Poring over black and white photographs is a surreal experience. In the mildewed, dusty room of my deceased grandfather’s bedroom, I am transported back to the Chinese New Years I spent in this house. The inscrutable calligraphy covering his wartime letters and the gleaming ensign of the lapel pins lay almost unblemished in his briefcase and drawers, like artefacts frozen in time. Only the yellowing of the margins and slightest of tarnishing hinted at their great age. My grandfather’s narrative, as a Kuomintang (國民黨) lieutenant colonel during the Chinese Communist Revolution (第二次國共內戰), is now only accessible to me through the decrepit remnants of historical memorabilia. Their untold stories from that fading period of history are the ones featured in Taiwanese writer Lung Ying-tai’s (龍應台) novel-length work, Big River, Big Sea- 1949《大江大海,一九四九》. Perhaps fittingly, the emptiness I feel from having irreversibly lost any chance to hear my grandfather’s stories is like what the author laments in the prologue- her father passed away and mother afflicted with severe dementia before she had wanted to hear theirs.
The book is an ambitious compilation of war-time stories gathered through the author’s interviews of Chinese and Taiwanese veterans. In contrast to the high tensions and media hype surrounding the cross-strait issue, the book refreshingly offers a coolly objective yet poignant portrait of this controversial period history through the lens of ordinary people. A far cry from the whitewashed history textbooks used in the local elementary school I went to in Taiwan (and presumably even more so in those counterparts in China), its sometimes disturbingly honest accounts simultaneously function as a lens and a critique of history- as well as a sobering warning on the impersonal brutality of war.
Weaving together distinct narratives in a straightforward, unembellished style, Lung paints a picture of the pain of physical and emotional separation with gently moving gravitas. I wonder how my grandmother and grandfather had felt, forcefully displaced from their native province of Henan (河南) and Hebei (河北) over fifteen hundred kilometres away from Taoyuan (桃園), Taiwan where they have lived together for the past half-century. Unable to even send letters to their loved ones due to the suspension of postal service between China and Taiwan after the war, the river and sea of the title take on the symbolic significance of an unbridgeable gulf. In Taiwanese author Pai Hsien-yung’s (白先勇) fictional short story, A Sea of Blood Red Azaleas,《那片血一般紅的杜鵑花》¹, this divide- the Taiwan Strait- is what drives the main character, Wang Xiong, 王雄, into hysteria and ultimately, suicide. Perhaps, underneath the veil of polite courtesy and joyous greetings in the letters my grandfather received from his relatives after postal service resumed in 1979 lies an undercurrent of unspeakable sorrow and resigned acceptance.
In one of the chapters, Lung describes her mother’s reluctance to visit her hometown of Chun’an, Zhejiang Province (淳安,浙江省) after the resumption of air travel in 1987 – we learn that it has been submerged in 1959 by the Xin’an River (新安江) hydroelectric station, and what was once “a sea of mountains is now a sea of islands.” Her hometown, a two-thousand-year-old city that had existed since the dawn of Chinese civilization (during the 東漢朝代) has been forever wiped into oblivion. Lung further recounts conversations she had with those relocated. She intertwines stories of the past with those of the present with dreamlike fluidity, yet still manages to retain a strikingly dispassionate tone. Like a detached external observer, Lung peels away the layers of history and invites the readers into this world. In her silence, Lung allows the stories to speak for themselves.
My grandfather was more fortunate. When he finally returned to his hometown in the early 2000s, he paid a visit to his mother’s and father’s graves. Captured in one of the rare colour photographs in his drawers, he stands alone on a windswept hill beside two oblong pieces of polished stone.
Lung makes no attempt to shy away from the raw inhumanity of war. Indeed, her most stunningly moving descriptions are those of raw hunger in famine.
“Only three thousand remain out of a town of thirty thousand [永年] when it was finally ‘liberated.’ Yet, when the PLA marched into the city and saw the remaining survivors had ‘fat bellies and round faces’, they were positively astounded.”
Changchun (長春), a city of originally fifty thousand, only seventeen thousand remained after the barbaric 1948 siege. The city was barricaded until the civilians starved to death. Yes, this
“glorious victory and honorable liberation of Changchun was done without spilling a drop of blood.”
In an interview, she laments how the book, White Snow, Red Blood《雪白血紅》², by Zhang Zhenglong, 張正隆, on the cruel atrocities of the Chang Chun Siege, was banned in mainland China. When do these illusions melt away to become a part of reality?
In a speech made shortly after the release of the book, Lung said, “My intention for writing was not to place blame on any one actor- not the Nationalist Party or the Chinese Communist Party. No, I wished to dismantle the vast machinery of the state, revealing that behind each cog and screw is an individual life at stake.” ³
I picked up another photograph- this one undated- depicting a group of uniformed soldiers lounging outside a block of army barracks. Sometime in 1948 perhaps, when the regiment was retreating to Hainan Island. My grandmother said that my grandfather always had a camera on him, taking photographs of everything and everyone around him. They’re just people like you and me, whether they left for Taiwan in 1949, or were already in Taiwan, or had stayed in mainland China, it’s just that they had just been caught up in the unfortunate throes of history.
¹ There exists no English translation of this work. An original Traditional Chinese version can be found here: http://tw.shuhai.org/books/4380-那片血一般红的杜鹃花/.
² There exists no English translation of this work, 《雪白血紅》, and is only available in simplified Chinese from select bookstores in Hong Kong.
³ Translated from a speech at The University of British Columbia. “Lung Ying-tai — Why 1949 (in Chinese).” Youtube, January 27th, 2010, https://youtu.be/GPKynvGdDlY.
Author’s note: There, unfortunately, exists no English translation of this work, and sale is banned in mainland China. The things I have mentioned here about Lung’s book touches only most briefly upon the ideas presented. If you are literate in Chinese and want to find out more about this historical period, I highly encourage you to find a copy and read it.