A Village with My Name

by Scott Tong

  Carleton was angry. He’d long objected to Mildred leaving China, where he had to support his mother and his brother’s widow and children. They never agreed on the best place for the family. “They blamed each other,” Aunt Lily says. “He said, ‘You should not have left.’”

  As it turns out, Mildred never continued on for the United States. The turmoil and uncertainty of the new Communist era convinced her to stay close and head for Hong Kong. A lot of families found themselves in the same situation: one person hedged against the future by exploring Taiwan or Hong Kong, and another would stay behind to see what the new regime would bring.

  “I have only heard from you once since you went to Taiwan,” Carleton wrote in a letter to Mildred. “And I have not heard from you since. This is my third letter to you in Hong Kong. Everyone in the family misses you. Folks now are puzzled about your going there. Things are not running smoothly in the school.

  “I think the best scenario is for you to come back to Shanghai at once. Preferably before summer break. Then you can clear up a lot of rumors. If you come back, you can assign people to their proper positions. And then go abroad. Finish this, and then you can go.”

  But Mildred never returned home. The situation in Shanghai grew worse. The new regime took over newspapers, associations, factories, and universities. Residents started calling each other “cadre.” And instead of wearing colorful Western suits and leather shoes, men donned the high-collar cotton tunics Sun Yat-sen suits. By March 1950, Carleton had seen enough. He sent the kids to join their mother in Hong Kong, staying behind himself to run the school.

  “I dropped them at 4:25 p.m. on the train,” he wrote Mildred, “then I went home alone. It feels so empty I can’t describe it. The last few years I was so busy at work, worrying about our jobs and income. But when I got home, spending time with the kids made the worries dissolve.

  “Da mei [Lily, the oldest] is so very mature. She helps comfort me. . . . Now that she’s gone, so many things seem pointless. In Shanghai, business is not good. We have some money to live, but I’ve spent most of it down. I hope to finish up some things here so I can rest awhile, and eventually save up to invest in a new business. My heart is so unsettled.”

  At the bottom of the letter, he wrote a few words for the children, in simple sentences:

  Anna, after you boarded, what did you eat? I bet it was hard to sleep. How did you go from Canton to Kowloon? I can’t go with you in person. I cannot put into words my pain. Every second, every quarter hour, I pray for you to arrive safely. . . .

  My heart always follows you. I hope you can go to school. You left your playing cards behind. I hope you can find something else to play.

  The key detail my mother remember from the trip to Hong Kong was the heat. The travelers got warmer and warmer the further south they went: Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanchang, Changsha, Guangzhou. “We kept taking off layers,” she told me. “We were like refugees.” They were refugees.

  At the border they crossed the narrow Luohu Bridge over the Shenzhen River into Hong Kong, where Mildred was waiting.

  With hindsight, the decision of Mildred and then her children to escape to Hong Kong was a no-brainer. They avoided two and half decades of Mao’s terror. “What would it have been like if we’d stayed?” my mother’s brother, Uncle Eddie, often says. At the time, though, this decision was questionable at best. Mildred Zhao went with just $60 in her pocket to feed herself and three children. None of them spoke Cantonese, the local dialect, and the kids found themselves teased by local children. “They pointed at us and said, ‘Communist! Communist!’” my mother recalls.

  They settled in a sordid shantytown known as Ngau Chi Wan, alongside thousands of other mainlanders. Only my mother went to school; there wasn’t enough money for the others, so Lily and Constantine stayed home and rolled sweet tang yuan dumplings to sell. Mildred was by all accounts a lousy seamstress, but she made Anna’s uniform nonetheless.

  On April 26, 1950, Anna received this letter from her father:

  Little one,

  Thank you for your letter dated April 14. I am so happy to read it.

  How is your Cantonese coming?

  Did you like the honey I sent? Do your shoes fit? I will be in Hong Kong hopefully in 3 weeks.

  Then a week later:

  Little one,

  In two weeks, Daddy can visit you in Kowloon.

  Your classmate Chen Huang came up the stairs today looking for you. I told her Sun Ailian [Anna Sun] went to Hong Kong. So she left.

  Carleton visited the family in Hong Kong at least three times, and always returned to Shanghai, exhorting Mildred and the children to go back with him.

  “Mildred, this year you spent down 90 percent of your savings,” he wrote. “You don’t even have transportation money. You and I can starve. But we cannot let our kids suffer. . . . Don’t be so suspicious and paranoid. Just bring the children back to Shanghai for now. We can save and get by. We can live together and die together.”

  Somewhere between the spring of 1951 and the summer of 1952, he was arrested.

  Chapter Nine

  THE WARTIME COLLABORATOR IN OUR FAMILY

  It’s no problem to talk about this now. This is history.

  —Wu Mingtang, Wuhan archivist

  The gunmen first came for him one midnight in 1947. Thugs burst into the family living quarters on the second-floor residential quarters atop the Light of the Sea School in Shanghai. Mildred and the children jumped awake. “It was the first time I ever saw a gun,” Lily says. She was fifteen at the time.

  The men directed Mildred to a small table at the foot of the bed and interrogated her for hours. “For his sake, I was faced with pistol by a man (or detective) rushed to my bedroom one night urging me to hand over my husband to him,” Mildred wrote Anna Graves. “If not by the help of telephone, a number of board of trustees came to the rescue, I was killed that night.”

  Carleton, meanwhile, was on the run. He’d anticipated this, and had relocated to a “safer place,” Mildred wrote. A second close call came months later. “Carleton came back to Shanghai, where he was walking on the street one day. He was caught. Just before putting in prison while he was still in the detained house, many friends rescued him.”

  He would not be so lucky a third time. As Aunt Lily tells the story, the thugs pursuing him were hired by the ruling Guomindang. After the war, GMD leaders emerged from their mountain hideout in southwest China and began settling scores. They hunted down suspected traitors—particularly those suspected of collaborating with the Japanese occupiers. That was Carleton’s war crime, the reason they were after him.

  ***

  This is the part of the story where it’d be easiest to turn away. Anyone who has ended up on the “wrong” side of history surely has wished for some kind of do-over, now that they know how things turn out in the end. I wish that in the fog of war he had not joined the occupation government controlling Wuhan—that is, the puppet state of the Japanese. To many relatives, and most of the billion Chinese on the planet, this is an unforgivable source of shame, particularly in light of what we know about the 1937/38 Rape of Nanking.

  Like most English readers, I learned about this event from Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking, one of the first English-language accounts of the atrocities. I met her once in the late 1990s. Chang came to the studios of the PBS NewsHour, where I was working, to be interviewed about the book. When she spoke on the screen, what I remember most about her is her eyes—searing with hate as she spoke of Japanese Imperial Army soldiers tossing Chinese babies up in the air and spearing them, half-burying Chinese soldiers and having German Shepherds finish the job. Chang was around my age, which made the account that much more accessible to me (she committed suicide not long after). Chang’s critics say she was more activist than historian, at times favoring emotion over evidence. But to me that day, history became sermon.

  This was the hardest part about looking up this chapter of my grandfather�
�s history: I already knew how the movie ended. I could only interpret what I was learning through the lens of hindsight. In real time, Carleton Sun made his decisions in a Shanghai of the 1930s swirling in uncertainty and intrigue. The city served as a hub for agents and spies from Russia, Japan, Germany, France, the United States, and England. Alongside them were dueling Chinese political camps, rival drug gangs, and fence-sitters playing all sides, waiting out what would turn out.

  A key question at the time was what to do about Japan, which had already occupied Manchuria in northern China and a section of Shanghai. I’d always learned about this period as one of unbridled Japanese aggression. But in fact, the two sides engaged in a number of overtures before all-out war. Guomindang strongman Chiang Kai-Shek penned an article in 1934 asking whether Japan was a friend or foe. A year later, Japan’s foreign minister explored a possible détente with China. The secret back-channel peace talks involved a group of GMD leaders who called themselves the “low-key club.” Central to the consultations was a man my grandfather will forever be linked with: Wang Jingwei.

  He is, bar none, China’s most notorious collaborator—its Pétain, or Quisling, or Judas Iscariot in the public imagination. At the very least, Wang was a man of complexity and contradictions. I have seen him variously characterized as: misunderstood, baby-faced, idealistic, traitorous, womanizing, pragmatic, vain, hoodwinked, outmaneuvered, reckless, naive. But most often: puppet.

  Someday Wang Jingwei may get a fair shake from history, but I don’t imagine I’ll be around for it. As soon as you throw out a term like “collaborator,” people’s minds are made up. Imagine I told you a story about someone who decided to join the Islamic State, or the Klan, or the political party you cannot stand. The rational side of our brains would turn off and we’d default into right-versus-wrong mode. Wang joined the early wave of Chinese intellectuals studying abroad in Japan (the same wave as my great-grandfather), and signed up as an early member of the Tongmenghui, Sun Yat-sen’s secret Revolutionary Alliance with designs on overthrowing imperial China. Wang saw himself as a true believer, an ideological heir of Sun’s “pan-Asian” vision of Eastern geographic unity. Surely that was better than aligning with Western hegemons. Wang criticized the Chinese Communist Party for allying with the Soviet Union, and later blasted the Guomindang for its ties with the British and Americans. At the same time, he fancied himself a realist in the face of the Japanese occupation.

  To many observers, the war by 1939 was unwinnable for China in the face of Japanese aggression. After Nanking fell, Hankou burned to the ground. Chongqing suffered its worst bombings to date, and a rotten harvest made food prices skyrocket. At this point, there was no hint of Pearl Harbor, no suggestion the Americans would join the Pacific Theater and support the GMD in retreat. This set the stage for Wang Jingwei’s dreadful miscalculation.

  Seeking to end the conflict and the killings, he sought a deal with the Japanese, to trade land for peace, space for time, and to cut Chinese losses. In return for Chinese territory, Wang wanted Japan to end the bombings, give up key mines, and promise to pull back in two years. This would end the conflict and preserve the nation. In the end, his plan was built on two mistaken assumptions: that he understood the patriotic pulse of China, and that his GMD colleagues would back him up. They abandoned him, leaving Wang isolated and with little negotiating leverage. In the end, he accepted a very bad deal, in which Japan gave no commitment to eventually evacuate or cede territory. He had been outplayed.

  In 1940 Wang signed on to run a government in central China under the control of Tokyo. At the ceremony to recognize the founding of Wang’s “Republic of China” collaborationist government, tears ran down his face as he declared, “I hate it, I hate it.”

  When the time came to recruit officials in Wang’s government, Carleton Sun was offered a position and he took it, leaving back in Shanghai his wife and three children. He was in a way returning home. I imagine the move had several upsides for him: He could move back to his home province, speak the local dialect, eat the local food, and support his widow mother and widow sister-in-law’s family nearby. His work would oversee food distribution to local Chinese. And he could work an important government job, something he’d pursued for years. Could all this have been part of his thinking?

  “There are several possibilities,” says Yuan Jicheng, a retired economic historian in Wuchang. He speaks with a clinical detachment to such an emotionally charged issue. Like many Chinese analysts and academics, he makes his points in numeric order. “One, a small portion were actually traitors who sided ideologically with the Japanese. Two, some had business arrangements with the Japanese. Three, some did it against their will, but were forced or blackmailed into it. Four, some needed jobs so their families could eat, so they were desperate. Five, some were tricked into it.” That’s his list.

  I note this is not the black-and-white view of most.

  “Chinese historians, we all luan chao,” copy each other like crazy, he says. “It’s time to rewrite history.”

  I don’t imagine this will happen soon. American historian Timothy Brook writes in his book Collaboration: “Every culture tags collaboration as a moral failure.” Once you say “collaborator” out loud, Brook writes, it “superimposes a moral map over the political landscape.” To him, this allows for a common narrative of World War II occupation: that most people resisted the Japanese and German aggressors, whereas a tiny smattering of cowards joined them. The problem, Brook argues, is that this oversimplifies the reality we now know. In German-occupied France, many people in fact aided the occupiers, for one reason or another. They hedged their bets, sat on the fence, and took the jobs available to them. By the 1970s, enough time had passed for the French to consider a more nuanced view.

  Not in China. The difference is, the French have seen scores of regimes come and go, whereas in Beijing, the party in charge still subscribes to its founding myth: we the Communists beat the Japanese and founded the republic. We the revolutionaries, we the underdogs, we the redeemed. Thus, Brook writes, the Chinese “are at a much earlier stage in coming to terms with their occupation.”

  At ten the next morning, I’m walking into the Wuhan Municipal Chronicles. A “chronicles” office is basically a local records building. Ten in the morning is the earliest most morning meetings take place in China, as only the odd foreigner would talk shop over breakfast or coffee (typically the lunch “hour” is noon to two, so much of the midday is off-limits too). Male archivist Wu Mingtang buzzes me into the gated complex, as Chinese history here is indeed a gated enterprise.

  “I believe he was sentenced as a hanjian,” I begin, wiping the sweat off my face in his large office stacked with books and binders. I put the embarrassing information out there immediately, figuring it might get us straight to the point. It does.

  “He was a hanjian,” he says. Wu pulls over a stack of fifty or so pages he’s prepared. Most are copies of government meeting minutes, attendance lists, and speeches. He asks: “Can you read Chinese words quickly?” I hesitate, just long enough for him to continue. “Never mind, we can talk it through.” What strikes me is his confidence and continuous eye contact.

  The document he places in front of me says “Reorganized National Government,” the name of the Japan-controlled puppet regime Wang Jingwei ran. It claimed to represent all of China, though a map of reality would include only a portion of central and eastern China. In 1940, three Chinese leaders claimed to represent the true people, each portraying himself as a political descendant of Sun Yat-sen: Wang Jingwei in the eastern center, Chiang Kai-shek in the southwest, and Mao Zedong in the northwest.

  The name on the documents says Sun Ditang, the name Carleton used while he was here. It was not unusual at the time for people to have several names in their lifetimes (which makes deciphering genealogies particularly challenging). In Shanghai, he went by Sun Honglie, and a decade later, his passport name read Sun Yi. Sun Ditang represented a kind of new identity for my g
randfather’s new job working for the Japanese. Surely he understood the risk: depending on who won the war and how its history would be written, he stood to go down as a realist, saving Chinese lives, or as a sellout.

  According to the papers, he held the lofty title of president of the Social Mobilization Committee for the Hankou Special Municipal Zone. “This suggests he was wealthy,” Wu Mingtang says. “Or that he had good guanxi connections.”

  “His hometown was Mianyang, not far away,” I say.

  “That would definitely have helped.”

  Archivist Wu explains that the job of the Social Mobilization Committee was to promote Japan-China unity. Carleton Sun Ditang’s unit spread this message to Boy Scout troops, business organizations, medical and education groups, drama clubs, book clubs. This job, of public messaging, later fell under the category of “cultural traitor,” as opposed to “political traitor” denoting people who made actual governing decisions. Many political traitors were executed after the war.

  I ask Wu if it was plausible Carleton took this job because he had an anti-Communist streak, mentioning old letters indicating that Communist-allied bandits confiscated his family property in the 1920s.

  He confirms this. “Hen jiandan.” It’s very simple. “During land reform here, the Communist Party took people’s money and property. That meant he couldn’t afford college.”

  Carleton Sun Ditang served in Wuhan for at least three years, and in 1943 he played a small role in a political change affecting his family back in Shanghai. In Europe, the Vichy government of France (under the occupation of Germany) gave up its historic concession in Shanghai. The territory went to Germany’s Axis ally—Japan. So after a century, the famed leafy French Concession was finished. For my grandfather, suddenly the Japanese regime he served under controlled the very section of Shanghai where his family lived.