by Scott Tong
“Fine. I’ll break it.” The elderly shopkeeper woman flings my change onto the counter, adding a glare for good measure. I linger a second and to my right see a younger woman with the same exact round face. Surely she’s the shopkeeper’s daughter. She clutches an infant wearing the one thing every Chinese baby does in the summer: a one-piece jumper with a massive slit on the bottom. This allows for real-time potty training anywhere—just squat and go.
“Can you tell which part of him looks like a boy?” the elderly woman asks, no longer surly. We both laugh, and the ice breaks. She asks me what has brought me to the end of the earth, and I give my abridged tale: Chinese American, Tong village, Grand Canal, Subei province.
She cuts me off. “I know all those places. I used to work on the Grand Canal,” on a freight barge that began in Shandong province in the north and motored all the way down to Zhejiang province, near Shanghai. The trek took three weeks each way.
“Wow. It must have been hard work.”
“No, not really.” I hardly hear Chinese people admitting this. “We’d work till we stopped at a port for loading and off-loading. Then we didn’t push off until the next morning.”
I must have gotten stuck on her accent, because she stops talking. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” I nod. Eighty percent is getting through, which for these purposes is enough. I learn her grandson is coming up on his hundredth day, and she asks about my children. I pull out my mobile to show her a few.
“IPhone,” she says, and then turns her focus to the images. “Will your kids go to Harvard? Harvard is the best, right?” This is an important question to her. “What’s second best? Third?” She wants her grandson to attend Harvard, then changes her mind. Too far away.
New topic. “When will you retire?” she asks.
I shrug. “Too early to think about.”
“As long as I can get my kids through college and married, and my grandson raised, my work will be done.” This strikes me with two thoughts: how quickly China is changing now, allowing regular people to prosper; and how long it took to finally get here—after false starts, war, floods, famine, and internal witch hunts. Finally, with this generation, the seeds of change my ancestors helped plant are taking root.
My beers are getting warmer, so I grab my shopping bag and snacks and vow to stop by again. In truth, we both know I won’t. “We have a connection,” the shopkeeper says. “When you walk out, I’ll be sad.”
I have arrived in Xining with two promising contacts. The first is a mysterious distant uncle of a friend. He works for a government office that keeps records from the camps. The uncle walks into my hotel in a suit, which is unusual—perhaps he’s high up.
He can only meet briefly. I ask him where records go when a prisoner dies. Do they still exist?
“When someone died, they contacted the family” to come and retrieve remains and possessions, he says. “But back then, there was no phone, no e-mail, no cellphones. So after a while, if we didn’t hear back, the body was just buried.”
I ask if he can help me gain access to department files. The uncle says he’ll try, which means no.
“What’s your name?” I ask as he heads to the door. He gives the pause of a man savvy enough to survive in this system.
“Just call me ‘old man.’”
Contact Number Two gives his name immediately, perhaps because he’s retired. Mr. Jin worked as a manager at the prison department, and he in fact is the son of a Delingha prisoner. His father was convicted as a “historic counterrevolutionary” for aiding the GMD before the 1949 liberation. But unlike Carleton, his father survived his sentence.
Many ex-cons stayed in Qinghai to work in the prison economy. There are opportunities here, and their pasts make them unemployable back home. “Your record, your history, it never leaves you,” my uncle Tong Qi in Changzhou once told me.
Mr. Jin takes me by cab to his old department to hunt for records. “Maybe they still have his sentencing document.” Mr. Jin is short and half bald, and makes extended eye contact in a way that tells me to never cross him.
“What about his personnel dossier?” I ask. I’d received conflicting information as to whether a person’s file was destroyed upon his death. Historian Frank Dikötter of the University of Hong Kong once told me he stumbled upon old personnel files for sale at a Chinese outdoor market—a fitting marriage of authoritarianism and capitalism.
“They’re supposed to be kept forever.”
The department is housed in a large tan building with a sign on either side: QINGHAI PROVINCIAL PRISON MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT on the right and QINGHAI PRISON ENTERPRISE GROUP LIMITED COMPANY on the left. Privatization has come to this place. In the front hallway, Mr. Jin flashes an ID card to the guard and signs a registration book. “He’s with me,” he says to the guard, shooting me a look of keep walking and don’t pull out your passport.
The file room is filled with ceiling-height file cabinets, almost like a corporate human resources department. Two women work at desks facing each other—they are the gatekeepers. Mr. Jin explains we’re looking for files for a man surnamed Sun. Perhaps it’s listed under Sun Honglie. Or Sun Ditang. Or Sun Yi. I give all three names.
“Sit.” One of the women motions us to a set of nice soft leather chairs. Perhaps this is the private-sector Qinghai Prison Enterprise Group Limited Company. The woman walks to one cabinet and pulls a handle revealing a set of card catalogs, like an old library’s Dewey decimal system back home.
Indeed, the woman looks stereotypically librarian-ish: wire-rimmed glasses, no-nonsense straight hair, humor challenged. Her two fingers walk through a set of cards, then another. “Nothing,” she says, returning to her desk. We approach. Are you sure? Yes. Did you check all three names? Yes. Are all the files from labor camps here? (I’d received conflicting answers to this question.)
“We have all the files,” she says, not a bit perturbed. “Except for laojiao.” There were two types of prisoners in the system. Laojiao, or “reeducation through labor,” was in concept a shorter-term punishment for lesser convicts. Carleton Sun fell under the more severe category of laogai, or “reform through labor.”
We walk out, stuck and lacking options for the moment. I need a bit of air to think about the next step, though Mr. Jin needs something else. “Lunchtime,” he says. “I’m taking you to eat mutton.”
Mr. Jin has his own fascinating story. After working for the prison department that put his own father in the gulag, he retired and took a job at a direct marketing consumer goods company. This company just six years prior had been declared a lawless “evil cult” by the central government. Now the firm is a thriving, legitimate enterprise pulling in $3 billion a year. Mr. Jin is a salesman for Amway.
He warns me about going to Delingha. “You can’t take a train there. They won’t sell you a ticket.” Indeed, it is a nuclear weapons testing zone. The safe bet is to take a long-distance bus ride, which means eight or nine bumpy hours at high altitude. “You’ll be able to buy a bus ticket no problem.”
We return to the prison department/company two days later. “Did you find another name for him?” the same woman asks. I’ve called three people in the States, but only come back with an additional nickname of his that’s highly unlikely to be the right one here. She confirms this—nothing. I pepper her with more questions: “Any chance the system got one character wrong in his name?” No, I’ve tried alternatives. “Can I flip through the card catalog myself?” Only staff members. “Are there any records stored elsewhere?” No. “Can I look at one of the cards?”
On this she relents, passing me a yellowed prisoner-registration card. It reads:
Prisoner number.
Personnel dossier (dang an) number.
Name.
Additional names.
Sex.
Age.
Date of birth.
Component social status.
Hometown.
Address.
Ethnicity.
<
br /> Job prior to arrest.
Sentence.
Crime.
Starting/ending date.
Date jailed.
The woman reaches to take the card back, then lowers her voice to say something that contradicts her previous statement. “Basically, we don’t have all the files from Delingha camp.” Perhaps it was true that when the camp shut down in the 1980s, its files had nowhere to go. They got destroyed, or misplaced. “Even if we had a card for your grandfather, it wouldn’t have much information. Many don’t even list the date of death.” In some cases, I’d read, authorities lied outright about a cause of death, to cover up mass starvation during the famine. Some simply listed the cause as bing, disease.
“I suggest you just go there and see it,” she says. “You came so far from America. A lot of prisoner relatives have come here looking for the same thing. The best thing you can do is take some soil from the labor camp and bring it home to bury it. It’s very meaningful. You should do that.”
This presents a face-saving solution for both of us. She exits the situation without admitting failure, and I have a symbolic gesture to pursue. I bid goodbye to her, and then Mr. Jin, and walk in the direction of the long-distance bus station.
Part of me anticipates the long bus ride ahead. In my experience, slow, long-distance travel is the best chance to see a fight.
Once, in 2007, in the dead of night in middle-of-nowhere Zhejiang province, a migrant teenage woman bus worker whose job was to take tickets on the bus simply lost it. She was teased by a tall young man who refused to present his ticket and demanded the driver take a different route. She tried to shush him, he badgered on, and the ugly words escalated. A bathroom break temporarily defused the situation. “Ten minutes,” the girl declared as the bus pulled over on a dark stretch of two-lane road. All the women got off and went left toward the shops. The men, including me, peeled off to the right to urinate directly into a concrete ditch on the shoulder (in these moments, the Chinese man is an unparalleled multitasker, able to conduct his business, operate his cellphone, and light a smoke all at once).
Bus Monitor Girl and Passenger Boy started up again on the edge of the ditch. Suddenly a crowd materialized around them. Passenger Boy must have delivered a piercing insult, because Bus Monitor Girl rushed him, swinging wildly and screaming something fierce. Unfortunately for her, he had four inches and perhaps forty pounds on her. He grabbed her and flung her into the ditch.
She pulled herself up and screamed something primal again. The bus driver stepped between them and shouted for everyone to get back on. Show over.
A more vivid boy-versus-girl fight came at close range a couple years later. My assistant Cecilia Chen and I were taking a slow train in Hunan. Our timing was terrible. The trip came on the most traveled week before Chinese New Year, the largest movement of humanity on the planet.
Any seats were long gone by the time we boarded. We carved out a bit of space by the door, squeezed in with two dozen other people. Amazingly, a pair of girls—perhaps teenagers—boxed out enough fellow travelers to make room to sit on tiny four-inch stools, around a rice pot. They were migrants from the countryside with no makeup, no discernible hair product, no deodorant.
From time to time, they’d pop the top of the rice pot and dig into their meal, which consisted entirely of bright-red Hunan peppers atop white rice. One girl, upon closer examination, looked mentally challenged—her eyes didn’t focus quite right, and it appeared she hadn’t combed her short hair in days. The other, perhaps an older sister, wore a round face and midlength ponytail, constantly directing the other what to do. An hour later, she unveiled a pack of dried watermelon seeds and the two worked on them, cracking them with their front teeth, swallowing the meat and spitting the shells into the rice pot.
At the first stop, one or two passengers boarded and dove into the crowd, incident-free. Stop two, though, was a major city. The door opened and a pack of five or six teenage boys, each with cheaply dyed orange hair, rushed off, bumping the Hunan Pepper Girls. The ponytailed one cursed. A minute later, another man with regular black hair came running to exit before the door closed. In his haste, he knocked over the Pepper Girls’ rice pot and bowled over the confused-looking sister. He almost took me down as well.
He cussed. The ponytailed Pepper Girl screamed back. This all took place in a local Hunan dialect, but, really, when you’ve been worn down by heat and human density, the language doesn’t much matter. Everyone speaks venom.
His dignity at stake, the young man countered with some rude comment. He stepped off and they continued yapping at each other. But the physical distance—him outside, her inside—seemed to sap the energy of the exchange, and we stood there awaiting the door to close.
It didn’t. So the Pepper Girl spat a wad of watermelon seeds—and associated saliva—at the man, accurately enough to nail him in the face. He paused for a moment, and then dropped his duffel and charged her.
I don’t exactly remember what happened next, as I found myself in the middle of the swinging arms and fists. I ducked my head into my arms but still got struck by glancing blows. This was one of those silent fights, with only the sound of combatants exhaling. And in a moment, it was over. Neither party seemed to win the bout. The combatants flung one last set of insults, and the man stepped off.
The door finally closed, at which point the Pepper Girl gave one last grumble. And then, remarkably, life on the train resumed as if nothing had happened. In America a dispute like this would prompt travelers to ask if she was okay. There’d be outrage at a boy fighting a girl. The event would be mined for some broader meaning about society.
Not here. The Pepper Girls reached into a bag and began working on a third snack.
The bus ride to Qinghai turns out remarkably uneventful. Silently we cross the frontier of traditionally defined China. Historically, the territory of ancient China was described as the land between Four Seas (sihai): Lake Baikal in modern Russia to the north, the South China Sea below Hong Kong to the south, the East China Sea off the eastern coast, and Qinghai Lake to the west. Delingha exists well beyond the lake.
However Delingha might have looked back then, today it welcomes visitors the way other Chinese cities do: with bright lights. Well past midnight, I awake to see a well-lit, official-looking building that spans two or three football fields. Alongside it runs a manmade marine-blue river, lit from the bottom like a swimming pool. The Chinese infrastructure boom has stretched clear from the eastern lip of Shanghai to this little-known missile-testing city on the Western edge.
“Welcome.” The simply dressed middle-aged man I’d arranged to meet waits at a quiet street corner that doubles as a bus stop. I’ll be staying with him, as I’m told Delingha hotels are off-limits to foreigners. “Tomorrow we see the nongchang,” he says, the farm. My host’s father had been a Delingha prisoner as well, around the same era as my grandfather.
When I meet the old man the next morning, he shares a few of his own memories and then looks straight at me through cataract-clouded eyes and points a crooked finger: “If you write about this, don’t use my real name.”
No wonder this Chinese story is still so largely unknown to its people. Far more has been written and spoken about the Mao Zedong’s twin tragedies: the mass famine caused by the Great Leap Forward and the political witch hunts of the Cultural Revolution. Those events involved far more people. There were far fewer forced labor convicts (1.5 to 8 million) than those who starved in the famine (thirty million to forty million plus) or persecuted during the Cultural Revolution (hundreds of millions). The gulag era also began earlier, so there aren’t many survivors left. Another factor could be that there is no widespread, acclaimed Chinese version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s book on the Soviet prison camps, The Gulag Archipelago. But I also get a sense after meeting with several prisoners of that era that they’re also scared to talk. Six decades after the blame and indoctrination sessions, fear of the state apparatus remains.
I’m not sure how I’ll react to being in Delingha. There’s been so much buildup to this moment—talking to relatives, chasing documents, reading and rereading family letters, interviewing old prisoners, promising to keep identities private, listening to my mother and her sister talk about their father Carleton Sun for hours at a time. What does this moment mean? So much is made in Chinese society about xun gen—searching for your roots. But when you physically come as close as you can to the actual roots, what happens then?
The first reaction is entirely physical and unemotional: breathlessness, from the altitude and my asthma. Asthmatics often describe their struggle as breathing through a straw, but here it’s more like a coffee stirrer. On the first day, I can only walk a couple hundred yards before resting.
The other reaction is that of being tardy. One phrase keeps replaying in my mind: “You came too late for this.” Sun Peipei, my mother’s second cousin and Carleton Sun’s great-niece in Shanghai, has said this more than once. It’s too late to find anyone still alive who remembers Carleton’s politics, or his arrest, or his imprisonment or death. It also seems too late for documents. So what am I really here to see?
“Here it is.” The driver turns left off the main road a half hour outside Delingha city, to the grounds of the old prison labor camp. It doesn’t look like we’ve turned into, well, anything. It all looks the same here: yellow-brown dirt and gravel and dust—the monochrome look of a moonscape. The only interruptions to the scene are a few trees, a smattering of barley and oil vegetable plants, and several goats. I finger a plastic bag in my pocket.
“There are no people here,” I say. The place reminds me of the entirely abandoned town in West Texas I’d visited for a story: Happy, Texas. More than a decade after farmers overdrilled and drained the aquifer dry, the place ran out of water and everybody moved away. My host and driver look at me as if to say: What did you expect?