by Scott Tong
Eventually, a staffer presents a hardback book with the page from the e-mail attachment. This is the registration book bearing my great-grandfather’s name, but there’s more information on the next page: Tong Zhenyong studied political science and economics. The reading list for his class included Rousseau, Locke, and Adam Smith. A second book I’ve requested contains writings published by graduating Chinese students. I flip through and find that Tong Zhenyong wrote a poem in calligraphy brush. The message of the poem is one of self-determination reflecting the spirit of the time: Asia for the Asian people, led by Japan.
Safeguard the Whole Yellow Race
Pattern the political system after North America
Greater power than Western Europe
Safeguard peace in East Asia
Aid the independence of South Africa
The date: July 11, 1906. Each line in the poem makes sense to me, except the South Africa reference at the end. “Aid the independence”? Perhaps Tong Zhenyong was identifying with Chinese laborers in the mines there, or the Boers freeing themselves from colonial rule in 1907. Or perhaps, for literary symmetry, he simply had to insert the word “south.” I photocopy it all and e-mail it back to the States that night. My father’s sister—Aunt Pu in Fremont, California—e-mails back, proclaiming it “incredible.” Their younger sister, Aunt Alice, also in Fremont, posts it on Facebook with the word “amazing.” My dad calls it “gold.”
To them, what’s important is the ink-brush writing. You see, in a Chinese family, life stops abruptly at the sign of good calligraphy. You must pause for a moment of lavish praise for the artistic value—or at least, the perceived value—before moving on with your day. Honestly, I wish I’d developed this appreciation or this skill. In second grade, my mother tried to teach me calligraphy, explaining that every Chinese character has geometric balance. It’s like a house. A character must stand on a strong base and not lean and fall over. Every line, curve, right angle, hook, or dot has to be stroked boldly, not too fast or too slow. Every so often, a character appears with a long tail—think of a capital R or T—that ends in a dramatic flourish. At the same time, an individual stroke cannot invade the personal space of the neighboring word. I tried this, failed—just as I had failed piano—and moved on to baseball.
Why did my great-grandfather write this poem about China and its place in the world? Perhaps he felt strongly about Asian solidarity, as Sun Yat-sen did. More likely, my father suggests, he was simply brownnosing. This could have been a mandatory assignment, presenting him an opportunity to please his Japanese teachers.
He did have one extracurricular activity we know about. The Waseda student manual warned visiting students against “dangerous lures and a host of temptations.” Tong Zhenyong’s temptation came in the form of a young Japanese woman named Arai Yamako. She would become his wife. “She was the daughter of a Japanese mayor,” Uncle Tong Bao told me. “And she worked for Panasonic.” I honestly wonder how they got together. She was an educated woman of privilege, while he was a village kid from poor China with a penchant for spitting with the pu pu sound.
They wed over her parents’ objections, I’ve been told. And there was one thing Arai Yamako didn’t know: Tong Zhenyong already had a wife back in the village in Jiangsu, and three daughters. If he were alive today to defend himself, he might argue that polygamy was widespread back then and did not become illegal in China until decades later. He might argue that his first wife failed to bear him a son.
Arai Yamako is my great-grandmother. Fortunately, a number of photos of her are still around. Most are standard, wallet-size black-and-white shots of her: long and serious face, closed mouth, high-bridged nose. Her eyebrows can generously be described as bold. Surely mine came from her. But there is one picture that looks strikingly different.
She is smiling in the shot. It’s not the subtle grin of a person hiding a secret, but rather an open-mouth smile that seems quite unfit for her era. Even in today’s Shanghai, I’ve taken pictures of mainland women with big smiles that they’ve later asked me to delete. A bit too happy. Arai Yamako is kneeling in a kimono with her hands together, as if she’s reuniting with a sibling returning from war. She seems casually comfortable with who she is: a modern Japanese woman showing her teeth and marrying who she wants.
Intermarriages between Chinese exchange-student men and Japanese women in fact occurred on occasion. But most did not last. Often they dissolved when the Chinese husband graduated and returned home. Or the Japanese woman remained loyal to her homeland and stayed behind. Tong Zhenyong and Arai Yamako managed to stay together, however, and in the year of the 1911 Chinese revolution that overthrew imperial China, she bore a son—my grandfather. He was half Japanese, which makes me one-eighth Japanese.
Perhaps the most striking example of China’s grudging acknowledgement, if not acceptance, of the Japanese model is that of supreme leader Deng Xiaoping. Early on in his reforms of the late 1970s, Deng visited Japan as the first Chinese leader to meet a Japanese emperor. Upon touring a Nissan plant, where each worker produced an astonishing ninety-four vehicles per year, Deng proclaimed, “We are a backward country and we need to learn from Japan.”
You only have to look at the Chinese language today to understand how many modern ideas came via Japan. A remarkable number of words in Mandarin have been imported from Japan: Independence (duli). Women’s rights (nvquan). Gender equality (nannv pingdeng). Science (kexue). Industry (gongye). Atom (yuanzi). International (guoji). History (lishi). Market (shichang). Invest (touzi). Economics (jinji). Society (shehui). Telephone (dianhua). The list goes on.
After studying at Waseda, Tong Zhenyong chose a career of stability over politics. He became a lawyer. This will strike an American reader as mundane (I am typing this from our house in Arlington, where I count sixteen attorneys in a half-mile radius). But the modern legal profession was very new to China in the early twentieth century. Before that, independent, private legal counsel did not exist, aside from the foreign barristers and solicitors in Western-controlled treaty ports.
It would be nice to claim that Great-Grandfather’s generation of lawyers ushered in a Chinese legal renaissance. They did not. You can ask anyone on the street if the basic rule of law exists today, and you will get an earful in return. You don’t have to conduct a dramatic interview with a dissident in jail; just ask anyone who has tried to enforce a contract, or bought a bootleg version of Microsoft Windows on Nanjing Road. Legal bans tend to be more speedbumps than walls—temporary barriers. Without appropriate enforcement or an underlying moral code that once existed in Chinese society, it simply pays to cheat.
Every morning in the Marketplace bureau in Shanghai, our fax machine would spit out an unsolicited advertisement. It offered to sell official transaction receipts, handy for padding an expense report or invoice. Each receipt has a price. If you need evidence of a $100 “transaction,” it may cost you $1. A receipt for a $500 “purchase” costs $5, and so on. Bending the rules remains the norm.
That doesn’t mean China’s legal system hasn’t made important reforms this past century, due in part to scholars who imported modern concepts from abroad. The Qing dynasty established a Chinese Supreme Court in 1906. It created laws governing business transactions and marriages.
Some changes abolished grisly forms of criminal punishment. The old system included lingchi, death by a thousand cuts; xiaoshou, displaying head of the executed; and lushi, mutilating a prisoner’s corpse. These practices gave way to fines, detention, imprisonment, and labor. The death penalty remained, though guilty persons were no longer executed before large crowds. They were strangled in private instead.
I found only small bits of information about my great-grandfather’s legal practice. He was a member of an attorney association in Huaiyin, Jiangsu. He authored a painfully dry document: a translation of an international intellectual property conference. Yikes.
“It means he probably wasn’t so famous or successful,” my Shanghai cousin
Tong Chengkan suggests. He’s probably right. If Tong Zhenyong had become a top government official or a notable professional, there’d likely be more in the public record.
The more important point is the status that overseas study provided him. It made him a scholar from abroad. After Japan, Tong Zhenyong returned to the west side of the Tong Village and a rather complicated personal situation. He went back with three children and a Japanese wife, which by all accounts came as a great shock to his Chinese wife. All this time, she had been raising three of their daughters in China. Now here she was, challenged by a younger concubine. Things apparently did not go well for Arai Yamako either. She learned Mandarin—something that impressed villagers mention to this day—but her stepdaughters were rude to her, and villagers made anti-Japanese comments to her. Eventually she returned to Japan, to escape the comments and, as one uncle recalls, whispers of her husband’s interest in yet another woman.
***
Back in the Tong village, my third cousin Tong Daren does not make it to the next Chinese New Year. He died a few months after my second visit with him. His older daughter, Tong Yuqin, tells me he that at the end, he went twelve days without eating or drinking. Still, she says, “he waited until the whole family came before taking his last breath.” On a Thursday he declared, “I’m going.” He died that Saturday.
I’m here to visit his grave, and his younger daughter, Tong Yuhua (the feisty one), pulls up in her motor scooter to take me there. Hers is a step-through electric model, which comes in handy, as she’s wearing a pink sundress on this 95-degree summer day. She does not wear a helmet, nor does she offer me one. Ten minutes later, I spot the outdoor mini-cemetery built on a concrete slab. About twenty rows of identical-size gray headstones stand erect.
Near the back row, Tong Daren’s image looks out from a standard headshot. He is not smiling. His trustworthy long face appears too naive, too un-savvy for today’s dog-eat-dog China. His daughter brings a stack of blank red sheets of paper to burn, a countryside variation of a ritual I’d joined in the past: sacrificing pretend paper bills for the deceased to spend in the afterlife above. The big cities provide more upscale offerings to burn: printed bills that look like real currency, paper BMWs, faux Viagra pills, and flammable paper condoms (you never know what can come in handy up there).
“In America, do you do the same thing?” Tong Yuhua asks. It’s a fair question, though I don’t know where to start. It’s a long answer; I’d rather focus on bidding farewell to a Tong who deserved a better life than he had. So I simply shake my head and set another red paper ablaze.
This is a quick trip, so I hustle to the bus stop to board a long-distance bus back to Shanghai. I’ll have a couple days there to research before flying back to the States. The good news is, I’ll be taking the bus ride with our old nanny from our years in Shanghai. We call her Ayi, or “Auntie.” Ayi’s village turns out to be just three miles from ours, which is the main reason we hired her in the first place. During our first week in China, my father came with us and happened to meet her in our building elevator. Somewhere between the eleventh floor and the lobby, he figured out the two of them came from the same part of northern Jiangsu. We hired her the next day. Ayi did everything for our three children. She walked them through the neighborhood, picked then up from the bus stop, took them daily to the playground and barbershop. She taught our youngest, Daniel (who was then two years old), how to rest outdoors by squatting with his bottom one inch above the ground. She also inadvertently got the kids to mimic her unfortunate Subei-accented Mandarin. Ayi is family.
By the time I board the bus, Ayi is already on, sitting in the very back row and waving me toward her. I make my way up the aisle slowly, and that’s my mistake. The impatient driver takes off quickly, leaving me to wobble and stumble up the aisle with a backpack and rolling suitcase.
A hand flies out into the aisle, forcing me to halt abruptly. “Rang yixia,” an elderly voice rings out. Excuse me. A grandfather with a crew cut and a nice-to-meet-you smile has stopped me. Right beside him, a toddler boy is standing, and peeing. The urine creates somewhat of a fountain that arcs directly across the aisle. Had his grandfather not stopped me, I would have stepped right into the stream. I have no choice but to wait. And here is the oddest part: no one on the bus bats an eye as I stand and try to balance myself, waiting like a car at a railroad crossing. Eventually, the old man’s tollgate hand rises up, and I continue on.
But there is another obstacle. Every seat is taken, except for two in the back row next to Ayi. To get there, I have to step over a migrant worker man holding a freshly killed chicken in a bag. His other hand steadies a bucket on the floor, which is filled with some nontransparent liquid that sloshes with each bump and sway. I wait for a steady moment and high-step over.
“Did you give them any money?” Ayi asks once I sit down. I look at her and blink. As a former hired nanny who still calls me “Mister Tong,” she hardly speaks this directly. But this is important.
“No,” I say. “I brought gifts, cosmetics from America.” Brand-name facial moisturizers, vitamins, leather wallets. But this is an inadequate answer.
“You should have. They’re your family, and very poor.”
I tell her I’ll try once we get to Shanghai, but am not sure Tong Daren’s daughters will accept it. Giving money to friends in China often requires an awkward set of social dance steps performed by both giver and receiver. No, I can’t take it. Yes, I really want to give this, it’s expected. Really, you don’t have to. Yes I do, I have to. But the critical part is reading a person’s body language and tone. Sometimes no really means no, except when it actually means yes.
The return trip to Shanghai takes far longer than the five hours advertised, as the driver makes several side stops off the freeway to make unauthorized passenger pickups. In any event, this is a “black” gray economy bus, Ayi tells me, so there may be no company rules to break in the first place. Upon arriving, I call Tong Yuqin and offer to send her money. I have prepared myself for this conversation, knowing she will initially refuse.
“Sure. This is my bank account number,” Tong Yuqin says. Ayi was right. I make arrangements to wire three thousand renminbi, or about $400. The village relationship, as best I can tell, is restored.
Chapter Four
THE NANJING GLEE CLUB AND A REVOLUTION FOR GIRLS
It was almost amusing the degree to which the Chinese wives “bossed their little Japanese husbands.”
—Welthy Honsinger, missionary
Rousong is my chief comfort-food memory from childhood. If you wander through any Chinese grocery store on the planet, you will encounter an odd-looking pork product called rousong. It comes in plastic tubs large and small, and sometimes in bulk. Tan and fluffy, rousong is what cotton candy or fluffy wool might look like if they were meat. It may be the world’s most processed food product. First, you take pork shoulder and stew it. Then strain it, pull it apart, shred it, dry it in an oven. Mash. Pummel. Wok fry. Eat it on a bun, or rolled into a rice ball or sushi maki, or atop tofu or rice cakes or toast. Rousong is quite possibly the best food in the world. It is also true that rousong is fatty and unattractive. And in English, it suffers from an unfortunate translation: pork floss (insert your own joke here).
I was born in Poughkeepsie, in New York’s Hudson Valley, where everyone (including my father) worked for IBM. Every morning in our split-level home, I requested rousong for breakfast. It never ran out, which is curious because it was illegal at the time. In the early 1970s, rousong had not yet hit the shelves of Asian grocery stores in the States, and US customs laws banned the import of meat products. So how did we get it? I later learned my maternal grandmother in Hong Kong shipped it over and gamed the postal system. Here’s how: she’d mail tins of tea leaves, taped shut with Scotch tape across the top. Even if a border official opened the tin, he or she would see only tea leaves—at least, on top. The densely packed rousong cargo hid underneath, like a thief in the trunk of a car
.
Rousong was the center of my relationship with my maternal grandmother, which is another way of saying we didn’t have one. I learned in the process of reporting this book that she was part of a groundbreaking generation of women pioneers. They joined the industrial workforce, marched in strikes alongside men, and went on to be doctors and suffragists. They built schools for the girls who came after. Until recently, I knew none of this, and none of the details as they pertained to my grandmother—because I met her only once.
In 1971, I was two when we flew over from the Hudson Valley to see Grandmother in Hong Kong. My mother referred to her as my waipo, which is the term for one’s maternal grandmother. Waipo lived in a five-hundred-square-foot apartment in a modest section of Hong Kong’s Kowloon territory. Modern parenting practice might argue against that kind of strenuous trip, but modern parenting practice is no match for filial obligations. It was my parents’ job to bring us to see our grandparents—in Taiwan on my father’s side and Hong Kong on my mother’s. First we landed in Taipei, where sources say I threw a remarkable tantrum. I greeted a smiling male customs officer with an efficient kick to the shins. Then, after a couple weeks, off to Hong Kong.
This of course is all my mother’s telling of a trip. Waipo—by then a widow for more than a decade—took us around to see Hong Kong harbor. She boarded the Star Ferry with us to cross the stinky harbor and bought us street food. That’s pretty much everything I knew of her. Waipo died of a brain aneurysm when I was seven.
So what was she really like? For years, I could only default to the general Chinese grandmother image my Chinese American friends and I liked to mock as kids: a penny-thrift woman who lived in the kitchen and watched bad Hong Kong soap operas. She couldn’t pronounce “three.” Second-generation immigrant kids have third-world grandmothers.