Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival

6.

For educated Chinese people, the late 1910s and early 1920s was a period of intense ideological exploration and political agitation. Both inside and outside China, all sorts of groups were vying to influence the minds of China’s future élite. The Chinese student communities in France were no exception.

The “Diligent Work and Frugal Study in France Movement” (留法勤工俭学运动), or “Work Study Movement,” was originally launched by a group of Chinese anarchists as a scheme both to enable Chinese students to study in France at low cost and to practice certain social ideals. The three men who started the movement, Li Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, and Zhang Jingjiang (also known as Zhang Renjie), were known to their friends as the “Three Paris Musketeers.” They had studied and lived in Paris together during the 1900s, admired France as the center of Western enlightenment and humanism, and were especially impressed by the radical writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus, and Jean Grave. Eager to spread their newfound faith in the anarchist philosophy of cooperative self-governance, the Musketeers published a magazine, Xin Shiji (New Century), to introduce anarchist thought to Chinese readers. The magazine printed, among other works, the Chinese translation of Kropotkin’s classic treatise, Mutual Aid.

Li Shizeng, the most important figure in the Work Study Movement, was an eccentric idealist. Despite coming from a high mandarin family—his father was the tutor of Emperor Tongzhi and a Grand Councilor at the Qing court—and inheriting an official title, Li had no interest in a civil service career. He arrived in France at 21 with his friend Zhang Jingjiang, scion of a rich Zhejiang silk merchant family, in search of new knowledge and new ideas. Li became a lifelong Francophile. After studying agriculture in Montargis and then chemistry and biology in Paris, he opened a bean-curd factory (Usine de la Caséo-Sojaïne) just outside Paris, which was a groundbreaking commercial soy dairy. Here, Li and his agricultural engineers designed modern processing equipment using cutting-edge technology, and they transformed soybeans into many pioneering fusion products such as soy bread, tofu cheese, vegetarian ham, and even a version of the sweet crème de marrons, made with soybeans instead of chestnuts. Li would receive multiple French and U.S. patents. A series of groundbreaking research papers on soy foods and a book on soybeans he published remain classics today, still admired by experts for their originality and influence.

But for Li, these experiments also had a moral dimension. Soy products, he believed, would be beneficial to public health by meeting the dietary needs of poor people in the East and West and alleviating famine in China. Li became a lifelong vegetarian, and was equally serious about practicing Kropotkin’s mutual aid philosophy in his bean-curd factory. He went back to his hometown in China, recruited dozens of young people, and brought them to France to work. He set up a worker school nearby, where he and Wu Zhihui personally taught the workers French and general science in the afterwork hours. Later, as a way of financing their education in France, some Chinese students would join them in teaching while also working in the bean-curd factory. Some of Li’s workers would become French tutors. This was the modest beginning of the Diligent Work and Frugal Study Movement.

A wide range of contacts Li had made among French politicians and intellectuals helped him and his Paris friends bring more students from China. After China became a republic in 1912, many progressive officials, businessmen, and educational leaders were also enthusiastic about promoting the movement. Cai Yuanpei, the first Republican minister of education and president of Peking University, was especially effective. He, too, had studied in France and taught at Li’s tofu factory. Like his anarchist friends in Paris, Cai was attracted to the ideals of a new moral and scientific education that, by bringing together labor and learning, workers and intellectuals, would enhance understanding and cooperation between the classes, and help produce a modern citizenry for China’s moral reforms and cultural rejuvenation. President Cai gave many public talks to promote these ideas. The title of one speech he delivered at a peace rally on Tiananmen Square celebrating the end of World War I, “The Sanctity of Labor,” quickly became a popular slogan and a hot topic among the educated elite and in the media. It was perhaps the moment that anarchist influence reached its crescendo in China.

With new support and funds, the movement organizers opened a number of preparatory schools across China and lowered admission standards to help candidates from less educated or elite families to get in. The program expanded rapidly, attracting youngsters from humble social backgrounds, especially from poor inland provinces like Hunan and Sichuan. In 1919 and 1920, nearly 2,000 were sent to France. The organizers, elated by the growing momentum, didn’t see the hurdles ahead. And certainly no one could have predicted that many of these new students would become future communist leaders.

* * *

In August 1918, the 25-year-old Mao Zedong led a group of 24 students from their native Hunan province on a journey heading to Beijing, the northern capital. Train service to Beijing from the railway station in Changsha was scheduled to open in October, but Mao and his group didn’t want to wait. They wanted to reach Beijing in time to attend a preparatory school before going to France. The journey, first by steamboat down the Yangtze to Wuhan, then by train to Peking, took them four days, with flooding causing train delays. But the group arrived in high spirits. In the end, Mao himself decided to stay and focus on revolutionary activities at home. But in 1919—the year my grandfather arrived in France—Mao twice traveled to Shanghai to see his Hunan friends sail for Marseille, where they would board trains to Paris. Xu Teli, Mao’s college professor from Hunan, was the oldest to join the movement: arriving in France in early 1920, the 43-year-old Xu became acquainted with my 18-year-old grandfather when they both took language courses at Collège de Melun. They would rise at 4:00 every morning to practice French together.

In 1920, the 16-year-old Deng Xiaoping, the youngest of a large Sichuan group, sailed for France. Traveling steerage, they spent nearly 40 days at sea. That same year, the 22-year-old Zhou Enlai arrived in Paris with another group.

But the Work Study Movement program offered only an initial subsidy, and it didn’t take long before hard reality hit most of the new students. Like many others, Deng ran out of funds within a few months; he dropped out of school to work, first in a steel plant, then in a factory making rubber galoshes. Hutchinson, the rubber factory, was in Montargis, where the mostly poor Hunan and Sichuan students congregated because the lodging and school Li had arranged there were the cheapest.

Zhou Enlai found French too difficult a language and quit studying almost immediately. He had a private scholarship, and he was paid by a Chinese newspaper to write dispatches. He worked at a Renault factory near Paris for a few weeks just to get a taste of the social and political situation in France. Zhou estimated that, due to a lack of money, there were about 700 Chinese students in the Paris region unable to attend school or find a job.

France was suffering the effects of post-war depression: high unemployment, long work hours, deplorable labor conditions. Struggling just to survive, many Chinese students grew disgruntled. Some of their frustration revealed certain elitist and racial sentiments, for even the poorer members of these groups often came from modestly wealthy families and enjoyed the kind of social status in China that would never expose them to what they now felt to be physically intolerable or culturally offensive. Wang Ruofei, a future communist leader, refused to be housed in the same immigrant workers’ dormitory with blacks and Arabs. Chen Yi, the future communist marshal and foreign minister, worked at the Michelin plant at Clermont Ferrand and resented illiterate French workers he felt treated him the same way they treated blacks. Chen was thoroughly disillusioned upon realizing that the renowned French ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity were nowhere to be found in factory life. Instead, his time there gave him a firsthand experience of the “evil nature” of European capitalism. Chen was the same age as my grandfather and came from a similar gentry family: Chen’s father was a small landowning magistrate in Sichuan.

It was in this context that some of them began to question their hope of saving China with industry and science, and to start taking an interest in more radical theories like communism. Cai Hesen, Mao’s close friend and leader of the Hunan group, was the earliest convert. A serious, asthmatic chain-smoker, Cai spent his first six months in Montargis feverishly reading works by Marx and Lenin and the French Communist Party newspaper. This compelled him to reject all reformist theories in favor of a communist revolution through violent class struggle and proletarian dictatorship. Like Mao, Cai Hesen had long been an admirer of Mohism, a Chinese philosophy developed in the fourth century BCE known for its radical egalitarianism, military skills, and secret society discipline. Leninism was even better than Mohism, Cai now told his friends. We must build a vanguard party to lead our struggle. The Soviet Union, not France, would be China’s role model and best friend.

In his letters to Mao, Cai passionately expounded on these ideas and received Mao’s full endorsement. Mao had, earlier on, toyed with anarchism, but reading and studying the on-the-ground reality in China, he was now reaching the same conclusion. “Your opinions are extremely suitable,” Mao replied to Cai. “There is not a single word with which I disagree.”

Cai Hesen was also the very first person to propose organizing a communist party in China. He raised the idea at a Montargis student group meeting in July 1920, five months before the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) founders did the same in Shanghai. By the time the CCP was formally founded in Shanghai in 1921, many of the Chinese students in France were ready to join. Cai Hesen, Zhou, and several others launched the European branch of CCP. Deng, who never went back to school after the first five months, was soon recruited.

While the Work Study Movement organizers failed to secure sufficient financial aid for the students now feeling stranded in French sweatshops, the young communists mobilized for collective struggle. Zhou and others wrote articles attacking and maligning Li, Wu, and Cai Yuanpei as corrupt, callous elitists. During a rally at the Chinese embassy in Paris, the protestors manhandled the ambassador. In 1921, when a new French-Chinese University opened in Lyon and required an entrance exam for admission, the communists organized over two hundred students to occupy the campus, demanding free admission for all. The standoff lasted three weeks, souring the opinions of many Work Study Movement supporters in France. The French police ended up arresting more than a hundred campus occupiers and sending them back to China. Escorted on the ocean liner by armed French guards, half of the deported were from Hunan, including Cai Hesen, Chen Yi, and many future Communist Party leaders.

In the CCP history annals, “Zhanling Lida,” or “Occupy Lyon University,” would be celebrated as a milestone in which so many Party leaders first tested their mettle. But the incident was also a wakeup call to the French and Chinese authorities. The frazzled anarchist organizers recognized that their scheme had become unsustainable. After that they switched to a more selective, merit-based scholarship system. The Diligent Work-Frugal Study movement quickly fizzled out.

To avoid expulsion, the CCP comrades who stayed on in France also made strategic adjustments. For some leaders, this meant a more low-profile approach: hide your light, grow your strength, bide your time. Zhou Enlai, a chief organizer of the Occupy Lyon campus event, continued to lead the struggle from behind the scenes. Traveling frequently and maintaining clandestine contact with Comintern chiefs in Berlin and CCP leaders in China, he moved discreetly between Paris and Berlin. Deng Xiaoping emerged as one of his talented deputies. They agitated and mobilized Chinese students for occasional demonstrations, but focused more on organizational and propaganda work to spread the message. A samizdat, Lumière Rouge/Red Light (赤光), likely published with Comintern funding, was edited and produced in Zhou’s Paris apartment, where Deng frequently spent the night, and did a good job cutting out the stencils and running the duplicating machine. Zhou gave his diminutive protégé an affectionate nickname: Dr. Mimeograph. Deng looked up to Zhou as a big brother.

France became a CCP cadre incubator. Party cells grew, and members were sent every year for training at Moscow’s Communist University for Eastern Workers, before going back to participate in the great revolution in China. Almost all of them would become CCP leaders. The French authorities monitored these subversive foreign agents for years and finally decided to go after some of the leading suspects. It was too late. Having earned a reputation as a brilliant organizer in France, Zhou had returned to China in 1925 to take up a top post at the elite Whampoa Military Academy. Deng very narrowly escaped arrest. In January 1926, the night before the Paris police chief issued an order to search Deng’s residence and expel him, he left with a group of comrades for Moscow. The gendarmes found a large number of French and Chinese pamphlets, Chinese newspapers, and printing equipment at Deng’s residence.

7.

My grandfather was never interested in politics. His was a temperament more suited for science and engineering. Chemistry and metallurgy fascinated him.

Or, was he answering a call from his childhood?

He was born in a village in the county of Daye (大冶), or Great Smelting, thus named because the region was famous from ancient times for its iron ore deposit, the largest and the best in all of China. Mining and forging went back to the 3^rd century, when the great warrior King of Wu built furnaces and refined weapons for his army here. In the 10^th century, large scale mining and smelting gave the county its official name.

Nearly ten centuries later, after the conflicts between China and Western powers that took place from 1839 to 1860 known as the Opium Wars, reformers in the Qing Dynasty government launched the Self-Strengthening Movement, a period of reforms and attempts to modernize China by adopting Western technology and science, including railroad construction. The very first major project proposed was a north-south line between Beijing and Hankou (now part of Wuhan). This made sense since Daye, near Hankou, would be supplying steel for the tracks. The project gained urgency after Japan, newly modernized, defeated China in the war of 1894-1895, sometimes called the First Sino-Japanese War. As the 20^th century dawned, so many iron mines, iron works, and steel plants were operating between Hankou and Daye that its landscape was transformed by black pits, smoky chimneys, and burning furnaces. The region became known as “The Metallurgy Corridor.” Daye was its beating heart.

So many obstacles had to be overcome to build railways in China: securing foreign loans, turning construction projects from the hands of inept officials to private companies. But in 1906, the line was finally completed. Trains!

Was my grandfather, aged four or five, aware of the exciting news from Hankou, where hooting trains were now coming and going? By the time of the Qing Dynasty’s demise, Han-Ye-Ping, the regional conglomerate, stood among the largest iron and steel companies in Asia, boasting over 7,000 employees and 90% of China’s steel output.

China became a Republic when my grandfather was nine. The European-style Hankou railway station, designed by a Frenchman, was heavily damaged by a bombing during the anti-Manchu uprising that ended the Qing Dynasty. But in 1917, when grandpa was 15, the station was rebuilt.

I can’t help imagining the effects of these events on my young grandfather. Growing up in such an environment. Inhaling the Great Smelting air from infancy. Native soil and water make one’s character (一方水土养一方人), a Chinese proverb goes. For a Daye man, going to France to learn the art of forging and smithing must have felt both exotic and familiar, modern and ancient. It must have felt like he was in his very metallic element.

But many of his fellow countrymen in France were inhaling something quite different in the air. In Paris, an incessant stream of Chinese activists lobbied my grandfather to join their groups. There were communists, anarchists, socialists, members of China’s Nationalist Party or KMT (which eventually lost the Chinese Civil War to the CCP and fled to Taiwan). There was a fledgling anti-communist nationalist party called the Young China Party. Politely, with apologies, my grandfather turned all of them down. I want to concentrate on my studies, he kept on explaining, I don’t have time for political work.

Gradually, they stopped knocking on his door, and he was happy to be left alone to delve into the world of science. After gaining French proficiency in a school in Melun, suburb of Paris, he majored in chemistry and metallurgy at École du Génie Civil in Paris, then at Faculté des Sciences in Grenoble. Every summer he worked at French factories. The rest of the year he devoted his time to studies. He must have received a scholarship for his graduate studies—his family’s modest wealth could not possibly have subsidized his continued education. Back home his father lost out in a land dispute, and the rent stopped coming in from the village.

Grandpa must have demonstrated his academic excellence, for upon graduation and with the school’s recommendation, he was hired right away as an engineer by the famed Établissements Keller et Leleux. The company was founded by the great French inventor and industrialist Charles Albert Keller and his partner; their huge complex of plants and labs lay spread in the Oisans region. At the height of its production, the company employed a large, diverse team of scientists and engineers of different nationalities. There my grandfather worked for two years. Then he answered a newspaper ad for a position at another good electric metallurgy plant, and was offered a job heading its research lab. The plant was in the region of Firminy, a short train ride from Lyon. It was probably around then that he got married and became a father. A good job, a decent income, a family.

Then the telegram from Hubei arrived, falsely informing my grandfather of his mother's death and compelling him to return home.

Back in his homeland in 1930, despite all his training and expertise, he could find no employment. He was not an active member in any returnee network. He had joined no political party, he belonged to no local clique. He was a loner.

After many months of job hunting in vain, he was so frustrated that he seriously considered returning to France. But in an interview at the French consulate in Hankou, the consul listened to his difficulties and arranged an introduction. Soon my grandfather was working at a Hankou brewery run by a French merchant.

The job tided him over, until he met a man in Hubei who would become the most important figure in his career.

8.

Shi Ying (石瑛) was one of the luminaries of China’s Republican era, the period of foment, reform, and revolution when the KMT ran much of the country between the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1912 and the Communist Party revolution of 1949. Shi was a radical anti-Manchu revolutionary in his youth. He became the trusted personal secretary to the KMT’s founding leader Sun Yat-sen, a man of such honor that he still remains respected by most scholars and officials in Beijing, Taipei, and Washington D.C. to this day, almost a hundred years after his death in 1925. Shi later served in a string of high official positions in the KMT government.

His character was best indicated by his two monikers: “One of the three Hubei eccentrics” (湖北三怪之一), and “The most upright official in the Republic of China” (民国清官第一人). Widely revered for his moral probity, simple lifestyle and straight manners—which were considered rare enough to be called “eccentric”—Shi was a famous opponent of nepotism. There was a story about his refusal to employ a man who came with a letter of recommendation from Sun Yat-sen’s successor, Chiang Kai-shek, known for his nepotism and imperious manners. “Sir,” Shi reportedly wrote to Chiang, “if this utterly untalented man must be hired, then I must hereby resign.” The Generalissimo backed down.

Shi was also a tireless promoter of science and modern industry. When my grandfather met him in 1930, Shi was running a major science and technology college in Wuhan. Despite an age gap of twenty-three years, the two men hit it off right away. To my grandfather’s delight, he learned that the elder man was not only born and raised in a town near Daye, he had also been extensively educated in Europe: Shi had studied railway engineering in England and metallurgy in France! A mentor-protégé relationship developed quickly. The next year, when Shi left Wuhan for a new official post in Zhejiang province, he invited my grandfather to join him, asking him to help build the region’s new industry by developing a major science lab there. Grandpa, who had started his new family with the birth of my mother in 1931, happily obliged. He quit his job at the Hankou brewery and moved to Hangzhou, the capital city of Zhejiang, now most famous perhaps for being the location of the headquarters of e-commerce giant Alibaba. He worked in Hangzhou for several years, and my grandmother gave birth to their first son, my Uncle Hangsheng, whose name means “born in Hangzhou.”

Backed by a powerful mentor who genuinely appreciated his talents, my grandfather’s career flourished. He led teams that established several metallurgical labs. He managed factories, too. In 1936, while grandpa worked in Shandong, my Uncle Lusheng was born: the character Lu（鲁）means Shandong in Chinese.

Then in 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out and the country needed bullets.

My grandfather was quite familiar with the munitions business from his years working at Keller et Leleux. Before the war started he had just moved to Nanjing’s Jinling Munitions Factory, also known as Jinling Arsenal (金陵兵工廠), to be in charge of its product research and improvements. With nearly 5,000 employees, it was one of the biggest arms manufacturers in China, specializing in guns. After being bombed repeatedly by the Japanese, it now had to disperse into smaller divisions in safer zones. The main part was moved further southwest to KMT’s wartime capital of Chongqing, but significant operations were set up in Badong, a mountainous area several hundred miles west of Wuhan. With Shi Ying’s recommendation, Grandpa stayed in Hubei to head the Badong factory. He lived in a cramped cottage compound near the mountain factory with Grandma and their three children.

My mother, then an elementary school student, remembered the visceral sense of danger in everyday life during the war. She had to walk a long way on steep roads to her school on the other side of the mountain, and since the region was within the zone controlled by the KMT, Japanese fighter planes flew overhead frequently and sometimes dropped bombs. Horror stories about Japanese atrocities flew around the school; everyone hated the invaders and was terrified of their savagery.

Aunt Dongsheng, born in Badong, was too small and had mostly idyllic memories: playing by the waterfalls and creeks, eating roasted yams and plantains, watching her mother play cards with the fur-clad wives of high KMT officers stationed at the factory. Grandpa had never worked as hard as he did then. Under his leadership the factory defied all kinds of shortages and hardships and kept production going. Supplying guns and repairing machine parts for the KMT troops continuously for more than six years, the factory actually improved its product quality and expanded.

But in December 1943, Shi Ying died. Almost immediately, rival factions fell into a nasty war for power. Within months my grandfather was ousted; the protégé of another powerful KMT man replaced him as the head of the factory. So great was the shock and the feeling of injustice that Grandpa’s hair turned white that year.

KMT rule was hopelessly corrupt and rampantly nepotistic—it was a major reason for its eventual downfall. Grandpa was lucky to have been a protégé of “the most upright official in the Republic of China.” He still belonged to no political party or faction, and he was no good at the art of cultivating patrons. But so long as Shi Ying was alive, a diligent scientist like him didn’t have to worry too much.

Or so it seemed. Because what my grandfather probably did not know is that Shi’s political influence had been waning for quite some time, partly due to intraparty feuding.

Shi was one of Sun Yat-sen’s loyal lieutenants who advised him against the KMT’s alliance with the CCP from 1924 to 1927, when the two parties made common cause to strengthen China and repress the ruthless warlords that controlled large parts of the country. But Sun ignored early warnings about the dangers of trusting a partner that pushed its own covert agenda under the cover of a united front. After Sun’s death in 1925, a group of KMT stalwarts known as the “Western Hills Group” (西山會議派) , of which Shi was a member, insisted on breaking with the CCP. Within the next two years, an intense debate split the KMT into the pro-alliance “KMT Leftists” and the anti-communist “KMT Rightists.”

The Paris musketeers—Li Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, and Zhang Jingjiang—who founded the Diligent Work and Frugal Study movement in France, and their supporter Cai Yuanpei, landed firmly in the Rightist camp. The old friends, known in political circles as “The Four Great KMT Elders,” had all learned their first lesson about the communists in France. By April 1927, they and many other KMT leaders had also become seriously concerned with mounting evidence that the Soviets had been secretly directing the CCP, while the radical wing within the CCP was gaining ground in its agitation among the peasants and the workers for violent class conflict.

The communist movement, the four now concluded, would be a disastrous turn for China’s future. It was already becoming an imminent threat to the KMT, the party of the Chinese bourgeoisie. Wu Zhihui worried that China might be turned into a Soviet colony. Cai Yuanpei, who once popularized the notion of “Sanctity of Labor,” now recognized that the communists really intended to use the laborers to destroy the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. For Cai, a reformist liberal, China’s national renewal was a long process that would need the talents of the capitalists and the bourgeoisie, not the shortcut that the communists promised.

The Rightists won the debate. The KMT broke off the alliance and purged the communists, conducting a series of bloody campaigns between 1927 and 1936. The communists were driven underground in the cities and chased to guerrilla bases in the countryside in the south, then later forced to embark on the Long March, the famous military retreat from the southern region to the Red Army base in the northern Shaanxi province.

Many CCP leaders were executed during the KMT purge, including Cai Hesen and several members from his Hunan-Montargis group.

Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping escaped the purge. They were working together in Shanghai, just as in Paris. The two men and their wives were neighbors at one point. Deng opened a grocery store and then an antique shop as a front for their clandestine work: intelligence gathering, Party cell development, propaganda, and even, some alleged, assassination. But eventually, Deng left Shanghai to join the guerrillas in the south, while after surviving the KMT purge, Zhou continued to lead the urban underground.

The biggest victors emerging from the open war between the KMT and the CCP, unfortunately, turned out to be the two strongmen Chiang and Mao. By the end of the KMT’s “Suppressing (Red) Bandits Campaigns” and the CCP’s Long March, each man had consolidated his personal power within his own party.

As the KMT grew more authoritarian, factional, and corrupt, many of the first-generation stalwarts like Shi Ying and the Four Great KMT Elders became disillusioned and marginalized. They distanced themselves from partisan politics and focused on works in the arts, education, and industry. Despite their elevated status, their political clout gradually diminished.

9.

My grandfather was once again a political orphan. He must have felt darkness thickening in the wilderness of Badong. “Where is the sunlight in my life?” he moaned one night, drinking with an old family friend. Aunt Dongsheng, then a girl of five or six, still remembers her father’s words and the smell of whiskey on his breath.

He returned to the academy and found a position at a Hubei college. For the next five years he taught there and chaired the chemistry department. Japan surrendered in 1945, but the CCP and the KMT soon broke off their fragile “Second United Front” made during the anti-Japanese war, plunging China into a nasty civil war. Several KMT munition factories invited Grandpa to help. He declined all offers. He was a despondent man, even though the college pay was decent, and his family lived comfortably. There was so much greed, division, and violence around. Where was the “New China” he had once hoped for in his youth?

It came in 1949. On the eve of Wuhan’s “liberation” by the CCP, my grandfather went out at night and quietly tossed some guns into a garbage dump. His younger brother, once a KMT army officer, had left the guns in the house before disappearing without saying goodbye; he would resurface later in Taiwan, but the two brothers would never see each other again. My grandfather waited calmly for the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to enter the city. By then, like most other educated Chinese, he was fed up with the corrupt, inept KMT regime. The communists, my grandparents hoped, would bring the nation a better tomorrow.

10.

The fresh energy sweeping across society was contagious. Grandpa, eager to participate, didn’t have to wait for very long. The new government welcomed him to join forces in building up industry for the new People’s Republic, chiefly on the strength of his curriculum vitae, and despite his lack of guanxi. The Central South Financial and Economic Committee, based in Wuhan and governing six provinces, appointed him to head its Bureau of Industry. This was participation at a very high level: Suddenly he was overseeing industrial affairs in six provinces!

The responsibility was tremendous. Every morning he rose early and biked 40 minutes to his office. He traveled often and went to Beijing for meetings and briefings. Heavy workload, few perks. But he was in high spirits. He felt appreciated, happy. At home Grandma cooked his favorite local foods. And whenever possible he would bike home on lunch break just for a bowl of her spicy hot dry noodles, a Wuhan specialty he never tired of eating.

The Liu children, too, caught the “New China” fever. In 1949, right after Wuhan’s “liberation,” PLA recruiting officers visited local schools and picked 12 high schoolers to join the army. My mother, aged 18, was one of them. Envied by youngsters across Wuhan, the group was escorted to the railway station with great fanfare, then put on a train heading to a northern military base where they’d undergo special training. Another train.

My mother had no idea why she was picked, but several years later she was discharged and sent to work in Beijing’s municipal government, where she met my father. Decades later, she revealed to me why her PLA career ended early: she had the wrong face. Originally she was chosen to be a military spy, but evidently my mother’s face was so transparent and expressive it reflected every thought in her head like a mirror. The senior officer, who supervised her training program and grew quite fond of this naïve, emotional, hotheaded Hubei girl, came to conclude that she was “temperamentally unsuited for intelligence work.” “He thought I’d get in trouble sooner or later if I stayed in this line of work,” my mother told me. “To protect me, he arranged to put me on a different track, and that made it easier for me to transfer to civilian work.”

In 1951, my little uncle also joined the PLA. The Korean War was on and Uncle Lusheng was only 14 going on 15. He was a very handsome boy, talented in music: he had a good voice, played the organ, erhu, and harmonica, and composed songs. He had a gentle temper and a sweet tongue. He was loved by everyone but particularly by Grandma: everyone knew which of her now six children was her absolute favorite. But the boy was a romantic dreamer. He longed to become one of “The Loveliest Men” (最可爱的人)—as the official press dubbed the Chinese “volunteer troops” in Korea. Young as he was, my little uncle was eager to join the fight against “American imperialist invaders.” He was willing to die in a PLA uniform. Just imagine: he’d then be honored as a patriot and a revolutionary martyr, with the glorious tune of The Internationale playing at his burial! In his passionate fervor he faked his age on a form and used Grandpa’s chop, the seal traditionally used as a signature, to certify it. His trick worked and he was enlisted. Grandpa was furious. Grandma was heartbroken. But it was a fait accompli.

It rained heavily on the day of my little uncle’s departure. My grandparents went to the pier and took the ferry to see him off. Grandma cried the whole way. Grandpa was so distressed he slipped on the dock and lost the Parker pen he had brought back from France.

Uncle Lusheng failed the physical test at the end of basic training and never made it to the Korean front. He was assigned to an air-force base in Jiangxi as a “culture teacher.” He taught writing and music to soldiers and officers, leading them to sing many revolutionary and patriotic songs. He also toured and performed at different military bases. In the photos he sent home in those years, my little uncle looked like a movie star, dashing in his uniform with a junior officer’s cap and epaulets. But my grandma never got over the blow of his unexpected departure. She missed him terribly. One day she fainted at home and was rushed to the hospital. She had had a stroke, which slightly impaired the function of her right arm and right leg. She began to take pills for hypertension.

Then, in 1954, came a major change. Advised and aided by the Soviet Union, China began an ambitious campaign of rapid industrialization. A total of 156 state projects were launched across the nation, with a focus on heavy industry. One flagship project was a large heavy machinery plant, which would manufacture all kinds of shaft products such as 12,000-ton hydraulic press, bearings for naval ships and so on. This was super-scale engineering and metallurgy, a field Grandpa had been involved with since his youthful years at Keller et Leleux. Nobody was surprised when he was appointed the chief metallurgist and director of the lab for the new plant. In the original blueprint the slotted location was in Wuhan, but the groundwater level turned out to be too high to build the necessary underground quenching space. The site shifted to the northeast. When grandpa was asked to relocate to Fularki, he said yes, of course. “Everything follows the Party’s arrangements” (一切听从党安排) —this was not merely a slogan for Party members, it was for everyone. In the New China, to say no to the Party was now unthinkable.

So they moved. By train.

A horrible flood of the Yangtze River that summer disrupted railway transportation from Wuhan, but as soon as service resumed, they embarked on their long journey. My Uncle Hangsheng and Aunt Dongsheng stayed behind to finish their schooling, while my two younger aunts went with my grandparents, along with a large load of furniture. They even packed their rope bed, for they were now migrating from China’s hot, moist, fertile Yangtze River Valley known as “The Land of Fish and Rice” (鱼米之乡) to a region known as “The Great Northern Wilderness” (北大荒). In a couple of decades, Fularki would be transformed into one of China’s most important heavy industrial bases, but in the early 1950s the place was known for nothing except howling gales and icy blizzards. Everything had to be built from scratch. To achieve the planned objective, the state marshaled an army of workers and engineers, nearly all from the central southern provinces, and shepherded them north. Tens of thousands of families were uprooted from their hometowns and villages, boarded the trains just like my grandparents. The trains, with passengers packed tight in every compartment, headed to the same destination.

Clink clank, clink clank, whoosh!

11.

The move hit Grandma the hardest.

In Fularki, life revolved around a cluster of state factories. These factories were all big, all new, and all arranged purposefully in a production chain. The steel plant produced the steel used by the heavy machinery plant, the power plant and the coal mill supplied power and coal for all the factories and the town, the textile plant wove fabric but more importantly, supplied a corps of female workers for the wellbeing of all male workers in town. The railway, the shuttle buses, the cabbage and potato farm…Everything and everyone in Fularki worked for the factories, served the factories, lived off the factories. The work hours were long: six days a week, frequent overtime shifts, with some “volunteer workdays” thrown in. It kept everyone busy.

Grandpa was one of the busiest. He seemed to always be at the factory. My two young aunts, five and nine years old when they were brought to Fularki, went to school during the day. The school was also set up by the factory and filled with workers’ children. Its classes and extracurricular activities kept the pupils busy while their parents worked.

But what was Grandma doing in this giant worker beehive? As a stay-at-home wife and mom, she didn’t even have an entry pass to the factory zone. What could she do in this drab, barren middle-of-nowhere, this isolated town where winter seemed interminable?

In so many ways, Fularki is the opposite of Wuhan. Perched on the Yangtze banks like a great octopus, Wuhan spreads and stretches in splendid connections. An ancient hub between the north and the south. A key point linking the east and the west. It is where every ship sails past your window, every accent is heard on the street, every food has a chance not only to be tasted but to influence, to blend in. Hot, cold, spicy, sweet, bitter, sour…Wuhan cuisine is diversity itself. As one of China’s “Three Furnace Cities,” Wuhan’s summer is hot, long, and humid—oppressively humid to visitors unaccustomed to it. But locals know how to cope. Home means all kinds of things, and to Grandma, one of them was the Wuhan climate.

In Wuhan she had lived in a neighborhood where she knew all her neighbors and they all knew her. She would do her shopping and errands in the morning: She knew who had the freshest vegetables, where to buy live fish, which tailor could sew up new clothes and alter old ones for her children. The weather was fine most days of the year, so she often sat outside to chat with neighbors. Her shopkeeper friends invited her to drink tea by their counters and catch up on gossip. In the afternoon she’d join the maid, Lamei, and they’d prepare a proper dinner together. In the evening she would relax with her family. As the seasons changed, they would pickle different vegetables according to their nutritional properties and make soups and snacks. During the Spring Festival, the family would pay respects to the ancestors before the New Year’s Eve feast, and they would receive relatives or visit them on the New Year’s Day.

In the northeast, this familiar way of life vanished. Lamei, too, had vanished. She had been with the family since she was a little girl, and it was understood that she’d be my Uncle Hangsheng’s wife one day, maybe as soon as he graduated from college—at least, that had been my grandparents’ plan for their future. But before the move to Fularki, Lamei suddenly announced that she was leaving the family to marry a local barber. It was romantic love and marriage by her own choice, a fine thing to do in the New China—more than fine in this case because it was two working-class comrades joining their hands to form a new Red family. The only thing my grandparents could do was wish her the best.

My grandma grew moody in the long, grim northeast winters. No more warm neighborhood scenes. The wind howled, there were snowstorms, the streets were empty during the week, the giant nondescript apartment complex was devoid of people when all the adults were at the plants and all the children at school. No fresh vegetables, no live fish markets, no fruit vendors. Cabbages, potatoes, and turnips dominated the meal table; every family stored large piles of these in their cellars. For a woman over fifty who was accustomed all her life to the southern climate, to its soft comforts and distinct rituals, this was like being banished from civilization. In fact, Fularki was even farther north than the most notorious place of exile during the Qing dynasty: Ningguta, a freezing, barren town southeast of Fularki near the Korean border. Fularki was China’s Siberia.

Grandma’s own description of the family’s relocation is chong jun (充军) : drafted to the frontier garrison. Except she was not a soldier. She was an outlier, in a new society wrought into a giant iron machine for a single purpose: constructing a great socialist nation. Everyone around her was a useful cog, fulfilling a function, playing a part. She was a useless loose part. A nonentity in society. Even to her own family her usefulness was now very limited. She existed on the margins of everything, ignored by everyone.

No one noticed that she was sinking into depression. She had always been a good-tempered woman. Soft-spoken. Never quarreled with her husband. She didn’t quarrel with him even then, but she had mood swings. Sometimes she had outbursts, broke things, tossed jewelry out the window. She might also have been undergoing menopause. In any case, nobody really understood why she was so grumpy and volatile. Grandpa, not a very good communicator even in the best of times, was now always overworked and had no capacity nor energy to understand the turmoil churning in his wife’s head and body.

So, it finally happened.

Scene at the railway tracks, Fularki, Heilongjiang, August 30, 1957.

The trees are still green. The sky is blue. But summer is ending. Already, in the crispness of the morning air, a hint of fall announcing its advent—and after it, inevitably, the long, desolate winter again. It is an ordinary weekday in Fularki. Hours after my grandfather leaves for the factory and my two young aunts leave for school, my grandma, too, leaves home. She wobbles out of the apartment complex. She wobbles through the empty streets. She must be a sight to behold: a little, prematurely aged lady with a limp, partially paralyzed arm, and a crazy, dazed look in her eyes. But no one is around, and she doesn’t stop until she reaches the railway tracks, long and winding through the open field. Of course, no one is there, not a soul. There, she waits for a train. For how long? No one knows. But before the train finally shows up, she has laid herself down on the tracks.

My grandfather is summoned to confirm that the mangled body belongs to his wife. He faints at the sight. After regaining consciousness, he doesn’t know where he is. He remains confused about everything for days. Later, at his request, they fix up Grandma’s crushed head for the funeral service. Grandpa buys the best coffin he can find in Fularki, made of top-grade cypress, and buries his wife in a local public cemetery. There, lowered into the northeastern black earth, Grandma is finally absorbed by the bleak, magnificent landscape that never felt like home when she was alive.

* * *

My two young aunts learned how their mother died when they were brought back from school that day. But my mother, Aunt Dongsheng, and my two uncles, scattered in different cities, were not informed of the circumstances of their mother’s death for some time. Aunt Dongsheng found out several months later, by accident: She ran into a woman from the Fularki factory who assumed that she knew and blurted out to her: “So your mom was run over by the train, right?” Aunt Dongsheng was shocked. She thought her mother had died of high blood pressure.

Suicide is never an easy topic. But in China at that time, the Party also treated suicide with a particular kind of suspicion, as a form of political protest.The logic was that by killing oneself a person was rejecting the new communist way of life embraced by everyone else. Suicide was thus not a private tragedy, but a disruptive behavior, an act of defiant aggression. It interfered with the good order forged by political power in the name of the people. Hence by throwing herself at a train my grandmother was willfully causing friction at the great roaring wheel of social progress—how dare she? This was why a decade later, when suicide became more common during the Cultural Revolution, it was typically described as “severing oneself from the people” (自绝于人民).

This was a familiar phrase in my childhood, and standing amidst the crowds at mass rallies, I had many times heard it pronounced from a loudspeaker or a megaphone, always in a voice brimming with certainty and disgust: the voice would be certain that it was on the right side of history, disgusted that a mere worm of an individual had dared to commit such a pathetic and offensive act. Grim as this sounded, the Party’s view was not entirely wrong: suicide was, in a certain sense, a voluntary self-excommunication, and as such a declaration of individuality, an exercise of human free will. And these were illegitimate values in a communist society.

By the same logic, words like “alienation,” “depression,” or “isolation” might be useful in describing bourgeois diseases in Western capitalist societies, but since no such spiritual ills could possibly exist in the People’s Republic, these words also did not exist in the people’s vocabulary.

Not long after my grandmother’s suicide, a technician working under my grandfather in the factory lab was found dead: he had hanged himself in his room. He was a quiet young man from the south, assigned to the Fularki factory right after graduating from Tsinghua University in Beijing. Talented and hardworking, he was someone my grandfather appreciated and leaned on in the lab. Unlike my grandma, here was a well-trained professional, given a clear task, fulfilling a clear function. He was not a loose part. So why had he decided to tie a rope around his neck? Nobody knew, and nobody bothered to ask a probing question. “He severed himself from the people.” End of story.

My grief-stricken grandfather never married again. Shortly after the funeral, the factory officials relocated him and my two young aunts to a new apartment unit. They assigned a young college graduate and her mother to move into one of the rooms. Kitchen and bathroom were to be shared. Grandpa was furious when he discovered the scheme was to get him interested in marrying the young woman. “How can I do a thing like that? I’ll never marry again.” That was all he said.

The factory had to shift to plan B: An order was issued that one of Grandpa’s adult children should move to Fularki to help Grandpa look after my two teenage aunts. That was how Aunt Dongsheng, then an 18-year-old high school graduate who had just started working at a steel mill, was transferred to Fularki. She was given an entry-level job in the big factory.

Grandpa never spoke about Grandma’s death at home. But every April, on the traditional tomb-sweeping day, he would take the entire family to visit Grandma’s grave. The cemetery was on the outskirts of the city; it was not always easy to arrange a car for such a long drive. “You can’t imagine how barren it was out there,” Aunt Dongsheng told me decades later. “We’d be on the road for a whole hour without seeing anything or anybody outside. But my father never missed the annual visit. We went every year until we moved back to Wuhan. And every time, after sweeping my mother’s tombstone and offering fresh flowers for her, my father always went to the tomb of that Tsinghua graduate to do the same. He never forgot that young man.”