Gao Yushu also spoke and talked about attending the planning for a Chinese Democratic Party (in those days people would say “new party” or “outside the party”). Liang Surong, Kang Ningxiang, Du Zhengsheng, Liu Shaotang, and Guo Guanying also spoke, saying that if the new party had been established, the political factionalism in Taiwan today might have been avoided and not be so abrupt and bitter. Hu Fo and Zhang Yufa took the historical point of view that the people of the northeast and Taiwan had similar frustrations and hopes with regard to their fates because both had been colonies of Japan.
Over the last twenty years I have sat before the graves of my parents countless times, gazing at the waves on the vast Pacific, thinking of his life and feeling extremely fortunate that this life of mine was bound to two such parents.
SAYING GOOD-BYE TO MEET AGAIN
In November 1987, mainland China opened up and restrictions were relaxed so that people from Taiwan could visit their relatives, but I didn’t return until six years after that. In those intervening years, most “people from other provinces” had been back for a visit. The intensely emotional homecoming literature gradually cooled and narratives of disillusionment even began to appear. Separated by the Taiwan Strait, people wondered and thought constantly about China and the friends and relatives they had left behind there, even though the parents in their minds had not aged in forty years. But what they saw upon return were the bones of a once lovely dream. Those who returned to their homeland were advanced in years and no less heartbroken, so I balked at returning, not just because I had no relatives to visit but out of fear, and lest disillusionment ruin my treasured memories. I lacked the courage to go home.
When I read in the May 1993 Luojia, the Wuhan University Alumni newsletter, that Lu Qiaozhen had lung cancer and that it had advanced to the final stage, the news came like a bolt out of the blue. I decided there and then to go to Shanghai to see her one last time. Qiaozhen was the first good friend to write after postal relations were opened with mainland China. Our friendship was one of the most beautiful memories of my youth at the confluence of three rivers in Leshan, deep in Sichuan Province. How could I have been so heartless as not to visit her earlier, now that it was almost too late to see her again?
I settled on a date to go to Shanghai, and then first called her husband Xu Xinguang, who had been an upperclassman at Leshan, and set a time. From our phone conversation, I learned that Mr. Yu, who had always lived in Shanghai, had died from a heart attack the previous year. If I had married him back then, I, with my background as one of the five evil types, would certainly have become bad luck for him. My old Leshan friends Yao Guanfu, Su Yuxi, and Peng Yande had all passed away. The only person left for me to see in Shanghai was Qiaozhen, and she was on the verge of death.
The Shanghai airport was pretty chaotic in those days, and I never found the Wuhan classmate who came to meet me. I’m afraid that after fifty years we wouldn’t have recognized each other even face to face. Guided by a young woman, I almost got into an unlicensed cab, but fortunately felt something was amiss and returned to the main hall to find a policeman and take a licensed cab. At the Hilton, where I had a reservation, I left my luggage and went down to the lobby to wait for Xu to come and take me to the Post Office Hospital. Qiaozhen, who was helped to sit up, her eyes as clear and limpid as ever, said,
“I knew you were coming. I’ve been waiting.”
She took a sheet of paper from beneath her pillow, and solemnly, as if welcoming a guest, read Du Fu’s poem “Presented to Wei Ba, Gentleman in Retirement”: “Life is not made for meetings; / like stars at opposite ends of the sky we move. / What night is it, then, tonight, / when we can share the light of this lamp? / Youth—how long did it last? / The two of us gray-headed now, / we ask about old friends—half are ghosts; / cries of disbelief stab the heart.…” Breathing weakly, she continued to read to the end: “Tomorrow hills and ranges will part us, / the wide world coming between us again.” I leaned over the edge of her bed, unable to stop from crying. Gasping for breath, she continued speaking about things that had happened in the last fifty years and how reality had destroyed her youthful dreams. “All these years in Taiwan, you could really study and teach—I’m so envious.” She urged me to cherish everything I had, and to live. Dazed, I left the hospital, knowing that meeting once again was also a farewell. After returning to Taiwan, I received the news that she had passed away. She was sixty-nine that year.
I was not favorably impressed by Shanghai and was in no mood to stay. Coming out of the hospital and taking a cab through what was once the most fashionable part of the city, I recalled how, a half century before, dressed in my wartime clothes, I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or cry. The people and events of the past had all vanished. By that time, I had seen a good many of the world’s major cities, their glories and splendors, but more important, I had read many important books that ought to be read and had done a number of important things that had to be done. I had not lived my life in vain. If I had been seduced by Shanghai’s pomposity in those days and stayed, I would have long before been declared one of the five evil types and been done to death in struggle, and if I had managed to survive, I certainly would have wasted my entire life in denying myself.
HOMELAND OF STONE AND HERBACEOUS PEONIES
From Shanghai I flew to Beiping (now called Beijing), and with the help of my nephew, Gan Dawei, bought a train ticket for Tieling in Liaoning to see the land of my birth. I was on a daytime express train that left at 8 a.m. and arrived at 10 p.m., so, just like on that train sixty years earlier, I could see every inch of the land, and those places I had heard about all my life. The train passed through Xingcheng, Huludao City, Jinzhou, Goubangzi, Xinmin … I was in a constant state of excitement the whole way, and though I was physically tired, I didn’t want to close my eyes even for a few minutes. In the winter of 1925, my father accompanied General Guo Songlin when he led thousands of troops and occupied this stretch of territory. When the train crossed the steel bridge over the Great Flowing River, it was already dark; the bridge was long and I couldn’t see a thing. I had a return ticket and hoped that on the way back I’d cross the bridge during the day so I could see everything. Who could have foreseen that I would return by plane? I was unable to see the eastern bank of the Juliu River from that long bridge and thought with affection about my young father, with his lofty aspirations and great ideals, alongside General Guo, spurring his horse into battle, firmly believing they would enter Shenyang the following day, never imaging that one night later they’d be fleeing for their lives, and as they fled, traversing the bridge inch by inch.
On my journey home, I was so excited I couldn’t close my eyes, but there were even more surprises to come. With my Taiwan ID I bought a first-class soft sleeper seat in a compartment for four people, the other occupants being two Russians, along with their interpreter. They were engineers contracted from Vladivostok, Russia, to work in Anhui Province, while I was a female professor of English literature from Taiwan. They looked at me as if I were from Mars, and looking at them, I thought of the great slogan of “Fight Communism and Resist Russia” of thirty years earlier, and how I was now going to spend fourteen hours with the enemy in the same compartment of this slow-moving express train! Restless, we sat facing each other, like people from different planets meeting in outer space. Their range of interest in Taiwan surpassed the scope of their interpreter’s vocabulary, so we used the occasional English word. Spreading out the world map they carried with them, they never stopped asking me questions about Taiwan’s geography, history, education, family life, the position of women in society, clothing, food, housing, and work.… I, in turn, asked them about Russia, from Tolstoy to Stalin.… It was a very enriching exchange.
When we arrived at Shenyang Station, there was a flurry of activity as some passengers got off the train and others boarded. An hour later, at 10:30 p.m., the train pulled into Tieling Station, which was pitch black except for the stat
ion sign; you couldn’t see your hands in front of you. Over the train intercom we were told that work was being done on the electrical equipment at the station. Perhaps the platform was outside, but all that could be seen was a station attendant approaching with a lantern in hand, seeming to appear out of a black abyss, and there was no way to tell if there were other people outside or not. Picking up my suitcase, I stepped off the train, but the two Russians from outer space said, “Too black, don’t go.” I replied that someone was there to meet me, and they said, “But you can’t see anyone.” Unexpectedly, they jumped off the train and gestured for me to go with them to Harbin, saying that their interpreter could take me back to Tieling the following morning. Clearly they were uneasy and were in all sincerity deeply concerned about me. They were as simple and honest as peasants in a Tolstoy novel. Hesitating, I shouted out my cousin’s name in the dark: “Zhenlie! Zhenlie!” From off in the distance I heard someone shout: “Third Sister! Third Sister!” (reflecting the numerical order in our family), which was followed by a flurry of footsteps as Zhenlie ran up, leading his entire family. Although everyone had aged, we still recognized one another. The Russians returned to their carriage, and as the train set off, they reached out and waved for all they were worth, and in the light in the compartment I could see that they were much relieved.
Years later, I still think of what a strange and symbolic trip home that was. We who had gone to Taiwan had spent half our lives hating and fighting the Communists and resisting the Russians, and in the pitch black of the station in my homeland, it was two Russians who had jumped off the train to protect me! And the impressions of Taiwan that they took home with them (a minute speck of a country on the map when compared with Russia) was of a modern and democratic place with an abundance of freedom, so that a woman on her own could take up her luggage and travel thousands of miles through Shanhaiguan in search of the homeland she had left behind sixty years before. That I was able to locate Chi Zhenlie and find my way home was no doubt the will of heaven.
In 1987, when Taiwan began allowing people to go back to mainland China to visit relatives, my father had already passed away. The Neihu house was empty, and gradually the neglect had to be put in order. The flower beds in the garden were overgrown with weeds, and my sister and I could no longer take care of a house in which no one lived; all we could do was return occasionally and look at the desolation. Before the New Year arrived, I went to the house and found a letter with a return address from Tieling, Liaoning, in the mailbox full of dead leaves.
Zhenlie and I have the same great-grandparents. After victory in the War of Resistance, my mother lived in Beiping for two years, and he and one of his brothers moved in so that they could attend school there—Fourth Elder Brother Zhenfei studied at Furen University, while Sixth Younger Brother Zhenlie attended middle school. He recalled two summers when I came home on vacation when I would always force him to study and strictly tutored him in English. I recall that the two brothers were handsome and very spirited. In 1947 when I went to Taiwan on my own, the people and events in my homeland were much the same as that pitch-black darkness in the train station that night. We had to shout our names of half a century earlier before we could find the road home. After mainland China was “liberated” by the Communists, Elder Brother Zhenfei passed through many places before arriving at Zhenjiang in Jiangsu Province. On account of his educational background or his work as an interpreter in the American Marshall Plan to mediate in the war between the Nationalists and the Communists, he was able to find employment at the Jiangsu College of Science and Engineering. He married a virtuous and dutiful wife who bore him three daughters, who, with their husbands, were all filial, making him one of the few truly happy people. After graduating from middle school, Zhenlie tested into the air force and was already at the stage of learning to fly when, owing to the numerous political movements, he was forced to halt because of his landlord family background and was ordered back to his home to farm; he planted crops on Little Western Hill for more than a decade before finally being “rehabilitated” and going to work at the Tieling Municipal Oil Company. His wife was a nurse at the Public Health Center. The family was warmly dressed and well fed. However, “falling from the sky to the land” (in the northeast, crop fields are referred to as land) was hugely traumatic to him and left him bitter about life. Before I departed, his wife urged me to get him to take off his leather flight jacket, which he had worn for so long that it had turned white, but he was unwilling to throw it away because it constituted the most glorious memory of his entire life.
Chi Zhenwu, another cousin, farmed and was simple and honest by nature. In 1950, the Korean War (also known as the War to Aid Korea) broke out and mainland China called for citizens to “Resist America, Aid Korea” (a Chinese volunteer army took part in the Korean War). When my cousin attended the large village meeting, it was winter and everyone was sitting on the warm kangs. The cadres who had come to draft able-bodied men asked for those willing to join the volunteer army to stand up. At the same time they asked that the kangs be stoked so that they were too hot to sit on, and as the men stood up, they were applauded and welcomed into the volunteer army! With no explanation they were loaded onto a freight train, and by morning the following day, the train had already crossed the Yalu River and arrived at the Siniuju Station in Korea. From then on it was a life with a total absence of justice, an unending bloody fight, always shifting. People became gun-wielding machines, the enemy uncertain, and naturally, there was no way to contact home. In July 1953, the Korean War at an end, the survivors had free choice to be demobilized or return home. A total of fourteen thousand soldiers were unwilling to return to mainland China and ended up in Taiwan, resulting in 123 Freedom Day, which became the focus of world attention. These freedom seekers increased Chiang Kai-shek’s prestige in the fight against communism.
Reporters from all over the world arrived at the camp for these freedom seekers. In looking at the name list, a reporter from Taipei discovered a Chi Zhenwu from Tieling, Liaoning. When he got back to the city, he asked my brother, “Is he perhaps a member of your family?” My brother went to check for himself, but before leaving asked our father how he would recognize him. Father said to ask him his father’s childhood name, adding that it was “Old Lump.” My father went to check himself and found that he was indeed the son of his cousin several times removed. We called him Fifth Elder Brother. After leaving the military, he got a job as a warehouse security guard. In 1970 he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. My brother and Mao Zhongying, the son of my husband’s sister, who preached in Gaoxiong, buried him in the Christian cemetery in Yanchao Village, Gaoxiong.
Thirty years later, Chi Zhenwu’s nephew Chi Changkai somehow saw my name in a PEN publication, called the Taipei PEN office from Shenyang looking for me, and was able to established contact. He said that since the end of the war to resist America and aid Korea, no one knew what had become of his uncle, and that he had been trying to locate him for years and had just learned of his death and that he was buried in Taiwan. On the phone, he began to cry and asked, “How did he die? How could this happen?” I asked Zhongying to have someone take a snapshot of his grave and mail it to Changkai. The sight of the white gravestone seemed to comfort the family.
How could this happen? When I returned to Little Western Hill, I too asked, How could this happen?
I took the day train from Beijing to Tieling on my own so as to see every inch of land. My cousin Zhenlie took me from Tieling to Little Western Hill, and I returned to our old place in the village; when asked, no one had ever heard of the “Hill of Weeping Ghosts and Howling Wolves.” Only then did I realize that when my mother spoke of it, that was just a reflection of her mood.
Since my father had worked for the Nationalist government, the big old ancestral house had been demolished and the ancestral graves plowed under, and the village had been combined with the neighboring village of Cizilin. Half of Little Western Hill, on which I had run wild to pic
k ginseng, had been flattened as a quarry; the milky white stone in various sizes shone with a cold and hard light. The stone was said to be of a high quality, and that was why the train station five li away was known as Luanshi Mountain Train Station. The ancestral graves of the Chi family had been plowed under and the herbaceous peony blossoms I picked as a child were no longer to be found. I was no Rip van Winkle, who went to sleep in the mountains and woke up twenty years later, white-haired, to return to his village and stand at an intersection shouting “Does anyone know me?” I left when I was six years old, so it was unlikely that there would be anyone I knew. On this trip home over thousands of miles, all I saw was some windbreaks and fertile fields stretching toward the blue dome of the sky. I no longer had a footing in my ancestral homeland of stone and herbaceous peonies.
Over the years, I have looked for herbaceous peonies in many places but have rarely seen them; they are even less frequently seen in Taiwan, no doubt owing to the climate. Nearly everyone lives in high-rise apartment buildings without yards and has no leisure to grow such demanding flowers. I remember accompanying my weeping mother to the ancestral graves, which were surrounded by large pine trees, in the shade of which the herbaceous peonies bloomed, protected from the wind and snow. I recall that my grandmother placed a bunch of peonies that I had picked in a vase, which she put on the large dinner table, and how the whole room seemed to light up. The pines and the cypresses around the ancestral graves went the way of the old house, and those herbaceous peonies with their sparkling petals will always be the flower of my homeland.
The Great Flowing River Page 47