Gifts to the Sad Country: Essays on the Chinese Diaspora 9819715989, 9789819715985

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Gifts to the Sad Country Essays on the Chinese Diaspora Souchou Yao

Gifts to the Sad Country

Souchou Yao

Gifts to the Sad Country Essays on the Chinese Diaspora

Souchou Yao Marrickville, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-981-97-1597-8 ISBN 978-981-97-1598-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1598-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Paper in this product is recyclable.

Author’s Note

A few years back I went to the Eighth Route Army Museum in Xi’an, a grey mansion of interconnecting courtyards and roofs of jutting eaves, and soaked in the grandeur of the revolution. Since 2018 onwards, it is no longer there. The reception area is gone, and the wooden door is replaced by an iron gate. The building is still there, and the renamed Eighth Route Army Office Block announces its alternative fate. It seems nothing in China escapes the rapaciousness of commercialism. In a stationer in Chengdu, books are sold by weight. You take the six volumes of Dream of the Red Chamber and front up to the counter, a sour-faced man piles them on a scale and declares, ‘Fifteen renminbi!’. They are cheap because you are competing with the paper recyclers and their sorry trade. Only money, it seems, would be savoured with reverence. For the anthropologist, the familiar landmarks and customary social values are like shifting sand. A Malaysian Chinese, he knows China and its ways. But things rapidly change and each trip is an attempt to catch up with the latest phrasings, to regauge the new twists given to familiar words. Xiaojie, Miss, a term of polite address, grants dignity to a sex worker; xi jiao mei, ‘Feet-washing sister,’ euphemizes young women of the massage parlour. There are other usages that can lead to innocent faux pas. It is a sharp realization: you can’t migrate a word or a concept from one context to another context, from one usage to another usage. To follow the fortune of a family of diaspora is to straddle two places, two social and political systems. All the braggadocio and bathos of their v

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longing are inscribed by the neat division of nations and social and political circumstances. In this sense, the first act of a migrant is to render what they know and believe in another language and through another mode of understanding. It is, in short, a feat of translation.1 Thinkers and migrants alike catch on quickly: being too literal and too accurate in transcribing a word or a phrase is not necessarily useful. For you want to keep some of the passion and ethos in the fresh context; the meanings of words are born of social usage. The following pages deal with men and women in their seventies and early eighties; their active years were spent during the Land Reform (1948–1950) and the collectivization of the Great Leap Forward (1958– 1962). As old people do, their minds have stalled and their daily parlance sounds quaint and out of place in present-day China. Communism and revolution still connote violence and state oppression. And in interpersonal affairs, they continue to use airen, lover, for husband or wife, and tongzhi, comrade, to suggest a person of intimacy and friendship. These are words that take the speaker to a time when such expressions were meaningful and telling. And the elderly still bring up Nanyang when they mean Southeast Asia, and Malaya, the name of the British colony, when they refer to contemporary Malaysia. In their letters, so I note, my parents had used Nanyang and Malaya right towards the end of their lives. To use the correct Southeast Asia and Malaysia would nullify their yen for the ancestral home under communist rule. Thus, I have kept these charming, old-fashioned expressions in the text. Translation or updating would be an outrage to scholarship, not to say to filial loyalty. Fieldwork in Zhang Chun village was carried out over several visits since 2016; my longest stay was six months in 2018. With the Covid pandemic, communication between Sydney and Zhang Chun continued on WeChat and WhatsApp. It is engrossing to examine the old state measures through the eyes of diaspora—at various times alarming and joyful, fearful and a relief. The Cultural Revolution has been abundantly written about, and the generation that lived through the Land Reform and the Great Leap Forward is ageing, which gave the book a poignant urgency. The anthropologist is grateful for their persistence and good sense, and for opening up to a painful period in their youth.

1 Steiner.

Contents

1

1

Moving Story

2

Revolution Comes to Zhang Chun Village

19

3

The Postman

35

4

Grandfather’s Two Households

51

5

Things That Bind

71

6

My Sister’s Grave

89

7

Homebound

109

8

Revolutionary Romance

125

9

Soft Trauma

141

Index

159

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CHAPTER 1

Moving Story

Here I ain’t been travelling but a month, and I am already in Tennessee. My, my, a body does get around. —William Faulkner, Light in August (1932)

My mother, with her years in Maoist China, refused to set foot again on Chinese soil. On an autumn day in 2016, I was heading to China for an academic gig at Peking University. At the airport she held my hands and said, ‘Don’t forget to go back to the village; half of your family are still there.’ It was a plea, a reminder. Listening to her, I felt as though my whole life had been in preparation for this moment—to return to the village and to reconnect with my kinfolk there. I said I would, then she slipped a hand into her blouse and retrieved a thick bundle of money: ‘This is for you. Your grandparents’ grave in the far hills needs to be attended to. Distribute the rest among the relatives.’ The money felt as heavy as my self-consciousness. The deal was sealed; there would be no way to avoid the mission, even if I wanted to. From the airline reception desk, behind a ribbon of passengers waiting to check in, I saw her cordoned off in the waiting area with my sister. In her wheelchair, she looked frail and unmemorable, as the aged tend to look. My sister stepped away to answer her mobile, and mother was left alone. From where I was, she appeared stranded and like no one was going to save her. She was a woman forged by her difficult marriage into a difficult family and by the hardship of living through the revolution. She was a figure from the past, a past that I had heard so much about. At © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 S. Yao, Gifts to the Sad Country, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1598-5_1

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the boarding area, I turned my head, and she stared back, then began to fiddle with her handbag and waved at my sister to take her home. I was travelling to Beijing to give a lecture at Peking University and after that I hoped to spend a few weeks reading at the university library. The detour to Zhang Chun village had not been part of the plan. A week after I arrived in Beijing, my sister phoned to tell me that my mother had passed away in her sleep. The news shook me out of my complacency, and the journey to the ancestral village became something urgent that I could not avoid. For years, I did not think much about China. There were for me two Chinas. There was the China where my grandfather had, with the money from Nanyang, invested in land and built a home in the ancestral village; Father took over the family estate, and brought up the eldest son and daughter before he lost it to the Communists. It was China that witnessed the family’s descent from landowners to emigrants, who eventually settled in Malaysia where my siblings and I were born. The other China was the China of literature, ancient philosophy and dynastic history that was drummed into my head at the Confucius Middle School in Kuala Lumpur, where I finished secondary education. This was Cultural China, full of wisdom and civilizational achievement; not quite the real thing. It has taken me a long time to realize, when I stare at China’s long tumultuous history, the two versions are in fact one; they have come out of the same cultural systems and the play of state power. I settle in quickly at Zhang Chun village. Many of the informants are my kin, and I am soon steeped in their recollections of the radical reforms of the fifties and sixties. They are men and women in their seventies, a handful in their early eighties. What they call up from the recesses of memory is sharp and heartfelt and modifies my bookish view of revolutionary China. There’s a lot in the interviews that my parents did not—could not—tell me. Everyone was affected by the upheaval. My parents, being of the landlord class, were made the target of revolutionary struggle. They left during the height of the Great Leap Forward, which saved them—unlike other ‘blood-sucking’ landlords.

Things That Bound Broken by emigration and revolution, my parents were besotted by the dream of returning to their ancestral home with the wealth acquired overseas. Separation, absence and foreign sojourn drove the way we thought

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about the homeland. For some years, my mother was stranded in the village with her ailing mother-in-law. Her two adult children had left home—the daughter married, and the son studying at university in Dairen in China’s northeast. My father, travelling between Malaya, Hong Kong and China, as his herbal wholesale business required, kept a house in the British colony in Southeast Asia and returned to the village a couple of times a year. In his mind it was a neat, elegant division of homes and countries.1 China was where the family lived and kept a house and farmed the land with the help of tenant farmers and labourers, and Malaya was a place of business and temporary sojourn. With this belief, he had not thought about bringing his wife and two children to Malaya, and they maintained a transnational marriage before the term was fashionable. In any case, when Land Reform came to the village in 1951–1952, my grandmother was sick and could not travel. By the time her son and daughter left home, my mother had stayed on to look after her mother-in-law. After my grandmother died, separation and dispersal of the family became a pressing reality. My mother was alone, save the maid, and our kinfolk were themselves being persecuted. With my father in Malaya, the wrath of the party cadres fell on his wife. She was interrogated and threatened with a public trial. The circumstances gave a new urgency to getting her out, but the process was slow. After much rankling—my father had wisely stayed away during the negotiation—the village committee imposed a heavy fine and the family was ‘promoted’ from landlord to rich peasant, before giving her permission to leave. The family was thus divided. The two eldest children remained in China, and my parents and their younger children born in Malaysia made up the rest of the family. For my parents, the Great Leap Forward of the early sixties had finally pressed home the message. They realized they could not go back, and China was no longer home—there was a lot of rethinking and hard-nosed adjustments. While China may not be home, there was still Zhang Chun village where they were married and where my father’s ancestors were buried. Right towards the end of their lives, they would regard Zhang Chun as their original home—the Communists were not to cut off their connections with their kin and neighbours there. Given our relative prosperity in Malaysia, it fell upon us to support them when living through another of Mao’s revolutionary measures. The sending and receiving of goods and remittances helped to maintain the kin relationship, and people benefited from the donors’ evident generosity. In my mind’s eye an arc of water breaches the two lands, and

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across the divide a traffic of goods and remittances people desperately needed. A whole story can be told of these transactions. I remember how, as a young boy, I would lend a hand in laying out the parcels in the sitting room, tightening the ropes and checking the names and addresses against the list of recipients. It was joyful work, but there were worries. Would the parcels survive the journey? Have we sent enough? What about the relatives who didn’t ask? Then the occasional thought: Can we really afford all this? Kin sentiment costs money—and effort. An ocean away, the situation was harder to imagine. Visitors went and came back with news and rumour and gossip. The collectivization was being carried out. Every family was made to join a commune, which gave decision-making power about planting and harvesting over to the village committee. Life was getting harder; people ate at the communal kitchen, which turned out army-style dishes, tasteless and with scant pieces of meat. People got up at four in the morning, and things were rationed. Then they remembered their relatives in Nanyang and wrote to ask for help. When the goods arrived, they said, it’s a blessing that the Uncle in Nanyang was sensible and generous. And I am to hear this again and again: The dry boiled rice and pork lard were heaven-sent, without which the family would not have survived. The South Seas had always felt far away, almost mythical; now it became real through the parcels they received and the donor who sent them.

Journeying The narrative of diaspora is wont to bring up separation, and a sense of longing and regret. This is true, but not quite the whole story. For the diaspora, separation and longing are an expression of something more fundamental. Whether they hanker after expatriation or not, they must give in to the need for journeying. We speak of the social and political actualities that force people to leave their homeland, and yes, emigration is life-changing. However, with these there is also the desire to move and to move on. That they have followed the ‘push factors’ of economic geography—the poverty, the want of opportunities—and migrated to another land is saying a lot, yet not much. The economic explanation tends to dominate. In Malaysia, among the ethnic Chinese, what they tell are universally good stories about their ancestors: heroic pioneers for whom economic improvement was the drive—and obsession. You may question if the economic drive would make them singularly acquisitive and greedy,

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but their descendants rarely think so and turn it into the core of their cultural practices. Speaking as one myself, what do emigrants want besides economic improvement, besides getting the best mortgage deal to buy a house, to save for a trip to Disneyland for the family? It is not only academic specialization that turns me to ruminate on the emotions and sentiments, the regret and longing that affect a family of diaspora. The lyricism and the poetics of longing are themselves worthy of treatment. Indeed, they lead us to the central issue of social and cultural displacement. If migration is a search for a place of settlement, it also scripts the confrontation of different cultural standpoints, of contrasting social and political systems. This, in plainer terms, all migrants know and experience. Migration is, above all else, a journey of philosophic attitudes.

Migration as Translation ‘Any model of communication is at the same time a model of translation of a vertical or horizontal transfer of significance,’ George Steiner writes. He elaborates, No two historical epochs, no two social classes, no two localities use words and syntax to signify exactly the same things, to send identical signals of valuation and inference. Neither do two human beings. Each living person draws, deliberately or in immediate habit, on two sources of linguistic supply: the current vulgate corresponding to his level of literacy, and a private thesaurus. The latter is inextricably a part of his subconscious, of his memories so far as they may be verbalized, and of the singular, irreducibly specific ensemble of his somatic and psychological identity.2

Steiner has in mind the apparent contradiction involving all modes of translation. Earlier, he insists on the particularity of language that makes onerous words to be rendered in another tongue, to hew it with other ‘figures of syntax.’3 Each human language maps the world differently. There is life-giving compensation in the extreme grammatical complication of those languages (for example, among Australian Aboriginals or in the Kalahari) whose speakers dwell in material and social contexts of deprivation and barrenness. Each tongue—and there are no ‘small’ or lesser languages—construes a set of possible worlds and geographies of remembrance.4

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This does not suggest the futility of translation, however, only its challenges. The remaking of words and sentences into parallel signs and meaning in another language: the process takes up the other world, the other set of circumstances imbedded in their linguistic form. Translation propels the movement of words and meanings as well as their social roots—so does any act of communication. Steiner is surely right. To communicate is not only to convey a set of words and their meanings; it is also to set in train the social customs that make up what Steiner calls ‘the somatic and psychological identity’ of the speaker.5 This gives communication a considerable sense of mobility. It is a shifting ground that a person stands on, and they must be lucid with their message and intent, and grasp the social circumstances that define how such a message and intention would be received. In communication, there is a reciprocity of meanings and a reciprocity of social-cultural norms. When you think about it, an immigrant’s experience is a lot like translation—as they deal with two places and two social-political systems. I am trying to get a handle on my father’s effort to keep in touch with the homeland. It was an effort valiant, almost romantic. It was like swimming against the current, and circumstances were against him at each move. Separation and disconnection featured prominently in his earlier life, when he settled his family in the village while he kept, to his mind, a temporary home overseas. Life was made bearable—and his marriage kept viable—when he was able to travel to-and-fro a couple of times a year. Things radically changed after the Communist victory. For those in Malaya, China became Red China that lay behind the bamboo curtain, unreachable and hostile to the ‘free West’ to which Malaya belonged. The British colony became independent in 1957 and six years later, in 1963, formed the Federation of Malaysia by including the crown colonies of North Borneo, Sarawak and Singapore. These years were the height of the Cold War and Malaysia was fighting an anti-communist insurgency that started in 1948, and Beijing was alleged to be aiding the guerrillas. Travel to China was disallowed except for the elderly and business people. The situation was confusing for people like my father. The bamboo curtain had indeed come down, yet China was open in many ways. Because of the status of Hong Kong, Britain was among the first countries to recognize the People’s Republic of China when it came into being in 1949. Malaya and later Malaysia kept a moderate diplomatic contact, largely in the area of trade. The reality is the two countries were connected

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in all kinds of ways. All this time, the Bank of China stayed open for business in Kuala Lumpur and in Singapore. When letters and news were short in coming, the Bank of China was a saviour by transmitting what we could to the village. I recall as a child how I had held on to my mother’s hand on another expedition to the Bank of China building near the city market. The queue before each counter was long and sweaty. The line slowly edged forward, when we reached the counter and handed over the soiled notes, we felt as if we had accomplished a great mission, an intimation of care and longing that was to reach another land, another political system. Apart from the Bank of China and the letters, there were the shuike, enterprising postmen who plied their trade between the South Seas and the towns and villages in southern China. To the whimsical-minded, the itinerant courier was an angel of mercy, goods and letters and yearning travelled with him to reach the loved ones. As with translation, the modes of connection were like standing on an open channel across which words and meanings travel and instal their systems of significance. Gifts and remittances, too, made their way over the distance, but the expedient and material calculations do not describe the process. Often, one gives over to the lyricism and poetics of these transactions, transactions of the heart and emotional hankering. Hampered by the prevailing conditions, my parents never successfully managed their twin loyalties and national attachments. If what they did was ingenious and dramatic, it just as often failed. And the sense of tragedy began, you might say, with the position of the community in a Malay-dominated nation, where the notion of Chinese identity and of the Chinese diaspora itself are open to questioning.

Overseas Chinese, Chinese Overseas Not only in Malaysia does one detect a strong anti-China feel, a fierce disparagement of the notion of the middle kingdom as a sign of identification of its people overseas. Many want to lay to rest the ghost of a homogenized, culturally unified national community. The way out of the prison house is diversity, such that ‘Chinese ethnic identity’ can claim a root beyond the Chinese nation and its culture. Ien Ang in On Not Speaking Chinese cheers for diversity, and sees Chinese diaspora as a kind of ‘transnational nationalism’ that would give rise to ‘post-Chinese identities.’6 Allen Chun’s Fuck Chineseness is brilliantly postmodern in dismantling the foundations—China’s geography, long dynastic history

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and civilization achievements—that hold up the notion of huaqiao, the Overseas Chinese.7 Equally astringent is Shu-mei Shih, for whom huaquio are ‘complicit with China’s nationalist call to the overseas Chinese’, since ‘when the (im)migrants settle and become localized, many choose to end their state of diaspora by the second or third generation.’8 The authors have a point. With an eye on the globalized world, any form of China-centred ethnic identity would not do, it cannot but be restrictive and parochial. If nothing else, such an identity risks the reincarnation of the Chinaman of old, all buckteeth and Charlie Chan-speak, who holds on to their feudal instincts while blind to the realities of the contemporary world. The trouble is, in their rush to judgement, the China that causes so much critical rage turns out to be a figure of polemics, a phantom of a certain ideological posturing. China is here a sign, shimmering with unresolved desires and conflicting geopolitical loyalties, not to say personal partisanship from which even academics are not immune. To these pundits, the ethnographer may well reply: there are plenty of ethnic Chinese who, for their own perverse reasoning, still find China a meaningful place of cultural attachment. What with the rise of post-Deng China, these ‘parochial Chinese’ actually hold a great deal that is modern and cosmopolitan. In Malaysia and Singapore where I came from, these Chinese are easy enough to find. You can scour the elegant boutiques on the island republic where the Hong Kong-based Shanghai Tang brand is the latest in China chic. Better still, if you happen to be in Kuala Lumpur, visit one of the independent Chinese schools which, supported by community funding, teach the government syllabus as well as Chinese history, language and literature. Or you can call on a private university, one that is a part of the Chinese Education Movement: Marxism and postcolonial studies are absent from the curriculum, and in their place are graphic design, business management, media studies, engineering and Chinese language and literature. In another fashion, the ghost of eternal, unchanging China is brought to life for critical probing. In Southeast Asia—Nanyang to my parent’s generation—the ethnic Chinese face in various degrees and with different political heat, discrimination and resentment. There is nothing more dangerous, more inviting of ethnic hostility, than to call China—or any foreign nation—home. In Malaysia, more than six decades after independence, indigenous-migrant antagonism drives the national politics still. At its most coherent, the ethnic relationship takes on the grim elegance of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Each community sees itself as the injured

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party, with the Other race as the cause of our deprivation. The self looks anxiously to the Other side and finds all the things—economic wealth, political power—we deserve but are denied. And since we are talking about the workings of desire, everything is a wavering reality: self and Other are entangled, the attraction and repulsion are in constant traffic. Diaspora is an unhappy word to use in Malaysia; the academics shun it, the journalists and commentators avoid it—if they have ever heard of it. For the term establishes one’s connection to the original homeland, a perilous move in a nation of febrile ethnic resentment. A community of diaspora has two homelands—remember Steiner?—which makes them a group of persons of questionable loyalty. The concept invites ethnic malevolence. In Malaysia, the ethnic Chinese and Indians are often referred to as ‘immigrants’ by Malay politicians wanting to fire up their base. In such a context, the diaspora would give the non-Malays a source of identification beyond the nation. While the concept may be in vogue in the university circles elsewhere, it is poisonous when used locally. If ‘diaspora’ is controversial, so is the more familiar Overseas Chinese. No matter that the governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait had, since the fifties, renounced their jurisdiction over the ‘sons and daughters’ living abroad. Change of policy is one thing; the other is diplomatic realism—the need to assure the countries with a substantial Chinese population of the allegiance of their ethnic-Chinese citizens. It is an attempt at appeasement, a smoothening of a rough discourse of resentment by the parties concerned. Wang Gungwu’s article ‘Greater China and the Chinese Overseas,’ published nearly three decades ago, remains influential today.9 Wang gives an elegant typology that breaks up the ethnic Chinese into three groups. Group A Chinese, a relatively small group that had become smaller; they maintained links with the politics of China, either directly or indirectly, and were concerned always to identify with the destiny of China. Group B Chinese formed the majority group everywhere; they were hard-headed and realistic and concentrated on making a living in occupations which allowed them to behave openly as ethnic Chinese. In the political sphere, they tended to limit their activities to the low posture and indirect politics of trade, professional and community associations.

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Group C Chinese were generally committed to the new nationbuilding politics, even though they remained uncertain of their future as ethnic Chinese and were never sure whether they would ever be fully accepted as loyal citizens.10 Also mentioned are the minorities outside these groups: those who ‘had accepted assimilation and no longer insisted on being known as Chinese.’11 These groups all hold—in varying degrees and with different emotional intensity—a sense of identification with China. What is of concern, though, is Group B Chinese, the most numerous of the three. They are local-based, hard-nosed and pragmatic; their attitude to China is uncertain. They work hard, and they are politically docile. The wealthy among them would invest in China, but their hearts and loyalties are with the countries where they are citizens. In Malaysia, this is the alleged position of the ethnic Chinese. In this context, it is not surprising that Wang should reject the term diaspora, for its use is likely ‘to bring tragedy to the Chinese overseas’—he has in mind reprisal by the State or anti-Chinese rioters.12 The professor’s preferred term is Chinese overseas, which does away with China as a place of attachment and emphasizes local loyalty so as to allay the fear and resentment of the State and the non-Chinese. Once again, much effort is made to send China on the road to exile. Instead of pointing a finger at homogenization, the tactic here is expediency. The rejection of the term ‘diaspora’ and the adoption of ‘Chinese Overseas’ has the practical intent of calming the nerves of the extremists. However, so fervid is ethnic politics, that proscribing the use of Chinese diaspora or Overseas Chinese is not likely to have much effect. And then: how do you disentangle that phantom figure of desire that ‘China’ has become in some people’s minds?

Diaspora and Mobility Looking afar, other diaspora communities are not so hesitant in admitting to their ‘foreign origin’ and are less worried about being so tainted. The historian Tony Judt, during the months before he died, sat down with his collaborator to put down his thoughts on a lifetime’s work. The result was Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century.13 Fragmentary and trenchant, the essays make the point that, in Eastern Europe, the ‘issue of the Jews’ is a lot about the people’s migratory mobility, going

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back centuries and across the continent and beyond.14 Their positions as sojourners and immigrants, and their specialization in certain trades had earned the Jewish diaspora a certain reputation in relation to other communities. No Zionist, he reminded the reader the story of Jewish diaspora exists in ‘plenitude,’ not in a single strand of money-lending, petty trade and cultural isolation.15 There is also the Austrian writer Joseph Roth who depicts the Phoenicians, and other merchant-diaspora in lyrical terms. They were traders. But traders at a time when trade was heroic, and every transaction served not just a material purpose but also a historical one, broadening the horizon, establishing communications between people! What a time, in which merchants were considerably superior to the nobility in terms of true culture, knowledge of the world, and farsightedness, and when it took more courage to make a deal than it did to go to war!16

Merchants and traders of ‘true culture, knowledge of the world, and farsighted,’ that is not the reputation of the ethnic Chinese we are familiar with. On the ‘wandering Jews,’ it takes Roth, a member of the diaspora himself, to recognize the less discernible, almost mystical motives of their departure from Eastern Europe to Germany. ‘Many are wanderers by instinct, not really knowing why,’ he writes. ‘They follow a vague call from elsewhere or a specific one from some relocated relative, the desire to see something of the world and escape the supposed constraints of home …’17 When you put the Chinese diaspora next to the Eastern European Jews and the Phoenicians, the image is tragic and almost comical. In Southeast Asia, the ethnic Chinese are still blamed for their unnatural affinity with China. Added to that, from Thailand to Cambodia, Singapore to Malaysia, they are thought economically ambitious and financially obsessed. And it is these qualities that have partly caused the birth of the parochial, culturally homogenous ethnic Chinese that so enrage the critics and the racialists. It is not only filial loyalty that makes me want to redeem the uncertain image of people like my parents. For one thing, my parents may have been besotted with the ancestral home, but their attitude towards China was agile and expressive. They had lived through the end of the Nationalist government, and before leaving, years under the Maoist regime. If

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only for that, their approach to the Chinese homeland was anything but staid and unchanging. Their lives, especially my father’s, had traversed the ocean and countries that mattered to the family’s wholesale herbal business—China, Malaya/Malaysia, Hong Kong, Vietnam. Growing up, I have witnessed their emotional grace, their passion for relationships and their habit of journeying—even though much of it they had been forced into. The ethnography registers a diaspora family’s attempt to keep close its customary relationships under difficult circumstances. The Communist revolution affected many aspects of its social life that stretched across the ocean. Negotiation with local authorities, and consultation with kin on their needs and demands called for boldness, dexterity, and what may be called social and emotional competence. The tasks that faced my parents were byzantine and complex, which betrayed their normal traits as petite capitalists and shopkeepers. Merchants are not universally conservative, as Joseph Roth believes; just as petite capitalism does not necessarily produce inward-looking attitudes and parochialism. On a personal level, even a landlocked village in Southern China could breed an emotional boldness that led to the desire for travelling and migratory mobility.

Restlessness Some inconvenient truths have been left out from the family legend. For it had been something of an open secret that, as a young man, my father could not settle down and hold on to the job in the family rice wholesale business in Chayang township. The informant runs the tongue over his lips, lights up a cigarette and begins to tell the story. ‘All of the older folk know this about your father,’ he says. When told to take over the business, the son did not say no, but was lavish with excuses. He had just finished high school, and he wanted to find work in a town further away—to learn the rice trade, to pick up the experience, in the way of preparing to run the family shop. ‘Maybe because he was your grandmother’s favourite, that’s why he could shrug off the family responsibility,’ the informant says. For a few years he was free to knock about and enjoyed the pleasures of the small towns. The wandering lust satiated, he eventually returned to Chayang, took over the rice wholesaler and made it a success. In his midtwenties, he was on the move again, though more responsibly. He left the business to his young brother and went to Malaya where he took over his grandfather’s pawn shop and herbal business. What the informant tells, I

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don’t know, seems a jumble of gossip, the fantasy about the South Seas and the projection of youthful freedom denied to most people. Actually I have heard this before from my mother, though she was more careful with the words. As a boy, she told me, my father was often ‘moody’—the cover-all term that speaks of idleness, not listening to the elders, bad temper, skipping classes and playing with the neighbour’s kids till late in the afternoon. My grandmother, keen to say good things about her favourite son, thought otherwise: these were an adolescent’s problems, he would come around and wait until he grew up. She was proved right. Among his business associates in Malaysia, he was famous for his independent streak, he liked to do things his own way and rarely took advice from anyone. With this character, he often turned to bold adventure and made it a success. Among his many projects—the making of a Tiger Balm imitation, the sale of the drug streptomycin across the counter—his most profitable was the importing of herbal extracts from China. Bottled and preserved in alcohol, it caused a scandal among the traditionalists who thought the extract would diminish the healing power, and the alcohol would disturb the qi in a patient. Still, the extract proved a great success: it was modern and convenient, and retained its efficacy. Confident of his investment, he made himself a major shareholder of the import company he started and made a healthy return. There are at least a couple of points to my mother’s story. Her husband may have been reckless, but his true temperament was cautious with a large dose of circumspection. The ‘moodiness,’ which he exhibited plenty of in their marital life, had become a source of business innovation, and the reason for his commercial success. My mother came from a family of small landholders across the Sanhe River from Zhang Chun village. She and my father had an arranged marriage. Listening to her, you note the practical sense that had been injected into the traditional institution of matrimony. A wife gave a man stability and helped define his life’s purpose and responsibility. It had worked—as far as a son could know his parents’ intimate relationship. The marriage had helped realize his long-held plan. My father would stay in Nanyang to run his businesses, while my mother, together with my grandmother held down the fort in Zhang Chun village and farmed the land and looked after an extended family. My parents’ marriage was a transnational marriage of its time. The periodic separation brought difficulties. It was said that during his stay in Malaya my father had a liaison with a young, modern woman, a primary school teacher. He had rented a

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small flat and the two had moved in and lived together. The affair ended before my mother’s arrival, and with the reunion she eventually forgave him. She took it as a dark spot in their otherwise happy marriage, and a less forgivable element of her husband’s uneven temperament.

Bu an ding When relating the family tale, my mother had used the phrase, bu an ding, meaning unstable, unsettled and lack of calm. Bu is all negative, you add it to a word or a phrase to denote a state of lack or absence. Bu an is the dearth of stability or harmony. Jingshen is something between spirit and morale, so that jingshen bu an suggests a person’s poor motivation, lack of drive. Being fidgety, is, more colloquially, zuoli bu an ding, ‘cannot sit or stand still.’ Note that the negative implication of ‘being unsettled,’ bu an ding, is all embracing; it concerns a certain deficiency in spirit and personal attitude, as well as poor bodily posture. In a sense, the state of being settled is a matter of inner virtue as much as of the manifestation of the body. In the Chinese tradition, the harmonious partnership of inner calm and bodily movement was best found in travelling. Departures and wanderings had been the stuff of classical poetry. Here is the Tang poet Du Fu (712– 770) and his lavish lyricism in the poem Hou I , To Travel Again. I remember the temple, this route I’ve travelled before, I recall the bridge as I cross it again. It seems the hills and rivers have been waiting, The flowers and willows all are selfless now. The field is sleek and vivid, thin mist shines, On soft sand, the sunlight’s colour shows it’s late. All the traveller’s sorrow fades away, What better place to rest than this?18

Journeys, even in recollection, are redemptive. They put you in touch with nature (‘It seems the hills and rivers have been waiting’), and do away with the anguish and the ambitions of one’s earthly life (‘All the traveller’s sorrow fades away’). And each journey is taken for its own sake. There is no gawking at the mountains or the watery scene, but meditation: the silent ‘taking in’ of the transcendental, of what the eyes do not see. In the search for stillness, what better way to grasp the quietude of

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the mind and body than death itself, as the ending (‘What better place to rest than this?’) insinuates. My father was given to coasting—in his youth he had defied his parents and wandered off on his own. While he may have been giving over to his inner prompting, there were, in his adult life, other forces and circumstances. Colonial Malaya encouraged immigration and allowed entries of merchants, capitalists and indentured labourers. All manner of people travelled between the colony and the ‘sources of migration.’ My parents’ circumstances were perhaps unique, what with the Communist revolution and the persecution. Viewed this way, my father’s inner nature—his partiality for journeying—was at one with some solid realities in Malaya and the People’s Republic. The story of his various undertakings is remarkable, yet common and unexceptional. All migrants have faced social and political upheavals, and many have followed the footsteps of those in the past who made departures and journeys. Then there was the petite capitalist existence of my parents. With the ubiquitous shophouses in Southeast Asia, in Malaysia, each is a place of work and a place of living. The culture of petite capitalists or petite bourgeoisie prizes independence above other virtues. It is heartening to read James Scott who praises their sense of autonomy and views them as ‘anarchist heroes’ fighting for freedom against the state and its public bureaucracies. As potential anarchists, as fellow travellers to the Phoenicians, the Arabs, the Venetians, the Chinese petite capitalists showed plenty of the spirit of self-reliance in running their shophouses. I know this of my parents: their social and cultural horizon extended beyond the shop; their preoccupation was not with economic improvement alone. With their inner spirit and social circumstances, it is not too much to think they had, like the merchant-diaspora before them, contributed to the opening of the world.

Notes 1. On the use of Nanyang, Malaya, Malaysia, see Author’s Note. 2. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 45–46. 3. George Steiner, Preface, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 edition, p. xii. 4. Ibid. 5. George Steiner, After Babel, 1975, p. 46.

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6. Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese. London: Routledge, 2001, p. 89. 7. Allen Chun, “Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity.” Boundary 2, 23 (2), 1996, pp. 111–38. 8. Shih, Shu-mei, “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production.” In Sinophone Studies, edited by Shu-mei Shih, 25–42. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, p. 32. 9. Wang Gungwu, “Greater China and the Chinese Overseas.” The China Quarterly, 136, 1993, pp. 926–48. 10. Ibid., p. 940. 11. Ibid. 12. Wang Gungwu, “A Single Chinese Diaspora? Some Historical Reflection.” In Imagining the Chinese Diaspora: Two Australian Perspectives, edited by Annette Shun-Wah and Gungwu Wang. Canberra: Centre for the Study of the Chinese Diaspora, 1999, p. 15. 13. Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. New York: Random House, 2014. 14. Ibid., p. 25. 15. Ibid. 16. Joseph Roth, Report from a Parisian Paradise, translated by Michael Hofmann. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004, p. 100. 17. Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, translated by Michael Hofmann. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2001, pp. 10–11. 18. Du Fu, The Selected Poems of Du Fu, translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 93.

Bibliography Ang, Ien. 2001. On Not Speaking Chinese. London: Routledge. Chun, Allen. 1996. “Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity.” Boundary 2 23 (2): 111–38. Du Fu. 2002. The Selected Poems of Du Fu. Translated by Burton Watson. New Work: Columbia University Press. Gungwu, Wang. 1993. “Greater China and the Chinese Overseas.” The China Quarterly 136: 926–48. Judt, Tony. 2014. Reappraisals: Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. New York: Random House.

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Roth, Joseph. 2001. The Wandering Jews. Translated by Michael Hofmann. New York and London: W.W. Norton. ———. 2004. Report from a Parisian Paradise. Translated by Michael Hofmann. New York: W. W. Norton. Shih, Shu-mei. 2012. “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production.” In Sinophone Studies, edited by Shu-mei Shih, 25–42. New York: Columbia University Press. Steiner, George. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1992. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. New York: Oxford University Press. Wang, Gungwu. 1999. “A Single Chinese Diaspora? Some Historical Reflection.” In Imagining the Chinese Diaspora: Two Australian Perspectives, edited by Annette Shun-Wah and Gungwu Wang, 1–17. Canberra: Centre for the Study of the Chinese Diaspora.

CHAPTER 2

Revolution Comes to Zhang Chun Village

There’s a fair face to the land, but you can’t hide the hunger and guilt. —Orson Welles as Michael O’Hara, The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

On the long-distance bus I am on my way to the mythical place of my family. Last night the plane arrived at eleven in Guangzhou’s Baiyun International Airport; by the time I checked into the newly spruced-up Guangdong Victory Hotel on Shamian Island, it was too late to go out. I ordered dinner from the 24-hour kitchen and spent a night of solitary gloom in my room. Dazed with jetlag, I ran through ideas and memories of China my parents had told me about. But these were lost in the fogginess of the past, like the streets and shadows of pedestrians in the night below the window. Now, in the clear light of morning, things reveal themselves wherever I look. China is here, in the air-conditioned bus with reclining airline seats and free mineral water; in the noisy, gawky excitement of schoolchildren back from a holiday trip; in the sleepy-faced men and women wriggling in soft-cushioned seats like hens in freshly laid straw. And China is out there on the gleaming highway, in the dusty streets and hectic roads. The bus is going through one bustling industrial scene after another. Every small town we pass is a garrison of motor-repair workshops, farm tool and fertilizer outlets and emporiums of refrigerators and household goods. Once in a while, there are glimpses of farm plots by the highway’s edge: neat rows of cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuces under domes of plastic sheeting like miniature airport hangars. Then the more palpable signs of modern living: PetroChina gas stations, Volkswagen © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 S. Yao, Gifts to the Sad Country, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1598-5_2

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taxis, Dicos Burger, Beautiful Lady Wedding Photography, Giordano Jeans, Glory Jewellery and Watches. In the brilliant early summer light, the sun feels like a blessing, emitting an irrepressible joy. It takes the better part of four hours to get from Guangzhou to Zhang Chun village. After the towns, as you near the destination, the view changes. You approach the mouth of a tunnel and exit into an abruptly lit paved road; your eyes try to get used to the quick switch from light to darkness and back to light again. You register the engineering work, and the geological features—the region is scarce of arable land, a fact that led people like my grandfather to emigrate. The bus stops at Chayang township, a couple of miles from the village. Eldest Sister has sent a driver and you are off again. Half an hour before the village, the traffic turns placid. A team of sweepers, each in a yellow Hi Vis safety jacket, his yellow scooter parked on the roadside, running their brushes along the road. Their actions are punctilious and meditative. The sheets of dust do not stand a chance. In the car, you see a well-placed figure every fifteen minutes or so—a montage of busyness, of sweeping and raking, pausing for the vans and agricultural machinery to pass. Positioned along the stretch, each is a soldier guarding the post against nature’s debris. Perhaps it is designed to impress visitors: the order and cleanliness, the yellow-jerseyed sweepers and their fastidiousness. At the village square, you find the road cleaners, their trademark yellow scooters next to them, killing the dusky hours before going home. You proceed to Eldest Sister’s house where a receptionist is waiting for you.

The Mission Dazed with impressions, I have not forgotten my mission. Mother had wanted me to learn something of her past life, and to meet my Eldest Sister, and Eldest Brother’s surviving family—I had met him when he came to Singapore for a reunion a few years back; he has since passed away and my mother after that. During her remaining years, she was obsessed with a certain idea about my Chinese origin, and that I should find my way back to the land of my ancestors. It has taken me a while. For I could not go back as a mere visitor, but as one who would turn his anthropological eye on the ancient place. At Zhang Chun village, I shall seek out the old folks who remember those brutal years of the Land Reform and the collectivization of the Great Leap Forward that propelled my parents’ departure. I shall watch out for the inner flicker as they tell

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me their stories. I shall ask the questions: What was the revolution like? How much of what my parents told me bears the test of veracity? I shall focus on the turbulent years of the fifties and sixties when the two State measures were carried out. I have chosen these periods since books on the Cultural Revolution and the Deng reform have filled the library shelves, and because the generation of men and women who lived through the revolution are rapidly ageing. Above all, I need to confront the incidents of blood and killing that featured in these events—to lay bare the leftist romanticism and the enthusiasm for Mao’s great reforms I have held since my student days. At the end of the fifties, the Land Reform was over, and the even more brutal Great Leap Forward—Mao’s fantasy of rapid transit from an agrarian economy to an industrialized one—a few years to come. At the time, Eldest Sister had married, and Eldest Brother had finished his medical studies and was posted to Linfen, a city in Shanxi Province. The Great Leap Forward meant harsh working conditions and great shortages of all kinds. These were made known to us by letters, and by visitors who had gone to the village and returned. The family had never felt so separated as in those years. The physical separation was one thing, but the situation in Zhang Chun also tested the customary relationships and kin loyalties. We had a strong inkling something wrong was happening in the village when the letters came pleading for goods and money, so incessant and weepy as to breach the limit of propriety. My mother had experienced much of the deprivation before she left, even she was stunned by the demands for all manner of things, from food to medicine, from sewing machines to bicycles and money for weddings and birthday dinners. The demands for these things gave us, perhaps for the first time, a sense of the enormity of what was happening to our relatives. The needs, keen and desperate, were met with disbelief. However, my parents’ primary concern was with their two adult children who had stayed behind.

Inheritance Though married into a village a mile or so away, Eldest Sister has moved back and settled in a shophouse Grandfather had bought in Chayang, the market town that serves the surrounding villages. Her husband had passed away, and she lives with her first son and his wife—their daughter has left home and is working for the tech giant Tencent in Shenzhen. The ground

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floor, including the shopfront, has been turned into a comfortable apartment for Eldest Sister; it is an ideal arrangement, two generations living together, sharing the sitting room and kitchen and looking after each other. After Grandmother died, and Mother had left for Malaysia, Eldest Sister was one of the heirs of the family estate, though Eldest Brother in Shanxi had declared he was not interested. In the eighties, I remember, there was a flurry of letters from her urging us to reclaim what had been confiscated by the State as the Deng reform allowed. Altogether, there was the land, the ancestral mansion in Zhang Chun and the three shophouses at Chayang. The business of the family estate simply got lost in a bureaucratic muddle; nothing came out of it. Eldest Sister is now the de facto owner—until the local authorities decide otherwise. One is struck by the absurdity of it all. The revolution, then the dispersal of family members had made meaningless the idea of an ancestral estate. Most of it had been given away: some of the land to the villagers, while the poor had taken up rooms in the old house. Only the ownership of the shophouses remains unclaimed. But what does it mean, really? The shophouses could have been a big deal. I can hear the sound of money and the hectic bidding of buyers and developers at the auction. Alas, Chayang lies outside the booming coastal region; prosperity has passed it by. As it is, everything about the shophouses feels like a missed opportunity, a cruel abandonment. Years back, when Eldest Sister raised the matter, Father had declared: ‘It’s a waste of time, the communists would never give the property back.’ Then he added with some bitterness, ‘Your sister is always a little too much in love with money. She is wasting my time with her hare-brained scheme.’

The Greed It had not always been like this between the father and daughter. She was born first, well-loved and grew up to be a beauty. When she was to be married, the matchmaker had scoured the prominent families and found a suitable groom, a bright young man, a doctor recently graduated from Hong Kong University. On the day of the wedding, people had stood by their doorways and watched the palanquin passing by. With the bride inside, they could see, through the veil of red silk, her eyes wet with tears. ‘She is well brought up, she knows how to cry,’ everyone said. She was leaving the house of her birth, the tears were a ritual of the bride’s regret at leaving her natal home. My parents were sending off their daughter,

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and the train of servants carrying baskets of gifts, followed by a parade of gong players. The parade ended at the jetty, where a couple of hired boats would convey the party to the bride’s new home across the river. With her brother in faraway Shanxi, it fell on Eldest Sister to help with managing the family estate. She often came back to assist Mother and Grandmother to sort out the finances. The ledger received a cursory glance from Father when he came home. Satisfied with how things were done, he made no complaints. Some measures he quickly approved: the foreman sent to press the tenant farmers late with their rent; Eldest Sister’s plead to the village committee to stop the villagers who had channelled the irrigation water to their field; the hill farm gave a poor return, so some farmers had taken it over free of rent. Eldest Sister’s tough management and charity pleased Father. When Land Reform came to the village in 1951, the family received the ruinous status of landlord. During the Great Leap Forward a decade later, my grandparents had died, and Eldest Sister was busy with her own family. Understanding the upheaval, Father wisely stayed away. Everything fell on Mother’s shoulders. With a shrewd political sense, she tried to upgrade the family’s class status. She negotiated with the village committee and after paying a substantial fine in Hong Kong dollars— foreign currency was a vital need for the early People’s Republic—the family was ‘upgraded’ from landlord to the more revolutionary rich peasant class status. With the family class position improved, Mother could now apply to leave and join her husband. By the time of the late fifties, Father had built a successful wholesale business in Chinese medicine in Malaysia. Some of the money earned was channelled back to Zhang Chun to support the family. He had thought things would remain the same; the communists too loved money, they could be bribed like the Nationalists before them, he believed. For a long time, what was not spent was stashed in Mother’s room under the proverbial mattress. Now with Mother soon leaving, a decision had to be made about what to do with the valuables.

The Midnight Venture It was a hectic couple of months before Mother’s departure. Even as the family house and land had been collectivized, there was still much to do. Some furniture was given away, some sold and the grandparents’ graves had to be swept and attended to. Then there was the question about what

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to do with the substantial hoard of money, mainly silver dollars and gold flakes. A plan was eventually devised. One night the mother and daughter got together to carry it out. They laid out the silver coins and gold flakes, placed them in small envelopes and inserted them in layers of layers of folded waterproof sheets. It was way past midnight as they carried the whole package to the vegetable plot near the house and buried it under the old pomelo tree. It was to be a secret, not even Eldest Brother knew about it. A major part of the arrangement gave Eldest Sister the role of a custodian of the money, and she—and her brother in Linfen—would draw on it when necessary. Something of great worry had been settled; the savings were safely put away and the two children in China were provided for. With the money Father had looked ahead. Right into the sixties, somewhere in his mind was the thought he would return and re-establish a life disrupted by the revolution. A day would come when he needed that cache of savings to rebuild the home, to start a business and to bring up his children born outside the ancestral land. He was not a greedy man, but the savings were a crucial element of a master plan, savings he would retrieve when the time was right. In the first year and a few after that, a three-monthly account was sent to my parents. It would list the amount taken out for various purposes— house repair, roof refitting, expenses for Eldest Sister and her family, food, a birthday dinner for her husband, a jade piece for herself and quilted cotton blouses for everyone during the New Year festival. What with the hardship and poverty, who could blame her for dipping into the savings just a little too frequently? Father did not raise an issue. As time went by, accounts arrived less and less frequently, and the balances showed unhealthy depletions. My parents were deeply disappointed. By the time the balance sheet stopped coming, they had all but given up. In any case, when Mother finally arrived in Malaysia, the idea of returning and making a home again in Zhang Chun was abandoned. Whatever little that was left buried under the pomelo tree had lost its relevance.

The Barthesian Myth That, in any case, was the story told in the family. What was it about, really? You may say it was the defiance of the oppressed by attempting to defraud the authorities. You may say it is a story about the dynamics of a fragile father–daughter relationship when financial interests intervened.

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And you may bring up the excessive imaginings of a diaspora who planned to regain a former mode of existence. The trouble is, with a family’s past, one story leads to another story, one event is tied to another event. In a way, the truth or falsity of it is of little importance. The midnight venture had happened, and had become a myth, a Barthesian myth. As such, what warrants our scrutiny is the set of meanings it communicates.1 The undertaking worthy of a Hitchcock movie, the risk-taking and the subsequent contention in the family: they were symptoms of a life under stress. Certainly, the revolution had accorded love, loyalty and selflessness a different social logic and ethical norm. However improbable the incident, it earns a place in the narrative of a family of diaspora. The revolution bore on all aspects of life in the village, and by proxy life of those overseas. The father’s accusations against his daughter may come across as rash and unjust. But even he recognized a new world had emerged and social relationships were forever changed.

Commune Life The land redistribution in the fifties had left each family a plot for its own cultivation; the Great Leap Forward introduced further measures. When the Land Reform came, the informants had been young children, a decade later, by the time of the Great Leap Forward, they were in their teens. It was from this period they remember the most of the revolution. They know the jargon still, with which they pepper their sayings. Socialized mode of cultivation, shehuì zhuyì gengzuo fangshi, is shortened to shehui gengzuo; a concept propped up is collectivization, nongye jiti hua. A villager explains: Collectivization was to bring cultivators and the commune land under the socialized mode of cultivation. Having done away with private holdings, the party had made the commune the farming unit. We were told this is the way to increase production, to bring China forward. Every family belonged to one of the communes. A commune planned the planting and harvesting, it organized the use of labour, it fed the families thorough army-style cooking in communal kitchens, it decided on the distribution to each family. The hours a person had worked were recorded as points, and ration coupons for goods were allocated to each family accordingly. It was a hard life, and we never had enough to eat. But somewhere in our heads, we recognized we had to support Chairman Mao and his ideas. We were young people starting our lives, we listened (to the cadres) and took

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in some of what they said. We supported the party; it is also true we didn’t know any better.

The brutal realities were faithfully conveyed to us in Malaysia. Eldest Sister’s letters were vivid with wretchedness. There were struggle sessions at the village square to prosecute those who betrayed the revolution, and she told how she joined the production brigade each morning and worked her share of the labour hours allocated. And she had much to say about the communal kitchen: the rice cooked in large pots turned into thick, gluey congee; the vegetables scant with meat or chicken were fried in giant woks, turning out dishes bland and with little nutrition. There were shortages of everything—medicine, kerosine, stationery, rice and meat, cloth, shoes, and what was rationed was never enough. The letters were brimful of complaints and cries for help; there seemed no limit to her demand for things. From ginseng to vitamin pills, cooking oil to dried cooked rice, bicycles to sewing machines: they filled the lists of goods asked for. In the correspondence, my sister had given up the small talk and went straight to setting down what she needed. It was as if small talk and social greetings were superfluous, out of tune with the harsh realities of the time. Mother was the first to feel the mercy fatigue. ‘Always asking for things, does she think we are a goldmine that pours out money?’ The words came fast and easy, the floodgate of needs was opened. The medicine wholesale business was always cash-strapped. And having just graduated from high school, I was about to leave for Australia to study, and my younger brother was soon to follow. There was a lot of scrambling for cash, and Eldest Sister was adding to the worries. Then the matter was raised that was like an unhealed wound. Father could not refuse to send help, nor his daughter be abandoned. Torn between obligations and his own financial needs, Father would return to his lament, ‘The money we left behind, it would have been so useful now!’

The Revolution We are sitting in the small courtyard at the back of the shophouse; before us a scatter of pots of evergreens, on a brown dusty plot of Chinese cabbage, tomatoes and spring onions thrive against the odds. We have been talking all morning, and as we pause for tea Eldest Sister’s magnificent sadness begins to settle on my skull. She has charged the revolution with her suffering, and her husband’s incarceration. About our parents

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and her younger siblings in Malaysia, she has said with her melancholic voice, ‘You were all lucky, you were living in Nanyang, while I got stranded in this desperate place.’ Listening, I feel I have been hauled to an unfamiliar place I don’t want to be in. It is not only the pain and suffering, what comes across is also the illogic of what she wanted. For her to join us was to leave her young family behind: Did she really mean it? Would the authorities allow it? She is telling me what was on her mind many years back, and I almost resent her candidness. The Chinese communist revolution aimed to do away with the old political order and to bring about a new, socialist nation. What happened in Zhang Chun was a microcosm of what took place in rural China. The villagers recognized what took place as fanshen, the improvement of life under socialism. The simple term, meaning changing destiny, belies the near total collapse of the agrarian society—its social relationships, its economic foundation, the moral rule of everyday conduct. The route to socialism was harsh and oppressive. From the Party’s viewpoint, socialist production and distribution were not enough, there was also the need to create a new form of citizens. ‘Communist society considers the social education of the rising generation to be one of the fundamental aspects of the new life,’ wrote Alexandra Kollontai, the only woman in Lenin’s government. She wanted state-appointed supervisors to take over childcare, because ‘[t]he old family, narrow and petty, where the parents quarrel and are only interested in their own offspring, is not capable of educating the “new person”.’2 The moulding of the new person raised the terrible spectre of obliteration: the individual—and the social body writ large—were to be cleansed of the old ideas and old habits so that persons of ideological purity could emerge unhindered. This, though not in so many words, was the guiding principle of the radical reforms carried out in the name of socialism.

The Public Trial At least once a month, in the evening, a public trial would take place at the village square. People arrived in dribs and drabs, and the atmosphere was almost festival-like. Vendors of boiled peanuts and cut sugar cane mingled with the crowd; a white sheet had been erected on the stage to entertain the waiting villagers with the latest newsreel of a PLA military parade to celebrate a victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s army in the

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northeast, and Soviet peasants reaping crops with machine harvesters—a captivating mechanical marvel. ‘What can I tell you, it was a long time ago,’ the eighty-one-yearold Uncle Wu says. The elderly villagers all begin their reminiscences so; a way to loosen the tongue, to haul the past to the present. They dig deep in their memory, and a more or less coherent account would come forth. Uncle Wu was a mere boy during the Land Reform. ‘We school children were taken there by the teachers,’ he recollects. ‘We stayed in our little group, stuffing ourselves with snacks and looking forward to what happened next.’ A man, a ‘bad egg’ of a landlord, was dragged to the stage. The hands tied at the back, the head bent, he stood before the crowd. A party cadre called out his crime: he had been a blood-sucking landlord who exploited the peasants, and now he was to face the people’s judgement. His accusers had gathered by the stage, and one by one they went up to make the accusations. He sent a thug to force the rent out of us when we could not pay, one said. My son died soon after he was born because we were starving and his mother had no milk, said another. An accuser pointed a finger at the sorry-looking man: we were poor and could not pay the rent, and he got us to send our daughter to his house as a maid. She was only fifteen, and he wanted her for his concubine. It was the usual tirade against a wealthy landlord and his crimes. Some charges had been prepared by the party cadres, some from the peasants themselves. The charges verbalized were liberating and cathartic. You imagine the landlord motionless, his eyes downturned to avoid the glaring looks of those he had wronged. The cadres goaded on the crowd, and shouted and scowled at the accused. ‘Confess! Confess!’. As though he’s already known his fate, the man was all but shut down. Brandishing his Mauser pistol, he put the question to the crowd, ‘Should this bad egg be killed?’ From the crowd came a unison of rage, ‘Gaisha! Gaisha! Kill! Kill!’ ‘Though it took place when I was 5 or 6 years old, I remember it well,’ Uncle Wu declares. ‘There was a lot of shouting, and the man was lifeless before the crowd.’ After the outburst from the crowd, things happened very quickly. The landlord was made to walk through the witnesses of his trial, taken to a patch of sand by the river, made to kneel down and shot in the back. ‘I can’t say I saw everything. The river was a short distance away, and the man and the soldier had passed us and I took a good look

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at him. Then at a distance, a sharp crack. The terrible fate of the man. It left a deep impression on me.’ A couple of days later, I get him to take me to the execution site.

The Killing Ground I’ve seen the movies. A prisoner is led to a place against the wall and made to face the firing squad. Certain courtesies are granted: the last cigarette, the blindfold, the priest giving absolution. Of the members of the firing squad, one receives a blank in his rifle chamber, giving each person a chance to be guilt-free from the killing. The Western liberal notion of the death penalty is to allow for the prisoner’s individuality: each is a whole person in their last moment of life. Each is not denied some measure of humanity.3 What took place at the riverbank imposed a different cultural meaning on the taking of life by the State. My eyes scan the scene: the river is rapid, the sandbank a slight slant towards the water; the wall of tall, dense bamboo bushes along the shoreline seems designed to prevent the prying eye. There are no watery idylls here, but the feel of desolation. From Uncle Wu’s telling, an execution carried out here was a lonely death—no villagers saw it close; the solider-executioner was efficient and indifferent in carrying out his duty, from the shooting to the coup de grâce. ‘Ever since those terrible events, no one comes here,’ Uncle Wu’s voice wakes me. ‘People have long memories, even the young people don’t come here.’ I dig my feet in the soggy sand. A claggy sensation travels up my feet and stalls my movement. There is nothing to see here, and downriver is lost to the mist. Uncle Wu is falling behind, and my mind turns to the prisoner in his last living moment: his back bending forward to assist the executioner’s task; a total darkness a second later after the flash he couldn’t see. Then my imagination returns to the previous proceedings: the frenzied cry of Kai Sha! Kai Sha!, ‘Kill! Kill!’ on the stage when the crowd made its judgement; the call for death urgent and full of purpose. The execution was a comprehensive denial on many levels: the prisoner’s life, of course, his individuality, his place in the underworld that a mortuary ritual, now banned, would have granted him. It was the State’s revenge against one of its citizens. The public trial—the so-called struggle session, pidou—aimed to bring the peasants to the side of revolution. Along the way, the guilty were identified, interrogated and made

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to parade before the people—the execution was the final step of a long, tortuous process. Eldest Sister tells me that the conditions of the Great Leap Forward had sent some people to suicide. It’s not a happy thought: the termination of life was a defiance against the earthly powers and no less so against the communist authorities. Uncle Wu remembers none of the prisoners’ names. Each went through the same ordeal, that is as much as he can recall. That night after our visit to the execution site, a dream comes to me. There is an ancient house with heavy walls; I leap over and peek through the window into a room. A man sits motionless at a table, in front of him a bowl of rice untouched. On his pallid face, his eyes look ahead. He is alone, and I urge him to pick up the chopsticks. As he lifts his hand, the chest opens up and the inside is all ashes. I take him to be the spectre of an executed, and the dream is a protest against his lonely death. In death and in dreams, two sets of existence are joined; escape and reprieve are attainable.

The Use of History The public trials are one of the subjects—the other is starvation—villagers remember and feel the need to talk about. Perhaps the bloodletting and hunger were so oppressive that they needed to be expressed, to be released from the mind’s recesses. People know the uncomfortable fact that Chairman Mao and the CCP had caused great suffering, but to tell it calls for a certain language, a certain personal and emotional daring. Among the historians of modern China, the writing on the agrarian reform is universally bleak and condemning.4 Mao is held to account for his policies and his promiscuous greed for power. For the old folks in Zhang Chun village, the past was indeed terrible. But there is also a quiet attempt to moderate what they remember. Against the deprivation and violence, they bring up fate and the destiny of the poor. And mostly they turned to the casual yet bitter phrase, zhege nian tou, ‘these difficult times,’ to express the time’s rapid passing and their regret. They allied the revolution’s harsh measures with the government or the authorities, zhengfu. Zhengfu is more abstract and psychologically acceptable than the more specific ‘Chairman Mao’ or ‘the Communist Party.’ It is vague and abstract, and no name is attached to those horrendous measures. With the finer distinctions, the modulating subtleties, the sense of hurt and deprivation is articulated in overwhelming terms. Like the tomb of the

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nameless soldier, zhengfu is expressive and affecting as an empty signifier. In this regard, the villagers and the historians with a revisionist bent might well have something in common. When you ask yourself to lend truth to an extreme situation, it seems only excessiveness will do. Thus, for academics and their subjects, the most barbaric is of the greatest appeal. If hard labour and army-style cooking do not hit the target, then collective starvation and cannibalism would do it. There is a remarkable scene in Zhang Yimou’s 1987 film Red Sorghum. Japanese Soldiers on patrol capture a guerrilla fighter and bring him to the cornfield to be put to death. In the ‘kill all, burn all, loot all’ campaign unleashed on the countryside, the killing has to make an example of the futility of resistance against the Japanese army. The prisoner is hung spreadeagle on a tree, and a butcher is brought forward. The Japanese soldiers wait, sucking on their cigarettes; the butcher whimpering and sharpening his knife; the villagers writhing in fear. The witnesses and the viewing audience know what is to happen. The butcher, prodded by the officer, walks forward to practise his skill on the man. The scene appears in the novel on which the film is based. You accept that the author Mo Yan has described the killing truthfully, that he has heard about it and relates it faithfully. But then it is fiction; true or false is not the issue. As you watch the film, the scene of sheer cruelty makes its point. What is depicted is ‘typical of what the Japanese Devils did in China,’ one incident of atrocity among many: remember the Nanjing Massacre? I dare to say this is how people in Zhang Chun approach the revolution—in exaggeration, in a surreal narrative mode. As for Mao, the Chairman may have died but there remains a great chunk of legitimacy in what he had done. If he had brought terror and social and economic catastrophe, he had also led the CCP to victory and founded the People’s Republic. Yet, like the approach to the cruelty of the Japanese soldiery, there seems to be no moderate, no reasonable take on Mao and his policies and ideas. But just as often, Mao is more a figure of memory, not a real person. It is as if to call up the Chairman—and what he did— is so unbearable as to be invisible. At such moments, the useful phrase zhege niantou, ‘the difficult time,’ is brought up—to brush the bringers of suffering with a gloss of anonymity, and to preserve the experience of pain and deprivation in shared memory. Eldest Sister too has no name for those who had made life difficult for her. To an extent, it was, as she is fond of saying, ‘many years ago’ and she

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would rather not talk about it. Mao and the revolution do not feature in our conversation; only what can be rendered in the most personal terms. So her memory is rich and vivid when she talks about her husband and his incarceration, or the communal kitchen, or the near starvation diet and the long hard hours at the rice field. Her casting of blame is luxurious, digging deep into the workings of fate and of course, her family in Malaysia that, in the most critical time, appeared to have abandoned her. She had gone ‘unreasonable’ in breaching the father-and-daughter relationship, in defying the customary protocol in asking for gifts. Her apparent excessive behaviour, her evident insatiability and greed: trauma seems the right word to describe it. Like the villagers, she has turned into herself, and the revolution has become a personal affair. What pained her, what had brought so much misery to her family is the most significant thing about ‘those terrible years.’ The psychological analysis seems heartless when applied to one’s close kin. To bring up the past is to cast blame on her unworthy behaviour. That was a difficult time, and now seeing her almost ageing before your eyes makes you forgive her. Dwelling on Zhang Chun’s history, many people can claim victimhood under the wheel of revolution. This is always a mixture of injustice unacknowledged, official sins unredeemed and a measure of self-pity. Everyone—the villagers, my sister, the family in Malaysia—had all been differently dragged through the mud slog of Mao’s radical reform. In the end, the modish concept of ‘the traumatic’ may prove significant and relevant—when it points to the psychological force in what people say and remember, when it shows up in the recurrent anxiety in people’s daily behaviour.

Notes 1. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Noonday Press, 1972. 2. Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, translated by Alix Holt. London: Allison & Busby, 1977. 3. For a broader social and political meaning of the struggle session, see: Jonathan Neaman Lipman and Stevan Harrell, Violence in China: Essays in Culture and Counterculture. New York: SUNY Press, 1990. 4. See the classic Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts. New York: Macmillan, 1998, and Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine. London: Bloomsbury, 2011.

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Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Noonday Press. Becker, Jasper. 1998. Hungry Ghosts. New York: Macmillan. Dikötter, Frank. 2011. Mao’s Great Famine. London: Bloomsbury. Kollontai, Alexandra. 1977. Selected Writings Of . Translated by Alix Holt. London: Allison & Busby. Lipman, Jonathan Neaman, and Stevan Harrell. 1990. Violence in China: Essays in Culture and Counterculture. New York: SUNY Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Postman

It is hard to say exactly what is the profit of comparing one race with another, and weighing in opposed groups the manners and customs of neighbouring countries; but it is certain that as we move about the world we constantly indulge in this exercise. This is essentially the case if we happen to be infected with the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite—that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none. —Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A journey through Yugoslavia

In Zhang Chun village, like much of rural China, land was a life-anddeath issue. The shortage of it, the large holdings in the hands of a few, the drought: these things seeped into people’s consciousness and explained the disparity of wealth they saw. Even today the folks in Zhang Chun still speak of the land issue like a curse from Heaven. ‘You know what is the problem with the village?’, they ask. ‘It’s [that] people are plenty and good land is few, jen dou dian shao.’ Jen dou dian shao had been blamed for all sorts of issues. It’s the reason why people were poor, and why the farms were in tiny plots; it made the village backward and people ignorant. Three months into my stay, I am much preoccupied with the epochal events, the Land Reforms in the fifties and, a decade on, the Great Leap Forward. I try to cast about for the original cause, the social and political underpinnings that would explain the brutal events.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 S. Yao, Gifts to the Sad Country, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1598-5_3

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There was the wider picture, of course: the feudal tradition, the SinoJapanese war and the civil war, that gave rise to the CCP’s radical policies. However, each village had its own land issue, always a blend of skewed ownership benefitting a few families and demographic pressure. Either way, land redistribution was carried out by fiat. In Zhang Chun, it followed almost to the letter of the CCP manual. From their lopsided land holdings was determined each family’s class status, either landlord, rich peasant, or peasant. A landlord leased out his land, and a peasant was a landless tenant farmer. Landlord-peasant antagonism defined who was to be prosecuted, and who would reap the benefits of the new land policy. The interesting category is ‘rich peasant.’ It admitted the ‘special cases’—the moderately wealthy families who, aided by seasonal labourers, cultivated their land but did not visit gangster behaviour upon the poor farmers. As a class status, ‘rich peasant’ had a degree of flexibility. It hauled some landowners into the peasant class as a reward for their repentance or newfound revolutionary zeal. With their class position improved, these landowners were regarded as peasants but not quite—they were landlords who were not persecuted and not made to face the wrath of the peasants. What complicated matters was that such a family often had members who had emigrated to the South Seas. In my grandfather’s household, with his son running a profitable business in Malaya, foreign remittances greatly bolstered its income, and farming was done more out of regard for status and lifestyle. I can almost hear the angry assessment of the village committee: ‘They had exploited the workers in Nanyang, and don’t forget how they sucked the blood of the peasants in Zhang Chun!’ Nonetheless, the rich peasant status was granted when my father made the plea. The committee leadership, guided by the party cadre, were pragmatic men and women. The rich peasants were ideologically unsavoury, but the money they brought back was spent in local co-op shops and circulated around the village. They were useful economically and another way would be found to punish them. Thus arose a pattern of contradictions. Land scarcity had prevented extreme wealth and landownership, and no single family could dominate the village life. That landlords were often cultivators themselves helped to level the inequalities. The Land Reform was the first radical measure of communist China. It unleashed a struggle against the unholy union of landlordism and local feudal institutions, even though such a union did not happen in any significant way in Zhang Chun.

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Land and Geography The village sits in a valley against a backdrop of knotted hills and thick forest. This used to be a wild country, the home of tigers and snakes and the hideout of ‘bandits’—Nationalist soldiers who, for a short time, refused to lay down their arms. Nothing much grew here, though small patches of earth were cleared and planted with hill rice, a low-yield variety needing little water. To the villagers, the hills were recognized less for their agricultural value than for their astrological import. The hills and the forest form the spine of a landscape of perfect feng shui. The qi is channelled down the height, then divides itself to cradle the village with its propitious forces. It is no surprise that temples dotted the hills, and wealthy families buried their dead there. A paved road now runs through the hills, connecting the small townships and villages with Zhang Chun. But the topography has not changed. Leaving the Kuan Yin Temple where Eldest Sister and I have made our offerings, the car follows a winding road, and travel sickness makes us stop. By the roadside and looking down the valley, it is easy to feel the old affirmation: jen dou dian shao. The hills and forests do not induce poetic yearning, but warn of land scarcity and its social effects. From the high vintage point, I can see the line of a waterway snaking forth, a spiral of movement barely discernible to the eye, before vanishing in the misty distance. I know a river runs along the village, but this is the first time I see it from a height, clear and distinct. Your eyes trace the flow, noting the small jetty not far from the village proper. The river has been widened and the banks rebuilt. There is not much use for the improvement, however, as the transport between the villages and townships is now better served by the paved roads and motorways. All this, however, does not speak for the Sanhe River’s past glory and significance. The hardy geography had set the limits of the village, but there was also the river. As far back as people could remember, the river had been the village’s doorway to the wider world. People valued the ease of transport it afforded, and the sense of freedom a river journey inspired. If Zhang Chun felt cramped and shut in, for those who ventured out down the waterway there were places more prosperous, more liberating than the one they were born into. The humble stretch of muddy water was a cure for melancholy, a safety valve of social and economic pressure—so it can be said. Thinking thus, the idea of a landlocked village cursed with the hard facts of geography turns out to be a fantasy.

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At the newly spruced-up concrete jetty, the elderly shoot the breeze and describe what they remember of the river. In the past, if you didn’t want to walk, the river was the way to reach Chayang. You took a riverboat, joined the passengers of the same mind, sold your produce and shopped for things in Chayang, the nearest township to the village. From Chayang, if you wished, you could take another boat and reach another jetty; after a few frog leaps of transfers, you eventually reached Shantou, the port city. The whole journey to Shantou would have taken three days or more, travelling by day, resting and sleeping in the grass-hut inns at night. The idlers at the jetty had never taken the trip, mind you. Even so, Shantou, a port for foreign trade under the Treaty of Tientsin (1858), was the beacon on the hill, as it were. A few who went and returned reported jobs for the taking—about the wages you could earn by taking labouring work at the wharf, the money you could save and send back to the family. Shantou nurtured a certain stout-heartedness. Emboldened, some—like my forefathers—built up some small capital and took a British P&O passenger liner to the South Seas—the mythical land in Southeast Asia of even greater wealth and riches. The port city, the South Seas, the British and French colonies: each was a place glossed with myth and personal investment. Much has changed of course. The Sanhe River invites a few fishing folks and their boats; the Zhang Chun-Chayang stretch is connected by a motorway; and the P&O liner that plied the Shantou-Singapore sea lane has been replaced by planes. Still, the aura endures. The river journey, the prosperous port city, the cross-ocean voyages and the celebrated return are alive in people’s memory. As they talk of those days, they spread their hands over the grey water, and their voices quiver as though expressing the regret at time’s passing. Resting on cement benches, the men and women spin out a tale that reveals a secret. The village was landlocked, but they didn’t feel hemmed in; a doorway was open to those who sought escape and adventure.

Jen dou dian shao Again As a geographical fact, though, there is no denying jen dou dian shao had put the local folks on the side of history. The communists had built the land redistribution around it; their peasant-friendly politics was based on it. As for your emigrant forebearers, they had made the idea an affirmation of their heroic undertaking. For they had, against all odds, overcome

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the place’s physical constraints and made their riches elsewhere overseas. If Nanyang and its promises counted as myth, the opportunity to make good by leaving was available to anyone, even the poor. And as myth, the idea of journeying is most alluring when it transcends the single-minded aim of material improvement. During our father-and-son conversations, I recall, there was always a moment when the idea let slip, when he hinted that he had travelled for its own sake. Such an occasion was devoted to pep talk as much as to reminiscing about his youthful years; a smile glowed on his face, and a certain pleasure of his travels invariably came through. It was the first time I caught the inkling that the narrative of the Chinese diaspora—all sweaty labourers and calculating merchants—is half bunk, if not most of it. And it came to me that even a modest shopkeeper allowed himself some measure of romantic yearning. Here is an excursion into the heart of a man not radically different from my father, a business person and a traveller from Zhang Chun village.

Uncle Wu the shuike Uncle Hu is a few months shy of his eighty-second birthday. Some streaks of silver escape from the cloth cap on his head, and below, wrinkles carve a web of lines on his face. When he speaks his hands grasp at the edge of the table as though to steady himself. His tired eyes give the impression of one given to fatalism, to waiting. You soon regret your easy judgement, however. For people have related the story about the man with envy, a story so remarkable that it makes you pause. From Zhang Chun he had travelled afar, Uncle Hu begins to tell me. Instead of working on the land as most people were fated for, he started his young life as a boatman on a light rivercraft conveying goods and passengers between the village and Chayang. Later, in his early twenties, he had a career change. He took on the profession of a shuike, an itinerant courier who served customers in local villages and their kin in the South Seas. ‘People told me you had been a shuike, you had travelled far from the village,’ I say. As it turned out, his long narrative would stretch over the coming days. Each morning I would meet him in his small house where he had lived by himself since his wife died. I take my time, I am not one to rush a person who promises a bounty of self-revelation. I start by asking him, ‘People call you Hu Donghai. How did you get your name?’

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The Man of the Eastern Sea Life for him began with his father’s death, from tuberculosis, at the early age of forty-seven. After the funeral, the mourners turned to speculating: Why did he die so young? Why did he get sick while men of his age thrive and live a long life? Donghai’s grandmother, who was wont to seek solace from the gods and spirit mediums, believed her son was cursed. Not only was there her son’s illness and death, but before that hadn’t the spring festival rice wine turned sour year after year? Hadn’t the pomelo tree mysteriously crashed in the courtyard one winter night? These should have been the premonitions that some ill would befall the family. For mother and son, the most troubling was the daughter-in-law’s barrenness. The first of a series of pregnancies had raised hope, but each ended in miscarriage. They sent the family on a frantic search for a cure. The search ended with the Pitted-Face Woman, the village shaman and healer. In her dust-filled, dingy room, they had pleaded for an answer, ‘Why has the ghost taken our babies, why?’ The answer, the Pitted-Faced Woman told them, rested with the evil spirit which had taken up residence in the house. She threw a handful of rice over a large bamboo tray, and her body began to shake: the spirit had responded to her call. Her face dripping with perspiration, her body swaying, then slowing, gaining steadiness as she returned from the underworld. The evil spirit had strewed its answer on the bamboo tray, and the Pitted-Faced Woman, who was the only person who could read it, told her devotees: ‘The willow tree by the path leading to the northern hill; it is blocking the qi, and a ghost has made a dwelling of it. That’s your problem.’ The family was relieved. The next day Donghai’s father went with an axe and chopped down the white ant-infested tree. A year later, a healthy boy was born. The couple were ecstatic, and, guided by the mother, arduously followed the regime of herbal baths and swathing the baby in a thick cotton wrap, even in summer. They went back to the Pitted-Face Woman to thank her, who on hearing the good news added a piece of advice. The roots of the ghost-residing tree had soaked up the watery elements and brought catastrophe to the living. To restore some of the ying to the boy’s constitution, the healer named the boy Donghai, the Eastern Sea. All this Donghai relates to me—from what his mother had told him and how he imagines it. ‘I often think about the Pitted-Faced Woman,’ he says. ‘What a strange name she gave me.’ Donghai is indeed an odd

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name to use in a village where few had seen the sea. Growing up with the name made him feel special, but he had no inkling that his lifework would be forever associated with the ocean and voyages. The Pitted-Faced Woman had decided on his future.

The Apprenticeship Hu Donghai grew up in a house of women. After his father died, his mother, his grandmother and the maid loved and pampered him with natural extravagance. Good at school, filial and obedient at home, the boy could do no wrong. Each day, special dishes with little meaty titbits were prepared for him; the urging of another spoonful expressed the love for a child whose father fate had so cruelly snatched away from him. He was a promising student and the family had planned to send him to high school. What with his father’s death and the financial strains, life proved difficult. His mother was worried, she didn’t want him to be a farmer. What she wanted was for the son to learn a trade, a trade like that of his father’s old friend. Master Zhu had a small, comfortable apartment above a rice wholesaler in Chayang. From the balcony you could see the busy street below. For the retired businessman, the noise, the cooking fumes from the food stalls, the cries of children and vendors kept him in touch with the hurly-burly of town life. ‘This was the character of the man; he was kind and easy with people,’ Donghai recalls. Master Zhu was a shuike, an itinerant courier and a self-employed postman. A shuike conveyed mail, goods and money from the South Sea, and after delivery, would bring back letters and another list of needs from the recipient families. It was a time when the Chinese postal services were unreliable in the remote regions. Parcels from Malaya took months to reach the village, and political upheaval in China invariably impeded the traffic. The Bank of China in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore had remittance counters, but there’s nothing like personal services that joined the families divided by sea and distance. Besides being a mailman—it was mostly men who took up the profession—a shuike was also a banker, a letter writer, a conveyor of goods and news. ‘The job of a shuike included a lot of travelling. Was I excited? Yes, I suppose. But I was also concerned about the foreign places, and the new things to get used to.’ For almost two decades between the sixties and seventies, he journeyed between China and Nanyang, making three or four trips a year. Those in Nanyang cared

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deeply for their kin going through a rough time at home, and he was the saviour who brought goods and consolation. He witnessed collectivization, and his family was made a member of the commune, but he was free to travel as his profession demanded. He missed his grandmother— though he was weary of her persistent reminders to get married. He believed in his work, in being helpful and connecting people. He was content and enjoying himself. Before our meeting, I heard something that broke the mould of his staid messenger-postman image. ‘People said you brought a bride back from Nanyang when you were a young man, and she died only a few years back.’ ‘People talk too much. No, I don’t mind telling you my story. You have to remember it was a long time ago.’

The Meeting In the lounge room, Mrs. Lee and the postman sat down to discuss the mission. The house was in Kepong, he remembers, a tin mining town outside the capital Kuala Lumpur, and the taxi had taken the better part of an afternoon to get there. After tea was served, Mrs. Lee began to explain. Her daughter, Yulin, had just finished teacher’s college, and she wanted to join her fiancé already in China, who was teaching in a high school half a day’s walk from Zhang Chun village. They had met at the college, but he had left early for Guangzhou to finish teacher’s training there. The civil war was coming to an end, and a communist victory seemed assured. With the ancestral country on the verge of a revolution, the couple planned to return there, be married and start working where they would be needed. ‘Yulin would be travelling alone,’ Mrs. Lee said. ‘Perhaps you can take her under your care, and deliver her safely to her future husband.’ ‘I remember the first time I met her,’ the postman reminisces. ‘She came out of her room—she had been marking her students’ school work. She was so pretty, the way she pushed the pencil above her ear in the manner of an office secretary. Later when we were onboard the ship, she told me her mother was not keen for her to go, nor would have her father had he been alive. Everyone knew that once having left for China, it would be difficult to come back. In the end, her mother relented. It was all for the best. It’s right that she should join her fiancé and start a family there; and she would be a teacher, too, and help to build a new society. Anyway, that was what they thought.’

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‘The Shipboard Romance’ Throughout the voyage, Donghai and his charge lodged separately—he in his cabin, she in the hold at the lower deck for third-class passengers. Each morning he would go through his things, checking the letters in his weathered leather briefcase and tightening the ropes over the packages. He would then leave his cabin to join Yulin. After a night alone, breakfast was a reprieve from solitude; leaving his cabin he would find her waiting for him at the deck, looking lost among the throng of passengers. ‘On the ship, the cabin and the lower deck were two different worlds. A businessman like me took a cabin, the poor stayed in the lower deck— a large steel hold with beddings laid on the floor. These were mostly wives with children going to join their husbands. You felt sorry for them, spending the voyage in a dark, damp place, with the smell of stale food and rotten apples…’ At the canteen, they joined the crowd and took their place before the meal counter. As a cabin passenger, Donghai could have left for the dining room. But natural sympathy, or perhaps the need to be near the young Miss Lee, made him use the canteen and share her meagre fare. One evening he insisted on taking her as a guest in the dining room at the foredeck. There, Hong Kong-style dishes were served by whitejacketed waiters, and people debated the outcome of the civil war, some predicting a long, drawn-out conflict, some foreseeing the victory of the communists. After dinner, it was the couple’s habit to take a stroll on the deck, taking a slow pace, pausing to lean on the railings and examine the sea beyond. They were shy with each other and did not speak much. Nonetheless, they were taken with each other; he liked her company while she sensed in him a kind-heartedness she rarely encountered in young men of the business world. One evening, feeling brave and adventurous, and needling each other for courage, they made their way to the bar. ‘We just did. I had never been to a bar, and the same with Yulin. Maybe I was showing off, you know, like young people do. We gave each other a wink, as though to say “We have to do this”. We had been together on the ship, seeing each other every day… and we were a long way from home.’ They went up to the bar and parked themselves on the stools, and Donghai said something like, ‘Make us something colourful, light with a touch of bitterness, one for me and one for this lady.’

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The Singapore Sling came in two tall glasses—each filled to the brim with a pink liquor that swam in the clinking of ice cubes. The bartender watched, and they took their virginal sips. They had never had a cocktail, the Western-styled drink they saw in the movies about nightlife in Shanghai. The sensation in their mouths must have been sweet and tangy, then a certain fieriness would have taken over. They would have exchanged a smile and beamed at the bartender with a conspiratorial glee. The evening passed in a haze. He has forgotten how many glasses they had, it must have been a few. The ethnographer is heartened to take up the rest of the scene: the bartender’s broad, smiling face; their bouncy happiness of being young; how they had hung on to each other as they ambled off to the chairs, steadying themselves as though they were moving through stormy weather on the deck. ‘It broke the ice between us. It’s strange: we sort of fell into it. The whole experience had been waiting for us all our lives, I thought. I don’t remember what we talked about that evening, but at the end, before we left the bar, we had decided we wanted nothing more than to be together. I walked her down to the lower deck, returned to my cabin and fell asleep. The next morning, we met and I took her silence to mean she had stuck with her decision. We knew there would be problems, what with her fiancé and my duties and my promise to look after her (on the voyage). We were not being brave—it was just something we had to do. So I said to Yulin, let us go back to my mother’s house and sort things out from there.’

Love’s Mystery It is an ethnographer’s gain that in a village enclosed by the hills, in a place of hardy peasants and shrewd landlords, is found a story of love and romantic compulsion. Two young people had defied tradition and breached the protocol of marriage. The shuike, helpful and well-trusted, had betrayed his professional ethics. As I listen, I want to cheer them on, to see how their story unfolded. The courtship, the sea voyage and their venture to the bar were akin to a shipboard romance. It is not too much to think of their relationship as awash with erotic urgency. ‘Eros is necessarily between two only,’ C. S. Lewis has written; it admits no others and anoints the lovers at the centre of their intimate world.1 With passion and carnal impulse, erotic love seeks privacy and is wont to flout

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social conventions. Is that the best way to account for the couple’s daring change of plan? It is hard to plumb the depths of love’s mystery. In modern China, love and marriage took their cue from social causes. In the first years after the civil war, the country was a long way from the eternal China of Pearl S Buck and her ilk. Donghai and Yulin had found themselves in a world on the cusp of great transformation. Powerful forces were making themselves felt on traditional values and institutions: first the late Qing reform, then the founding of the Republic, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria followed by an all-out war on the rest of China; the struggle between the Communists and the ruling Nationalists was the latest conflict that reinforced the social and cultural changes of the earlier reforms. The new sensibilities of the young were drawn on a broad canvas of war and foreign invasion. Donghai and Yulin were of the generation after the Japanese occupation: fresh-faced, optimistic and open to new experiences. To fall compulsively in love, and to upset the traditional expectations about marriage were at one with the modern outlook.2 Listening to the postman, you get rhapsodic—history is the wind behind the sail, urging the lovers along. Their behaviour was rash and unreasoned. It makes you call up the figures of Existentialist thought, say, the narrator of Camus’ The Stranger, who, similarly unreasoned, faces a life event—his mother has died—with a kind of dizzy unresolved.3 Yet, the lovers’ impulsiveness felt right; both passion and history had played their part. They had surrendered to their heedless self-regard, while on the horizon, modern China—on the verge of a communist victory—was casting its glances. ‘It was a scandal, but they had made a good marriage, and they had lived among us until she passed away’ is how the villagers evaluate their life together. Time heals all wounds and so on. Donghai continued to travel; despite the gossip that he had kept his client for his wife. Supported by her husband’s income, Yulin had a relatively comfortable life during the collectivization. When the world was embroiled in the Cold War and China tightened its borders, the postman began to make his entry through the Lo Wan Station in Hong Kong, then followed the porter with his luggage across the bridge over the Shum Chun River. He witnessed the first stirrings of the Cultural Revolution in Hong Kong where, at the Lo Wan checkpoint, the Red Guards were harassing the returnees from the British colony. In around 1965, the Great Leap Forward was over, he ceased travelling and started to work on the piece of land his parents had left him. A child was born to the happy couple.

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Yulin died a few years back, aged 82, of cancer in the womb. People said to each other: she did not suffer, she had a good life and the scandal did not spoil their marriage. Their only son runs a small factory making brooms and plastic pails in Chayang. He had wanted his father to come and stay with his family, but he preferred to live on his own. Zhang Chun is where he was born, full of memory. He and Yulin lived for many years in his parents’ house by the river where he first brought her and begged for his mother’s blessing. Mostly, I guess, it was the place where he and his young bride had started their life together. The story, in a way, belongs to Yulin. The family album contains only her Malaysian pictures. She is in a cane chair with her back against the window, before her a low tea table with a glass top. In another: she is in the front row of a group of schoolgirls standing on the steps of a Thai temple, each in a white-starched blouse and canvas sports shoes. A formal portrait shows her standing stern and straight-backed in the sitting room, in the background a framed portrait of Dr. Sun Yat-sen; in the photo, she carries a casual prettiness, her face showing a hint of impatience, like a person waiting to give a speech. But what was she really like? Did they have a tough time during the Great Leap Forward? Listening to the postman, you fear misery and social catastrophe would dominate their marriage. The truth is, even during a revolution, any revolution, life is not a mud slog through suffering without reprieve. People fell in love and became man and wife. I am suspicious of happy endings. Nonetheless, through all the upheavals the couple went through in their marriage together, it did not fall apart. Theirs is a case of lifework holding the elements, deciding on its outcome and delivering something mysterious yet foreseeable.

The Traveller as Stranger On the enabling position of the stranger, the anthropologist Michael Jackson writes: While insiders find it difficult to see the world from any point of view other than their own, the pariah has no fixed position, no territory to defend, no interest to protect. As a visitor and sojourner, as one who is always being moved on, he is much freer than the good citizen to put himself in the place of another. It costs him nothing. He can try out a plurality of

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perspectives without any personal loss of status or identity, because he is already marked as marginal, stateless, and indeterminate.4

Situated on the margin, the stranger turns his position into one of strength. Indeterminacy spells freedom; he or she is out of the prison house of objectivity and a single viewpoint. Marginality has its limitations; but at its most suggestive, it delivers the gift of cosmopolitanism. The strangers and pariahs of different shades are blessed with what Jackson calls ‘visiting imagination’: This ‘visiting imagination’ of the pariah implies neither an objective standpoint (the pariah does not seek disinterestedness or distance from the other), nor an empathic one (the pariah is not interested in losing himself in the other); it is, rather, a way of trying on other identities. The result is neither a detached knowledge of another’s world nor an empathic blending with another’s worldview. Rather it is a story that switches from one point of view to another without prioritizing any one, yet unsettles in the mind of anyone who reads or hears the story not only his certainties but his belief in the possibility of certainty.5

A charming parallel of the stranger is found in the Chinese phrase, fu sheng, the floating life. A line from Li Bai’s poem: ‘The floating life is like a dream, how enduring is our happiness?’ More memorably, the term appears in a collection of essays by the scholar Shen Fu, Six Chapters of a Floating Life, Fu Shen Liu Ji. The essays are whimsical and meditative, meandering from one daily subject to another. If the texts hold a single theme, it would be, in our terms, the contingency of life. There are chapters on weddings, sorrow, and small pleasures in life (about gardening, mainly). On the joys of travelling, Shen Fu described a visit to the hills: On the embankment, there was a pagoda in an enclosure where I once viewed the bore on a mid-autumn night with my father. About thirty li eastward further down the embankment, there was the Needle Hill, which rose up abruptly and ended up in the sea. A tower on its top bore the signboard: ‘The Sea is Wide and the Sky Empty,’ from which place one could gain an unlimited view of the universe, with nothing except angry sea waves rising to meet the sky.6

More generally, on the siting of a city:

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A city should, in order to be picturesque, be built against a background of a vast countryside with ranges of hills in the distance; it was, therefore, a most difficult problem to have pavilions and parks around it without achieving a stupid, closed-in effect. But the whole thing was so contrived, with a pavilion here and a terrace there, and glimpses of walls and rocks and bamboo groves so cleverly designed that there was not the slightest bit of obtrusiveness to the tourist’s eye. Only a master architect of the mind could have conceived and executed this.

The author did allow himself to comment on the unsavoury aspects of secular life—corruption of officials was his main gripe. Throughout the essays there are hints of a philosophic attitude. ‘The Sea is Wide and the Sky Empty’ on a signboard is philosophizing, and so is the comment in another essay on the problem of having ‘pavilions and parks around [a city] without achieving a stupid, closed-in effect.’ One bears on the transcendental depth of human existence, and the other concerns the alignment of cosmic forces in city planning. The approach reflects a literary aesthetic that ties human experiences to the spiritual realm, the material to the non-material. Remembering the postman and his lover, you are moved by the mystery and fragile beauty of human relationships. Jackson is at one with the Chinese poet in opening a person’s heart to the expanse of unfettered thought and spiritual freedom. The anthropologist finds such a person in the stranger, Shen Fu in the traveller. In the East or West, a journey takes place in the mind, as much on the road and over the waterway. It reminds you that travel is a kind of wondering—wandering, a mode of existence not granted to those eager to settle in domestic comfort and social convention. An orthodox mind does not cede easily to the ocean-going voyages, the slew of experiences outside his or her normal expectations and the chance to meet with all manner of people. Wandering/wondering has a bad reputation among the people hectic with work and calculations, but it has the power to thrust itself upon them without their knowing. Donghai the shuike was a member of the Chinese diaspora, like my parents. It seems impossible to speak of the stranger without bringing in the equally fervid positions of the diaspora. For they too were endowed with the ‘visiting imagination’ that beset the stranger and traveller alike. In Southeast Asia, the ethnic Chinese have been blamed for their disloyalty and for casting their eyes outwards beyond the nations where they have settled. For them and their forebearers, emigration had been driven

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by land shortages and demographic pressures in the home country. However, in each village, not everyone left, most stayed behind. The myth of the land issue had picked its winners and losers, and the winners were those who were—for some unknown reasons—blessed with the yearning to move and to move on. The yearning is the nearest thing to the ‘visiting imagination,’ which may well be the primary makeup of a diaspora, an exile or a wanderer and adventurer. I am looking for the right words to describe the remarkable traits of these people: ‘quixotic’ will do, ‘inner prompting’ too describes their restless spirit and need to swim against the current. There seems no other reason for our postman to take a young woman already spoken for his bride.

Notes 1. C. S. Lewis, Four Loves. London: Fontana Books, 1960, p. 91. 2. A readable account is: Jonathan D. Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution. New York: Penguin Books, 1982. 3. We recall the beginning, ‘Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; YOU can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW, DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.’ Albert Camus, The Stranger. New York: Vintage, 1958, p. 1. 4. Michael D. Jackson, “Where Thought Belongs: An Anthropological Critique of the Project of Philosophy.” Anthropological Theory, 9 (3), 2009, pp. 235–51 (p. 243). 5. Ibid. 6. Shen Fu, Six Chapters of a Floating Life, translated by Yutang Lin, in The Wisdom of China, edited by Lin Yutang. London: Michael Joseph, 1948, p. 447.

Bibliography Camus, Albert. 1958. The Stranger. New York: Vintage. Fu, Shen. 1948. “Six Chapters of a Floating Life.” In The Wisdom of China, translated by Yutang Lin, 380–466. London: Michael Joseph.

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Jackson, Michael D. 2009. “Where Thought Belongs.” Anthropological Theory 9 (3): 235–51. Lewis, C. S. 1960. Four Loves. London: Fontana Books. Spence, Jonathan D. 1982. The Gate of Heavenly Peace. New York: Penguin Books.

CHAPTER 4

Grandfather’s Two Households

No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half replaced and half utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. —Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1889)

The name of the Yao family ancestral home, Chan Shen Lo, House of Eternity, has been carved into the plaque that perches on the top of the main doorway. Uncle Haw—a village elder of my sister’s acquittance— pushes open the door and we find ourselves facing the ancestral hall. A traditional Chinese house consisted of a U-shaped set of rooms, with the ancestral hall at the centre, and the two wings extended to form separate living quarters. The custom was for the master of the house and his family to live in the eastern chamber, and his eldest son—or his second wife, if he had any—the western chamber.1 When other sons married, further chambers were built adjacent to the existing ones; the wings were lengthened, while the house maintained the U-shape. It was an architecture of agnatic solidarity: the male line of descent was strung out across these chambers overseen by the ancestral hall, resulting in a domestic order of patrilineal ideals. My grandfather’s splendid house never extended beyond two chambers, two households; from where I stand, the past magnificence doesn’t hold and the place feels dejected. At the ancestral hall, the giant offering table is ‘cold,’ unattended to. Before the table is the main altar with dust-smeared gods and deities © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 S. Yao, Gifts to the Sad Country, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1598-5_4

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installed in a couple of rows. On the right wall is a chart of the Yao lineage record, a giant map of the dead and the living on which I can trace the first ancestor a few hundred years back in the early Qing Dynasty around the 1600s. He had passed the bureaucratic exam and served as a magistrate in the local county, so the family legend goes. But then, I have seen enough ancestral halls in Hong Kong and Taiwan to know that no families ever trace their ancestor to a farmer or a petite merchant or a pauper. So much had happened in the house Grandfather had built. The ancestral hall had been a lively place where once a year priests filled the hall with their jangling voices, where men and women of our clan came to plead for the ancestors’ blessing. Then the communists came and put a stop to the feudal practices of the old days. On the right is the entrance to the eastern chamber where Grandfather and Second Grandmother lived and brought up their son, my uncle Shen-Shien. Entering, I am shocked by the clutter and the chaos. The courtyard is piled high with sand and bricks; and the hallway is a shamble of furniture, farm tools, rusted bicycles that block the doors to the rooms. The western chamber beckons this expatriate who has returned. ‘This is where your grandmother lived,’ my guide says. ‘Not only your grandmother; it is where your mother had helped keep the family together and waited for her husband’s return; this is where your eldest brother and sister grew up.’ The rooms are boarded up and empty. The kitchen is at the far end: an ancient wok sits on a cold stove, around it a few broken stools and wooden pails. An air of dereliction and neglect—until you step out onto the elongated courtyard facing the rooms. Here light finds its way and illuminates a cement pool at the centre. Tian jing, sky well, collects the downpour from the Heavenly sphere. The water is sacred, but people use it for washing and bathing the feet before going to bed. The tian jing shows signs of maintenance—the receptacle has been scrubbed, and the water is clear. Knowing of my return, Uncle Haw has sent his niece to spruce the place up a bit, and she singled out the sky well for her task—an astute decision. What I see has taken a page from Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.2 ‘A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space,’ he observes at one point.3 With a name like House of Eternity, who can ignore the grandeur and the pride the grandparents had invested in the place? All my life, the divided dreams and the majestic discontentment of the people who lived there have been drilled into me. At the house, it is not grandeur and pride that meet my

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eyes, but their phantasmic shadows. Bachelard is right. As your head goes into a reverie, the house does not make you see so much as make you feel—and dream. For a moment you forget the neglect and the abandonment, and the house is glossed with a sparse, delicate beauty that age gives. The ancestral home is as imposing as its name, hoisted up by the family legend and what the villagers still remember.

‘The Lonely Bygone Days’ Writing this book, I have gone back to some of the Chinese texts I have put aside over the years. In the preface of his collection of short stories Call to Arms, Lu Xun writes, ‘For although recalling the past may bring happiness, at times it cannot but bring loneliness, and what is the point of clinging in spirit to lonely bygone days?’4 Nevertheless, the tales in the book are, in one form or another, awash with mournfulness and the regret of the ‘lonely bygone days.’ Take the short story ‘My Old Home.’ The narrator Hung Erh has returned to help his mother to sell the family home in a seaside town. He can’t remember much of the old house, now—‘[b]roken stems of withered grass on the roof, trembling in the wind, made very clear the reason why this old house could not avoid changing hands.’5 The mother mentions a childhood friend of his is coming to help and to pay his respects. Runtu was his servant and playmate, whom he had loved dearly when they were children. His friend turns up, and Hung Erh feels the estrangement: The newcomer was Runtu. But although I knew at a glance that this was Runtu, it was not the Runtu I remembered. He had grown to twice his former size. His round face, crimson before, had become sallow and acquired deep lines and wrinkles; his eyes too had become like his father’s with rims swollen and red, a feature common to most of the peasants who work by the sea and are exposed all day to the wind from the ocean. He stood there, mixed joy and sadness showing on his face. His lips moved, but not a sound did he utter. Finally, assuming a respectful attitude, he said clearly: ‘Master!…’

‘Master!’: the narrator turns nostalgic, and recognizes the social hierarchy between old friends. Runtu has his son with him, and introduces the boy. He turned his head to call: ‘Shuisheng, bow to the master.’ Then he pulled forward a boy who had been hiding behind his back, and this was just the

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Runtu of twenty years before, only a little paler and thinner, and he had no silver necklet on his neck.

The social separation of the two men is passed on in the deference of the young boy. Hung Erh’s regret is not the regret of selling the family home, but for having a ‘high wall’ descend between him and his friend. He tries to call up their childhood but to no avail; the ‘vision of that small hero with the silver necklet among the watermelons’ has blurred.6 Runtu asks for the incense-burner and candlesticks that Hung Erh’s mother cannot take with her. He wants them as a souvenir from a house where he grew up and served the master and his family, like the silver necklet his friend had once given him as a child. A man from the city, Hung Erh laughs at his friend’s naivety for putting so much importance on these things. ‘After he had gone out, Mother and I both shook our heads over his hard life: many children, famines, taxes, soldiers, bandits, officials and landed gentry, all had squeezed him as dry as a mummy.’7 On the boat that carries the mother and son to their new abode, the narrator observes: As I dozed, a stretch of jade-green seashore spread itself before my eyes, and above a round golden moon hung from a deep blue sky. I thought: hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.8

Lu Xun’s politics is subtle, quiet. ‘My Old Home’ came out in 1921. Modern China had just witnessed the great cultural reform, the May Fourth Movement that grew out of student protests in Beijing on May 4, 1919, with the view of saving China from European and Japanese incursions and from its own feudal stupor. The blend of wistfulness and a hint of political commentary is typical of the May Fourth aesthetics. ‘My Old Home’ has set me straight. Rage all I want against filial piety, against Chan Shen Lo as a symbol of male privilege and feudal power, the release is as illusory as the caretaker Runtu’s hope in clinging to the discarded things. Chan Shen Lo had been the fulfilment of my grandfather’s life and ambition. It stood as the token of a dream: he had made it in a foreign land, and then returned to build a grand mansion for him and his descendants. A diaspora’s longing is etched in every brick, on every doorway of the place. As I walk through the house, I am stumped by the

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emotional muddle that I feel. It was a house that fostered the hope— the fantasy—that the idea of a family’s longevity meant something. But objective forces would make futile such an idea. As I trace my steps back to the main door, I can think only of the sadness and the wastefulness of it all.

Nanyang---The Other Home An uncertain idea of home was burrowed deep within us. For many years, the family had two homes: there was the home in Zhang Chun village, China, and there was the other home far away in the South Seas where Grandfather lived. The home in Nanyang was a mythical place made real by news and hearsay, and by Grandfather’s returns bearing gifts—windup toys, chocolate and chewing gum, spam, cakes in tins embossed with words none could understand. As the old villagers tell it, Nanyang was full of wealth and opportunities—a place where young men could go and make something of themselves. There were those who said Nanyang could not be the real home; the real home was where the ancestors were buried, where seasonal rituals were carried out, bringing kinfolk from far away to join in worship. Zhang Chun may be the real, authentic home, but it was a parasitic affair. In a village with little arable land, some people were sustained by the wealth made overseas. The China home depended on its fake twin in Nanyang. Grandfather went to Malaya in the 1920s. His wealth was built on herbal medicine, pawnshops and textiles. With the earnings he built a grand house and invested in land and in shophouses in Chayang, the nearby town. His was the dream of Chinese immigrants, who held onto the singular aim to strike it rich and return home. The romance was palpable; since the real home was elsewhere, everyone was living out of a suitcase and saving up to go back. The trouble was, for most the temporary sojourn turned out to be a lifetime. Most of the coolies, rickshaw pullers and plantation workers never became rich and never got to go home. Then there were the needs of men. In British Malaya and Singapore, government-approved opium dens and prostitution houses were comforts for the poor.9 For the wealthy there were young women in elegant houses, and in private clubs where scented ladies in shimmering silk would pour steaming cups of Oolong and, drawing close, rub the shoulders of men to keep up their vigour in all-night mah-jong sessions. Grandfather

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was too proper a man for such roguish pleasures and took the simpler course of seeking a new bride and marrying again. Hearing the news, heads in Zhang Chun spun a little. The social reasoning was straightforward enough. It was a man’s privilege to seek sexual comfort where he could. When the first wife had passed her prime, he would marry a young woman who matched his unflagging virility. The senior wife was not cast aside, though. She was still the head of the family, with the scraps of power and respectability that went with it. Nonetheless, her life was forever changed. At the Yao ancestral house, the wives lived in different chambers; each was unhappy in her own fashion, to rephrase Tolstoy. One, my father’s mother, sought solace in Buddhist piety and charity work. The other, my second grandmother, gave birth to the blind Uncle Shen-Shien, and, bedevilled by shame, turned to jealousy and spite. The discord and grief touched everyone, and turned the magnificent home into a place of sour rifts. That, though not in so many words, is how the informant describes the family legend. He remembers, I was only a young boy then, six or seven at the time. Each morning I walked by your house to get to school. It had a high wall and I couldn’t see the inside. But I could hear women’s voices and servants running around. On the way back from school, there was a strong scent of herbs [from the house]. I asked my mother, she said it was the scent of herbal bath: your grandfather’s younger wife was often sick, born in the tropics she couldn’t get used to cold mornings, her qi was not right.

As I listen, I imagine myself as the young boy. Over the wall was a world filled with wonder—the mystery, the fluttering of feet, the call for servants, the scent. Yet, there was no question of Second Grandmother being real. She was the bride Grandfather had brought home from a distant place, and inserted into the domestic order my grandmother had long occupied. Grandfather’s two wives, two households, had hewed a family legacy.

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The Blind Uncle Shen-Shien ‘I know Second Grandmother had a son,’ I ask the informant. ‘What happened to him?’ ‘You mean your uncle Shen-Shien?’ he replies, then proceeds to tell me the story. Uncle Shen-Shien was Second Grandmother’s only son. The spiteful village tale held that, when pregnant in Malaya, too impetuous to keep warm at night and follow a healthy regime, she had caught ‘wind’ in her womb and nearly miscarried. On the astrologist’s counsel, the yet born child—he was sure the child would be a boy—was named Shen-Shien, ‘Similitude-Virtue.’ The metaphor of mirrored-goodness was a talisman to curb fate’s further injustice. Despite that, the baby was born blind, someone—perhaps Grandfather himself—had offended the gods who turned their wrath on his newly born. Second Grandmother fought bravely for her son. She had him taught by a private tutor, and a boy-servant helped him to dress and attended to his daily needs. Uncle Shen-Shien grew up believing his blindness was a negligible setback, a mere speck on the white of his charmed life. Later Grandfather bought him a commission as First Lieutenant in the Nationalist Army garrisoned in Chayang. It was a symbolic post, of course. Like his book learning and the parents’ devotion, the commission was a social prop that belied his disability. More real was Uncle Shen-Shien’s horse riding—which he did fittingly dressed in smart khaki and a tan leather Sam Browne belt, a Mauser pistol swinging from his hip holster. Picked from the small garrison stable, the horse was his eyes outdoors. It learned the feel of its master’s reining hands and guided him along the narrow paths between the rice fields, calmly pacing among the villagers and frightened children. The khaki uniform and Sam Browne belt were a fashion statement; but the Mauser was less innocent and was to cause him and his wife much grief when the communists came. Land Reform came to the village sometime around autumn in 1952. Grandfather had died early that year, lucky to escape the turmoil. Six months later his first wife followed him to the grave. By winter the reform was in full swing, and Father found it prudent to stay in Nanyang and put off his journeys to China. With my father and his parents out of the way, the party turned its deadly hand to those who stayed behind. The first stage of Land Reform had everyone jostling for the right class status. In the spinning of the wheel of fanshen—the ‘turning over’ of the peasants—the poor and landless were the backbone of the revolution, and

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landlords the targets of political vengeance. The struggle session took the form of a public trial. One by one, on an open stage, the enemies of revolution were made to face their accusers who had gone up to ‘tell bitterness,’ to purge their grievances. The principle was: when a landlord or a ‘Nationalist bandit’ was imprisoned or executed, it avenged the victims’ suffering and harnessed support for the communist cause. In this atmosphere, things began to close in on the family. With Father in Nanyang, Uncle Shen-Shien was the head of the household. The village committee had him arrested. In prison, before the party cadres and village leaders, he was led through the indictments. He was a Nationalist Army officer, his public parading in uniform was evidence of his allegiance to the ‘reactionary regime’; and he had assaulted a peasant girl who, many years after, had come forward to point an accusing finger. Then there was the matter of the pistol. That he didn’t surrender it meant that he was unrepentant and planning to do mischief. To his accusers, he replied that he had months ago thrown it into the river. Do you think I am so stupid as to keep it in the house, I imagine him saying. The village committee decided he had to be broken. They dug a pit in the prison courtyard, and at midnight he was brought from his cell and buried up to his chest. The guards taunted him: ‘You bad egg of a anti-revolutionary, you better confess!’. He was taken back to the cell at daybreak and put through the same treatment the following night. After four nights of the ordeal, in the cell he made a rope from his cotton blanket, tied it to the bar of the tiny window and hanged himself. What the informant tells sweeps me with disbelief. Had Uncle ShenShien really done this? Can a sightless man actually deploy such agonized ingenuity in order to kill himself? Hearing it for the first time, I am unprepared for the wretchedness of his lonely end. In his cell, he must have felt, perhaps for the first time, the effect of his disability and the malign pressure of society which his mother had barred from him.

Interrogation Uncle Shen-Shien’s suicide left unquenched the thirst of revolutionary vengeance. Second Grandmother had died three months earlier; after her son’s suicide, the village committee turned the heat on the blind man’s wife, my First Aunt.

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Before Mother’s departure from the village, she and First Aunt were called for interrogation together. In the correction centre, Mother went through the verbal abuse, accusing her of political crimes of all sorts. However, the family had paid the fine, and Father was away, so she felt safe. She knew it was a bit of a show, since word had come that she would be allowed to leave soon. As though to demonstrate that punishment awaited all unrepentant class enemies, Mother was made to watch the interrogation of her sister-in-law. First Aunt was tied to a chair, and a party cadre fell on her like a beast on its prey: ‘Admit your crime! Where did your husband bury the gold? Tell! Tell!’ No words came. A woman cadre took over; she stood a distance away and whipped her with a cane. Each lash brought the cry, ‘Renzui! Renzui! Confess! Confess!’ Then the trump card of her husband’s pistol was brought out. ‘You must know where it is! Your bad egg of a husband was blind; you must have helped him hide it.’ Mother’s recollection was sharp as she related the story. She was allowed to leave at this point. Describing her experience, she carried with her the thick, depressive gloom of the interrogation, her eyes full of fear. She had escaped, and she was safely in Malaysia, but the scar remained for the rest of her life. The informant’s words come and go, fleetingly, like the call of a foghorn to distant ships. I almost miss it when he says, ‘Did you know your First Cousin went to a labour camp in Heilongjiang? Did anyone write to you to let you know?’ So the revolution’s repercussions had been passed on from one generation to the next. Maybe that’s how it works. The wheels of the larger scheme of things grind everyone down, some deservedly, some not; there is no reprieve from the sins of one’s forefathers. First Cousin was sent away for stealing an electric torch from the co-op shop. After his father’s suicide, and his mother’s ordeals, the boy had his centre ripped out of him. During the Great Leap Forward, he played his part in the commune, but he was more troublesome than cooperative. Listening to the informant, I wonder what all this means. I want to ask, ‘What troubles did he cause in the production brigade?,’ ‘Could you actually send a person to a labour correction camp for stealing a paltry item like an electric torch?’ I hear the soft voice rambling about the Party’s ‘many mistakes’ and ‘bad deeds,’ but they do not add up to what I want to know.

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Memory and History In my room at the Hong Tian Hotel I settle down to write my notes. There’s a lot to take in. As a university man, it is easy for me to see what happened as something of history. British Malaya had opened the door to immigrants, and they came in droves. Grandfather had worked hard and saved and invested wisely, that made him the stuff of legend of the Chinese diaspora. If only the lives of immigrants were so logical and straightforward. History is the key, but it also tends to explain too much—when it sustains a past that is objective, when it wants you to believe what has been recorded is free from polemics and the effects of representation.10 When we travel back in time, how do we find our way through the missteps of interpretation, how do we see through the experts and their own polemics? Ah, that ‘foreign country,’ ‘they do things differently there.’ L. P. Hartley’s unforgettable line in The GoBetween deposits history as memory, and memory reincarnates as history. It’s the same feeling of the past in Lu Xun’s ‘My Old Home’—remote, and capricious. The informant’s remark comes back to me, ‘Your Second Grandmother had it tough, you know that? Your family suffered, but she and her family were the true victims.’ One branch of the extended family was saved by uprooting itself wholesale, the other branch had stayed and faced the political rage. Revolution’s victims suffered differently; they did not drink from the same bitter cup, as the locals would say. What people say about Grandfather and his two wives is true, but it is not the only truth. Ethnography is an art that deals in depth, with the ‘big picture’ lying vigilantly in the background. You struggle to understand the domestic contentions in your Grandfather’s divided households. You have checked and rechecked to satisfy yourself what the informants tell you indeed happened. However, to ask the villagers about the revolution is an invitation to an outpouring of suffering. And regarding Grandfather’s marriages, it was wife against wife: one patient and virtuous, one younger and imprudent except when it came to her son. It was a difficult domestic arrangement made more difficult by the political upheaval.

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Patriarchy The revolution is one thing; the larger blame can be put on patriarchy. The two households, separate but tied to the same husband, had their origin at a time when bigamy—more accurately, a system of wife and cowives or concubines—was socially approved. However, to make sense of the Chinese traditional marriage, male privileges have to be accounted for, but so do the individual needs and gratifications that marriage holds for the husband and his wives. Social mores and physiology both mattered. Instead of oppression, it is probably truer to say that each marriage was a blend of oppression and the allowance of negotiations in the partnership; invariably a blend of subjugation and compromises involving all parties. About the oppression, here is a condemnation of women’s position in the silk production of Late Imperial China. [In the silk cottage industry], women were expected to work hard and live cheaply. … The subordination of women meant that the wealth they produced above and beyond necessary for her own reproduction was channelled to her fathers and brothers, husbands and sons. Women’s low status in the Chinese world was not an accident or feudal peculiarity; it was an integral part of a complex economic pattern.11

In China’s silk cottage industry labour almost totally relied on women in the family. The wives, unmarried daughters and daughters-in-law greased the engine of an important industry in the Ming and Qing dynasties. The silk industry was organized in the classic petite capitalist mode: homebased, serviced by women’s labour, with men making the major decisions. In the author’s Marxist take, everything that sustained the industry was ideological to boot. Since silk production relied on homebound wives and daughters and daughters-in-law, it made sense that domestic confinement should become a primary feminine virtue. The Confucian propriety that dictated the feminine propriety of women turned out to be one of significant economic logic. Where Chinese patriarchy dominated, women were ‘a source of power, wealth, and social superiority for Chinese men.’12 The subject of Chinese patriarchy can be approached with greater subtlety. For the historian Patricia Buckley Ebrey, the question is whether the women’s rectitude was ‘an ideal that those of great virtue should strive to achieve,’ or ‘a standard by which everyone should be judged.’13 Confucian-based ethics often attempted to ‘alter old understandings of women in the family system in ways that imposed greater constraints on

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women.’14 But this was a matter of emphasis; the Confucian virtue of modesty did not present a social and judicial rule for women’s behaviour. Women were not merely passive agents in this system; many played active roles in keeping the system going. Mothers trained their daughters to occupy certain statuses in this system, fostering in them the modesty expected of upper-class wives, the charm expected in courtesans, the obedience expected in maids. Women purchased most of the maids and many of the concubines. A wife whose husband took a concubine could to some degree limit or shape her husband’s behavior by arousing fears of what she might do to the other woman if sufficiently provoked. And women were of course also actors as concubines, maids, and courtesans. Not only did some women choose an economically secure position as a concubine over a life of poverty as a poor man’s wife, but even those who had been sold quite against their will were not entirely powerless. So long as there were chances to improve their situations, they could strive to gain the favor of their master or mistress, working within the system and thereby also helping to validate it and reproduce it.15

Professor Ebrey’s approach is free of the materialist reasoning that makes much of men’s ownership of women and their labour power. It is not wrong to say that women like my grandmothers were oppressed and the victims of the masculine privileges their husbands embodied. But the truth is: to the dynamic of traditional marriage, the professor might have added the carnal tenderness, the gracious negotiations that gave the husband-and-wife bond a real emotional depth. We are, of course, talking about the nature of intimacy—the give and take, the traffic of sentiment between a man and a woman that typifies most marriages. Both my grandmothers had blamed their husbands for their unhappiness. For one, he was unfaithful and fuelled the local gossip by taking another wife; for the other, he would not devote himself to his overseas bride who could not adapt to the rustic village life. My grandmothers were not the liberated women of our time, but they did not conceal their disgruntlement. They made their resentment protests heard, and they did not act as martyrs. After Grandfather had taken another wife, Grandmother kept her ability to make decisions and to oversee the farming of the family land. As for Second Grandmother, she fought at every step for her disabled son, though she herself was frequently sick. It is easy to give over to quick judgement. My grandmothers were each given their due in various ways; patriarchy was not undone, but moderated.

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The Marriage Law Eldest Sister has replied and said this about our grandfather’s marriages: You have to remember I married young, at seventeen. I can’t say I remember very much of Grandfather. He died a couple of years before I left home. [After I got married], I came back as often as I could, bringing my children with me. Was our grandmother unhappy? It was the oldfashioned way, for a man to have two wives. By the time I got married, all that was very much over. Grandmother always seemed to me tough, and our mother, you know, could read and write. Second Grandmother was often sick, but she played her part in managing the household, though organizing farming was given to our grandmother and our mother. People said, ‘Your grandfather has taken a young wife and your grandmother is cast aside.’ Grandmother would ignore it and told us to be righteous and pay little attention to the gossip. Towards the end of her life, the situation had somehow gotten to her. I remember once we were in the kitchen, the children were playing with the maid, Grandmother had held my hand and said, ‘Life is hard, and one day you’ll grow old like me.’ She didn’t mention Grandfather, but I knew what she meant.

By the time Grandfather died, and my grandmother not long after, the Land Reform was in full force. The family was no longer the centre of the village tattle, and what went on in the ancestral house was nothing compared to what had descended on the village. The revolution had brought about new legitimacies and social mores. Women began to take up positions in the village committee, and the co-op shop was run by women; some arranged marriages were dissolved, and those forced to be concubines of landowners were released from bondage. This was the textbook stuff of women in socialist China. The writing was on the wall: the old form of marriage was in its dying days. Father in Malaya knew of the new marriage law in China because Mother had sent him a copy from Zhang Chun. He was accused of receiving inflammatory literature from Red China and was sent for questioning at a police station. The forbidden item in question was a copy of the 1950 Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China. Chinese women had long been the victims of feudal values and institutions—now their lives were to be free under Communism: that was the spirit of the Marriage Law.16 Reading a copy, you have the impression that its makers

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had propped up an inventory of the evils of traditional marriage and, knitting their brows, written down remedial legislation item by item. Nothing was left out. The Marriage Law catalogued the feudal practices that were to be prohibited: ‘Bigamy, the keeping of concubines, child betrothal, interference with the remarriage of widows, the exaction of money or gifts in connection with marriages’ (Chapter 1, Article 2), and ‘infanticide by drowning and similar criminal acts’ (Chapter 4, Article 13). Chapter 3 was entitled ‘Rights and Duties of Husband and Wife.’ No more the Confucian cliché of the ‘virtuous wife walks five steps behind the husband’ sort. Instead of male superiority there was to be ‘equal status of husband and wife’ (Chapter 3, Article 7). Instead of being confined to the house, the wife could now enjoy ‘free choice of occupation and free participation in work or in social activities’ (Chapter 3, Article 9). Divorce was no longer the shameful thing it used to be. ‘Divorce shall be granted when the husband and wife both desire it’ (Chapter 5, Article 17) and both shall have the duty ‘to support and educate their children’ (Chapter 6, Article 20). The modern, progressive marriage was set out in Article 8: Husband and wife are duty bound to love, respect, assist and look after each other, to live in harmony, to engage in productive work, to care for the children and to strive jointly for the welfare of the family and for the building up of the new society.

For my mother, the Marriage Law must have held a special appeal. She had witnessed great unhappiness in her marital home. She was prosecuted during the Land Reform, but she could, with a certain yield to reason, identify with the radical spirit of the Marriage Law. In her mind, the sighing disappointments, the intrigues and jealousies in the extended household, came across as the evil the Marriage Law had set out to abolish. I imagine her sitting by the kerosene lamp at night, her adult children away, the house as quiet as a ghost. The pamphlet she has bought on an impulse at the co-op shop, reading it she tries to grasp at the meaning of the words and jargon. A cold realization strikes her. Grandfather had twice-married, would her husband in Nanyang follow the footsteps and take a second wife? She is tired. She tells herself it’s only a rumour, nonetheless it plays on her mind. Word had come from Malaya that her husband had set up house with a young woman in an apartment not far from the shop. That’s what people said, but hasn’t that been men’s way, and her husband has

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the added excuse of being far away from home? So she bought a copy of the Marriage Law, and after reading it posted it to her husband. In her mind this was not so much to admonish him for his suspected infidelity, as to share with him the marriage under socialism they both should know about. She has the instinct that the language of ‘abolishment’ and ‘prohibition’ and ‘the new union based on love, respect and productive work’ will teach her and her husband something worthwhile. In any case, the affair was over—if there had been one—when she arrived from China. Neither husband nor wife wanted to talk about it. Still, the world was opening up and even someone like her, the wife of a blood-sucking landlord, was being drawn to its ideas. Mother had witnessed the troubles of the old marriage first-hand; the Marriage Law had put the unhappiness and its remedy on an ‘objective plane.’ Her feeling towards the ‘socialist marriage’ ran from curiosity to sympathy, then to a kind of wakening. Finding the Marriage Law meaningful, she could pick out the relevant parts and leave the cant. As it turned out, my mother was not the only one in the village who read the Marriage Law with a personal eye. Comrade Chang, a perky seventyeight-year-old woman, is so moved by what she remembers that she grasps my hand and says, ‘I am not a reader of books, but I knew what was going on in an old marriage. I knew [a] fire was lit, and things were to be changed.’ Once, during a public trial, she had gone up to the stage to accuse the head of the Wang family of forcing her to marry his dullwitted son. ‘Why? Because it mattered to me, because I had held this anger in my breast for a long, long time.’ Fanshen was Comrade Chang’s opportunity to seek a divorce. The new marriage law came too late for my grandmothers. To grasp at the depth of their unhappiness calls for a different language, an alternative way of understanding the marital relationship. For Comrade Chang and perhaps my mother, something like the socialist marriage would help them to grapple with the bewildering changes they were facing; for them the 1950 Marriage Law was more than ideological sham. Comrade Chang had been the first one to recognize that the unfair treatment of women still happened during the revolution. ‘Yes, women are were at the village committee and the co-op shops, but not enough of them. Men made the decisions!’ Like many women in the village, Comrade Chang is optimistic. Girls, if their parents can afford it, go to universities, others leave home to get a better job than being

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a hawker or a farmer. And she points to the sure sign of women’s independence: the Hong Kong-style teahouse in Red Sky Hotel is filled with wives and daughters while the men are at work.

Meeting First Cousin I have met briefly with First Cousin in my sister’s house. The meeting has set in my head certain ideas of the man: the poor health inherited from his mother, the effects of his father’s suicide, the rumours about the gangster behaviour during his young days. I go to his stationer in Chayang, but find a different person: his face is soft and calm, his eyes mellowed with a kind of beauty that comes from suffering and reprieve. In my head is the thought: it seems incredulous that this plain, gentle person was once an inmate of the Chinese gulag, a man who had been taken in shackles and put on a train together with other ‘enemies of revolution’ across the great plain of the Chinese northeast to one of the labour camps near Siberia. But I cannot reach out and raise the many questions going through my head. It had happened a long time ago, in the dark years of Maoist China; his incarceration might even be put down to an embarrassing youthful misbehaviour. Perhaps he would rather leave the past where it belonged, and it would give him no pleasure to talk about it. It is morning, and there’s a constant flow of customers. Each arrival prompts him to leave the counter and retrieve from the shelves a ream of paper, a set of account books, or a bundle of paintbrushes. Then the wrapping of the purchases and the ringing of the cash register. He is carrying on his trade, and I know better than to interrupt him. He has been warned of his scholarly cousin’s coming, perhaps the meeting would be like meeting his interrogator, full of uncomfortable questions needing answers. So I watch the coming and going. Near noon, the business quiets down and First Cousin orders rice buns and a pot of tea and we exchange pleasantries. I look around, and am struck by the success and the aura of wealth that has dispersed the gloom of his past. ‘You are doing well, I am happy for you,’ I say. ‘You are making too much of it.’ The shop stocks school texts and exercise books, but the profit-making items are bamboo paper, thin and absorbent for drawing ink painting on. On a small table near the counter are books of poetry and the ancient classics—Dao De Qing, Confucius’ Analects, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Dream of the Red Chamber. I stop before a glass shelf and my eyes catch a volume

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of the masterly work of Mi Fu, one of the Four Treasured Calligraphers of the Song Period, whose style we had tried to mimic in our literature class at school. It was a long time ago, but the thrill of the exercise, and what I recognize as an exquisite style comes back to me. Self-absorbed, I flip through the volume from page to page. Without my knowing, two volumes of the master’s work bound in blue silk are pressed on my hands. We do not say anything, but the delicate arching of generosity and gratitude somehow unites the two cousins living in different countries, separated by histories—until now. Our forefather had the dream that all the descendants should live in the grand mansion he had built, in harmony and united with the bond of common ancestry. In spite of myself, I have found the vision enticing as it assuages my grim sense of alienation from the ancestral land. Time and revolution had turned his dream into ashes. At the stationer, we two from Grandfather’s two households, descendants from his troubled marriages, are united. We have achieved, in small measures, what our forefather had tried but failed.

Notes 1. The Chinese architecture takes the perspective of a person standing with their back to the house—rather than with their face to the house, as in the West. See Wang Sung-Sing, “Taiwanese Architecture and the Supernatural.” In Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, edited by Arthur P. Wolf. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974, pp. 183–192. 2. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. 3. Ibid. 4. Lu Hsun (Lu Xun), “My Old Home.” In Selected Stories of Lu Hsun. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1960. 5. Ibid., p. 234. 6. Ibid., p. 269. 7. Ibid., p. 263. 8. Ibid., p. 272. 9. After international criticism, opium trade in Malaya was scaled down and eventually banned after the Second World War, in 1946, along with the opium revenue farm. In colonial Singapore, to finance its freeport, William Farquhar, the island’s first Resident, introduced the revenue farm system in 1820. Under the scheme

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10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

which later covered the rest of British Malaya, government licences were auctioned off to private investors and commercial interests to grant them monopoly in running opium dens and brothels. The trade in opium and sex, so vital to the local commerce, helped build the fortune of British and Chinese capitalists. See Carl A. Trocki, Opium and Empire. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. Michael Taussig, “History as Commodity in Some Recent American (Anthropological) Literature.” Food and Foodways, 2 (1), 1987, pp. 151–69; especially pp. 155–57. Hill Gates, “The Commodification of Chinese Women.” Signs, 14 (4), 1989, p. 802. See also the same author, China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. Hill Gates, “The Commodification of Chinese Women,” p. 832. Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Women and the Family in Chinese History. New York: Psychology Press, 2002, p. 12. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 21. “The Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China.” In China Yesterday and Today, edited by Molly Joel Coye, Jon Livingstron, and Jean Highland. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.

Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston. 1969. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Coye, Molly Joel, Jon Livingstron, and Jean Highland, eds. 1984. “The Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China.” In China Yesterday and Today. New York: Bantam Books. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. 2002. Women and the Family in Chinese History. New York: Psychology Press. Gates, Hill. 1989. “The Commodification of Chinese Women.” Sign 14 (4): 779–832. Hsun, Lu. 1960. “My Old Home.” In Selected Stories of Lu Hsun. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. Taussig, Michael. 1987. “History as Commodity in Some Recent American (Anthropological) Literature.” Food and Foodways 2 (1): 151–69.

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Wang, Sung-Sing. 1974. “Taiwanese Architecture and the Supernatural.” In Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, edited by Arthur P. Wolf, 71–92. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Things That Bind

The exchange of presents between men, the ‘namesakes’—the homonyms of the spirits, incite the spirits of the dead, the gods, things, animals, and nature to be ‘generous towards them’. The explanation is given that the exchange of gifts produces an abundance of riches. —Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925)

In Kafka’s seemingly Chinese tale, ‘An Imperial Message,’ a story is told of a message from a dying Emperor that can never be delivered.1 In his last breath, he sends for the envoy, commands him to kneel and whispers something into his ear before sending him on his way. The Emperor is surrounded by princes and high officials, and a multitude that has come to witness his death. Important as he is, he is denied the dignity of a private death. In any case, the content of the message is never revealed; it remains the secret between the mighty and one of his humble subjects. A cowering ‘insignificant shadow,’ the envoy alone is trusted with the message, and he must make the dash to deliver it to the grandees who administer the vast empire.2 The messenger—now described as ‘powerful, an indefatigable man’—must cut his way through the throngs of people assembled around the dying Emperor.3 The crowd seems infinite, and the ‘messenger must next fight his way down the stair; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; the courts would still have to be crossed; and after the courts the second outer palace; and once more stairs and courts; and once more another palace; and so on for thousands of years.’4 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 S. Yao, Gifts to the Sad Country, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1598-5_5

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There is no certainty to the success of the messenger’s mission. Still, the story ends on a brisk, positive note: ‘Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.’5 Thinking of my divided family makes me bring up Kafka’s remarkable tale. ‘An Imperial Message’ has a dogged relevance; partly because it is based on the Middle Kingdom, not the Jewish-Czech writer’s familiar territory. For Kafka, China is impenetrability itself. The parable makes much of feudal China’s ills: the mighty yet sickly imperial power, the benighted masses, the decrepit communication between central authorities and their officials. Kafka’s tale of ancient China cannot help but take on a tragic note. In it, the Emperor is an ailing figure, his subjects are obstructive and clueless, the messenger does not deliver. Whatever people desire, the gods have their own plans. My parents’ connections with their kin were similarly uncertain. Growing up, I was moved by their ferocious need to keep in touch. To my young mind, they were following some script from a time when kin relationships were flourishing, where sentiment among relatives was relevant and meaningful. As for communication, during the fifties, it took the better part of three months for a letter from the South Sea to reach the village. The delay, and the fear that a letter might never arrive, were upsetting. The narrative of the diaspora can be romantic, when it tells of the resettlement and the joy of keeping in touch with those in the homeland. However, there’s romance, too, in the frustration and the despair. Expatriation is alienating. However, for emigrants and exiles, estrangement invites near heroic efforts to keep alive the customary attachments. Estrangement tests the will and calls for prodigious deeds to reprise the past life. There is comfort when letters and messages arrive and whisper: ‘I hope you still remember us; separated, we are not strangers.’ For a moment, your sense of loss is assuaged, your effort to link up with your kin has paid off. The transaction is, of course, a two-way street. Those who’ve never left have their needs, too, perhaps more desperately. As war and political turmoil colonize their thoughts, their wants are conveyed to their kin overseas. Pared down, the connection means a conveyance of goods and remittances across the divide. And I’ve learned this from my family: the story of the diaspora is awash with emotional grandeur; it is also banal and calculative.

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Letters In the days before the internet and text messages, letters were the charming conveyers of news and sentiment. My father was a literary hoarder. Books and writings were sacred to him and he never threw any away. Letters from the village and carbon copies of those he wrote and sent off were kept in a sandalwood box in the study. Years on, after he died, there they were. Snugged in the dustless fold of brown envelopes are the letters, the receipts of registered mail, chits of bank transfers, lists of goods sent and their costs, airline and P&O ship tickets, cocktail bar receipts. My father’s formidable dealings were detailed in these scraps of paper. And woven into the letters were bitter ruminations about the communists; from our kin, the pleading for help. Picked from the pile, a letter: Dated 13 February 1961, from Second Maternal Uncle from Grandfather’s other family, After many talks with the party official, permission has been granted to repair the ancestor’s grave. Please send funds for cement and labour costs. Bless your good heart; we simply cannot afford it.

From another scriber in April, the same year: The shuike arrived a few days back… We received the cooking oil, the cloth, and the rubber shoes. The shoes are too small for our boy, and we will give them to someone who can wear them. We thank you my good heart for remembering us. Our life continues to be hard, there’s shortages of everything and the children are crying out of hunger. It shames us to ask Senior Uncle for help. Here is a list of things we need. …

You recognize the pattern. Best wishes are followed by the telling of terrible things, and the expression of gratitude is a prelude to asking for more things and more remittances. You get the picture; whatever’s missing you make up with your empathy and imagination. And your mind is overwhelmed. You are grateful to know, but the frail envelopes, the thin writing paper, the shoddy village stationery tell a message as eloquent as the letters. The situation at home is so desperate, it implies, as to justify the greed and the lack of propriety in the asking and pleading. A quick realization: the profuse tenderness in the correspondence is not what it seems. It calls for a rethinking of your understanding of kin loyalty.

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One large envelope contains, besides the letter, two folded red sheets written over with calligraphy in bold, black ink. A few auspicious words to paste over the doorway of your shophouse to bring luck and prosperity, the sender has instructed. On the envelope, sheets of stamps featuring hydroelectric dams and faces of Chairman Mao squeeze the address to the bottom corner. The accompanying letter, dated 15 November 1961, reads: Dear First Brother, We thank you for the 200 Hong Kong dollars you sent us, my mother reminds me to thank you for not forgetting my family. Our situation you know from shuike Hu who would have returned to Nanyang by now. … Things are very difficult and it is our ancestors’ blessing to have you in the foreign land to send help… I shall put away my shame and ask my support again. Fifth Uncle’s eightieth birthday is coming; it will be in early winter, about six months’ time. Things being what they are, we have to plan ahead. It will be about six or seven tables, not like the old days; we’ll invite the elderly relatives and their wives, and some party officials. We have thought it through: the eightieth birthday is a landmark for anyone. Even with the current conditions, we should try to hold a modest dinner for Fifth Uncle. Who knows if Fifth Uncle would enjoy another birthday gathering? I know how much that would cost— Mr Hu will give you a figure when you talk to him. Mr Hu assured us you are healthy and the herbal business is doing well, and your latest is a girl, and both child and mother are healthy. We are so pleased. He told me you have the first stage of diabetes, you must take rest and use some of the ginseng from your shop, which you know is best for diabetes. My mother sends her best wishes, and asks you not to forget us at home. In much embarrassment. Third Brother

The letter came from Second Grandmother’s brother, who was three years younger than my father. Grandfather and his wives had passed away, but there was to-and-fro between the families. You note the hesitant tone: he was uneasy about asking for money, and he had negotiated with the village council for permission to hold a birthday for an elder. Father waited a few days before penning a reply. Dated 20 November 1961, the letter goes: Dear Third Brother,

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I am pleased to know you have received the money. Please spend it on the children at school, and on winter clothes for all when the weather turns cold. On Fifth Uncle’s eightieth birthday, conditions are difficult here too. The business has been poor the last quarter, and my second son has left to study in Australia. Nonetheless, I agree that we should give a dinner in Fifth Uncle’s honour. He stayed loyal and looked after Grandfather, when others had ignored the old, ailing man. I was away, and he organized the funeral. I am glad to do what I can for Uncle in his advanced years—time passes, people reach old age in the blink of an eye. The number of tables is fine, perhaps if I can manage it, some money should be left for Uncle’s medicine and other needs. I don’t want to intervene in your decision but see if that’s possible. Start the preparations, make sure you have the government’s permission. Don’t forget to invite some party people. Have the dinner in the courtyard before the ancestral hall; this is a good opportunity to sweep and tidy up the place. When I get the budget from Mr Hu, I’ll send the funds. My eldest son is in Dalian attending university. Has he been in contact? Please write to him—you have his address—and let him know of Uncle’s birthday. He is my eldest and should know about family affairs. First Brother

Rules of Asking and Giving The correspondents were educated men and women, their writing was formal and correct in cultural protocol, and universally polite. However, with their worn-out phrases, modest philosophizing and meek confessions of shame, they could not help but reflect an old world that communism was determined to abolish. Other letters were more rustic, written by the neighbours and distant kin of peasant backgrounds. Their letters typically proceeded along the lines of: ‘My family used to work for you during harvest time. I hope you remember us. You know we are having a difficult time in Zhang Chun, I thought I would ask you to send a few things.’ They knew they were not close kin, so they kept the message brief. Each letter gives off the tone: ‘These are wealthy people. I think give it a try, maybe I’ll get lucky.’ In all this, requests were made following a certain principle. With the neighbours and distant kin, requests for modest and practical things led to favourable responses. Food, medicine, clothes, shoes were safe bets; the daily necessities invited no suspicion of greed and lack of grace. In most cases, bringing up the kin connection was a good move. This usually

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worked with the donor until the conditions in the village worsened. We in Malaysia could sense the hardening of government measures by the shift of tone in the letters, and by the things requested. Added to the daily needs were a little luxury, a few goods to ease the hardship. In normal circumstances, a bicycle was hardly a luxury. However, when daily existence was a struggle, not only a bicycle or a sewing machine, a can of Spam, a quilted blouse, a new pair of rubber shoes would be something special that added comfort to one’s life. Thus, everyone was testing the waters. Shopping lists were sent out like the proverbial fishing expedition. In Malaysia we responded by setting a limit. Sewing machine, bicycle, and camera were turned down; food, clothes, medicine, some money for a daughter’s coming wedding were usually conceded to. From a distance, what was a luxury or a practical thing called for a bit of guessing: a sewing machine may be a luxury, what about a foreign-branded fountain pen, or large jars of Vaseline—things that could be sold for cash. On the whole, deprivation came to dominate what and how much to ask, leaving little space in the letters for social niceties. With my parents, whose solicitude towards their kin seemed boundless, it was an unhappy situation. They wanted to help, but the letters were urgent and testing of our patience. A person of old-fashioned civility, my father was usually silent about the state of his finances. It was bad form to refuse the requests for assistance, worse still to hint at his precarious want of cash. We knew life was tough back in the village, but the endless telling of daily shortages and misery slowly ground them down. To us children, our parents were morally correct, they set the example of how we should behave—generosity and good manners were the yardstick. It shocked me when, receiving one of those beseeching letters, my mother had cried out, ‘We hardly know them, and yet they are asking us for help!,’ or on another occasion, ‘That buck-teeth woman caused me so much trouble at the village council, and she dares to ask me for money. Shameless!’ And then, ‘Do they think we are a gold mine that spouts out its wealth?’ Still, as her exasperation cooled, she would urge her husband to make the preparations, while she went shopping to fill the lists. The things asked for were sent. My parents were keen to keep alive the relationships because they mattered to them. As typical of the diaspora, they continued to invest in the old society and its values, as they tried to adjust to the place of expatriation. Linking the old and the new attachments, their approach was judicious and sensible. On a good day, the gifts they sent out tied

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them to the beneficiaries, and the letters, in spite of the grim news and pleadings, cut a piece from old normalcy. Reading the letters, the stuff of an Uncle’s birthday dinner, the clearing of the ancestors’ graves, the children’s shoes and blouses, felt like reminders of the previous world. For a moment, things stood unchanged, social dealings still held their meaning. This was my parents’ ideal at its most alluring. Thus, goods that got sent to the village showed graciousness, and gave a material significance to a social bond. Personal concord and social harmony is not the only game in town. This has been the legacy of social anthropology: a gift creates obligation on the part of the receiver, an obligation they are bound to acknowledge and to repay in some form. In the conception of Marcel Mauss, a gift embodies the heart and soul of the donor and gives force to social relationships with all the attendant qualities of sentiment, loyalty and mutual bond.6 Yet, greed, and power, and unresolvable conflict too, often claim a place in the intersubjective world. Perhaps the idea that things given away and received cement relationships is a partial truth?

Gifts and History While my parents were busily trying to make links to the homeland, people there were facing ground-shifting changes. In 1949 China became the People’s Republic. Land Reform took place soon after that, and the collectivization of the Great Leap Forward followed in the late fifties. In British Malaya, the insurgency war—the so-called Malayan Emergency—began in 1948, and was carried on by the independent nation until the defeat of the Malaysian Communists in 1960. Right until the Deng reforms, Malaysia’s relationship with China was frosty. Travelling to China was forbidden except for the elderly and businesspeople. It was a time when being ‘interested’ in China was to tread on the dangerous grounds of disloyalty and subversion. Pragmatic and politically astute, ethnic Chinese like my parents were careful to show the government that they received mail from China and sent parcels there because they had kinfolk there. They were not in the habit of packing young people off to the guerrilla training camps in China. It was all about good political sense. In such circumstances communication became the first casualty. It took more than three months for mail to reach us, and some people stopped writing altogether. There was a lot of reading between the lines, as we

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pored over each page to get at what was really happening. From where we were, it felt like powerful forces were ripping apart our customary relationship with our kin. The narrative of diaspora can be romantic, fanciful. It tells of the joy of settling into a new life, of saving for a mortgage to buy the first home, of going on a trip to the Disneyland the children have long coveted. But expatriation is alienating. So they turn mawkishly to the letters and text messages that whisper: ‘I hope you still remember me; separated, we are not strangers.’ In such moments, their sense of loss is assuaged. But it is a two-way street between the diaspora and those back home. People who’ve never left have their needs, too. War and social turmoil colonize their thoughts, and their wants are faithfully conveyed to those overseas. Pared down, the traffic of messages is an opportunity for people to split and realign themselves; old feelings are reconsidered, current ones consolidated—even within a family. The story of diaspora is awash with emotional grandeur, but also brim-full of the banal and the calculative.

Gifts for Son and Daughter There was much to do before Mr. Hu the shuike came to collect the parcels. These were for Eldest Sister and her family, and for Eldest Brother in Linfen city, Shanxi, where he was posted to since leaving the university. Mr. Hu would bring these with him, while others’ requests would be filled in Hong Kong before reaching China. Since the goods were for their son and daughter, my parents preferred to do their own shopping. As a child I used to accompany my mother to Petaling Street in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown to pick up what was needed. We went from shop to shop, rubbing the cotton to test its thickness, inspecting a blouse or a set of pillow cases for their stitching, searching on the cans of spam for their ‘Made In USA’ label. Some of the goods were actually Chinese imports, but the purchaser cared only for their quality and that she was not overspending. One of the most requested items was pork lard; this we prepared at home in the kitchen. A large chunk of pork fat was cut into pieces and fried in a large wok. The sizzling oil was hot and everyone stepped back for safety; only my mother stayed close. On cooling, the oil was ladled into a large kerosene can that had been steam cleaned, and sealed with molten tin. The proceedings held little interest for a child. But I sensed it meant a great deal to my parents; the personal labour and care had made

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this something special. The pork lard was for Eldest Sister and her family. Decades on, in Eldest Sister’s house, I bring up the issue. Pork lard for us is now pure cholesterol scare; in those terrible times, it was godsent for her family. It flavoured up a plate of fried sweet potato leaves, and added flavour and goodness to the meagre dishes from the commune kitchen. Somewhat dramatically, Eldest Sister holds my hand and says, ‘The lard you sent us helped us to survive, you know that?’ So much was garnered from a can of pork fat. Meanwhile, at the sitting room the piles of goods were being sorted, packed and labelled with addresses. The mounds of packages looked like merchandize for the night market, and we the vendors. Each was wrapped in old newspaper and tied with jute ropes. Placid and imperturbable, they were unaware of their mission. Over there on the coffee table, sitting snuggly were goods wrapped in fresh manila paper, their contents—ginseng, antelope horn powder, cod liver oil, vitamin tablets— too valuable to be crudely bundled up. These Mr. Hu was to post to Linfen for Eldest Brother. Next day when he arrived, there would be last consultations. Was it better to post the medicine from Hong Kong? Or should they trust the Chinese postal services? Mr. Hu knew the young man was a doctor, his parents’ favourite. He would post those items from the British colony—the parcel would be registered and insured to guarantee delivery. It came to me as a child that every aspect of love was imbedded in these mute packages. After my grandparents passed away, and my mother had arrived in Malaysia, my two elder siblings were left in China. In their wretched moments, my parents thought the two had been abandoned. It was mostly guilt, and the recognition that the son and daughter were adults who should be with their own families. My father had said, ‘It’s best for her to stay, after all she’s a married woman now. But the “boy” should come and help me with my shop.’ He was realistic about the daughter, and fierce love was reserved for the son. There is an element of male preference, but there are also the different characters: one a professional devoted to his work, the other cried victim to all manner of suffering. And, as if true to character, Eldest Brother never seemed to want anything. When asked, the reply was most commonly, ‘I can’t think of anything now, anyway the government is providing us with what we need.’ We knew it was a bit of a white lie and let it go. In contrast, Eldest Sister was constantly asking for things and money. Each of her

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letters ended with the request for goods that had to be sent straightaway: medicine for the family, ginseng for her and her husband, clothes and textiles, food. To her daughter my mother would write, ‘Have you forgotten you have brothers and sisters here who need looking after too?’ To her eldest son, she would feign annoyance, ‘Why do you never ask for anything? Have you forgotten your parents?’ Then she turned solicitous, ‘My son, I know you have asthma and you must keep warm. Have you bought the winter jacket you said you had an eye on?,’ she wrote, before reminding him of the $400 HK dollars that had been remitted to him a month ago.

Dr Huang the Anti-revolutionary Eldest Sister is my parents’ first child. Her letters to us had a sense of authority, urging us to study hard and not to cause troubles for our parents. She had married young, at eighteen. The groom chosen for her was a son of the wealthy Huang family in the nearby village, a graduate of medicine from Hong Kong University. Father came home to give away the bride, and sensing it might be the last time when such extravagance would be allowed, he gave a grand dinner to which practically everyone, landowners and tenant farmers, some party officials, were invited. It was the marriage of his firstborn, and Father had wanted to make a splash. The matchmaker had indeed done her best. The groom was handsome and personable, and one with a foreign education. When Eldest Sister returned home to visit, so people remember, her husband was with her. When they brought their baby to show the family and neighbours, Dr. Huang would set up a small table in the ancestral hall where villagers came to see him for all manner of illnesses—asthma, ‘rotten feet’ or skin ulcers from working long hours in the rice field, diabetes, tuberculosis. After diagnosis, from the Gladstone bag he would dispense whatever ointment and pills and injections he had to help the patients. Everyone thought him a good man, kind and giving his services for free. By all appearances, they were happy and Dr. Huang soon took up a post in the village clinic. The Great Leap Forward was at its turning point, as her letters sketched, page by page, the hardships in village life. She was lavish in describing the hardship; after listing what she needed, her letters would descend into the stuff of melodrama. ‘You have abandoned me,’ she wrote Father. ‘You have left me living in poverty, while my siblings in Nanyang enjoy a comfortable and secured life.’ After the first letter, the

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neglect and abandonment became a constant theme. She could not adapt to the work schedules of the production brigade; the dishes cooked in a giant wok in the commune kitchen were tasteless. Then one day came the news of her husband’s arrest. A team of cadres had come and taken him away because he complained of the political study classes that took away his staff from the clinic; it was a sure sign of his anti-revolutionary tendencies.

History and Bribe Dr. Huang was one of those tragic figures swept away by the revolution he could barely understand. Eldest Sister kept us informed of him, in and out of the correction centre. One day, Eldest Sister let slip the news. Someone from the correction centre had suggested that a gift could be delivered to the chief comrade in charge, she asked our father if she should go ahead and make the arrangement. Father approved; he may believe the daughter was ‘greedy,’ but he could hardly refuse to help. Besides, there was a certain satisfaction in the fact that Communists too could be bribed, like Nationalist officials before them. The plan was: Uncle A knew the husband of Auntie B, whose relative Comrade C was on the detention centre staff. Kinship would provide the conduit through which a substantial gift could be safely channelled. Eldest Sister sent the details, and money was sent. The scheme never went ahead. After the initial elation common sense returned. To bribe a party official would be a bridge too far. The matter was dropped. Many years on, Eldest Sister insists the scheme could have worked. Yes, even the communists loved money—if you knew how and to whom to give a bribe. I half believe her; still, I wonder. In a sense, what matters is a kind of self-obsession, and the overreading of a situation of periodic crisis. Like the villagers in Zhang Chun, she has a view of the past that could be squeezed into a few key events. The Land Reform happened; the details were remembered through some personal happenings: land redistribution was aligned with the serious illness of a child, the start of public trials of landlords and anti-revolutionaries coincided with the first water buffalo they could afford to buy; and so on. Situations changed, but events settled in the mind and served a chronicle of life’s occurrences. (‘Oh, yes, the collectivization. My boy just turned fifteen, he is over fifty now.’) History is what the party told you, but it is also, Proustian-like, a slew of intimate recollections of things. It is a mode of history shorn of a neat timeline,

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but personal and visceral. In the words of the anthropologist Michael Taussig when he writes, ‘[Against the fetishism of history], it is we, with our specific conventions, convictions, and curiosity, who provide that light (of intelligibility)—and thereby continue to puzzle about the connections between meaning … and power.’7 Of course, to say that people in the village are replacing history with personal memory is to suggest people’s return to the old relationships and habits that had somehow survived the revolution. Yes, government officials were corrupt, like the ones before them. On a more personal level, for those who had kin overseas, they would return to a time when kinship and personal loyalty mattered as a source of help. ‘If I couldn’t turn to my blood-relations, who could I turn to?’ With my sister, her fault of personal greed is nothing more than sticking to some remnant of the father-and-daughter bond diluted by the separation and the social upheaval brought about by the revolution. Thinking of my parents: as they looked at the homeland, they knew things had changed. Yet, they still believed some measure of the old ways had remained. It is a feeling nursed by a powerful longing for the homeland. How tortuous their relationship with their children—living in a different place, in a different political setting! It comes across as a valiant effort and considerable fantasy to think that their emotional connection with their children could somehow hold. Thus, the sending of gifts, the pleading solicitude seemed naïve, quixotic. Yet, they were not traditionalists, they did not hold on to the past unmoved. And you hold on to the image: as they move, history moves with them like so many pieces of luggage. It is a powerful feeling, this mobility of selves while some things are left unalterable. The dialectic is profound and touching: kin loyalty and fidelity to the ancestral land are the foundation of stability in a world of flux and of radical transformation. It is a world immigrants carry in their heads when they first step on a plane or board a ship.

Son Who Rejects Gifts Because of his long years away from home, first at the boarding school then at the university, Eldest Brother was something of a remote figure— unlike his elder sister. He did well in school and was picked to attend medical school in Dalian city in the country’s northeast. He was a brilliant scholar, but poor in health and suffered from asthma for much of his adult life. He was happy and optimistic as a student. A picture of him taken at

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the Dalian port shows him standing at the wharf, behind him the murky shades of ships (‘We had to get security clearance to take pictures.’) He dresses in a lime-olive Mao jacket, his face tilts slightly, his mouth halfopen as though ready to make a speech. In his letter, he wrote about the sense of hope and purpose he felt as he readied himself to serve the New China. From Dalian, the treaty port made modern and prosperous by German and later Japanese occupiers, he was sent to the mountain region of Shanxi. He arrived in Taiyuan city by train; from there it took him two days by truck to reach the village clinic. If he felt like an exile, he didn’t tell us, neither did he talk about the lack of food and daily necessities in the village. And the young doctor—he was later to join the Communist Party—filled his correspondence with stark descriptions of the illnesses he encountered: diabetes, tuberculosis, black lung disease among the miners, malnutrition. Later he was made the head of the clinic for communicable diseases in Linfen People’s Hospital in a city south of the provincial capital Taiyuan. When conditions improved, so did the tone of his letters. We noted the enthusiasm, the eagerness to get on with the job of looking after the patients; and he was fired up when he led his medical team to the hills to collect Chinese herbs to supplement the pharmaceuticals. What he wrote from Linfen was, much of the time, formal, matterof-fact. Nonetheless, messages came through. They were in the coded phrases, hao shenghuo, ‘a better life,’ xin shehui, ‘new society,’ that masked his feelings for the government. Occasionally, the phrase zhege niantou, ‘these troubling times,’ would drop a hint that another political movement was taking place in Linfen. After the news, he would give over to the homely language of filial regret—for failing as a good son, for not being at home to look after his parents. And I detected a meek attempt to reconcile with his Chinese-physician father, when he wrote about how he and his colleagues were trying out herbal medicine and acupuncture together with pharmaceuticals on some of their patients. For his siblings, the message was: study hard and be good, don’t cause problems for our parents. Thinking of First Brother, I would forever associate him with the letters in faded blue ink on the thin brown paper from the village stationer. His life was scattered, episode by episode, over the smudged, wrinkled pages. Reading again from the canon, Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, William Hinton’s Fanshen, I can feel the chaos, the terror in the majestic righting of wrongs by the Communist Revolution. These things Eldest

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Brother never wrote about. The family had lost a great deal in the revolution, and for a while it looked like Mother was to be denied an exit visa to join her husband. These matters cast a shadow over the exchange between father and son. Eventually, a kind of protocol emerged: Eldest Brother was not to write about the good work of the Chinese government, and Father would turn down the heat in speaking about the Communists. And as though it were a concession, the young doctor who never asked for things changed his habit by sending a shopping list: a fountain pen, pairs of socks, shoes with thick rubber soles, a woollen neck-scarf, useful things. Emboldened by the change of heart, the family drew up a list of things to send him. Carefully avoiding the luxuries, it included: streptomycin for his tuberculosis patients, cod liver oil for children in the clinic, vitamin pills, May & Baker morphine-based cough syrup, dozens of needles and syringes and a set of stethoscopes. We also got the shuike to buy a British-made Raleigh bicycle during his stopover in Hong Kong— to replace the government-issued bike Eldest Brother had been riding to make his rounds among the patients’ homes. My parents were happy, and his reputation as the son who didn’t want anything was diminished.

Reunion In August 1994, the family brought First Brother and his wife and daughter to Singapore for a reunion—the Malaysian authorities had refused to grant them visas, movement between China and Singapore was freer. They stayed for a month in an apartment rented for them at the busy Orchard Road, and we went over to see them whenever we could. For the first time in many years Mother could not voice her usual lament, ‘The Heavens have no eyes. I have four sons, but only one is with me.’ Her demand for love was met. The visitors made the most of their days and went shopping and sightseeing. At the Cold Storage Supermarket, First Sister-in-Law was dazzled by the exotic fruit and cheese and tried every titbit on toothpicks offered up by the promotion lady. In the kitchen, First Sister-in-Law turned out sour and spicy Shanxi dishes and savoury pancakes, garnished with shallots and sour pickles. In the evenings we would move the table to the balcony and dine by the evening light. The reunion after nearly four decades had opened up all kinds of feelings, some pleasant, some less so. At dinner, however, it was all pleasant table ritual and dexterity of chopsticks that saved me from the emotional muddle thumping inside my chest like fits of anger.

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After dinner First Brother would light up one of his Double Happiness cigarettes. Why do I smoke so much? Because people give me cigarettes as presents, cartons of them. And he was a doctor. Drinking and smoking and talking, we stretched out the hours. We were marked by the happiness of being together, as embodiments of luck and survival. The struggle sessions that caused Mother’s lasting depression: they were like the bad dreams of yesteryear and could not breach the golden conviviality of the present. First Brother and I spent a lot of time together. Walking on Orchard Road, under the giant angsana trees, I was tired of effusiveness. And I wanted to know, to fill in the gaps in the letters. Sitting in a roadside café, he looked aged. My family was swept away by the great flood of revolution. My parents were devastated, and Mother had escaped by the skin of her teeth. He alone had hung on to the driftwood of his beliefs and survived. Zhege niantou, these troubling times, I remember the phrase from his letters. But what were they really like? ‘You know those books I sent,’ I began by asking him. ‘I remember it was during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Didn’t I get into trouble for sending them?’ ‘I had a bit of influence in the town,’ he replied. ‘A patient of mine worked in the post office, so there was no problem.’ ‘That was in the early months. I was then the chairman of the Overseas Chinese Association. Later on, everyone was stirred up by the Red Guards, that’s when things got difficult. To post something in those days to a foreign address would have got me into trouble.’ The gate was opened, and it all came back to me. ‘For months we didn’t receive any letters from you, and Mother would say, “There is trouble at home, I am sure of it. I hope your brother is all right.”’ ‘In the hospital we spent a lot of time in study sessions. It was a difficult time for everyone.’ ‘Mother worried a lot about you. You are her eldest son. She used to complain, “He never asks for anything when he writes. What’s wrong with him?” She wondered why you didn’t want anything from us.’ ‘Is that so?’ ‘In those days, she thought you had forgotten her, you had forgotten the family.’ We were talking, and I was stuck by the absurdity of it all. Here we were meeting up after decades of separation, and everything of the past

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is remote and banal, even the revolution. The days of mass deprivation are long gone, yet the things asked for and sent somehow retain their sting. Eldest Sister had said, ‘You know the lard you sent us? It saved our lives.’ And then there were those who brought up the pair of rubber boots, or the measure of tough cotton, or the cough syrup and vitamin pills that were like blessings from heaven. In a way, the grateful recipients were at one with anthropology on the subject of gifts. In the formulation of Marcel Maus, gift exchange creates obligations.8 Gifts are allied with sentiment—and with some measure of the donor’s selfhood. Gifts build relationships, and articulate and calm the competitive violence between people. My parents understood the gifts they sent in similar terms; gifts connected them with their kin, and just as likely fractured the social relationships. My sister turned ‘greedy,’ and strangers came begging and pleading; the revolution is to be blamed. Eldest Brother paused and chewed over what I had said. Once every couple of months, he said when he had found the words, he and his colleagues would drive to Taiyuan, the provincial capital, and pick up what they needed from the government depot. There were shortages, but they made do with what was given to them. Everyone was being frugal. ‘I didn’t think of asking you—it’s so far away,’ he said. ‘It was tough; the poverty and diseases, you couldn’t imagine. Everyone experienced shortages and we in the clinic were no exception.’ Then he said, ‘I was glad for the stuff you sent me. They were useful, but I was happier for getting the news from the family, for keeping in touch with you all.’ It was all so matter-of-fact. He made no claims of virtue or revolutionary fervour. There was scarcity and there were political study sessions that took the hospital staff away from their work, and he and his colleagues looked after the patients the best they could. Against ‘the troubling times,’ the matter of goods was paltry, and trivial. He was still making little of the matter of the gifts, but I wouldn’t let it go. ‘There was one large parcel that came with the bicycle. Surely you remember? We all helped after school—to pick the goods from the store, to help with the wrapping and putting the address on the pack. I went to father’s friend Mr. Ally and bought from him the needles and syringes, and the stethoscope; we didn’t keep them in our shop.’

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‘Yes, of course, I remember the bicycle and I rode it for a while before we were issued a car. I gave the rest to the clinic to use among the patients. The stethoscope—it was better quality than what we had.’ What he said about the bicycle and other gifts woke me to their significance. That he had remembered seems to suggest something. I try to visualize the scene as he ran his fingers over the painted mudguard, as he felt the sturdiness of the steel crossbar that would hold up the structure with a rider on it, while his friends stood by and shared his pride. That, the US-made stethoscope, the morphine-based May & Barker cough syrup: they held no commodity fetishism for the doctor, only their usefulness and his good grace in receiving a set of presents he was reluctant to accept. Once again, you blame it on the revolution. How foolish that things of everyday use had brought about so much fuss among kin. Brutal measures had made worse people’s existences, and turned askew the normal rules of social conduct. Lives were improved, while the customary values and habits were put to a different assessment. Against these, the desire for the old preferences did not stand much of a chance. In 2011, when the news of First Brother’s death reached me, I felt curiously calm and at peace. I suppose I, we, had been preparing for this. Knowing the approaching storm, I had boarded up the windows and secured the roof. The meeting in Singapore was like a premonition, and we had tied up the loose ends and said the things we wanted to say. The things we had sent were invested with meaning, with a kind of hunger that could not be easily satisfied. For both donor and recipient, the feeling and desire were unsettled. My parents had carried these feelings and desires to their graves. With the eldest son gone, death turned a big chunk of unresolved sentiment into a kind of peace. Their undertaking to send goods home had been to keep taut the connection with the homeland, it looks now overbearing and a dash quixotic. But that too is the working of history that charts the alternations of things. So you pick up your steps to visit the past, and what you have done. So powerful is the yearning that you are stalled in the foreign place where innocence and your parents’ love and care still reside.

Notes 1. Franz Kafka, “The Imperial Messager.” In The Complete Stories. New York: Schocken, 1995, p. 24. 2. Ibid.

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Marcel Mauss, The Gift. London: Routledge, 2002. Taussig, Michael, “Maleficium: State Fetishism.” In Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, edited by F. S. Apter and W. Pietz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993, p. 221. 8. Marcel Mauss, The Gift.

Bibliography Kafka, Franz. 1995. “The Imperial Messager.” In The Complete Stories. New York: Schocken. Mauss, Marcel. 2002. The Gift. New York: Routledge. Taussig, Michael. 1993. “Maleficium: State Fetishism.” In Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, edited by F. S. Apter and W. Pietz, 217–47. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER 6

My Sister’s Grave

The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessity. —Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (2004)

When I arrived, Eldest Sister had wanted to give me a dinner in a restaurant ‘to dust off the weariness’ of a traveller. It took some doing to get her to change her mind. For it is customary to entertain in one of the Hong Kong-style restaurants in Chayang, but the culinary experience is not much to boast about. Instead, I convinced her to have a local version of the potluck party. You get together with a few friends and neighbours and make the traditional dish, suan pan, the translucent yam dumplings stuffed with bamboo shoots, dried tofu and fried pork. I much prefer that than going to a restaurant, I told her. She readily agreed. A few WeChat messages were sent out, and there they were, a group of frisky village women gathered in Eldest Sister’s kitchen to prepare the famous Hakka fare. Skilful hands work with rolling pins, kneading the yam-flour dough into pastry wedges; others spoon out a dollop of the rich filling onto the pastry and fold each wedge into a boat-like shape. In the wok, steaming transforms the pastry into perfection, each holding the shape, and the skin is thin and light, showing the goodness inside. The first batch is offered to the returnee from Malaysia. ‘Look how happy you sister is! For months she has been telling us her brother is coming,’ the boisterous Mrs. Lin © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 S. Yao, Gifts to the Sad Country, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1598-5_6

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says. She gives me no time to respond, as she rejoins her friends in the cycle of making and steaming and brief pauses to savour the fruits of their labour. Deep in their enjoyment, they talk about the relative virtues of home cooking and restaurant food. Restaurant food is greasy, they say. It is salty and spiced up with flavouring, and people should eat less meat and more vegetables. Someone mentions organic food, and I venture that the beans and broccoli and spring onions they grow at their backyard are organic anyway. To be healthy, just follow the simple rule, they say. At their age, people should eat what’s good for them, and eat less. Filling the stomach completely full was once the aim, almost the sole purpose of existence; now it is neither healthy nor a luxury. I look up from my plate. Through the back door, the light glosses the leaves and branches of a tall persimmon tree hanging with fruits. It is October, late autumn in southeast China. Beyond the dwarf fencing, I catch the sweep of the rice field, the stalks bending with the breeze, the ears browning before your eyes. Basking in the morning light, the fertile persimmon tree, the ripening rice stalks emit a sense of hope and abundance. The women are sitting becalmed, satiated with food and the pleasure of their own company. As I listen to the bantering, as I watch their aged, rough hands holding on to their plates, they do not appear as people who are held prisoner by the past. Yet, I know they feel insecure, vulnerable. A woman has been telling us she is urging her grandson to get a better job—the present sales position does not earn enough to meet the cost of living; someone has revealed that she is urging her granddaughter to get married soon—she is twenty-seven, an old maid. The women are sensitive to the ‘bigger picture’ of present-day China. For them—they follow the gossip on WeChat—China all but belongs to the mega-wealthy like the start-up mogul Jack Ma, or Xu Jiayin, the founder of the Evergrande Group, the largest construction company in China faced with overbuilding and the credit crunch.1 The wealthy have their problems, and ordinary people have theirs. Deng Xiaoping had made the country peaceful and prosperous, but grim vicissitude still haunts the society. When they think about it, who’s to say the past suffering and sacrifices may not come back again? The welcoming lunch is a happy moment, and no one thinks of these things. Yet, I know in her deflating moments, Eldest Sister thinks about the past a lot. A terror descends, the cruelties of the government measures are eating into her skull.

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The Lament Knowing the history fatigue, I am prepared for the brush off when we sit down to talk. ‘These things happened so long ago, why bring them up now?’ Eldest Sister says. It’s after dinner, which puts us in a mellow mood. I mention ‘those terrible years’ which makes her launch into the lament. You have to remember Mother had left, and everything was left to me. I had moved back to Chayang town, into one of Grandfather’s shophouses. Eldest Brother was in Linfen at the time. He wrote that he could not take care of the family estate and wanted me to take over. … The government had us return to Zhang Chun and made us members of the commune. … Can you imagine what it was like? We lived in a couple of rooms while the rest of the house was taken up by the villagers. Each day I joined the work team in the field, and got home at six or later; we ate in the commune kitchen, my husband and I and our two children. How did we get used to it? I’ll tell you we just did, there was no escape. … Your brother-in-law died a couple of years after that, poor man, and I was alone.

She speaks bitterly, and she is inveighing against her abandonment by us overseas. But I have heard this before, it had been the theme in her letters: that our parents had left her in the village, while her siblings lived in comfort in Malaysia. Hearing it again, I want to say, ‘Many suffered during those years, you were not the only one.’ But then she is the one in the know, and I am a modest scriber from academia. So I ask meekly, ‘Tell me what happened in the commune.’ During the Great Leap Forward, she begins to tell me, she didn’t witness any executions. There were correction centres and interrogations, but the real suffering was the near starvation and the shortage of many things. The families were organized into cooperatives, and she joined other families to form a single co-op; it wasn’t too bad, you used your own tools and you gave up your land, but you kept the land title. Later, the cooperatives were consolidated into communes. The communes were small, because there were few of us—ours had about fifteen families. We made all the decisions about planting and harvesting, childcare and, later on, building a backyard furnace for producing pig iron. But the party cadres were looking over us to make sure everyone stuck to the plan, the working hours.

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What she tells is heart-wrenching, echoing what I’ve read from the books and articles. Disappointed, I want her to get to the personal, to the side-stepping of orders, perhaps a bit of sabotage or ‘micro-resistance’ of the daily routine. But she is sticking to her narrative of misery. They built a large oven in the front courtyard outside the ancestral hall. This is where we used to lay out the rice to dry after a harvest; it was turned into an eating place. We had a simple breakfast and took our lunch to the field. At dinner, the families ate together. Rice was steamed in a large pot, and vegetables were fried in a giant wok. We went up with a tray, and collected our share of the dishes and went back to our table. The rice was claggy like heavy congee, the dishes were tasteless. Why? Because it’s army-style cooking, everything into a big wok. There was never enough to go around, and meat or fish were served once every three or four days. It was a poor reward for a ten-hour working day, starting at five in the morning.

I let her speak. As if following a script, she follows up with the backyard iron foundry. Yes, we built a foundry. A cart went around the neighbourhood collecting anything made of iron: you know, door latches, window bars, old iron woks. But people had no experience, no one had done this before. The kiln was a failure. It collapsed with the heat, and the half-molten iron ran off in a mess. The co-op people soon gave it up. They argued about the right temperature, the technology, and they realized a kiln made of heavy clay would not hold up.

From long working hours to bad food to the iron foundry, the litany of catastrophes culminated in the rationing. The co-op shop was always empty. There were few things to buy—cloth, some pairs of shoes, stationery. Everything was rationed; I saved up my coupons to make a blouse, or a couple of pillow cases. ‘You have relatives overseas, you are lucky,’ people said. I remembered not to show off, I kept my good fortune to yourself. Do you remember the pork lard you sent us? It saved us. My nephews—poor boys—would have died [without it].

For a moment, she is at one with the historians whose books on Communist China fill the shelves of bookshops. It is easy to be impatient with an elderly woman steeped in her sorry past; her suffering is the only story

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worth telling. Yes, I remember the pork lard, I say. We had seen our mother preparing it in the kitchen, alarmed by the boiling oil in the wok. But she is deep in her thoughts, her memory of those years is dark and visceral. The collectivization was a social and political measure, and she experienced it personally, in her private self. Who could blame her for being so possessed—when her telling is a demand for justice, when her suffering makes a claim on history itself?

A Match Made in Heaven Eldest Sister married the son of a landlord family from Da Hu Village across the river. My parents had employed a matchmaker who found a suitable groom, a medical doctor who had graduated from the University of Hong Kong. The older village folk remember the wedding: Eldest Sister in her bridal gown stepping into the palanquin; her tearful wailing, an emotional and ritual lament for a bride for leaving her natal place; the train of servants and well-wishers bearing gifts; the gong players. The villagers watched keenly, as though they were marrying one of their daughters. After the wedding the couple often came to visit. On such journeys, while Eldest Sister would cling to her mother and grandmother, Dr. Huang would set up a small table in the ancestral hall to receive his patients. There were many who required his care: children’s coughs, cuts and lacerations, the asthma of the elderly, ulcers of the feet from working long hours in the rice field. From his Gladstone bag he would dispense aspirin for pain relief, iodine for the cuts and wounds, and, when he had them, medications for asthma and high blood pressure. Eldest Sister describes with pride her husband’s work among the villagers. Her eyes glisten, then sadness comes over her—for the villagers’ ingratitude, for her husband’s miserable end. When revolution came, the doctor’s services were seen as charity from the rich and were taken over by the village clinic. For a while he worked at the clinic, but he was ‘restless,’ he could not adapt to the conditions. He resisted the order to release staff to attend lectures, and he himself was criticized for showing insufficient zeal in political discussions. Later he was sent to the correction centre, where writing self-criticism was the main rehabilitative regime. Again, he was told he lacked revolutionary spirit, and his confessions were patchy. The confessions should go back at least to those years when he studied in the foreign place, which was the root of his false ideological position. As I listened to her, I remembered what she wrote in one of her letters. ‘My

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husband has once again been taken to the correction centre. He needs special food, could you send us some money?’ Or, ‘I went to visit Lao Huang a couple of days ago. He looks gaunt, he says he can’t sleep…’ On reading one such letter, Father had said, ‘Why can’t that Huang fellow be more flexible? He’s an educated man, he should know how to sail with the wind, not against it.’ Many years on I think of Dr. Huang as—like many people of his background—a casualty of the new political regime. His class status was tainted by his landlord background, made worse by a foreign education. Devoted to his skill, he could not cope with the many directives that stood in the way of his practice. To an extent, Father was right. When professionalism was guided by social and political considerations, a doctor of the old school should be prudent and show ‘flexibility.’ Listening to Eldest Sister, I am sympathetic for the doctor. However, another side of me would conjecture: If he could not adapt and serve the clinic, surely there were other things he could do? He could train nurses; he could join the barefoot doctors and offer his services in the remote regions? Why be stuck to the staid bourgeoise attitudes? How easy it is to slip into clichés! These are terms—serve the people, barefoot doctors—that have long since morphed into platitudes. They once dazzled me with their ideological fire during my student days. Now, they are as tired as yesterday’s headlines.

The Incarceration The authorities had turned an old peasants’ house into a correction centre—there were not enough reactionaries and gangster elements to justify a prison. Eldest Sister never knew when she could visit her husband, it depended on the revelation of his confessions, the details of his written statements, his having the right attitude in taking part in the cleaning and sweeping of the centre. Mostly, though, it was showing the revolutionary spirit that truly mattered. However, revolutionary spirit is not something you can easily show, not something made visible by a person’s daily conduct. The fact is the officials didn’t care much about external manifestations; the whole exercise, from self-criticism to physical labour, was to dig deep into the mind, into its recesses—in order to expose an inmate’s true intentions and personality. The process involved a lot of judgment by the political officer in charge. True, revolutionary spirit had to be shown, and confessions had to be sincere, just as self-criticism must

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come from the heart. However, the revolutionary spirit had to come out of the inmate themselves; it had to be their own realization, not put on by aping what the interrogator told and expected of them. The method was a kind of Zen puzzlement: an endless repetition of nonsense and incongruity. The questions had no true answer; rehabilitation was not the showing of repentance but instead meant to take on, at the level of instinct and almost the unconsciousness, the aim and legitimacy of the revolution. Eldest Sister’s voice breaks my train of thought: Each time I went to see him, he looked tired, confused. He wanted to cooperate, and he wrote the confessions as he was told, but they were never satisfied. They told him he was not anyone special, but a health worker who served the people. Poor man, he tried so hard. He told me he even emptied nightsoil buckets. When we met, he would say the tired old things an old married couple said to each other, how he missed me, how he missed the children. ‘I am coping well, don’t make yourself sick from worrying,’ he said. I wanted him to keep warm, and I told him that I would bring him another piece of blanket, and the quilted cotton jacket he left behind. I remember him in those visits: his drawn face, his eyelids drooping as though falling asleep, his head dipping when he spoke. He was growing older. As we tried to reach our hands across the table, the guard eyed us: ‘No!’ He was taken away, and I started to walk out of the centre. Everything was designed to break my heart. My husband was back there, in the derelict house with fencing all around it, and I took my steps to find my way home.

His last incarceration was relatively short. The correction centre sent him home after a little less than three months. He died of coronary thrombosis and malnutrition. The family received a plot in the far hills from the village council. They had a simple ceremony at home, just Eldest Sister, their children, a few in-laws; there was no traditional ritual to send him on his journey to the underworld. That too was political vengeance, Eldest Sister says, in denying a man an afterlife.

Imprisonment and Terror Dr. Huang never thought himself guilty. He would say to Eldest Sister after a spell of detention, ‘What did I do wrong? All I did was do my job, to serve the patients like I have always done.’ On the other hand, if he could be faulted, it was for his self-deception. He had a temperament

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nurtured by a comfortable upbringing, which allowed him to make light of the turbulence that was happening around him. It was a time when political realism had more purchase than professionalism. He was proud of his family and his education, but these were precisely his crimes, the source of his wrongdoing. In a sense, he was a person out of synch with his time, when all he held dear had lost its meaning. ‘Nothing is worse in prison than the consciousness of one’s innocence; it prevents acclimatization and undermines one’s morale…’ writes Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon.2 In a prison a person is put through a cycle of ‘threats and promises,’ ‘imaginary terrors and imaginary consolations.’3 On the arrest and imprisonment of the character Rubashov, Koestler describes a series of mismatches that mirrors Dr. Huang’s interrogations. The Party denied the free will of the individual—and at the same time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to choose between two alternatives—and at the same time it demanded that he should constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguish good and evil—and at the same time spoke pathetically of guilt and treachery. The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, a wheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and could not be stopped or influenced—and the Party demanded that the wheel should revolt against the clockwork and change its course. There was somewhere an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out.4

The communist approach to ‘political rehabilitation,’ Koestler submits, is not a straightforward quelling of a prisoner’s will. More insidiously, it is to force on them a contradiction, an impossible choice. The prisoner must follow a single course, one dictated by the Party, and they must do so with a genuine change of conviction. A visible conversion to the revolution is vital, and the only way for a prisoner to earn their freedom. With the crushing of his free volition, Rubashov cries out to his interrogator, I bow my knees before the country, before the masses, before the whole people... And what then? What happened to these masses, to this people? For forty years it had been driven through the desert, with threats and promises, with imaginary terrors and imaginary rewards. But where was the Promised Land? Did there really exist any such goal for this wandering mankind?5

And Koestler comments,

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That was a question to which he would have liked an answer before it was too late. Moses had not been allowed to enter the land of promise either. But he had been allowed to see it, from the top of the mountain, spread at his feet. Thus, it was easy to die, with the visible certainty of one’s goal before one’s eyes. He, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, had not been taken to the top of a mountain; and wherever his eye looked, he saw nothing but desert and the darkness of night.6

Darkness at Noon fixes its gaze on the technique, the physical and psychological processes of interrogation. Every element in the process implies a double; both truth and lies are deep in the game. If self-sacrifice and self-deception are quintessential revolutionary gestures, they also lead to futility and broken promises. As for the ‘genuine confession,’ it reeks of moral perversity, as it imposes on the prisoner real and imaginary threats, true promises and false rewards—a method from which the interrogations of Dr. Huang had taken a page. As I write, I can hear Eldest Sister’s bleating voice, ‘He had done everything they wanted, but they were never satisfied.’ What was expected of the doctor was submission, submission to an impossible position. He needed to reject the grand artifice of his life: his professionalism, his understanding of what was true and valid, his sense of authenticity, as Sartre might say. The trouble was: the rehabilitation could not be an outward performance but a genuine revelation of the true self. He thought the confession could be a kind of white lie; all he needed to do was to say what the interrogator wanted to hear. He was fatally wrong. But then what are genuine, unshaken convictions, convincing and instantly recognizable? Rubashov of Darkness at Noon deployed his cunning and philosophic guile that enabled him to see through the interrogator’s game. You might say that the doctor needed too large a measure of the same. At his darkest hour, you wish he too would understand that the extraction of confession was to cut a slice from the revolutionary scheme of things. Both are propped up by deceit to create anew the old social subjects. What’s the point of the Zen-like questioning except to compel the acknowledgement that nothing less than a total surrender to the party would do? The understanding was to be an awakening, a sudden illumination. Each prisoner had to arrive at a position by their own free will, not by the interrogator’s threats and deception. The New Person under socialism is ideologically driven, and politically compliant.

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The doctor was just one of those who could not become what history had in mind for them.

My Sister’s Grave It says something about contemporary China that ancestral worship has returned with a vengeance. In Zhang Chun village, the great hall that used to commemorate the Yao clan’s forefathers has been spruced up, and during the Qingming festival villagers take to the hills to visit their kins’ graves, bringing food and incense and candles to renew the connections. I got Eldest Sister to organize a small party to attend the burial ground of Grandfather and his wives, as I promised Mother I would. Three mounds of yellow earth crowned by weeds, a knot of low bushes flanking the tombs, the aged cement façade and defaced inlaid photographs of the dead complete the bland melancholy. The work of the Red Guards? The acts of unforgiving peasants? The grave needs tidying—weeding, some masonry work, cutting the tangle of shrubs. As the workers go about their business, you turn your eyes to the far distance: below the dip of the valley, a tiny silhouette figure stands against a background of emerald green. You tag him as the Chinese cultural type, patient and addicted to the virtue of waiting and endurance. The family fancies itself lucky for having survived the revolution and the separation. Here at our grandparents’ grave, we are touched by the transcendental world that has the power to defy death and oblivion. The clearing is done. We pick ourselves up and lay out the tea and wine and boiled rice cakes, then kneel and bow before the ancestral dead; and on rising, put the ritual money and paper mâché silver nuggets to flame for our forebearers to spend in the underworld. Eldest Sister announces in a soft murmur, ‘Your grandson from Nanyang has come back to pay his respects.’ Back in the car, I am swept away by a kind of frenzy. The gloominess is gone, and the affirmation of kin connections across time and places gives rise to a feeling of near intoxication. I want to hold on to the sensation, like a child holding on to its mother’s embrace. Is this a feeling shared by all diaspora when they have returned? Was this what Mother had in mind when she gave me the mission? A few weeks later, we made a similar expedition. The burial ground is nearer to the village, and seemingly happier.

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Together in Death The grave site my sister has chosen for herself sits on a low hill. From where I am, my eyes take in the auspicious view: the valley below opens up, and urges the lush vegetation to form the rear of the grave. A soft breeze comes, pressing lightly on my face. The description comes easily. It is recognizably a site of good feng shui, girdled by the tiger’s seat and dragon’s breath that join by a slant of green bushes at the back. A perfect burial site. Chayang town is a fair distance from the coast, and, like the nearby counties and villages, it has missed out on the prosperity of the industrial boom. No developers have come to buy up land to build factories and industrial plants. On the other hand, if prosperity has passed them by, the people gain in another aspect; they can die well and be buried on sites of perfect feng shui. When Dr. Huang passed away, he was buried without fanfare. Being of the wrong class status, he was given a spot in the deep hills. There were a few graves scattered over the cemetery. But they were not much as company: executed landlords and Nationalist government officials, and nameless beggars and vagrants. During the reform in the eighties, Eldest Sister got permission to move her husband to a site closer to the village. The reburial was done according to the old customs. Eldest Sister has shown me the pictures: the bones were cleaned and polished, wrapped in red cloth and placed in an earthen urn, then, escorted by a small party of gong players and family members, made their way to the new resting ground. Befitting of its congenial spirit, the local government had also offered a plot for the wife. She thought ahead and applied for a grave site next to the doctor’s. The thinking was: since burial land was still free, if she made a claim she could have enough room for herself when the time came. You never knew when burial sites would become too expensive for ordinary folk like her, as is already happening in the nearby counties. The idea caught on. Sensing that such an offer would not last, the sons acquired two adjacent lots to their parents. On the way here, I have listened, unfazed by the sense of the macabre. Besides the practicality of it, there is also, so it appears, the officialdom trying to make amends for their past wrongdoings. In any case, here I am, looking intently at the four graves: sitting companionably next to each other, one filled, the rest standing by to receive their occupants.

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A small altar, crammed with statues of Guan Yin the goddess of mercy, the earth god, some minor deities, has been installed in a small shed next to the doctor’s tomb. The family huddles on the steps to take a break and to soak in the gods’ blessing. They had endured so much, and here is a glimpse of reversed fortune. Eldest Sister wants to put things on their former footing, and to restore what had been disrupted by the revolution. She is asking a lot; what she wishes for is nothing less than stalling the march of history. Nonetheless, something like what she is doing is going on in rural China. In her study of Wenzhou in China’s southeast, the anthropologist Mayfair Yang shows that people have responded to the post-Mao reforms by giving traditional religion a façade of modernity. Religious worship has not so much returned as it has taken on a baroque blend of old practices and new innovations. Ancestor offerings, divination, and feng shui claim a place in people’s lives, so too do New Age Buddhism and charismatic Christianity.7 It too is cultural innovation, when a widow in post-Deng China has sought to be buried next to her husband, the sons next to their parents. As she enjoys the comfort and the prosperity of the new era, she needs to make up for the years she had wasted while her husband was languishing at the detention centre. The Chinese believe that the transcendental world is a mirror reflection of the secular realm; the yin and the yang exist in paralleled universes. Think about the quaint mortuary ritual. The fake money and paper mâché cars and TV sets are burned as offerings to the dead; transformed, they regain their status as things to be spent and used in the alternate world. The whole rigmarole traverses the two spheres of human concern, the living and the dead. The dead are not reincarnated, so much as being tied to the living in a new configuration. Eldest Sister, born in the forties, is a modern woman. Nonetheless, tradition and customs ensure the dead live on, each spirit lodged among the living. In the Chinese way of thinking, mortality creates a special kind of solitude, one that’s social in nature. Hannah Arendt writes, ‘In solitude … I am “by myself,” together with myself, and therefore two-in-one…,’ except for the Chinese, the two-inone configuration covers the secular and the spiritual worlds, and the final union of the loved ones in the underworld.8

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Good Mao and Revolution Back at my hotel room in Chayang, I sleep badly. I get up and play with the TV remote. The erhu master in a variety show plays the song of lament at the withering of camellias in the South of the Yangtze. The sea in the Taiwan Strait is expected to be choppy. Then the TV epic, The Eight Route Army is on. Tonight’s episode offers few sweltering battle scenes; it is devoted to showing the human side of the Chairman. Mao Zedong is in his cave-office in Yan’an, going through the maps and papers laid out on the table; his orderly comes in, bringing messages and steaming bowls of hot water. ‘Chairman, Morning! Have a drink; kills the cold.’ ‘Ah, Little Chang! How is the wound? Are you getting better?’ Mao’s manner is warm, casual and unmilitary. ‘It is almost healed now, see,’ he said, reaching down to pat at his bandage-covered leg. ‘Very soon, I’ll be able to carry a machine gun and walk as fast you!’ Little Chang has asked for the day off to visit his father in the village nearby; it is the old man’s birthday and he hasn’t seen him for months. But Mao is not going to let Little Chang go alone. The Chairman is to come along to wish his father a long life. In the mud cave they spread themselves on the kang bed, and Little Chang’s father is trembling with awe. The Chairman has come to his home to drink a bowl of ‘watery wine’ with him! If this wasn’t a time of revolution, it would be like the Emperor descending from the Heavenly Heights to grace his humble home. ‘How can it be! The Chairman coming to my home, to celebrate this Old Bone’s birthday! I don’t deserve it! I don’t deserve it!’ ‘I am only the Chairman, you are the common folk, the backbone of the revolution. Old Chang, we all rely on you, the peasants. Without the peasants the Eighth Route Army is but dust in the wind. It should be this way! Comrade Zhu De and Comrade Peng Dehui can’t be here; but I’ll drink to your long life. Come! Come!’ The atmosphere is snug, cosy. Amid so much bowing and scraping, they tussle over their mutual admiration; the Mighty and the Humble seal their common bond over bowls of home-brewed gaoliang sorghum wine. Mao Zedong is brought to life by the actor Gu Yue who has made his career playing the Chairman. It is a handsome, young-looking Mao. He

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was 42 when he reached Yan’an at the end of the Long March; his hair glisteningly dark, though the trademark receding hairline was starting to show. When he speaks his face breaks into an easy smile. In Old Chang’s home, he is all heartiness and charm; there is little trace of the obstinacy and solitariness of his habits. He is in his element, talking and drinking with a peasant like Old Chang. This Mao, caring and at one with the rural folks, works on you; and you feel you are open to every aspect of him, to every element of China’s revolution he embodies. It is the version of him that most Chinese people want to remember. Still, in the scene he comes across as just a little too oily, a little too self-seeking. His affability and merriment are like a politician’s baby-kissing to garner votes in an election. You do not forget, however, that it was the same revolutionary patina that had sent tens of thousands of young Red Guards to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, causing havoc wherever they went. Chairman Mao the bringer of revolution was also the instigator of political bedlam and violence, and a murderer of millions. The real face of Maoism and revolutionary China is best viewed with eyes half-closed. Ethnography has brought me back to the land of my ancestors, and I am filled with self-consciousness. I dread Eldest Sister’s effusive sentimentality—because it invariably calls up a time when the family suffered the most. The revolution was bloody, and we were on the wrong side of history. What she has described belongs to the narrative of suffering dominated by texts as varied as June Chang’s Wild Swan and Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine.9 The question confronts me: how do you avoid the dopey polemics and unrestrained emotions when dealing, unflinchingly, with the history of persecutions and revolutionary violence? In the austere room at the Red Sky Hotel, a certain realization comes to me. What is important is not the retelling of a family legacy, but, beyond the social tribulations and personal suffering, how to reconcile this legacy with a brutal history of which your family had played a part. Before you could begin, history would pose the issue. To you and the author of Wild Swan, it would say, ‘You and your family had suffered, but millions of others had suffered too—with greater forbearance, and a greater sense of historical necessity if not clemency for the perpetrators.’ In Zhang Chun village, suffering was shared by the victors and the vanquished. In the play of fanshen, the peasants would send the landlords and other oppressors on the road to perdition. However, the rural reforms of the fifties and sixties were so unsparing as to affect everyone—in the

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Great Leap Forward, even party cadres could not escape rationing and the restrictive fare offered up by the communal kitchen. The massive wrongdoing of the old political order had helped the rise of the CCP. Your family was not alone in having their lives turned upside by the upheaval. Thinking of the neighbours and those in the village council who had written us to beg for help: it lends truth to the fact that, in the long run, in the vicissitude of human existence, everyone is subject to the rule of contingency. I try this reasoning of universal suffering on my sister, she nods her head and says nothing. Perhaps a slant of light has entered her thinking; perhaps she too has begun to think, as I have, that the family was not the aristocracy of suffering, but hapless participants in a tumultuous political transformation.

Revolution and Its Reprieve The Communist Revolution did not only produce violence and the vengeful masses. Mao’s stroke of genius had been to sell the revolution as the solution to the historical problems that dogged the peasants—poverty, disparity of class, skewed land ownership, the feudal social relationship. Geming, changing life or changing fate, was a triumph of promise. It promised the peasants a better life, and it reminded them what was at stake: justice and abundance had to be paid for, and what heart-rending costs they turned out to be. Radical and thorough, anything that stood in way of geming —reactionaries, old habits, traditional thinking—had to be eradicated. It was Mao who rewrote the rule of communist revolution by passing the rallying flag to the peasants, rather than the urban working class. China’s problems called for a revision of the Marxist orthodoxy, it was argued. The peasants were to be the moral source, the raison d’etre of the revolution. From the rural hinterland, Mao would lead his troops who would eventually engulf the cities. What took place in Zhang Chun was the letting loose of an irrepressible force of history. Historical hindsight is a great clarifier—when the past is an open book, when contemporary reflection makes you look back at those events that fill you with disquiet. An estimate of 200,000–800,000 perished during the Land Reform, and more than twenty million died in the Great Leap Forward. What our family had gone through was allied to this wretchedness. Yet, it’s hard not to think that, against death on such monumental scales, one family’s suffering was as nothing.

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Enemies of revolution, exploiters of peasants, my parents were lucky to have escaped persecution. But certain things endure. I think of my mother, and how she lifted her head in alarm when a car backfired in the street, sharp as gunshot. With Father, he left behind much of his bitterness and became a model diaspora. The ancestral village was a sign, less a real place, that incited in him so much yearning. China is Red China, almost a foreign country in his mind. He sent goods home out of the remembrance of the place he was born, as much as out of social obligation. In a peculiar sense, Chinese Communism had freed him. For the rest of his life, he would devote himself towards making good what he had lost, to uplift the social status of the family, and we children played our part by studying hard and achieving scholarly success with our meagre talent. In all this, China was losing its lustre and relevance. All this seems true. But there’s—there always is—another story. My parents never stopped wanting what they could not have. China was lost to the communists, but they were reminded they had close kin there, notably their two children that were, in the pained narrative of the family, ‘left behind.’ If only for this reason, their alienation from the ancestral homeland was softened. Their view was sustained by a half-light of remembrance. The Deng reforms arrived, and by the beginning of the nineties even they recognized the changes in China were irreversible. With that realization was the thought: perhaps they could, in some fashion, go back and retire. By then, Father had fallen sick and passed away, and Mother would follow him after a long illness. We children finished university, and our parents’ ‘China project’ fell on my shoulder. Finding myself in Zhang Chun village, I feel I am, for the first time, steeped in the workings of Chinese Communism. My father had often skirted around the subject that would have forever changed my life. When I was in my last year of high school, First Brother wrote from Linfen to offer a suggestion about my future. He wanted me to go to a university in Beijing—there are excellent ones to choose from—and he would make the arrangements. Through his social connections, he said, he could help me secure a government scholarship for overseas students. Father tore up the letter in rage. When First Brother followed up with another letter, he took me to the study and sat me down. ‘You write to him, you tell him if he’s going to write this kind of rubbish, he is not my son!’ I was left alone to compose a reply. At the desk, his cold fury stalled my mind and I barely knew how to begin. But I managed and put up an epistolary effort to mediate

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between Father’s acridity and his eldest son’s socialist zeal. Later at Adelaide University in Australia, the episode often came back to me. What with Marxism and reading Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution and Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station, the vista of studying in China gingered up my imagination. It was fantasy, of course, like being a student radical out to dismantle capitalism in the street marches. Nonetheless, the thought was enticing: to study in China, and to stay on after graduation where I would participate in another grand radical movement under CCP leadership, and I would be a part of history. Is it too fancy to say that, studying in China I would have found myself and killed off the existentialist doubt that plagued my young life? It sounds trite when put this way. But such was the imagination, and the need to escape the petite capitalist existence of a Chinese shophouse that you give yourself over to such extravagant thoughts. Added to that was a certain political awareness caused by, so I believe, my grandfather’s troublesome marriages and the family’s landlord background. From where I was, there seemed no inconsistency between my family legacy and my modish leftism. We are born within our skins. We grow up with the social and political relations that make their demands on us, and show up the grandeur as much as the contradictions of a revolutionary project. We are truest to ourselves when we are steeped in these contradictions, in the light of these revelations. Of the two elder siblings, I was more drawn to Eldest Brother. He had all his life kept his socialist faith; his political sense did not waver in the tumultuous political movements over the years. His young life was before my time, of which I had little inkling of, except through the letters. One day I found a slew of youths whose lives mirrored his. At the entrance of the Museum of the Eighth Route Army in Xi’an, on the wall of the reception hall was an inventory of the students who went to Yan’an from May to August 1939: Wuhan, 880; Xi’an, 801; Hunan First Guerrilla Liaison Unit, 120; Lanzhou, 30; North-East National Salvation Headquarters, 50.10 Next to the inventory were photographs of eternally youthful men and women, a collage of smiling faces; here a stooping figure resting on the ground as though waiting for a delayed train, there was an upturned face towards the light above a writing desk. Images of fanatical hope and idealism. What is one’s staid academic career, comfortably salaried, compared with the aspirations of the students at Yan’an and the young doctor in Linfen? But then, that was a long time ago, as people in the village are wont to say when asked about the past. They also have another

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line of wisdom: In life don’t expect too much—you start somewhere, the rest is Heaven’s will. The Communist revolution was something that had to happen, driven as it was by poverty and age-old social and political injustice. And it is an anthropologist’s luck that his kin had lived through the Communist Revolution and its wretchedness, that the kinfolk have, with candour, revealed their experiences through their stories.

Notes 1. In January 8, 2024, the Associated Press reported that ‘Zhongzhi Enterprise Group, a major shadow bank in China that has lent billions in yuan (dollars) to property developers including Evergrande, filed for bankruptcy liquidation after it was unable to pay its debts. A crackdown on excessive borrowing that began several years ago has left dozens of Chinese developers [including Evergrande] out of business or struggling for survival.’ https://apnews.com/article/china-property-bankruptcy-evergr ande-zhongzhi-3b1fe3941e7a827bbcd529a22dc09fe4 2. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon. New York: Bantam Books, 1968, p. 20. 3. Ibid., p. 80. 4. Ibid., p. 208. 5. Ibid., p. 215. 6. Ibid. 7. Mayfair Yang, Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020, ch. 3. 8. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: André Deutsch, 1986, p. 476. 9. June Chang, a publishing sensation, whose narrative of suffering of Mao China is carried over, in the academic form, by, most notably Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. 10. Based the author’s visit in 2018.

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Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1986. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: André Deutsch. Dikotter, Frank. 2010. Mao’s Great Famine. London: Bloomsbury. Koestler, Arthur. 1968. Darkness at Noon. New York: Bantam Books. Yang, Mayfair. 2020. Re-enchanting Modernity. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Homebound

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. —Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts Into Air (1983) I find myself saying briefly and prosaically it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)

It is the fate of many families: some children do well and make something of themselves, while one or two fall by the wayside. Of my sister’s two sons, the older Gua Rong used to be a manufacturer of plastic chairs, who, having a daughter in a well-paid job in Shenzhen, lives in early retirement. His younger brother Gua Zheng did poorly at school and spent his adult years doing odd jobs in town. Together with his wife, he keeps a hovel of wire cages breeding rabbits, which they butcher, skin and sell at the morning market in Chayang. They have a son, a rough-faced young man who works in a kitchen utensil shop. Gua Rong is the one who has evidently made it. I hold no avuncular favourite, but the older nephew with his cumbersome family relations interests me. His daughter excelled in school and attended university in Guangzhou; on graduation, she was recruited by the tech giant Tencent; she is married to a fellow engineer from the same company. With a three-year-old son, they’ve made © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 S. Yao, Gifts to the Sad Country, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1598-5_7

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a home for themselves in the megacity Shenzhen, and Gua Rong’s wife has gone over to be the grandson’s full-time carer. The arrangement frees the young couple of the worries and the financial burden of childcare, and the grandmother has the opportunity to enjoy the city highlights. Sociologically, though, it makes a ‘bachelor’ of Gua Rong—he lives alone and rarely sees his wife and daughter. One day an invitation comes from the young couple to go and visit them, and I eagerly accept. After months in Zhang Chun, you feel edgy and want to move on. You need a change, a fresh breeze to clear the writerly fatigue. The old folk want to talk, and each interview opens a floodgate of desolate emotions. The gush of revelations, when it happens, can be too much of a good thing. You are drawn in; your senses get bogged down. There are occasional poetics, as when an informant describes the killing, ‘The execution ground gave out a bad smell—like a coffin shop.’ Translation is a tricky task. As you render the rustic Hakka dialect into English, the temptation to ginger up an interview is hard to resist. Self-doubt slowly creeps in: ‘Are you sure you got it right?’ When the cruelties of the state are so neatly laid out, the clarity is a curse. I am travelling to a place where another set of my kin has settled. In the high-tech megacity, everything will be an exaggeration of the norm, and I’ll take with me the question: How do a three-generation household manage their lifework in a metropolis of corporate headquarters, high-rise apartments, shopping malls and app-driven food delivery?

Face-to-Face with ‘Getting Rich Is Glorious’ China The visitors’ brochure I picked up at the Shenzhen International Airport tells the impressive facts: a population of 11 million, the fastest growing city in the world; the first Chinese Silicon Valley for hardware; the busiest import and export hub in the country; it has 124 skyscrapers of more than 198 metres high; its transformation from a fishing village into a global economic powerhouse in 40 years. In the taxi I strain my eyes to find any traces of the old neighbourhood. The buildings have been pulled down, and I miss the workers’ flats of the austere socialist style of the fifties and sixties still found in many Chinese cities. I pine for the walls of dark, mouldy patches, and their morose and dilapidated look which calls up the social equality that the CCP tried to achieve. Instead, the city is dominated by the sharp-edged look of money and financial capital.

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It’s early morning, the air motionless. Each high-rise gives out its form of unsparing contour, all glass and steel. Ambiguity or ambience is absent from the buildings; only a sense of tough conviction. Nothing hovers over them except certainty: you know what the city is about. The traffic is picking up. As the taxi drives through the morning streets, there is no escape from the frantic spinning of your head as you confront, face-to-face, the ‘Getting Rich is Glorious’ post-Mao China.1 The apartment of Chrissy and her husband John Chang is on the twelfth floor of a five-year-old development located in Nanshan district. The place is a ten-minute walk to the nearest metro, then a few stops from the station is the Tencent Binhai Mansion, the high-tech company’s headquarters. Talking with the Changs, it is easy to fall into the giddy real estate-speak. The apartment is just about 80 square metres (about 860 square feet); it has a large sitting room, two bedrooms and a tiny servant’s quarters; the modern kitchen is fitted with an electric induction oven and cooktop; the whole place is air-conditioned. The apartment cost them over one and half a million RMB when they bought it off the plan. Heavily mortgaged, they have achieved the dream that dazzles every middle-class professional in China. We introduce ourselves and move to the balcony; below is a waterfeatured garden surrounded by a spread of trees and bushes. You offer the news of Chrissy’s folk at home. They listen; you have just come from the village and the place already feels like yesterday’s news, irrelevant and forgettable. They speak about their work and busy schedules, the overtime and weekends at the office, which shame your meek attempts at small talk. You sense that work stress is another name for professional commitment, something that would take you far in any company. They are proud to be in a rapidly growing, highly profitable company; ‘Tencent will catch up with Google in a five-year timeline, you just wait.’ Around noon the doorbell rings. The grandmother and her charge have returned from their stroll. The parents go to the pram and take over. The young Xiao Yong escapes to his mother’s embrace. ‘Did you have a good time in the park? Were there many people there?’ They are less questions than a way of coaxing some babytalk out of the tired, morose three-yearold. The boy digs his head into the soft folds of his mother’s blouse and turns placid and content. It is approaching lunchtime on a Sunday. You know in Chinese cities things change rapidly, but surely the dreaded cellophane-wrapped sandwiches have not replaced the three-cooked meals a day culinary habit?

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Food Delivery There are many things to say about Shenzhen, for the visitor one of the most remarkable may well be the food delivery services. Uber Eats and its local variants are ubiquitous in Sydney where I live. But the various systems that operate in the high-tech city are a different beast. The country’s two largest food delivery systems, Meituan and Ele.me, have deep roots in Shenzhen. They are everywhere: linking the kitchen with the customers is an army of yellow jersey-clad motorcycle riders zig-zagging through the busy streets. Each system offers a full restaurant menu, from steamed rice to soup to a rich variety of dishes. On the app, you pick the main meals—pork in dark fermented soya bean sauce goes well with lamb-based Xinjiang offerings, fried or steamed vegetables as a side dish and soup; for dessert Macao egg tart is popular. For dinner or weekend lunch, you order by the set—each set consists of a combination of dishes designed by a chef. The delivery charges are minimal, and the dishes are free from the dubious taste and nutritional value of Asian takeaway you are familiar with. The lunch set arrives. Chrissy is in hostess mode as she transfers the dishes from the polystyrene containers to China plates—the stoneware surface gives the dark-sauced Mongolian beef with shallot an appealing glow; the boiled chicken slices form a ring on another plate; the prawn omelette rests on a bed of tomato and lettuce; rice is served on individual bowls to complete a family Sunday lunch. Forget the Shenzhen stock exchange, ignore the glass and steel glimmer of the corporate headquarters, the cultural shift at its most telling is standing before your eyes. Women who labour daily in the kitchen seem a thing of the past; the Meituan delivery service has taken over. From the fingering on the app to the order’s final arrival, the process invites no wonder, it just happens. What was previously something of womanly virtue is now a software-driven food delivery, efficient and anonymous. The menu’s rich offerings, and the arrival of the guest, have made Chrissy overorder. ‘A full table always looks good; what’s a few RMB?’ she says. It is a display of abundance that hints at her parents’ frugal ways and her own prosperity. She had spent the better part of her youth in the village and was familiar with the penny-pinching habits of the rural folks. You dig into the dishes: each dish is tasty and well-sauced but greasy with a touch of MSG, and the volume tests one’s appetite. After lunch, we are having steaming, grease-cutting Oolong tea, but there is still the problem

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of the leftovers. Normally, they would be wrapped and dropped in the chute to find their way to the rubbish bin. Today Chrissy’s mother has targeted her domestic frugality at the roast pork in lemon sauce: it is a meat dish, with a dash of hoisin sauce and sprinkle of chopped coriander, it will make a nice cold dish the next day. She begins gathering the pieces into a food container which invites the daughter’s remark: ‘Oh, Mother. It’ll be stale tomorrow, and no one is going to eat it.’ For a close-knit family, these are harsh words to say to a mother, who clamps down and turns silent.

The Pleasure of the Table What does this bit of domestic scrape say? Surely not bad feelings between mother and daughter, for there is love between them. To catch the inner truth of human affairs, it is best to rely on mundane situations—grand gestures and dramatic events do not fall on an investigator’s lap when they need it. The everyday is indeed banal and ‘a platitude,’ ‘but this banality is also what is most important.’2 The leftovers have brought the grandmother’s austere domestic economy into the open. But that surely can’t be the whole story—what besets the elderly woman from the village? I am familiar with the goings-on of the Chinese dining table. For parents and children alike, individuals get what they want through a subtle interplay of silent contention and a gracious giving in. When I would let out that the soup was lacking in flavour, my mother would be quick with her rebuttal, ‘It is home cooking, I don’t use Ajinomoto, like the restaurants,’ which put an end to the subject. At a Chinese table, contention is not quite domestic conflict. To read into Chrissy’s mother’s defiance calls for a language that takes account of both power and the eagerness of peace-making. The clash of chopsticks leads to meek reconciliation, but that’s not what’s significant. The site of the everyday, the French critic Maurice Blanchot writes, offers enjoyment that is animated by ‘the hidden present, or the discoverable future.’3 The everyday is a platitude (what lags and falls back, the residual life with which our trash cans and cemeteries are filled; scrap and refuse); but this banality is also what is most important, if it brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity and it is lived—in the moment when, lived, it escapes every speculative formulation, perhaps all coherence, all regularity.4

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The elusiveness, the richness of the everyday hauls you in and makes you lose yourself; it makes for a form of power that escapes abstract thinking and neat conceptualization. The pleasure of the everyday is not without costs; for all the leaks and slippages, it entails constraint and discipline that tames the freewheeling recalcitrance. At the same time, everyday offers an opportunity for those with foresight and tactical daring to seize upon and exploit for their own purposes.

Mao’s Children Li Ai Fang had married my nephew and lived with him through the hard times. Born in 1948, she is of the generation that has been called Mao’s Children.5 This is the generation that was drawn to the incandescent light of the Cultural Revolution. They were the ‘sent-down youth’ who, in response to Mao’s call, travelled to the countryside to socialize themselves with the revolutionary spirits of the peasantry. To the women of this generation Mao had devoted the adage, ‘Women hold up half the sky.’ These women, now well-fed and proud grandmothers, are the free-spirited da ma: elderly women with poor dress sense, who perform health-bolstering fan dances with coquettish enthusiasm in the public square or by the shopping mall. Remembering their revolutionary origin, you are let down by their swaying and spinning, leaving no trace of their former selves. At the park with her grandchild, Li Ai Fang is full of revelations. She was a good student, she says, but did not graduate high school. On working at home, she tells a story about mercy. Since I was a child, it had been my duty to feed and bathe the water buffalo, which over the years became my companion. When I led him to the river, he would look at me with those deep, dark eyes, and I would tell him about all kinds of things: being beaten by my mother, being accused of being lazy, having to leave school. It couldn’t talk, but I bet it understood what I said. How miserable it was to be a dumb beast! Now, as a way of remembering it, I do not eat beef. Every mid-lunar month, I would burn a few incense sticks in the kitchen, and be a vegetarian for the day.

She was never a Red Guard; Mao’s vanguards were mostly children of the educated elite—the army people, the party members, the officials, the teachers. She avoided being sent down, as her parents were peasant

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farmers themselves. She met Gua Rong at school, so they had a love match of sorts. With their plastic chair manufacturing business, they had saved hard and sent Chrissy to high school in Chayang, then to Zhongshan University in Guangzhou where she studied the engineering and management degree that led to her job at Tencent. Having her come to Shenzhen to care for the grandchild was Chrissy’s idea. It was an arrangement made in heaven, so people said. From the first day, the grandparents have doted on the child, their first grandson. It is logical that while the grandfather would make occasional visits, the grandmother would move to Shenzhen to look after the child and enjoy a bit of the city’s bright lights. And less ostensibly, it would also save Chrissy and her husband childcare costs. No one would put it in cold economic terms, but often in a family women’s labour is free labour, and the right to call on a grandmother for childcare is the custom. I remember what the grandmother once said to her companions in the park, ‘I have brought up my own child, and people still give me their babies to look after. They say, “Do you mind? Just for today when I go to town.” But they are not even my relations! Is it because childcare is an old woman’s duty?’ Indeed: perhaps it is a bitterness that comes with old age; perhaps she doesn’t want to be taken for granted. After a lifetime of being a mother, why should she feel guilty for not wanting to care for another child?

At the Park We have put the infant in a stroller and are walking to the park not far from the apartment. Shenzhen in October is muggy, most days the sky is dense and grey, threatening a storm. But today, in the early hours, the sun breaks through the overcast, and warmth works its way into our jackets and quilted cotton blouses. ‘We shouldn’t have to bring an umbrella,’ grandmother Li says. Her steps mimic her cautious nature: soft, considered, moving as though in fear of stepping on an insect. The footpath is scrupulously clean. It leads to a sandy patch and a sprinkle of wooden benches: our destination. The grandmother and her stroller melt into the gathering of elderly women and their charges are already settled on the park benches. Chrissy’s mother seems to be the group’s leader; people go up to her, speaking excitedly in a cacophony of dialects and voices. Li Ai Fang digs the food out of the stroller and prepares to feed the child. The adoring congregation gathers to watch. The spoon travels the distance

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from bowl to child and misses the target. Someone takes a napkin and bends over to wipe the debris off the child’s face. ‘Aiyah, look at what you’re doing. You are painting its face like an opera singer’s.’ ‘I can’t squat down; my bones hurt. See if you can do it better!’ It is a teasing challenge. The women chirp like happy birds, and joy runs through the small gathering. With effusive concerns, they talk about their rheumatism, the news from home, and the goings-on in the highrises where they live with their forever-busy sons and daughters. Listening to them, I jot a few notes in my head. What do these women in their sixties and seventies want? Are they as easily lured by the city as their adult children evidently are? The bantering goes around. Chrissy’s mother’s accounts seem to duplicate the stories of her companions. For in other apartments, there are also small domestic mutinies and quiet reassessments of the time-honoured duties of the grandmother. The customary obligations are being revalued.

Xiandai, the Chinese Modern Chrissy’s husband John Chang says, ‘I came from Beida [Peking University] straight to Tencent. Anyone who has education and ambition can get a good job. This is Shenzhen, after all.’ The city’s reputation sticks. You keep thinking of the abundance, the opportunities and the urban pleasures of the high-tech city. It is a city that grants all requests and ensnares you with its dreams and promise. Perhaps the myth of Shenzhen is the myth of all cities. From the travel writer Jonathan Raban: The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.6

The streets, the walkways, the office buildings and corporate headquarters, the metro, the shopping malls, the restaurants, the fast-food outlets: these are elements of the hard city. However, the hard city is meek and almost shorn of significance when put next to the underbelly, the pulse and throbbing heartbeat of the soft city. As you play the flâneur in Shenzhen, the hard city recedes from the mind, and the metropolis is constantly at risk of being a place of pure imagination and fantasy.

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Burdened with a baroque sense of fancy, the soft city is modernity par excellence, driven by a sensuous animation and fraught with corrupting power. To think of the soft city is to think of ‘the city’s spread, contingency, and aimless motion.’7 Here is Raban on London—or is it New York? You come out of a Formica kebab-house alone after lunch, your head prickly with retsina. The air outside is a sunny swirl of exhaust fumes; that faint, smoky-turquoise big city colour. … A cluster of Italian au pair girls, their voices mellow and labial, like a chorus escaped from an opera, pass me; you hear, in the crowd, an adenoidal Nebraskan contralto, twangy as a jew’s-harp. Turned to a dizzied tourist myself, forgetful and jet-shocked, you have to hunt in your head for the language spoken here. … You’re a balloonist adrift, and you need anchors to tether you down.8

Take away the kebab house and the Italian au pairs, it describes well your experience in the Chinese city. Looking up at a corporate headquarters rising skywards, you are in the grips of a powerful aura that belongs to financial capitalism. Capitalism is not only money and buildings and industrial plants, it is also social and economic relationships as well as the signs of the culture of modernity. The culture of modernity may prove to be the most alluring when it pledges freedom, diversity and new forms of identity. Your mind calls up the domestic scene in which you have inserted yourself. Modernity may be too blunt a word to bring forth the little vexations, the edgy contentions you’ve witnessed; we are speaking of personal feelings and human relationships. Nonetheless, modernity is the right word—when it calls up China’s cultural and political reforms from the Late Qing to the Communist Revolution, each including the aims for the improvement of women’s social positions. The Chinese idea of modernity, xiandai sixiang, is anti-feudal and anti-tradition. Historically, modern thought embraced the nationalist struggle against Western and Japanese imperialisms and social and political advancements on all fronts. ‘Women hold up half the sky’ has its legacy in the uplifting of wives, and mothers and daughters advanced by May Fourth writers like Lu Xun and Ding Ling and others.9 Women’s rights—and concubinage—were a much-discussed issue among the progressive circles. In present-day China, modernity, xiandai, is far-reaching in its usage. Hair salons are modern, so are furniture stores, fashion certainly, and so

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too should interpersonal relationships be modern. Modernity is not only an idea of philosophic grandstanding; it also describes mundane things and what people do at home and in the streets. Thus, app-driven food delivery is ‘modern’; though it is not quite the feeding machine in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Modernity’s coupling with the personal is key to women’s rights. When Virginia Woolf writes about women’s need for private space, it is not a rerun of the Victorian cliché of the homebound wife but spins a wider argument about economic security so that women are not tied to men’s patronage and protection. For the modern woman, the struggle for a room of one’s own is a struggle for a foundation for self-discovery. There is—and it applies to the Chinese men and women as well—in this struggle a romantic, Prometheus-like defiance that pits the self against the world. The striving of the modern subject is redemptive; it gives birth to a new self from the old self. However, the moral costs also render the modern project truly tragic. For modernity is a condition where, in Marx and Engels’ wonderful phrase, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’10 Xiandai is, word for word, ‘the era of the now’ or simply, ‘contemporariness.’ There is something fateful about the Chinese modern, for contemporariness connotes a state of being in the perpetual ‘now.’ With terse precision, the translator has chosen out of the hope and fragmentation of the modern world a quality most gripping and desirable for the Chinese subject. To be in the ‘now’ is to be triumphantly rejecting the traditional and the antiquated, in short, all that is repressive and crushing of individual aspirations. So much of the May Fourth aesthetics is devoted to the battle with the old traditions, and celebration of the contemporary which is ipso facto better, more liberating, than what has already passed. ‘Now’ is like a runaway train, driverless and moving relentlessly forward; the day or minute is already behind us on the smoky trail of history. The freedom of modernity, in China as elsewhere, is a pencil line away from cultural chaos and alienation.11

Redemption Li Ai Fang has kept her money-saving ways, and she feels a strong sense of loyalty to the village where she has left her husband. Her entree into Shenzhen’s soft city has been enticing and bewildering. The tussle over

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the leftovers is, you might say, painted on such a canvas. In our conversation, she seems unsure of her daughter’s effusive recommendation of the city. The urban glamour is not for her, and she misses her husband and their village home. Yet, Shenzhen is not without its attractions. You remember the ripple of self-questioning she raised with her friends, ‘I have brought up my child, and people still give me their babies to look after. Is it because it is an old woman’s duty?’ She might have added, ‘Is that the only destiny for a woman, being a wife and a grandmother?,’ and at her boldest, ‘Can I ever claim a life of my own?’ Under Chinese Communism, women’s rights to be educated and protected against social oppression have been, to various degrees, built into national policy. However differently they worked out in practice, such policies nurture confidence and self-will. Here in a morning gathering of women and their charges: you learn of the small rebellions, the occasional tiffs and the management of domestic discord. Chrissy’s mother has her little victories, you’ve noted. The urban consumption and the dazzling soft city of Shenzhen may not be for her, but this is where she could realize her needs and sense of identity. Not only her mother, Chrissy too has sought this opportunity and carved a place for herself in the metropolis. Spending time with the family, it is hard not to be impressed with ‘Capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ and its redemptive power. With the State having a strong hold on the economy, it nonetheless delivers people like the Changs and Chrissy herself an economic future not seen a generation ago. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, has left ‘a world without an alternative’ to the capitalist world order.12 China has kept its communism, though it is not quite the real thing, you may argue. The old state absolutism and the Confucian belittlement of women and wives are gone, though some remain. Chrissy and her mother are realists who know what they want— a measure of independence, a marriage in which they have a role, to be appreciated for what they are. It is a tall order, and the grandmother, careworn she may be, is reworking the old wisdom: the traditional solidarity of home and community is nurturing, but such solidarity has to preserve a space of her own where modern aspirations reside.

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Moving On Weeks go by in a blur of outings: visiting the Tencent headquarters, drilling Chrissy on her work and salary, trying to break the reticence of her husband John. At home he is a man of few words, but in his office he opens up: the government imposes strict controls on foreign currency but Tencent has its influence and connections; the company’s long-term plan is to dominate the world’s multimedia industry; no, Huawei poses no competition in networking platforms. The work is stressful, but the wage is good and the annual bonus is generous. A Tencent loyalist, he speaks of everything good about the company. As I listen, I find his enthusiasm for corporate capitalism menacingly infectious, which somehow lessens the greed and moral vacuousness. It’s at that moment the thought comes: I have been here long enough, I need to move on with my hoard of fieldnotes. Before leaving, I move back to the maid’s room at Chrissy’s apartment for a couple of days. I say goodbye and thank her for the hospitality. The night before my departure, the grandmother comes to my room with two steamy bowls of herbal soup. We drink and let the medicinal goodness seep into our systems. I let her know that I intend to stay a while, but not in Shenzhen. ‘Shekou is the sister city of Shenzhen, and there is still some of the old city left,’ she says in the way of an endorsement. And she adds, ‘When you get back, tell Gua Rong I am happy here, there’s nothing to worry over.’ I arrive and there’s not much to see. Shekou is all high-rise, corporate offices, shopping malls and gated communities, a mirror image of the city I have just left. Every corner is a café, a pizza joint or a taco salad shop; every street leads to a steel-and-glass office block; each waterside development an imitation of the brassy luxury of Florida or Dubai. Only the port, with its container ships and sky-reaching cranes and the ocean beyond, feeds your restlessness. On shore, facing the sea, the odour that reaches your nostrils is not salt but diesel, the vapour of which floats effortlessly above the water. The container ships are moored adjacent to each other; they are so closely packed that, for a moment, you believe you can walk across the port from ship to ship, terminal to terminal. Like all international ports, it is a place where you can imagine more than you can see. The skyline is a maze of cranes turned man-made monsters, whizzing and zooming as though in frantic search for the last piece of implant to make them human. In the belly of each ship are goods for the world’s

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markets: hardware that makes computers work, branded clothes, designer shoes and handbags and accessories for mobiles and tablets. Facing the sea-going vessels fills me with longing. In my first years of university in Australia, homesick and alone, I often hit the pavements at the Port Adelaide wharf; invitations would come from Chinese seamen to share their lunch of rice gruel and salted fish on the lower decks. I wanted to be one of them—to join them on their voyage. From where I am, it feels like the realization of a dream. Squinting my eyes, I gain a faint vision of the horizon beyond the chain of ships—and to my mind comes the exotic, faraway places the ships will travel. A line from Conrad: It is a great doctor for sore hearts and sore heads, too, your ship’s routine, which I have seen soothe—at least for a time—the most turbulent of spirits. There is health in it, and peace, and satisfaction of the accomplished round; for each day of the ship’s life seems to close a circle within the wide ring of the sea horizon. It borrows a certain dignity of sameness from the majestic monotony of the sea. He who loves the sea loves also the ship’s routine.13

Conrad is not one to give over to romantic extravagance; the sea and the ship’s routine tame excessive, unbridled thoughts. To an extent, it is also the story of my forebearers. In the family legacy, they were staid, pragmatic petite capitalists and their journeys were tied to the business and making money. However, there were multiple journeys, by sea and on land, not all for practical purposes. Still, their reputation of romantic, sealoving shopkeepers would not stick. In a sense, the narrative of diaspora is everywhere a double narrative. Events at home, and what happens in the place of settlement are twins who bring their effects upon each other. Migration, or any movement from one social situation to another, can be an experience of chaos and estrangement. As with modernity, liberation for one person is mental anguish for another. My parents’ resettlement in another land had been both rewarding and disruptive to the family. As for my hosts in Shenzhen, riding on the coattails of Chinese capitalism has brought so much, yet you fear for them. You think of the Evergrande Group, overbuilt and heavily in debt. Capitalist modernity liberates, while just as often it is fraught with social catastrophe. A late newcomer, Chinese modernity is still, so it appears, innocent of the spiritual emptiness and heart of darkness that beset the Western counterpart. As the light of optimism recedes, it is a

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brave or arrogant soul who believes the ledger of costs and benefits is easily reconciled.

Leaving As it turns out, the old Shekou (‘Snake’s Mouth’) or what remained of it is not hard to find. For that you have to seek the side streets and the bylanes, each with its stale urban smells of damp laundry, cooking oil, pickled cabbage, diesel fumes and motor oil. In a nameless, dusty neighbourhood, I check into a hotel occupied by internal migrants and construction workers. It is cheap and rundown, but full of life. People get up early, and at 7 AM the courtyard below my window is a scene of busy living: an old man sweeping and putting the debris into a cart; women cleaning vegetables and picking off the yellow ends of beansprouts; children reading while waiting to be taken to school. It is in-your-face communal existence. I watch the men rushing off to the construction sites—they do not forget to throw a smile at the children and their carers. I sense an overwhelming wholeness: a wholeness of self and family, a wholeness of a social community. I have left behind the gated community that encloses Chrissy’s apartment, and find myself in the hot, pulsating pace of daily relationships. The month I spent in the neighbourhood has been oddly memorable. In some strange way, it counts for home; it is much like the neighbour in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown where I grew up. I take another glance at the children doing their homework on a tiny table under a tree, and the clump of bamboo bushes, a cluster of camellias by the gate and dread the prospect of leaving. Prickling my mind is the journey to Linfen city, Shanxi, where Eldest Brother’s family lives. There once lived a man who had weathered the storm and kept faith with the revolution. When he came to Singapore with his wife and daughter some years back I thought him immune from the alienating effects of contemporary China. He died and many questions were left unanswered. I make a booking on a fast train to Xian, from where I plan to make the rest of the journey by car.

Notes 1. Attributed to Deng Xiaoping, the parallel slogan is ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’, used by Hu Yaobang, the CCP General

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

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Secretary, in his report to the 12th National Congress on 1 September 1982. Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech.” Yale French Studies (73), 1987, pp. 12–20 (p. 13). Ibid. Ibid. Anita Chan, Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation. UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1985. Jonathan Raban, Soft City. London: Harvill, 1975, p. 10. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 1. A useful, accessible text is: Jonathan D. Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace. New York: Penguin Books, 1981. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Peking [Beijing]: Foreign Languages Press, 1970, p. 35. See the classic: Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air. London: Verso, 1983. Zygmunt Bauman, “Living Without an Alternative.” The Political Quarterly, 62 (1), 1991, pp. 35–44. Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea. London: Methuen & Co, 1906, p. 6.

Bibliography Bauman, Zygmunt. 1991. “Living Without an Alternative.” Political Quarterly 62 (1): 35–44. Berman, Marshall. 1983. All That Is Solid Melts into Air. London: Verso. Blanchot, Maurice. 1987. “Everyday Speech.” Yale French Studies (73): 12–20. Chan, Anita. 1985. Children of Mao. London: Springer. Conrad, Joseph. 1906. The Mirror of the Sea. London: Methuen & Co. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1970. The Communist Manifesto. Peking (Beijing): Foreign Languages Press. Raban, Jonathan. 1975. Soft City. London: Harvill. Spence, Jonathan D. 1981. The Gate of Heavenly Peace. New York: Penguin Books.

CHAPTER 8

Revolutionary Romance

Don’t you remember in the month of April, that long train on the way to the border… —Italian folk song

Eldest Brother was a distant figure in the family. After finishing high school, he was selected to study medicine in Dalian city in China’s northwest—a dislocation from the humid, subtropical south to a region of harsh winter and snow-capped mountains. When Mother received her visa to leave for Malaysia, her son was on his way to his first posting in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province. He was good at his work and was later made the head of communicable diseases at the People’s Hospital in Linfen, an industrial city south of Taiyuan. For the rest of his life, he lived in Linfen with his wife and their two children until he passed away in 2011. He was eighteen when he left for Dalian and my parents had not seen him after that, almost a lifetime. With our father’s own passing, we decided to bring him and his family to Singapore—the Malaysian authorities had refused to grant them visas—for a reunion. They stayed for a month in an apartment we rented for them, and I went over to see them whenever I could. Save for Father and Eldest Sister, we were, at last, together as a family.1 In that super-modern island city in the tropics, the years’ separation between us was bridged, and Eldest Brother manifested from his letters to stand before us, aged by the years and by what he had lived through. He was the son and brother shut off from us by revolution and emigration, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 S. Yao, Gifts to the Sad Country, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1598-5_8

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one who had joined the Chinese Communist Party and devoted himself to its cause. Despite that, a fierce sentiment nonetheless bound us as a family. In the island city, we spent our time sightseeing and making up the missed years. We were content, but inside we were pilgrims going through a dark forest, with Death on their tail. The British historian E. H. Carr once wrote, ‘[F]acts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them…’2 Put differently, facts are important, but perhaps more so is what you do with them—a matter of interpretation and discovery. The story is unchanging: the diasporas are economically driven and in pursuit of security at all costs. But some experiences are so heartfelt, so elegiac that they overwhelm the material calculations. For the emigrants, this is the moment when their mind wonders and loses itself in selfscrutiny. Among other things, what comes up is a set of bitter questions: Has the emotional cost of departure been worth it? Do the kinfolk who stayed on feel abandoned? Running through my family is a heroic chronicle of how our forebearers, by foresight and by garnering their modest resources, made a fortune in the South Seas. As told to the children, it is all about blood, sweat and tears, and the just rewards of work and sacrifice. But we knew better; this existence had not freed our parents from moral uncertainty and self-doubt. In the back of their minds, they believed their children were left behind when they emigrated to the South Seas. The realization cut deep. The idea of abandonment led to a difficult relationship with the daughter, and the suspicion that they had lost their son to the Communists. They loved and cared for their eldest son, but his commitment and aspirations were barely understood. It is the diaspora’s fantasy that blood ties endure, and cataclysmic changes would, like most things in life, eventually pass. In Singapore, the reunion had brought us closer. But in my mind, there were questions: How could lost time be regained? How could the petite capitalist father and his son of the socialist bent be reconciled? Now, the questions are left to me. So is the mission of coupling the two sensibilities, the two ideological worlds the father and son embodied.

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First Posting His first years at the university were full of excitement, as an elite student chosen for an elite education in Socialist China. In his letters, he wrote that he was making friends, was deep in the sciences of physiology and anatomy and that he was learning elementary English and German. He did not raise the jargon—‘Serve the People!,’ ‘Let’s Build a New China’— that must have peppered his student life. But he did write about the sense of hope and purpose that the new China inspired in him. From Dalian, the treaty port made modern and prosperous by German and later Japanese occupiers, he was sent to the mountain region of Shanxi. He arrived in Taiyuan city by train, and from there it took him two days by truck to reach his village clinic. If he felt like an exile, he didn’t tell us; but he did describe the poverty and the diseases. Perhaps not to make us worried, he would report on the interesting medical cases he encountered. There were cases of tuberculosis and leprosy, which provided opportunities to study the symptoms and to provide cures. In response to government directives, the clinic was trying Chinese medicine and acupuncture together with pharmaceuticals, and he had led a team of doctors and health workers to the hills to collect herbs and medicinal roots to be used in the hospital. Reading about these efforts, we could not help but detect the son’s meek attempt to reconcile with his herbalist father. These and other events of his life were found, plot by plot, page by page, in his letters. I keep in mind images of the frail envelopes, the flimsy writing paper, the stamps of hydroelectric dams and the head of the Chairman that took up half of an envelope. What was true and urgent about Eldest Brother was conveyed by what was written on the shoddy village stationery. We read the letters eagerly. To us, the news of his work and the deprivations were like precious secrets we were privileged to share. As for the ‘ideological differences,’ his correspondence was propped up with carefully chosen words, whose meanings were insinuated rather than openly conveyed. It was many years before I read Barthes and LeviStrauss, the masters of communication as codes for writerly intent. Now I see clearly in the correspondence the goodwill and thoughtfulness, the keenness to keep in Father’s good graces. After finishing school, Eldest Brother had become an adult and soon the head of the family. In October 1953, he was waiting for the government to decide if he was to go to university; Father wrote from afar:

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9th October 1953 My Dear Son, I am so happy that you have graduated, and with such brilliant results. This will, I am sure, show a good example for your brothers and sisters and bring pride to the family. Now that you are living at home, it is my hope that you would help your mother and grandmother in managing the plots of land we owned. You should now take over the decisions about planting and harvesting. Regarding your future, what do you have in mind? If the government gives you a place in the university, would you consider studying agriculture, to acquire knowledge on farming? That would be good for you and the family. In the long run, I think the best plan is for you to join your mother and grandmother and come to Nanyang and help me with my business. I know there has been talk about land reform, of taking the estates from landowners. Even an uneducated man like me knows the changes are sure to come. Think about it carefully and write back, especially about coming to work with me in Nanyang. I know you have moved out from the boarding school, please go to Chayang and open a bank account under your name. You are now head of the family, and I shall send money directly to you from now on.

Father didn’t rush him for his decision. A couple of months later, on the 20th of December, he wrote again to remind him to look after Grandmother, who had bruised her ankles when she fell and that the money had been transferred. The son’s letter, dated 2nd February 1954, gave his considered reply. Dear Father, Forgive this unfilial son who cannot be with you in Nanyang. Yes, I am back with the family but most of my luggage is still at the boarding school. I’ll get the school to send them to our house. Mother and Grandmother are fine, and Grandmother’s ankles are all but healed now. So please don’t worry. I have checked with the bank in Chayang; the money has arrived and I have made a withdrawal for the family expenses. Some of the cash we shall keep for the planting in spring, and for the spring festival when we will have the usual ceremony at the ancestral hall. I have thought carefully about my future. The party people have told me the government decision will arrive any day now, and I have to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. The government is efficient and it wants to train people to build the new nation. I would of course come to Nanyang if need be; but we must get used to the fact that decisions like this may not depend on us. All they told me is that I would be sent away to study medicine, but I don’t know where—and when. There have been meetings in the village, and

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people were discussing all kinds of issues. From what I read in the papers, land reform is serious and few dare to predict what will happen when it comes. All this is for you to think about. You should certainly start trying to get visas for Mother and Grandmother at your end, and I’ll do my part on this end. It is going to be a difficult time and it is best we make the arrangements now. Your unfilial son

Like his other letters, this is courteous and formal—I have left out the ceremonial phrases, ‘honourable father,’ ‘blessing of ancestors’ and so on. Nonetheless, a gentle wrangling comes through. Father would like his eldest son to emigrate and help him in his business, while his son would prefer to stay where he is. In spite of their mutual regard, a diverging world was starting to break through the staid sentiment and traditional bond of father and son. Wading through after many years, I take note of the civility, the striving for the epistolary norm both were keen to observe. Meanwhile, in the South Seas, things were changing, too. After the short-lived Federation of Malaya, in 1963 the postcolonial nation became the Federation of Malaysia by including Singapore (later expelled), Sarawak, Borneo or Sabah. The government continued with the counterinsurgency war against the communists that began in 1948. Travelling to China was forbidden except for the elderly and business people. To be interested in China and to have connections with it, was to tread on the dangerous grounds of disloyalty and subversion. My mother’s second brother from Medan, Indonesia, had his passport stamped by immigration authorities at the China–Hong Kong border during one of his surreptitious visits to the mainland; arriving in Kuala Lumpur for his sister’s birthday, he was detained by the Malaysian Police before being deported. Always the most pragmatic of peoples, we learned from such instances that we should be careful and show the government that we received mail from China and sent parcels back only because we had kinfolk there. We were not aiding the Chinese Communists, nor were we in the habit of packing young people off to the guerrilla training camps in Red China. All this was taken up by the correspondence. Both sides tried to convey what happened, but the temptation to make light of the bad news was irresistible. We wanted to be truthful, and we did not want to cause alarm. So the political events were like waves lapping at our respective shores; our feet treading on water, hoping the certainty of love and consideration would keep us safe.

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One day a letter came and the term airen, lover, broke through the news and greetings to seize our attention. Eldest Brother was in a happy mood, though he was too proper to speak of falling in love. After a short courtship, in 1964 they were married. The bride was Comrade Li Daozu, aged twenty-two, a nurse from the hospital where he worked. She was from a farming family, which gave her a better class status than her husband. We didn’t talk about the circumstances of their marriage when we met in Singapore; now in Linfen city, I am obsessed with what I deem their revolutionary romance.

Honeymoon at the Coal Pit Eldest Brother’s three-roomed apartment, like others in the same block, has kept the dusty, austere look of the architecture of the Mao era. The grey concrete surfaces and the socialist aesthetics signal another era when most people, save the senior party elite, lived under the roofs of such buildings. Despite its dour look, the apartment is comfortable and functional. There are two bedrooms and a sitting room, and the kitchen has been extended to take up much of the balcony. In this apartment Eldest Brother and his wife brought up their two children, and, after he died, Eldest Sister-in-Law has continued to live here. She is retired and lives comfortably on her and her husband’s pension. While the children have married and moved out, she is rarely lonely. As her granddaughter goes to a day-care in the same neighbourhood, she gets to see her son and his family practically every day. The daughter too pays her visits whenever she can. ‘I moved in with my daughter and her husband for a few months. They live in a condominium, a modern place. But I missed my neighbours and the crowded streets, and this is where your brother and I lived since we got married.’ Comrade Li Daozu was twenty-two and Eldest Brother was a couple of years older when they married. ‘My father said, “His parents are overseas Chinese, he has foreign connections. You love him, and you should go ahead and marry him.” He had been a farmer all his life, but he was an enlightened man.’ The couple had a simple wedding, a ceremony followed by a dinner of a few tables at the co-op restaurant. The MC was the head surgeon at the hospital, who gave away the bride and praised her devotion to the revolution. A few Red Guards sniffed around, but the wedding went ahead without incident.

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Your brother wrote to you all about the wedding. It upset him that none of you could come. It would have meant so much if your parents could make it. After the guests had gone, I remember, he was sombre and full of thoughts. I sat with him and held his hand, looking at the empty tables. … At home we were too tired to sleep. I heated up a bottle of Moutai which your brother liked, and we drank till well past midnight. … That was our wedding night.

At home in Malaysia, the herbal business kept us busy. The Vietnam War brought on high prices for rubber and tin, and the prosperity spilled over to the rest of the economy. People, even lorry drivers and labourers, bought ginseng and antelope horn powder—expensive tonic medicine— for their relatives in China. However, preoccupied as they were, my parents could not ignore their firstborn’s wedding. In the shophouse after dinner, we gathered to read another letter from Linfen. After going to bed, I heard coming from the study my parents’ soft voices, in the manner of people sharing a secret. Failing to attend their son’s wedding set in train other realizations. In Zhang Chun collectivization had started, and Mother was to experience it first-hand before she left. Later, in Linfen, there were stirrings of another political movement, the Cultural Revolution. From Nanyang, my parents took in the signs that the world they knew was falling apart. And it came to them that they may never see their eldest son again. ‘Our parents were upset because they couldn’t go to your wedding. Inside they knew that was impossible anyhow. What really happened at the time?’ I ask. We got married in 1964. The Cultural Revolution had started. There were all kinds of talk and everything was up in the air. The Party Chief said we should go ahead with the wedding and he would support us. It went ahead without incident. At a certain level, we agreed with the Cultural Revolution and we wanted to be a part of it. We were swept away by the emotions and the rhetoric of the meetings and the discussions. Anyway, when we were given two weeks for our honeymoon, we thought we would get away from all this and do something useful. We applied to go work among the miners in a coal pit in Taiyuan. We didn’t join the Cultural Revolution, but we wanted to show our revolutionary spirit in another way. After the two weeks, we applied to have our leave extended. Your brother and I stayed on for a further three months, going into the pits

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and visiting the miners in their homes. We were accustomed to poverty and sickness, but the conditions of the mine still shocked us.

‘We still have the pictures you sent from Taiyuan. You two looking happy, standing outside the hostel, faces scrubbed. You remember?’ I ask her. The younger miners, those in their twenties, were alright; but among those in their fifties and sixties black lung disease was rampant. They had worked underground for a long time, twenty or thirty years, some a lifetime. We were struck by the symptoms. Chronic coughing, tightening of the chest that led to shortness of breath, the emitting of black mucus. Our task was to lighten the symptoms, to prevent them from worsening. We advised the miners to improve their diets, to take rests and work less hours. They looked at us and threw their hands in the air: ‘To work less hours! We have to feed the family, and the mines need us.’ Who can blame them for going down the pit day after day even when sick? It was the first time we met cases like these; medicine is of little use for overwork and malnutrition. All the same, it was for us an uplifting experience. We were serving the people; we were lessening their suffering. We were two people in love and helping to build the nation…

‘We were two people in love’: she says it without awkwardness. In the ethos of the time, love was not an affair of two persons, but encompassed national aims and social purpose. She uses the term, airen, lover, as casually as she would, linju, neighbours, but with a hint of intimacy. To her brother-in-law, a reader of books, it is remarkable that the intimate and the emotional were drawn with the wide arc of revolution. Across the kitchen table, her face is a cartography of lines, her grey hair drooping over her ears. Listening to her, you are startled by a language quaintly out of date, with its blend of public duty, ideological inspiration and private sentiment. It reminds me she was young once, at a time when the talk of love and duty and revolutionary ideals meant a lot. What greater endorsement of the ideal than the fact it had taken the young couple to the coal pits to care for the miners—in lieu of a honeymoon. You can’t help thinking: their actions were politically eloquent and romantic.

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Revolutionary Romance Throughout history, romance and imagination have propelled the revolutionary struggle—quite apart from the material conditions. To an extent, all social transformations are romantic; they call for inventiveness and commitment to a cause whose realization still lies in the future. This kind of take on revolution would likely be philosophic and lyrical. There is nothing more evident of this than Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station, first published in 1940.3 Written by a literary critic and essayist, the book traces the thinkers, ideas and social forces that gave rise to the social upheavals from the French Revolution to the overthrow of Tsarist Russia in 1917. Wilson, who had written on Proust, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, is an unlikely scriber of a political tract about the origin of European socialism. The reader is hauled through a host of European philosophers, anarchists and socialists, including Marx and Engels. As a meditation on the development of socialist thought, the book is rhetorically brilliant yet analytically flawed. In the Introduction to the 2003 edition, Louis Menand writes: The test for a successful history is the same as the test for a successful novel: integrity in motion. It’s not the facts, snapshots of the past, that make a history; it’s the story, the facts run by the eye at the correct speed. … The world turns beneath the character’s marching feet. The figures and the landscape come to life together, and the chart of their movements makes a continuous motion, a narrative.4

This is an elegant defence of Wilson’s writerly style. ‘[B]y getting into the heads of writers he liked,’ the author makes plausible a narrative of events where these writers had been participants. As history moves through their lives and work, and those of their fellow travellers, ‘[t]he past reveals itself to have a plot.’5 Wilson achieves his narrative style by flattening the uneven contour of history, and by depicting the major social events at their most dramatic, jammed with revolutionary advancement one moment and tragic reversal the next. The past, European or otherwise, is rarely like that. When you read, say, Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, you get a powerful sense that the political struggles in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been anything but smooth running. Conflicting needs and interests propelled them, contradictory forces fomented them.

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If To the Finland Station seems uncomfortable with contradictions, this becomes even more apparent with the brand of the dialectic the author deploys. Social conditions and political leadership, not to say philosophic ideas, do not by themselves guarantee the final outcome of a revolutionary movement. More likely, the process is crab-like, scuttling directionless on the political landscape, until other factors and circumstances come along to nudge the struggle along, perhaps to fruition, perhaps not. Even socialist revolution is subject to the rule of contingency. There is no inevitability—or determinism—in the desired transformation. History still plays its part, but what kind of history is it? It is, in Wilson’s thinking, a history that rides on the wings of the Divine; and such a history cannot help but ‘shift the human responsibility for thinking, for deciding, for acting.’ So much for the agency of social actors.

Revolutionary Romance Reined In Remembering the young doctor and his bride, you try to understand their need to put themselves behind the wheel of revolution. Theirs was a romance with discipline and devotion to duty. They were no doveeyed devotees of Mao and his ideas; nonetheless, they gave over to his exhortation of ‘Serve the people!’ which, in the Maoist dictum, stands for personal sacrifice. And there’s nothing more romantic than laying down one’s life before the altar of the grand mission. Self-sacrifice offered itself as a major trope for the extravagant demands the revolution expected of its followers. In Zhang Chun village, the near starvation and the dusk-todawn hard labour at the commune were taken to mean sacrifice, xisheng, a term that is another name for revolutionary spirit. Xisheng has its origin in religious worship, the making of offerings to appease the gods in the way of seeking their blessing. Sacrifice in the secular mode retains some of the mystical character of the original term, but connotes a form of political millennialism: communism was to realize a (socialist) paradise on earth. In the notion of sacrifice, revolution had found its justification for violence and bloodletting. From the newly married couple spending their honeymoon serving the sick, to the mythical PLA soldier pressing his breast against an enemy machine gun to save his comrades—they lifted the game of revolutionary struggle to the level of mythology. Eldest Sister-in-Law never speaks of her marriage in such terms, of course. Yet, when you dig deeper, it is clear that romance and the spirit of sacrifice had defined the rich significance of the couple’s lives and

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work. More than sacrifice, there was as well a touch of martyrdom. From romance to sacrifice to martyrdom, the telescope is reversed to bring into view the bigger picture of radical change. Private affection was wedded to revolutionary progress. Thinking thus, your mind is seized by a vertiginous torpor. With a single misstep, you find yourself deep in the rabbit hole: they are all there, the conspiracy of the heart, the urgency of history, the ever-expansive plot of a revolutionary romance.

The End of Romance Comrade Fung is in his eighties, a veteran of the Korean War. In 1950, at seventeen, he faked his age and joined the People’s Volunteer Army to fight in Korea. He lives in a village an hour’s drive from Zhang Chun; an introduction over the phone was followed by an invitation to visit him. I find Comrade Fung in a fresh army uniform, the epaulettes buttoned down, his chest decked full of medals; on his arm, a cloth armband announces, in Chinese: ‘Chinese People’s Volunteer Army.’ We shake hands, which prompts him to remove his cap, and run his fingers over the back of the neck: ‘I got hit here, and here, by a mortar.’ I thought I would die, many of my comrades were already killed. We fought like tigers, but our weapons were poor compared with the enemy. At the end of the battle only seven were left of my company. We were in a valley; the enemy descended from the heights, firing as they came. My comrades and I fixed bayonets, and prepared for hand-to-hand combat. Our artillery fired over the hills just in time, flattening the earth and the enemies before us. The tud, tud, tud sound of the shells was fierce, hurting my ears. I hugged the ground for dear life, holding onto my rifle …

Comrade Fung is loquacious and animated; despite his age, the memory holds. The story is stirring like an army press release; concise, heroic and full of bombast. Maybe that’s the only way such tales can be told. The battles were savage, and there were many acts of unbelievable bravery. His sergeant, the twenty-one-old Comrade Dong, charged at the machine gun with a satchel of explosive, killing himself and the enemy gunners. They had Russian bazookas but they were never enough, so a tank or an armoured vehicle would be similarly attacked with a satchel charge. They were aiding the Korean people, but they were also fighting for China’s existence. ‘It was right for us to cross the Yalu River to fight

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in Korea,’ Comrade Fung says. He adds, as though to convince himself of the worth of his and his comrades’ sacrifices, ‘Me and my comrades were volunteers, we were not forced to go. We never thought of ourselves as having wasted our lives.’ His wife had passed away a few years back. He lives on a small army pension and keeps in touch with other retired army veterans and their families. He has a son, an official at the provincial ministry; he’s married and the father has not seen him and his wife and child since the Lunar New Year six months ago. He talks of them casually, like filling in an official census form with family details. His voice is uncertain, with a note of indifference. Comrade Fung is not one for small talk. He takes a short breath, then leads me back to another loop of heroic feats—the annihilation of the enemy, the bravery of the PVA, the satchel charge. His opinions and recollections are raw, rough-hewn. And you are jostled by a singular thought: revolutionary romance takes different forms and different emotional forces; it propels human action. Comrade Fung’s incredible deeds on the Korean battlefield, the young doctor and his bride at the coalmine: they articulate revolutionary spirit at its most committed, at its most ‘beautiful’ and sublime.

The Revolutionary Sublime The elderly villagers in Zhang Chun describe vividly the cruelty and violence of the revolution. As you listen, there is a question in your head about how deeply they were involved and the kind of sympathy they express for the prosecuted. One or two have taken me to the execution site and speak movingly about the taking of lives by the party. But most depict the reform plainly, without controversy. They had to do what they were ordered to; it was a matter of survival. Yet, like a convert or a true believer, at the commune, they invariably put in extra to prove their revolutionary credentials. For these men and women, there were no grand speeches, only personal gestures. They were the first to go on stage during a struggle session to make an accusation; having the largest catch of sparrows and rats that ate up the grain in the field; to divorce an abusive husband of an old marriage. The common and most easily conspicuous activity was to report on your neighbour for badmouthing Chairman Mao or one of the party cadres. What drove it may have been a settling of scores, or the irrepressible revolutionary passion to dig out an enemy. Ratting on your neighbour—or your parent, your

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teacher—proved most radical because it was, in the standard of everyday judgement, excessive, what you should not do normally. Excessiveness and the unreasoned were the key. In the conditions of radical politics, moral norms were reversed, and personal betrayal became a progressive act. In the same vein, the executions were not killings, but the elimination of reactionary elements—a positive insurgent deed. Taking away the ideological justification, the violence and killing make for a good story, a rapturous celebration of a splendid enterprise. Ideology and historical necessity are not enough to plumb the depths of what happened, so it seems. Whether the young doctor and his bride, the teenage PVA trooper in the Korean battlefield or a farmer who was always the last to leave the field at the end of the day: each was in touch with something profound and affective. Each was immersed in the realm of passion and a state of feeling that is akin to what the philosopher Edmund Burke called the sublime. Romantic science, often called the second scientific revolution, took place at the end of the eighteenth century. If the first scientific revolution was based on the calculations and objectivity associated with Newton, Locke and Descartes, the second one brought about an emotional intensity and excitement in science. Closely associated with Romanticism, it was driven by ‘a common ideal of intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery.’6 Indeed, the aesthetic—the idea of beauty— came under the purview of science. Burke’s work addresses the sensuous perception of what is for a viewer beautiful and moving. Nature, he observes, is most evocative and beautiful, but it is also terrifying with its storms and gales and other awesome forces. Nature at its most beautiful thus carries two contrasting elements intimately linked with each other. For Burke, terror—or pain—compels one to feel the upmost one is capable of feeling. In his own words, Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.7

The sublime is the most awe-inspiring of feelings, but its source is terror—or pain, or danger. Since sublimity works through the senses, it is overwhelming and it has a way of escaping reason and rational thought.

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It is not too much to say Burke’s notion of the sublime speaks directly to the ‘causes’ of revolutionary romance. The use of the term ‘unreason’ is clumsy, but it shows up the psychological tenor, the unbridled passion expected of the politically devout. The Linfen doctor and his bride and the Korean War veteran: what prompted their magnificent acts was brimfull of significance that cannot be easily explained and explained away. Like the villager who ratted on his neighbour, their revolutionary passion was recruited from the vault of secrecy and one’s inner self. Something more intimate and visceral than historical necessity had hauled them in and besotted them. And what besotted them was a sign alluring and beautiful. Burke traced the sublime to the awe and terror that nature inspires; the revolutionary sublime takes a shot at the affecting dialectic of personal commitment and collective fear and dread. And what with the interrogations and executions, there was plenty of fear and dread to go around. The killing is like scything down the weeds, in the way of preparing the ground for socialism to grow and flourish. It is a poetics of the rustic folk; for them, revolutionary violence is the right hand of socialism’s rich abundance. ‘What benefited my life also benefited others,’ the villagers were told. Perhaps what Eldest Brother and Comrade Li discovered in the coal pit was more than professional work ethics, but the ‘communist sublime’ that enthralled them with its beauty and suffering. As for the terror, they had kept it to themselves. It was the Zhang Chun folk who were more revealing of that uneasy feeling that revolutionary violence was tinted with; if not beauty, a certain satisfaction and delight. They are wont to lament, ‘It’s a long time ago.’ The half-wilful forgetting is a reassessment, not the denying of the meaning of what they had done and participated in. Some gained land and improved their lives; some revenged the injustice that was done to them and their families. Again, the improvements and the righting of wrongs were carried not only through speeches and the party cadres’ grandstanding but also through the dispatching of life as a form of public ritual. Informants express regret at these events, but what happened had a wider meaning: ‘Life was so tough you can’t imagine. We never had enough to eat, and I had two pairs of trousers, one pair all patched up for working, and the good one I put away for special occasions.’ The turmoil and brutal measures of fanshen, the changing destiny of peasants, needs no further justification. The ethnographer is enchanted, and his family’s revolutionary sin is evoked. The past is brought alive,

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and the ‘revolutionary sublime’ loops and coils around the present like an eternal celebration of a once majestic undertaking.

Notes 1. The meeting is described in greater length in Chapter 5. 2. E. H. Carr, What Is History? London: Penguin, 2008, p. 9. 3. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station. New York: New York Review of Books, 2003. 4. Ibid., p. viii. 5. Ibid. 6. Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder. New York: Patheon Books, 2009, p. 2. 7. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909, p. 20.

Bibliography Burke, Edmund. 1909. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: P.F. Collier & Son. Carr, E. H. 2008. What Is History? London: Penguin. Richard, Holmes. 2009. The Age of Wonder. New York: Patheon Books. Wilson, Edmund. 2003. To the Finland Station. New York: New York Review of Books.

CHAPTER 9

Soft Trauma

The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess. —Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995)

Before I arrived, Eldest Sister-In-Law had booked me in the five-star Jindu Garden Grand Hotel with an indoor swimming pool, two restaurants, executive lounge and business centre. She believed that this is where I should stay. It took some wrangling to convince her I would rather lodge with her in her austere apartment of the Mao era. I move in and the transition is startling. For here in the neighbourhood is the hot, searing tempo of life: the narrow lane packed with little shops; the kindergarten across the street, the children’s sing-song full of joy; a slew of stationers where a copy of the 1952 edition of Lu Xun’s essays can be had for 10 RMB; and further down, the wet market is of such abundance as to shame the great deprivation a generation ago. Why do you take easily to the place? Why does the apartment of grey concrete façades and dark staircases fill you with a strange stirring? The morning after my first night here, I get up feeling like the communist-apparatchik mother in the film Good Bye Lenin! (2003). After falling into a coma just before the unification of the two Germanys, she wakes up to a post-communist world while her mind is still marooned in the past. Comrade Daozu, my Eldest Sister-in-Law, has her ‘Ostalgie,’ nostalgia for the East—except the ‘East’ for her was China before the Deng reform, before the ‘capitalism with © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 S. Yao, Gifts to the Sad Country, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1598-5_9

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Chinese characteristics’ altered people’s lives. In the morning, the rustic décor—the aged sofa, the Hong Kong movie star calendar, wet clothes on hangers by the doorway, the display cabinet and its hoard of photo albums and China plates and bottles of Moutai—exudes the modest existence of another era. The apartment had been built to provide a worker’s family with modest comfort and security. It feels honest and practical. She is attached to her ancient apartment, which for her is a symbol of loyalty to her husband and the past they had shared but left behind in a whirlwind of changes. Linfen is a city of about a million people, small by the standard of Chinese cities. Nonetheless, with a view of future demand, several four and five-star hotels have been built in the metropolitan area. Economic growth and prosperity are evident; together with the grand hotels, office blocks, shopping malls and condominiums adorn the city skyline. I thought of Comrade Daozu’s apartment as a remnant from a bygone era. Actually, apartments like this, having escaped the earth excavator, are still found in many cities. They sit cheek-by-jowl with the shops and stores and offices and make themselves a feature of the urban streetscape. For people who live in one, these apartments are special. Comrade Daozu lived here with her husband through the political upheavals, so who would blame her for holding dear to the place? Others, including her children, are like emigrants, they have a certain view of the world they have abandoned. To them, the past is decay and an old apartment elicits the fear that they may get trapped and never leave. Each time I visit my eldest nephew’s condominium, the thought echoes in my head: the residence is not only a socio-economic upgrade, it is also an alleviation of dread: ‘I have finally left the old, decrepit world of my parents and there’s no looking back.’ It is the classic middle-class consumption: buying a new apartment is a privilege, a blessing. For the same reason, consumption is also aligned to a sense of crisis. A high-rise apartment, a new car or a holiday home on subtropical Hainan Island has the import of overcompensation. In contemporary China, the deprivations are gone, and the wretchedness of yesteryears is redeemed by purchases and goods.

Scissor-Cut Noodles Suffering and death mitigated by the pleasure of reunion lie thick in ethnography. The writerly task feels dissonant: the recollection of hardship and the contemporary delight—two themes jousting for dominance, like

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quarrelsome twins. I still have a certain image of the homeland, but the welcoming dinners come across as a show-off, a reminder that even simple folk can afford to entertain in a restaurant. There have been several invitations, and tonight’s dinner is hosted by Eldest Sister-in-Law’s brother, and the guests include Colonel Liu and his wife, old friends of the family. I am being taken to try Shanxi’s famous dish: scissor-cut noodles. At the Three Sisters Noodle House, a small kitchen has been set up near the reception bench to demonstrate the ancient art of slicing noodles. I watch the presiding chef: each flick of the open scissors produces a piece of dough that falls into a cauldron of boiling water. It calls for timing and an even hand. He ladles up the pastry, after draining off the water, then fries it with pork or beef with garlic and spring onion before serving the customers at their tables. The restaurant has spared no effort in elevating the dish, to make it worthy of its reputation as a Shanxi speciality. The waitresses wear tight, red, embroidered qipao; the glamorous Miss Chen Li Li Chen, the guzheng player, entertains us with Spring at the Snowy Mountain, Xue Shan Chun Xiao, a lyrical celebration of winter’s end. When the bowls of noodles arrive, your reaction is a kind of deflation: the efforts have not altered the dish, it retains its humble origin. For this rice-eating ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia, everything about the dish is out of sync: it is a daytime dish eaten as dinner, and it is a hawker food consumed to the sound of ancient music. Southern China has its culinary tradition—shark-fin soup, roast piglet and morning dim sum renowned for their variety and hand-made freshness. Linfen is situated in China’s hardy northwest, and, befitting of the geography, modest wheat noodles have entered the menus of top restaurants. To me, a bowl of scissor-cut noodles may be a parody, but it is a dish that deconstructs itself and reveals the matter-of-fact practicality of the Shanxi people. Colonel Liu and his wife are old retired army officers. They are dressed in designer quilted jackets, their faces sparkle with heath, their demeanour firm yet approachable—they have the confidence of people accustomed to giving orders. I know Eldest Brother has kept a wide connection with people in government, and my sister-in-law has faithfully kept the custom. My return is an occasion for her to introduce her brother-in-law, a man who earns a good wage at a foreign university. Courteous and gracious, the Lius listen as I act out the ritual of modesty, ‘Ah, teaching is a chalkeater’s life, hours are long and there’s no money in it.’ Then I ask: How are they spending their retirement? Everyone is busily eating, and the

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words get lost. As though to execute a shortcut, the colonel thrusts a phone to my face and starts flicking through the screen. The blessed life of the Lius is laid bare before your eyes: their son and his wife and the grandchild, the old army friends, their wedding anniversary, the colonel’s 70th birthday dinner, the one-year-old Toyota Fortuner SUV, the holiday in Thailand. It is a dazzling impression of contentment and riches. Such is the nature of our digital lives: you are expected to eat and view the pictures at the same time. As though leaving the best till last, the colonel’s finger stabs at an image: ‘This is our holiday home in Hainan Island. Do people have holiday homes in Australia?’

Holiday Home on Hainan Island Each time I go back to China, I try to catch up with the doings of the CCP, the latest government policy, the corruption scandals and the ups and downs of the Shenzhen Index. The scandals and dark gossip engross me less than the economic news. I have read things on the internet, but what people actually say enthrals me. Life under President Xi is good and bad, mostly good; and for my informants what is good elicits a sense of envy. The booming economy has raised expectations, and the feeling that ‘I should share what others are enjoying.’ When people talk about corruption, there is anger but rarely moral outrage. My informants are ordinary folks, deep in their minds they believe they too deserve a piece of the action. Influence and access to the wealthy and the influential are not available to everyone; the art of guanxi is complex.1 Those from the era of Land Reform and collectivization are the generation called Mao’s Children. Born in the fifties, they grew up through the upheaval, they have had enough of the ideological exhorting. They are exhausted, what with the sacrifice and the moral high ground that the revolution had expected of them. In this environment, corruption has taken on a different meaning, and the bitter memory of wants deserves a reckoning. So they turn to a consoling thought: if we cannot reverse the past—all those wasted years—let us embrace the present and what it offers. The colonel and his wife bought the seaside apartment straight after retirement, I learn as I sit in their bright, comfortable apartment in Jiefeng Lu—Liberation Road, China is full of such commemorations in the cities—Linfen. By all accounts, to own a holiday home to escape the brutal winter is extraordinary, when many struggle to save in order to buy their first home. ‘We got a bit of savings, and we sold some bonds and

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shares,’ he tells me. ‘The rest we borrowed from the bank; an army friend is on the board of directors, so that helped a good deal.’ The Lius are in their mid-sixties and grew up in Linfen. They didn’t mind the pollution or the traffic, and they had wanted to stay in Linfen to be near their son and his family and their old army friends. The reality is that as they get older, winter becomes hard to bear. The gale from the Mongolian desert at the north eats into their bones. When people have money, they tend to go out and buy a new car, take an overseas holiday, or help their son or daughter to purchase an apartment. But the Lius have done all that. We are elderly people, and we are constantly made aware that we are living a new, changing world. Everything is different from when we were young. To eat to fullness is no longer anything to celebrate. We want to be like the young people, to try new things, to find new ways to spend the money we have earned. You are an educated man, a reader of books; you surely know what I mean. In our minds, we knew that to buy a house only for the warmer climate seems outrageous. I mean, the house would be empty much of the year, and we have spent a lot of money on refitting it to make it comfortable. But that’s old thinking. Why do we do still scrimp and worry about everything [like the old days]? The revolution had made us very timid. My friends say: Maybe those troubling days will return, who’s to say they won’t? They are living in a prison, always worrying and in fear of the old days. But my wife and I refuse to think like this. It is an investment, but mostly we were thinking about our health, our comfort.

What he says is a string of justifications. And there’s a certain charm when winter is used as a verb. To winter is to escape, to gather family and friends and plant them in a warm and congenial place—like, in reverse, a Chekhov or a Tolstoy decamping with his entourage to the summer dacha to avoid the heat. I get the colonel to show me the pictures again. The apartment has two bedrooms, each with a bathroom, a modern kitchen and the balcony has a sea view. It covers an area of about 65 square metres, for which he and his wife paid 1.2 million RMB in 2012. Listening to him, and browsing through the brochure they had retained, you are besotted with real estate-speak. The luxurious living, the golden beach cuddled by the stretch of coconut palms, the golf course that apartment owners can access with a modest subscription fee: these features are so much tourist cliché, reminiscent of a Florida retirement home. The agent has assured them they can expect at least five per cent growth in value per year. They

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brought their son’s family and their army friends there, and everyone had a good time; the place is worth the money just for that. One day, aware of my interest in the colonel, Eldest Sister-in-Law gives me the news, ‘The colonel and his wife have sold their apartment [in Hainan]; did you know?’ So the idea of the winter home has not worked out. Their son is busy and he can’t bring his family every winter, and Hainan is a long way for their ageing comrades in Linfen. It had been an idea that sounded better in thought than in reality. In the end, the husband and wife have decided they would prefer to stay in Linfen; the seaside pleasure cannot replace the warmth of family and friends.

Commodity Fetishism A singular notion is burrowed deep in the case of the Lius’ winter apartment. In Marxism, commodity fetishism elevates the hard economic relations as the core of production, casting aside the social organization of labour power in the making of things. It is shot through with reification—when commodities are seen as ‘super-real’ like a fetish for tribal worshipers, free from the social aspects of production. In short, the economy is set against the social and the communal; the oppressive and the exploitive against what is existentially fulfilling. The denial of the social nature of things is ipso facto fetishistic because it gives them an unreal, magical quality in the minds of consumers. For the author of Capital, the endgame of commodity fetishism is a comprehensive depersonalization of social and economic life under capitalism. Marx was writing in his own time; the concept is driven by the old anthropology of fetishes and stupefied natives. So defined, the commodity is alluring and invites adoration. But even that is giving commodity a stable, recognizable form it does not have. If the native approaches a fetish with awe and dread, the modern parallel is a consumer and their latest purchase—when you imagine the enchantment and the satisfaction the good affords. A commodity does not stay still. Consumption and the goods desired: the union devours what lies in its path, each move spins out another bout of ‘coupling and decoupling,’ another around of ‘dazzling epistemological somersaults.’2 So you ruminate on the nature of commodity: it tends to morph into fetishism and incites a certain fantasy, and over-imagines the redemptive power of its consumption. Lucky for the Lius, they have the foresight to sell. Doubts arose that the purchase might not have been a wise decision after all. The prospect

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of making a killing in real estate, as the agents had promised, became more and more remote. And the distance and separation from their son and grandchild soon set in. Good sense and love for the family have saved them from the capricious moneyed-world. Still, this is not a typical story in present-day China. It merely shows that one can escape the rabbit hole of consuming desire. The fantasy of gain in post-Deng China is pervasive, taking hold of people’s minds like insect stings on their skin. If the state cannot tune down the extravagant optimism of the stock exchange, it is harder still to do so for people with their real estate and designer goods.

In the Moneyed-World We are in my sister-in-law’s kitchen waiting for her children to come for lunch. Like her parents, the eldest, a daughter, is a health professional. Yao Hua Yan is a senior nurse in Linfen People’s Hospital where her parents also worked before they retired. The younger child is a son, an accountant at the city council. The brother and sister are model mid-level public servants, conscientious in their jobs and earning good wages. Each owns a car (a Volkswagen Polo and a Citroen C5 Sedan), and both have bought condominiums in the same gated community to be near each other. The accountant nephew Yao Zhong Li has married well. The wife attended the prestigious Beijing University of Chinese Medicine and is the resident Chinese herbalist in the same hospital as her sister-in-law. Secure and happy in her job, she is a loving partner to her, at times, erratic husband. The daughter Hong Xiu, in her second year in high school, is good at maths and the sciences and hopes to study engineering in Shanghai. I am drawn to the family: they are fun-loving, secure in their government positions and relaxed in their modest prosperity. The daughter Hua Yan, being the eldest, is the head of the family, with the mother ageing and easily getting tired. She is formal, officious, and you secretly hold her responsible for the one too many scissor-cut noodle dinners held in your honour. Her husband is a PLA man, who likes to corner you for a rave about politics and scandals in the CCP’s inner circles. Of the nephew and niece, one is happy and content, one troubled by something I am not sure of. Hua Yan’s half-hearted investment in the role of the dutiful daughter, the sickly, bookish husband pushing towards retirement and the social absence of their son: they all have a strange hold

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on your mind. With all families, unhappiness hints at conflict, betrayal and disappointment, while jollity is merely banal and shorn of the dramatic. A few days back, I told Hua Yan I wanted to meet the whole family as I had brought gifts for everyone. Lunch over, we gather in the sitting room: Eldest Sister-in-law gets a bundle of RMB; her son and the son-inlaw both receive a designer clutch bag; her daughter and daughter-in-law are given gold jewellery, with the instruction: ‘For you to pawn when you want to run away from your husband!’ I have heard the joke from a Tamil woman in Malaysia, it is the first time I tried it out at a family gathering in China. They laugh, sort of. Hua Yan says thank you and puts away the earrings, then she takes my hand: ‘Come and meet my son. You are an educated man, please talk to him.’ I have been so caught up with the parlour games that I’ve forgotten the young man at the coffee table reading a magazine. The young man who is to receive my mature wisdom is the embodiment of cool. He gets up, shakes my hand and drops me his name card, then steps back as though to wait for my reaction. He wears a black suit over a black polo shirt, a gold chain below the neck, a pair of sunglasses tucked in the breast pocket; I recognize in him the Chinese ‘gangster chic’—the loose-limbed, tough-eyed elegance of the post-Cultural Revolution generation left rudderless by the Deng reforms. I take a glance at his card; it says: Li Ai Bing, Senior Loan Officer, Lian Ning Finance Company, Taiyuan, Shanxi Province. His mother has left us, and we dance the awkward dance of two divided by age and temperament. We are related, but time and emigration have made us strangers. Li is in his early twenties; he is quietly assertive and seems to have a fractured view of the world. He says he is happy in his job, but he is looking for opportunities, zhao ke ji hui, a phrase I hear many times among young people. The introduction over, he gets up and begins his restless shuffling. I give him the present—a chunky gold ring of some value—and we make a time to meet in Taiyuan where he works.

Capitalist Fantasy Sitting opposite me at the restaurant, he looks tired. It has been a long day, he says, all the phone calls, the reports to write, the manager breathing down his neck and the equally stressed co-workers. The business card says he is a Senior Loan Officer, but ‘Senior’ does not mean anything in a company where all the staff are senior. If this is the owner

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Mr. Xu’s worker-friendly gesture, it is also designed to save costs. Given the same rank, even the receptionist and accountant have to go out to sell loans and recruit customers. Ai Bing speaks rapidly as if he has to get his grievances out before they throttle him. His parents had described him as broody, finding it difficult to settle down. They complain that he changes jobs, each lasting for a year or so; Lian Ning Finance Company is his fourth employer. And he goes through girlfriends like ‘scattering flowers to the wind,’ his father says. It is an unhappy situation: he shows little drive and ambition, and the job change is no way to ensure a good career path. ‘We had to do something,’ the mother has said to me. ‘It couldn’t go on like this. So we thought we would get him to join the PLA—to learn discipline, to settle him down—and to make connections.’ To everyone’s surprise, he agreed. The parents called on Colonel Liu, who made the introduction. The son entered the army at age eighteen. They thought, if he was unable to get into university with his poor marks, the military would be a good career choice. As a conscript, he would be given an allowance, and after two years, if he chooses to stay, he would become a non-commissioned officer with a better salary. Besides, a short stint in the army would build social connections among the officers and soldiers, which he could utilize when he had served his term and joined the private sector. The parents’ ploy evidently worked. He left the PLA with a new person. After a series of jobs, he found a position with Lian Ning Finance Company and stayed there. And much to the parents’ delight, he has acquired a steady girlfriend, an owner of a hairdressing salon, though there has been no talk of engagement or marriage. I got all of this from his parents, but you suspect the facts may be less tidy and straightforward. ‘Each time my parents said I should study computer science or engineering—there had been other suggestions—I immediately clamped down. I didn’t want to work with computers. I was not open to the suggestion because I was not sure. The fear was not just about taking up a profession I am not interested in, but for being imprisoned in a job, any job. I am in this finance company now, but I still don’t know what I want to do. Everything I tried seemed to shut me in, and I couldn’t breathe. You know what I mean?’ Then he turns to the fatal words about our forefathers. Like them, he feels restless and unsettled. ‘When I am in a job, I feel trapped. But when I am not working, it is not freedom that I feel, but a kind of emptiness.’

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In his heart, he says, he wants to be successful, to make his parents happy, to get married—all the normal things people want for themselves. His exarmy friends are doing well, earning good money, most are married, some have their own businesses; he wants what they have achieved. In the end, I asked him by way of encouragement, ‘I know you are in finance now. Do you have other plans?’ Putting down his tea cup, he opens his briefcase and releases from it some sheets of paper and a cardboard cut-out. He lays them out on the table. The sheets are instructions in neat handwriting, and the cardboard, when assembled, becomes a sort of receptacle. His voice is want of despondency, ‘I have been working on this for a while, it is only a prototype at the moment.’ Folded up like a hat, the invention consists of two compartments, one big and one small, and it sits steadily on the table. ‘Guess what it is,’ his voice is proud yet taciturn. Impatient for me to make my guess, he cradles it in the fold of his hands and volunteers the reply: ‘It is a takeaway container for restaurants.’ ‘Why are there two compartments?’ ‘The big compartment is for food, the smaller one for soup,’ he explains. The answer opens a dam of questions in your head. A food container, it surely requires a special coating for the inner surfaces. The section for soup has to have a waterproof lining to prevent leaking. The overall design still lacks the handle for the delivery person. The cardboard container has got me, having worked in a Chinese takeaway as a student, into the design issues. In defence, he reminds me it is only a prototype. ‘There are still details to be worked out. You see, presently there is no single food container that can carry soup as well.’ And he adds, ‘If the restaurants would take it up—I mean, there are thousands and thousands of them all over China, can you imagine how much money there is? All I need is to find someone to invest in the project.’ It is imagination unbound; it is a capitalist fantasy. And like all fantasies, it is driven by desire: the simple invention would rake in millions. I admit to some measure of admiration—for the young man’s daring, for his ability to think big. Still, having heard it, I feel I should not pass it on to the parents. The husband and wife, like the son, deserve their illusions too.

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‘Only the Distant Happiness’ The contestants in China Star, the country’s answer to The X Factor, are pop wannabes, their offerings stay safely in the easy listening genre; saccharine and uncontroversial. The 2016 event included a sixty-year-old, named Yang Le, who went on stage to sing his own composition. ‘Only the Distant Happiness’ was similarly sentimental to the usual repertoire, but what stood out was its subject. The lyrics recounted the suffering of his family during the Cultural Revolution: ‘When I was young we were a family of six … My father was handsome, mum was young and beautiful. After the Cultural Revolution only five of us were left.’3 ‘When his lament-filled, taboo-breaking performance ended, Yang bit his lower lip. Applause rippled through the theatre; the judges leapt to their feet; tears streamed down cheeks,’ the Guardian Newspaper reported. Yang Le’s father, Wang Yuguo, a lecturer in industrial economy at Beijing’s prestigious Renmin University, was one of the estimated two million people who lost their lives during the upheaval. The father was persecuted and he killed himself by jumping from the roof of a university building. ‘At Renmin University you heard of professors killing themselves every day. It was horrible. I would hear someone crying and we would wonder who was crying and whose family was suffering those bad things,’ the son said in the interview with the newspaper. The father’s suicide devastated the family. His mother sold the family’s belongings to feed the children. Yang Le’s three siblings were sent to the countryside for re-education. The last straw was when the mother remarried and moved to Jiangxi province in the south. ‘She felt sad. But she had no choice,’ Yang Le said. He believed the father had been interrogated and beaten before he was found dead in December 1968 at the age of 39. ‘I heard they used shoes to beat my father in the face. He felt humiliated. He couldn’t stand it.’ Yang Le has evidently survived. He left China after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and went on to study at the Schola Cantorum de Paris. A classically trained flutist with a love for Mahler, he wanted to take music beyond entertainment, as a ‘way of inspiring listeners to confront painful truths.’ Historians are wont to suggest the CCP has been brutally effective in crushing people’s memory of the catastrophic event. However, the audience outpouring over Yang Le’s performance would suggest that many have not forgotten; the pain persists. To an extent, historians are right. As Frank Dikötter is quoted in the Guardian article, ‘I think [the suppression of memory] does leave scars. That does leave a society that is

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very traumatised by who did what to whom without any sense of redress or justice.’ There’s a lot to take in. Using a television show to vent public grievances is a stroke of genius. You get the audience, you get to use a mass entertainment platform to raise a historical issue that is all too often stamped out by the state. It appeals to the audience’s sympathy, many of whom had suffered as the singer had, and it releases the emotional pain the nation still carries. Viewed this way, the singing competition becomes a public ritual that helps to heal the collective wound. The country under the CCP has nothing like post-apartheid South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or Rwanda’s National Unity and Reconciliation Commission formed after the genocide, but it has China Star and other X Factor imitators. The political life in contemporary China is complex and sometimes hard to pin down. Mao was ‘70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong,’ and the state socialism is ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.’ Nonetheless, it is not all propaganda that makes many people support the CCP. In a social encounter, when people profess love for the Chairman and the good the CCP have done for the country, you do well not to give over to total dismissal. ‘These difficult times,’ zhege nian tou, as people like to say, or what you identify as history fatigue—these are ways of managing a lifeworld that is puzzling and contradictory. In Zhang Chun village, people’s memory is brim-full of death and suffering. Given the brutal past, and with the state’s suppression, who would blame them if the villagers too, like the China Star performer Yang Le, approach the present with anxiety and a heightened imagination?

Emotional Conduit If Colonel Liu and my relation Li Ai Bing were victims of capitalist fantasy, it is also true a lot was invested in what they had purchased or planned for. For the colonel and his wife, the winter home in Hainan was a source of pride, a final arrival after a lifetime of service in the army. With the young Ai Bing, directionless in life and work, he was eventually led to a ‘capitalist scheme’ of some prospects. As for the villagers in Zhang Chun, there is recognizably plenty of consuming behaviour. You are impressed with their new phones, the recently bought fridges, the quick flash of the WeChat payment app at the shops, and, of course, the ever-popular Hong Kong-style restaurant at the Red Sky Hotel in Chayang town. You are keen to make something of the feverishness, the

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unwarranted zeal with which people approach their purchases. These are signs of prosperity, and the purchases have released them from their years of deprivation. Each time you sit in their sitting rooms before a brand new 50-inch television, or when you are invited to another dim sum breakfast at the Red Sky Hotel, you have a sense of people making up for the lost time, of compensating for some real or imaginary want. And you wonder: If the past is packed with painful memories, where do the recollections go? Where in the mind’s recesses do they reside and from where do they seek release? The China Star performer has shown that the Maoist past still torments the living, but this is a means of expression not available to everyone. Knowing the ruling conditions, in a political environment with few options, you wonder if consumption is not the conduit that channels the pain of historical wrongs unaddressed. Consumption, as it deploys the potency of commodity fetishism, seduces and blinds, just as it pleases and mystifies. With this insight, the conjecture of the alluring power of consumption looks increasingly feasible.

Recollections Among the villagers, some shed tears over the suffering, many seem to talk about it with heartless detachment. Yet, the miracle is that people remember. Events that took place decades ago appear to affect them still. And the acts of recollection do not happen in any ostensible way; they happen unexpectedly. You are unaware of how common they are until you witness them yourself. Aided by your reading, you become an amateur detective of the unconscious. You are sitting in the small, functional apartment of Comrade Zhao and his wife. On retirement, they had sold their plot of land in the village and moved to Chayang to enjoy their twilight years. The morning autumn light is cheerful, and Mrs. Zhao has laid out the rice cakes and tea. We have been talking for a whole week—with time on their hands, retirees are good informants—and they have filled you in on the terror and the clandestine domestic joy during the Great Leap Forward. In their bedroom, at midnight, they had shut the windows and prepared chicken steamed in ginger and wine over a charcoal cooker. The husband and wife snigger when they call up the event: the whole family snuggled around the cooker; the sheer joy of it, the warm, juicy dish being enjoyed free from the neighbours’ prying eyes.

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We are in the midst of a happy evocation. Then everything happens instantaneously: a sharp noise in the street, Comrade Zhao jerks a few inches from his chair, then as though regretting his action, settles back. His wife moves over and rests her hands on his shoulder. It is a flash of mise-en-scène: the noise, the alarm, the return to normal posture, the wife’s soothing hands. The noise is nothing more than a car backfiring, a second or two of it. We try to return to the tea and cake, but the mood has gone. The flow of the conversation is impeded. Mrs. Zhao says, ‘That’s nothing, really. Lao Zhao is like that—he doesn’t like loud noises.’

Soft Trauma Here is a bit of physiology. In hearing, the sound goes through the brain and the network of nerves to reach the ear. It is a journey of muscular function and the system of neurons, and of course, the auditory stimulus which is another name for sound. The elements work in perfect partnership to make you hear. In human physiology, acoustic startle reflex (ASR) refers to the apprehension to sounds of more than 80 decibels. Above that level, the human subject responds instantly, alarmedly. Normal talking is between 40 and 60 dB; a rock concert reaches beyond the startling mark, up to 140 dB near the speakers.4 For the average person, ASR is necessary and useful; it warns the listener of the danger in the vicinity. The reflex is a warning system that has evolved through evolution, a part of our survival mechanism. What makes it work is the linking of sharp noise to the alarm. This is in ordinary circumstances; but when you are spun around over something that occurred in the past or is evoked in memory, the connection is short-circuited. You are in fright over an event that happened years or decades ago. Trauma has its origin in a risky event and how it is remembered. History, memory and ‘over-response’ mark out the nature of trauma. The literary theorist Cathy Caruth writes, … most descriptions [of the traumatic], generally agree that there is a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event.

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This simple definition belies a very peculiar fact: the pathology cannot be defined either by the event itself—which may or may not be catastrophic, and may not traumatize everyone equally—nor can it be defined in terms of a distortion of the event, achieving its haunting power as a result of distorting personal significances attached to it.5

It is irony above irony. The traumatized person is compelled to ‘remember’ the catastrophic event, and yet she must avoid the emotional impact of it. She is pained by an event or its image, yet she is compelled to revisit it. Against her will, the traumatized person must return endlessly to the originating experience. In this fashion, trauma is experienced, not only as distortion but also as something affirmed by the senses here and now, months or years or decades after the event. Despite the distance of time and place, the experience is, for the traumatized pressingly real. What floods into her present recollection is imbued with ‘literality and [a] nonsymbolic nature.’6 A person thus damaged cannot help going back to the past any more than she can truly ‘live’ in the present that torments her. ASR is free from these multiple contradictions. The reflex is triggered by something real that happens mere seconds ago. As you would normally do, you cease the startling when the sharp noise has ceased. In contrast, what invites Comrade Zhao’s response is an illusion—the sound is of a car backfiring, not of a gunshot. But for an instant he has returned to the execution ground where landlords and Nationalist bad eggs were killed; the gap of time and place is breached and he is behaving like one traumatized. Trauma proper is pathological, a wrought response to a real event that often spins into fantasy. With Comrade Zhao, he is decidedly traumatic behaviour. But he recovers almost instantly. His symptoms are mild, and a few comforting words and a soothing massage on the shoulders are enough to restore him. Management is the key; civility and good manners make sure both the afflicted and their families keep their normal relationships. This form of trauma deserves another name. Soft trauma, it may be called, is intricate, socially considered and amenable to self-management and the support of loved ones.

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The Bigger Picture China may not be a nation of trauma, like Rwanda or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which experienced killings on a genocidal scale; it is seemingly suffering from the garden variety of it. Hard or soft, an affliction of this kind does not easily heal. We are speaking about personal suffering and its collective, national incarnations. The fact is the Chinese state does not have a clear plan about how to account for its revolutionary excesses. Mao is regarded as having been ‘70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong’ is a kind of compromise, but does describe his true legacy. There are other reasons: the saying holds up the Chairman’s position as the founder of Socialist China and satisfies the CCP’s own need for legitimacy. People I met speak of ‘those terrible years,’ but rarely about Mao himself and his moral failures. The China Star performer Yang Le has wisely detached Mao from the misery that the Cultural Revolution brought upon his family. But then, the issue is not only around Mao; the transitions from Mao to Deng to the current President Xi Jinping are lodged in a foggy terrain of misinformation and glorification. With the state management of history, the collective memory and the informants’ own assessment of the revolution, the past has become a trauma: stressful and overbrimmed with unresolved feelings. In a sense, the gawky ‘soft trauma’ suggests nothing more than the contingency, the making do, that typifies people’s approach to their lifework. Life in post-Deng China is anxious. I remember my niece, with tears in her eyes, telling me she had got her son into the PLA, for the singular purpose of building relationships that would be useful in life and in business. I was dismayed by what the people’s army has become, but more so by the caring apprehension with which she had planned for her son. Not only life but consumption, too, is glossed with a kind of fretfulness. Each pick of the chopsticks is to announce how well we are doing, each purchase of a car, or an overseas holiday is to make up for what we did not have in the past. It is as if by overspending the apocalyptic vision of the past and the uneasy present can be calmed and arrested. What happens in Zhang Chu village and in Linfen city is a smaller version of what happens in the nation. The idea of ‘the traumatic,’ once we go beyond the modish psychologizing, best sums up the stressful urgency of the China Story. Mao had the concept of perpetual revolution: the nation is under constant siege by the capitalist roaders and reactionaries, a siege that only a periodic

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revolutionary awakening can lift. China’s modification and ideological degrading of both socialism and capitalism, too, work with a feverish pace and imagining. Both socialism and capitalism—appendaged with ‘Chinese characteristics’—have to be fostered. Mass consumption, real estate investment and speculative trading of stocks are the keys to the system, much like in the liberal capitalist West. However, overspending as a national ethos is a sucker’s game. If overspending is a sign of prosperity and individual wealth, it is also highly risky. The risk is not because of the uncertainty of return or the failure of your investment. Consumption, excessive and extravagant, is driven by desire, less by utility. As the marketing cliché goes: people are made to buy what they want, not what they need. What people need has a narrow horizon, what they want is just about limitless. I think of Colonel Liu’s winter home in Hainan Island: it started with need then gradually moved to want—the lure of investment returns; it is the denial of want that saved him. The meditation has turned the ethnographer into a financial puritan or a Dickensian stooge. The endless dinners become an imposition, and people talking about their new purchases make you cringe. What you witness are the profound emanations of history and your mind registers: decades on, things are not resolved, and the terrible years live on.

Notes 1. See Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. 2. Taussig, Michael, “History as Commodity in Some Recent American (Anthropological) Literature.” Food and Foodways, 2 (1), 1987, pp. 151–69 (p. 153). 3. The Guardian, Reality Show Singer Breaks China’s Cultural Revolution Taboo, 5 April 2016. 4. For an instructive read on this issue, see The Mount Sinai Health System, https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/selfcare-instru ctions/hearing-loss-and-music. 5. Cathey Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995, p. 4. 6. Ibid., p. 5.

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Bibliography Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Taussig, Michael. 1987. “History as Commodity in Some Recent American (Anthropological) Literature.” Food and Foodways 2 (1): 151–69. Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. 2016. Gifts, Favors, and Banquets. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Internet Resources The Guardian, Reality Show Singer Breaks China’s Cultural Revolution Taboo, 5 April 2016. The Mount Sinai Health System, https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/ selfcare-instructions/hearing-loss-and-music.

Index

A Acoustic startle reflex (ASR), 154 Ancestral mansion and architecture, 51–52 Ang, Ien, 7

B Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 52 Barthesian myth, 25 Bauman, Zygmunt, 119 Blanchot, Maurice on the everyday, 113 Burke, Edmund and romantic science or second scientific revolution, 137 and the sublime, 138

C Capitalist fantasy, 148, 150, 152 Carr, E.H. What Is History?, 126, 139 Caruth, Cathy, 154–155 Chayang, 20–22, 38

China Star TV show, 151 Chun, Allen, 7 Commodity fetishism, 146 Conrad, Joseph, 121

D Diaspora and ethnic Chinese in Malaysia, 9–10 and gifts, 7, 71–87 and letters, 73–75 and mobility, 6, 10 and rules of gift giving, 75–77 the narrative of, 4, 78

E Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, 61

G Good Bye Lenin and Ostalgie, 141 Gungwu, Wang

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 S. Yao, Gifts to the Sad Country, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1598-5

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on Overseas Chinese and Chinese Overseas, 7–10 H Holiday home on Hainan Island, 144 J Judt, Tony, 10 K Kafka, ‘An Imperial Message’, 71–72 Koestler, Arthur Darkness at Noon, 96–98 L Land Reform, 20, 21 execution, 29, 30 fanshen, 27 public trial, 29 Love and modern China, 45–46 Lu, Xun ‘My Old Home’, 54, 60

P Patriarchy, 61–62 and women’s position in traditional China, 61 Post-Chinese identities, 7

R Raban, Jonathan, 116 Revolution and interrogation, 58 and use of history, 30–32 Revolution and trauma, 154–155 Revolutionary romance, 133–136, 138 Roth, Joseph, 11, 12

S Scissor-cut noodles, 142, 143 Shenzhen, 112 and food delivery system, 112 Shih, Shu-mei, 8 Shuike, an itinerant courier, 39 Soft trauma, 154–155 Steiner, George on translation, 5–7

M Malaysia and Communist China, 6 and the Cold War, 6 Mao’s Children, 114 Mao Zedong and revolution, 101 Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China 1950, 63–66 Memory of suffering, 151 Migration as translation, 5–7

T Taussig, Michael and fetishism of history, 82 The Great Leap Forward, 20, 21, 23, 25, 30, 91 The money world of post-Deng China, 156 The revolutionary sublime, 136, 138

N Nanyang (the South Seas) and opium and prostitution, 55 Nanyang (the South Seas), 55–56

W Wilson, Edmond To the Finland Station, 134 Woolf, Virginia, 118

INDEX

X Xiandai, the Chinese modern, 116–118

Z Zhang Chun Village, 19–32 and the land issue, 35–38

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