by Scott Tong
One of Sanjie’s sons begins: “Do you eat genetically modified foods? Americans eat lots of GMOs.”
“Yes.” I explain that GMO and non-GMO corn, at least in America, are stored together. You can’t separate them out. And then I regret going there.
“Europeans don’t like them,” he replies. “Neither do Chinese.”
This is a familiar moment to any American who has spent five minutes overseas—the moment he or she becomes an unwilling proxy for everything good and ugly about the United States. Not only must I engage in my second language, I also have to address distorted facts. In China, so much news about the outside world lacks context, or is presented in an outright anti-foreigner context. So I’m not just defending America, I’m defending Funhouse-Distorted America.
Another son jumps in: “You know, China is becoming better friends with the Middle East. This is a good opportunity, because America abandoned this part of the world. It’s because America now has its own oil. It’s all about the oil.”
I can’t resist this one, because I’ve reported a fair bit on this exact question. “That’s overstated. Americans still import a lot of oil from the Middle East, several million barrels every day.” And, I add, Washington has historically spent billions to support stability in the whole region—to gather intelligence, to protect shipping lanes, to defend Israel.
The son nods and gives me a few seconds to eat, which also gives him time to circle and jab from a new direction. “Do Americans care about Edward Snowden?”
“What do you mean?”
“Of course they do!” Often in this situation, a combatant will pose a rhetorical question simply to give his own answer. I do know there’s a lot of news about Snowden in China, but in a different context. Back home in the States, the focus of the Snowden leaks is on the US government spying on its own people. But in China, it’s all about American hypocrisy: Washington accuses Beijing for hacking US databases, yet now the Ugly Americans are caught spying on other countries—including China. Gotcha.
Son 2 goes on: “Do Americans think the Snowden news is good? Or bad?”
I take a breath and try to explain the American government is actually not the same thing as the American people, the same way official Beijing does not equal real China. Then I make the case that even though these leaks are embarrassing for the US government, transparency is good. My job is not to protect the reputation of Washington. In fact, if I as a reporter expose something embarrassing about my own government, I win awards.
It’s a good argument, except that it takes far too long for me to say in Chinese. I get blank stares in return. In any event, for these brothers, encounters with foreigners are not really debates or exchanges of information. They’re release valves for their frustrations with an outside world that can be so hostile and critical of China. It’s their way of saying: We’re finally catching up with the modern world, and you the historic polluters are lecturing us about climate pollution? We are making low-cost products for consumers, earning pennies, and getting beat up about it?
The original brother jumps in, this time to rescue me. “America. We like the people, but not the government. They just want to be everyone’s policeman. For China, it’s best to be number two, or maybe number three in the world. Otherwise, we’ll attract too much attention.”
He offers a toast to my mother and me and—voilà—he has expertly saved face for me, and for him, and for China. I ladle some food onto my plate and wait for someone to please change the subject.
***
When my grandparents Carleton Sun and Mildred Zhao married, he was studying at Shanghai’s elite Fudan University. During my 2013 trip, I have plopped myself down on a curved bench on the campus of Fudan University. I have been running for a month, racing across Japan and China for small bits of history that may or may not fit together. My father is waiting for me at a nearby hotel. I still need to catch up with Ayi, our old nanny, and interview my cousin and my uncle. Cathy and kids want to know when I’m coming home.
And then I stop myself, and wonder what it must have been like for Carleton Sun eighty years prior. By the time he got to Fudan in his late twenties, he’d lost his father and brother, joined a movement to kick foreigners out of Hankou, survived the world’s worst flood on record, and seen his village property taken by bandit warlords. He’d have needed this bench more than I.
Like many universities in China, Fudan was designed by a foreigner—specifically, Henry Murphy, the same American architect who’d designed Ginling Women’s College in Nanjing. Fudan University was set up in 1905, by dissident professors and students from the Jesuit Aurora University across town. The word fudan means roughly “return of the dawn,” chosen by its founder to symbolize China’s new, outward-looking future.
There are a lot of similar examples. The medical center at the elite Jiao Tong University in Shanghai has its roots in an 1844 facility founded by a British missionary. Fudan’s medical college was founded by a Chinese public health doctor who graduated from Yale. The list goes on: the Rockefeller Foundation helped fund Nankai University in Tianjin, the US Congress supported the original Tsinghua University in Beijing. American financier Edward Harkness donated to Xiangya Medical College in Hunan. The century of humiliation sure left behind a lot of lasting institutions.
Approaching the entrance of the university archive, I once again rehearse my pitch to the staff: Chinese American, looking up family history, my grandfather went here, requesting records. The only person in the small entry room is a middle-aged woman at a wooden desk. “Yao shen ma?” What do you want?
Before I get very far into my spiel, she interrupts. “Zhen jian.” Document. I hand over my passport, along with Carleton Sun’s from 1949. “Wow,” she says, reaching out with two hands as if she’s taking communion at church. She flips to the main passport page, to the section written in both French and English.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China requests all civil and military authorities of Friendly States to let pass freely
[handwritten] SUN I, CARLETON
a national of the Republic of China, going to
[handwritten] USA, CHILE, ARGENTINA, BRAZIL, VIA ALL NECESSARY COUNTRIES
and afford assistance and protection in case of necessity.
“How did you get this?” she asks.
“My mother kept it all these years.”
“And how did she preserve it so well?
This is my opportunity to say bu tai qing chu. It’s not so clear. I present a few more supporting documents as a male student walks in and stands right behind me. The woman gatekeeper’s lengthy pause troubles me.
“Can you prove this man Sun Honglie is your relative?”
Ouch. This is the question I’d prayed not to come up. This same thing happened in Tokyo. I have no documentary evidence that Carleton Sun fathered my mother. In fact, I haven’t even brought my own birth certificate.
“Bu hao yi si,” I say. Sorry, this is all I have.
“Hold on.” She disappears through a door behind her. The student behind me sighs. And then, relief—she returns in two minutes with a slim 8-by-10-inch envelope. “You can’t take these with you.” Neither am I allowed to photocopy them. “But you can take pictures with your phone. Go over there to do it. Kuai dian.” Hurry.
The “hurry” sets me off, but my back turns before I roll my eyes. Then I open the envelope and pull out the contents: Yellowed papers. Folded handwritten letters. Report cards the size of 5-by-7 index cards. A course sign-up sheet: Chinese name. English name. Major (banking). Student number (5711).
The report cards tally his grades from both Wuchang Zhonghua University and Fudan. Carleton Sun, it turns out, was not a great student.
World Trade Theory: B–
Economic History: C+
Banking History: D
Modern Political Systems: B–
Banking Systems: A–
American Political Systems: C+
Que
stion of Chinese Accounting: C–
History of American Literature: D+
Commercial Banking: D+
Japanese—Basic: B–
History of Chinese political theory: D
History of Economic Thought: C+
Rail Transportation: B–
Japanese Language: D–
Wow, okay. For some reason I treat the report card as a secret document, looking over my shoulder and assuming the protective crouch I employ at the ATM. And I start snapping pictures.
The year 1934 was a defining one for both Mildred Zhao and the Chinese Communist Party. It was the year of the Long March, when the Red Army, decimated by the Guomindang in Jiangxi, retreated to a four-thousand-mile trip across punishing and frigid terrain. The men who survived ended up in Shanxi and began plotting their military and political comeback.
In Shanghai Mildred Zhao and her husband built a private grade school and started enrolling students. “I had planned for three years to open a girls’ middle school before I asked my two friends to join me,” she wrote Anna Graves. “I always think that this will be the better way for we girls to do some solid work for our country. . . . We had ninety-two students the last term. In spite of the danger, I am very happy and interested in my work.”
She named the school hai guang xiaoxue. Light of the Sea Primary School. When my mother and her sister talk about their old days in Shanghai, it’s hai guang this, hai guang that. Mildred wrote:
The name of the school is Hai Kwong Primary School. “Hai Kwong” means the light of the sea. I do wish this little light could guide our small people in the dark.
The school went up on Avenue Tenant de la Tour, Lane 431. The road was named after a French lieutenant and World War I flying ace surnamed Tenant de la Tour. Or Lado Road, in Chinese. Based on an address directory from that time, if Mildred walked south down the avenue toward the Catholic cathedral, she’d have passed the China South Weaving store and Yung Ching Rice Shop. Her neighbors were surnamed Virsky, Grant, Dietrich, Savitsky, Kardosvskaya, Robin, Munson, Jaubert, and Green. Going northbound, she’d encounter the Southern California Oil Company, an outfit called Le Champ de Cours Français, and Shanghai’s main Jewish synagogue.
It was an international neighborhood, but Mildred and Carleton only partially embraced it. In certain respects, Mildred lived a culturally Chinese and inward-looking life. She avoided dealing with Jewish merchants and described them in unkind ways. Clinging to old traditions and beliefs, she served pig’s foot to her daughter Lily on the eve of Lily’s trip to the Holy Land, on the assumption that eating feet strengthens your own for walking. She cooked pig’s brain for the same reason. Often she dreamt about burning incense and paper money to dead ancestors.
At the same time, she loved classical music performances—except for the parts when she nodded off. “I was listening!” she would later claim. When designing the school, she splurged on notable Western technology upgrade: flush toilets. And for hours every week, she wrote her English-language letters to her contacts in the States. Mildred still had aspirations of studying there.
This was the source of conflict with Carleton, who hardly spoke any English. If they were alive today, he’d disparage her as a “banana”—yellow on the outside, white inside, insufficiently Chinese. And yet, Carleton was a culturally hybrid man himself. He wore both Chinese coats and Western suits. He danced the tango and fox-trot when he went out. They lived in a “patchwork town,” in the words of historian Marie-Claire Bergère, and thus lived patchwork lives.
It all seemed very promising at the outset. Their first child, Lily, arrived in 1935. Then Constantine in 1938. School business increased, and by the late 1930s enrollment exceeded four hundred students. During the occupation of China by Japan in World War II, the Light of the Sea Primary School was remarkably safe and secure. “Comparatively we suffer very little during the hostilities,” Mildred wrote in 1939. “My address will not be changed at least for 20 years.”
That same year, Mildred brought in a business partner to administer the school as dean, a woman named Zhang Qiong. She later became the godmother to Mildred’s son, my Uncle Eddie. But there was one thing about Zhang Qiong that was unknown to anyone at the school at the time: she was an underground member of the Communist Party. In the meantime, Mildred’s husband was being recruited for a high-profile political job back home in Wuhan.
The unraveling would soon begin.
PART TWO
The Great Interruption
Chapter Seven
THE DAY THE JAPANESE WAR DEVILS CAME
He grabbed a piece of paper and drew a Japanese flag on it. And put it on a bamboo pole to welcome them.
—Villager Tong Guangde
During World War II in China, my great-grandfather saved the Tong village from slaughter. At least that’s what villagers tell me—all the villagers. This is the challenge of oral history. On one hand, several people here corroborate the basic story and details, so it seems hard to make something up in such a coordinated way. This passes the two-source rule of journalistic confirmation. On the other hand, I wonder about historical groupthink, how so many memories can converge on the version recalled by the best storyteller. Or the loudest or most frequent storyteller. In this case, the people I’m talking to were either quite young at the time, or they’d heard the story from elders.
By this time in World War II, the Japanese had taken advanced positions across China, occupying key rail and river strongholds. Many of these were the same locations controlled by European powers a century prior: Tianjin, Qingdao, Shanghai, and the Yangtze cities at the bottom of the Grand Canal. When the Japanese marched on the river cities of Changzhou, Zhenjiang, and Yangzhou, and then took Nanjing in horrific fashion, they were just 120 miles south of the Tong village. News came quickly, even to this Jiangsu backwater.
“Pregnant women, they raped them,” Tong Daren’s niece tells me during my village visit with her. “Stabbed with bayonets.”
My great-grandfather was still living in Nanjing when the Japanese came, and somehow he escaped the bloody winter of 1937/38. His son, my grandfather, had retreated to Sichuan in the remote southwest with the forces of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang. There in Sichuan, his wife bore a son—my father—before she succumbed to tuberculosis four or five years later.
Much has been written about the Rape of Nanking, but there is one account most searing to me: the recollection of Japanese soldier Deguchi Gonjiro, recorded in activist and filmmaker Tamaki Matsuoka’s book Torn Memories of Nanking. His words are imprinted on the wall of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall—in a section describing a Japanese soldier’s confession:
On the day when Nanjing was seized, the corpses outside the city wall piled into hills when we entered the city. I felt something soft under my soles, so I lit a match and found the ground was covered with dead bodies as if it was covered with mats. There were women, children, old men and old women. . . . I once saw they took women on their shoulders and raped them, even old women were captured and they were killed immediately after they were raped. It was extremely cruel.
Now we must apologize to the Chinese people.
After the Japanese took Nanjing, and then Wuhan further west, fighting in the China theater came to a relative standstill. Tong Zhenyong left Nanjing and went up the Grand Canal to the Tong village. Around 1940, according to oral interviews, Japanese troops approached the village. And my great-grandfather went up to talk to them.
“Tong Zhenyong told us, ‘Don’t be afraid,’” Tong Daren’s niece says. She was less than ten at the time. The story from her and several villagers goes something like this: Tong Zhenyong hosted the Japanese troops in a village granary for about three hours, talking to them, feeding them, and pleading for them to spare the village. “He saved us,” she says.
I ask, “I heard he cooked something for the Japanese soldiers to eat—some kind of egg?”
“Dan cha.” Poached egg with sugar.
“
And did he wave some kind of white surrender flag?” One villager had mentioned this to me.
“Don’t know anything about a flag.”
Among the people I try to confirm all this with is the despised Tong Guangde, the tall man with the hat from Tong East. I meet him at an outdoor table in the village just outside his house. This time he’s wearing a baseball cap.
“Xun gen?” he asks. Searching for your roots again? As we exchange pleasantries, another elderly man joins us. This always happens here. A stranger comes, the people pounce. Representing himself as in his eighties, this man would have been a teenager in 1940. His hair is jet white, as is his thick moustache. He is wearing blue sweatpants and a red warm-up jacket with a logo of Michael Jordan soaring for a dunk. “I remember your great-grandfather,” Moustache Tong says. “I grew up here and then moved away. I’m just back from Anhui province.”
Hat Man Tong interrupts with the requisite host greeting: “Did you eat?” Moustache Tong waves his hand to reject the offer. I do the same and say yes, I have eaten, which is a lie. There is no time for lunch. It’s already midday, and I have two precious hours to gather information, grab my suitcase, and hustle onto the bus for Shanghai. Chinese hospitality is many things, but it is not efficient.
I move on quickly to the “Tong Zhenyong Saves Village” story. “I hear a hundred Japanese soldiers came that day?”
“No,” Hat Man says. “Not more than twenty.” Already he is sketching out an alternate narrative. “When they came, he grabbed a piece of paper and drew a Japanese flag on it. And then he put it on a bamboo pole to welcome them.”
The flag details also differ. I’d heard about a white flag, not a Japanese flag. There is something extremely challenging about these oral histories. It’s a bit like that party memory game where you place ten items on the table with a sheet over it, and then lift the sheet briefly for everyone to see. You re-cover everything and see how many items each person can list. But in this case, the actual event has been covered for more than seven decades. Each person’s recollection is colored by his own thoughts and narratives. Who knows, perhaps Tong Guangde remembers a pro-Japan flag because my great-grandfather had a Tokyo past. The problem isn’t that people remember differently. The problem is that they speak with absolute ken ding certainty.