by Huan Hsu
She would spend the rest of her life with Cong Ji, who, in a reversal of his childhood, now took care of her. She remained a vigorous woman for many years, waking up early every morning to take a walk around the lake and then do tai chi. In the afternoons she listened to English programs on the radio—she didn’t want to lose the language. At night she taught Li Nan to recite poetry. But then her eyes started failing. Her ears followed her eyes, and she spent the last five years of her life bedridden, blind and deaf. The only way the family could communicate with her was by tracing out characters on her hand. She died in 1998, and her ashes were taken back to Xingang for burial.
“In our family there were three major characters,” Liu Cong Ji said. “Grandfather, Ting Zan, and San Gu. When our economy turned for the good and we were richer, it was due to Ting Zan. But this big group of sisters, when it came to their peiyang”—he used a term that encompassed “cultivation,” “nurturing,” and “education”—“who was it? San Gu. She helped our family so much. Pei Yu, Pei Sheng, Pei Ke, and me, we were all raised by her. Ting Zan died early and we didn’t get a chance to know him, but we all knew San Gu, and our family are all very grateful and affectionate to her.” Cong Ji called her one of the family’s two gongchen, ministers who performed outstanding service.
AS WE GATHERED around the kitchen table for dinner, Li Nan opened an ancient bottle of chardonnay, pouring it into thin jade baijiu cups about the size of shot glasses. “Who’s driving tonight?” Cong Ji said. “Whoever’s driving, don’t drink!”
I had noticed that Cong Ji had mostly avoided talking about his father, Ting Gong, the youngest of my great-great-grandfather’s sons. In one of our early conversations, my grandmother had mentioned that Ting Gong had gotten into trouble with the Communists but refused to elaborate. I had heard from other relatives that while Ting Gong was at St. John’s, his father arranged for him to marry a girl from the Xingang countryside, the daughter of a wealthy but uneducated family. Ting Gong went along with it, but the marriage was an unhappy one. Ting Gong had received one of the finest educations available in China, and the gap this created between him and his wife, a farmer’s daughter with little schooling or culture, was too far to bridge. Instead, Ting Gong fell in love with a beautiful, urbane cousin who had studied medicine. He wanted to divorce his wife, but his father forbade it. After Ting Gong graduated in 1924, he took up with this cousin, a woman named Yao Meng Mei, in the provincial capital in Nanchang, while his wife and son remained in Xingang. My great-great-grandfather wouldn’t allow him to bring his mistress home with him for the Lunar New Year, so Ting Gong stopped going home.
After dinner we all sat in the living room. “I didn’t tell you the last couple of days, but if you’d asked, I would have told you,” Cong Ji said. “After Liberation, there were antirightist movements beginning in 1957 throughout the whole country. And my father got labeled a rightist. At that time there were these big meetings and persecutions. All the rightists were the capable people. The people who had no ability, they see all these able people, so they used this campaign to clear the way for themselves.”
Ting Gong was isolated, prohibited from communicating with anyone, and forced to attend meeting after meeting where he was publicly criticized and denounced for absurd reasons. “Later, he couldn’t take it,” Cong Ji said. “He committed suicide in 1958.”
Cong Ji didn’t learn of it until two years later, from San Gu. Ting Gong’s label as a rightist had far-reaching consequences for his descendants, as the Chinese believed that si bu hui gai—the dead couldn’t repent. At his job Cong Ji was “set aside,” frozen out of promotions, ostracized from his co-workers, and under constant threat of persecution. He described spending those years with his tail tucked between his legs.
When the gaokao, which had been suspended during the Cultural Revolution, resumed in 1977, Cong Ji’s son, Li Dong, registered for it and passed it, but as he prepared to attend university, the administration did a “political check” on his family, saw that his grandfather had been a “rightist,” and invalidated Li Dong’s test score. By the next gaokao, Deng had made the test open to all, and Li Dong passed it again and headed to Xiamen for college, where he learned that half of the incoming students shared his experience. “Isn’t this amazing?” Li Nan said. “It lasted so long, and so many generations felt the impact.”
“That’s not fair,” I said.
“Of course not!” Cong Ji said. “They said that if any one of your family is one of the five bads”—landlords, rich farmers, counterrevolutionaries, criminals, and rightists—“the rest of your family was branded. Just as the emperors used to kill entire families of criminals, this was the same. That’s the feudal system. If you belonged to the wrong family, they didn’t give you any opportunity to advance. Mao, he was basically an emperor. He just used another name, ‘chairman.’ ” It wasn’t until two years after Mao’s death that the Deng Xiaoping–led government began to posthumously reverse the condemnations. In the 1980s Cong Ji received a letter stating that his father was no longer considered a rightist and had been rehabilitated. “We really appreciated that, remedying things,” he said. “But the people are already dead. Mei ban fa.” Depending on the context, mei ban fa can mean “impossible” or “what can you do?”
As they emerged from the Cultural Revolution, the family was so impoverished that Cong Ji’s wife used to bring back used medicine bottles from the hospital to use as storage, and the boxes the bottles were packed in, too. If she was out and came upon an old brick, she’d pick it up and bring it home. “If you collected enough bricks, say seven per stack, and put a piece of wood on top of the legs, then you had a table,” Cong Ji’s wife said.
Purchasing goods, from cloth to bicycles, required ration tickets. Si Yi Po, due to her and Fang Zhen Zhi’s jobs in Beijing, was able to acquire more tickets than she needed, and she sent the extras to Cong Ji’s family. “I remember when we got our first television, a tiny nine-inch black-white one,” Li Nan said. “Si Yi Po pulled some strings so that we could buy one. And once we got it, our house turned into the neighborhood theater.”
“We were the first adopters of all the new things,” Cong Ji said. “The first to get a television, a refrigerator, a washing machine, an electric fan. Boy, people were jealous of us then. They really envied that fan. And then we got a new television.”
“No,” Li Nan said. “First, we got a magnifying glass in front of our old one. Turned it from a nine-inch to a twelve-inch!”
“Yes, but then we bought a proper twelve-inch color television,” Cong Ji said. “Si Yi Po helped us get that, too. She was always the first to get new things.”
“You know, I think that’s all from old Grandpa,” Li Nan said. “I mean, back then, they had a saying that the only girls who were any good were the ones who didn’t know anything, but he sent all five of those girls not just to school but to Western schools. He was so ahead of his time, so open to new ideas and things. That got passed down to the girls, and they kept it going. I think that’s probably one of our family’s greatest traditions.”
FOR MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER, THE RELIEF FOLLOWING the Japanese surrender was short-lived. The Chinese civil war reignited almost as soon as the Japanese departed, the Kuomintang and Communists racing to seize control of the former Japanese-occupied territories. The government was bankrupt from the years of fighting, and inflation further demoralized the country. Even the National Palace Museum treasure trucks remained in the countryside, unsure if they should return to Nanjing. Skirmishes escalated between the Communists and the Nationalists. My great-great-grandfather, never one for politics, fended off overtures from both sides and followed the fighting in newspapers. He couldn’t abide the venality of the Qing before, and he didn’t stand for the Kuomintang’s corruption now. But he couldn’t possibly have agreed with the Communists “redistributing” his land, for which he had worked and saved so hard, and which two sons had died in the process of acquiring.
J
iangxi was the birthplace of Communism, where Mao founded the Jiangxi soviet, and where the Long March began. While my great-great-grandfather was inclined to side with the Kuomintang, most of his sharecroppers sympathized with the Communists, who offered the irresistible promise of being able to take and own the farmland they rented from their landlords. But in villages like Xingang, where the families had known each other for centuries, an unspoken agreement was enforced. When the Nationalists came through hunting for Communists, Liu would warn the peasants and hide them in his home if necessary. When the Communists prepared for smash and grab campaigns against wealthy landowners, the peasants would tell Liu in advance and let him know where he could hide. After a few days, things would settle down and return to normal.
Despite vast amounts of foreign financial and military aid, Chiang lost battle after battle. Inflation rose to devastating levels, further eroding his power base, and waves of intellectuals, students, and professionals defected to the Communists. As the Communists advanced, many of the wealthy sold off their homes and land and moved their money and collectibles abroad. One day Liu received a letter from a friend in Beijing reporting that the Communists—who had built up a strong base in northern “liberated” China, while the south remained under tenuous Kuomintang control—were close to taking the country, and to prepare for the worst. “If meat costs one hundred silver dollars per jin, buy it,” the friend advised. “But whatever you do, don’t buy land, even if it’s offered for only one dollar per mu.”
As a Communist victory appeared more and more likely, Liu’s only remaining son, Ting Gong, urged him to leave. “You’d best sell off this place and our things quickly,” he said. “The Communists aren’t like the Japanese. They won’t ask you to collaborate with them. They won’t respect your education or your property. They’re going to come after you.”
But Pei Fu’s husband, who unbeknownst to most had recently switched allegiance to the Communists, assured him he would be safe. “What’s this I hear about you leaving?” he said.
“Number Three says we need to leave,” Liu said.
“Are the Communists not still Chinese?” Pei Fu’s husband argued. “They’ll take care of their own people, no matter their politics. Don’t go.”
“If you don’t leave, you’re going to regret it,” Ting Gong said.
Most of the landlords and rich peasants in Xingang didn’t leave. As wealthy as they were for the area, it was all relative, and going abroad, even to Hong Kong, was about as feasible as moving to the moon for them. But of all the people in Xingang, my great-great-grandfather should have known better. Had he not foreseen the end of the Qing and China’s subsequent industrialization and Westernization? Maybe he had already experienced enough turmoil and displacement in his lifetime. Maybe he thought nothing could be as cataclysmic as the end of the Qing dynasty. He was nearly eighty, and maybe he couldn’t imagine spending the rest of his life, or dying, far from home. The information he gleaned from his newspapers suggested that the Communists would take only “what was empty.” A gang full of wheat or rice—and other spoils of personal investment or toil—would be left alone. He just couldn’t believe that the Communists wouldn’t respect a man’s personal property.
Ting Gong, with whom my great-great-grandfather had reached détente over his mistress, fulfilled his filial duty by staying at the house. But he did get my great-great-grandfather to agree to a few precautions, and with Old Yang’s help they buried his silver, his remaining valuables, and most important, the stack of his deeds to his properties and farmland, the proof that he was a landlord.
When the Communists declared victory a few months later, it was too late for my great-great-grandfather to leave, and he was past the age of running anyway. He had done it once before, when the Japanese invaded, and he hadn’t been a young man then, either. But his conscience was clear. He had never committed a crime and had done not a few good things in the village. So he stayed, and the Communists found him without much trouble, alone in his empty manor on the western edge of town, sipping the small cup of warmed sorghum wine that he had every evening, a tonic for warding off arthritis. As the area’s wealthiest landowner—the most hated oppressor in the Communists’ class struggle—Liu knew they would come for him first. He stood up, as if he were expecting them, and told them to get on with it.
The Communists had begun executing landlords all over China, retribution for the “crimes” they had committed on peasants and farmers. In Xingang, they hung landlords from trees and beat them or made them kneel on ice for hours. They tortured the women in landlord families by forcing them to walk across frozen ponds in their bare—and often deformed-from-footbinding—feet; as interested as the Communists were in a new China, old habits like one person’s crime staining an entire family died hard.
As the local cadres embarked on Mao’s promised land reforms, they held a public meeting in the village, where they tied up my great-great-grandfather atop a table and accused him of being a tuhao lieshen, or “shady gentry,” who’d fattened himself on the people’s blood. “You took everything the people grew and kept it for yourself!” the cadres shouted. “How could you have inflicted such evil on the people?”
“Say whatever you want,” Liu said. “I don’t care. My wife and sons are already dead. The sooner you kill me, the sooner I see them again. And I’ll thank you for the opportunity, even as you chop off my head.”
The cadres urged villagers to condemn him. But while plenty of villagers had found themselves on the receiving end of a tongue-lashing over the years, no one was willing to step forward and accuse him of being anything more than temperamental. Finally an old woman spoke up. “You people have no conscience,” she shouted. “All these years, everything you ate and drank, wasn’t it from him? The land you farmed, it was this man’s. During the droughts and floods, when there were no provisions, wasn’t it this man who took care of you and made sure you ate? Now that he’s filled your bellies and raised you into adults, you want to persecute him?” The Communists dragged her away before she could say more.
No one would turn on my great-great-grandfather, so the cadres took him down. Still, they couldn’t allow him to go unpunished. So, like thousands of other landowners, my great-great-grandfather had his house, his property, and his belongings taken from him and was told to saodi chumen, literally “sweep the floor and leave.”
He moved into a hovel on the edge of his property, made of dried mud bricks and formerly used as a storeroom. Ting Gong’s wife followed him. Some villagers tried to take care of him, slipping him food at night. He lived in that small room without a bed or windows for half a year before dying. According to San Yi Po and Si Yi Po, my great-great-grandfather died from repeated beatings. According to Liu Cong Ji, it was cancer. The discrepancy seemed to say as much about my relatives as it did our history. Liu’s only surviving son, Ting Gong, buried him in the family cemetery on the hill between the fishpond and Poyang Lake, where he joined all the other ancestors in looking upon the land that no longer belonged to them.
I TRAVELED TO JIUJIANG THE SAME WAY MY GRANDFATHER’S porcelain had—through Jingdezhen. For centuries porcelain moved out of Jingdezhen on the Chang River, through Poyang Lake to Jiujiang’s customhouses, a journey that took days. But that water route has been replaced by highways and flight patterns; the locals I asked in Jingdezhen weren’t even sure if it was still possible to reach Jiujiang by boat. Now, after boarding an early-morning bus, the trip to Jiujiang was an uncrowded ninety-minute ride on a brand-new coach still smelling of plasticizer.
Jiujiang was the rare Chinese city that appeared smaller than I expected, a web of narrow streets enclosed by the Yangtze River to the north, Lushan to the south, and lakes to the east and west. As the bus crawled into the city center, I saw no pre-Mao architecture but also little new construction. Even Jingdezhen seemed to have both more ancient neighborhoods and more development, and Jiujiang felt passed over and decaying. I took a taxi from the Jiujiang bus statio
n to the Bayi Hotel that Tang Hou Cun, my grandmother’s local cousin, had booked for me. Bayi, or “Eight-One,” referred to the August 1, 1927, founding of the People’s Liberation Army.
I dropped off my things and went to the lobby to wait for Tang Hou Cun. Instead, Pei Fu’s son, Chen Bang Ning, showed up. He reported that Tang Hou Cun had gone fishing, and since we had some time before Tang Hou Cun got home, he would take me for a walk around the city.
Chen Bang Ning was barely sixty but appeared much older. His hair still displayed the side on which he had slept, his bloodshot eyes ran with mucus, and he had a phlegmy cough that he never covered. His neck seemed to be under constant strain. He smelled of cigarette smoke and alcohol and walked with a slight limp, which didn’t stop him from wading into traffic whenever he felt like crossing the street. He was hard of hearing and spoke in a shout. “Do you have that photograph of your mom and her brothers?” he said, assuming I knew which one he meant. “We had one but couldn’t keep it during the Cultural Revolution. We had it really tough back then, all the people suffering in denunciations, suicides. It wasn’t until Deng came up that things improved.”
On our way to the Nengren Buddhist temple, we stopped at a former missionary hospital, now engulfed by a modern medical complex. Only a single cornerstone remained, carved with the Chinese characters for “Water of Life Hospital” and protected behind a Plexiglas cover. Farther on was an old mission compound, including a Catholic church complex built by the French, its former soccer field having been turned into vegetable gardens. Inside the temple gates we paused at a rain stone, a rectangular block of granite, the top of which centuries of raindrops had worn into a bowl, placed there to display nature’s relentless power and to serve as an example of persistence.