by Scott Tong
The bespectacled Jinhe guy returns to the car with his friend, named Mr. Zhu, who wears the round face and gray slacks of an office man. But something is wrong. Mr. Zhu has no cigarette in his mouth. He hesitates as we fire questions his way. “Do you know Fu Ma Ying? Can you point us there?” I wonder if he’s assessing the situation for what’s in it for him: perhaps a free meal, a potential business deal, maybe a kickback from any purchases he can recommend to us. I suspect he’s waiting for some kind of offer. Then, to my surprise, Mr. Zhu fishes out his phone and things happen quickly. He calls a local village head and arranges for him to meet us; this would be our third middleman, and I have no idea how close we are. Mr. Zhu hops into the minivan next to me, and we drive on.
“Where are you coming from?” he asks.
“Shanghai.”
“Too crowded. Too chaotic.”
I nod and pivot the conversation. “What do you grow here?” We’ve left the town and turned right into a vast stretch of farmland.
“Dadou, shui dao.” Soybeans, rice. I nod and process shui dao. In English it’s “rice,” but Mandarin has different terms for the stages of a grain’s life. Planted in the field, it’s shui dao. After harvest and de-husking, it sells in stores as mi. Sticky rice is nuo mi. And once you cook it, it becomes fan, which to further confuse things also refers to an entire meal. There is a linguistic precision at work, similar to the way Americans have separate words for wheat, flour, dough, batter, bread, bagel, brioche.
The “road” we’re driving on has turned into one-lane paved path, about the width of a bike trail back home. It has the added drama of five-foot-deep irrigation ditches on either side. As Mr. Xu drives, I try not to consider the odds of a car coming the other way, except that’s all I can think about. About a mile down, we stop at a house on the left to pick up the village head. Surely he knows Fu Ma Ying.
“No, but I know someone who does,” he says as he climbs in too. He points us down the road as I survey this circus car of five. Our driver, the village head, and Mr. Zhu are all standard height, skinny, nondescript. You’d walk past them.
But the man who suddenly steps in front of the moving minivan, daring it to stop, is different. He stands taller and rounder. He sports a well-executed comb-over and has an overt self-confidence—the confidence and penetrating stare of a member of the Communist Party. He wears a beige zip-up polyester jacket, and I can’t help but look for a Members Only logo. He is the area party secretary.
The man gets in. Party secretaries, even in remote places like these, are singularly important persons in a favor-based society. And he knows it. He says nothing and expresses nothing, yet transforms the mood of the minivan the way a priest might. We are all a little nervous. The party secretary directs us to a road where the gravel ends, yielding to a narrow brick walkway only navigable on foot. We get out and walk. To our left, newly planted poplar trees line the walk, and on the right a brownish creek creeps along more slowly than we do. A cluster of unremarkable gray concrete houses comes into view. No one has to say it: this is the Tong village.
This makes for an underwhelming homecoming. The path is populated by pink plastic trash bags and cigarette butts, but there is no sound, save for the occasional cluck of an unseen chicken. The main smell emanates from the creek, which appears to serve as clothes-washing basin, kitchen sink, and sewer. The Tong village seems more notable for what it doesn’t have: roads, a central gathering spot, an organizational plan, anything to buy or sell. John Lu was right—there is no good reason to come here. I ask myself, Is this all there is?
And yet I pick up the pace, as we have found this place after all. Fu Ma Ying, the Tong village, our lao jia, it is still standing. This littered ground to me isn’t exactly hallowed, but how do I put this . . . It’s one thing to know where you were born; it’s quite another to walk in the place you are from. Generations of Tongs past have walked this path before. I have to say, this reaction surprises even me, someone so un-Chinese in so many ways.
A dozen people suddenly gather. In China, faster than anywhere else I’ve seen, a crowd can materialize instantly at the sight of something new: a fight, a car crash, a free product sample. These people are almost all elderly; squinting, crooked, sun-beaten. Hands clasped behind their backs, they stare intently and wait for someone to start talking. This much I know: it’s not for me to talk first in the presence of an elder (my dad) and a political leader (the party secretary in the faux Members Only jacket). So I smile and search the faces for the trademark feature so many of us Tong males have: unruly bushy eyebrows, suggestive of the thick-browed Communist revolutionary Zhou Enlai. Or perhaps Michael Dukakis. I do not see the brows.
“Ni hao,” my dad begins. “Hello. May I ask your name, please? My name is Tong Hu.” I look down. Like me, he wastes a lot of words getting to the point. People who have lived in Taiwan speak with a Mandarin verbiage cluttered with polite, extraneous words that make for inefficiency on the mainland.
A seventy-something man in a black wool driving cap steps forward. He is taller than everyone here. “We are all Tongs here, of course! This is the Tong family village. For every hundred of us here, ninety-nine are named Tong.”
Naturally. We should have known this. Everyone here is from the same root family, and this is not the kind of place to attract outsiders. Dad explains he’s visiting from the States and moves on to his own life story. He talks with his face and his hands, with a youthful curiosity that seems out of place here. Then he introduces me, with a phrase I’ve never quite gotten used to all these years. “This is my number-two son.”
The villagers engage in a local dialect we struggle to follow. This much I pick up from all directions: We know your family. Your aunt, the one from Taiwan, she visited a few years ago.
That information would have come in handy earlier in the day.
I remember her. She wore red. What year was that?
Your grandfather is buried a couple miles away. What’s America like? Is it nicer? Of course it is—why are you asking him that? Did you eat?
I start recording video on my camera to document the episode. Through the viewfinder, I see Dad talking to the tall man with great energy. Everyone seems to talk at once. At the edge of the frame, our driver, Mr. Xu, wears a satisfied grin of mission accomplished. Two of the local guys we’ve picked up smoke cigarettes on the perimeter. The party secretary stands alone, wearing an awkward pose. He has wedged his right hand into the zipper opening of his jacket, as if he’s wearing a sling. Or reaching for an inside pocket. Or reciting some pledge of Chinese allegiance that doesn’t exist.
As I record and listen in, new clues about my great-grandfather emerge. He hailed from an educated family here in the village, married and had three daughters, and then went off to Japan to study. He returned with a Japanese wife, something not uncommon for the time. And yet, I wonder how that went down.
A stooped old man approaches me, and I hit stop. He’s likely in his late seventies and at this moment appears to be the smallest man in China. He wears a navy-blue jacket that reminds me of the traditional Sun Yat-sen suits from the past generation, and has a long face of curious determination. It’s clear he has something he wants to say. Through an inefficient dialect exchange, I learn he is my third cousin, the closest relative I have remaining here. His name is Tong Daren.
“Do you remember anyone in our immediate family?” I ask. “My great-grandfather?”
“Of course.” Tong Daren nods vigorously.
“What did he look like?”
“Broad chest. Tall. Much taller than you.”
Tong Daren leads me in a new direction, to the small courtyard where he lives. His house is one of the smallest here, with separate structures for the living quarters, kitchen, and outhouse. The main house has rectangular cutouts for windows that have not yet been inserted, so that hot, humid air blows through in the summer, as do freezing winds in winter. The floor is an unfinished slab. No lights are on, and I just make out a sm
all bed in the corner. Tong Daren is one of the poorest people here.
“Do you have children?” I ask.
“Two daughters,” Tong Daren says with a pinch of regret. No sons. I’m reminded of the type of dead-end farming life so many have in China. Tong Daren lives on a tiny plot of land he’s not allowed to sell or put up as collateral for a loan. There’s no way he can produce any crop at scale and make a reasonable profit. So he exists here, eats the few vegetables he grows, raises a couple chickens for eggs, and waits for his daughters to send money back from their city jobs.
Tong Daren appears very anxious to speak, but first we have to engage in the requisite small talk: I take a seat, drink some tea his wife offers, and compliment the tea. Now it’s his turn: How old are you? What’s your monthly salary? Why did the United States invade Iraq? How much does a chicken cost in America? By now we are indeed warmed up, and he begins.
“We were affected,” Tong Daren says, using the catchall euphemism for personal suffering at the hands of the state. If you were tortured, executed, imprisoned, or exiled, you were “affected.” At some point, he helped care for my great-grandfather. The problem was, my great-grandfather’s son—my grandfather named Tong Tong—had a history of siding with the anti-Communist Nationalist Guomindang (also Kuomintang) party. This was the US-supported side that lost the Chinese civil war. The purges of the 1950s and ’60s targeted “class enemies”: landlords, counterrevolutionaries, capitalists, spies, traitors, intellectuals—and those deemed associated with them. Tong Daren practiced no politics, yet paid a political price simply because he was related to my grandfather.
“Did you have to wear that high hat?” I ask, referring to the dunce caps that shamed individuals were required to wear, with handwritten words indicating traitor status.
“Of course. We were marched from village to village wearing them.” The phrase “of course,” ken ding, is by far the phrase I’ve heard most often in China, bar none. Above all, you are to speak with absolute certainty.
“And the name-tag boards around your neck?” These served the same function, to shame publicly. Tong Daren looks around and nods slowly. Forty years on, shame remains a powerful force.
My father appears on the path and beckons me over to meet someone else. I stand up to apologize for leaving early, and Tong Daren gives a feeble wave. “We’ll talk later,” he says.
“Scott, did you hear this?” Dad asks, interrupting my thought. The crowd encircling him is talking about my great-grandfather during World War II, something about being a village hero. When the Japanese soldiers came to attack and pillage the village, he went out and greeted them. Several people start talking at once. Each has a version of the story that goes something like this: Great-Grandpa spoke to the troops in Japanese. He trotted out his Japanese concubine. He fed them poached eggs. And somehow, he talked or begged them out of attacking, saving the village and its people from destruction.
I squint. This doesn’t add up. In World War II, Japanese troops occupied Shanghai just to the south, and to the west, Nanjing (also Nanking), the site of unspeakable war crimes: beheadings, bayonet stabbings, killing contests, men buried alive, nuns and grandmothers gang-raped.
“Are you sure, Dad?” Hardly anyone in the village would have been alive in the late 1930s or so. I’ve heard lots of tales in China told with absolute certainty—ken ding this, ken ding that—with dodgy evidence. My father shrugs. “That’s what they say.” Even if it were true, there’s surely more to this story. There always is. The China of this period is not one of happy endings. My own family’s history is unremarkable in that it rhymes with so many others on the mainland—of people left behind, arrested, jailed, betrayed, abandoned, exiled. A number starved to death in the famine. One died in a labor camp in the northwest “Siberia” of China. Modern Chinese history can be a numbing metronome of suffering, with the striking exception of the prosperity today.
It’s dark now, too late to talk more. Dad and I depart, but not before agreeing to return tomorrow with our families—my mom, Cathy, and the kids—for lunch at the home of the tall man with the hat. He turns out to be a former elder here. We say yes a little too quickly for me, without considering his motivations. In China, I’ve learned that a meal is never just a meal. They say in the Middle East that the first thing you learn is the meaning of silence. In China, it’s the meaning of lunch.
On the way back, we drop all the middlemen off, including the party secretary, whose hand is still in the pledge-of-allegiance pose. He says nothing as he gets out, and I have a hunch we’ll see him again.
***
“What’s in the village?” my older son, Evan, asks. We are all in the Odyssey the next morning, seven Tongs en route to Fu Ma Ying.
“It’s a place where everyone’s last name is the same as ours,” I say.
“That’s it?” That’s all I have for him. Evan is nine.
I look over at Cathy, quietly hoping for one of those unplanned China surprises we’ve experienced on many family trips: a post-harvest fire to burn crop waste, a basket of ducklings for sale, a baby kitten in the rice fields, a climbing tree that isn’t off-limits the way it is in Shanghai. We come upon the village, and down by the creek a middle-aged woman looks up and waves. She has a dark, round face, short hair, an old red apron, and the familiar slight heft of a mainland woman who has spent a life outdoors. She smiles instantly, the way city folks tend not to, as she washes a pot of green raw vegetables in the creek water. I suspect these will end up on the table of our special lunch.
The villagers are ready for us. Two dozen greet us at once, led by the tall man in the hat from yesterday. He leads Dad and me to a round table in his home, which is far nicer than cousin Tong Daren’s. It has actual windows, interior lights, and painted walls. After a round of tea and small talk, we sit on wooden stools to talk about Great-Grandfather Tong. He studied in Tokyo as an exchange student, one of the first men to venture out. I do a little math, putting him in Japan around the turn of the twentieth century, when some of the first Chinese students ventured abroad.
This suggests Great-Grandfather Tong was a reasonably big deal—at least, in this little place. Leaving for Japan back then was the equivalent of going from the farm in Kansas to New York City. In Asia at the time, Tokyo served as the essential hub of modernity, the transmitter in Asia of what historians consider the second industrial revolution: electricity for lighting, petroleum for cars, steel for train tracks and buildings. By then, the Qing dynasty was on its last legs, and the Chinese had fallen far behind what many of them pejoratively called the “dwarf pirates” of Japan. My great-grandfather returned as a lawyer, practiced in Nanjing, and went back to the village at the end of his life. He was treated well, the hat man says.
“In the winter they stuffed his bed mattress with hay to keep him warm. When he died we buried him at a scenic spot at Pine Bamboo Village. It’s about two kilometers away. I can take you there.” Dad takes notes, and I venture outside.
“Where are the kids?” Evan asks. Out of perhaps one hundred families, we spot one boy toddler and one girl around five. That’s it. Any person of working age has gone out to work, and their school-age children are with them or attending boarding schools. Four-year-old Daniel, our youngest, runs over with an urgent need for a bathroom. “He just needs to pee?” one woman villager asks rather directly, making it clear no outhouse is required. She points us to an open field where Daniel conducts his business.
Back at the host’s house, about fourteen people crowd around a small wooden table for lunch. I spot a few familiar faces from yesterday, including the party secretary with the same jacket, plus the current village elders. There are no women, except for my mother and Cathy, though the entire meal has been prepared by women. Far too much food is served. Several local chickens and ducks have been sacrificed for this meal. Generous cuts of pork are stir-fried with locally grown vegetables, plus side dishes of tofu, eggs, and mushrooms. Lunch lasts a very long time, and soon
after we have to beg off and return to Shanghai.
That’s when I realize one person who is notably missing: third cousin Tong Daren. This snub can’t be an accident. Our closest relative in the Tong village for some reason has no status in this place. Something has happened here.
On our way out, Tong Daren intercepts me for a word. I ask him why he didn’t attend the lunch.
“Next time,” he says, “you eat at my house.”
Once again I have to interrupt him and leave. He watches quietly as I scoot up the path to join a group photo. Before ducking into the Odyssey, I turn back and see someone approaching my father for a final word. It is the party secretary. I listen in.
“We welcome you back any time,” he says. Then he lowers his voice one level: “Next time, you might consider investing here.”
Of course. I should have seen this coming. This man is best placed to make deals happen here, and take a personal cut along the way. I can’t imagine why anyone would invest in this forgotten place, but surely the party secretary can think of some bridge to nowhere.
I take my seat, put Daniel on my lap, and keep thinking about third cousin Tong Daren’s parting words. Like many Chinese family events, these occasions often take on the feel of a choreographed show, separate and distinct from reality. Next time, I will indeed head to his house.
Chapter Two
REVENGE OF THE PEASANTS FROM TONG EAST
Everything the man told you is a lie.
—Tong Yuhua
Two years later in the village, Tong Daren is dying fast. He has esophageal cancer, which has rendered him too weak to say much the next time I visit, in 2011. So his wife does most of the communicating, blaming his cancer on chemically polluted soil and water. In truth, she doesn’t really know. The source could be runoff from chemical fertilizer, or waste sludge from nearby petrochemical and wood-processing factories. Or, as many cancers are, of unknown origin.