A Village with My Name

by Scott Tong

  This uncomfortable exchange has played and replayed in my mind ever since. How can I tell his story, and still honor him? So I have decided to change his name, at least somewhat. This is not a wholesale alias. Early on in his life, my uncle had his surname changed from his father’s to his mother’s. But here, I will use his true-but-long-discarded name of Tong Bao. Here is how I think about it: for the first three decades of his life, Tong Bao had many things taken away from him, robbed from his life experience: Warmth. Desire. Opportunity. And most of all, trust. Naming him would turn me into the next thief. So here goes.

  When Tong Bao was born in 1947, his father (my grandfather) was a widower attempting to put his prewar life back together. My grandfather had spent seven years hiding from Japanese air raids in the western mountains of Sichuan province, alongside members of the Nationalist Guomindang government of Chiang Kai-shek. In Sichuan, my grandfather’s wife gave birth to their second child: my father. This wife, my father’s birth mother, died shortly after from tuberculosis. My father remembers nothing of his birth mother.

  Upon the Japanese surrender in 1945, my grandfather returned down the Yangtze to Nanjing. He fell in love with the woman who would become his second wife and Tong Bao’s mother. This marriage to Wife 2 lasted two years before my grandfather left her and left China. Wife 2 would suffer for decades, on account of her marrying a GMD professor for two years.

  Before leaving wartime China, my grandfather found time to meet a third woman, a Ms. Wang of Shanghai. “He represented her in a legal case,” Tong Bao says. “She was the daughter of a capitalist.” He pulls out the term “capitalist” in a room furnished with a nice piano, a flat-screen TV, and a $5,000 racing bicycle.

  To make things worse, Tong Bao’s mother—the spurned Wife 2—was pregnant with their second child when my grandfather left her. “She never talked about this,” my uncle says.

  Aunt Qi Menglan jumps in: “Mistresses were very common then. They say a good man has nine wives.”

  Tong Bao’s mother at the time did not even know her husband had left, or who he went with. She later received a letter from a friend in Taiwan who’d run into my grandfather and his mistress.

  “This was when mail still went back and forth from Taiwan,” Tong Bao says. By the summer of 1950, though, Beijing and Washington entered the Korean War, the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet sailed into the Taiwan Strait, and all communications between Taiwan and the mainland ended. Tong Bao was two years old then, and has no childhood memories of his father.

  China’s political system, though, does not forget. Tong Bao bore the stain of being a GMD son. There was one incriminating phrase that kept haunting him, a phrase stamped atop his dossier: the political status of haiwai guanxi. Overseas relations.

  ***

  I first met Uncle Tong Bao in 2005, when Marketplace sent several journalists to the mainland for a special series of live programs from China. This was a common thing. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, virtually every major news organization in the world went over to “discover” China. This was our turn.

  He lives in a walk-up apartment on the fifth floor of a solid but modest neighborhood. I hardly remember anything about our interaction. Aunt Qi Menglan did much of the talking while he slaved in the kitchen, frying up one dish after another. This, I learned, is what Shanghai men do: cook and clean while the women appear to be in charge. Once during an early trip to Beijing, I told a cab driver I lived in Shanghai, prompting a strongly worded reply. He warned me: “Don’t come up here and say you’re a Shanghai man. They’re wimps. They talk and talk but they never fight. Bu nan bu nu.” Neither man nor woman.

  Uncle Tong Bao is not so much androgynous as overlooked. If you passed him on a Shanghai street, you might look straight past. Medium height, slight build, round face. His eyebrows slant down toward the edge of his face, almost as if he’s sad all the time.

  On the first trip, he spoke mostly of logistics: where to get a cab, how Shanghai lays out on a map, what to eat and not eat. Only later would I realize that these everyday details are Uncle Tong Bao’s way of showing affection. Just before I left that night, he presented me with several thick cotton sweatshirts to bring home for the kids.

  “We have sweatshirts,” I said. I pack light, and there was no way I’d squeeze these in the suitcase.

  “Yisi yisi,” he said. Just a little something for meaning. He shoved the oversize shopping bag in my hand, walked me down five floors, and delivered me into a cab.

  Building a relationship with Uncle Tong Bao is like putting pennies in a jar. Each visit is a small deposit. Most of the times I met him, I asked him to help me explain something for a story I was chasing: How do the currency controls work again? What do you make of the slave labor scandal? How do you deal with Internet censorship? What was it like before there were direct flights to Taiwan? Will you attend the Olympics? The Shanghai World’s Fair Expo?

  The ice begins to break in 2011, the year after we’ve moved back to the States. I fly back specifically to start researching family history. It’s summer vacation, so I’ve brought along my older son, Evan, who is eleven. Uncle Tong Bao and Aunt Qi Menglan insist we eat at their place for dinner. And sure enough, once we arrive, he is cooking up a feast: bamboo shoots, tofu, shrimp stir-fried with ginger, braised pork, snap peas with potatoes, soy sauce–boiled eggs.

  Quickly we learn there is a problem. We’ve arrived an hour before the appointed dinnertime, and Evan is starving.

  “It’s still early for dinner,” Aunt Qi Menglan says. Still, she has to offer something, so she walks out and reappears with a bakery box filled with individual cakes. “Eat cake.” As we settle into the small living room couch, I nod my consent to Evan and he digs in. Better to spoil an appetite than a relationship.

  At dinner my aunt doesn’t so much sit as roam. She explains she can’t eat much on account of bad teeth. Mostly she hovers around Evan, with a pot in one hand and a spoon in the other. It seems to me she’s making a mental tally of every bite he takes, the way an umpire tracks balls and strikes.

  “He eats so little,” she complains. “Why isn’t he eating more? What does he like to eat? We’ll make it.” No need, I say. Perhaps it’s just jet lag.

  “He doesn’t want to eat,” Uncle Tong Bao says to her. “You’re pressuring him.”

  Evan sits back from all this attention and says he’s not feeling so well. “I might have a fever,” he says in English.

  “What’s the problem?” Aunt Qi Menglan requests a translation as I ask for a thermometer.

  Request denied. “No fever!” she declares, with the kind of Chinese certainty that shall not be challenged. “If he had a fever, he’d feel cool, not hot.”

  The logic confuses me—perhaps she’s referring to the chills from the patient’s perspective—but now is not the time to seek clarification. Instead, I direct Evan to lie on the couch for a few minutes and ask if they have beer. And then Uncle Tong Bao begins talking.

  “I was always put in the back of the line,” he says of his childhood. “So long as there was a front and a back, I was in back.”

  I ask: “What kind of lines?”

  “All of them.” Uncle Tong Bao was deemed ineligible to attend the best middle schools, even though he received top grades. He grew up in the city of Changzhou, in between Nanjing and Shanghai—his mother’s city. She and Tong Bao crammed into a small apartment with his younger brother (named Tong Qi), her own brother and his two children, and her mother. “There were so many political movements in the 1950s, celebrating loyal revolutionaries and criticizing the rest of us.”

  The status of haiwai guanxi followed him like a shadow. When the time came during the Cultural Revolution to exile teens and young adults with bad political status to the countryside, Tong Bao received a long sentence of ten years (though one of my mother’s nieces actually was exiled to Guangxi province for thirteen years).

  But he focuses on the treatment of his mother’s persecut
ion during the Cultural Revolution, at the hands of Red Guard youths enforcing ideological purity. “They came to dig up your roots.” Party members went back into everyone’s dossiers to hunt for family connections to real and imagined enemies of the regime. Red Guards targeted teachers and school administrators in particular; Uncle Tong Bao’s mother was a vice principal. “She was a leader,” he says. “So long as you were a leader, you were targeted.”

  “They called it ‘cleaning up the classes,’” Aunt Qi Menglan says. “Some teachers were forced to sit in public and have their heads shaved—but only on one side of their head. They called it the ‘yin-yang’ haircut.” I’d read about cases of students beating teachers to death with baseball bats and belts, but this was an altogether different experience, hearing it directly from participants and victims in my own family.

  As for Tong Bao’s mother, “they criticized her on dazibao,” he says, describing the handwritten “big-character posters” that went up on walls across the city. Dazibao turned up everywhere: in outdoor spaces, work units, and notably schools. Some signs parroted propaganda slogans or poems; others directly targeted key leaders to whip up revolutionary frenzy. Some dazibao denounced key leaders as bourgeois intellectuals, historical revisionists, or counterrevolutionaries. Periodically, a sign would simply describe a hated person as “Guomindang’s bitch.”

  He looks at me for a moment. “She never talked about any of this.”

  Chapter Twelve

  CURSED BY OVERSEAS RELATIONS

  I was so lucky to find a frog on the way home. My grandmother would cook it for us to eat.

  —Uncle Tong Bao

  Soon after escaping mainland China, my father tasted Coca-Cola. This was in the early 1950s, when Taiwan enjoyed the protection of the US Cold War umbrella. It began with the conflict in Korea that mainlanders knew as the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea. Six hundred thousand Chinese soldiers and thirty-six thousand American troops died. By the time of the cautious truce in 1953, Washington and Beijing were outright enemies. The United States folded Taiwan into its Pacific alliance, joining Japan, South Korea, Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

  Into Taiwan came American money and influence. As the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet patrolled the waters of the Taiwan Strait, American GIs, diplomats, and missionaries landed in Taipei. My father remembers attending a Boy Scout camp with wealthy American boys. At the time, the typical person in Taiwan made just $900 US a year—around the same per capita income as Ghana or Kenya, but one-tenth that of America. “Everyone was poor,” he recalls, “but we were equally poor.”

  On the radio, my father remembers Taiwanese deejays playing rock-and-roll hits by a foreign star known as mao wang, the Cat King. “I don’t know why we called him that.” The Cat King slicked his hair, and his music was bolder than what the 1950s Taiwan audience was used to—Pat Boone, the Brothers Four, Connie Francis. The Cat King was, of course, Elvis Presley. My father and his friend knew other stars through film. Theaters in Taipei played Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, A Streetcar Named Desire, all with Chinese subtitles, giving students the illusion they understood English. In truth, he found the Southern accents of Blanche DuBois and Scarlett O’Hara particularly hard to follow. Even now, after six decades in the States, “I still don’t understand” the accent.

  Taiwan’s economy in the ’50s and ’60s began to rev, for a number of reasons: intellectual elites from the mainland, the GMD’s iron-fist authoritarian rule, American money, and legacy Japanese colonial investments in roads, electricity, and education. Turbocharged by capital from the US Agency for International Development, Taiwan became a low-end manufacturing titan, churning out textiles and transistors for the world.

  At the age of sixteen, my father met an American sergeant from Allentown, Pennsylvania. Bill Bloss had transferred to Taipei after serving in the Korean War, and his new tour came with a house, cook, driver, and Jeep four-by-four. Before long, Bloss ventured across the street where he lived—Dragon Spring Street—and chatted up a group of local teenage boys, including my father. Bloss offered to teach them English, and joined them at ping-pong and snooker, the British billiards game. He drove them around in his Jeep. “He had a record player with an automatic changer,” my father recalls. “It was totally fantastic to us.”

  Bloss took them to a Lutheran church, where my father and a couple friends got baptized. He even helped them choose English names: James. Jerry. Carl. David. My dad chose Alvin. Eventually the American GI offered a room in his house for Alvin Tong to sleep in. The two men spoke English every day, and Bloss bought my father luxury items from the PX, including cotton underwear as an alternative to the cheap, sandpaper-like boxers local boys tended to wear. My father can talk about Bill Bloss’s influence for a long time, most of all the positive image this friendship gave of the United States: “It was always the goal to go to America. It was the obvious choice for all of us.”

  By the time my father graduated with an electrical engineering degree from National Taiwan University, Taiwan was sending two thousand of its best and brightest to the United States for graduate school. Alvin Tong would join them, inspired by Bill Bloss from Allentown. It was, in a way, a passing of the industrial baton. One century after America’s post–Civil War industrial boom had brought fortune to the ironworks centers of Pennsylvania, post–World War II Taiwan was having its own manufacturing boom. It was 1962.

  That same year, my father’s younger brother Tong Bao on the mainland was eating tree bark and grass to survive. In the mainland city of Changzhou, he was a teenager in the worst famine in recorded history.

  Tong Bao would not have told me any of this had I not asked about it. Like many of his generation, he does not sermonize about the bad old days. I have to squeeze out the information as if it’s the last toothpaste left in the tube.

  I’m sitting at his dinner table in Shanghai, asking about the sannian ziran zaihai. I’ve heard of this period of the Great Leap Forward described as the Three Years of Natural Disasters. But he looks at me as if I have two heads.

  “It was not a natural disaster,” he says. “It was a totally manmade disaster. There was no flood. There was no period of no rain. We had to eat tree bark and grass.”

  “How did you eat the bark?” I ask. “Did you just pluck it off the trees and eat it?”

  A pained looked comes upon his face. Of course not. “We stir-fried it, with a little soy sauce, scallions, and water.”

  “That was just to make it a little salty,” Aunt Qi Menglan chimes in. “To go down with the rice.” I’d later learn from other relatives and interviews that people scraped bark off trees, soaked it in water from limestone quarries to soften it, and then fried it up.

  This was when things were the worst, Uncle Tong Bao says. “I was so happy to find a frog on the way home. My grandmother would cook it up for us to eat.”

  The food started to become scarce when he was twelve. China followed a strict Soviet model of central planning, built on five-year plans. In 1957, the last year of the first Five-Year Plan, grain production grew only 1 percent—not enough to keep up with the growing population. In Changzhou, the government issued ration coupons to buy eggs, fish, pork, rice, noodles, cloth, and beans. Tong Bao’s family received fewer food rations than others, he says, suggesting it was punishment for haiwai guanxi, overseas relations. “You got more coupons, or fewer, depending on your status.”

  The government launched the Great Leap Forward a year later, directing farmers what to plant: yes to the “eight essential crops,” no to the “five eliminates.” Many in the countryside were recruited to communal industrial projects, siphoning them away from tilling, sowing, and reaping. Food production plummeted.

  China’s motivation was a familiar one in the country’s history: to throw off generations of backwardness and reclaim its place among the elite nations. To catch up and surpass. This motivated the Qing reformers in the late nineteenth century, the May Fourth demonstrators in 1919, a
nd Deng’s free-market reforms of the 1970s and ’80s, and motivates the leaders in Beijing today. University of Hong Kong historian Frank Dikötter writes in his book Mao’s Great Famine that Beijing during the Great Leap Forward sought specifically to overtake Britain in fifteen years, as measured by steel output.

  Under the Great Leap, bureaucrats had to meet unreasonably high quotas for steel and grain production. So they lied about achieving them. Behind the fake numbers were mass shortages. Based on various estimates, somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-six million to forty-five million Chinese starved to death during this period.

  In prison labor camps—like the one I assume my grandfather was sent to—prisoners were known to trade briefcases and wristwatches for food. They ate the scabs that formed on the edges of their lips, as well as lice from other inmates’ heads. In one harrowing scene from the semifictional documentary Jiabiangou (The ditch), one man falls over and throws up. Another immediately mines the vomit with his fingers and stuffs chunks of the returned food into his own mouth. “There was not a single county where cannibalism was not discovered,” wrote a county party committee deputy secretary in Anhui cited in Tombstone, an account of the famine by Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng. Yang wrote that people sliced human flesh off the buttocks and legs of corpses and ate it—sometimes cooked, sometimes raw. One Shanghai intellectual and author, over a smoothie at a Western-style coffee shop, told me the story of his friend in Henan province during the famine: the man somehow came into possession of a pig, and buried it to hide it from his own friends and family. At night, he secretly dug it up to eat, and survived the famine.

  “1960 was the worst,” Uncle Tong Bao says. “We even needed ration coupons for pots and pans.” Then he looks at me and asks: “Why talk about this? It doesn’t change anything.” He always gives off a certain hopelessness about the past. There is nothing empowering about it, no cliché about learning history to avoid repeating it, no need for a museum of bad memories.