A Village with My Name

by Scott Tong

  We pull over at an old-fashioned irrigation ditch, so rudimentary it might go back to the 1950s. “Do you think the early prisoners dug these irrigation trenches?” I ask. Shrug. Maybe. Driving on, we spot a few signs of life: two very old houses with clay walls and holes in the roofs, a primitive water well, and a wheelbarrow from a long time ago. And more goats.

  Then we come upon an old graveyard. It is a wide-open space with no headstones or identifying names, just a vast stretch of oval mounds, one per body. “These are probably from the ’70s,” my host says. That’s too recent. I ask to see an older makeshift cemetery, which looks pretty much the same—except with darker-colored sand. It looks eerily similar to the shallow graves I saw at a Somali refugee camp in 2011, though in East Africa the mounds were topped with sharp tree branches to deter foraging coyotes. In much of the world, this is the way you leave it—simply and namelessly.

  A wood plank sticking up from the ground just about trips me. It’s maybe twice the size of a small cutting board. The planks, my host explains, once had the names of the deceased—etched on it or written in ink. By now, the board was perfectly blank, smoothed over by heat and snow, sand and wind. Literally airbrushed from history. I can only make out one other plank. Perhaps the others are covered under sand, buried with their owner, or never even existed at all in this vast tomb of the unknown prisoner.

  I bend down to grab a fistful of graveyard soil, with an image in my mind of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, frantically planting seeds at the end of an unfulfilled life. Surely my grandfather had similar thoughts in this place, I tell myself. I fish out the plastic bag from my pocket and toss in the soil—just as the bureaucrat woman suggested—to bring with me back home.

  Given the vague and thinly documented information I have on Carleton Sun, I am left with a few dozen pieces of a five-hundred-piece puzzle. There are academic books and others’ memoirs from the gulag; a documentary-style film, Jiabiangou, on the topic; and the personal recollections of a handful of prisoners. If he’d have kept diaries or letters, those would have been confiscated. There are no remains or prison belongings still around; mainland relatives vaguely recall that a few of my grandfather’s personal items were returned after he died, but they were very young children in the 1950s and their parents are gone. Indeed, I waited too long to start chasing all this.

  I also have my imagination. So I’ve decided to put the following three letters in Carleton’s words, as he might have described life in the Delingha prison labor camp. To be clear, what follows is a passage of fiction. These are not his direct words, though several passages come directly from anonymous sources I’ve met. This type of allegorical writing is common among Chinese writers today, to convey a certain reality and still detour around government censors. To me, it gives voice not just to Carleton Sun, but to the millions who perished alongside him.

  1955

  Zhen,

  Two years have gone by since they put me in a freight railcar and banished me far to the west. They took everything—my watch, my books, my clothes. Even my hair. We were all shaved after arriving, and got matching black clothing and cotton quilted jackets. In the winter it is colder than I can imagine. The dryness of the mountain air is just as bad, bringing cracks to my lips and fingers and heels.

  Are you still living in Diamond Hill in Hong Kong? Life is so hard for you there. Did you manage to make enough money to send the children to school? Did the Dai family help you get visas for Argentina or Chile? Every day I wonder where you are. Is my mother still alive?

  One of the hardest things is not being allowed to talk during work. If we break the rule, we pay for it at the struggle session. Repeat offenders get beaten, not by the guards but other prisoners. One man, a skinny guy with glasses, tried to run away and escape, but he was caught and executed by firing squad. Intimidation fuels this place. The thing is, even if anyone got out, he couldn’t survive Qinghai. It is so barren. There is nothing here.

  In struggle sessions, they brainwash us. I think it’s working. First we criticize ourselves, like confession in a church but in front of everyone. We all tell bad thoughts. Bad deeds. They pick a person each night to criticize, and we have to join in or we’re the next target.

  Honglie

  “During that period, we were like Roman gladiators. If you kill someone else, you live.” This is how Wei Xiezhong, the former Delingha prisoner, describes the Lord of the Flies environment there. Wei tells me about the time he betrayed another man.

  “There was this prisoner, named Liu, from northern Jiangsu. He’d been sentenced to twelve years for being a counterrevolutionary. Privately, he told me all his thoughts and experiences. Then, when food got scarce in 1960, we only got 18.5 jing of food per month.” That comes out to about three hundred grams per day—half of what the World Food Program deems a survival ration.

  “We were all in bed, preparing to die. But the farm still needed workers. Liu was strong and wanted to work. He said it helped him to go outside, forage for food and steal. He kept bugging and annoying me to let him do it.”

  Wei adjusts his glasses briefly and looks down. “So I informed on him. I told leaders Liu still had counterrevolutionary thoughts. I assumed being an informant would shorten my sentence. It didn’t. But Liu got a longer sentence. I met him years after we both got out and was so ashamed. He knew what I did, and I know what I did. These betrayals give us the most shame. And now all these years later, we are dealing with guilt at the end of our lives.”

  He asks if I know what it’s like to give confession in a Catholic church. I shake my head—not exactly in that way. I need a bathroom break and hurry over, experiencing my own surge of sorrow for the first time during this project. The gulag system, far from turning out politically reformed men, did something else: it stripped them of their humanity. Wei Xiezhong became a shadow of himself in Delingha, and surely my grandfather did as well.

  Looking into the bathroom mirror, I can hear my mother’s words coming back to me. Perhaps it’s better not to know everything. I take a breath, splash some water on my face, and wipe away the tears before rejoining the group.

  1957

  Zhen,

  I wish you could tell me about the children. How is Constantine? The girls work hard, but I hope he can focus on schoolwork. I hope you have found a way for them to keep going to school.

  Yesterday they asked us to fill out forms to put in our dossier, to write down the names of all our relatives and where they live, where they work. Who is your wife? Who is your uncle? Who is your grandfather? What is their work unit? We cannot skip any details. I’m afraid for you and other family members to be connected with me, but if I don’t write the truth and the Party finds discrepancies in our family, this will bring trouble for everyone.

  All our dignity has been taken away. You and the children are suffering in Hong Kong. And I am here, criticized for the choices I made. Some things I say are true, some are lies. We all manufacture lies to attack others and protect ourselves.

  Always we carry shovels to dig. When I first came, we dug roads and rail paths through the mountains. Now we dig trenches for irrigation so we can plant enough food to feed ourselves. We eat potatoes and mantou dumplings with no filling. They are hard to chew and digest, because the flour is less refined. Right now the food is enough.

  Leaders can’t kill us all, so they put us to work. Officially, they say reform is the number one goal and production is number two. Not true. Production is the most important thing. It is hard for us intellectuals to do labor, we’re not as strong. But we must keep up. It doesn’t matter what your crime is, so long as you produce.

  Remind the children about me. Tell them they can still get ten peanuts for each spoonful of cod liver oil. Tell them if they eat the root at the tip of the peanut, be careful: a peanut plant will grow out of their heads.

  Honglie

  By 1959, China’s great famine had arrived and starvation was the main cause of death. “At that point, only
the thieves survived,” Wei says. “Me too. Stealing is the only reason I survived. During the harvest, everyone did, otherwise the food we grew would have shipped to somewhere else.”

  Wei does not offer specifics as to how he stole food. When I ask him if he feels guilty for surviving at someone else’s expense, he shakes his head. “There’s a twisted logic in China today. It’s okay to steal from the government, but you cannot steal people’s private things. Private property is sacred. It’s as if we go to dinner and fight over the check. If I say, ‘I can write it off on my expense report,’ we all stop fighting. People are immoral today because of this past. This is why we have so much corruption. Because of the Mao era.”

  1959

  Zhen,

  I don’t think I will survive this 15-year sentence. Food is so scarce now. Our grain rations are half of what they were a few years ago. Many men do not go out to work anymore. They are too weak. For now, I can keep going, but barely.

  It is hard to focus on anything, because we are always thinking of hunger and food.

  We know someone has died when a horse comes by. It pulls a cart with a body inside, wrapped in a large sheet and tied up. Each corpse gets what they call a soft burial. Of course there are no caskets, just shallow graves arranged haphazardly because men are dying so fast. Every day gets quieter.

  Not too long ago, I still had hopes of seeing you and the children. I assume everyone is still alive. By now, Lily and Constantine are adults over 20. Even Anna must be 16 or 17 by now. I cannot believe what I have missed. Likely my mother is gone by now.

  We have run out of hope here, for new ideas, for a new and strong China. Wang Jingwei said he did not believe the Communists would bring a better China. I fear he may have been right.

  Honglie

  The record is uncertain, but Carleton Sun died either during the famine, or just before it hit.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE BROTHER LEFT BEHIND IN THE WAR

  It’s best you don’t write about these things.

  —Uncle Tong Bao

  The older brother held the hands of an adult on either side as they boarded the boat. The grownups were his father and his father’s mistress, but the boy’s younger brother was not there. The trio had only two tickets, but somehow, as the crowds pushed onboard like cattle, they all made it on. The three took a set of stairs down to a dark, bottom-level cabin with barracks-style bunk beds.

  Already the room was filling up with people, but this was the safest place for the three to be discreet, just in case ticket checkers came. The boat, named Zhongxing, which means “resurgent,” was a converted cargo vessel, designed to carry perhaps five hundred passengers. More than twice that many had boarded.

  The location: port of Shanghai. It is February 1949.

  These three had been running from the Communists for weeks. The father had to get out: he’d taught law at a university whose president, Chiang Kai-shek, headed the Nationalist Guomindang government, and now the GMD was in full retreat. One month prior, the rival People’s Liberation Army forces took Beijing in the north and headed south toward the capital city, Nanjing.

  The three had left Nanjing two months before it fell. They’d boarded a bus in a hurry, and as it pulled away, the older brother spotted a dog trying to chase down the vehicle. “It was a small dog, maybe white,” the boy recalls six decades later. “I think it was my dog.” The older brother is my father.

  The bus took them to a Shanghai-bound train packed to the rivets. Some passengers were so desperate they clung to the outside rails; others balanced atop train cars, until the tunnels.

  “When the train went through the tunnel, those people got wiped out,” my father has said many times. This is his enduring war memory, although he didn’t see it himself. “The people on the train told us this.”

  They waited in Shanghai for more than a week before boarding the boat to Taiwan, and thank God they waited. By the time the Zhongxing steamed across the Taiwan Strait—passengers huddled, seasick, vomiting for days—they arrived to learn that another ship ferrying war refugees to and from Taiwan had sunk. One night before Chinese New Year’s Eve, the holiday in Asian culture, the Taiping, meaning “tranquility,” sailed with its lights off, due to wartime Shanghai’s night curfew. The ship struck a small cargo boat and sank in frigid January waters in half an hour. The Taiping had been licensed to carry 580 people, though in reality more than a thousand—perhaps as many as 1,500—got on. Only thirty-six survived. The estimated casualties are on the order of those from the sinking of the Titanic in 1915.

  Like so many refugee stories, my father’s escape story is stacked with close calls that can bring you to your knees. Why did his father choose to take him, and not his younger brother? How did they get space inside the train bound for Shanghai? Why didn’t they get tickets on the Taiping before it sank?

  My father landed in Taiwan at the age of ten and quickly climbed the education and economic ladders. You’ve heard this zero-to-60 immigration story before: He became a starting point guard on the high school basketball team and studied engineering at National Taiwan University. He met an American GI stationed on Taiwan and got baptized in a Lutheran church. In the early 1960s he joined a small wave of students to study in the United States, during a peak in US–Taiwan relations. He attended graduate school at the University of Minnesota, where he met the woman he would marry at a Chinese Student Association dance. Then he got a high-salary job at the only company he ever wanted to work for: IBM. He drove a 1967 Ford Mustang—four-door, yellow.

  Having heard this story a number of times, it now makes me wonder about the flip side, about the brother who did not get out. In a normal distribution, for all the winners of history there would be a proportional set of losers. Perhaps these losers were born in the wrong place at the wrong time and serendipity worked against them. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a parallel case, of a brother in the same family who traveled one road while my father traveled the other?

  That person is my uncle, the younger brother left behind.

  Technically, Tong Bao is my half uncle. Tong Bao and my father share a father—and thus the surname Tong—but were born to different mothers. But in my Chinese conversations, I can’t ever remember hearing the word “half” in this context. Family trumps accuracy.

  To be honest, my uncle can be a challenging interview. If I were reporting this story as traditional journalism, I would not choose him as a source. Sometimes you shake a tree all day and a single mango drops. Or to swap metaphors, Uncle Tong Bao can float on the surface of a conversation for hours, as if he’s wearing an emotional life jacket that doesn’t let him dive deep.

  Yet over time, I discovered his story of survival, abandonment and exile, public humiliation and reinvention, and redemption. The Tong Bao movie would have a dramatic soundtrack. But there is one problem: he doesn’t want the story told.

  “It’s best you don’t write about these things,” Uncle Tong Bao says at the coffee table in his modest apartment in northeast Shanghai. It is the summer of 2014. This was the last of dozens of conversations we’d have before I start drafting this book.

  I put down my pen. “Why not?”

  “Bu bi.” It’s not necessary.

  “But this book will be published in America, not here.”

  “I have friends in America. They might read about my private affairs.”

  “Friends in America. Do you have a lot?”

  “Six.”

  I sit on a low couch, looking at the last of some sixty pages of notes I’ve just scribbled about his extraordinary life. Six friends.

  “You should write the book this way,” Tong Bao offers. “You should focus only on my mother’s life, before 1945.”

  “Drink tea.” Aunt Qi Menglan enters and pours hot water in my teacup. She sits to my right on the couch, as Uncle Tong Bao leans back on a chair to my left. “Why don’t you write a novel?” she suggests. “You can change the names.”

  Goodness.
“Which parts are bu bi?” I ask. “What part of your life should I keep out?” The signature scene from the 1980s film Amadeus flashes, the one where the emperor tells Mozart that the composer’s masterpiece contains “too many notes.” My insincere reply is the same as Mozart’s: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?

  I don’t let a source decide what goes in or out of a story. It’s as absolute a rule as there is in journalism. Yet this situation feels different, as we’re talking about my uncle. The Professional Me is colliding with Filial Me. I repeat my offer: What sections should I take out?

  “Bu guangrong de.” The parts that are not glorious.

  I sip my tea. By now, the leaves have steeped so long it’s very bitter. I’ve avoided this confrontation, this conversation, for too long. Yet this moment was coming, one way or another.

  “This is my book,” I say, surprising even myself as the words came out. After so many years in China, I am tired of exercising self-restraint: Take the business card and smile. Drink the alcohol that goes down like Drano. This story has to be told in a real way—setbacks, infidelity, arrests, labor camps—to humanize what so many people have overcome. It has to be real.

  My uncle says nothing. So I kept talking, filibustering. It’s hard to litigate this kind of argument in your second language. “This is not a product of advertising or public relations. A book about just the glorious parts would be your book. Not mine.”

  Uncle Tong Bao looks away and folds his arms. “Then go ahead and write it.” It is an answer of resignation rather than permission. This is the first time I can remember angering him. Aunt Qi Menglan breaks the silence. “Then just write a good book. Write it beautifully.” She speaks in a more direct, unfiltered way about herself and her past. “I like books that are transparent. Honest.”