by Fang Lizhi
My mother, Shi Peiji, married into the family and then became one of the ones who stuck close to the patriarch. She lived inside my grandfather’s Hangzhou household while my father went to the university in Beijing. Both of my elder brothers, Fang Nianzhi and Fang Fuzhi, were born inside that patriarchal home. But then my grandfather died and his wealth quickly disappeared. My father, who had been relying on my grandfather to finance his studies, could no longer make ends meet and had to quit. He left the university in 1934 and, looking for ways to support himself, eventually found a job with the Ministry of Railways. He brought my mother and brothers to Beijing and set up his own separate little household. I was the first of my siblings to be born in Beijing.
For that reason I never got more than vague impressions of life in a big traditional-style Chinese family. In Beijing we were a small family and didn’t even have any relatives living in the vicinity. We children saw none of the comings and goings of kin that are a normal part of Chinese big-family life. It was only when I visited Hangzhou that I got a better sense of my extended family—or, at least, a sense of what it once had been. Even now when I go back to Hangzhou, or even to the general area of Hangzhou, I get the sense of being immersed in a sea of relatives who appear and disappear under various labels—Younger Male Cousin This, Second Maternal Auntie That, and so on. All four of my grandparents lived in Hangzhou, and they seem to have had descendants of every possible kind. To make matters worse, there were all sorts of lateral interconnections. I often felt embarrassed to meet my relatives because I wasn’t sure exactly how I was related—and this mattered, because it meant I didn’t know the right word in Chinese to use in addressing them. For someone like me, who grew up in a nuclear family, the complex web of family nomenclature was always somewhat mystifying. This also might be why, every time I tried to read the great Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, I never got very far. All those family relationships, and the complex network in which they were embedded, seemed alien to me, hard to empathize with—and hence boring.
I don’t know how much the ethical values in Chinese tradition have to do with these complex family networks, and I am not sure, either, that they represent the “essence” of Chinese culture. I do know that I am grateful to my parents for the wonderfully simple environment—parents and siblings only—in which I grew up.
Family webs aside, I have always been very fond of Hangzhou. Other than the cities in which I have worked, it is the one with which I am most familiar. In my youth, my siblings and I often traveled from Beijing to Hangzhou to visit my grandparents; later on, we brought our aging mother to visit her relatives there. The Hangzhou rail station became a very familiar place to me. My parents’ wedding took place in the Hangzhou rail station hotel.
Their marriage was arranged by their families. This was the norm at the time. But the wedding photos show my mother in a white Western-style gown, not the flowery red dress of Chinese tradition.
My mother, born in 1911, was a year older than my father. Her impulses were different from his, too. She went to high school—a bold move for a woman in her day—and told me that during the Northern Expedition in 1926, she and some female classmates took to the streets chanting slogans like “Down with the foreign powers and out with the warlords!” If the guiding principle of my father’s philosophy was “Stay the same no matter what happens around you,” my mother’s principle was “Watch what happens and make a difference.” In the several decades I spent with my father, I could not notice even a slight change in the way he approached life. He never spoke of making any difference; he didn’t even express opinions on events in the news. The only thing I ever saw him get exercised about—and this was only rarely—was the need for a drink. By contrast, my mother could, and did, change her life patterns radically as different needs arose. She surprised us. At first she seemed to us only an ordinary mom and housewife, but in the 1950s she suddenly turned into things like National Model Worker in Childhood Education and Delegate to the All-China Women’s Federation. But then later on, just as abruptly, she set activities like those aside and went back to being an ordinary housewife—or house granny, I should say, because she took charge of the third generation, my children and those of my siblings—ten altogether, on her second go-round at parenting, after six of her own. My word “ordinary” of course is not right.
Where my mother got her activist philosophy is a puzzle to me. Her family story is even more convoluted and hard to figure out than my father’s. Her father was from Huzhou, famous for its writing brushes. But neither he nor his wife—my grandmother—spoke with a pure Zhejiang accent. My grandmother had a strong Cantonese twang that announced to anyone within earshot that she had grown up somewhere in Guangdong. My mother told me that she herself grew up not in Hangzhou but in Sichuan. Her taste for spicy food, which she passed on to me, is probably a result of her childhood there.
Both of my grandparents on my mother’s side must have been from the families of officials, or at least of government clerks or secretaries. This would be the only way to explain why they had lived in different places and had absorbed such different accents. My mother once mentioned to me that her father had told her that his branch of the Shi family included the famous Shi Kefa, who had defended the city of Yangzhou during the fall of the Ming Dynasty in the 1640s. But this might have been just family lore—a way to enhance clan glory or to establish how long the unbroken line of officials was in the Shi family. In any case, my mother said that her father had served in official posts at the county and province levels during the early Republican years, and this must have been right, because she followed him both to Jiangxi and to Sichuan, and that would not have happened unless he had held posts at the county level or higher. My clearest childhood impression of my mother’s father, as relayed through my mother, was that he had blue eyes that could strike terror into people when he got angry. Later I met him and saw that, sure enough, he did have gleaming dark-blue eyes.
Even though we often stayed with my grandfather during childhood visits to Hangzhou, I have very few personal recollections of him other than the austere presence that he projected. He had given himself the name Shi Jiulong (Nine Dragons Shi), apparently to reinforce his gravitas. He walked with a slight limp, which was said to be the result of an injury sustained in falling off a train, but to us it only added to his authoritative air. He lived separately from his wife, which I think was the result of his keeping too many mistresses. During his later years, the last of these women moved in to live with him. My mother addressed her as “New Auntie,” and we children called her “Little Granny.” We knew that she had no children, but knew nothing else about her.
In short, my ancestral family in Hangzhou, in my child’s mind, was always hazy and mysterious. I was aware that its members were supposed to be my nearest and dearest, and I knew, too, that my two brothers had been born in the Hangzhou home. But it all seemed extremely distant compared to my Beijing home. The extended family seemed too large, and unfathomable. The buildings that the family inhabited seemed unfathomable, too.
The Hangzhou homes of both sets of my grandparents were near Chengtou Xiang. A bit more than a hundred years ago, Hangzhou was the scene of ferocious battles between the Taiping rebels and the Qing rulers. Most of the structures in the city were burned or demolished. After the devastation, the whole Chengtou Xiang area was rebuilt, and from then on it remained largely intact and unchanged. By the time I visited my grandparents’ homes, the neighborhoods were almost a hundred years old. Their wooden door frames, window casings, and gutters were black and decaying, and some of the walls tilted to one side. Once the resplendent homes of officials, they now exuded gloom. The courtyards were small, and the paths and corridors that led to them were sinuous and complicated. To a child like me, who was accustomed to simple rooms in a single house, all of this seemed darkly terrifying. My mother was not superstitious, and in our daily lives in Beijing she never showed any sign of belief in ghosts or spirits; but every ti
me she spoke to us of the family home in Hangzhou, she insisted that she had seen ghosts in it. I do not believe that she really saw ghosts; but I do believe that, growing up inside that dark and dilapidated, deep and unfathomable hundred-year-old mansion, with its crooked corridors and slanting walls, she honestly thought that she had.
I thank my parents for letting me be born in a place free from infestation by ghosts. I was born in Beijing, away from all of those fetters and shadows.
My father died in March 1983, and we deposited his ashes in the mourning hall of a cemetery near Babaoshan on the western outskirts of Beijing. Within a month I began—subconsciously at first—to feel uneasy about this decision. Should his ashes be in a mourning hall in Beijing, physically so far from those of family and friends? I discussed the matter with my mother, who agreed with me, so I insisted that we send the ashes back to Hangzhou. The experience made me realize how deeply the notion that “Hangzhou is home” had sunk into my consciousness, even though I had not grown up there. In May, when Li Shuxian and I were invited to give lectures at Hangzhou University, we took the opportunity to bring my father’s ashes along with us, and, bringing my mother, too, we deposited them in his native place, where they belong.
I personally selected my father’s final resting place on a slope in the South Mountains, to the southeast of Hangzhou city. The site is in the shade of some pine trees halfway up Yuhuang Mountain. Our stone monument to him is backed by the mountain, on the other side of which lies the famous West Lake. Lying before it is the wide Qiantang River, along whose banks run the tracks of the Zhejiang–Jiangxi rail line. As I stood in the cool mountain breezes that wafted by, gazed at glittering ripples on the river in the distance, and felt the stillness that was broken only by the occasional low rumble of a passing train, my subconscious unease about my father’s loneliness melted completely away. He had given me my life in Beijing, and I had now brought his spirit back to his home.
On our lecture trip, Li Shuxian and I did not stay in the old family home. My grandparents had all passed away by then, and we stayed in a modern hotel. As I sensed a new distance from the old family, I also felt, strangely, more intimate toward Hangzhou as a city. Perhaps it was the release from the burdens of family protocol, which had been so constricting during my youth, that finally allowed me to enjoy the beauty of my parents’ hometown.
Hangzhou has, of course, always been beautiful. On this trip the feelings came over me that I knew the beauty of the city and that it indeed was my hometown. I remembered times when our mother brought us to the shores of West Lake. It was so much prettier than the lake at the Summer Palace in Beijing, with its presumptuous airs of imperial power. At the West Lake shore, what lay before you were mountains and the glittering lake, crisscrossed with pleasure boats and reflecting the images of pagodas, the whole scene as leisured and pleasant as you could imagine; behind you were rows of shops of every color, offering exquisite local crafts, as fine and brilliant as were to be had. I recalled a time, before I was even ten, coming to West Lake with cousins and going out in a boat to harvest water chestnuts. They were so plentiful at the time, and so easy to harvest! I remember, too, the first time I climbed Chenghuang Mountain to visit its famous temple, of which my deepest impressions as a child were of its two guard-demons outside—terrifying but simultaneously comical, because one was painted a ridiculously white white and the other a ridiculously black black.
Gu Mountain, or “Mount Isolate,” which stood at the end of White Dike, had always attracted Hangzhou’s literati. I wonder if my father’s attitude of transcendence might have originated there, in the Pavilion for Releasing Cranes. He used to bring me to Mount Isolate to visit the famous literati engraving club called the Xileng Seal Society. He liked to go there because he was a collector of seals as well as an engraver himself. It was under his influence that I, too, learned how to carve seals—not to the level of the Xileng Society, of course; but still, if you were to trace things back, I would count as a disciple in that tradition.
There were places in Hangzhou that had been off-limits to me as a child. During our 1983 visit, our hosts at Hangzhou University brought us to see one of them. It was Wangzhuang, formerly one of Mao Zedong’s vacation villas. Mao had been dead for several years, but it still remained closed to the public. Our hosts had to use special connections to get us into the mysterious place. It lay on a large plot of sheltered lakeshore and was enveloped by thick bamboo, through the shifting leaves of which the lake was visible. It was said that Mao, on one of his visits, had gotten out of his car and casually commented that “the wind is really brisk here,” after which the building was expanded so that, on its next approach, the chairman’s vehicle could be driven directly inside it. And in fact, the main building was huge. (The quarters that had been used by Mao’s bodyguards were being converted into a hotel for ordinary citizens.) If one peers across the lake from Wangzhuang, one can get a glimpse of Mao’s other villa (he had two in Hangzhou); the other one was Liuzhuang, which a few decades earlier had been Chiang Kai-shek’s vacation palace.
The breezes on West Lake always carry a gentle bouquet that arises from the combination of the lotus, water chestnut, and floating duckweed that live in the lake. At Wangzhuang, the scent of bamboo added to the pleasant aroma. The mud at the bottom of the lake, on the other hand, was not so pleasant. Lotus and water chestnut plants, no matter how fragrant at the surface, die and rot as all plants do, sink to the bottom, and, if you dig them up, stink. As they lie on the bottom, though, they do no harm to the pleasant scent at the water’s surface; indeed they supply the nutrient-rich mud that nourishes the next generation of fragrant lotuses and water chestnuts. Out with the old, in with the new—nature’s cycle is so reasonable, so fair. And how could the pleasant fragrance be kept so constant? Can we imagine what the lake would smell like if all the generations of lotus and water chestnut plants refused to sink to the bottom but just stayed, decaying, at the top?
The thought reminds me of China. The country’s history is indeed very long. The ancestors are innumerable and their heroic accomplishments are even more uncountable; their accumulated glory cannot be denied. The only trouble is that, having passed away, they are unwilling to sink to the bottom of history’s lake. The four-thousand-year-old legacy of China’s glorious past still floats on top. We move only from “Confucius says…” to “Chairman Mao teaches us…” Does this allow growing room for new life? It is time for the masters of Wangzhuang and Liuzhuang (without asking whether it was fragrance or something else that they emitted during their lifetimes) to sink to the bottom of the lake and assist the mud in doing its thing. Just imagine what it would be like, on the day when China’s first free election finally arrives, if all of the ancestors and heroes of the past were unwilling to step aside but crowded up to the ballot box to dominate the vote. Wouldn’t that be our haunted house again, crowded with its ghosts and demons?
I honor my ancestors. I respect them. But they are too tired. It is time for them to sink to the bottom, be at rest, fertilize. The Leifeng Pagoda near Wangzhuang collapsed a few decades ago—struck by lightning, they say. It is also said that lightning is sly but fair: it tends to target dead trees and limbs, ones that are on the way out anyway, and does the same to the older and more decrepit of the buildings and towers that mankind has built. Nature has it right, I think: we should let collapse things that are ready to collapse, let rot the things that are rotting, and let die things ready to die, no matter how splendid their glory, be it real or false, once was. Even if we oppose the disintegration, we will fail. Eventually it will happen anyway.
I was lucky. I was born into a Beijing family that was a fresh offshoot of a disintegrating clan from Huizhou and Hangzhou. None of my ancestors—from Fang La in a mountain holdout to the authentic war hero Shi Kefa, down to my paternal grandfather the savvy merchant and my maternal grandfather the triumphant government official—could use the glorious past to suffocate my chances to grow.
2. MY
HOME IN BEIJING
From 1936 to 1952—until the age of sixteen—I lived in a family home in Beijing. At first there were five of us: two parents, two older brothers, and me. My eldest brother, Nianzhi, died young, and I have no memories of him. Then came Fuzhi (born 1934), then me. Later three sisters arrived: Yingzhi (born 1939), Yunzhi (born 1941), and Pingzhi (born 1946). This brought us to seven regular family members, but two more, my father’s mother and a widowed aunt, also joined temporarily during the early 1940s. Those two ladies both eventually returned to the family home in Hangzhou.
If the value of a home environment were measured in the number of spectacular events it produced, then mine would rank very low. My first sixteen years, at least in my memory, were utterly ordinary—no dramatic ups or downs and nothing that I remember as either especially joyful or painful. Everything was routine: getting up in the morning, eating the breakfast that Mother had made, carrying to school the lunch that she had made, going to classes, and then coming home to eat the dinner she made. Life went on, year after year, like the turning of a dharma wheel: steady, unchanging, monotonous.
In the larger society, though, those sixteen years were anything but. They were filled with turmoil: the War of Resistance (World War II) from 1937 to 1945, the Chinese civil war from 1946 to 1949, and the Korean War that began in 1950. Beijing in those years had three different political authorities: the Japanese occupation government (1937–45), the Nationalists’ “Northern Headquarters for the Extermination of Bandits” (1946–48), and, after the Ping jin Campaign in the winter of 1948–49, Communist rule. Hardly any Chinese household could avoid the scourge of war. Many families, especially in the major cities, saw disaster in varying kinds and degrees: interruption of schooling, unemployment, flight, exile. The living were forced apart, while those who died took their leaves forever. Our family, too, struggled to survive, but—call it a small miracle—my own childhood and adolescence somehow escaped major misfortune. For sixteen years I never had to miss a day of school, never had to flee anything, and never saw a dead body. The contrast with my later years, which were free of war but saw me knocked about by calamities of other kinds, makes me wonder about God’s mischievousness in planning my life.