A Village with My Name

by Scott Tong

  There was one big challenge in this project that surprised me. Yes, this pursuit crashed into censorship and maddening bureaucracy. Police officers and officials adept at stonewalling made head-scratching statements like “Personnel files are not for individuals to see (only employers can see).” But by far the bigger and unexpected barrier was self-censorship. The sources in my family were keen on not cooperating, and often avoided the most salient and personal questions. It’s understandable. China is a society built on status and avoiding shame. You can line-dry your undershorts in a busy alley, but family dirty laundry stays discreetly inside. “We’re ashamed of what we did during the Cultural Revolution,” Aunt Qi Menglan told me over dinner at her modest apartment in Shanghai.

  Picture an uncomfortable child on stage. When my youngest son, Daniel, was three, his preschool class at the Rainbow Bridge International School in western Shanghai performed a holiday dance to some Disney song (about animals, I think). The music began, and his young classmates—Elsa from Switzerland, Priya from India, Julius of Germany—marched, clapped, rolled over, and sang, side by side and somewhat in sync. Daniel disengaged. He retreated two steps from the formation, turned his back squarely to the audience, and bowed his head as if his chin were Velcroed to his chest. My family is a little like that.

  In the end, though, the people I consulted for this project were gracious enough—or perhaps they simply relented. A Village with My Name is long-form journalism that borrows from leading scholars in history and economics. It draws from a reporter’s notebook and audio recorder, preserved diaries and letters, a vast set of interviews, a multiyear reporting tour of China, return trips with my parents to their ancestral villages, government archives, old family letters, and a lifetime of dinner-table conversations with relatives.

  Upon exiting the old Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, I paused at the waterfront as I always like to do, to observe the barges trolling up and down the Huangpu. For so many generations, the Bund stood as an outpost for opportunists—legitimate and shady—from every direction: opium sellers from London, property developers from Baghdad, bankers from Ningbo, barbers from Hangzhou, Jewish refugees from Germany, prostitutes from Russia, missionaries from Syracuse. I have conducted a bit of my own business here. At the north end of the Bund I drank lattes with a market researcher who likes to Google himself daily. Cathy and I rang in the New Year at a deafening waterfront bar with too many expats. I attended the grand opening of the Peninsula Hotel, microphone in hand. To the south end, I chased behind our older son, Evan, then a nine-year-old dirty-blond kid in wheeled Heelys sneakers, encircled by gawking tourists. I attended book talks at the Shanghai International Literary Festival, and dined with a journalist colleague visiting from back home in Washington—the late, great Gwen Ifill.

  Staring at the river prompted a new thought in my head, the way only water can: Did Grandfather Carleton and Grandmother Mildred ever see that same bank ceiling? This was their town too, from a past golden age of the bourgeoisie. But by 1950 China had turned inward, and my grandparents were deemed enemies with foreign connections, even by members of their own families. Their experiences became historically incorrect, silenced and obscured along with millions of others’. But their stories, like the frescoes, are still there, just beneath the surface and waiting to be uncovered. If you find yourself on the wrong side of history, no one tells yours—except perhaps your grandson.

  PART ONE

  The Great Opening

  Chapter One

  SECRETS OF THE TONG VILLAGE

  Next time, you eat at my house.

  —Third cousin Tong Daren

  My dad looks over and shakes his head, the way a doctor does after whispering cancer. We’ve squandered the better part of this steamy day pursuing a place that may no longer even exist: the ancestral Tong family village. Hours ago we set out in a rental car that came with a driver—a slim man named Mr. Xu and his silver Honda Odyssey minivan—with two clues: a very general location of the hamlet, somewhere in a vast stretch of soybean and rice fields in northern Jiangsu province five hours north of civilization Shanghai; and an obsolete name of the village dating to pre-Communist days.

  We’ve been away awhile. The last Tong on our limb of the family tree was born in the village in 1880. Soon after, our direct ancestors began venturing out, during an age of discovery for China in the modern industrial era—its nineteenth-century enlightenment. They’d end up in faraway places: Tokyo, Nanjing, Nanchang, Taipei, Minneapolis, Poughkeepsie. And now Shanghai, where I was assigned as bureau chief for the American public radio business and economics program Marketplace. The cliché metaphor for China’s economic transformation, most often attributed to the late reformer Deng Xiaoping, is “crossing the river by feeling for the stones.” Now, Dad and I are trying to return back across the water.

  Mr. Xu’s Odyssey has driven in a series of big circles, returning once and again to the same nondescript stretch of China’s Grand Canal. It just keeps looking the same. More than a thousand miles from Beijing in the north to Hangzhou to the south, this waterway outruns both the Suez and Panama waterways. On this day, it seems even longer than that.

  The place we are looking for was once called Fu Ma Ying. The old name of the village went obsolete in 1949, when the Communists took the mainland and proceeded to rewrite history, street names and town names. At the local registry in the nearest city, Huai’an, no one had ever heard of the place, or of any Tongs in the area. At a nearby police station, officers said little and offered less. So we resorted to pestering strangers—pedestrians, cabbies, food peddlers—for some sign of Fu Ma Ying. Quickly, the inquiries took on a predictable sequence: an initial moment of hope, a diversion from the main topic, and finally the phrase bu tai qing chu. It’s not very clear.

  At a bus stop by the canal, I approach a middle-aged man with a crew cut and a face weathered by a life of farming. Before he can talk his way out, I pounce quickly. This much I’ve learned as a reporter in China: when you spot your prey, you cannot hesitate. “Hi, we’re looking for a place called Fu Ma Ying,” I say. “Heard of it?”

  “Fu. Ma. Ying.” The man repeats the words out loud. And then, as if it would provide further illumination, says them again but three times as loud. “Fu. Ma. Ying. Why are you going there?”

  “It’s our lao jia.” Old home.

  “Ahh! Lao jia!” He moves in with a half smile, as if I’ve earned a few Confucian filial points for seeking out family roots. “Do you still have relatives there?”

  “Don’t know. That’s why we’re looking. Fu Ma Ying is the old name.”

  Pause. “Where are you from?”

  “Shanghai. I was born in America. Can’t you tell by my accent? Now I work here in China.”

  “Are you married?”

  I know where this is going. “Yes.”

  “Children?”

  “Three.”

  “Three! You must be rich.”

  There is an assumed equivalence here between children and wealth, which I must admit makes some economic sense: the more you have, the more you have. Okay. The thing is, the rule only applies to people making purely rational, long-term decisions.

  “Not so much.”

  Crew-Cut Man moves on to the next topic. “Shanghai tai ji, tai luan.” Shanghai is too crowded, chaotic. “They’re snobs, looking down on us country folk.”

  “Yes, they are.” For this I have no argument.

  “Are you traveling by yourself?”

  “No, my father’s with me, in the car. He also lives in America. So, Fu Ma Ying? Can you help me find it?”

  Another pause.

  “Bu tai qing chu.”

  I move on. I’ve lived in greater China off and on for more than a dozen years. I have taken years of Mandarin lessons. I can recite a Tang dynasty poem. Occasionally I drink bubble tea. But my understanding of China ends at bu tai qing chu.

  In a literal sense, the phrase does mean “not very clear.” But it has a linguistic
flexibility. Each time I grasp a new context for bu tai qing chu, it turns up in a new way. It means at least these things: I can’t help you. I will not help you. I don’t want to tell you. I’ll get in trouble. You don’t deserve to know. I’m moving on now. A great paradox of China is, people make declaratory statements with absolute certainty, yet at crucial moments reach into their pockets and pull out bu tai qing chu.

  This roundabout exchange has eaten up twenty minutes I’ll never get back, but this is how things work. Chinese civilization goes back five thousand years, the saying goes. My people have time.

  I would later learn Fu Ma Ying was a place of military intrigue, going back to the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth century. According to historian Shih-shan Henry Tsai in his book Perpetual Happiness, an army leader named Mei Yin lived there with his wife, the princess daughter of a renowned emperor and Ming Dynasty founder, Zhu Yuanzhang. At some point, things got complicated. The emperor died, his fourth son usurped the throne, and the new guy in charge deemed Mei Yin in Fu Ma Ying a threat. Mei Yin died mysteriously soon after, in what his obituary calls a drowning “suicide.” China has its share of mysterious accidents.

  My father and I have limited time to find the place. He’s flown out from his home in Oregon, with my mother, for a three-week stint with us. We have budgeted this weekend to look for the village. For him, this is a filial act. He fled the mainland during wartime at the age of ten, exactly sixty years ago, and his return to the lao jia amounts to a pilgrimage of respect to where the Tongs began. Still, I suspect this pursuit matters less to him than me. For Dad, this is something to do once: go to the place, cross it off the Confucian bucket list, and tell his friends about it. I can understand that.

  I, however, am developing an obsession with this quest, and it’s unclear why. To organize my own thoughts as we drive—and drive . . . I start scribbling words in my reporter’s notebook. “First mover,” I write. This phrase comes straight out of Father Spitzer’s freshman theology class at Georgetown: the Problem of God (Aquinas: Every single thing must be moved by something else, but at some point there had to be an original First Mover, or God). Every migration story starts with person one leaving a place for another place. That person in the village was Great-Grandfather Tong Zhenyong. This much I know. But how did he get out? When? Why? A lot of Chinese Americans have written eloquently about their families’ immigrant experiences, but often those are tales of second or third movers. I care about the first: Tong Zhenyong’s story.

  Then I write the Chinese phrase I’ve heard my mainland relatives utter over and over: haiwai guanxi. Overseas relations. This is the punishable offense that doomed so many in the 1950s–’60s era of strongman Mao Zedong. For his association with an anti-Communist father living in Taiwan, Uncle Tong Bao was sent down to the countryside for a full decade. His mother was publicly tortured and shamed for the same reason. In the twisted symmetry of the Communist Party, when one person goes abroad and becomes a de facto political enemy, several of that person’s relatives back home incur a disproportionate cost. How did that play out in the village, for those left behind?

  I write “stubborn.” When I was young, my parents wore that word out describing this pesky younger brother who once threw a tantrum by lying down in the center of a busy Taipei street (long story). Simply put, I’m digging into the past because so many in my family want to bury it. My maternal grandfather’s name has barely been mentioned in my lifetime because of his now-shameful politics during World War II. He died alone in a faraway prison labor camp, almost entirely forgotten by family members trying to survive and protect themselves. There’s an old imperial saying that when a person commits a serious crime, punishment extends to nine generations of his family. So it’s best to “draw a clear boundary line of separation” from offenders and never mention them. The upshot in my family is that certain stories get actively forgotten, wiped from the historical record. But not if I can help it.

  Two barges putter by on the canal, with the innards of industrial modernity on their backs: rice, wheat, cement, coal, sand, logs, pipes. The vessels move at different speeds, like China itself. More than half the population is racing ahead, in cities, to join the global, digital, service-economy future; the rest toil in places like the Tong village—if it still exists—growing the same grains and vegetables their ancestors did.

  The canal itself was, like China’s Great Wall, built out of imperial self-interest. In the sixth century, the Sui dynasty emperor in the north ordered a canal to the south to provide access to two things: taxes and food. The waterway did not take form without cost or misery, and surely people in and around the Tong village paid a price. Half the conscripted laborers are assumed to have died on the job. Summer temperatures in this area peak at 105 degrees, and in winter the water can freeze over.

  Once built, the canal carried revenue collectors southbound to China’s fertile region, to take a share of grain from each family. On the way back, barges also carried produce, rice, and salt. Domestic water transport helped create a vast, efficient marketplace; rice sold for a remarkably similar price all across China in the early 1700s. In a way, the canal serves to connect the Chinese people, rather than separate them—the great anti-wall of China.

  By the time my great-grandfather was born in the late nineteenth century, the canal was long in decline. Like the Erie Canal back home, these old waterways lost out to superior technology: steamships allowed bigger, faster vessels to travel the ocean and supersede canal trade. The new “iron horse” of railroads replaced horse-drawn canal boats. In China the problem was also maintenance. Dredging of the rivers and canals fell off in the late nineteenth century, as the Qing dynasty began to crumble politically and fiscally.

  If this forlorn part of northern Jiangsu ever had a heyday, I don’t know when it was. Across China, people from the area known as Subei are looked down on, and have historically occupied low rungs of society. My mainland-born friend John Lu, an ad executive, put it succinctly when I first met him and told him about my lao jia. “No one,” he said, “has any reason to go there.”

  ***

  My father asks Mr. Xu to drive us back to our hotel, an acknowledgment of defeat—at least, for now. There’s still time for a miracle. In this moment of fantasy, a classic ’80s movie scene pops into my head, from one of the Indiana Jones films. You’ve seen it: the protagonist played by Harrison Ford finds himself stumped in a library, searching for a hidden tomb. Then, in a moment of illumination, he hustles up a circular stairway to gain a new perspective and sees it. X marks the spot.

  “Do we know any Tong relatives still living in the village?” I ask my dad.

  “I don’t think so.” He’s never been there either. In a way, he’s more of an outsider than I am. My father left the mainland in 1949, fleeing the People’s Liberation Army. By now, I’d spent three years in Shanghai with my wife, Cathy, and our three young children. The kids attended Rainbow Bridge International School on the grounds of the Shanghai Zoo. Their favorite meal was a thirty-cent noodle bowl down the street from our apartment. Cathy had taken Mandarin lessons twice a week.

  My Nokia cellphone rings. It’s Cecilia, my news assistant, from Shanghai. “I found info on Fu Ma Ying online.” she says. I’d texted her two hours back, suggesting a last-ditch Internet search for the place. This was the pre-smartphone era, and in any event we’d found the Chinese web unhelpful for this kind of thing. It was hard to find good maps and directions, analog or digital. “It’s near the town Jinhe, just north up the canal.” Cecilia gives a few directions, Mr. Xu fires up the Odyssey, and Dad sits up and smiles. X marks the spot.

  I’m not so sure. Perhaps we have simply found the right haystack. If experience is any guide, we may still have in our way villages and sub-villages, roads without names, and bu tai qing chus.

  By the time we enter the town of Jinhe it’s almost five in the evening. Mr. Xu drives up to a bespectacled forty-something man walking out of a store, puts down the window, and g
ets to the point. “Fu Ma Ying?”

  “Fu Ma Ying,” he repeats, and approaches. A good sign. Mr. Xu passes him a cigarette, a down payment for his time. The man doesn’t know the exact spot but offers the services of a friend, makes a cellphone call, and crosses the street—presumably to find this friend. Again we wait. So I get out and step into a gritty general-goods store, the kind you see all across China.

  I love these. The smell brings me back to living in Taiwan in the early ’80s (my father was recruited from IBM in the States to work for the Taiwanese government, and then he left for the consumer technology firm Acer). The whiff in the air is not exactly fragrant, but it’s familiar: a mix of past-expiration soap and mothballs. The items on the shelves here are remarkably similar to that time: bottled orange juice separated into its constituent liquids, chocolate bars that have begun to powderize, knockoff-brand ramen noodles, prawn-flavored chips, batteries hiding under dusty glass countertops.

  But there is one thing that is different: the toothpaste. During my days in Taiwan, the dominant and wholly politically incorrect brand we brushed with was known as Darkie. The logo featured a black man in a top hat sporting bleach-white teeth. But now, having been acquired by Colgate-Palmolive, the brand goes by Darlie, and in the revised logo the man appears racially ambiguous. He’s somewhat lighter. Yet for all the corporate updating, the Mandarin on the packaging remains black person toothpaste. Upon seeing that, I experience a confusing sort of nostalgia.

  Exiting, I look over the three blocks of shops that make up Jinhe. In America, a visitor might say this place’s best days were behind it. In China, though, it’s the opposite. Things are picking up here. Years ago, these stores had just two choices of chocolate instead of twenty. They didn’t have plug-in freezers to stock ice cream bars. There were no sidewalk merchants hawking next-generation rooftop solar thermal panels for people to enjoy hot baths.