Voices on the New Diasporas - an MIT student journal
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Rediscovering Grandpa by Jaylene Hang, Class of 2005
"Mama, where do people go after they die?"
"They go see the god of heaven and search for their ancestors. High up there they look after their descendents like you and me. We should be good and treat them right or they'll never find peace."
Where is my grandpa, then? He must be wandering about in the sky, lonely and incredibly lost, since we hardly ever mention him. The Old Societys tradition of honoring the dead by burning paper money was such a nuisance that since the end of the Qing Dynasty, we have abandoned it. With no place to rest and no home to return to, he must be tired. Mother, didnt you tell me that he passed away with his eyes still open?
Grandpa was a mystery. His life was sealed and locked away in some secret past because he belonged to the forbidden days, to an era that gave nightmares to those who tried to remember. He belonged to a ghost generation who were better off having memories of them cremated with their times, with their ashes dispersed into a forgotten dimension, than having their apparitions trouble the living.
Spirits lived in graveyards; they wandered about in search of victims to cling to, to resurrect themselves or to inflict yet another death. The pitch-black Halloween nights when the wind hollered and when the moon scratched the air set the quintessential scene for hocus pocus. The witches and the mummies and the vampires, draped and wrapped in threadbare material, make for a sensational portrayal of the land of the dead few know. These were the burial sites that I came to know well from American movies and fantasized real graves to be just as exciting. I imagined myself being able to see and hear in the sixth sense. I didnt know Grandpas "grave" until I returned to my hometown in central China a few summers ago. Early one morning I found myself in a packed family wagon with five of my relatives. I got stuck in the back with my six-foot-two cousin; attempting to fit both sets of legs in there took real genius. Still dizzy from a night of restless sleep, glancing at the changing landscape outside the window I realized that I hardly knew where I was going or how I ended up being stuck in the back with my cousin and his smelly feet. Somebody mentioned cemetery, but the buzzing of the engine devoured rest of the information, perhaps deliberately. Somebody mentioned that having my cousin and me come along was not a part of the plan.
Silent whispers bounced back and forth in the passenger compartment. Still not quite awake yet, I became frightened. Something secret I didnt know? A morbid feeling seized me that someone in the family was dying, and I shouldnt know. Could it be grandma? Everything seemed creepy. Now that we had left the city, dilapidated wooden shacks, looking as if abandoned but probably not, lined the country road, and rice paddies filled the background.
While still stuck in the car I recalled my last trip to a cemetery in Springfield, Illinois with my eighth grade English class. I saw mausoleums and tombstones of all shapes and sizes covering a rolling grassy hill, and I heard Spoon River folks competing to tell the world their life stories. To my left Homer Clapp cursed about losing his savings to a canning factory, and Rutherford McDowell talked about the courageous men and women in the fields. Halfway down the hill Abel Melveny lamented about buying all the new farm machines, grinders, shellers, planters, and mowers, only to find them rusting in the rain because he had no sheds to store them in. Had Grandpa been a resident of Spoon River, surely his parting stories wouldve become a part of Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology.
Our car came to a squeaky stop, and I got unloaded. Before my face was this colossal amphitheater-like 300-foot high mountain covered thoroughly in gravestones, all of them in the same dull gray and made of the same dense granite, neatly disrupting the green draping the mountain. To see the highest grave stone, I had to raise my head so that my face paralleled the sky, as if I were seated in the front row of a theater. I got excited to finally see a graveyard of personal relevance.
The dramatic but odd sight had me breathless; the thousands of faces on the mountain made me cower. Thunderous voices, hysterical sobs, and morbid laughter overwhelmed me. My being held no significance in front of my elders, my teachers and my masters, for they had suffered much more. I somehow forgot about the beloved children whose faces some stones might bear and saw only the faces of my elders. Only the old died with enough honor for a stone, I thought.
I listened more closely to their ghastly voices. At some point when I was still lost in thoughts of my own insignificance, the voices reorganized and marched in unison, startling me. The fisherman, the rice grower, the student, the postman, the intellectual, the village bride, and the Liberation Army soldier marched together. They told me their life stories: "I have sacrificed so much, suffered too much. I starved myself for my son and daughter. I traveled miles to find Mom a respectable doctor. Those hypocrites and backstabbers and cheaters, how theyve made me suffer! The worlds done us so much wrong. Can you not understand? Can you not understand?"
However unjust one could condense all of Chinese history into one word suffering; even the Jewish poet David Slavitt knew that without having known China. His poem "An Extremely Short History of China" elaborates on that idea and tells the Great Tale in a single sentence:
Suffering, suffering, squalor, suffering, flood, suffering, suffering, really severe suffering, war, suffering, suffering, drought, famine, suffering, brutal suffering, really terrible suffering, a slight diminution of suffering, a few years of reasonable life, the birth of some hope, the revival of the arts and crafts, and then corruption, disaster, war, and flood, drought, and more suffering.
How could a fifth of the worlds people tell no other stories? I wanted to hear some funny stories.
After my arrival, to my surprise, I learned that Grandpa wasnt actually buried on that mountain but was kept in an ash box at some government-designated memorial hall located in the city. We were visiting the public cemetery where his family hoped to relocate him.
How would Grandpa react? After all, he was a communist, one of the early party members who worked in the underground, fought guerilla wars and steadily moved up the ranks. When the Cultural Revolution spun out of control, he became one the first ones to suffer in the vicious power struggle. Big Brother watched his every word and every emotion and even forcefully dug into the memories of his close relations as hazy as they were for materials to use against him. Friends became traitors, and family members became conspirators. Something owing to his devotion to the party made his personal voice silent. In the revolution defending oneself against false allegations became in and of itself a crime. One had to accept criticism and admit mistakes without rebuttal. Chairman Mao, the leader in the Chinese Communist Revolution, wrote extensively in that regard. He alone defined faithfulness and proper behavior:
They [Good Chinese communist cadres] must be modest and prudent and guard against arrogance and impetuosity; they must be imbued with the spirit of self-criticism and have the courage to correct mistakes and shortcomings in their work.
The subjectivity and vagueness of aphorisms like these empowered people to arbitrarily accuse each other of counterrevolutionary tendencies. History is complicated.
Had grandpa been merely a fisherman he would have cursed his attackers, spat in their faces, torn their shirts and wrestled them to the ground, but he was foremost a faithful communist and second, a man. He had only sighed but had not fought back. If he had spoken during his suffering, he would have said that "the truth was[is] on our[Marxists] side," quoting Mao once more, and that the Party would one day properly honor him for his service. That day came while he lay dying on his hospital bed. What if he disguised himself as a fisherman in the afterlife and resided on the mountainside with the commoners? Perhaps he could speak and find a voice for himself and be free at last from the burdens of his communist legacy.
Perhaps Grandpa would be angry. No longer would his ashes be with his fellow revolutionaries; he would be a commoner in a public cemetery. Without ideological association, he would be a pagan like a Christian removed from his churchyard cemetery. Removing his ash box from the memorial hall was like removing a World War I soldiers body from the Arlington Cemetery. The memorial hall kept his lifes singular devotion to Marxism and the party and the honors that he had sacrificed his life to earn. The transfer meant his deliberate dissociation with his times.
All of this needed to be hushed; someone might be eavesdropping. Chinas political environment remained sensitive. No one knew what would become of China in twenty years and what would become of the memorial hall where Grandpa was kept. Interring his past in the mountains appeared wise. No one wanted to see his ashes thrown into the wind if some radical anti-communist political group decided to purge from the history books Chinas communist past. The Red Guards had done so in the Cultural Revolution, tried to purge history by smashing the tombstones of the feudal society, and no one could promise that China would never have another revolution.
Silence then, not because death and heaven and God are too impressive to stare straight at but because of the power of ideology. Grandpas soul had not gone to see the god of heaven; instead, everything communist pinned him down. His ash box lay on a great wall consisting of 12" by 20" cells, each containing an ash box belonging to some faithful party member in Hunan Province. His best comrade friend lived three cells above, but two cells to his right lived his accuser, the ravenous creature who initiated the attack against Grandpa during the Culture Revolution. He had no voice, no presence his web of his comrade friends and foes and his communist legacy defined who he was. All around him lived memories of the communist struggle. He had to continue the fight he took on while young, never receiving the peaceful afterlife he so deserved. When he spoke, he spoke gravely and inaudibly. Dreadful memories of betrayal and suffering drowned any funny family stories he might recall. Even if he could speak, would he tell me about my mothers mischievous addiction to comics or my uncles adventurous hikes in the woods? Or would he be too tired to say anything?
So far removed from the land of my birth, I could only wonder about a life that I didnt know and reconstruct an era from an amalgamation of family memory, course readings, and Chinese films. Staring back at the mountain, mesmerized, saddened yet enlightened, I forgot about the bumpy country road and the stale air inside the car. I kept on thinking about what my grandpas generation meant and how forgotten contemporary history was. I wished that when his soul does find peace, we could sit down and chat over tea. From a grandpa to a granddaughter, he could tell me stories about my family, China, and the revolutions that changed the world. Even if his stories might fall short of my dreams and nightmares, I wanted to simply sit quietly and listen to a forgotten grandfathers voice.
