12.
This happened in the 1990s:
Two decades after her family moved back to Wuhan, Aunt Dongsheng made a special trip to Fularki. My grandfather had died by then, but my little uncle Lusheng was still alive, and in his sober, wistful moments, he would beg Aunt Dongsheng: “Could you go bring Mom home from the northeast?”
It was a very long journey by train, so Aunt Dongsheng got off in Beijing to take a break. Before getting back on the train, she bought a roll of film at a store near the train station. But when she finally arrived in Fularki, she was informed that the cemetery was gone. It had been dismantled, steam-rolled, and transformed into a new airport. Development. Fularki was expanding, becoming more populous, more prosperous. Grandma’s grave was flattened by the marching steps of progress. The airport was a big government project and, presumably, those who saw the announcement posted in the local newspaper had their familial tombs removed in time. But no one had notified my uncles, or my aunts, or my mother.
Aunt Dongsheng went to the site anyway. And, with no sign post, no way of tracing Grandma’s remains, she just stood there watching the planes gliding about and taking off. Then she took out her camera and began snapping. She finished the entire roll of film at the new airport.
But after arriving back in Wuhan, she discovered that she had not brought any images home: the Beijing store clerk had botched the installation of the film in her camera.
A blank roll. A complete void.
She never went to Fularki again.
13.
Things had gone downhill steadily after my grandmother’s death in 1957.
Later that year the great Anti-Rightist Campaign swept from Beijing to the northeast, and my grandfather was labeled a “rightist” at the factory. What got him in trouble were some mildly critical remarks about the Party. And these remarks were not even his own.
Grandpa had never been interested in politics or political parties, but the Chief Metallurgist at a big state factory was a rather prominent position, and it looked bad for such a person to remain outside politics during times of ideological fervor. This was another crucial difference between the Old China and the New China. In the New China, a political “orphan” was inevitably suspected of disloyalty because a person outside of Party-controlled organizations was harder to monitor and to discipline. The pressure on Grandpa was too much. At a friend’s invite, he had joined Minmeng (China Democratic League), one of China’s “democratic parties.” Of course, it was a rubber-stamp organization, but membership offered a necessary organizational identity.
Grandpa was then quickly elevated to a seat at the Provincial Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, or Zhengxie. This was also a rubber-stamp organization, but it represented a certain social status and an acceptable political identity. Then, in 1956, the government announced a policy of “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom and a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend.” The intelligentsia and the “democratic parties” were warmly invited to review the CCP’s leadership and offer criticism. Like millions of naïve intellectuals across the country, my grandfather and his colleagues at Minmeng took the offer seriously. They met, discussed, and provided their criticism. My grandfather was chosen to submit the critique on their behalf at the Zhengxie meeting.
In Beijing, Mao Zedong was surprised by the number of critical remarks submitted to the Party. He had been expecting only praise! The Chairman had no doubt thought a few snakes might be teased out from their shady nests. But who could have imagined there would be so many two-faced rightists hidden among us? And now they were all coming out of the woodwork and attacking our leadership!
Mao decided to flip the switch. And the man he chose to oversee the Anti-Rightist Campaign was none other than Deng Xiaoping. Deng had been a very early Mao loyalist: he had signed onto the rural-oriented, pragmatic “Maoist Line” even before it gained the upper hand within the Party, when Mao was still battling the Moscow-trained urban dogmatists who believed revolution must be made by industrial workers, not peasant farmers. In 1951, Deng directed land reform in China’s southwest regions, which included his home province of Sichuan. Deng’s pragmatism won Mao’s approval. “Land reform cannot be done peacefully,” he declared, echoing Mao’s view. Under Deng’s watch, peasant violence against landlords and their families—horrific torture, beatings, hanging—became widespread, often led by poor rural hooligans or egged on by Party cadres. This disturbed some moderate officials and intellectuals. Deng didn’t flinch. By the end of land reform, an estimated one to two million landlords had been murdered or committed suicide. The landed gentry, a class that had existed in China for over two thousand years, was destroyed. Their land was taken and given to poor peasants, until the state took it all away several years later in the name of “collectivization.”
But Deng showed great flexibility in handling the famous Sichuan secret society Ge Lao Hui, a large criminal organization in which Deng’s own father had been a low-level leader. Deng’s “Let go of the past” policy dissolved the tensions between the CCP and the members of Ge Lao Hui and other underground organizations. The gangs melted away.
Mao praised Deng’s performance. This was a man the Chairman could trust to get the job done.
Under Deng’s rigorous management the Anti-Rightist Campaign promptly kicked into high gear. Within one year, more than half a million “poisonous weeds” were ripped out across the nation and labeled “rightists,” among them my grandfather, my mother, and my little uncle. Hundreds of thousands were sent to labor camps. Some never got out: They starved to death during the great famine that broke out three years later.
In Fularki, at the big factory where she now worked, my 19-year-old Aunt Dongsheng watched my grandfather being interrogated and attacked through long struggle sessions. She sat helplessly among the audience, listening to him confessing and apologizing for all his sins. Past and present. Especially in the Old China, in capitalist France.
The revolutionary masses: We want to know how a decadent bourgeois life in the past led you to this reactionary, anti-Party present. We want a full confession, a thorough account.
So, Grandpa, earnestly and diligently, gave them a thorough-going account. He described his bourgeois habits: the croissants, the wine, the photography, the dancing. But he described his share of “eating bitterness” as well. Working under harsh conditions in French factories every summer. Exhaustion. Bruised hands, blisters between fingers, because at the Saint-Étienne plant the employer never provided gloves. Was he angling for some fellow proletarian sympathy? Well, he got none.
The revolutionary masses: So why didn’t you fight the French capitalists? Why didn’t you join the Communist Party? Why didn’t you make revolution with the comrades?
They kept shouting at him, laughing in contempt.
By the time the campaign finally ended in 1959, the factory had stripped Grandpa of all his titles. Then his pay was cut by half. Then he was fired. Later, he was allowed to teach chemistry at a local night school. For years he thought he might be called back to the factory. The call never came.
14.
The author in France, summer 1984. Photo by Bernard Benitez.
In September 1981, I boarded an airplane for the first time in my life, in a mentally and physically feverish state, as I had caught a cold from biking around Beijing in the autumn rain saying goodbyes to so many dear friends and relatives. I suffered horrible airsickness and was unable to keep down any food or juice during the long flight. But my light-headedness and famished condition only heightened the excitement. The journey felt like a surreal dream in which I was embarking on the ultimate romantic adventure, and this time I was being transported not by roaring great wheels but by noiseless great wings: I am flying across the Pacific Ocean, hooray!
That feeling of bliss and passionate curiosity accompanied me for the next six years, while I attended the University of South Carolina and Columbia University, while I traveled across the United States and visited Europe. The scholarships I received from the two universities weren’t enough to cover my living expenses. So I worked all kinds of part-time jobs each semester, and in the summer I sometimes worked full-time. I was a library clerk, a research assistant, a waitress and a dishwasher, a night schoolteacher, a packaging and processing worker at a cap-and-gown rental company, a bookkeeper at a travel agency, and so on. It had occurred to me that I was, in a sense, following my grandfather’s footsteps, and I was sure he’d be proud of me if he could see how I handled my own Diligent Work and Frugal Study program in America with competence and good cheer. I honestly felt that all the work experience added a rewarding dimension to my American education. It did not feel like “eating bitterness.”
Features
11.12.24
Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival
While in Columbia, South Carolina, I fell in with a group of fellow graduate students from Europe. I dated one of the French students, Bernard, from Montpellier. Though Columbia was the state capital, it seemed a very small and rather dull college town to the European students, so they rented apartments next to one another on Henderson Street and constantly partied together. They dubbed their accommodations the “Republic of Hendersonia.”
I hung out there a lot and stayed at Bernard’s place frequently. Like other grad students, we drank, smoked weed, and debated everything in the world in long, meandering conversations. China was occasionally a topic, and I was astonished to discover so many of these young Europeans held the Chinese revolution and Mao in such high esteem. When I told them that, as students, we all had to go to the factories and the farm to labor and be re-educated by the workers and peasants during the Cultural Revolution, they listened with envy and praised the practice as Mao’s great educational experiment.
I never spoke to Bernard about my grandfather’s life in France. I suppose I suffered a kind of proxy guilt, feeling ashamed of his abandonment of his French wife and baby daughter in Lyon. I’d fantasize about all the cousins I must have in France, but never hoped that I’d find them in my real life—they remained hauntingly missing, like so many other ghosts in my grandfather’s story. It did occur to me, though, that these socialism-loving young French intellectuals were, in some odd ways, the spiritual heirs of the utopian French anarchists who had influenced China’s young cosmopolitan intellectuals like the Paris Musketeers and Cai Yuanpei. Now these romantic French youths admired the New China from afar.
I was sure, however, that none of them would have stood a chance if they had lived in the real Maoist China. They were all too fond of dinner parties and expressing their own opinions. “A revolution is not a dinner party,” Mao had said. No, these incorrigibly bourgeois European left idealists wouldn’t have stood a chance.
15.
In 1957, my little uncle Lusheng in Jiangxi experienced a fate similar to my grandfather’s. He, too, failed to see the looming danger. He, too, submitted critical remarks in response to the Hundred Flowers policy. One target of his critique was China’s media. The state newspapers described the Soviet-China relationship “as dear and close as father and son,” and Stalin was often referred to as “our beloved father.” Uncle Lusheng suggested this language lacked dignity and was inappropriate. Another of his complaints also had to do with dignity. The Party promoted equality and brotherhood among all comrades, he pointed out, but some PLA officers did not treat soldiers with respect.
Uncle Lusheng and his wife, Huayu, at the time of their wedding, circa 1958.
These remarks were promptly deemed “vicious anti-Party assaults.” Uncle Lusheng was labeled a rightist, stripped of his officer rank, expelled from the PLA, and sent to a forest farm to cut bamboo. His girlfriend, a high school senior who had fallen in love with him during one of his army troupe performance tours, was warned of the dire prospects of following such a man. Break up with him now, the school principal advised her, or you will have a very hard life and you will regret it. But love prevailed. They married in a crude adobe house with nothing but four walls. Eventually, he became a village schoolteacher. Three children were born. But his military career was destroyed. The family languished in the countryside for twenty years.
16.
When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, old targets like my grandfather and Uncle Lusheng were trotted out again for another round of abuse.
In Fularki, the “revolutionary rebels”—young radicals often called “Red Guards” who were encouraged by Mao to completely overturn the old order—put a tall dunce hat on Grandpa’s head, forced him carry a large signboard that displayed a self-denunciation, and paraded him on the streets along with numerous other “reactionary elements.” The townsfolk swarmed to watch the spectacle, cheering and jeering as the pariahs passed by. Aunt Dongsheng recalled that Grandpa came home on the brink of collapse. “He was so weak, so thirsty, he gulped down a whole pot of milk.”
Then the rebels decided to lock him up in a basement, the kind of makeshift prison popularly known as a “cowshed” for intellectuals labeled as class enemies. They took him out only for struggle sessions. He was not allowed to return home for ten months. Food had to be delivered to the basement by his family.
The task fell on my little aunt Kangsheng. The youngest of the six siblings, she was then 18, a shy, soft-spoken, sweet-tempered girl. Out of school with no job, she mostly stayed home. The first time the rebels came to raid the house, she watched, trembling with terror, as the strangers trashed the place, kicking and beating her father right in front of her. Grandpa had so many bruises he couldn’t sit in a chair afterwards. And when they came back to take him away to the basement, my little aunt was again there, standing pale-faced and speechless in a corner, a passive witness.
Aunt Kangsheng in the late 1960s.
One day, Aunt Kangsheng learned that her application to work at a state farming corps had been granted. For someone with her family background, this was considered good employment. Eager to share the news, she wrote the message on a piece of paper and tucked it inside the bundle of food she was delivering to her father. The guard, a burly, menacing man, discovered it. He gave her hell, shaking a fist before her nose, threatening “severe consequences.”
Something cracked in my little aunt Kangsheng. After that episode she started doing odd things. She climbed onto the windowsill of their apartment and stood there loudly singing Peking Opera and Red songs. She talked nonsense, laughed, and wept for no apparent reason. It got worse after she went to the state farm. She swallowed entire jars of bean sauce, cut her own clothes to shreds. One day she attempted to jump into a well. They brought her back to Fularki.
Around that time, a neighbor’s son in elementary school was denounced as a “counter-revolutionary” because he had accidentally sat on top of a newspaper bearing Mao’s portrait. The boy suffered a mental breakdown and became deranged. This story made my grandfather’s family realize that my aunt Kangsheng’s odd behavior was triggered by political shock and that she needed medical help.
They first took her to a local clinic specializing in traditional Chinese medicine. The doctor’s diagnosis was that my aunt suffered excessive phlegm inside her body. The phlegm blocked her heart orifice, the doctor said. This meant her capacity for clear thinking was blocked. He prescribed a potent herbal remedy.
But the potion, instead of sucking out the phlegm from her system, caused violent convulsions. The pain was so intense she doubled over and shrank into a ball. Terrified, she cowered in a corner, refusing to move or eat. Finally, the family took her to a mental hospital. The facility was just a row of shabby sheds with rudimentary furnishings inside. Treatment was rudimentary too: she was given large doses of tranquilizers daily, which basically knocked her out. After several months she was released and put on meds at home. For many years she lived with Aunt Dongsheng’s family, deemed mentally unstable and unfit for employment.
Features
12.17.24
Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival
Meanwhile, in Jiangxi, my little uncle Lusheng once again endured a similar ordeal: he, too, was beaten, dragged to the streets to be paraded with a tall dunce hat on his head and a self-insulting signboard hooked around his neck, and his children, too, were forced to watch their father’s public humiliation . . .
Is there any point to going into any more detail? Rallies. Struggle sessions. Dehumanizing, infantile insults. Physical violence. Psychological torture. Similar public shows were staged all over China.
It was nothing new. All of this had happened before. The pages of Mao’s famous 1927 essay, Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, contain a kind of playbook for the Red Guards’ actions. Published shortly before the KMT rightists decided to break off their party’s alliance with the CCP, Mao painted, with colorful details, a vivid tableau of the peasant revolution in his home region. This passage is from the “Fourteen Great Achievements” that Mao enumerated and celebrated in his essay:
“Crowning” the landlords and parading them through the villages. This sort of thing is very common. A tall paper-hat is stuck on the head of one of the local tyrants or evil gentry, bearing the words “Local tyrant so-and-so” or “So-and-so of the evil gentry.” He is led by a rope and escorted with big crowds in front and behind. Sometimes brass gongs are beaten and flags waved to attract people’s attention. This form of punishment more than any other makes the local tyrants and evil gentry tremble. Anyone who has once been crowned with a tall paper-hat loses face altogether and can never again hold up his head. Hence many of the rich prefer being fined to wearing the tall hat. But wear it they must, if the peasants insist. One ingenious township peasant association arrested an obnoxious member of the gentry and announced that he was to be crowned that very day. The man turned blue with fear. Then the association decided not to crown him that day. They argued that if he were crowned right away, he would become case-hardened and no longer afraid, and that it would be better to let him go home and crown him some other day. Not knowing when he would be crowned, the man was in daily suspense, unable to sit down or sleep at ease.
Other revolutionary deeds against the landlords and gentry that Mao praised include: raiding their homes, rolling on the beds of their unmarried daughters and sons’ young wives, slaughtering their pigs, consuming their grain, taking their land away, punishing them with heavy fines, locking them up in the county jail, chasing them from the village, staging rallies and demonstrations against them, tying them up with ropes, beating them with clubs, cutting their beards, smearing charcoal on their faces, publicly executing them.
It was in this essay that Mao declared: “A revolution is not a dinner party.”
17.
Sometime in the late 1960s, my little uncle Lusheng began to unravel.
The symptoms were mild at the beginning. Occasionally there would be a sudden burst of crazy speech or odd behavior: He’d rave about phantoms, or conduct an invisible orchestra. He would hold long dialogues with my grandmother. He’d warn her: Watch out, mama, the train is coming! Or: Hurry up, mama, you’re going to miss the train! But then he’d catch himself, grin sheepishly, and return to his normal behavior. Most of the time he was lucid. He struck people as a cheerful man. Sunny, positive, a “good comrade.” His classes meticulously followed the Party line; he composed optimistic, uplifting songs about China and its future; he conducted and sang these songs with his pupils and with his children.
My little uncle Lusheng managed to hold it more or less together until the end of the Cultural Revolution, which was petering out in the early 1970s, and then ended completely when Mao died in 1976.
Then, one day in 1978, an official letter arrived: the conclusion drawn on my uncle’s case in the 1957 campaign was mistaken, his “rightist hat” was “removed.” It should have been good news, but this long-awaited rehabilitation unleashed a full-fledged delirium. Two decades of injury, insults, uncertainty and repressed hopes—he finally let it all go. And, with the joyous release, his nerves snapped like overly taut bowstrings.
My little uncle Lusheng surrendered to madness. He lived for twenty more years, but never regained his sanity.
* * *
A note regarding “removing hats”:
Deng Xiaoping, who oversaw the Anti-rightist Campaign in 1957, finally fell into official disgrace himself during the Cultural Revolution. He and his family suffered persecution at the hands of the Red Guards, though under Mao’s orders, Deng received certain special protections. For a period, Deng worked in a Jiangxi tractor repair factory as a fitter, using the old skills he’d learned in France. The factory was only sixty kilometers from the rural area where my little uncle was banished to live. After Deng’s rehabilitation and rise to power as leader of the Party, he led the Reform and Opening policy, which became his main legacy. But when the liberal-minded party leader Hu Yaobang wanted to announce a complete overturn of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, to remove every hat from every head of the five hundred and fifty thousand wronged rightists, Deng blocked the motion. The old Dr. Mimeograph, who had supervised it all in 1957, insisted that the campaign had been “necessary and correct,” though he conceded that it had shown “a tendency to overreach.” Nonetheless, Hu managed to remove more than 99% of the rightist hats. But Deng’s attitude clouded the rehabilitation process, and no compensation was issued to any of the victims or their families.
In 1987, Deng and several Party Elders tossed away any pretense of legal procedure and removed Hu’s hat as the General Secretary of CCP, accusing him of being too soft on “bourgeois liberal spiritual pollution,” a trend then spreading among Chinese intellectuals and students. On April 15, 1989, Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack. The public mourning of his death triggered the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.
* * *
In Fularki, my grandfather and Aunt Dongsheng repeatedly petitioned to be allowed to return to Wuhan. Both Aunt Dongsheng and Uncle Guan were worn out by the daily care of my manic-depressive little aunt Kangsheng, two young children, and their own full-time factory jobs. They started to have health problems themselves.
One night my grandfather left home without telling anyone and walked in the direction of the train station. Aunt Dongsheng went to look for Grandpa and found him on a dark, deserted road. He was alone, silent, in despair and rage. He said he was leaving Fularki and going back to Hubei by himself. She talked him out of it and they went home.
After this incident, permission finally came to return to Wuhan. Given what had happened to my grandmother, the local authorities probably didn’t want another scandal on their watch. One day in 1973, Grandpa, Aunt Dongsheng and Uncle Guan, their two children, and my little aunt Kangsheng took the train back to Wuhan.
The change of environment proved hugely beneficial. My little aunt’s health steadily improved. I remember her from a visit during that relatively tranquil period. She stayed with us in Beijing for several months, sleeping on a camp bed set up next to mine. Sometimes we’d chat into the night in whispers. A childlike air hung about her; with her smooth and unwrinkled skin, roundish chin, big eyes, and soft voice, she seemed more like a gentle, considerate older sister than an aunt. She knitted scarves, hats, and mittens for my brother Jianming and me, and braided sleeves for our tea jars. She mended our long johns and stitched pretty-patterned patches onto the elbows of our threadbare winter jackets and padded coats. Helping my mother and me cooking or cleaning, she hummed as she picked vegetables and washed plates. She was still on daily medication, and I had been told that she was recovering and “not yet totally right in her head,” but I never once noticed anything in her manner or speech that struck me as abnormal. My little aunt Kangsheng was a helpful, unobtrusive presence. After she went back to Wuhan, I missed her soothing company.
Aunt Kangsheng got a factory job in Wuhan. A few years later she was considered fully recovered. A fellow worker fell in love with her; they dated and married. She was soon pregnant. For the first time the future looked truly hopeful. Then came the delivery day. She had a massive internal hemorrhage while giving birth. Aunt Kangsheng and her infant both died in the hospital. She was 30 years old.
* * *
In 1995, I visited my little uncle Lusheng and his family in Jiangxi. It was impossible to reconcile the handsome, smiling young PLA officer in the family photo album with the gray-haired, thin, raving lunatic before my eyes. Sometimes, when he was quiet, I’d hold his hands and speak to him about this or that; he’d listen and nod with an innocent, doleful smile on his face. But the next moment he would begin shouting, a torrent of rambling speech, as though he were an emperor or a general issuing orders to his ministers or lieutenants. The living room would become a public square, and Emperor Lusheng, it must be admitted, was not above corruption. He was prone to filling his cabinet with members of his own clan: his sons and son-in-law would be in charge of the military and oversee industry and commerce; I was appointed the chief diplomat leading the foreign ministry. His family, accustomed to such theater, joked about his “nepotism.” Everyone laughed, except me. I left after many sleepless nights.
Uncle Lusheng died in 1998.
18.
The stories I’m telling have turned out to be an odd, patchy collage.
Childhood memories. Silences. Deceptions. Partial revelations. Fragmented flashbacks. Big history bleeding into small stories. The zeitgeist sweeping up private lives. Derailed possibilities. Stunted developments. Dead ends . . .
Was it all inevitable? Could any one of my relatives have avoided their fate?
At the center of this collage stands my grandfather, a small, reticent man with melancholy eyes. That rare, whiskey-laced midnight groan: “Where is the sunlight in my life?” Where, indeed.
I find myself returning repeatedly to one crucial scene: at the Lyon railway station. This was the moment, it seems to me, that sealed his fate, and the fate of his family. Until that moment, he had been traveling toward a very different direction: he was becoming more Westernized, more cosmopolitan. He had moved from one job to another after graduation, he seemed in no hurry to leave France. He was probably just waiting for the right moment to inform his family about his decision to make a life there.
That was the choice he had made: He was going to be an immigrant, the first of the Liu clan from Hubei to settle abroad. The new name he gave himself, Liu Xin, was not a reference to a new China, but to a new man, embarking on a new life. He was already off to a good start. He had gotten himself a decent education and a decent job, doing exactly what he loved to do. He had married a French woman, by his own choice. They had a daughter. He was settling down in France. He seemed to like it there. In a photograph taken at the time, I see a confident, dapper young gentleman, comfortable in his crisp Western suit and striped silk tie. A full head of hair, coarse, dense, jet-black. Behind the stylish spectacles, bright, vigorous eyes. Not a trace of melancholy. A new self, emerging. A new identity, forged.
If Grandpa had pulled off that plan, his hometown folks would have been upset at first, but they would probably have accepted it over time and reconciled with him: What else could they have done? It was a transitional time in China, with so many young radicals breaking off arranged ties and marrying their lovers. Especially the communists—they were doing it with bravado and pride, as it was considered both progressive and revolutionary. A great number of male CCP leaders ended up having serial marriages, with progressively younger wives. After breaking off arranged marriages, Mao went through three wives, and Liu Shaoqi, Chairman of the People’s Republic of China from 1959 to 1968, went through four.
Aunt Dongsheng agrees with me. “I think after ten years in France my father had made up his mind: he was not coming back to China,” she told me recently.
My grandmother would probably have ended up marrying another man. She might have spent her whole life in Hubei. Decades later, after escaping the poverty and the madness of the Maoist era, my grandfather would have returned to visit Hubei, a respected engineer, retired after a long, successful career in France. He would have been warmly received as a chenggong renshi, a successful personage. He would, of course, have donated money to help his hometown’s economic development. The newspapers would have lauded him as an aiguo huaqiao, a patriotic overseas Chinese; the locals would have held him up as a role model, an icon. Chinese official media reported many such heartwarming tales throughout the Reform and Opening period.
Liu Xin, Zha Jianying’s grandfather, in France circa 1928.
But the Hubei elders laid a filial trap and my grandfather fell right into it. Once he boarded that train at the Lyon station, all of the plans he had made for his new life were derailed. From that moment on, the train switched to a different track and carried him off to a different destination. Most scientists are terrible at politics: They are slow to sense which way the political winds blow, tone-deaf to ideological language. So was my grandfather. He was not a combative or confrontational person. That was probably why he stayed away from all politics for as long as possible, and why he found life in France appealing. Despite emigrant loneliness and difficulties, it would have been a simpler way of life, more straightforward, more congenial to his polite temperament, his bookish personality, and his bourgeois tastes. He would be treated as an individual, not just as a part of a web of relations or a cog in a big machine.
But there was no turning around for Grandpa once he was pulled back and tossed into the tribal, partisan entanglements of his ancestral land, just as it was becoming a fully mobilized society where politics would dominate and saturate all aspects of life. He would lose his freedom of choice, first partially, then completely. Once that happened, all his advantages, everything he had learned and acquired through his youthful strivings, would be turned against him. He and his family would become captives on a mad train, insignificant statistics in a great, terrible revolution.
Did Grandpa realize that this is what had happened to his life? That distant summer I spent in Fularki, when he sat like a silent statue in his room, lost in thoughts for hours—could he have been musing about his past, about the mysterious forces that had ruthlessly bent him and his loved ones into a series of tragedies? Or had he become so terrorized and defeated by then that he no longer wanted to indulge in such useless reflections about his past, about the lost possibilities?
Bilingual Chinese-French pamphlets of Mao Zedong’s writings and Liu Xin’s notebook.
The conformism, the xenophobia, the sheer hatred of anything Western during the Mao era was so extreme that my grandfather felt compelled to disguise even his nostalgia about the French language. That was why he was reading a French translation of Mao’s writing, and why in a companion notebook he carefully wrote out, in very neat handwriting, study notes in Chinese, as if to prove he was really interested in nothing but Chairman Mao’s ideas. I have kept those bilingual pamphlets and study notes in a drawer. Every time I look at them and recall the sight of my white-haired, shriveled grandfather bent over a desk, reading French surreptitiously, I am swamped by sadness.