A Village with My Name

by Scott Tong

  Another woman stubbornly refused to get married. She disdained as “flower vases” women employed by companies as decorations to attract male clients. She also opened a school, but in the Maoist era ripped up a poster of the Great Helmsman, inviting the inevitable persecution. Here is her money quote: “If a woman marries a chicken, she has to follow the chicken; if she marries a dog, she has to follow the dog.”

  “My friends have all passed away,” one eighty-eight-year-old interviewee told Wang. “I won’t be able to die with my eyes closed if I do not tell the stories of these sisters.” She designed her own tombstone, etching on it the names of several female peers. She herself died three months after that.

  In an e-mail, I asked Wang Zheng to place my own grandmother’s life in some perspective. She replied: “Your grandma was implicated by politics of her time, which led to many tragedies in her life. However, the spirit to be independent was a shared value for all the educated women who were shaped by May Fourth feminism, regardless of their political orientations.”

  Wang argues that these May Fourth women won a “breakthrough in the long process of Chinese women’s liberation.” Today, a girl born in China has a 95 percent chance of knowing how to read, and will live to be seventy-seven, on average. She’ll join a workforce with more female participation than Japan or the United States. She inhabits an empirically driven, science- and GDP-focused China (if anything, overly so). And if she lives in Shanghai, she won’t even have to carry her own purse, a duty now outsourced to her subordinate male partner.

  To be sure, there’s more to do. Women’s salaries are falling off, relative to those of men. Many of today’s Material Girls obsess about marrying Material Boys with property. The top party bosses remain male. And yet, when my third cousin’s teen granddaughter in the inconsequential Tong village greets me with a forceful jab in the chest, I pick myself off the floor and thank the early, big-footed Cinderella’s Sisters who ended up on the wrong side of history.

  ***

  It’s now been six years since my family and I left Shanghai and returned to suburban Virginia. Our China memories fade by the day. Sure, a painting of the Bund waterfront circa 1920 hangs over our mantel (it was produced beautifully by a migrant artist for the Foreigner Price of $30). We often cook our nanny Ayi’s Subei wings and sweet garlic broccoli. But the kids’ Mandarin has pretty much gone out the window; Cathy has returned to her primary care medicine job unavailable to her in Shanghai; the boys play travel soccer, engaging us fully in the parenting arms race, American flavor. I find myself sighing over our day-to-day “issues.” A breakdown in the air-conditioned subway. A leaking valve cover gasket (whatever that is). A prescription delivered late. Dog pee in the basement. Mutual-fund fees. We take these lives pretty much for granted, except on the occasion I find myself in Houston.

  My reporting job at Marketplace now focuses on environment and energy issues, and periodically this work takes me to the energy capital. The oil business is of course a boom/bust sector for unabashed risk takers, so it’s fitting that Grandmother Mildred lies at rest there. For decades, her ashes lived in a crowded Hong Kong cemetery, but when Aunt Lily moved to Texas in the early 1980s, she brought the urn with her. On a late autumn day in 2016, about a dozen of my family members and friends gather before her tombstone at the Forest Park Cemetery on Westheimer Road. At my behest, we have come to remember someone else: her late husband, Carleton Sun, my maternal grandfather, six decades after his passing. For the first time, there is a place in the world where he can be remembered.

  My parents and older brother have flown in from the West Coast. Also joining us is a distant cousin of mine from California, whose grandfather was Carleton’s brother. When this brother died in his early twenties, Carleton took care of his widow and his brother’s three daughters, bringing them out of the Hubei village to live in Shanghai. At this ceremony we have no remains to bury, though I’ve brought the soil I scooped up from the mass grave site at the Delingha prison labor camp. Since then, I’ve waited three years to bury my grandfather, symbolically, on the advice of the woman bureaucrat in the Qinghai provincial prison department.

  My Houston-based cousin Marjorie says a prayer, and then I’m given five minutes to summarize everything I’ve learned about Carleton Sun, which is impossible. So I race through a timeline of his life, interspersing quotes here and there from family letters: his birth into a merchant family in the dying days of imperial China; his meeting the daughter of his father’s work colleague (“we two were small friends”); confiscation of his family’s land (“his family property was occupied by the Communists for nearly seven years”); his participation in college student protests against foreign imperialism. My attempt to lighten things up by mentioning his mediocre college grades falls flat. No chuckles.

  I take a breath. Then I mention his fateful decision to work for the Japanese occupation of China during World War II. A couple of nods. This is when I mount his criminal defense, which may matter only to me. Looking back, I say, we know the victors from that period—the Communists, the Guomindang—got to write the history we read today. I cite the argument of convicted collaborator Chen Bijun, who won a courtroom ovation for arguing it was actually the collaborators who fed the local people. They were the ones who traded land for peace and halted the killings. They were the true patriots, Chen’s argument goes, not the other parties who retreated like cowards.

  A couple of heads nod again, but mostly the audience remains stoic. That is the Chinese way, but it also tells me it’s time to move on. In framing his story on the right or the wrong side of history, I am playing the Chinese Communist Party’s game—on their turf. In challenging the party’s historiography about who the true patriots and enemies are, I am viewing the past through their lens. The older generation here has long moved beyond this fight. It’s me who has come late to understanding my grandfather’s life on his terms, not anyone else’s.

  My five minutes are up. I close briefly with what I learned about his arrest, sentence, and imprisonment, and end with this anecdote: he rewarded his children for taking cod liver oil with ten peanuts. But don’t eat the nubby seed of the nut, he warned, “or else peanuts will grow out the top of your head.”

  It’s now Aunt Lily’s turn to speak about her father. She ends up speaking directly to him. She leans forward in her chair and faces a large, grainy photo of Carleton Sun we’ve blown up from his 1950 passport picture. She says: “I am going to speak jiali hua.” Family dialect. What she spoke at home to her parents is a jumbled mix of Mandarin, Hubei, and Nanjing dialect that is remarkably easy for me to understand. “In 1950 you dropped us off at the train station,” she begins. “We went to Hong Kong and you stayed behind. Then we heard you were locked up, and we were so worried. You took such good care of us.”

  Then she proceeds to update him on the last six decades, as if it’s a family Christmas letter to catch him up. “The three of us children are still around. Anna and I live in the United States; right now we are in Houston. Brother Eddie is in Hong Kong. I saw him last year. Anna will likely go visit him next year. You don’t have to worry about us any more—we are all doing very well. Every day I write ink-brush characters, but not as good as you.” It is odd to hear an eighty-something aunt speak this way, even though she is speaking to a father she last saw at the age of seventeen.

  She says that because of the information I have found, “we finally can have an understanding of your life. This is the burial ground of your wife. And my husband. And for me. Before long we can see each other again, and I can call you ‘Father’ one more time. Thank you that you married a woman who could take care of us all these years.” Then Aunt Lily yields to my mother, who stands and reads from her iPad.

  My mother speaks with a quiet anguish that makes me wonder if she’ll make it through. “After I came back from my trip with Scott from China, I was incredibly saddened,” she says. “I was saddened for my parents for their hard lives, and the unthinkable torture
my dad had to endure while he was in prison. So to this dark place I rarely dared to venture.” The wound from her childhood never really healed. So many Chinese people of a certain age walk around with these same wounds just beneath the surface. In my mother’s case, her reckoning began with therapy, convincing her “to stop feeling so guilty” and to focus on her parents’ essential hope: for their children to have better lives than theirs. “To remember them and thank them.” It’s a cliché in America that a parent wants his or her child to have a better life, but in the early 1950s China, it was hard to imagine what that might have looked like.

  My mother concludes by holding up his passport from 1950, with a blue cover and visas stamped inside for Argentina, Chile, and the United States. In the end, he never left China. “Even though it never materialized, this is the passport. And after sixty years, he is here. So my wish for my mom and dad is to finally rest in peace together, in a place they didn’t get to come when they were alive.” Her words bring to mind an image: when she and her siblings left Shanghai during the war, they set out with a heavy trunk full of family photos and heirlooms. But on the long journey south, they had to get rid of the chest—perhaps to keep moving. In the same way, my mother has had to slough off this heavy burden of guilt in order to continue forward.

  After the last speaker, a four-person Chinese choir sings the Mandarin version of my mother’s favorite hymn:

  When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,

  When sorrows like sea billows roll;

  Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,

  It is well, it is well with my soul.

  At the end, we each place a yellow Texas rose at the base of my grandmother’s tomb stone and then sprinkle a handful of Qinghai graveyard soil on top. It’s the closest we can come to burying him, at least for now (I will continue looking for any records of his life and death). At some point Carleton Sun’s name will be etched on the same stone. We have spoken his name aloud so many times this day, and I wonder when the last time was that my mother and aunt did that. His name for so many years had only been whispered in shame.

  ***

  For me, discovering Carleton and Mildred has opened up something bigger. I now locate their hopes and hurts in a broader picture of China—and its long, interrupted opening up to the outside world. At the start of this project, I sought to step back and try to refocus my own lens and challenge my assumptions about the Deng Xiaoping reboot and China’s supposed instant rise. To be sure, there is no definitive take on any history. “You can’t prove history” the way you write out a math proof in high school, one Beijing historian lectured me early on. Each of us lives through a series of events and then packages them in a particular way. How it affects you dictates how you frame the picture. Still, there is a framing that makes most sense to me. If you’ve endured reading up to this point, it’s probably obvious to you by now. But just to restate my view—borrowed from intellectual historians—it goes something like this:

  Mildred and Carleton were born children of the Chinese enlightenment, its Great Opening to the early twentieth-century connected age. They worked in the cultural import business, bringing ashore the isms from overseas: Darwinism, feminism, Marxism, empiricism, Adam Smithism. I am asked to play in chapel, Glee Club, and YWCA meetings sometimes.

  These cultural transactions had counter-parties, Westerners who found their way into the treaty ports, including Welthy Honsinger Fisher of Rome, New York. Firm of chin, large of mouth, deep bosomed, and straight backed, and was sure I cut a figure that did not suggest the Methodist missionary-teacher on her way to the Chinese interior.

  Much has been written and alleged about the outsiders, who traded and shot their way in, who were arrogant, who built hospitals, who brought opium and civilization all at once. But equally important are the Chinese nationals they influenced, who adopted the leading ideas and transplanted them onto local soil. Some mainlanders found their way abroad, in search of revolution and science. They sought to turn the page for themselves and for a weak China. Great-Grandfather Tong Zhenyong was one of these first movers.

  For all the promise, this golden age did not lift up the Chinese masses. The impact was limited mostly to treaty ports. Into these beachheads of modernity came steamships and sewers, protests and political pushback, gaslights and Glee Clubs, nationalism and natural feet for girls. It also didn’t last. The Great Opening yielded to a Great Interruption, a series of events that closed the window to the outside and turned China inward: Floods. Nationalism. Infighting. Invasion. Mao. In 1949 I was in the prime of my life . . . but my life has been wasted since then.

  Out went the nefarious foreign influences and what the regime called the Four Olds: old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. Those with overseas relations were persecuted, exiled to farms, and kicked to the back of the line. Uncle Tong Bao lived this story. Some were fortunate to get out (including maternal grandmother Mildred Zhao) even as the political net ensnared those left behind. Mildred’s husband, Carleton Sun, was imprisoned. Tong Bao was left behind. Into this age of scapegoating and rationing came the next generation of only children: cousin Tong Chengkan and Cecilia Chen. The price was forty kilograms’ worth of grain ration coupons. My parents went home that night and thought about whether to buy me a brother. But by the next morning, he was already sold.

  They were also born into a Great Resumption, an age that tapped into the golden age of the bourgeoisie of the pre-Mao period. Many capitalists never went out of business during this time. Education never went out of style. Tong Bao’s generation of children of the intellectual elite lived before and after the Maoist trials, returning to universities when they reopened in the late 1970s. Other intellectuals and bankers who fled during the 1949 Communist liberation returned from places like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (with their technology, contacts, money, and ideas). The economic historian Thomas Rawski calls education in China a historic “embedded institution” that never went away, along with what he calls “market thinking.” These are the old and deep roots. “A lot of people who write about China now think it started in 1949 or even 1976,” he told me. “It just in my view doesn’t work that way.”

  Rawski doesn’t discount the role of the Communist Party. In fact he credits it for doing what the predecessor GMD could not: put the power and finance of a centralized state behind market reforms—to scale them, to let people move around to where they could make the most things and the most money, to build the infrastructure to connect people and ideas and investors, to let small companies form and thrive and fail. And of course the party allowed in technology and investment from overseas Chinese and foreigners on the outside. The larger point, though, is that today’s China is far more than a simple (or nefarious, if you’re so inclined) Communist Party story. It is also a story of long delayed modernization, what economists call “catch up,” finally happening for hundreds of millions of people.

  ***

  My great fortune has been to learn this story through my own family. In a way, that makes the long China story my own. But there is also great misfortune here: many ancestors were doomed to have front-row seats to history. Actually, no: like so many, they were in fact thrust onto the stage to play the villains in the show. Across several generations of the Tongs and the Suns, most gambled on the opportunity of going out of China. Of those who placed their bets at exactly the wrong time, I see in my head the weary, shaking head of Tong Daren, my late third cousin in the Tong family village who got the worst plot of land because of his “overseas relations.” I see the winter icicle water torture dripped upon Tong Bao’s mother for the same political crime. And I hear Uncle Tong Bao’s simple explanation for all this: “It was because of Dad.”

  And I think of Grandmother Mildred, who at a young age read what was then a scandalous commentary on the role of women: Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. You may recall the ending: the main character Nora is trapped in a hopeless marriage to a narcissistic man who calls her �
�lark” and “featherbrain.” In the final scene, she challenges the male-dominant world, and her status as her father’s “doll-child” and her husband’s “doll-wife.” Nora states: “I must try and educate myself—you are not the man to help me in that. I must do that for myself. And that is why I am going to leave you now.” She walks out the door and slams it, and the play ends. We don’t know how it turns out for Nora, but Grandmother Mildred yearned for the same opportunity to venture out.

  China’s reopening provided fruits to Uncle Tong Bao and his son, cousin Tong Chengkan. At the same time, the money flows coming in also invited corruption, of officials lining their own pockets in orphanages delivering baby girls to America. Those girls may have included my own daughter.

  Looking back on this incredibly broad sweep of time, it’s as if I’ve hiked up a punishing mountain of history with my intergenerational team. It has been a privilege to take this trip. Not long ago, Cathy, the kids, and I trekked up Old Rag Mountain in Shenandoah National Park, a place with many boulders and not enough water. Only when we crested the peak could we turn around and take in the terrain we’d covered. When I look out on the winding switchback trail of the Tongs and the Suns, I see many attributes and qualities I’d use to describe the Chinese people in general: Resilient. Pragmatic. Opportunistic. Exploring. Thin-skinned. Gritty. Weary.

  Much of this I knew, though one takeaway came as a surprise. I met so many regular people—on roadsides and inside third-rate government offices—willing to help me chase this story. This is unusual. As a foreign correspondent in China, I reliably got nowhere asking strangers for help: they walked away, hung up, and uttered bu tai qing chu, it’s not so clear. There was nothing in it for them. For this project, there were no quid pro quos for the people who reopened their memories, connecting me with others, flipped through prison records and offered a bed for the night.

  For those relatives still alive, surely it was not easy to speak openly of their victories and failings. In China, it’s one thing to spill your guts at the dinner table in private, and quite another to speak information that might be published overseas. Cousin Chengkan shared hours of his time, patiently answering my questions and not knowing what I might write, and for this I am indebted to him. He also taught me that for all the opportunities globalization has brought to China, there is also a cost. Chinese cultural history is being forgotten by the day.