Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  ‘Yes, she was,’ my father confirmed.

  ‘But how come? She looks just like a man!’ I exclaimed loudly. ‘She’s very ugly, and kind of spooky!’

  No one responded to my comments. They just stared at me, then turned their heads back to the TV screen.

  It’s true, Madame Mao looked terrible on-screen. Her hair was cropped short like a middle-aged man. She wore a pair of plain glasses with scratched black rims. Her grey Mao suit looked uncomfortable on her, as if she had stripped it off someone in the street. Her face barely registered any expression and there was an icy look in her eyes. She was most unattractive. I wondered how and why our Chairman had married her, and why would a woman in such a position want to undertake a ‘counter-revolution’? As we followed the televised trial for weeks, I desperately wanted to understand this new thing called ‘politics’. After all, I sensed the deep involvement of my parents in the events of this period. With so much about them still unknown, how could I not want to know a bit more about it?

  As the trial approached its end, I began to understand, or, rather, began to take in what my father had explained to me: Madame Mao Jiang Qing was not accused of conspiring with Lin Biao – the then vice president of China – to assassinate Mao. Other members of the Gang of Four were charged with planning an armed coup to usurp power in 1976, when Mao was frail and close to death. Instead, the charges against Madame Mao focused on her systematic persecution of artists and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution. Among other things, she was accused of hiring forty people in Shanghai to disguise themselves as Red Guards and ransack the homes of writers and performers. She had even been a famous actress before she married Mao! Why would a once famous actress want to persecute actors and artists?

  ‘But why were there no posters or images showing what she was like when she was an actress?’ I asked my father.

  ‘That would make her look worse,’ my father answered, somewhat impatient with my constant questions.

  ‘Why? What’s wrong with being an actress?’

  ‘That would prove her bourgeois decadence. A Shanghai actress wearing all that make-up could never be a real Communist comrade.’ My father turned back towards the screen.

  Every evening Madame Mao appeared unrepentant. She would not confess her guilt. I remember that for every question the court asked, she would only answer ‘I don’t know’. The crowd watching was livid – it seemed no one liked Madame Mao. At some stage during the televisation, my mother began to be drawn in. Perhaps because she had been a Red Guard and under Madame Mao’s command. But even she despised her.

  ‘Without that manipulating wife, Chairman Mao would have remained sober. But she manipulated him with her pillow talk and got control over him!’

  That was my mother’s self-assured judgement of this supposed evil woman. In my young head, I wondered if it was simply that she was a woman. Had she been a man she probably wouldn’t have been the object of such intense national hatred.

  There had been reports that Madame Mao planned to defend herself by cloaking herself in Mao’s mantle, saying that she had done only what Mao had approved. As the trial got under way, Jiang Qing dismissed her assigned lawyers, deciding instead to represent herself, answering with just a cold ‘I don’t know’. A few days later, she argued that she had been obeying the orders of her husband and that therefore she was innocent. She said, in front of the whole nation: ‘I was Chairman Mao’s dog. I bit whomever he asked me to bite.’ I didn’t have a clear opinion of her then, but my father was furious. He stood up from his bench and shouted in rage at my mother: ‘No wonder things have been going so wrong over the last fifteen years – these people are totally mindless! Including Mao’s own wife!’

  No one in our hall dared to comment. Everybody was still tormented by their own political involvement in the Cultural Revolution, an episode in which wives denounced husbands, neighbours denounced each other, and students denounced professors. Years later, when I came to the West and first heard the Lou Reed song ‘Growing Up in Public’ with lines such as ‘Some people are into the power of power/The absolute corrupting power, that makes great men insane’, I thought, how could a Western musician manage to write such an accurate account of Chinese life? It was exactly how we grew up – under the absolute power of the collective. No one had any secrets – to have a secret was to betray the state. Everyone had to be absolutely loyal to the government, and the government was the party.

  The trial finally drew to a close at the end of January 1981. Madame Mao was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve. Then in 1983 her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. But she didn’t want to live, and several years later she committed suicide by hanging herself in a hospital bathroom.

  Where did we come from, Father?

  Ever since leaving Shitang, images of my grandparents and our small stony house by the sea had flashed through my mind. I was constantly comparing Wenling to my experiences in the fishing village. There had been a question torturing me for years that I needed answering. One day when I was about nine years old, I managed to pluck up the courage, and went to my father’s studio during one of his tea breaks.

  ‘Father, why did Grandfather kill himself?’

  My father thought for a few seconds, then said: ‘I think he must have felt disillusioned with his life. He had lost hope.’ He answered quietly, in his usual reflective tone. I didn’t really know what ‘disillusioned’ meant, but losing hope was something I could understand. ‘He was an outsider in Shitang, you know,’ my father went on. ‘Your grandfather moved from Fujian to Zhejiang. He was Hakka.’

  ‘What’s Hakka?’ The meaning was literally ‘guest family’.

  ‘They were travellers and migrants originally from northern China. But that was long ago and I don’t know when your grandfather’s family moved to the south. It could easily have been two hundred years ago. He didn’t keep any family records, neither did the government.’

  I remembered the stationmaster telling me that Grandfather used to live in Zhoushan and had once saved some foreigners from a Japanese boat.

  ‘I heard that Grandfather was a hero and that he saved some big-nosed Westerners who were drowning in the sea. Is that true?’

  ‘Where did you hear that?’ my father responded with a frown.

  ‘I heard it from the stationmaster in Shitang. He said the fishermen in Zhoushan rescued lots of foreigners from a Japanese boat.’

  ‘It sounds like the stationmaster was telling lies. Your grandfather wasn’t that kind of man.’ My father paused, then said: ‘But that was a long time ago, no one really knows what happened. I was only a small boy then and I lived with your grandmother in Shitang. Your grandfather often sailed up and down the coast. Sometimes he stayed on his boat for days on end. It is true that there was a huge Japanese boat that tried to transport two thousand prisoners of war to Japan, but the Americans bombed it. I don’t think your grandfather saved the drowning foreigners, though. He was a loner, he never joined in on any group activity. And in fact, I don’t think he was anywhere near those islands then.’

  I was disappointed by my father’s words. I had formed an image in my head of my grandfather as a hero fallen on hard times in Shitang. Yes, he had been cruel to my grandmother and had lived a miserable life, but at least this way he had once been brave, adventurous and good, a man who had saved others. But now my father was telling me this wasn’t true. Maybe my father was wrong. Before I could speak, my father continued. ‘Your grandfather never told me how or why he ended up in Shitang. I think he had spent most of his life sailing up and down the coast before arriving in Zhejiang. Actually, I think he went even further south during the war, past Hainan Island. Then he came north again. Perhaps a typhoon brought him to Shitang, damaged his boat and he stayed. He was a sea nomad. He didn’t like to be on land, or to live in a house. He never belonged in Shitang, or got used to the life of a settler.’

  My father stopped for a moment. He looked as if he
was lost in his thoughts. In that moment, I realised that my grandfather had been as much an outsider as my grandmother. But did she ever know that her husband wasn’t a local either? Did they ever talk about their pasts? We fell into a long silence. I had hoped I might now understand more about why my grandfather had killed himself. Maybe the only thing that had gone everywhere with him was his boat, but he had lost it eventually. He had lost everything.

  I could see my father was looking at me. Could he feel my sadness? My father was wise and kind. I was sure he understood me. He got up and made a cup of thick Longjing tea. ‘Do you know what our family name, Guo, means?’ he said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘It means “outside the first city wall”. In the old days, people built two layers of wall around their cities and Guo is the space between them. An in-between zone. That’s what our name means.’

  Maybe my grandfather had always felt stuck in an in-between zone. He had no roots, not in Shitang, nor any other town or village. Maybe that’s what made him so unhappy that he eventually chose to abandon everything.

  ‘So where were the first Guos from?’ I remembered the stationmaster mentioning our family was from the west of China, in central Asia.

  ‘Hmm, good question.’ My father gazed at his painting. He had just sketched a troubled sea and a rising moon. He spent most of his days painting the sea, and it seemed to me he wanted to capture its every possible movement. Was he trying to find the answer to my question in his picture?

  ‘I don’t think anyone has ever known the real origins of the Guo family, Xiaolu,’ my father sighed. ‘Our country has one of the longest continuously recorded histories in the world, but the Cultural Revolution destroyed it. They burnt all the history books and destroyed the museums. But I think we can trace the Guos back to the Yuan Dynasty, the period when the Mongols conquered China. Our ancestors were Hui Muslims, but they might also have been Persian Mongols. They were tribes with their own religion and culture. There’s really no such clean-cut thing called the Chinese.’

  I reflected on what my father just had said. No such clean-cut thing called the Chinese.

  ‘In recent decades, since the fall of the last imperial dynasty, we have all had to adapt to the customs of the Han Chinese, because they are the majority. Your grandfather had to abandon his Hui Muslim customs in order to fit in with life in the village.’

  My father put down his brush, opened one of his drawers and took out an old world map.

  ‘Come here, let me show you this.’ He pointed to a large yellowy-brown area circling the border between Iran and Mongolia.

  ‘You see this? That’s where we came from. We were outside the city walls. From the borderland. Our ancestors moved all the way down to the south of China.’

  I followed my father’s finger from Central Asia all the way to the East China Sea. It was a long way from the deepest inland to China’s south-east coast. I took another look. There was no water near that yellow-brown patch.

  ‘Maybe that’s why Grandfather couldn’t swim,’ I concluded, thinking that if my ancestors had come from a place without sea or water, then it was no wonder that he had never learned to swim.

  ‘You are right, Xiaolu. Horsemen don’t swim. We were originally horsemen. Nomads.’

  I was mesmerised by my father’s descriptions of our ancestors. Perhaps my grandfather was the last generation to have really known about our family history. But he was dead now. The curse of the amateur genealogist. Did he speak Hakka as a child? Did his family tell him stories of where they had come from? Did his mother wear a headscarf like the Muslim women I had seen in picture books? Then I reflected on my earliest years. My parents had given me away to foster-parents of whom I had no memories at all. If I had stayed with them, would I have ever known about my roots? Would I have one day discovered that my biological father was a painter and my mother a Red Guard? Or perhaps I wouldn’t have even bothered finding out, since in those days we just got on with life. Would I instead have been eking out an existence on a barren mountain, feeling as desolate and suicidal as my grandfather? We were really a family of orphans, it seemed to me. Orphans of a nomad tribe. But what if he’d had no tribe to belong to? What kind of life would that have been? I wondered what belonged to me, what I could really call mine in the end.

  Becoming a Young Pioneer

  But I had to belong to something. It was one of the first things I learned about survival in a town like Wenling. Belong to an official work unit, or a school, or an organisation which would give me status. Otherwise I would be the odd one out. I was no longer a peasant in the village. There was no rugged seashore where I could lose myself, no vast expanse of sea to absorb my daydreams. I realised that I had to fit into the social order, a political labyrinth for a child.

  I look back on my schooldays in Wenling as a string of anguished memories. I was a late developer, given that my illiterate grandparents had never introduced me to Chinese characters. Nor had I ever gone to kindergarten. I was a taciturn child, fearful, and small for my age. The mere fact of sitting among sixty-five students in one classroom left me feeling at once exposed and constrained. I had been a wild street kid used to wandering around by myself. Days were winding streams. Now I had entered a world of rules and stiff uniforms. I hated it. The uniforms were always too long and too big for me, their colour a dull dark blue. I felt like a dwarf street cleaner – the street cleaners had almost the same blue outfit.

  I was bullied by most of my teachers because I couldn’t keep up with the other students – I didn’t dare tell them that I had very bad eyesight and I couldn’t see anything written on the blackboard. They just thought I was an idiot. ‘She’s retarded,’ my maths teacher told my parents. ‘She can’t even count!’ I dreaded maths class. I hated all the strange symbols. I swore that if I ever became a politician I would abolish them all.

  I was lost when teachers conducted the class on the blackboard instead of from the pages of our textbooks. But not even my parents realised the problems were with my eyes; I had my first eye test at the age of nine. The eye doctor told my parents that I had severe myopia – both eyes registered minus ten. By the time I had turned twelve, they measured minus fifteen. But for some reason, I didn’t wear glasses until I was twenty, even though the myopia had been progressing. I basically lived in a state of near blindness for most of my childhood and teenage years. It explained why I always had bruised knees and toes, and why faces looked like yellow-brown clouds unless they were right in front of my face.

  The teachers in the school spoke Wenling dialect. Only Chinese class was conducted in Mandarin, the official language of China, itself based on the northern dialects. We use the word dialect, but really Mandarin was my third language. And Chinese class was also the only one to focus on our textbooks, rather than the blackboard, so I could see the characters properly and was able to follow what was going on. Hence why Chinese was my favourite and best subject. We were required to learn new characters every day and compose short essays with the new characters we had learned. While the other students found Chinese writing too complicated to be enjoyable, I loved it. Maybe because writing characters for me was like drawing a picture. I was fascinated by their pictorial nature, the multiple strokes, and the mysterious meanings that seemed to lie behind each one. I was never tired of learning new ideograms. For example, the character for ‘bright’, (pronounced ming), was composed of a sun symbol on the left, and a moon on the right. Sun plus moon means bright. I loved how characters could be glued together to make new meanings. The character for ‘dew’, (pronounced lou), contained the radical for rain on the top and a footpath beneath. Morning dew, rain on a footpath. A beautiful concept even for a young kid. I found ways of creating my own imaginative sentences as well, despite the fact that I had only begun learning Wenling dialect at the age of seven, and Mandarin at nine. I quickly became Teacher Ruan’s favourite. He would often get me to read my essays out loud to the whole class.

  Apart
from Chinese, I also liked world geography. I found the idea of the world beyond China fascinating. Would we ever get to leave this country and see these foreign lands for ourselves? Even travelling beyond our own local region was difficult. I was obsessed by the history of the Mongol Empire. Somehow I still felt that the enigma of my own family history was linked to these wild people who had lived in yurts and ridden horses and stampeded across the plains of central Asia. Our teacher told us that the Mongol Empire had once been the world’s largest land empire – twice the size of the Roman one. It had ruled over land stretching from central Europe to southern China. I had a vague idea that Genghis Khan was someone impressive, much like Chairman Mao.

  World history caught my attention too, apart from the bit about the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire sounded so remote and strange to me, with all those images of ancient Romans wearing silly clothes looting and fighting across ancient Europe. It didn’t seem a very sophisticated empire to me. And frankly, I didn’t care. I more or less slept through the chapters on the Middle Ages as well, until we got to the bit about Columbus discovering America. That woke me up again. I still remember the teacher telling us:

  ‘Columbus went to conquer the natives in the name of the Spanish king. He probably never realised that, before him, our great marine explorer Zhenghe had already made seven voyages around the world by 1405, nearly a century before Columbus embarked on his voyage. But unlike Columbus, Zhenghe didn’t hurt the natives. Instead, he respected the foreign lands and cultures he encountered. This is the difference between us and the Westerners; they are aggressive and greedy.’ It sounded to me like Westerners were evil, at least that was the impression our education system liked to give us.

  I was also drawn to the Tang and Song – the great dynasties that ruled China from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries. Their world seemed very poetic, even up to the Qing, when China was attacked by the British and defeated in the Opium Wars. The teacher introduced us to a figure called Hong Xiuquan – the leader of the Taiping Rebellion against the Qing emperor.