I’ve come to appreciate that my mother is a collector of stories.
Whenever I share a little anecdote about a silly something with my kids, I can almost see her mentally processing the story as I’m telling it for later retelling—applying her own filters to distill the context or play up a funny or quirky personality-revealing bit.
She stores the stories in her head to entertain others or disperse when prompted: mention a name, wonder aloud about a face in a photo, or ask a vague question about someone from the past, and chances are good you’ll get a story in return.
Now I can see that this is why I often felt lost in her stories when I was little. We would be talking about one person, and then suddenly we’d be in a nested story about someone else—who was invariably some kind of “aunt” or “uncle” even if they were the stepsister from the first marriage of the best friend of the brother of the second cousin who was actually no relation, just a close family friend. Or something like that.
I would constantly lose track of who was related to whom in what way and who did what and who went where and who died when—not only because it was all so complicated to begin with (there are dozens of highly specific Chinese kinship terms I never quite learned), but also because, like so many native Chinese speakers, my mother tends to use her pronouns interchangeably. There is no distinction in spoken Chinese between “he” and “she,” “him” and “her,” or “his” and “hers.”
Sometimes I wonder if all this work is really about sorting out pronouns.
One of the rewards of figuring things out is being able to share a story (or three) about this photograph. It’s the kind of photograph that dares you to ask, Who are they? Even when you’re a little afraid to know, And what happened to them?
I dared to ask my mother.
They’re striking, aren’t they? All three men are about 6 feet tall. I easily recognize my young grandfather on the far right, dressed in the lighter color.
On the far left is my mother’s oldest cousin, her 大表哥 (da [eldest] biaoge [father’s sister’s son]. He was the son of my grandfather’s second stepsister and worked as a bank clerk at the time. My grandfather doted on him and later introduced him in Taiwan to the woman he would marry. (Sorting out confusion about who, exactly, this woman is and how else her family intersects with ours was the topic of no less than two separate conversations with my mother; in short, this woman had a younger sister who would later marry my mother’s older brother.) They would eventually move to the U.S. and settle in Los Angeles, where he lived comfortably into old age. They had eight children, six girls and two boys, who were conveniently named in alphabetical order from A. through H. Of all eight children, only H., the youngest, would marry and have children of his own.
(An indulgent aside for myself: I remember forging a brief but strong friendship with D. when I was young. He sent me a few letters, and I can still bring to mind the elegant cursive of his handwriting.)
In the middle is a kind of uncle to my mother, her 三姑父 (san [the third] gufu [father’s older sister’s husband]). He was married to the youngest of my grandfather’s three stepsisters; she was very close to him, and my grandfather’s mother was like her own.
This third stepsister was considered more of an “inner beauty” than an outer one. When the time came to find a husband, a matchmaker declared it would be a mistake for someone like her to marry into an upper-class family. Better to find someone more “stable.”
Enter my mother’s 三姑父, sight unseen. He came from a family of five boys whose last name was Sun. They were all tall and handsome, but no one wanted to marry them because they were poor.
When my grandfather’s mother saw this soon-to-be son-in-law arrive on her doorstep, she thought, Oh no. This boy was too good-looking. What would he think about his betrothed, who was not? Would he be content? Would he be faithful? Would the marriage succeed?
She lay awake all night, worrying.
The next day, she sighed with relief when she saw the bride and groom look at each other for the first time: they actually looked happy!
When the above photo was taken, Sun probably felt he had it all. He loved his wife and he loved their many children. Despite having only a high school education, he had made it as the manager of the Haitangxi 海棠溪 railroad station in Chongqing, the Nationalist government wartime capital. It was not a big station, but it was an important one. Government officials took the train from his station to and from work. Even Chiang Kai-shek took the train a short distance home every day.
(My mother speculates it was thanks to Sun that my grandmother had a train ticket at Nanchang, when she was making the harrowing journey from Jinhua to Chongqing in the thick of war to find my grandfather. Either that, or she’d spent an extortionate amount of money to get one.)
In the civil war that reignited after the end of WWII, Sun’s luck turned when the Communists arrived in Chongqing. They showed up at his house in the middle of the night and demanded his allegiance. Join us, and hand over that train station, they said. But he was a good, loyal employee who just wanted to lie low and do his job. I’m just a civilian, he said, I’m no threat.
For his obstinacy, he was thrown into jail and his seven children were scattered to some of the harshest, most remote labor camps—locales typically reserved for people with government connections, university degrees, and other affiliations and backgrounds deemed most “dangerous” and “counter-revolutionary.” Some children were sent to Gansu, a Communist stronghold in northern China with strong ties to Russia, and others to Heilongjiang in the frozen northeast, also under Communist and Russian control. His wife and youngest daughter were sent to a commune in Sichuan, where her assigned work included washing rice in the river.
When his life was torn apart, was it better for Sun to know or not to know that his wife was pregnant? He would never meet his eighth child.
It was 1948 when Sun went to jail. He was finally let out in 1960 or 1961—at the height of the Great Chinese Famine, the deadliest famine in human history.
He had nothing.
To survive, he pulled a heavy, wooden hand cart in front of the train station at Chongqing.
My mother remembers a summer afternoon in Taiwan when she was 13 years old or so. A piece of mail arrived for my grandfather. Unbelievably, it had come from Shanghai, via Hong Kong, transferred hand over hand at a time when correspondence with mainland China was all but impossible.
On yellowed, thin paper was a letter from Sun. My mother remembers the calligraphy was hard to read. Life was very 苦 (ku, painful, bitter), he wrote. He was doing very hard labor, he didn’t have much money, he had nowhere to live, he had no clothes. He wanted so much—reading this, my grandfather wept—to have a little taste of sugar.
My grandfather leapt into action. He asked someone he trusted in Hong Kong to help exchange US$300 in cash for Chinese money and please, please, get it to Sun. It was a dangerous mission for friends and middlemen. If anyone was caught, they would surely be killed.
There’s no knowing if Sun ever received any of the money. My grandfather never heard from him again. At some point, there was news that he had died. “People told us,” my mother says, “that he dropped dead on top of his wooden pull cart.”
What is the opposite of a nested story? A lapsed story? A reinstated story?
Here is one:
In 1985, my grandmother had finished a round of radiation treatments for her lung cancer. No one would know about the cancer metastasizing to her brain for another two years. She was well enough that my mother planned a trip for her parents to China—the way you plan something when you realize you might be running out of time to do it. It would be the first time my grandparents set foot in China since fleeing to Taiwan 36 years earlier. They were traveling in mid-October, so they would start in the north (where it was already cold) and make their way south.
My grandparents, my mother, and my mother’s older brother and his wife arrived in Beijing on a Pan Am flight. My grandparents had never been to Beijing before. Of course, they went to the Forbidden City. It wasn’t at all crowded in those days. My grandfather was so excited by all the sights, he lapsed into his old stutter (which always completely disappeared when he was angry).
After a few days in Beijing, they flew to Shanghai for a few days (what is it like to return to a place where you’d left a whole life behind?) and then took a train to Hangzhou. There they walked along a beautiful path beside West Lake, lined with weeping willows and peach trees. It was a place my grandmother had always wanted to go; when she was pregnant with my mother, she’d told my grandfather she wanted to buy a house there.
Their trip continued in Zhenjiang, my grandmother’s hometown, where they met a few long-lost cousins. Then, on to Xi’an, where there was an even bigger reunion with more long-lost relatives who had managed to survive all these hard years. My mother remembers how emotional it all was: “Oh my goodness, there were so many people. I’d never met any of them before, and they were all crying.”
My mother didn’t cry; she had no idea who was who. (I know how that feels.)
While in Xi’an, my grandparents hosted a steady stream of visitors who came to take showers every day in their hotel bathroom at the Sheraton. It was an unheard of luxury for people who had no indoor bathrooms and had never even seen a shower before.
At the hotel breakfast buffet one morning, my grandfather prodded my mother to open her bag. She did, and into it went a stash of hard-boiled eggs he wanted to give to the third stepsister he loved so much—the “inner beauty” who had married Sun.
Her re-education at the hands of the Communist Party was long complete. Perhaps at first she had renounced Sun and their marriage as a matter of survival. But in time, she had come to fully denounce him in her heart and believe what she was no doubt told over and over again: he had been like a poison to her, her family, and her country.
If he had just cooperated.
Now in her 80s, she had come down from Lanzhou to join the reunion in Xi’an. She wore a headband and traditional padded cotton trousers (mianku), tied around the waist. Presented with the eggs, she swallowed one in a single gulp, before distributing the rest into her pockets.
Then she hugged my mother, cried profusely, and said so many things my mother couldn’t understand.