A Village with My Name

by Scott Tong

  I don’t know if I buy the concept of closure, but for sure this trip would have been the right time for my grandfather to return to China and apologize to the sons he had abandoned. After arriving in Taiwan, he built a white-collar life as a lawyer in Taipei and eventually retired to Northern California. Surely he thought of Tong Bao and Tong Qi all these years—or did he?

  The Buick purrs smoothly in on the left lane, overtaking vehicles creeping dangerously slow. The further out one ventures from a Chinese city, the less predictable the adventure gets. Just past one exit off-ramp, a VW sedan is driving backward up the shoulder. Obviously the driver had missed the exit. “The car’s from Anhui province,” Chengkan grumbles, shaking his head. There is a certain Shanghai view of the world, kind of like the distorted New Yorker magazine cartoon cover we’ve all seen: the less-important people and vehicles in the distance barely register on the sketch. Half an hour on, a box truck has jackknifed on the right. “Drivers stay on the road too long and they get tired and fall asleep,” he says. “They all want overtime.”

  This trip is a long time coming, with a cousin I’d never met until I was well into my thirties. We’d talked about it for years, but the scheduling stars never aligned. I was constantly on the road for Marketplace, and his General Motors factory job demanded inconvenient shifts. On more than one occasion, I’d wondered about my “what if” life. What if my dad had been the sibling left behind? What if I were the mainland cousin, driving—of all vehicles—a Buick?

  My cousin has no time for theoretical musing. “No point in thinking about that.” Each day has enough trouble of its own. From the driver’s seat, he starts uploading random thoughts about the present. “European films are very philosophical, whereas American movies are all shooting and blowing things up,” he says. Chinese films are luan qi ba zao. A big mess. His favorite composers are Chopin, Shostakovich, and Bach. My cousin doesn’t understand why Americans like Brad Pitt are so obsessed with a certain frontier province in the Himalayas, as if the treatment of monks there matters to regular Chinese people. “Don’t write about that part.”

  Tong Chengkan reveals he has a new girlfriend, but again there is a “however.” He is sinking under her expectations of gifts and declarations of love (editor’s note: they have since broken up).

  The OnStar lady notifies us we’ve missed a turn near Changzhou, prompting him to sigh and scramble. “Changzhou drivers are crazy and break the rules.” This is indeed a lower-profile city without the trophy high-rises of Beijing or Shanghai. “Here, you can buy an apartment for ten thousand renminbi per square meter,” he says, instantly rattling off a property statistic like so many in China. “In Shanghai that would buy a place way outside the city.”

  We meet Uncle Tong Qi and his wife and son (an architect) at their apartment. Like his brother, Tong Qi was also exiled to the countryside for a decade. And after the national college entrance exam returned, he took it and also aced it. By the time we settle into a Changzhou restaurant, I ask about The Grandfather Reunion.

  It turns out my grandfather waffled on meeting his own sons—he almost didn’t show. In 2000, Grandpa Tong was taking a group tour of China. Before the tour began, he’d made plans to see them but didn’t commit to a time or a place. By the time the tour hit Shanghai, my father and his siblings spent hours on the phone convincing my grandfather to meet Tong Bao and Tong Qi. He almost backed out.

  “He eventually decided to meet with us, but by then there wasn’t much time left in his schedule,” Uncle Tong Qi says. The tour was about to move on. The only option was to meet very late at night in Shanghai’s Hua Ting Hotel, where the tour group was staying. “I had a big exam the next day,” Tong Chengkan says, but there was no choice but to go.

  From Changzhou, Uncle Tong Qi’s family rushed onto the soonest train. “It was so late. We booked a return trip on a 3 a.m. train.” The uncles and their families arrived at nine, and Grandpa Tong came two hours later. Finally, they came face to face: these brothers and the father they never knew.

  The meeting was, by all accounts at the table, a bust. They exchanged greetings and small talk. My grandfather commented on “how tall we were,” Chengkan says. “And how the Tong family has no short kids!” After an hour, my grandfather excused himself to go to bed, and that was it. There was no talk of the 1949 abandonment, no questions about political suffering or icicle torture or the famine—all because of his politics. I suppose, to be fair, my grandfather could not have anticipated Mao’s crackdown against these Tongs and so many millions. But to not even ask about this after so many years? This was unconscionable.

  The sons offered to meet again the next day. But their father did not call again.

  “Just one hour,” Tong Chengkan says calmly as he eats.

  I am the incredulous one. “That’s it?”

  “It was not particularly successful,” Tong Qi says, as if he were commenting on a game of cards.

  The dinner comes to an awkward end. A creature, perhaps from the roach family, surfaces from bottom of the sea cucumber soup. As the guest from America, I choose not to be the one to discover this and try to eat as normal. Soon after, Uncle Tong Qi’s wife, Luo Jiana, shrieks. She hollers for the female manager, who takes a little too long to commit to action. In front of all of us—and now the entire restaurant—the manager ladles out the critter and starts walking away with it. “I took it out,” she declares.

  Aunt Luo Jiana explodes. “That’s all you’re going to do? We can’t eat this now!”

  The manager glares at my aunt and takes away the entire sea cucumber platter. Minutes later she comes back with the same dish in a suspiciously similar-looking bowl. I suspect she has simply gone into the kitchen and executed a slow U-turn. And then a fly turns up in the noodle soup. Aunt Luo Jiana does not know what to say by this point. And since we’re just about done, we get up to leave. She demands that the dinner be free, on the house. I don’t think she gets what she asks for, and I look away as she settles the bill at the front of the restaurant. Cousin Chengkan and I drive back to Shanghai.

  I start speaking about my grandfather in a way Chinese grandsons are not supposed to—how he left behind a pregnant wife and toddler for another woman; how he stayed away for five decades, how he didn’t even ask his sons left behind about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. I’ll never forget Uncle Tong Bao’s words about his mother’s torture at the hands of her students: There are things that happened in that classroom that we will never know.

  To be honest, it’s hard to fume in your second language, but my cousin understands the point. He just nods amen to the sermon, and then speaking with his inside voice. “Why would he just give us an hour?” he asks rhetorically. “Didn’t he care what happened to us?”

  Then he pivots and says something that makes me turn toward him. “I’ve always wondered whether this runs in the family.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Selfishness. Do you think we’ll turn out the same way?”

  My grandfather died in 2011, at the age of 101, in Northern California. I served as pallbearer alongside my brother Tony, our cousin Calvin, and Uncle John and Uncle Simon and Uncle Jimmy. My dad happened to be traveling overseas in Taiwan at the time, and called his brother Uncle Tong Bao in China to share the news.

  “Dad died,” my father recalls saying. Tong Bao gave a respectful “Oh.” And that was the end of the conversation—the end of a relationship that never was.

  A year later, cousin Chengkan and I meet for dinner at a small Cantonese-style restaurant on Shanghai’s west side. I break some bad news to him. My grandfather’s widow (his third wife) years ago had taken control of his estate. Seven-eighths of the money went to Wife 3’s three daughters, born in Taiwan. The son from Wife 1—my father—got one-eighth. That meant the mainland sons born to Wife 2—Tong Bao and Tong Qi in China—received nothing. One final slap.

  “I want to tell you my feelings,” Chengkan says after a few minutes. This time he is a li
ttle less diplomatic. “When Grandfather died, it meant nothing to me.”

  I nod and say nothing.

  “This may not sound very nice. But I feel no relationship to the Tong side of the family. No connection.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  LONELY AND SMOTHERED

  The Only Child

  Why does everybody want everything Western?

  —Cousin Tong Chengkan

  On the one day he needed to perform spectacularly on a test, Tong Chengkan did not. I’ve never heard him mention the nationwide university entrance exam, but his mother does. It’s a difficult conversation in their apartment, as if the entire family underperformed. The result has dictated much of his adult life.

  “He did not attend a top university,” she says. Tong Chengkan is out of the apartment at the moment, as he often is, perhaps cycling his high-end Giant road bike or rehearsing with the community orchestra. I imagine the point is, at some level, to avoid conversations like these.

  I’m a bit confused. “I thought he attended Tongji University, like his father?” Tongji is an elite university in engineering and architecture. She shakes her head.

  “No, no. There’s Tongji professional school, and Tongji trade school. They’re entirely different.” Tong Chengkan graduated with a trade degree in electricity and mechanical automation before taking his job as an equipment manager at the GM plant. The plant assembles Cadillacs and other vehicles for the Great China Market. For most American parents, this would be a perfectly acceptable career path, but something else is eating at his mother: before he took this GM job, he somehow passed up an opportunity at a better one, an office job with a state-owned company. She speaks as if this were unforgivable. We all turn quiet, as if we’re all conducting the same thought experiment: What if my cousin had done better? Where would he be now? Married and living in his own place?

  It’s hard to overstate the importance of the entrance exam. It makes all the difference in where you attend college, and that academic pedigree matters far more than it does in the United States. It’s as if your whole life boils down to your SAT score (thank goodness for me it did not).

  Tong Chengkan’s blue-collar job seems quite good to me. He inspects and repairs assembly-line machinery, making a middle-income salary at what in China is a superstar company. There are no bad Buick jokes here. In fact, our grandfather would have been proud to know he works for GM and drives a Buick. In the 1980s in Taiwan, Grandpa Tong would sit on his couch and wax about his favorite auto brands, all American: Cadillac. Oldsmobile. Buick. The bigger the sedan, the better. Today on the mainland, American branches have a certain cachet: Krispy Kreme, Apple, Nike, New Balance, Disney, JanSport, Walmart, even Howard Johnson. This is despite geopolitical tensions. Young Chinese “don’t wear their nationalism,” a market research consultant once told me.

  The Buick brand’s success in China helps explain why the brand still exists at all. During the 2009 financial crisis in the United States, the parent firm GM jettisoned several historic company brands during its bankruptcy reorganization. It got rid of Saturn, Pontiac, Saab and Hummer. But GM retained Chevrolet, GMC, and Cadillac, as well as Buick, largely because of its China sales. These days, more Buick—or bie-ke—vehicles today sell in mainland China than mainland America.

  What’s surprising is, my cousin does not consider his employer to be a foreign multinational company. “I think of it as a state-owned Chinese firm,” he once told me. “Which makes my job more stable.” He’s half right. All foreign automakers in China must operate under a joint venture with a Chinese company. GM partners with the Shanghai city-owned Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, or SAIC. The Chinese partner’s name always goes first, so on back of every Buick, there’s the logo: SAIC-GM.

  General Motors fought hard for this partnership. In the early ’90s, both GM and its rival Ford wanted to enter China and courted SAIC as a partner. To up the ante and impress SAIC, GM offered to assemble luxury Cadillacs in China. Automotive industry analyst Michael Dunne tells the story in American Wheels, Chinese Roads: The Story of General Motors in China. He writes:

  No, SAIC said, Cadillac is too ostentatious, too over the top. The central government would kill the project if they were to see Cadillac on the cover page. Growing a little impatient, the SAIC team finally came out and named their target. What we really want, SAIC revealed, is Buick.

  Buick has enjoyed a long and successful history in China. In case you’ve not been to China and you’re laughing now, this is not a joke. The last emperor, Puyi, rode in a Buick, as did Shanghai urbanites during the Roaring ’20s and ’30s in China. Sun Yat-sen and Zhou Enlai, the legendary Communist-era premier and diplomat, were also fans.

  Early on in my Shanghai assignment, I reported a piece on this alternative automotive universe of China—every business reporter does. In the story, I mentioned that Cathy and I were looking to lease a vehicle—with a driver—for our family in China. Like many expats, we chose to avoid driving ourselves. A friend referred us to a vehicle leasing agent, a middleman, who went by the English name Alex.

  “I recommend a Buick, quite suitable for you,” he said on tape. Alex claimed he dealt frequently with expats and wanted to do the interview in English. “If you buy a US van, you are quite a little bit high class,” he said. Our problem was, the monthly rate for the Buick far exceeded our budget, so we went down-market and rented a Honda instead. For the story, I also interviewed a GM sales director, who highlighted a special designed-for-China Buick Century. It featured a longer wheelbase, to provide extra legroom for the executive in the second row.

  “There’s a very proud Buick hood ornament,” the sales director said. “In China the consumer still really appreciates the jewelry.” The notion of Buick bling struck me as odd. Every culture has its own rules of engagement for showing off. In China, you’re frowned upon if you brag about how fast your kid runs, or how much money you make, and yet you can roll down Huaihai Road with a gangster-size Buick ornament on the hood of your car.

  Buick was not the only foreign firm to successfully “localize” its product in early twentieth-century China. In 1902, British American Tobacco struggled at the outset, but then hired local Chinese artists to design ads promoting its Ruby Queen brand. By the 1930s, BAT was producing fifty-five billion smokes every year for Chinese men and women.

  ***

  Any international journalist will tell you that the “fixer” is the unsung hero of the news business. The job of the fixer is a hard job to define, simply because there are so many dimensions to a good one: translating, arranging travel, booking interviews, monitoring local papers and social media. A good fixer has a good network for finding stories and people, and for avoiding confrontations. If we go to a certain place, will we get followed? Detained? Blocked? Beat up?

  Some of my best moments in the world—as a reporter and as a person—have been with fixers. In Iraq in 2003, I worked with a Shi’a fixer named Fakher. He’d been part of the Shia resistance against Saddam Hussein’s Sunni crackdown. After taking our team throughout Basra and Nasiriyah, he said goodbye with one last request: if I’d buy his children T-shirts with the US flag on the front. He truly thought the American “liberation” would bring better days. I went to Target and bought them before realizing the postal service did not deliver to Iraq. Fakher was murdered a few years later, working for the New York Times, his body found in a trunk.

  At a Somali refugee camp in eastern Kenya, the biggest in the world, my fixer Paul warned me to stay on the edges of the camp. Al-Shabaab militants were active on the inside, he explained. In the car on the way back to Nairobi, he showed me how to send money via text message, texting continuously behind the wheel. In Venezuela, Yesman asked me to bring him a sack of Pampers for his baby girl, as the most basic goods were in short supply. Then he led me to the Colombian border, where grains in short supply were being smuggled out by the army. In Japan, Fumiyo led me through the tsunami-destroyed coast before offering to tak
e me shopping for a toilet seat with the plug-in warmer my kids requested.

  In China, fixers are hard to retain, and at the start I struggled to keep them. So many stay in the game for a few years and move on. As experienced English speakers, they are in high demand in the job market. One of mine was conflicted about doing stories that were embarrassing to China’s image. Another was finishing up university and quit after graduating. A third was sweet and diplomatic, but like many Chinese did not have an ability to say no. The conversations went something like this.

  Did you call person X yet?

  —Let me come talk to you about that.

  Is the expense report done?

  —You asked me to do these other things first.

  Is this a good story for us to chase?

  —It’s hard to say.

  The most important job of the fixer—far more important than scheduling, translating, reading, and chasing interviews—is calibrating risk. For a story on electronic waste (old computers around the world recycled and shipped illegally to China), one fixer smartly suggested we visit a town in Zhejiang rather than Guangdong, where plain-clothed thugs had harassed and beaten up reporters in the past. In a smuggler city at the border with Burma, she lectured me for wandering out late at night for ice cream and a haircut. “It’s not safe like Shanghai,” she said.

  On the mainland, the Chinese nationals who do this job face more risk and harassment and physical injury than their foreign reporter bosses making five or ten times more money. If I get into some incident, I can extricate myself, or try to, by calling the US consulate or embassy. That does nothing for a local fixer. One fixer for the New York Times was imprisoned for three years, on grounds of leaking state secrets.

  Fixers also tend to be the journalists harassed by government minders. Cecilia Chen first started working at Marketplace in 2008 as an intern, and within a few months came on full-time as my fixer. One morning soon after starting at Marketplace, Cecilia’s cellphone rang at dawn. The female caller did not identify herself as working for the Public Security Bureau, but simply said, “I think you know what this call is about.” The caller recommended they meet in person, to “have tea.”