by Scott Tong
Middle-aged dads are not supposed to care about such things. And yet, certain riders have inferior equipment, or they look much older or less healthy. They don’t look like they should be sailing past. “On your left.” This is what they typically say, a phrase that on a bad day can set me off. It is meant as a courtesy, but instead reminds me of my creeping pace. On your left. On certain days I consider making a counter-pass, as if that will return the world to its proper order. One morning as I thought about this, I gave my own insecurity a name: I have on-your-left syndrome.
So too, I believe, do many Chinese people. In a society that runs on hierarchy far more than the United States, there is an individual and collective fear of being left behind in the world. This has, after all, happened in the twentieth century. The preferred position in any relationship is to be the “big brother,” or da ge. If you spend any time in real China, you will learn the primacy of da ge status. On one reporting trip to the border town of Ruili, just across from Myanmar, a Chinese seller of smuggled jade explained to me why all the trucks stuffed with smuggled goods flow in the direction of China. “Because we are the da ge,” he said, with a slight puff of chest.
The da ge conversation is long time coming. China’s economy was once on par with Western Europe in the fifteenth century—some say even the seventeenth century—until it stagnated. By the late 1800s, the tiny island nation of Japan overtook the mainland as Asia’s da ge. This was a moment of pure humiliation for the Chinese, as Japan prior to that had idled on the periphery of imperial China. The Japanese in 1868 chose to open up to the modern technology and science of the West, ushering in what was known as the Meiji Restoration. In came steel train tracks and telegraphs, coal mines and factories, shipyards and guns.
In 1895, Japan shocked the world by defeating the Chinese navy. Under the treaty that followed, the Japanese took the island of Taiwan, and the Liaodong Peninsula in the northeast. A decade later brought an even more unlikely military rout: Japan annihilated Russia’s navy. For the first time since the Middle Ages, a non-European power had defeated a European country. Germany’s kaiser declared it the most important naval battle in a century. US President Theodore Roosevelt called the victory “the greatest phenomenon the world has ever seen.”
Japan had overturned the historic order of Asia and became its hub of modernity. Reform-minded Chinese students began flocking to Tokyo, to study, to develop professional skills, to plot revolution. It was the place to be. One of those students was named Tong Zhenyong—my great-grandfather.
He was born in 1880 in the Tong village. Way down the canal in Shanghai, residents read books by Edison’s lightbulb and rang one another up on Bell’s telephone. But for Tong Zhenyong, that life was a million miles away. What he had going for him were his grades and, apparently, his looks. Mei nanzi, pretty boy, is the phrase Great-Grandfather’s niece uses when I visit her in the village and barrage her with questions. Why did he leave? What did he look like? What were his habits? His loves? She is now in her eighties but still lucid, particularly when talking about his personal life.
In her telling, Tong Zhenyong married at least two times, perhaps as many as four. He did not take to the chief vice for men in the village: gambling. Instead, he liked to take walks down the village path, and spit. “Kind of a small pu pu,” the niece mimics. “Not very loud.” The way she describes it, this seemed an act of habit rather than pulmonary necessity. He married a woman from Tong West and had three daughters right around the time of a new social practice imported from abroad: natural, unbound feet for daughters. For centuries, girls with bound feet were deemed sophisticated, their tiny feet forcing them to walk in a way considered attractive in the day. The shuffling developed strong hip, thigh, and buttock muscles.
I still remember the first time I saw an old woman with small feet. In Taiwan in the early 1980s, my mother pointed her out—an old woman at a Chinese New Year mahjong party. As tiny as her body was, her miniature cloth shoes could have fit a doll.
My great-grandfather rejected foot binding, but it was gradual. For his first daughter, he hired a traditional foot binder for a process that went something like this: the binder soaked the girl’s feet and clipped her toenails. Then he took the four small toes—all but the big toe—and forcibly curled them under the bottom of the foot, breaking the bones and the arch. All this shrank the foot, and to keep it that way, the foot binder wound a bandage tightly to keep the foot from growing. Periodically, the bandages were unwound, bones were rebroken and the foot was rewrapped.
Foreigners in China considered it beyond barbaric. Here are the words of the English missionary John Macgowan, from his modestly entitled book How England Saved China: “One morning there came a succession of screams, sharp, shrill, and piercing, that rose distinctly above the babel of sounds that penetrated to us from our neighbours across the wall. . . . When I asked my wife what was the meaning of these distressing cries, she explained that some woman was binding her daughter’s feet, and the agony was so great that the child was screaming to relieve the pain from which she was suffering.”
Macgowan founded an anti-foot-binding society soon after the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) against the imperial court. Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan had studied under an American Baptist missionary, and his rebels promoted gender equity. Their strongholds included parts of southern China where foot binding was not practiced. The rebellion failed, but the foot-binding issue remained.
In Beijing, the reformer and public intellectual Kang Youwei made the case that foot binding held back women’s productivity. It symbolized a weak China that had lost its, well, footing. Shortly after, in 1902, the empress issued an edict to ban the practice.
By then, Tong Zhenyong’s second daughter was born. When she was young, her feet were bound too, until he intervened to have them unwrapped. He saw her feet grow partially, but not fully. The youngest daughter had full-size feet, which struck his niece as ugly and uncivilized.
“When we walked into their house, her feet were the first to greet us,” she says with a head shake. To be sure, the new cohort of big-footed girls was not universally celebrated. To some, they served as a reminder of coarse, barbarian women of foreign lands—“Cinderella’s sisters,” in the words of one historian.
***
When Tong Zhenyong was in his midtwenties, the empress in Beijing began overturning the entire educational system. She phased out the imperial civil service exam. The ground shook. For more than a thousand years, this test was the main vehicle for males to get ahead. Simply put, top performers got top-level government jobs. This three-day ordeal assessed a young man’s understanding of classic Confucian writings, and his ability to articulate it through long essays. It also tested his calligraphy. In its prime, the testing system won praise as a merit-based tool to discover China’s best and brightest.
By the end of the nineteenth century, though, it became widely dismissed as an anachronism. To critics, the created a corrupt club of aristocrats: it was offered only to men; it stressed outdated texts and classical writing over science and math. Perhaps the one area it fostered creativity and innovation was in the cheating. Students hid mini cheat sheets in their palms, sewed important texts inside their sleeves, and sometimes arranged for academic hired guns to take the test for them. Sometimes they took the more direct route of bribing test proctors.
The imperial court first tried to make mild changes to the test. According to Benjamin Elman’s A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China, one turn-of-the-century exam was divided into two sections, one old school and the other forward looking.
Section 1
The military policies of Guanzi (725–645 BC)
The policies of Han Wendi (179–156 BC) toward Southern Vietnam
Imperial use of laws
Evaluation procedures for officials
The proposals of Liu Guangzu (1142–1222) for stabilizing the Southern Song dynasty
Section 2
The
Western stress on travel as a part of studying
The Japanese use of Western models for educational institutions
The banking policies of various countries
The police and laws
The industrial basis of wealth and power
But in the end, the whole test was scratched, creating a social vacuum. Imagine the impact of ditching the SAT and ACT and the GPA system, as well as the nation’s entire university system. In this confusion, there was one thing in early twentieth-century China that still held value: a degree from overseas. It paid to be an exchange student.
Which is what Tong Zhenyong did. A number of his peers went to Europe, home to Immanuel Kant of Germany, Thomas Aquinas from Italy, and John Locke and Charles Darwin of England. A smaller portion chose America, then the land of capitalist tycoons John D. Rockefeller and John Pierpont Morgan. But most chose Japan for practical reasons—it was closer and cheaper. The written language overlapped with Chinese, and the food was not strange. By the time my great-grandfather sailed, some ten thousand Chinese students were setting off to Japan every year, making up one of the first large-scale exchange-student programs in the world.
I had no idea if I could find any information about my great-grandfather’s time there. When did he go? Was he picked for this? What did he do there? There is no guidebook for chasing a long-deceased ancestor born in the same year as Helen Keller and W. C. Fields. There is only trial and error.
I began with oral histories, interviewing a few relatives in the Tong ancestral village about him. My uncle in Shanghai—my father’s half brother Tong Bao—shared some information he’d heard as a child: Tong Zhenyong studied at the elite private school Waseda University in Tokyo. He married a Japanese wife, a key piece of information conveniently withheld from his Chinese wife. The problem was, there were no photos of him, no documents corroborating any of this information. The wealth of online genealogy resources in America excludes Chinese surnames, except for immigrants. On today’s Internet, Cathy and I constantly warn the junior Tongs that any info put out there is forever. But those who lived and died just two generations ago left without a trace.
A breakthrough came in 2013. That fall I took leave from my reporting job at Marketplace to be a journalism fellow at the University of Michigan. I knew Great-Grandfather attended private Waseda University, and on the advice of a Waseda grad at Michigan, I sent an e-mail query to the librarian there. Her reply:
Dear Scott Tong:
Thank you for your inquiry about visiting our library. We found your great-grandfather’s name in the book you mentioned (p. 14, 7th line from the right). Attached please find the copy of the relevant pages.
Best regards,
Aya
She attached a scan of a 1906 registration list of Chinese exchange students. Page 14 reads:
Tong Zhenyong.
Alternative name: Tong Fengwu.
Age: 28. Jiangsu.
Scholarship type: Public
County: Baoying
Village: Fu Ma Ying
Fist bump. I forwarded to my father this first independent confirmation that Tong Zhenyong actually lived. It’s one thing to hear about a great-grandfather over dinner in Shanghai, or in the village from distant relatives speaking with a bit too much certainty; it’s another to see it on paper.
The Waseda document indicates he attended on some sort of public scholarship. But exactly how Tong Zhenyong got accepted remains unclear to me. I received conflicting answers on this question: some in the village said he actually took the imperial civil service test and did well enough to be sent to Japan by the central government. Others said the province sent him. Either way, I try to picture a tall, chubby Tong Zhenyong wandering the Waseda campus, spitting, pu pu, as he went along.
Those were heady times for a student from the sticks of Subei. Surely my then-redneck Chinese great-grandfather and his fellow students spun their heads at everything new to them in Tokyo: Western suits, rickshaws scooting down paths of gravel rather than mud, P.E. class, electric power lines, a library that lent books on the honor system, girls in class. Arriving in Japan for the first time, reform scholar Liang Qichao wrote upon arrival: “It is like seeing the sun after being confined to a dark room, or like a parched throat getting wine.”
One scribbled in his journal about “thousands of electric lights” in Tokyo’s famed Ueno Park, in contrast to his home village, where days ended when the sun went down. “Very favorable. The whole country was a garden.”
The challenge was for these peasant Chinamen to fit in to a modern society. Liang Qichao lamented his people’s “village mentality and not a national mentality.” To encourage more dignified behavior, a Chinese Student Union in Tokyo in 1906 published a Handbook for Students Abroad with a tally of dos and don’ts.
Don’t urinate in public.
Walk down the street on the right.
Offer up your streetcar seat to the elderly.
Speak quietly at night.
Wash your clothes often.
Swap your shoes for slippers indoors.
Don’t ask people their ages.
The all-purpose handbook even provided earnest advice on how to swim. Still, Chinese students faced hostility from some of their Japanese hosts. One wrote in his journal, describing Japanese locals as “inwardly conceited but courteous to strangers.” Tokyo kids chased after the Chinese university students, shouting Chanchanbotsu—pigtailed Chinaman. To them, the students’ hair was both long and short in the wrong places: for generations, Chinese men shaved their foreheads and grew braided ponytails at the behest of the ethnic minority Manchu rulers. Tong Zhenyong cut off his queue when he got to Japan.
Many students viewed China’s place in the world—and their own—through the lens of social Darwinism, a leading idea of the day. The British sociologist Herbert Spencer coined the term, taking evolutionary theory from biology and applying it to human societies. An early analysis of Spencer found its way into Chinese print in 1896.
“The weak invariably become the prey of the strong,” Chinese scholar and translator Yan Fu wrote. “The stupid invariably become subservient to the clever.” Chinese society, after thousands of years, faced an existential crisis. The lesson of extinct empires—the Persians, Turks, Irish, American Indians—was clear: adapt or die. One Chinese ambassador to Britain described countries that had incorporated modern culture and politics with the transliteration of a word he’d learned in London: se wei lai yi si de. Civilized. One point of sending students to Japan was to civilize China to save it.
The question was how. Some students opted in favor of revolution, joining secret societies such as the Tongmenghui, or Revolutionary Alliance. “Your great-grandfather joined the Tongmenghui in Japan,” Uncle Tong Bao once told me at his house. He’d heard this from Great-Grandfather Tong Zhenyong’s brother, who is now deceased. I couldn’t find any documents to corroborate this, but later learned that the Tongmenghui as a secret society may not have regularly kept meeting minutes or membership lists.
The group hatched several revolutionary plots, seeking to “slay” and “exterminate” the ethnic minority Manchu, or Qing, dynasty, which had ruled since 1644. The Tongmenghui was founded by Sun Yat-sen, the man revered in both Taiwan and the mainland as the father of modern China. Today that seems an overstatement; at the time of the revolution, Sun was living in, of all places, Colorado. To be sure, he served as an effective fundraiser and organizer. Bankrolled by a US-educated Chinese entrepreneur who found a way to mass-produce noodles by machine, Sun brought several secret political groups together under the Tongmenghui umbrella.
The Tongmenghui failed several times to overthrow the dynasty, until its eleventh try in 1911. A mutiny at an arsenal in the central Chinese city of Wuchang sparked a chain of events leading to the end of imperial rule. By then, one Tong relative tells me, my great-grandfather had likely moved on from politics in Tokyo. Perhaps he had a case of risk-aversion: students found participating in the sha
dowy Tongmenghui could be expelled or, if discovered back home, executed.
***
It is the summer of 2014, and I am strolling on the campus of Waseda in Tokyo. The buildings are not the exact same ones my great-grandfather walked in. They were destroyed by fire bombings in World War II and have since been replaced by fancy glass structures. Still, there is one statue that remains from the old era, of school founder Ōkuma Shigenobu. He was a finance and prime minister, and an early advocate of Japan adopting Western science and culture.
Surely Tong Zhenyong was struck by the same observation I have now: Japan has a discernible sense of order. It’s the same feeling I get when walking into a newly built house (our split-level is a 1958 vintage), where the towels in the guest bath hang just right. The armrests on the bullet train from the airport hang just right. During one reporting trip to the Japanese countryside, I visited a noodle house with the most amazing bathroom. Once I opened the door, the light automatically turned on. The toilet lid raised up, ready for action.
I’m on my way to an appointment at Waseda’s main library. To get in, I’m required to submit my passport, my university ID, and a letter of introduction from the University of Michigan Asian Studies Department. Only then does the security officer hand me a card to pass through the entry turnstile and head to the basement. There, I spend the next hour sitting and waiting for an archivist to bring the book I’ve requested. For a moment I’m thankful my own great-grandchildren will discover my own paper trail in a more convenient way.