14 The Tomb of the Emperor

 

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In the autumn of 1987, my father’s cousin Lijiao sat down to write a letter to the Political Consultative Committees of two Northeastern provinces, entitled “Regarding the Issue of Zhang Shenfu’s Tablet Urgently Needing an Inscription.” Lijiao was hoping to engrave an epitaph on the graveside stele of his uncle, who had been dead for forty-one years.

 

Zhang Shenfu is my uncle. I sincerely hope to solve the problem of his tomb inscription as soon as possible, which will be useful in developing our overseas United Front work.

 

A draft of the handwritten letter, which was twelve pages long, had been given to me by Lijiao’s children. They had been unable to tell me the story of our family, but on these rough sheets of paper Lijiao had laid out everything—his private history of my grandfather’s years in America, his wartime contributions to China’s mining industry, his assassination and burial.

 

Before the tomb was a small piece of black marble inscribed with the words TOMB OF MR. ZHANG SHENFU, with every character about ten centimeters by ten centimeters. In front of the tomb to the right was a stele. On it was inscribed nothing . . .
In the fall of 1948, Shenyang was liberated. In Beiling near the Dismounting Stele was left the tomb of Zhang Shenfu and a stele with no words . . . Li Xiangheng moved with her children to Taiwan . . . Her nephew Zhang Lijiao stayed on the mainland and did not go with them. After January 1949, he had no more contact with them.

 

In 1979, Lijiao returned to the grave for the first time in thirty years. The tomb was gone, and my grandfather’s remains had been scattered. But the stele with no name had survived—as my grandmother had foreseen, its blankness had protected it from harm. In his letter, Lijiao asked the authorities for permission to repair the tomb and erect a new stele with an inscription. Because the grave was in a prominent site in a public park, this was not something he could accomplish on his own.

 

Zhang Shenfu’s second son and oldest son both have deep love for our great motherland and have returned to the motherland many times and devoted their energies to its construction . . . It is said that recently the Party Central Committee has proposed vigorously promoting its United Front work overseas, to make friends and win popular support.

 

The “United Front” referred to the Communist Party’s policies to win the loyalties of Chinese outside the Party, including those living in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas. As a veteran of political movements, Lijiao knew that a personal plea on his uncle’s behalf would not get very far. It was necessary to appeal to patriotism, and it was critical to portray this as an issue of nation, not family. My grandfather’s whole life had been forced into such a framework, and now even in death it was the same.

The bureaucracy did not respond immediately. Lijiao wrote a second letter two months later, again asking for the support of the authorities and making clear that he would cover all the costs of the inscription. In November of the following year, after approval had been granted, a new stele was finally erected on the site of my grandfather’s grave. Lijiao wrote a final letter, entitled “The Long-Cherished Dream of Me and My Relatives Inside and Outside China Has Been Realized.”

 

Because this stele with no words has become a stele with words, our descendants will have a place to make offerings to their loved ones. In this, they feel most fortunate.

 

Lijiao died in February 2006, less than a year after I visited his family in Harbin. He had lived long enough to see his three children settled in jobs at the same university where he had taught, and a granddaughter enrolled there as well. In 1985, he had been given a provincial-level teaching award, the only person at his university to receive this honor. For the family, it tempered some of the pain he had suffered. “For my father to have lived through that time, I think, means that he had a generous heart,” his daughter Yinqiao told me. “People appreciated his decency. Four hundred people attended his funeral. We did not expect so many.”

Until the end of his life, she said, Lijiao had believed in the Communist Party. He had never talked about how political attacks had driven his father to suicide. He did not dwell on what he had endured. My father told me that on several occasions he had asked Lijiao about his experiences during the Cultural Revolution, but Lijiao would never say. “I believe that Zhang Lijiao was really brainwashed,” my father said. “Whenever he talked about this, he would only say how good things were, how good the Communist Party was. I think until the end of his life he was afraid. A lot of these people who suffered so much thought that the present was just another political movement. They were never sure that things would not go back to the way they were.”

Lijiao’s daughter had a different interpretation. “My father never told your father about these things,” she said to me. “I think he felt that your father had lived abroad, and that this was a nation’s own family scandal.” In her way of thinking, it was not fear but shame that had kept her father silent.

*   *   *

 

On the last day of the year in 2005, I visited my grandfather’s grave in a Shenyang park. In the frigid morning, the air tingled with the smell of burning coal and the sun hovered cool and pale as a lemon. The park was alive with people, mostly retirees. Old men jogged in a halfhearted shuffle, while old women practiced tai chi. At a footbridge, I stopped to look at the lake below, where snowdrifts had been cleared to make a wide oval track. People skated in the crouched pose of champion racers. A woman past middle age had bundled up in many layers; she wore a surgical mask over her face—a common accessory in Shenyang’s brutal winters. As I watched, she attempted to glide forward while balancing on one leg with the other stretched out behind her. She almost pitched forward, recovered, and looked around to see if anyone had noticed.

I kept walking until I came to the Dismounting Stelae, a pair of pillars carved with Manchu script that marked the start of the “spirit walk” to the Qing emperor’s tomb. Off to the left, I saw the grave in a small clearing surrounded by pine trees.

The tablet marking my grandfather’s tomb was about twenty feet high, of gray cement with characters carved in red:

 

MEMORIAL TO MR. ZHANG SHENFU AN ENGINEER OF CHINA’S MINING INDUSTRY FROM JILIN PROVINCE, JIUTAI COUNTY, LIUTAI VILLAGE 1898–1946

 

I read the inscription slowly, word by word, and felt comforted by it. The epitaph was only four lines long and contained the starkest of facts—but all of it was true. Nothing had been falsified; politics had not intruded on the writing of this text. If you had to describe a life in thirty-five Chinese characters, this seemed a fair measure of a man—his birth and death, his work, his native place, and his name.

I stood looking at the tablet, unsure what I should do to mark the occasion. I didn’t kowtow or burn offerings; I simply stood before my grandfather’s grave. No one disturbed me. A few men kicked a shuttlecock near the Dismounting Stele, but they paid me no mind. Finally I had to walk away, because it was too cold.

As I was leaving, a man rode by on a bicycle. A tape player strapped to the back of his bike was playing the migrant anthem of that year, a song from a place far away, where every street had a factory and the history museum did not include a single mention of Mao.

 

I love you
Loving you
As a mouse loves rice
No matter how much wind and rain
I will always stay with you

 

When I thought about my grandfather’s life, it was mostly with sadness at the lost opportunity. As a young man, he had left home—for Beijing, for America—to pursue his studies and to serve his country. He had lived in foreign environments, and he had struggled to find his purpose, but always he had worked hard. It was his sense of duty that drove him to visit the Fushun mine against all warnings. On that last winter night, when armed men boarded his train and stabbed him with bayonets, all that learning and effort was rendered useless. It had been the crudest type of force; against such weapons, a man’s idealism meant nothing. In the years after my grandfather’s death, the promise of his China died too.

But it didn’t feel like an accident that things turned out as they did. When I read my grandfather’s diary, or watched the adults gang up on Min and her sister during a village wedding, I felt as if I were witnessing over and over where China went wrong. The concerns of family and nation were overwhelming, and they trapped a great many people—millions upon millions—in lives they never would have chosen. If it weren’t for the sake of the nation, my grandfather would not have become a mining engineer, and he would not have gone to the Fushun mine. But he was born into the burden of being Chinese, and so he did these things. It was the same reason that Lijiao and Zhao Hongzhi stayed behind that autumn of 1948, and it was also why my father suppressed so much emotion. It had led my aunt Nellie to express her feelings through poetry, and it had driven Lijiao’s children to diminish the past. Only Zhang Hong had chosen to remember, and for him this memory had become a kind of torture.

And perhaps I, too, am more Chinese than I knew. Because now I understand all of them—understand why a person would choose not to tell her story, or be unable to tell it, or not admit to any feeling, because the emotion would overwhelm you otherwise. I understand the poem my aunt Nellie wrote for her father, in which she tries to contain her emotion, to shape her personal sorrow into something proper and purposeful. In the final verses, she fails—But I hate it! Father—and the emotion floods through, a secret wound suddenly open to the world.

Learning my family story also changed the way I saw the factory towns of the south. There was a lot to dislike about the migrant world of Min and Chunming: the materialism, the corruption, the coarseness of daily existence. But now there was an opportunity to leave your village and change your fate, to imagine a different life and make it real. The journey my grandfather attempted was one that millions of young people now made every day—they left home; they entered an unfamiliar land; they worked hard. But nowadays their purpose was not to change China’s fate. They were concerned with their own destinies, and they made their own decisions. If it was an ugly world, at least it was their own.

Perhaps China during the twentieth century had to go so terribly wrong so that people could start over, this time pursuing their individual courses and casting aside the weight of family, history, and the nation. For a long time I thought of Dongguan as a city with no past, but now I realize it isn’t so. The past has been there all along, reminding us: This time—maybe, hopefully, against all odds—we will get it right.

*   *   *

 

The last relative I spoke with about family history was my aunt Irene, my father’s younger sister. She had been seven when her father died, and she had only one memory of him: He returned home from a trip with a newly grown mustache, and he kissed her on the stomach and made her laugh.

After he died, my grandfather remained a presence in the lives of his children. When Irene was too tired to study, her mother would say, “Your father died for your country. You must work hard so you can be just like him.” Beijing had twelve electric tram lines, all named for martyrs of the nation; my uncle Luke remembers riding the Zhang Shenfu tram when he was a child. A mine in the Fushun complex was called the Shenfu Mine, a street in Shenyang became Shenfu Road, and the isolated station where he had been pulled off the train and killed was renamed Zhang Shenfu. In death, my grandfather was inscribed into the landscape of China. And then the names all changed after the Communists took power.

Once when Irene was in middle school in Taiwan, her class went on a field trip. They saw an exhibit about a person who had been killed, with descriptions of his murder and photographs of his wounded corpse. “I thought, ‘the poor man,’ ” Irene recalled, “and then I saw the name of my dad.” She fainted. The pictures were part of the government’s anti-Communist propaganda, but Irene had never seen them before. She hadn’t even recognized her father’s face—only his name.

Of the siblings who had left China, Irene was the only one who knew her mother as an adult. After her older sister and brothers left for America, she spent time alone with her mother and heard many of her stories. Later after Irene had gone to America too, she returned to Taiwan and spent time with my grandmother the summer of her death. Many people shared their memories with me, but Irene’s were different. In her telling, her mother was an independent-minded woman who chafed against tradition and longed to travel abroad; her father was a youthful rebel whose patriotic idealism opened up a gulf with his family. The burden of my grandfather’s generation had been to see everything in political terms, but Irene’s stories restored the personal to their lives.

Holding regret until the end of time. Several people had told me that these words, inscribed on my great-grandfather’s funeral garments, expressed his regret for the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. But Irene had another interpretation. When my grandfather returned home after seven years in America, his father wanted him to stay in Liutai to run the estate; he was angered when the young man decided to leave home anyway. The Japanese invasion cut off communication between father and son without allowing them to reconcile. “It was regret for the way he treated his children,” my aunt said. Her story of my grandfather’s death was also different. As he lay dying of his wounds, according to several accounts I had read, my grandfather was thinking of his duty to the nation. I am from the central government, he had said. To die for my duty, I have no complaints. But Irene told me he had tried to write something on a piece of paper, using his own blood. One of the people in his group was able to leave unharmed, and he gave the paper to my grandmother. It contained only a few characters. “My mother couldn’t make out much of it,” Irene said, “but she could read her name.”

In everything I had read and heard about my grandfather, I could find no trace of the individual—his entire being seemed to be focused on saving the Chinese nation. This was the image of the man that was presented in his letters and in his diaries. I wanted to like him, but the more I learned about him the more foreign he seemed. He was like a man disappearing inside his own story, and that seemed terrible to me. But maybe there had been something more—something I could not see, apart from the faintest glimmer in the stories my aunt Irene told me.

 

 

I HAD NOT INTENDED to speak with Irene, because she would have been too young to remember much about her father’s life and death. I talked with my father, my aunt Nellie, my uncle Luke, Lijiao’s family, and many other relatives. All of them had a way of obscuring their tales even as they told them.

We don’t know much about family history. We never had a chance to talk about it.

In fact, my experience of China was very shallow.

My grandfather’s father. Nobody knew his name.

Months after I spoke with all of them, my aunt Irene called me one day. She had heard I was writing a book, and she wanted to talk about my grandmother.

“Let me tell you,” she said, “my older brothers and sister don’t know Grandmother the way I knew her.” It had not occurred to me to ask about my grandmother. She had never gone far from home; she had left no written record. How much of her life was there to know? But many of the most vivid details of my family history—my grandmother’s clashes with her father-in-law, the beating of my grandfather with the jiafa—came from my aunt Irene. After our first phone conversation, my aunt sent me an e-mail. In its emotion, it was unlike anything anyone in the family had expressed.

 

My mother (your grandma) came from a very traditional Chinese family, with strict family rules. She has had high education, very unusual for a woman at that time. Later she was very successful in her career. She educated her children very progressively almost single-handed under very difficult conditions with a meager resource. I love her very much and respect her immensely. I got to know her well only after my elder brothers and sister left home.
After our short conversation I began to think about the changes, challenges Chinese women had to face, probably that is why Chinese women are very strong. In our family, Grandma, myself, and you, these three generations covered a period of one hundred years of most significant changes around the world, especially in China. We sacrificed, suffered, and we stood up.
I am looking forward to hearing from you and talking to you.

 

Love,
Aunt Irene

 

My aunt had told me she was “semi-retired” from her job as chief executive officer of an American biotechnology company. But we still had to schedule our phone call a week in advance; her husband, who was fully retired, organized the logistics for her. In China today, women like my aunt are known as nu qiangren, superwomen. At the appointed time, I picked up the phone and called my aunt Irene, and this is how she began her story: I will tell you what I know.