by Scott Tong
By contrast, my wife, Cathy, had a long, close relationship with her own maternal grandmother before she passed. We know a lot about Grandma Jane: she was the daughter of a steel mill worker, with a hankering for black bean soup. She liked to dress up as a clown for kids’ birthdays. She paid close attention to grandchildren who gained weight, or didn’t dress sufficiently “smart.” Even Cathy’s great-grandmother lives on in our house, through a couple of pieces of antique furniture. When it’s time for flashlight tag, the kids flip the top of Great-Grandmommy’s secretary’s desk and grab the batteries inside. Upstairs, Great-Grandmommy’s cherry bookshelf is loaded down with books for parents of a certain age: The Adventures of Tintin. Handbook for Coaching Youth Soccer. Everyone Poops.
For my waipo, there is no bookshelf. Now that I have teenagers, I wonder about someday creating memories for my own grandchildren: maybe shuffling playing cards the way my dad taught me, or hitting a one-handed backhand, or pinching a pork dumpling the absolute correct way before ladling it into boiling water. Did it ever occur to Waipo that she might not be remembered?
It’s not as if her children didn’t try. My mother’s sister, Aunt Lily, recalls a failed effort to save a set of old family photos. In March 1950, nearly a year after the Communists took control of Shanghai, my mother and her siblings fled for Hong Kong. They left with a heavy chest full of family papers, heirlooms, and photos, carrying the chest from one packed train to another. By the time they arrived at a cheap hotel in Guangzhou, near the Hong Kong border, the chest was gone. “Maybe it was stolen,” Aunt Lily tries to recall. “Or just left behind” in the rush. One way or another, the mementos are gone.
That is, except for the contents of the accordion file.
Name: Miss Djao Dji-djen (Mildred Chao)
Age: 43
Occupation: elementary principal
Home: Hubei
Issue date: June 13, 1949
Date of birth: xx 1904
Travel destination: USA, via all necessary countries en route
This is the main page of her passport, which has survived. I’m looking at it in Houston, at the kitchen table of Aunt Lily. She’s my grandmother’s oldest child and my mother’s big sister. On this brief visit (I’m attending an oil and gas conference for work), I have come straight out and asked Aunt Lily if she has any information about Waipo, for a book I am trying to write. She steps into her bedroom and produces a thick accordion file loaded with documents, and the passport of Mildred Chao (also Zhao).
Mildred was her English name. When she was born, hers was the tenth most common girl’s name in the United States, trailing just behind Dorothy, Marie, and Florence. I did not know she was born in 1904, though it turns out she actually wasn’t—Mildred lied about her age on occasion, including this one. She was in her midforties for the passport photo, revealing her dominant feature: a sharp widow’s peak that has passed down to my mother and me. Mildred does not smile. She has the face of an introvert.
I reach again into the accordion file, this undiscovered toy box of the past—how come no one told me about this?—harvesting trifold aerogram letters, diary entries, even a handwritten shopping list. I’m most interested in a thick, yellowed sheet folded up for so many decades the corners have holes in them. Opening it up carefully, I notice a small black-and-white photo of Mildred, surrounded by dozens of tiny rectangles pieces meant to be torn off—like a bulletin-board ad for babysitting services. The pieces were meant to be surrendered when buying grains, meat, cloth, or oil. This is a ration coupon booklet. I mistakenly assume this came from the Communist era; this booklet, on closer inspection, dates back to the prior government of the Nationalist Guomindang Party.
“Take the file with you,” Aunt Lily says. “But bring the letters back later.”
Months later, I call my mother to discuss the discovery. She knows about the documents, as she and Aunt Lily have saved them ever since Grandmother Mildred died in 1976. “They’re sad,” she says. This is why she never mentioned the letters. “My parents argued a lot.” Some of the letters were written by my grandfather during their family’s separation in the early 1950s: Mildred and the children lived in Hong Kong while her husband, Carleton Sun, stayed back in Communist-occupied Shanghai to run the school they’d built decades earlier. The couple disagreed about money, where to raise three children, whose relatives mattered more, and most fundamentally, whether it was safe enough for him to stay on the mainland.
The letters are sad most of all because my mother knows how things ended for her father.
What is striking to me is that just about every letter in the folder comes from a US address: West 67th Street in New York City. Colorado State College in Greeley. Baltimore, Maryland. Franklin Springs, Georgia. One letterhead bears the logo of the United Council of Church Women. In all, there are more than a hundred pages. Almost every one of Grandmother Mildred’s correspondents were American.
The two women who penned most of the letters to Mildred were her old teachers. More than a century ago in middle-of-nowhere Jiangxi province, she attended a Methodist missionary boarding school run by American women: the Stephen L. Baldwin School for Girls. Welthy Honsinger of Rome, New York, was principal. Anna Melissa Graves of Baltimore was a teacher.
But these were only the letters Mildred received. What about the ones she wrote? Remarkably, Honsinger and Graves kept all the letters from their lives, and with a bit of Googling I was able to track them down. Graves’s collection lives at Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia, and Honsinger’s is stored at Boston University. Combining the letters from those special collections with the accordion-file letters, I assembled a thick, perhaps three-hundred-page chronology of Mildred’s life—at least, the life according her letters. It became an essential primary source for this book section.
***
It’s better to be lucky than good. My father-in-law likes to say this on the golf course. Cobbling together my grandmother’s lifetime of letters turns out to be a very unusual finding. The feminist historian Wang Zheng at the University of Michigan has told me most personal writings from back then have not survived to today. “Even if many educated women had kept diaries and written letters,” she writes in her book Women in the Chinese Enlightenment, “the chances were slim that these personal documents had survived civil wars and the War of Resistance against Japan.” Another China historian was more direct, dismissing the possibility of turning up some old treasure chest of family letters as “a historian’s wet dream.” Don’t bet on it . . . unless you get lucky.
At first glance, the letters seem to amount to a pile of very bad advice. One, from Anna Graves during Japan’s occupation of China during World War II, suggests the occupying soldiers were not so bad, perhaps even wimpy:
I knew a missionary in Shantung [Shandong] who told me that the rate of intermarriage (and hence amalgamation) between Japanese soldiers and Chinese women was extraordinary (marriage, not simply sexual relations) and that it was almost amusing the degree to which the Chinese wives “bossed their little Japanese husbands.”
This much I know: These “little Japanese husbands” murdered fifteen thousand Shandong civilians during the Pacific war. In the same letter, Graves turns bossy. She criticizes Mildred for abandoning China for Hong Kong during the Communist takeover, apparently attributing this unwise decision to menopause.
My dear child you must be about 48, i.e., you must be passing through the period in a woman’s life when she is least apt to be reasonable, most apt to be excitable, and less apt to be able to judge matters calmly. That is not women’s fault.
For her part, Honsinger dispenses the absolute opposite advice: Leave. Get as far away from China as possible and travel to America: “You have chosen the right college in Colorado, and it will be wonderful if you can take some classes by correspondence, and finally get here for one year. . . . Your husband and you may have to be separated many years—who knows? But God knows the way he takes, and this may be a deepening
of character for you.”
Mildred Zhao was born in 1903, smack in the middle of a worldwide debate over the role of women. That year, a woman—Marie Curie—won the Nobel Physics Prize for the first time. In Britain, women marched for the right to vote. And in the United States this was the Progressive Era, when individual states were holding votes one by one on women’s suffrage.
Across China, leading intellectuals questioned why their country had fallen to the status of Asia’s “sick man.” They challenged authority, history, tradition—particularly, three Confucian relationships underlying traditional society: father guides son, emperor rules subjects, husband controls wife. A woman’s traditional job was inside the home: sewing, cooking, and designing gardens and home interiors. Her marriage was prearranged, and she did not attend school. “To be a woman means to submit,” went one Confucian teaching at the time. “The wife’s words should not travel beyond her own apartment.”
Perhaps the most famous female Chinese counterculture voice in my grandmothers’ day was writer and self-proclaimed revolutionary named Qiu Jin. “Arise! Arise! Chinese women, arise!” screamed one of her manifestos, Stones of the Jingwei Bird. Qiu Jin likened to slavery traditional society’s treatment of females: cracking foot bones and binding their feet, keeping them inside the home, depriving them of the ability to read. “Chinese women will throw off their shackles and stand up with passion; they will all become heroines.”
As a young women, Qiu eschewed sewing for archery and martial arts novels. In her twenties, she divorced her husband—an unheard of act in the day—and sailed to Japan, funding her education abroad by pawning her dowry jewelry. Often dressing in male clothing, she chopped her hair dramatically short. She exhorted young men and women to overthrow the Qing dynasty and helped train revolutionaries in Chinese cities. Qiu herself tried to assassinate a Qing governor in Zhejiang province, but failed. For that attempt, she was beheaded in 1909.
This debate over women’s rights was filled with metaphors and slogans—good and bad. Freeing women from old Confucian culture would liberate China. Women were held down the way China had been restrained by Western colonial powers. Binding women’s feet, well, bound China to an underperforming past. And the Chinese economy was going nowhere in the midst of an industrial revolution on the outside.
Consider these numbers from noted British economic historian Angus Maddison: In the fourteenth century, the typical Chinese person made a tad bit more than his or her Western European counterpart—annual income per person totaled $600 in China, compared with $560 in Europe. But then Europe grew and China stood still. China’s income fell to two-thirds of the European standard by 1700, and then it cratered. By 1900, the median Chinese person earned $545 annually—in dollar terms, almost unchanged from six centuries prior—compared with $3,000 in Germany and more than $4,000 in England and the United States. Industrialization and its benefits were passing China by.
The Qing court’s abolition of the civil service exam was its attempt to reverse this. The test was an avenue of mobility available only to males, and to its critics was outdated and backward looking. It focused on moral and political theory, rather than modern essentials of science and math. So the empress shut down this heir club for men. This phaseout of the test created a social power vacuum that opportunistic entrepreneurs, foreign-trained students and educated women sought to fill.
When Mildred was young, two critical decisions were made for her. The first was that she should receive a Western, missionary education. I presume, but don’t know for sure, that her father made this call; he hailed from an elite family of scholar officials going back to imperial days. Thankfully, Mildred was an only child. If she’d had a brother, surely he would have gone to school instead. Second, Mildred had her bound feet unwrapped at a young age, allowing them to grow naturally for most of her life—Cinderella’s Sisters style. By the time she enrolled in boarding school at the age of eight in 1911, my grandmother had joined a rare club of Chinese girls with the privilege to do two things their mothers never could: read and run.
***
The Yangtze River is China’s Mississippi, its economic lifeline. To the north, the mammoth Yellow River is indeed the birthplace of Chinese civilization, but the Yangtze is the essential waterway, dotted by many of China’s most important cities and transportation hubs. When it comes to freight transport, no other inland river in the world comes close. In the case of my family history, on both my parents’ sides, I could tell an awful lot of the story by simply following the river downstream.
At the headwaters to the far west in Qinghai province, I’d point out that my maternal grandfather spent his last years at a prison labor camp there. Halfway down the mountains in the megacity of Chongqing is where my father was born during the Chinese civil war. If you float down further, to Wuhan, you pass both ancestral villages on my mother’s side. Downstream in Changzhou is where my uncle Tong Bao grew up and hunted for frogs to eat during the great famine. And the delta city where the river dumps into the sea—Shanghai—is where my mother was born. And where my father boarded a dangerously overloaded boat to flee the mainland ahead of the Communists in 1949.
As best we know, Grandmother Mildred was born in the central Yangtze River city of Nanjing, a historic capital to dynasties and governments past. Her grandfather served as a government official there, relatives say. Then, when she was eleven, her parents took her upriver to attend boarding school. “It seems to me my mother and father took me there,” my grandmother said in an audio interview that still exists on tape at Boston University.
This is how I imagine the trip went: During the steepest upstream portions of the trip westward, shirtless male workers onshore had to tug the boat up and over the rocks. At the port city of Jiujiang, or Nine Rivers, they boarded a second, smaller boat; turned left (south); and crossed a massive body of water known as Lake Poyang. Surely it was hot and sticky, as their destination city, Nanchang, today brags about being in the club of Chinese “furnace cities.” For some reason, a number of Yangtze cities I’ve visited (Wuhan, Changsha, Chongqing, Nanjing) also seek to market themselves that way, as if the label confers a certain branding advantage.
On one broiling-furnace day in July 2014, I have come to Nanchang to try to find her old school. I’ve learned the Baldwin School has now become a public school in the city, the Number Ten Middle School. My father and I have just visited one of his uncles, and we are stopping at the school address on the way to the airport. We’ve asked the cabbie to stop and wait.
Back in 1911, this was a walled city ringed by a moat, with dogs and chickens roaming the interior. Now it looks like any midtier Chinese city: you can cruise the mall to buy a new smartphone before catching a movie in the IMAX theater. To me there is a certain sameness to cities like this: a river, a few bridges, a set of familiar chain stores, nondescript medium-rise buildings. It’s not unlike a stretch of road back home that features the same exact chain stores and restaurants—Anywhere, USA.
“Gan shen ma?” What are you doing? a male voice rings out as I attempt to walk through the gatehouse and into the school. Most Chinese public institutions are not what you and I might regard as public. They hide behind guarded gates. A skinny man with a comb-over in his fifties stands to block me. He is simply doing his job. He wears a sweat-soaked security guard uniform with the pants rolled up to the knees. “Can’t come in here.”
I have a plan. In these moments, I’ve had luck playing my family history card, so I start in with my pitch: “I’m an overseas Chinese visiting from America. I’m coming to ‘dig for my roots.’ My grandmother once went to school here.” The keys, I’ve learned by error and trial: Stay on message. Speak quickly. Keep talking until they relent.
He cuts me off. “You can’t come in. No outside people.”
“I’m just here for today, flying out in a couple hours,” I appeal, pulling out my grandmother Mildred’s 1949 passport. This is the next-level intervention, to present a historical docu
ment. It does nothing for him. “These are not my rules. They’re school rules. If you don’t have permission, you can’t go in.” In my head, I can hear the voice of my teen daughter: Fail, Dad.
I walk out to devise a workaround plan. My imagination is not the greatest, but I am a reporter and this is China, where everyday survival requires a plan B and C. Dad is still sitting in the cab up the street, and we don’t have much time. I decide to try to identify a collaborator, someone who can at least go into the school and snap some pictures for me. That’s what I’m really after—to compare the place today with the old vintage photos of the old Baldwin School. It is lunchtime at the Number Ten School, and students are filing in and out of the gatehouse. For the next ten minutes or so, I discreetly approach one middle-schooler after another, requesting this favor and delivering the same elevator pitch: grandson of China, traveling from America, digging for roots. They all walk on by without answering—except for one pair of students, a girl and a boy. “Would you take my iPhone in and take some pictures for me?”
The girl is in charge here and answers immediately. “Can’t you go in yourself?” I like this dynamic. The student wears tortoiseshell glasses and a level of fearlessness.
I shrug my shoulder. “I can’t. The guard in there stopped me.”
“You’re from America?” she asks. Non sequitur, no problem. “America where?”
“Washington, DC.”
She nods. “Okay.” In this rush, I fail to consider the risk of handing over my iPhone to a twelve-year-old whose name I don’t even know, and just foist it on her. She asks: “What do you want me to take pictures of?”
I hadn’t planned for this. “Anything you find interesting. Trees. Old buildings. Anything that might have been around a hundred years ago.”
They disappear in, and I retreat up the street to avoid the sight line of the guard. But on this day it’s pretty hard for me to blend in, with my fire-engine-red T-shirt that says “Washington Capitals” on the front and “BACKSTROM 19” on the back. Within a minute, she reappears.