A Village with My Name

by Scott Tong

  In reality, the French Concession had been good to him and Mildred. It gave them the peace and space to open the Light of the Sea School and raise a family. But his day job required him to blast the devil French colonialists. He spoke in August 1943 to a business group, according to a speech Wu, the archivist, has tracked down.

  Shanghai is the country’s economic capital. One hundred years ago, Westerners occupied it. They controlled everything. They were invaders, and we became a colony. We lost our rights and territory. This is a cancer, and if we don’t cut it out, our country cannot be independent.

  Before leaving, I put to Wu Mingtang the question I have really come to ask: “All this is embarrassing to my mother, her family, my family. What do people today think about this issue of collaboration? Is it okay to talk about this?”

  He knows what I’m asking: whether today’s China still judges Carleton Sun, aka Sun Ditang, a traitor.

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

  I give out a sigh of relief. He has, in a way, granted permission to start turning the page on my grandfather’s shameful past. And it seems he knows it. “Call any time,” the archivist says as I walk toward the exit gate. “We’re friends now.”

  The next day’s research can only be described as comical. A local history professor has volunteered a male undergraduate student to assist me for the day.

  “Teacher Tong, can I carry your bag?” Li Honggong, the student, greets me in the morning at the entrance to Wuhan University. Teacher Tong. The first hello requires some kind of honorific title.

  “You don’t have to call me Teacher Tong,” I say. But I pause because there’s a problem. I can’t think of something different or better, yet still appropriate. Calling me by my Chinese given name, Tong Zhigang, is not something a person two decades younger does. Addressing me by my English name sounds odd. And “Mister Tong” is too formal. We’re stuck.

  He says: “I’ll call you Teacher Tong. It’s appropriate.”

  Our plan is to scour local Wuhan-area local history volumes suggested by the professor, and scan for any references to my grandmother Mildred Zhao’s father. He’s an important player in the whole story—the man who presumably decided to unbind her feet and pay for her education. Some of Mildred’s letters suggest her father studied in Japan, but we don’t even know his name. We start at the library of Wuhan University, but again, there’s a catch.

  “Teacher Tong,” Li, the student, begins, “it’s like this.”

  It’s like this. Shi zheyang. As day precedes night, shi zheyang always precedes bad news. Shi zheyang—we don’t have your hotel room ready yet. Shi zheyang—I cannot process your refund. Shi zheyang—I quit.

  Shi zheyang, Li says—he’s not a student here, and we can’t get into the library without university IDs. So he has to call a friend who studies here and borrow some. We have to impersonate other people. This is something I haven’t done in two decades, and now I’ll pretend to be someone just a couple of years older than my son. What could possibly go wrong?

  As we wait, we discuss Chinese economic history, which Li is currently studying. He explains Chinese universities are changing the way they teach. The old dogmatic view—of a century or more of humiliation and suppression by Western imperialists, followed by Maoist liberation—is evolving. “We used to think 1911 was a failure,” he says, referring to the toppling of the Qing dynasty and imperial China. Traditionally, this had been taught in the People’s Republic as a bourgeois revolution rather than a real one. “But now we see differently, as a step along the way.”

  Then the student says something surprising. He cites Chinese scholars from, of all places, the United States. First, Li mentions John King Fairbank, the father of China studies in America going back to the 1940s. Fairbank emphasized the influence of the West in China’s modernization—Western ideas, Western thought pushing its way in from the outside. The good white men. The newer framework, Li says, emphasizes change from within. “But today, we look at both.”

  This is a refreshing conversation. Typically in China, I hear history described as This is how things happened. There is correct history and there is incorrect history. But I throw Li a far more basic question: “Why are you studying China through the lens of American historians? Why not Chinese historians?” Imagine a reverse situation, of American intellectuals adopting a Chinese take on the US Civil War: Confederacy General Luobaite Yi Li losing to his Union counterpart, Youlixi Si Gelante.

  He thinks for a second. “Maybe it’s because China produced no history books for several years. There was too much chaos.”

  The student IDs show up. Neither one looks like either of us. My mission is to pretend to be a young adult with shaggy hair and thick-frame spectacles. I have neither of those. “Should be no problem,” Li Honggong says. “Let’s try it.”

  We wave the cards over the digital readers, and the turnstiles open. Still, I walk through and brace for an alarm and the possibility of uniformed men coming from four directions. Nothing happens. We make our way to a reference section of finding aids: books that serve as indices to other books. Li Honggong starts flipping through records of Mildred Zhao’s county, Hanchuan, writing down in my notebook the names of various people surnamed Zhao.

  Zhao Zhoujia: information located in Hanchuan County volume, scroll 2, article 9, female name. And so on: Zhao Guozao, Zhao Dezhi, Zhao Cheng, Chao Zhen, Zhao Shiyou, Zhao Mengzhu, Zhao Ping, Zhao Benxi. My plan is to run these names by my mother and her contacts in the village, to see if any ring a bell. It’s a ridiculous quest, really, as Zhao is the seventh-most popular surname in China, shared by twenty-seven million people. It is the Davis of China, though there are twenty-five times more Zhaos than Davises. I mention to Li Honggong that this seems an inefficient way to do research. He shrugs, as if to say, “This is the best we have.” Then he spots a librarian walking briskly in our direction. “Let’s go. Now.”

  Li Honggong seems to know what’s about to happen. He flings the volume back into the stack and directs me to dart toward the stairwell. Not exactly done, we speed-walk out of the library and pursue plan B. I have flown eight thousand miles for this.

  Next stop: Wuhan city archives. A second student, a woman, joins us there around 11 a.m. In my experience, most records offices in China are not self-serve operations: you submit your identification and what you’re looking for, and a person behind the desk does the searching for you. But first, that person interrogates you.

  “Why do you want documents on Sun Ditang?” the elderly male archive staffer asks. I explain he’s my grandfather, knowing what the next question will be.

  “What are you going to do with them?” This is the equivalent of a public relations officer back home asking me the angle of the story I’m chasing. Will this be a hit piece, or a positive story? Gatekeepers are gatekeepers. If any information put out there can be used to make an organization look bad, it’s better to restrict or deny access. I figure it’s best not to mention that this may show up in a book published overseas.

  “To research family history,” I say.

  He follows up: “So, this is just for family use?” I stay quiet as he directs us to a waiting area that looks like a set of church pews. Indeed, I can use a bit of divine intervention. Once again, I am waiting for China to serve its history to me, on its schedule and its terms. Forty-five minutes later, the archivist calls us over and says he’s located some documents: handwritten speeches, minutes of government meetings. Which ones do I want?

  “All of them,” I say.

  He cocks his head in a show of irritation. “All of them?” A Chinese negotiation requires this type of performance, but I have come a very long way and refuse to back down.

  “Are there a lot of documents?”

  “Quite a few.”

  “All of them, thank you.”

  He appears to relent, but as the clock approaches noon calls us back up.

  “It’s like this,” he says.
Shi zheyang. “We have to make copies of the documents. But now it’s lunchtime. We’ll start after.”

  Li Honggong moves in. “We’re in a hurry, as Teacher Tong is visiting from America. When do you open again after lunch?”

  “Two o’clock.”

  “Can a staffer do it now, and go to lunch later?” No. Can we make our own copies? No. So off to lunch we go as well, but by 2 p.m. they are just starting to photocopy. This project is taking a full day.

  The documents here cluster around one important date. July 7, 1942 was the fifth anniversary of Japan’s invasion of China. In one internal memo, Carleton Sun Ditang of the Social Mobilization Committee writes that the puppet government should “not overemphasize” this anniversary. There is also a copy of a speech my grandfather gave on that anniversary, focusing on Sun Yat-sen’s vision of a “Greater Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.” “Listeners will be very touched” by Sun Ditang’s speech, the minutes indicate. “They will denounce the Western imperial powers.”

  So after all this, it’s becoming clear my grandfather was a political messenger for the pro-Japan regime. This comforts me—perhaps because back home in Washington I’m surrounded by people in the same business: political framing. They craft and sell narratives. It’s important for American companies to still manufacture things. The best food is grown locally. Solar energy should be subsidized. Solar energy should not be unsubsidized. The best way to exercise is in a warehouse.

  It’s late afternoon by the time we leave the archives, so the workday is pretty much over. I bid goodbye and thanks to my student accomplices, and on the subway back to the hotel I come to a realization: anything I find here will reflect my grandfather’s public life, the 9-to-5 version of him in a highly political environment. It’s not as if I’ll uncover his private, unguarded thoughts as to why he made what turned out to be a colossal mistake.

  In the Wuhan city of Hankou, Carleton lived in a modern, Western-style apartment during the war. Sanjie, his niece, says he lived on the second floor of an apartment. “Two bedrooms, one for him and one for his mother.” Sofa, coffee table, record player, calligraphy on the wall, and a piano. He owned a rickshaw pulled by a laborer to get him around town.

  My mother and I visit this apartment building during our trip. It still stands today, having survived wartime bombardment by the Japanese in 1938 and the US B-29s in 1944. This is rather impressive for Hankou; the city twice burned to the ground (in 1844 and in 1911) and has flooded over countless times.

  First, we notice the arch entrance, leading to an alley. This is the signature design of hundreds of structures in Shanghai and Hankou, “stone-gate houses,” or shikumen. “Yan Qing Li,” she says, reading the sign that hangs over the arch. A local historian has told me Yan is the surname of the builder who erected this structure soon after the historic flood of 1931. Atop the concrete face of the arch it reads: “A 1933 D”—AD 1933, I assume. Inside the alley there are entry doorways to individual apartment units on either side. Suddenly a man emerges from one door, slapping his back with a towel as if he’s just emerged from a shower. He is wearing boxer shorts and nothing else. Perhaps sixty or so, this man is entirely comfortable with his bald head and protruding potbelly. We approach.

  “Do you live here?” I ask. He nods but makes no eye contact. He whips his towel across his back again. My mother asks if anyone still lives here who was around in the 1940s. He shakes his head.

  “This place once belonged to a capitalist,” he says. “Before liberation.” The owner rented out units until the Communist government took ownership, and the tenants have all changed over.

  “My father lived here,” my mother says, and the man turns toward her. Now he’s interested. He looks at her, in a purple blouse and silk summer pants, and says to me: “She looks like a capitalist.”

  “My grandfather’s name was Sun Ditang,” I tell him. “Have you heard it?”

  “No. He must have been rich.”

  “I’m not sure,” my mother says.

  “You said he had a rickshaw. Of course he was rich. That’s pretty simple.” Towel slap, towel slap. He lifts his chin to bid us goodbye and walks into his house.

  ***

  It seems to me there is a lot more space in today’s China to discuss the once-touchy issue of collaboration. Not at the official history-book level, but in less formal contexts. China historian Rana Mitter of the University of Oxford referred me to oral histories on the topic, noting specifically a set of video interviews produced by a noted Chinese state television anchor named Cui Yongyuan. Cui interviewed hundreds of people about the war, in an online series called My War of Resistance.

  In one section, several men now in their eighties explain their own collaboration with the Japanese side. Here are three reasons from three different men interviewed:

  “I decided to try working for the Wang Jingwei navy. I figured, ‘If it’s good, I’ll stay. If not, I’ll go to Chongqing [to join the KMT].’ Today we would call it bourgeois thinking. Back then, I wanted to get promoted and make money.”

  “Wang Jingwei came and saw that I could speak well. And I dared to speak. So I joined him.”

  “We had no food to eat. I needed to take care of my family. Joining the [Communist] Eighth Route Army would have meant too much suffering and poverty. So I opted against that.”

  These were self-interested men, looking for the best deals for themselves and their families. Self-interest over ideology. And then there is collaboration in film. In 2007 when I was in Shanghai, the award-winning director Ang Lee released the erotic spy thriller Lust, Caution. Based on a 1942 wartime novel by Eileen Chang, it received lots of attention on the mainland, mostly for its adult NC-17 rating. The mainland version redacted the raciest scenes, though curious, tech-savvy Chinese netizens found easy workarounds. The Marketplace Shanghai bureau intern at the time, Edward Sheng, said the main reason young people used these web proxies to jump over “the great firewall” was to view the forbidden scenes from Lust, Caution.

  In the film, the female lead is sent to assassinate a dashing male Shanghai collaborator working for the Japanese occupation. It all goes south when she falls for him and they become lovers. Not to give it all away, but the whole setup of Good Girl taking out Bad Guy turns murky in a hurry.

  Wang Jingwei died in 1944, an utter failure. Outmaneuvered by the Japanese in 1940, he did not envision the United States entering the war. When this happened, Wang told his son that if the Washington-Guomindang alliance won, his family’s honor would be lost. This, of course, happened.

  But here is a footnote to the story that I find fascinating. Wang’s widow was put on trial, in a case that challenges the narrative of good resisters versus bad collaborators. Her name was Chen Bijun. In June 1946, GMD lawyers tried Chen Bijun as an enemy traitor in a Suzhou courtroom, though in reality it was just a show. Publicity materials described this as a “traitor trial.” She was charged with colluding, on behalf of herself and her late husband Wang Jingwei, with the Japanese prime minister, at a time “when all Chinese were united against Japanese aggression.”

  Chen Bijun flipped the script entirely during her defense, delivering a rage-filled indictment of the GMD. She argued that the GMD army were the cowards, retreating into the mountains and then selling out to US and British foreign interests. Meantime, Chen argued, Wang Jingwei’s regime kept the Chinese people fed and alive, even under Japanese occupation. She blasted the Chiang regime for postwar hyperinflation and mass unemployment; life after the war was worse than during it. And Chen cited a saying that went around at the time, that GMD leaders were corrupt and cared only about gold bars, cars, houses, women, and face. It’s snappier in Mandarin: jinzi, chezi, fangzi, nuzi, mainzi.

  Chen Bijun received an ovation from the public observers in the courtroom. She was mobbed for autographs. After receiving a sentence of life in prison—a foregone conclusion—she slammed the GMD’s attempt to “deceive three-year-old children” about who the real war heroes were.
Chen died in jail in 1959.

  ***

  After the war ended, Carleton Sun laid low from politics and shifted to the business of honeybee production and needle trading for several years. His letters to Mildred make reference to needle import taxes, tax rebates, and Guangzhou honey prices. Here is one from November 1950:

  Guangzhou honey prices are low. Shanghai prices also fell 10 percent. But that’s okay. As for needles, we can’t sell #22, but we can ship over #32. If the price is good, let’s pursue that.

  He was arrested, as best we know, at some point in the next year. Mildred wrote in 1951:

  There is still no information from my husband yet. About a couple weeks ago I tried to get in touch with him indirectly. But in vain. . . . No letter came since April. War brings us bankruptcy and separation.

  By then, two purges were under way on the mainland. Mao unleashed the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries in October 1950, exhorting citizens to turn in spies, agents, journalists, students taught abroad, foreign company workers, Catholics, and remnants of the old GMD and Wang Jingwei regimes. Many were executed, as Chairman Mao set execution quotas of 0.1 percent of the population in some areas.

  This campaign overlapped with another, called the Three-Antis Campaign, whose triple targets were corruption, waste, and profiteering government officials. Bureaucrats deemed crooked were fined and tortured, and sometimes executed. Bankers famously committed suicide by jumping out of high-rises, prompting Shanghai’s mayor to ask, “How many paratroopers are there today?”

  The exact date of Carleton Sun’s arrest remains unclear to me. The records in various Shanghai offices conflict—or at the very least, they don’t go together. Property records in the neighborhood police station near the Light of the Sea School show he was sent to prison on March 26, 1952. An officer at the city’s central police station in Shanghai told me my grandfather was arrested in July 1951, and then convicted in July 1953 as a counterrevolutionary. He was sentenced to fifteen years, Aunt Lily recalls, based on conversations with mainland relatives in the ’70s.