A Village with My Name

by Scott Tong

  The Zhao family genealogy is different from the Sun version. Rather than a hardback book, it’s six or seven flimsy paperback publications stacked on top of one another. Each is half an inch thick, cheaply bound—and easy to set on fire in case of political emergency. This edition will not last a century. One cousin settles next to my mother and the local official, flipping through. Others pass around the 1977 obituary of Grandmother Mildred Zhao we’ve brought.

  “She looks like a capitalist,” says one cousin with a blue golf shirt and side-parted, sculpted hair. It’s neither an insult nor a compliment, just an observation.

  The genealogy readers struggle with the classical Chinese, and most of the date references. Rather than Arabic numbers—or numbers at all—the dates of births and deaths are based on which emperor is on the throne. For instance, one person’s entry shows he was born in Guangxu emperor Year 25.

  “There might not be any information about your mother,” the official warns, “because she was female.” Plus, Mildred Zhao was not born in this village. We believe she was born in Nanjing. “If people go out, then there’s no news here,” Side-Part Cousin adds.

  Then the official notices something is wrong with the time references. Mildred Zhao’s uncles are listed as being born during the rule of Emperor Qianlong, who reigned in the 1700s. That was way off. Since she was born in 1903, her father’s brothers lived in the mid-1800s, long after Qianlong died. But no worries, they say: there is always a next edition. In fact, Side-Part Cousin says Zhao family members are drafting it already, and raising funds to pay for it.

  “If you want your name put in, it costs one hundred renminbi,” he says. About $13.

  “Can women’s information go in?” my mother asks.

  “Sure.” So long as you pay. “Whatever you want. If you want to buy the whole genealogy, it will cost five hundred renminbi.” Sixty-five dollars. I sit there and realize this is a good deal: $13 for published immortality.

  Chapter Six

  THE COMMUNIST MOLE IN THE SCHOOL

  I was compelled to leave Hankow on account of the great flood.

  —Mildred Zhao

  Shanghai, upon first arrival, is almost impossible to place in a familiar context. Is it a Chinese city, or a global one? Who’s in charge? There is something here for everyone: bankers, hucksters, beggars, British, multinationals, construction workers, prostitutes. At the historic Jing’an Temple on Nanjing Road, migrant factory workers from Anhui scurry across the street alongside Chinese men in Western suits working for Nestlé or Eveready. Buicks swerve by. A few blocks east, the latest Hollywood blockbuster is showing at the Grand Theater. If you can’t find the theater, walk past the YMCA and you’ll see it; if you get to the big department stores, you’ve gone too far.

  The year is 1931. The visitor is Mildred Zhao.

  She arrived during a golden age of capitalism in Shanghai. The city was the inaugural laboratory experiment in the treaty port system, first opening to foreign trade in 1843. This arrangement was built on what historian Marie-Claire Bergère calls a “double misunderstanding.” The Mandarins in Beijing assumed that opening up a few treaty ports would be a one-shot deal to appease the barbarians’ appetite, whereas the British treated it as the first crack in a doorway to later open wider. The place began, Bergère writes, as “a frontier town on the edge of empire.”

  The Great Flood of 1931 delivered Mildred Zhao to Shanghai from Wuhan. In China, floods are markers of time. The long history of China can be told in many ways: as a procession of dynasties, a hockey-stick chart of GDP, calories consumed, or the times rivers burst their banks. Between the Yellow and the Yangtze Rivers, there were major floods in 1870, 1887, 1911, 1931, 1935, 1938, 1948, 1951, 1954, 1975, 1998. Observers have attributed tragedies over time to bad dredging management, or signs that an emperor has lost the mandate of heaven to rule.

  The 1931 deluge came after a record snowfall in the Tibetan Plateau. The spring thawing sent record flows rushing down to the east and the Pacific. Combining with twenty-four inches of monsoon rainfall in July, the ensuing flood overflowed the banks of the two rivers that converge in Wuhan: the Han and the Yangtze. Hankou fell under nearly five feet of water.

  Mildred wrote in one letter: “I was compelled to leave Hankow on account of the great flood. Shanghai was the only refuge, because there were many friends there.”

  She gave no specifics. Perhaps she witnessed the riverfront rise an astonishing fifty-three feet above normal levels, higher even than the fifty-foot dikes. Maybe she lingered as the waters did, for half a year. This was not a rushing, high-speed disaster, but a slow-motion inundation of seventy thousand square miles. “This is an area approximately equal to the whole of England plus half of Scotland or to New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut combined,” a report from the China Flood Relief Commission noted. It described the deluge as “the greatest flood on historical record.”

  Certainly she saw death. The flood commission estimated 140,000 drowned in the disaster. Separately, smallpox, cholera, and dysentery claimed another four million lives. The flooding destroyed crops nationwide, prompting starvation and food inflation. To survive, men sold their children for money, or sometimes their wives. Living bodies ate dead ones.

  The numbers are mind shattering. The total casualties from this flood exceeded by fifteen times those of the Indonesian tsunami of 2004. The area flooded is triple that of America’s most destructive flood, the Mississippi disaster of 1927.

  Mildred Zhao went downstream as part of a mass evacuation. Half a million people—more than the entire population of Minneapolis or New Orleans at the time—were displaced. She was twenty-eight and alone. Her dreams of studying in America had long been stalled, and now she was simply trying to start over.

  Shanghai was a city of second chances. During the bloody Taiping Rebellion of the mid-1800s, millions of Chinese sought haven in the city’s international concessions. More came during the 1911 revolution. During their own revolution, Russians who defended the tsar against the Bolsheviks found themselves without a home, so many fled south. From 1926 to 1927, when regional warlords controlled much of the north around Beijing, intellectuals and writers escaped to Shanghai. During World War II, tens of thousands of Jews ejected from Nazi Europe went to the only place that would take them without visas: Shanghai. The city had not become a safety net for people by design; it was haven because local governance was so weak.

  As so many newcomers did, Mildred Zhao sought out members of her tribe. In her case, it was teachers and classmates from the Stephen L. Baldwin School for Girls. She’d stayed in touch with so many over the years: Gladys Wang. Cheo Lan Ching. Tang Mo Chiao. Sylvia Fu. Some she mentioned in letters by first name only: Harriett, Ruth, Lydia, Phoebe.

  One Baldwin alum taught at a university and found Mildred Zhao a job teaching world history and geography. From the campus, Mildred wrote a long catch-up letter to her old Baldwin teacher Anna Graves in Baltimore. By my math, this was her first letter in nine years.

  August 12, 1934

  My dear Miss Graves,

  I do not know the reason for my laziness as sending you a letter telling about all my past. Excuses are unnecessary as you said in your last letter which came to me a few days ago; only one I must tell you that since the death of both my parents, I seldom write letters.

  Examining the letter, I can see the Mildred’s penmanship evolved over the years. It’s less bold. Compared with a decade prior, each letter slants a little less and has shrunk down one font size. Her capital Ps, once drawn with a dramatic loop, have evolved into a pragmatic stick–plus–half circle. If Mildred Zhao by now is dreaming less big, less ambitious, her handwriting suggests it.

  The letterhead says “Great China University,” and I realize I have been there. After the Communists took over China, Great China University became part of what’s now East China Normal University. I’ve probably gone there twenty times, walking up the same campus steps my grandmother did. The campus is j
ust across the Suzhou Creek from our old apartment complex.

  On weekends I’d sometimes jog over a bridge and make my way over to the university’s giant statue of Chairman Mao. He stands on a square base and rises up twenty feet high in a buttoned coat, hand raised high and waving as if he’s Pocahontas bidding farewell to Captain John Smith. Then I’d turn around for home. Sometimes the kids and I rode bikes to East China Normal: typically our older son, Evan, would pedal in front on his own bike, and I’d follow with Daniel (then a preschooler) on the bike seat behind. On the way back, we’d buy a bottle of their favorite sports drink: the Japanese brand Scream.

  A few times, I gave guest lectures at the university, mostly to visiting students from the States. I’d stand before them and tally everything I got wrong about China, and then take their questions. No, an undervalued Chinese currency does not help Chinese consumers, it hurts them. Yes, the dollar has lost value against the renminbi—you can check my pay stub. Yes, we think we’re being bugged. No, the people trying to track the Marketplace bureau do not seem very smart. No, the profits from an iPhone assembled in China do not stay in China; they go to Taiwan, Japan, and mostly Cupertino.

  I imagine my grandmother addressed some of the same issues of China and the world when she taught there in the 1930s. But there was one difference: I told stories about all the provinces and countries I’d already visited. She spoke of places she wanted to see.

  In 1933 Mildred Zhao married. She recounted the events in a letter to Anna Graves in Maryland.

  His name is Carleton Sun and is three years younger than I. His family and mine lived together while both our fathers were working in the same place in Nanchang about twenty years ago. Both fathers and mothers were friends and we two were small friends.

  During the siege of Wuchang, Mildred and Carleton met again, and after her father died in the siege, “he helped us a lot and my mother loved him the more.”

  He was handsome. Carleton Sun appears in half a dozen black-and-white photos from the time, looking out from deep, confident eyes. His face was defined by high, symmetrical cheekbones. His hair parts on the side, in a way more suited for a television anchor than a grandfather. “He was a very good-looking man,” my mother has said more than once.

  Early on in his life, Carleton chose politics—or perhaps politics chose him. In the mid-1920s, China had fallen into a volatile mess of competing warlords and bandits, Nationalists, Communists, student protesters, and unions. During this messy time, Carleton was studying business at Wuchang Zhonghua University.

  “This was during the Wuhan revolution,” Carleton wrote in a letter to Fudan University administrators. “Students, in addition to studying, also participated in the revolution. At the time, I was ordered to participate in youth movements.”

  The movements targeted warlords and imperialists. Students and rioters ransacked the British concession in Hankow (today Hankou) city, tearing open sandbags tacked at the entrance and penetrating barbed-wire barricades. Panicked British citizens responded by hustling their wives and children onto riverboats bound for Shanghai. Before long, London abdicated its treaty port possessions in Hankow and nearby Jiujiang.

  Carleton also had reason to oppose the budding Communist Party. Mildred writes: “He did not have a chance to finish college courses, for his family property was occupied by the Communists for nearly seven years.”

  I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand this Communist property-taking. This is important, because my grandfather later on took a strongly anti-Communist position, and it turned out tragic for him. Around that time, the young Communist Party was actually struggling and had retreated to the countryside. They’d severed their Northern Expedition alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang (the GMD betrayed the Communists with a bloody purge in Shanghai). One of the party’s rural bases was by a lake Honghu near Wuhan. There, a Communist-allied bandit named He Long led campaigns to torch villages and execute landlords. More than one person has suggested it was He Long’s men who took my grandfather’s family land. Perhaps. But how could I confirm this?

  My next step was, in retrospect, not very savvy. I asked a local Wuhan historian where to find documentation of this persecution at the hands of the Communists. He gave me one of those you-must-be-stupid looks. “Even if they exist, they won’t show them to you,” he said. Public evidence of Communist bandits pillaging villages and executing people was not something the party was going to make easy to find. “I can try to look for you,” he said, suggesting he could leverage his connections to get documents through the back door. He never followed up with me.

  Then I realized something: I had just waded inadvertently into a broader fight over historical documents in China. Since the state controls the narrative, it naturally limits information that can undercut that narrative. Many Chinese archives are available only to the powerful and well connected. As I researched this section of history, one entire historical archive, the number two national archive in Nanjing, was closed. Or at the very least, it was “only unavailable to those with the best guanxi relationships,” one historian told me. The number two’s official status was “closed for digitizing.” But the rumor was that documents incriminating to top leaders had leaked out, so archive staffers had to go over everything carefully to prevent a recurrence.

  Many historians I know fume about this, but none as eloquent as sinologist Jeremiah Jenne in Beijing. “I feel like getting some friends together to ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ the number two archives,” Jenne told me. This was a reference to a movie about a brilliant casino heist pulled off by George Clooney plus ten friends. Here, though, Clooney and Co. would never stand a chance against the Chinese bureaucrat librarians.

  ***

  The digital speedometer on the bullet train hits three hundred kilometers per hour, or 186 miles per hour. I’m sitting in the aisle seat next to my mother, as we are now on our way to visit her cousin in the eastern city of Suzhou. Like an idiot, I blurt “Three hundred!” every time we hit that speed.

  We’re on our way to Suzhou to visit my mother’s cousin she calls Sanjie (san jie means “third sister”). Sanjie is my grandfather Carleton Sun’s niece who spent a lot of time with him. After Sanjie’s father died in his early twenties, Carleton supported her family and moved them to Shanghai.

  “She joined the Communist Party,” Mom says as the train slows, “so she cut herself off from our family. Drew a clear boundary line.” This is a common phrase: hua qing jie xian, draw a clear boundary line. This was a Mao-era survival mechanism, to cut yourself off from anyone with an incriminating past: a spouse, a sibling, a child. Otherwise, if that person got caught, your mouth was attached to the same hook. At the time, Carleton Sun and his family had anti-Communist pasts, so Sanjie had to cut loose from them.

  But time has a way of healing things. “Ai lian!” Sanjie walks out of her bedroom to greet my mother by her Chinese name. They don’t hug, but instead do a handshake that turns into a handhold. Several others join us in the living room of her modest apartment: Sanjie’s husband, daughter, and son-in-law.

  On the way here, I’ve suggested that my mother not mention this book project—it tends to cause lips to tighten. It’s one thing to sit and chat, and quite another to put information in the public domain. My mother deftly winds down the small talk and asks Sanjie her recollections of Carleton Sun,

  “He came from a tradition of Western learning,” Sanjie says, throwing out a term I need a little help with: xi xue dong zhe. Western learning spreading East. “He dressed Western. White suits and white shoes. He was very cultured.”

  This came as a surprise. My grandfather was by far the more culturally Chinese than his wife. Even though he loved to eat at the American restaurant at the Shanghai YMCA, he hardly spoke English, whereas Mildred spoke it fluently and went to the opera. I suppose this was all a matter of degree. To Sanjie and her siblings, who were never exposed to Western things, Carleton and Mildred dressed Western—perhaps too Western.<
br />
  Carleton’s mother—my great-grandmother—it turns out, was quite a character. She stayed home with bound feet and a feisty demeanor. Sanjie says: “She peeked into strangers’ doors during the Japanese occupation and was never scared of anyone.” She owned a textile dye house that she later bequeathed to a younger relative. But he gambled and squandered the money.

  Sanjie sits back. “So, one year at Chinese New Year, he returned home and she beat him.”

  Later, Sanjie disappears into her bedroom and brings out something for my mother. It is more than sixty years old: a decorative porcelain cup that sat in my mother’s family apartment in Shanghai. They had left it behind when they fled ahead of the Communists in 1949.

  I’m surprised she still has it. “Didn’t this kind of thing get destroyed in the Cultural Revolution?” I ask. Surely keeping this cosmetic item would have invited accusations of punishable status: bourgeois, landlord, rich peasant, running dog of capitalism.

  “No.” She shares no further details. I have a feeling this octogenarian remains as wily as ever. To survive all these years of mainland tumult, as a member of the party, you develop a certain savvy of what information to share and what not to.

  We move onto other topics, and Sanjie loosens up about Carleton. He loved kids. He would proclaim to a group of children: “Boys and girls, what do you want to eat today?” He loved to eat peanuts, whole peanuts, except for the tiny nub piece protruding from the tip—the seed. Otherwise, “peanuts will grow up and out through the top of your head,” he told them. He gave each child ten peanuts for every spoonful of cod liver oil they downed. He could work a room.

  The interaction with Sanjie and her family goes really well—until it turns combative over dinner. Nearly twenty extended family members gather for a restaurant banquet near the China–Suzhou Singapore Industrial Park. We sit around a giant table, perfectly suited for grandstanding men to challenge other men. Particularly, men from America.