September 24, 2018 | Occasus | Issue 8 | Creative Nonfiction

Sun Yu Lan, 1931-1946

In the beginning they were all poor, my mother tells me. The Japanese invaded and terrorized the Chinese, but against all odds we drove them out of our country. We sent them away, crippled and in awe of our powerful nation. Then under the leadership of the great Chairman Mao, China was reborn into the powerful state it is today. She insists the Cultural Revolution solved all the societal problems, and the Great Leap Forward allowed China to feed all its loyal citizens.
 
But through the years, I’ve realized that my mother’s view of China is heavily pro-Mao. Perhaps it’s because we benefitted heartily during his reign. Or maybe it’s her loyalty to my great grandmother that makes her turn off Canadian news channels whenever they present China in a negative light. You see, in her mind, China and my great grandmother have become intertwined with time.
 
My great grandmother is a central figure in all her childhood stories. She towers almost larger than life, with her kindness, her bravery, and her determination to survive. Which, my mother explains, was even more praiseworthy with the traumas she experienced and the brutality she witnessed.
 
They lived in small mud brick houses then, each with a small farm that small children would steal from and trample over. Every year, there would be new children and some children that would never visit again. It was hard to keep a child alive in the rural outskirts of China in 1931.
 
My great grandmother, like most other parents, sacrificed many things in her life to ensure her child was healthy. She overfilled the child’s jacket with chicken feathers and light plant fiber. What little meat they got from trading with neighbours would always fill the child’s belly. And when the Japanese invaded without any warning (most neighbours they invaded were slaughtered), she picked her child up and ran as fast as she could away from the men holding the white and red flag.
 
My mother tells me white is the colour of death and of funerals in China. After the invasion was over, my great grandmother insisted that their flags, white with the red circle, reflected what was happening to the Chinese. She heard rumours that the Japanese searched every house for sickly elders and pregnant women who feared the worst. Both were dressed in white, as their families were uncertain if they would live. Then, they speared them like fish and laughed. They would slice open the bellies of the pregnant women sometimes, and stab the fetus out. Watch it writhe like a rat in the dirt.  
 
Not knowing these stories yet, but still fearing the stony Japanese soldiers, my great-grandmother fled from her small village in Weihai. She carried my grandmother over her shoulder and was accompanied by her surviving villagers. They escaped each village before it was razed to the ground by soldiers with their artillery (and crueller bayonets). Eventually, they found themselves at the Northern region of China, but still far from Japanese-occupied Korea and the Soviet Union.
 
Here it was cold. Cold, but bearable. The brutal Chinese winter was already at its end. In their hand-sown wool jackets and the hard soles made out of the ma plant (a hardy, fibrous plant native to China), they planned to stay there until the worst of the war had passed. Under the canopy of leaves, with brush to hide in and tubers to sustain them, they had finally found safety. Or so they thought.
 
In the spring of 1933, the Japanese attacked the trees. The bullets penetrated through their protection, and proved that they were not a solid mass of green.
 
My mother recounts the story as my great grandmother told it. My great grandmother said, I could hear the planes. I knew they were planes. Planes of the Japanese. My mother quickly adds that the gunfire from the planes didn’t hit anyone. (But they were easy to miss; their group had dwindled to only a few people.) In the end, it wasn’t the threat of bullets that forced them to flee. It was the fear.
 
So they fled. To the base of a mountain, to a hill, to beneath the shadows of rocky hills. My mom insists, they were lucky. Your great grandmother was very religious, and God favoured her.  I admit that luck had certainly played a role, but they were only doing what the rural peasants of her village did best: surviving under conditions of starvation, homelessness, and constant uncertainty.
 
They were eventually liberated from the Japanese in 1946, or so my mother tells me. My great grandmother doesn’t remember liberation as peace. She insists there was still fighting, and the Japanese continued to commit crimes against the Chinese. Chinese were publically humiliated, tortured, and killed. But I know that she was probably recounting events from the Chinese Civil War, fought between the Nationalists and Communists. Chinese against Chinese.
 
Several years after their official liberation, my great grandmother lived in Communist China under Mao’s regime. In this time of relative peace, my great grandmother grew cabbages, radishes, carrots, and lettuce in her garden. She gave birth to five more healthy children, and one son who died from the flu. The neighbours didn’t steal anymore: they finally had enough to eat.
 
My mother does not tell me about how Mao’s policies introduced mass famines, the secret executions he commanded, or of his culture police. My mother refuses to believe that any negative aspects of the Cultural Revolution touched my great grandmother’s small village of Weihai at all. But my great-grandmother learned basic reading and writing, so I know it must have reached her. And I wonder how she remembered Mao.
 
Whether deliberate or accidental, the good treatment of my family by the communist regime is still reflected in my parents’ attitudes today. They remain patriotic to China, twenty-two years after leaving it. Even while leaving it they were hesitant, but they did in the end so that I could receive a Canadian education. My mother has never told me, but I know she regrets leaving. I know she misses her parents, and she still feels guilty over not being able to take care of them in their old age.
 
With enough food to eat and shorter work days, the peasants began to talk among themselves. My great grandmother recounts one story particularly vividly, while all the rest have become blurry with time. She tells my mother of how after the Japanese fled, they threw all their war materials into the sea. As Weihai was a small village bordering the sea, these materials eventually washed up to their shore.
 
The grenades came first. They floated up slowly with the tide. My great grandmother says they were black, roundish, and ugly. There was much talk in her village of these new rocks from the sea. After dinner one day, most of the village gathered around these objects of curiosity. They poked at them, prodded them, tried to make sense of something they had never seen before.
 
Then one exploded, setting off a chain of explosions. My grandmother heard it, back from her house. She frantically searched for her two neighbours, living above and below her. They were not home. She rushed to where the noise was coming from: the shore all the villagers frequented.
 
When she arrived, she saw a strip of fabric hanging on the branch of a tree. It was a pattern her neighbour had sown herself: intricate blue flowers on plain white cloth. The white was stained a deep shade of red. She walked further towards the shore, and it was then she saw the carnage. There were no more identifiable strips of cloth, or even identifiable bodies on the shore. The grenades had killed over half of her village.
 
But how did the villagers not know what grenades were, after long decades of Japan’s expansionist rampage through Asia, including China’s close neighbours Russia and Korea? The answer was they couldn’t have known; China remained fundamentally pre-modern even after their liberation from the Japanese. The Chinese were not geographically secluded, but instead isolated from the flows of knowledge. With low literacy rates, they couldn’t read newspapers and depended on word of mouth for the news. They had a profound absence of knowledge.
 
But of course, I don’t tell my mother this. I’ve learned to never criticize the Chinese in front of her. I nod along to her stories, and her descriptions of my great grandmother’s bravery, dedication to her children, and struggle to survive. She has told me these stories my entire life, and I envisioned my great grandmother as a war hero.
 
But when I flew back to China and visited her in 2015, she was a husk of who she was in the stories. She laid dormant on a bed, as still as her many pillows. Only her eyes followed me around the room, and even those were fogged over. When she called me by my mother’s name, my mother had to leave the room to cry.
 
I asked her how she was doing, how she liked China, if she could tell me some stories from her childhood. She replied with one-word answers, laughed at nothing. I stayed in her little room in my grandmother’s apartment for hours, just keeping her company. I wasn’t sure if she knew I was still there, or if I ever was. A few years after leaving her room, and then China, I barely remember her at all. Even now, the stories about her seem more real to me than her as a person.
 
A year later, she was dead.
 
My mother flew back to China alone, and attended her funeral. Four years later, my mother finally let me visit her grave. It was on a little hill, and was where all of my great grandmother’s villagers were buried. On the tombstone, all it said was my great grandmother’s name along with the names of her children. Of course, my mother’s name and my name were not on there. I felt no connection with her.
 
Yesterday, I asked my mother why she wouldn’t let me attend the funeral with her, or even visit the grave earlier. I asked her, If you are so proud of China, why didn’t you teach me more about it? She told me she didn’t want to worry me, and that my only job here was to study as a student.
 
I was surprised I got an answer from her at all. My parents have sheltered me for my whole life, in their contradictions and Chinese propaganda. They taught me loyalty to China but little about the country, and they provided no concrete reasons. But their perception of China and patriotism is also mine. Sometimes I feel like I am becoming my mother, who herself is a copy of my great grandmother with her religious beliefs and blind nationalism. 
 
I tell myself I have no Chinese loyalties, because I am Canadian. But my roots are Chinese, and these stories I’ve been fed my entire life are Chinese, thorough and thorough. I find myself not quite sure how to reconcile my own beliefs with those of my parents’, and my Chinese heritage with my Canadian future.

AMY WANG lives in London, Ontario and is completing a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing at Western University.