A Village with My Name
Page 27
Will this opening continue? Or will China—as in regular Chinese people—turn away from the outside world and inward? I am not so sure. Certainly, there is a movement afoot in the world today to pull back and raise drawbridges. Beijing has taken more measures to favor domestic state-owned companies at the expense of foreign multinationals. Chinese President Xi Jinping has played up nationalism and xenophobia, and state newspapers warn of “hostile foreign forces.” The Chinese military with regard to disputed islands has taken on a distinctly muscular posture. In the end, though, it’s my view that the Chinese people know they need the outside world.
Mainland students are flocking to American universities in numbers not seen before; during my fellowship year at the University of Michigan, by far the second language I heard most on campus was Mandarin. Any game-changing innovation that can scale globally will likely come from outside China. Mainlanders of certain means are still snatching up Starbucks lattes and Samsungs and iPhones. Conversely, they’re not sure whether to invest in a domestic Chinese economy that is slowing down. The real estate market remains notorious for booms and busts. “Every one of my friends has sent her money overseas,” my old landlord from Shanghai told me during a 2014 trip there. “And their kids.” She subsequently moved her family, including two children, to London.
When I’ve reported in other countries, the Chinese footprint has been unmistakable. When I reported in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi, a Chinese infrastructure company was building a freeway overpass, to the delight of my taxi driver there. “The Chinese are so fast, and they don’t come in and tell us what to do,” he said. “Just business.” In Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, just outside my hotel, there was a car dealership for the mainland brand Lifan. In Venezuela, my third cousin Tong Daren’s son-in-law recently completed a two-year construction stint for a Chinese state-owned firm partnering with the Venezuelan oil producer PDVSA. In São Paulo, much of Brazil’s slowdown has been blamed on sagging exports of soybeans and other commodities to China. Oil drillers in West Texas are trying to assess Chinese demand to get a sense of whether the global price of crude will rise.
The world is clearly a part of China’s present and future. But the point here is that this has been the case for China’s past as well. Some of the key supporting actors have been Chinese cultural middlemen who ventured out in the first place. But theirs is a quiet chapter in history, given the xenophobic, anti-foreign campaigns that followed.
***
On that day in Houston when we symbolically buried my grandfather, I realized that in the end, much of my pursuit of his life did not succeed. To this day, we do not know where he died, exactly when (the year 1957 is often suggested), or how. My mother and Aunt Lily do not seem much to care at this point, but this reporter will keep chasing the story. As best we know, he died in the gulag around the time of the great famine, in his midforties—the age I am now.
But for his children, they prefer to remember him as the father who said goodbye to them at the Shanghai train station in 1950. He dropped them off on the 4:30 train bound, eventually, for Hong Kong. Then he returned home to the Light of the Sea School and wrote his seven-year-old daughter:
My heart always follows you. I hope you can go to school. You left your playing cards behind. I hope you can find something else to play.
December 2016, Houston, Texas
Sources
For Chinese characters, I have used the system of romanization used on the mainland known as hanyu pinyin. There are a few exceptions, for alternative spellings that are familiar to many Americans—for instance, Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen, and Taipei. My grandmother Mildred Zhao went by other surnames in her letters, including Djao and Chao.
I have quoted each person of significance by given name, with three exceptions. Uncle Tong Bao actually uses his mother’s surname. He does not live in a world of oversharing Americans and has told me several times he’s uncomfortable making public his “private affairs.” The same applies to my cousin Tong Chengkan. My daughter in this manuscript goes by her orphanage name, Guo Shanzhen, rather than the English name she uses today. She deserves to shape her own identity rather than one set by her father. In these three cases, my editor agrees that identifying them by their current names would not add any benefit to the reader but bring real costs to them.
I have described historical events as accurately as possible, based on written and oral sources. In cases of fuzzy or conflicting recollections, or based solely on one person’s oral memory, I have sought to identify that uncertainty. The main research for this manuscript took place during visits to China after my 2006–10 Shanghai assignment for Marketplace public radio. I returned in the summers of 2011, 2013, and 2014. I’m particularly indebted to Uncle Tong Bao, his wife, Qi Menglan, and their son, cousin Tong Chengkan, for spending countless hours sharing their life experiences with me. More than anyone else, they inform my understanding of today’s China and how it has come of age. Special thanks also to Tong Daren’s daughters, Tong Yuqin and Tong Yuhua, for hosting me every trip to the Tong family village.
Many China academics provided me hours of explanation and analysis. They include Shanghai economic historian and commentator Ye Tan, economic historian Thomas Rawski of the University of Pittsburgh (author of the paper “From Divergence to Convergence: Reevaluating the History Behind China’s Economic Boom”), historian Clayton Dube of the University of Southern California, MIT economics and management professor Yasheng Huang (his book is Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics), University of Hong Kong historian Frank Dikötter (The Age of Openness, Mao’s Great Famine) and historian Odd Arne Westad of the London School of Economics (Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750).
My grandmother’s letters to her American teachers are housed in two places: the special collection of Welthy Honsinger Fisher at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, and Anna Melissa Graves’s collection at Swarthmore College’s Peace Collection. The archive of Ginling Women’s College at its sister school, Smith College in Massachusetts, also provided valuable archival documents and photos.
I began this project expecting little to no help from government archives and officers in China. My time as a reporter in China led me to assume public offices were xenophobic, corrupt, or useless—or all three. How wrong I was. I’m thankful to the Tilanqiao prison guard who guided me through the document process there, and to the neighborhood police officer near the Light of the Sea School who turned up a dusty yellow household registration book from 1950. In Hubei, the Hanchuan foreign affairs office led us to the Zhao family village and one of two valuable genealogies on my mother’s side of the family. A special shout-out goes to (1) the officer at the Shanghai municipal police headquarters who bent a couple rules to find Grandfather Carleton Sun’s official sentence and conviction date; (2) Mr. Jin, the retired Qinghai prison department official (now an Amway salesman) who snuck me past the building guard and into the prisoner file room; and (3) the retired worker from the Delingha labor camp who would not speak for the record but poured out his memories out of a “responsibility to history.”
At the outset of this project, I told myself I could really use a couple of semesters at a major university with a serious China studies department. That’s where the University of Michigan came in. The university’s Knight-Wallace journalism fellows program admitted me to their 2013/14 class, providing me the college do-over I never thought I’d get. Historian Pär Cassel let me audit his course on treaty ports (“islands of modernity,” in his words) and continued conversations over lunch in Ann Arbor to help me frame this narrative. University of Bristol historian Robert Bickers (The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832–1914) met with me the morning before his guest lecture to Cassel’s class. Linda Lim of Michigan’s Ross School of Business discussed how Chinese people over time have dealt with their own “cultural hybridity,” a term that aptly describes many of my ancestors, particularly my grandmother Mildred Zhao
. How typical was she? Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories, by mainland-born Wang Zheng in the gender and women’s studies institute at Michigan, provided instances of similar women in similar times. Wang Zheng spoke with me and tried to situate my grandmother in that time. Many thanks also to University of Michigan historians Charles Bright, for allowing me to audit his course on globalization history, and Juan Cole, for his historical insights.
My time at Michigan offered me the chance to delve into a host of recommended books. On general history: China: A New History (John King Fairbank); The Search for Modern China (Jonathan Spence); The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth (Barry Naughton); Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Ezra Vogel); Historical Perspective on Contemporary Asia (Merle Goldman); Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Rana Mitter); Rural Development in China (Dwight Perkins, Shahid Yusuf); China on the Eve of the Communist Takeover (Doak Barnett); Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (Stephen McKinnon); From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (Pankaj Mishra); Diamond Hill: Memories of Growing Up in a Hong Kong Squatter Village (Feng Chi-shun).
On treaty ports: Shanghai: China’s Gate to Modernity (Marie-Claire Bergère); In Search of Old Shanghai (Lynn Pan); Shanghai Splendor (Lynn Pan); Global Shanghai, 1850–2010 (Jeffrey Wasserstrom).
On prison labor camps: Grass Soup (Zhang Xianliang); Prisoner of Mao (Bao Ruo-Wang, Rudolph Chelminski); New Ghosts, Old Ghosts: Prisons and Labor Reform Camps in China (James Seymour, Richard Anderson); Great Wall of Confinement: The Chinese Prison Camp through Contemporary Fiction and Reportage (Philip Williams, Yenna Wu).
On wartime collaboration: Collaboration (Timothy Brook); Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932–1945: The Limits of Accommodation (David Barrett, Larry Shyu, editors); In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation (Christian Henriot, Wen-hsin Yeh, editors); Wang Jingwei: A Political Biography (Tang Leang Li).
On women in Chinese history: Gender and Education in China (Paul Bailey); Writing Women in Modern China: An Anthology of Women’s Literature from the Early Twentieth Century (Amy Dooling, Kristina Torgeson); To Light a Candle (Welthy Honsinger Fisher).
On adoption: Sold Into Adoption: The Hunan Baby Trafficking Scandal Exposes Vulnerabilities in Chinese Adoptions to the United States (Patricia Meier, Xiaole Zhang); The Missing Girls of China: Population, Policy, Culture, Gender, Abortion, Abandonment, and Adoption in East-Asian Perspective (David Smolin).
This book project was shepherded by many. Carole Sargent in the scholarly publications office at Georgetown University advised me on the book proposal and contract. Pietra Rivoli, business professor and author at Georgetown, encouraged me to insert myself into the narrative. Travis Holland in the creative writing department at the University of Michigan provided constructive suggestions throughout the process. I am in the debt of editor Priya Nelson at the University of Chicago Press for her initial interest in this project, and for providing much-needed narrative focus to an unwieldy first draft. The keen eye of copyeditor Johanna Rosenbohm saved me from myself countless times throughout this manuscript; any errors are mine alone.
I thank all the colleagues who read draft sections and provided insightful suggestions: Clayton Dube, Laura Starecheski, Cynthia Rodriguez, Travis Holland, Don Lee, Linda Lim, Pär Cassel, Curt Nickisch, Tony Wan, Mei Fong, Adam Allington, Peter Clowney, and Paul Orzulak. And of course my parents, Anna and Alvin Tong—who spent countless hours reading drafts but, more important, let me share these illuminating, shameful, painful, and noble stories with you the reader—and my wife, Cathy Tong. They made this entire journey with me, and this book is for them.