by Huan Hsu
MY FINAL STOP before Jiujiang was Shandong province, where Liu Cong Ji, the son of my great-great-grandfather’s youngest son, Ting Gong, and the only male of my grandmother’s generation, had ended up. I telephoned Liu Cong Ji in Jinan, the provincial capital, to ask if I could visit him. “Of course!” he said, as he wrote down my arrival date. “Now, how do you write your name?”
“Just like the Huan in Qi Huan Gong,” I told him.
It was raining in Jinan when I landed. Containing the Yellow River delta and dotted with Neolithic sites, Shandong was the mythical birthplace of the Yellow Emperor and one of the cradles of Chinese civilization, where that glorious five thousand years of Chinese culture began. In 1897 Germany forced China into leasing Jiaozhou Bay and the surrounding area, and the province fell under the German “sphere of influence.” The Germans developed coal mines and railroads throughout the territory, and the fishing village of Qingdao, modernized with wide streets, handsome architecture, electricity, an extensive sewer system, and safe drinking water, became a major port; in 1903 they established what would become the Tsingtao brewing company. Uncle Lewis liked to compare Qingdao to San Francisco and owned a seaside home there for many years.
I spent the bus ride from the airport watching cornfields and stands of willows, the latter an indication of Jinan’s famous artesian springs. As the bus reached the outskirts of the city, factories came into view, including a few ceramics companies making sanitary ware. The rain fell harder as we reached the bus station, a relic just off a brand-new thoroughfare.
I got very lost trying to find Liu Cong Ji’s house, so he sent his daughter to pick me up in their white Honda sedan. Liu Cong Ji and his wife, a retired doctor, lived with his daughter, Liu Li Nan, a pharmaceutical researcher, in an old army district at the foot of a “mountain.” Li Nan’s husband worked for a Chinese telecom in Weifang, about three hours from Jinan. Liu Cong Ji’s other child, a son, lived in Vancouver, and his grandson was studying engineering at the University of British Columbia. “When I asked you on the phone which Huan you were,” Liu Cong Ji said, “and you said ‘the same as Qi Huan Gong,’ I knew right away what you were talking about, and also that you were very educated and knowledgeable about China. There are lots of Chinese people who have no idea who he is. Unless you’re college educated, you aren’t going to know characters from the Spring and Autumn Period.”
Jinan had been part of Qi Huan Gong’s territory and, with its springs, mountains, and four distinct seasons, had been a desirable place to live for most of its habitation. Under Qi Huan Gong, the Qi state managed to rise to prominence, thanks in large part to the work of his prime minister, Guan Zhong, who drafted a philosophy that would not just consolidate his power but also supply the genetic material for the China that had yet to be born. The Spring and Autumn Period was a time of immense cultural and intellectual development, when the “hundred schools of thought” flourished (and which Mao would later appropriate for his “hundred flowers” campaign). One of those schools was Guan Zhong’s legalism, which, as the name implies, centered on the strict enforcement of laws. People were inherently selfish, the legalists maintained, and so the only way to preserve social order was tight control and harsh discipline from above. The state was singular in its importance, so its military strength and economic prosperity were to be pursued above all, including at the expense of the common people’s well-being. Guan Zhong centralized power, partitioned the state into areas based on assigned trades, and developed a system that relied not on aristocrats with inherited titles but instead on professional bureaucrats selected based on their talents, a step toward an imperial exam system. Many scholars believed that Confucianism, which most people thought of as the foundation of Chinese philosophy, simply rewrote legalism in less punitive terms.
Qin Shi Huang, the legendary “First Emperor,” used legalism to unite China and then rule it with an iron fist, ushering in a dynastic period of centralized power in which Liu Cong Ji said we still were. Just as America had its roots in ancient Greece and Rome, China had its in Qi Huan Gong. “If you can get these things straight, you see everything about how Chinese culture developed,” Cong Ji said.
Liu Cong Ji’s hair, a wedge of gray centered on his parietal bone, reminded me of Deng Xiaoping’s, and his Jiujiang accent had been neutralized by all his time in the north. He used old-fashioned vocabulary and peppered his speech with a tic that sounded like a soft clearing of his throat.
We sat on the sofa in the living room while his wife made us a snack of chrysanthemum tea, moon cakes, and grapes. “Don’t just talk the whole time,” she said to her husband. “Make sure he eats.” Shandong was China’s agricultural heartland, and boxes of grapes and peaches occupied one corner of the living room, along with a large watermelon. On the flat-screen television, the size of a coffee table, the evening news droned. Cong Ji paid it no attention, but when the weather report came on, he stopped everything and watched intently for the Jinan forecast.
Cong Ji grew up in the Xingang house, but neither my grandmother, who was many years older, nor San Yi Po or Si Yi Po, who were closer to his age, had mentioned any interactions with him when they were children. During the Sino-Japanese War, Cong Ji was the first to flee Xingang, well before my great-great-grandfather decided what the rest of the family should do. As the only boy in his generation, Cong Ji’s safety was a priority, so my great-great-grandfather sent him with San Gu when she relocated with the Rulison school. The church-organized retreat was efficient and smooth, and he encountered few of the terrors that San Yi Po and Si Yi Po recalled. “I was a little jiaosheng guanyang,” he said with a small laugh. Spoiled and pampered since childhood.
His protected upbringing, he said, explained why he didn’t know much about his grandfather’s porcelain. He clearly remembered taking refuge in a villa on Lushan with San Gu, but he didn’t know if it belonged to the family or someone else. He only knew of a house in Jiujiang city, purchased after his brother fell ill one summer day, while accompanying Old Yang to the market to buy fruit, and died in the boat on the way to the hospital. That left Cong Ji as the only male heir, so my great-great-grandfather, worried that the countryside wouldn’t provide adequate emergency medical care, bought a pied-à-terre in the city near the Tong Wen and Rulison schools. It was a fine house, three stories high with a skywell and two living rooms, but was destroyed in the Sino-Japanese War. As for the rest, he couldn’t be sure.
“These things, my impression isn’t clear,” he apologized. “I was just a kid, following people as they ran, trying to keep up.”
In Chongqing my great-great-grandfather reunited with his middle son, Ting Geng, who was working as a road engineer for the Kuomintang, and returned his daughters, Pei Yu and Pei Ke, to him. As Chongqing was bombed relentlessly by the Japanese, my great-great-grandfather settled with the rest of the family in the suburbs. Then Ting Geng contracted tuberculosis. He died after a year, and his girls went back to San Gu.
When my great-great-grandfather began his journey back to Xingang, he and Cong Ji took a bus from Chongqing and then walked or rode buffalo-pulled carts. They stayed in too many hotels for Cong Ji to count. My great-great-grandfather left Cong Ji with his father in southern Jiangxi, which was under Kuomintang control, and continued home, sneaking through blockades and checkpoints and slipping into Poyang Lake at night. When he reckoned it was safe enough, he sent for Cong Ji’s mother, Old Yang, and Pei Ke.
After the war San Gu returned to Jiujiang with Rulison, and Cong Ji moved back to attend Tong Wen in the winter of 1945. The house in Xingang had changed since he left. Of the square of buildings arranged around a courtyard, only a couple remained. Cong Ji graduated from Tong Wen in 1947, but with the civil war raging, he didn’t have the opportunity to take the university entrance exams until the next year.
He studied engineering at Southeast University in Nanjing and upon graduating was sent immediately to the Anshan steel factory in Dongbei, the largest one in the country, to he
lp the factory expand according to Russian blueprints. After four years that factory was finished, and his design group was sent to Beijing to build another one. There he met his wife, Pang Zhong Li, in 1958, and they married the same year. She had come from a wealthy family, too. Her father had been the Kuomintang chief of the telegraph and post service in Jiujiang. After she finished medical school, she was assigned to a hospital in Dezhou, working as a doctor and taking care of their children and Cong Ji’s mother while he worked in Beijing.
The government wouldn’t allow Cong Ji to bring his wife from Dezhou to Beijing, so they stayed apart for fifteen years, seeing each other once a year for seven days during the Lunar New Year. “This was a real personal suffering for me,” he said. “In 1973 I decided it wasn’t okay anymore. We were old, our children were grown, we couldn’t keep living separately. If she couldn’t come to Beijing, then I’d return to Dezhou.” Cong Ji punctuated many of his stories with sighs and whispered aiyous, as if they were shrapnel working their way out of his body.
Cong Ji’s other grandson came home from school as we were talking about the Cultural Revolution. He was tall for a ninth grader, with a flat-top haircut, round wire-rim glasses, and a peach-fuzz mustache. He said hello and disappeared into his room.
During the Cultural Revolution, work basically stopped. “You’d just ‘promote’ and ‘exercise,’ ” Cong Ji said. “The intelligentsia had to link with the workers and farmers, so they were demoted and exercised. You could farm, work in the factory, do low-level tasks. It wasn’t okay if you didn’t do it.”
Cong Ji’s group was doing critical work and was mostly left alone. Every year they had to spend about a week doing manual labor on a farm or shop floor. But because of his father’s landowning background, Cong Ji was pulled out to work on a farm in Inner Mongolia for a year.
“What was your reaction to all this?” I asked.
“I didn’t really have any special thinking about it,” he said. “Everyone had to do it. It was stipulated.”
“Didn’t you think it was strange?” I said, as Cong Ji’s grandson came out of his room and joined us on the sofa.
“Strange or not, it wasn’t okay if you didn’t go,” Cong Ji’s wife said, chuckling. “They’d hold a meeting, do an examination, and everyone would criticize you. ‘You’re straying from the revolutionary path,’ and so on, and they’d put a hat on you, saying you’re a counterrevolutionary or, worse, a traitor. Who would be willing to go through this? You’ve worked hard all your life, and then you make this mistake? It’d be bad for your children, too.”
Cong Ji’s wife got up to steep us a second pot of tea. I asked Cong Ji again if he could remember anything at all about his grandfather’s porcelain.
“I didn’t notice,” he said. “But I was very small. He could have collected it. At that time, if you had some money, what would you have spent it on? Porcelain. But you know, it was all Da Bai who purchased it. It wasn’t my grandfather who bought it. Da Bai bought it away from home and brought it back. So yes, he collected, but our family, we didn’t have much porcelain. Not a lot of porcelain.”
“Da Bai” was the kinship term for Ting Zan, my great-great-grandfather’s oldest son, my grandmother’s father. That might have explained why my grandmother had such misgivings about her grandfather. It was her father who worked so hard to support the family, to send his youngest brother to St. John’s, to pay for his father’s land and hobbies. I could imagine my grandmother connecting her father’s tuberculosis to having worked himself to exhaustion to satisfy his father’s myriad demands from back in Xingang. Ting Gong had aimed to study abroad after St. John’s, as many of its graduates did. But his brother’s death ended those plans, as it would have been difficult to leave the country without Ting Zan’s financial support.
Everything Cong Ji knew about the porcelain was what he heard from San Yi Po, my grandaunt in Taiwan. “She was the eldest at home when they fled, so she knew,” he said. “What became of that big cellar, I don’t know, and I didn’t ask. And then my grandfather was eventually chased out by people, so I don’t know what happened to his things. Pei Yu asked me and I told her I didn’t have the faintest idea.”
“I heard that Grandfather was the big landlord of Xingang,” I said.
“No, he wasn’t the big landlord. He didn’t have much land. How much exactly he had, I can’t say, but it wasn’t that much.”
“But it sounds like your family was pretty comfortable.”
“Relatively, yes, it was pretty good. But my grandfather, he was a very thrifty person, because he had been born very poor.” He chuckled. “I’ll use an old expression. We weren’t raised on being landlords, really. Our economy depended mostly on the people working outside the house, my dad, his brothers, and San Gu. They were all earning incomes. There was a bit of wealth in the family, but after fleeing the Japanese, after spending years in Sichuan, the money was spent.”
It surprised me to hear Cong Ji say this, which contradicted everything I had heard about my great-great-grandfather. I wondered if it was just another by-product of him having been the spoiled and sheltered child of the family, or if it was a reflex he had developed, a narrative he created after 1949 that disavowed any insinuation of his grandfather’s wealth, the sum of which should have furnished him, the only male heir, with a comfortable life, but instead became a cangue that he wore for decades and might still feel around his neck.
I asked him if my great-great-grandfather’s house was still in Xingang.
“All gone,” he said. “The government took the house and made a small cotton-processing factory. But the houses weren’t enough, so they expanded. Then that year there was a huge flood. After the flood, everyone moved to higher ground. I don’t know what happened to the factory after the flood, but it’s not there anymore. I returned once in 1999, and all the houses were gone. Finished.”
“Are you sure?”
“Aiyou, I didn’t look that closely. Cong You took me there to have a look, and I couldn’t find any foundations or anything. It was all water or fields. There used to be two big trees, a small road, and a grassy area. When I went, I couldn’t even find the plot. It’s all changed.”
That was the first I had heard of a Cong You. I didn’t know who he was, but the “Cong” in his name signified that he was of the same generation as Cong Ji.
“What do you think your grandfather thought of all those changes?” I asked.
“Grandfather, he didn’t care about politics,” Cong Ji said. “Of course, after Liberation, after they took his land, he had an opinion. He couldn’t avoid having an opinion then.” He gave a somber laugh.
“What about his sons? Did they have any opinions?”
“Da Bai and Er Bai all died young. The real changes didn’t start until after the Japanese war, and by then they had all died.”
“Er Bai” was the kinship term for Ting Geng. Cong Ji did not mention his own father. He paused for a long while before exhaling an “aiya,” like a deflating tire.
I SPENT THE next morning in what remained of Jinan’s old city and its famous springs. When I got back to Cong Ji’s house in the afternoon, he had found a small black-and-white photograph of my great-great-grandfather, taken at a Jiujiang photo studio in the early 1930s. It was the first and only image of my great-great-grandfather that I have ever seen. He is seated on a wooden armchair before a painted landscape and wears a long coat and a fur hat from which tufts of white hair poke out. His wispy beard reaches his sternum, and his lips are pressed into the straight line that comprises a Chinese smile. Next to him stands a young boy of about five years old. “We only have this,” Cong Ji said. “It was saved by San Gu.” She had never shown him the photograph; the family discovered it while cleaning up her things after she died. Cong Ji wasn’t sure if the boy in the picture was him or his older brother. “We never asked her who the boy was,” he said.
San Gu returned to Jiujiang with the Rulison school after the Japanese surrender.
She had never married, but not for lack of opportunity. Relatives introduced her to one man after another, including a doctor who had studied in France, but no one was ever good enough for her. Then, to everyone’s surprise, in 1948, a year before the Communists took the mainland, she married a Kuomintang major general, Guo Wen Can, whom she had met through my grandmother when Guo was stationed in Nanjing. Guo was tall, handsome, and well mannered, and San Gu fancied him as soon as they met. Few family members approved of the union, as Guo was a widower with three children and the Kuomintang’s prospects in the war were dismal. But he was kind to San Gu, and she loved him. Despite the political uncertainty, my great-great-grandfather held a huge wedding banquet in Jiujiang to celebrate San Gu’s marriage, under Kuomintang propaganda banners depicting the Communists as poisonous snakes and perverts.
San Gu continued teaching at Rulison while Guo was dispatched to the island of Hainan, where he was to cover the Kuomintang’s retreat. He was successful, but his own troops were backed into Yunnan, and he was captured and sent to a prison camp for “war criminals” in Inner Mongolia. By the time San Gu received the news, the Communists were about to march into Jiujiang.
Guo remained in prison for nearly twenty years, until Mao’s death, when he and other high-ranking Kuomintang officers were amnestied. He returned to his hometown in Hunan, where he received a residence, a small pension, and a titular position in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. San Gu left Rulison, which had since been combined with Tong Wen into one school, to reunite with her husband. But he was on his last beam of light. His time in jail had made him short-tempered and violent. He forbade San Gu from speaking to other men. He went to his committee meetings and took long walks alone. They had no children of their own, and her husband’s children ignored her—the old stepmother from Chinese folk songs. San Gu wrote to Cong Ji, pleading for him to rescue her.