this story. How do I view the past? Do I say that everything that happened then was wrong? Or do I accept it?”
“Don’t you regret all the bad things that happened?” I asked.
“It’s just that during that time there were also many people who were kind to us,” Zhang Hong said. “I have to decide what stance to assume in looking at this era. Or I could combine two stances, but that’s not very interesting.”
After lunch, Zhang Hong took me back to his apartment. He had some documents about my grandfather that he wanted to give me. In a cramped bedroom that doubled as his office, he took out two plastic shopping bags and shook out their contents: ragged photocopies, newspaper editorials, letters. Paper, paper, paper. As soon as I saw Zhang Hong’s filing system, I realized he would never write his book.
The pile contained letters written by his father to various government offices; a document certifying his father’s admission to a psychiatric hospital in the mid-1960s; a post-suicide letter from his brother’s work unit stating that the dead man had been a hard worker; and a statement signed by an eighty-one-year-old retired official who couldn’t remember if Zhang Hong’s father had been labeled a Rightist or not. Divorce papers, alimony payments, report cards. Regarding my grandfather, he had some old newspaper clippings—I had them already—and two articles pulled off the Internet with idle speculation about his murder.
Zhang Hong kept a running tally of every time he had sent a letter or made an appeal on his father’s behalf. Between 1993 and 2005, there had been fifty-one instances; in 2002 there had been eleven, and twelve in 2003. The most recent letter, to the Supreme People’s Court, had been written five days before my visit.
UNTIL I MET ZHANG HONG, it was possible to imagine him as a hero. In a world where almost everyone chose silence and forgetting, he dared to stand up and speak out. Throughout Chinese history, there had been such people—private historians, writing their own accounts of events when the official version fell short. Zhang Hong believed in the importance of his story, and he told it to anyone who would listen.
But his effort had not led to clarity—instead, it had twisted his mind beyond rescue. He insisted that his father was not a Rightist, yet he failed to see that the entire movement against Rightists had been meaningless. He had instincts of individualism—There is only one Beethoven and there is only one Zhang Hong, he asserted—but his ideas were hopelessly confused. How do I view the past? he had asked me, as if I could tell him the answer.
In the factory towns of the south, I was meeting young women and watching them learn how to be individuals. They found jobs; they confronted bosses; they tried to learn new skills. Mostly they came to believe that they mattered, despite their humble origins. Do not feel inferior because we are ordinary migrant workers, Chunming wrote in her diary. We have no reason to feel inferior. In Zhang Hong’s world, it was still 1957. He loved himself; he hated himself. He hated Mao; he quoted Mao constantly. He despised the Party; he belonged to the Party. The Chinese revolution has been defeated! My father is a Rightist.
