Swimming To Freedom — My Escape From China And The Cultural Revolution

CHAPTER I

HONG KONG IS NOT CHINA,

AND WE ARE C H I N E S E

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I WAS BORN IN 1948 in a small, peaceful Chinese coastal town

whose name in English is "North Sea" —that is, north of the South

China Sea. The Chinese Civil War between Chairman Mao's Com-

munist insurgent forces and General Chiang Kai-shek's National

Revolutionary Army was in its final stages. Three years before I

came into being, the Nazis were defeated and the Japanese impe-

rialists surrendered. I was blessed, for North Sea had no military

significance in the Chinese Civil War.

Three years before the Japanese invasion in 1937, Chiang

drove Mao's guerrilla forces on their "Long March" to a remote

area of northwest China, far from the reach of the Japanese invad-

ers. By the time I was born, Mao had perfected his "Protracted

War" against the Japanese and turned it into a full-scale attack on

Chiang. Chiang's army had been badly depleted by the Japanese

invaders, and Chiang's ally, the United States, was exhausted after

its brutal fight with the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese imperial

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forces over the Pacific. And Mao was winning. The Yankees would

not want to fight another war to help Chiang. "The globe is round

and it turns full circle"—so goes a Chinese saying. Mao was des-

tined to rule China.

A month after I was born, Papa and Mommy held a celebra-

tion for my having come into the world. Back then, Chinese did

not celebrate life when it started. They waited a month to see if that

life was still vibrant. Why waste money and excitement when many

babies didn't live past a month? The Chinese were practical people.

I was the second child. Mommy brought five of us into the

world, and we all passed the first-month test. She got the job done in

good order, over eight years, at two-year intervals. So, I can always

figure out how old the others are, unless I forget how old I am.

Mommy said I brought good fortune to the family. A few days

after my "birthday" party, Papa and all the other officers working

for the customs agency of Chiang's government were told to relocate

to Hong Kong. Papa and his colleagues knew Chiang was losing

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the war and planning to flee to Taiwan Island. Back then, Hong

Kong was a British colony, and Chiang's government had a much

bigger customs agency there. Papa was not happy to go to Hong

Kong, but Mommy was elated. "North Sea is too small for raising

children anyway," she declared. "Hong Kong is the place!" Mommy

liked to link the size of a city to how good its schools were. "It's

true, always. No sound-minded teacher prefers to teach in a small

town." To the Chinese, nothing is more important than a good

school with good teachers.

"But Hong Kong is not China!" Papa said, annoyed. "It's a

British colony, and we are Chinese."

"You aren't working for the British." Mommy reminded Papa,

"You're an employee of Chiang's government."

Papa raised his voice: "Chiang's government is corrupt, and

you know I hate it."

Mommy was calm: "How do you know Mao will be better

than Chiang? You're not corrupt; you don't take bribes. That's

good enough for me."

Papa loved China. He had a deep loyalty to it. But there was

no work available there that would pay as much as his job in the

customs agency. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that there was

no job available anywhere. China was a mess. There was blood

everywhere. The violence had spread from the battlefields to every

liberated village. Mao's army was shooting landlords, taking their

land away, and redistributing it to poor peasants.

When the day came, reluctant Papa and joyous Mommy

dragged the family's luggage and my older sister, Jing, who could

walk by then, and carried me onto a ship to Hong Kong. We settled

in an apartment in Causeway Bay on Hong Kong Island. We would

be safe there, even if Mao invaded the Hong Kong peninsula. The

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peninsular part had two districts, Kowloon and the New Territories.

Mao's army could march over the peninsula, but it could not reach

the island of Hong Kong, just as it could not reach the island of

Taiwan: It didn't have warships! The mighty Pacific Fleet of Amer-

ican warships was roaming the Taiwan Strait to protect Chiang. It

would take no time at all for them to sail to Hong Kong to help

out their British pals.

Although Mommy was thrilled to move to Hong Kong, the

move did not come without its difficulties. I became sick with a

cough for days, and on the recommendation of a neighbor, Mommy

took me to the British Hospital. "There were many kids there like

you, coughing and crying," Mommy told me years later. "The doc-

tor said you needed to stay in the hospital in order not to spread

germs to others. I left you there, but when I got home, I felt some-

thing wasn't right. I went back and found you and many other kids

crying inside a room full of brownish fumes."

I got excited: "Did the doctor burn opium in the room?" I

asked. I had just learned about the Opium Wars, when the British

Royal Navy beat the Qing Dynasty army so the Englishmen could

keep trading their opium for our Chinese tea.

"Of course not! What a silly question. I took you away and

swore not to go there ever again." The British Hospital frightened me

to death with the way they treated the sick kids. There should be a

sign in front of it reading, "CHINESE AND DOGS ARE NOT ALLOWED."

In those days, many parks had such signs by the entrance.

To be fair, the Chinese way of dealing with the sick was not

much better. Al we used were bitter-tasting soups made from dried

plants most people couldn't name and ugly-looking insects. I'd

seen sick people drink sake from a bottle in which centipedes and

venomous snakes had been placed while still alive and kept for

years, the longer the better. People also rubbed the sake onto their

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skin to soothe pain. But the worst were the cooked bugs sold in

stores. They looked just like cockroaches except they were black!

Parents would force their kids to eat them if they couldn't control

their bladders while they slept. Thank Heaven I was able to wake

up when the need to pee arose.

The Chinese had peculiar ways to deal with the human body.

For them, being sick meant that some invisible element inside the

body was out of whack. For example, pimples were a sign that the

body was too hot. So, logically, one must drink "cool tea" —but

illogically, one must drink it while it was still hot, to counter the

"hotness" inside the body. No kid liked "cool tea." It was very

bitter. When I had pimples, I was instructed to bite off a little bit of

an extremely salty and sour dried plum with every sip of hot "cool

tea"—to distract my taste buds from the bitterness. The skin of my

forehead would tighten until it tugged at my eyebrows.

Mommy laughed. "Look at you! You're suffering terribly,

aren't you?"

"How can you laugh, Mommy? You try it!"

"Mommy has no pimples."

Cantonese still drink "cool tea" in today's China. Some smart

guy added a whole bunch of sugar to our Cantonese "cool tea,"

refrigerated it, and sold it in cans all over China, calling it "Chi-

nese Coca-Cola." Adults, without pimples, drink it ice cold while

eating-to get fat, I guess.

Mommy liked to say that moving to Hong Kong was a bless-

ing from Heaven. It gave us peace when Mao's army was approach-

ing the area north of Hong Kong to wipe out the remnants of

Chiang's government, so Mao could declare, on October 1, 1949,

on the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the

birth of the People's Republic of China. I was too young to remem-

ber living in Hong Kong, but in the photos from those years, I feel

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the calm and ease and I see the joy in our faces. Mommy took a

lot of pictures of me alone, me with her and me with her and Jing.

Papa seldom showed up in the photos. "He was always busy at

work," Mommy explained.

A happy person takes pictures to remember happy moments.

Many happy moments left behind many pictures. Of the many

pictures of our family, quite a few show my fat cheeks and curious

eyes. The one that always made me laugh features ice cream. I

stuffed my mouth with too much of it, causing it to spill out and

drip onto my shirt.

"Mommy, how come I don't like ice cream anymore?" I asked

years later, when we were back in China.

"China has no ice cream. It has ice chips."

For all that Mommy loved Hong Kong, Papa did not. His

heart was always with China. "Hong Kong is not China," he d say,

"and we are Chinese. We must go back to China!" He never went

deeper to explain why he liked China so much, so I asked Mommy.

She explained that all Papa's brothers and sisters were in China,

and besides, he was stubborn. Once he decided on something, it

was hard to change his mind.

"Is stubborn good?" I asked.

"No, it's not good. You don't want to be stubborn."

"What's 'stubborn' mean?"

"When Mommy asks you to do something in the right way

and you keep doing it your way."

"But what if my way is the right way?"

"Then Mommy is stubborn."

"Oh, Mommy can be stubborn, too?"

"Everybody can be stubborn."

"Who is not stubborn?"

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"Nobody. But your Papa is more stubborn than all of us

combined."

But Papa didn't need to be stubborn to bring us back to China.

For two thousand-some years, Confucius's teaching had become

part of the Chinese "cultural DNA," which dictated that the Chi-

nese act as family units, not individuals, and that the authority of

a family rested on the husband, not the wife. That was great for

Papa. It also dictated that a woman's greatest duty was to produce a

son, not a daughter. Being a woman, Mommy faced insurmountable

odds in keeping the family in Hong Kong.

Before Mao, Chinese emperors had relied on Confucius's

teaching because it had taught the Chinese to respect and obey

authority. Then, in 1966, when Mao was seventy-three, he decided

to launch the Cultural Revolution to achieve his political and cul-

tural goals. He replaced all -isms (except, of course, socialism and

communism) with Maoism. Mao wanted all Chinese people to

worship only him-not Confucius, not Buddha, and especially not

the Christian God. After Mao died in 1976, Confucianism made a

miraculous reappearance and has been strong ever since. The new

leaders of the Communist Party of China appreciate the beauty of

this Chinese cultural DNA-conformity and obedience. Capitalizing

on the Western intellectuals' admiration of Confucian teaching, the

Chinese government has opened hundreds of "Confucius Institutes"

in the democratic world to serve its global ambition. I wonder

how the Western world can reconcile its advocacy for independent

thinking and women's rights with its endorsement of this Chinese

cultural DNA.

In 1951, two years after the founding of Communist China,

Papa joined an insurrection in the customs agency to bring the

family back to China. Jing was five, I was three, and our baby

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sister, Lily, was one. Lily was born in Hong Kong, and therefore

given a British first name, just like "Mommy," one she was proud

of. But when she grew up, Lily complained often that Mommy

had lost her British birth certificate. Back then, Cantonese loved

all things British.

Papa's insurrection ended our happy, peaceful life in Hong

Kong. At that time, Papa was young and handsome, ambitious and

hardworking. While many of his colleagues worked hard out in the

field hustling bribes, he worked diligently in the office on his way

up the career ladder. Neither he nor Mommy could have foreseen

that working for Mao's enemy in Hong Kong would turn out to be

perilous for Papa and our family later on in China.

When I was old enough to understand the meaning of the

word insurrection, I was disappointed. Mommy told me there was

no gunfire or bloodshed involved in Papa's insurrection. Papa and

some of his colleagues simply walked out of the office and declared,

"We quit! We're returning to the Motherland!" The customs office

didn't stop this patriotic bunch. There were many qualified people

waiting in line to fill the vacancies. And the British governor of

Hong Kong didn't give a damn. Their insurrection didn't affect the

money flowing back home to the Queen.

Why Mao did not take over Kowloon or the New Territories

on the peninsula during the liberation-together, these two places

comprised more land than the island of Hong Kong—was a mys-

tery to me for years. If Mao had taken over the peninsula, Papa

would have been working for the new China from the get-go, as his

office was on the peninsula. And I'm sure Papa would have joined

Mao's forces and become a revolutionary comrade instead of one

of Chiang's former officers-Papa had complained that Chiang's

government was no good because it was corrupt. But Jing said that

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Papa could be shot dead by the People's Liberation Army for having

been an enemy of Mao. Politics was bloody in China.

Why Mao did not take over Kowloon Peninsula remained

an aching question for me. But it was hard to find out the truth in

China. Not a single book I found said a word about the Yankees'

Pacific War, which destroyed the Japanese navy; or about the Ameri-

can atomic bombs that brought the Japanese invaders to their knees;

or about the evil Chiang's government representative standing

beside the leaders of the Allied powers to accept the surrender of

Imperial Japan on the deck of the mighty USS Missouri.

In the end, Papa had a simple answer for me: "China needs

Hong Kong to trade with the world. It needs a stable Hong Kong as

a whole, so it honors the Qing Dynasty's leases and lets the British

run the island. The trade gives me my job. That's what I'm doing

every day."

So, I learned that things happen for a reason. That I could

not find the reason did not mean there was none. Yet, in China, we

were not taught such reasons in school. And when no reason was

found, gossip took over.

"Don't tell anyone what I've just told you," Papa warned me.

"Why?" I asked. "Isn't it true?"

"Of course it is; Papa doesn't lie. But it's not good for China's

image. If someone hears it, it'll spread like wildfire. Twisting and

spinning gossip a few times will get me in trouble."

"What trouble?" I was curious.

"Trouble is trouble," Papa said. "I don't know what it would

do to me."

Mommy wasn't excited about Papa's insurrection, but China

was. The insurrection brought us to Canton City (now known as

Guangzhou). Upon our arrival, we were greeted by people beating

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drums. Banners on the train station platform bore the words

INSURRECTION HEROES in bold characters. By participating in the

insurrection, Papa was seen as officially rising up against Chiang's

government; he was a hero. It earned him a good job: as the head

of the import/export department of the provincial government in

the province of Guangdong.

As the family of one of the heroes of the insurrection, we

were driven around Canton City, the largest city in Guangdong

Province, by a young comrade, to view various apartments. We

were jammed together in the car like sardines in a can. Papa sat in

front, and Mommy, holding crying Lily, sat in the back between

Jing and me, to separate us-even though we were too tired to

bother each other.

"It was exhausting," Mommy recalled. "There weren't many

differences among the apartments." She was right. I had been in

some of my classmates' homes, in old concrete buildings. Most

had electricity and water, but no heating or air-conditioning. (I

didn't even know there were such things, as I had been too young

to appreciate them in Hong Kong.)

We were given two rooms on the ground floor of an old four-

story building. The bigger room had space for a square dining table,

a large bed with a steel frame for mosquito netting, a dresser, and

a desk under a window covered in rusty bars. The bed was for

Mommy and Papa and my youngest sister. (That sister would later

be Bun, the last of Mommy's five babies.) I slept in the smaller room,

in a small bed with a circular mosquito netting, the worst kind

because it allowed my forearms and legs to touch more of the net's

surface, giving the mosquitoes a better chance to suck my blood.

My bed was about one foot from a larger bed that took up almost

half the room. The larger bed was for Jing, Lily, and Ning-Ning•