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5

Why Did Father Join the Revolution?

After Nainai married my grandfather, she gave birth to ten babies in ten years. Father and Second Uncle weighed more than seven pounds at birth. Third Aunt was less than six pounds. After her, the babies continued to come. One each year. Smaller and smaller. Nainai did not know how to stop them. Nor did she know how to save them. So the babies died in a few days or just a few hours, before they could open their eyes and see their mother's face, which was as pale as the moon.

The heavy loss made Nainai love even more dearly the three children whom heaven allowed her to keep. She hired the best wet nurse she could find for Third Aunt, because she herself was too weak to nurse her. As for her two sons, they each had a nanny too. Yet Nainai's heart was with her children day and night to make sure that they got the tender love and proper care they needed. As a result, the three of them all grew up healthy and strong.

The Chinese had a saying, “At the age of three, one's personality begins to show.” Father and Third Aunt turned out to be more like Nainai herself, quiet and sensitive. Second Uncle, on the other hand, inherited my grandfather's fiery temper. If he was happy, he would laugh out loud. If he was mad at someone, he would tell the person to his face how he felt. After he spoke up, he did not bear the person grudges. Soon he would forget what had happened between them and be the person's good friend once again.

Despite the differences in their temperament, Nainai's three children had one thing in common: their love and devotion to their mother. When she was cursed by her father-in-law, the children knew how to comfort her to bring a trace of smile back onto her sad face. When she was distressed by the deaths of her parents and younger brother, the children turned her thoughts from the past to the future. Because of the children, new hopes began to sprout up in Nainai's heart. She said to herself that in the future she would send all her children to universities. Her daughter as well as her sons. Especially her daughter! Her daughter would not be a housewife and a dependent like herself. She would have a profession so she could support herself. That way she would not need to put up with the insults she herself had swallowed with bitter tears for so many years.

After her children graduated from universities and got jobs, of course, they would all get married and have children. The more children the better. Boys and girls. All were welcome. They'd fill her house with laughing, crying, crawling, climbing, running, and jumping. She'd hire wet nurses and nannies for each of them, and she herself would tell them stories. Of course, all her children and grandchildren would live with her in her house. A big family. She could not imagine that things could be otherwise.

When the year 1942 came round, Nainai's dreams seemed to be coming true. Father, Second Uncle, and Third Aunt were all in universities. Father was a junior majoring in Western literature in Furen University, Second Uncle a sophomore studying economics in Yanjing University, and Third Aunt had just started medical school. Nainai was ever so proud of each of them.

What she did not know at this juncture was that her children were planning to leave home. They made the decision because of the Japanese invasion. In the thirties, first the northeast was lost. Then big cities like Shanghai, Nanjing, Tianjin, and Beijing fell one after another. Throughout the country people were outraged, by the Japanese as well as by the Nationalist government, which they felt was ineffective in its resistance. Many students agreed with the slogan “Although China is vast, there is no longer enough room for a peaceful desk.”

Being “slaves without a country” day in and day out was more than Father, Second Uncle, and Third Aunt could bear. Everyday in the street the students could see Chinese civilians bullied by Japanese soldiers. Western professors were made to quit one after another. Patriotic Chinese were arrested, tortured, and killed. The hated “plaster flag,” as the Chinese nicknamed it, flew haughtily above everybody's head, making it hard for a Chinese to breathe. Father, Second Uncle, and Third Aunt thought it was time for them to leave Beijing.

Father was the one who had the connections. So he first arranged for his brother and sister to leave. With the assistance of underground workers, they went through Japanese blockade lines and headed for the southwest. Their destination was more than a thousand miles away. With the war going on, the expedition was a journey of danger and chaos. On the way they witnessed bombing, looting, accidents, and all kinds of extortions. Sometimes they rode on trains and buses; sometimes they walked or ran. It took them several months to reach Sichuan, where they eventually resumed their studies in universities.

As for Father, instead of going to the southwest where he could join Second Uncle and Third Aunt, he joined the Communists at Jinchaji anti-Japanese base, a mountainous area between Hebei and Shanxi provinces. Why did he do this? This is another riddle, which unlike the previous one I have a hard time figuring out, for over the years Father has given me too many answers.

For instance, he told me that he joined the Communists because he believed only they could create a new society in China where everyone would enjoy freedom, equality, and happiness.

But then he also told me that he hated the Japanese invaders and wanted to fight them as a guerrilla in the front. When his country was in danger, a young man should not stay in the rear and let others shed their blood and win the war for him. This was what the rich people had been doing in China and elsewhere. “If you have money, donate your money. If you have strength, put forth your strength.” Even the slogan seemed to say this was all right. But Father disagreed and he was serious.

So he went to Jinchaji, which by then was repeatedly attacked by the Japanese troops. Saodang (sweep it up) was what the Japanese called it. When the invaders came, they burned down houses, destroyed crops, took away all the food they could find, and killed people whom they suspected. Meanwhile the Eighth Route Army and guerrillas led by the Chinese Communist Party and supported by local peasants were fighting back. Many people lost their lives in the war. Yet more were coming of their own accord to keep up the resistance. Among them many were college students like Father.

Father arrived at Jinchaji when things were at their worst. By the end of 1942, Father told me, most of the houses in the region were without doors and windows. During the night, when the temperature dropped to ten and sometimes twenty degrees below zero, they had no coal, no firewood, no warm clothes to fend off the severe cold. Cotton-padded jackets and shoes were very hard to come by. Food was in such short supply that soldiers and peasants were all eating bran and wild herbs. The best food in the region was corn flour bread. White flour and green vegetables were never seen. Even salt was scarce.

On top of all this, the region was in dire need of medicine. The shortage was caused by the Japanese blockade. As a result wounded soldiers were sometimes operated on without anesthetic. Thousands of people in the area suffered from epidemic diseases: typhoid fever, smallpox, flu, . . . Many died because no medicine was available.

Father was aware of this situation when he was in Beijing. He heard it from a friend who later turned out to be an underground Communist. So before Father set off, he secretly purchased a fairly large amount of medicine that was urgently needed at the anti-Japanese base. The medicine was tightly controlled in Beijing. Yet as the Chinese saying goes, “With money, one can make the devil turn the millstone.” Father soon obtained what he had put down on the list, with the money and through the business connections of his hated grandfather.

Later Father brought the medicine through Japanese blockade lines. This was a dangerous task. Several times Japanese soldiers searched passengers on the train. If they should find the medicine in Father's suitcases, they would arrest him and the consequences would be dire.

To make matters even more complicated, later one of the guides along the line was caught by the Japanese. This happened shortly before Father's group arrived. As a result, everything they had achieved thus far came to naught. For without the guide they did not know how to get in touch with the next underground worker, so they could not go on. They could not stay in the region either, where they were a group of strangers. The collaborators would soon notice and report them. So they had no other choice but to return to Beijing and start all over again.

Eventually Father arrived at Jinchaji with all the medicine he had purchased. He immediately donated all of it to the local government. The medicine saved many lives. Father was praised by the leaders. A medal was awarded to him, his very first during the wars.

Later Father was sent to study at Huabei Lianda, a branch of the Chinese People's Anti-Japanese Military and Political College. A few months down the road Father got typhoid fever, which nearly killed him.

By that time, the medicine Father had brought to Jinchaji was already used up. Father had to fight the disease with his own strength. For days he lay in bed, running a high fever. A horrible pain turned his stomach and bowels upside down. He could not eat anything. It was almost a miracle that he survived. When finally he was able to leave bed and sit in the sun, he felt that he had become as light as a straw. A gust of mountain wind could make him lose his balance.

One day he borrowed a mirror from a comrade and looked at himself in it. He was shocked by what he saw. While he was sick, he had lost so much hair that he was almost bald. His eyes were frighteningly large, sitting in two dark pits. His skin was dry and sallow. His face was wrinkled, like that of an old peasant. Seeing him like this, who would believe that only a couple of months before, he was considered the most handsome man among the students who came to this region to fight the Japanese.

A director told him he was when he asked Father to play Mr. Darcy in his spoken drama Pride and Prejudice. Father was amused by the proposal, but he told the director he had never been on the stage before. The latter said it was all right. So he became Mr. Darcy, the Pride.

According to Father, the play they staged was a hit, despite his inexperience. “The peasants loved it. Everybody came to see it,” Father said, “even though they did not understand it. None of them had seen spoken drama before. So they thought the play was a lot of fun. They found the English gentlemen and ladies we played awfully weird.”

After Father recovered, he was transferred to Yan'an where Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party stayed during the war of resistance against Japan and the civil war that followed. In the early 1940s few people there spoke foreign languages. Thus when the leaders at Jinchaji found out that Father could speak English and some French, they immediately sent him to Yan'an as an interpreter. Consequently throughout the wars Father was in the army only in name. He never fired a single shot at an enemy.

As for his fellow students, later some of them were sent back to Beijing to do underground work; others stayed in the countryside and became guerrilla fighters. It was the organization—the Party—that decided who went where and did what. Father and his comrades obeyed willingly, for they had vowed that they would “sacrifice the individual and obey the organization” when they joined the Party.

In addition to joining the Party, Father also abandoned his old name Zhichang, “blazing prosperity,” chosen by his grandfather together with the old man's surname. He created a new name for himself: Yu Shan, which means “at the mountains.”

For many years I thought Father did this because he was determined to make a clean break with his upper-class family and live as a new person after he joined the revolution. Only years later when my zeal for the revolution died down did it occur to me that by changing his name Father had also protected Nainai and others in the family who remained in Beijing. Or else he'd have gotten them into trouble with the Japanese and the Nationalists, for both considered the Communists their deadly enemies.

Actually, Father told me, it was really because of Nainai and my great-grandfather that he joined the revolution. The old man taught him to hate oppression. Day in and day out, he was the oppression incarnate in the family. When he bullied Nainai and others, it made Father's blood boil. Father vowed secretly that someday he would avenge the wrongs the tyrant did to everybody by tearing down his evil world and establishing a new one on its ruins. In this new world, no human being would be allowed to oppress other human beings. Nainai's life, Father thought, would be much easier and happier in it.

With such a dream, Father left home and went to the mountains. When he sneaked out, he did not tell Nainai where he was going. So for years Nainai thought that he was studying in the southwest just like Second Uncle and Third Aunt. This was a blessing for her. For had she known Father's real whereabouts, the raids made by the Japanese troops, the disease, and the hardships, she would have worried to death.

As for her life in Beijing in those years, I heard a story from her two old servants who refused to be liberated after Liberation.

Before Father left home, one day he planted a Chinese yam, called shanyao, in the courtyard. It was only a passing whim. Afterwards he forgot about it. Soon he left Beijing. A couple of weeks later, however, the yam sprouted. Nainai put an exquisite fence around it as soon as she saw it.

The Chinese yam was a perennial plant, usually grown by the peasants around their cottages. Nainai kept this yam in her garden among beautiful tree peonies and roses. Gradually, the tender vine of the yam crawled all over a Tai Lake rock.

In those years, Nainai must have been awfully lonely. She missed her children. Because of the war, no news came from any of them. When she became too anxious, she would go and talk to the yam.

Sometimes the plant listened to her in silence as if it understood her feelings but could find no word to comfort her. Sometimes there was a gentle breeze and the numerous heart-shaped green leaves fluttered. Nainai thought that the yam was whispering to her, telling her something about her children in a secret language, which with the love she had inside of her she could almost understand. It soothed Nainai's burning heart. She felt that as long as the yam thrived and she could hear it murmur, things could not go terribly wrong with her beloved children.

Nainai prayed day and night to heaven and to her ancestors, asking them to protect her children and to put an end to the war. In 1945 the Japanese surrendered. Second Uncle and Third Aunt came back to her. But it took Father another ten years to return home.