Operation Babylift Opposition Documents

American Journalism Review, April/May 2005

Does No Mean No?

A former journalist says she doesn’t want to be interviewed, but then talks freely. Should the interviewer have used her remarks?

By Natalie Pompilio
Natalie Pompilio is a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer.


One of a reporter's basic tasks is to keep a source talking, to get past the initial refusals and hesitations and score an interview.

But what if the source is a former journalist who believes her conversation with a columnist is just a friendly talk between colleagues, not an on-the-record interview?

T.T. Nhu, a one-time San Jose Mercury News columnist who went on to work as a press secretary for Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, says she was reluctant to return calls from Scott Herhold, a Mercury News columnist, but she did so out of politeness. (The pair had never met at the newspaper.) Herhold wanted to talk about Nhu's decision to move back to her native Vietnam, a choice partially driven by her disappointment over the November presidential election results. Nhu told him she didn't want to be interviewed.

Then she proceeded to talk. In a highly quotable way. "I didn't say the magic words 'off the record,' because I'd already said 'no' to him," Nhu says. "Because he's a colleague in the newspaper business, I spoke to him frankly like I'm speaking to you. I didn't know he was writing it down."

Herhold did take down what Nhu had to say, not hiding the fact that he was typing, but, he says, "I wasn't advertising it either." Herhold devoted his November 28 column to Nhu and her decision to leave the country. The piece was important, Herhold says, because "it said something about the way people felt after the election of George W. Bush. I was trying to be sympathetic to her. I'm not quite sure why she's reacted this vehemently." He acknowledged Nhu's reluctance to talk in the first line: "T.T. Nhu really didn't want to talk to me."

Herhold then quoted Nhu as saying, "My animosity to America has been growing. America is such an incredible bully. It's doing the same things in Iraq that it did in Vietnam. America always comes down on the wrong side of things."

"It's bullying coupled with the vast ignorance of its people, who are anesthetized by television," he further quoted Nhu. "It's all about Halliburton, it's all about oil, it's all about Israel... People miss the subtleties, the nuances. All they can see is freedom on the march."

Nhu, who learned she had been the focus of the column when she saw a copy of the newspaper in an airport trash bin, was outraged. She fired off a letter to the editors, calling herself the "unwilling subject" of the column, pointing out two factual errors and saying that "it would be appropriate for the paper to publish this letter, without comment in a prominent place noting that the paper accepts the corrections and that it and Herhold regret his errors and his inappropriate use of information received that he knew that it was intended to be off the record."

The Mercury News did publish a correction for the two factual errors. But not the letter.

Herhold says he did nothing wrong. (Nhu admits that he quoted her accurately.) Although Nhu initially said she did not want to talk, "I stayed on the line and asked questions," Herhold says. "I did not say this was off the record or anything of the sort."

"One of the things you have to understand when interviewing is, 'What is the sophistication of the person on the other end of the line?'" he says. "A lot of the time, you give them a break because they're not sophisticated [about journalism]. I think T.T. Nhu is plenty sophisticated."

Herhold disagrees with Nhu's argument that she was a private citizen making a private decision to move out of the country. Her positions as a columnist and a press officer make her "of some high profile," he says. And, he says, Nhu signed off the conversation by saying something he thought implied it was OK to write about her: "The sense of it was, 'Take that for what you will.' To me, that was a clear understanding that she knew what I was doing."

(Herhold's editor, Rebecca Salner, left AJR a message saying she believed an interview with Herhold was sufficient for this story.)

Mercury News general assignment reporter Dan Reed, a friend of Nhu's, says he initially encouraged her to talk to Herhold, but she insisted her decision to move was private--not something she wanted to discuss publicly. That's why Reed was surprised to see the column. And when he heard Nhu's version of events, he was also upset.

"It struck me that if it were on the record, he would have been able to more freely fact-check things. The fact that mistakes were made suggests to me, again suggests, that perhaps he was not being forthcoming about the fact that he was going to write this," Reed says. "If he was not being sneaky, he would have interviewed her directly. I don't think he did that."

Edward Wasserman, who teaches journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, says Nhu's story provided "a way of making a point the columnist wanted to make so it was a very attractive column to write." But the somewhat incendiary tone of Nhu's words would have concerned him if he were editing the piece. "I think I would be somewhat concerned that this person has kind of unburdened herself as if to a colleague. I would be a little bit concerned that she was certainly being imprudent."

At the same time, he says, "I'm sympathetic. He didn't have a clear embargo. He didn't have a clear no-go... She didn't use the magic code words"--off the record-- "so the questions then become, 'Was there any ambiguity in his mind?' and 'Where is it that you can, in the course of an interview, confirm this is on the up and up? You can ask for a spelling, you can verify details, the kind of thing that makes it clear to the person you're talking to that you're trying to get the facts right. It seems to me the most he can be reproached for is choosing to benefit from the ambiguity."

Paul McMasters, First Amendment ombudsman for the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center, agrees it's the journalist's responsibility to ensure that interview subjects know whatever they say could end up in print.

"The public should assume a journalist is never off-duty. The journalist should always make clear that they're taking notes and are prepared to write a story or a column based on the conversation going on at that moment," McMasters says. "That's why there should be a sign in the newsroom that everyone sees once or twice a day, 'Make sure both sides are playing by the same rules during an interview.'"

Speaking generally, McMasters says every journalist has been "in that complicated terrain where one side thinks one thing and the other side thinks another. Most journalists go by the creed 'When in doubt, leave it out.'.. On the other hand, I think every journalist has been in a situation where a source knew fully well what he or she was saying, regretted it and tried to shift the blame to the journalist."

Nhu, who has now moved to Vietnam, maintains she was "ambushed." She considered legal action against the newspaper but decided not to pursue it since she was leaving the country. What she really wants, she says, is an apology, in print.

"I want the paper to acknowledge the fact that when someone says 'no,'" she says, "they should respect that decision."

###
Ethiopia Forum, March 28,2010.


There were some Americans who welcomed the Baby-lift, including American aid workers in South Vietnam. Sister Susan McDonald cared for 100 infants at a Saigon orphanage. As the North Vietnamese moved closer to the city, living conditions worsened. Food was in very short supply, and gasoline was so expensive that McDonald would buy it by the quart. The orphanage depended on supplies from overseas, and when these -- including food -- were no longer forthcoming, the children's lives were at risk. McDonald had been looking for a flight to move the children in her care to safety, but commercial flights had ceased. When the military invited her to participate in Operation Baby-lift, she gratefully accepted.

On April 26, 1975, McDonald boarded a plane with 200 Vietnamese children and 14 caretakers. The plane stopped in the Philippines to get the sickest children to a hospital, and after more than a week in a refugee camp, the rest of the children continued their journey in a seated cargo plane. The babies were placed in small cardboard boxes lined with blankets. The two hundred children landed in Seattle at the end of a long and strange journey.

Tran Tuong Nhu, one of a small number of Vietnamese Americans living in the Bay Area at the time, volunteered to assist with Baby-lift arrivals in San Francisco's Presidio. She and the other volunteers were surprised to hear children talking about their living family members. Many of the children did not appear to be orphans at all.
Nhu, Miller, and others approached the federal government and adoption agencies with their concerns about the situation. When they received no response, they contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the federal government, and the adoption agencies.

Operation Baby lift. In Vietnam, poor families would sometimes place children in orphanages if they could not feed them. But in such cases, parents did not intend to give them up, and would often visit their children. Many parents, especially of Amerasian, were concerned about their childcare's safety. In some cases, parents put their children on a Baby-lift plane, and later left Vietnam themselves as refugees, with the intention of finding their children later. "Many of [the adoption records] lacked the consents from the parents," said Miller. When Mai Thi Kim brought her daughter Hiep (Heidi Bub) to the Holt Adoption Agency in Danang, she was given no papers whatsoever.

A worker with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Saigon, Bobby Nofflet, recalled the tumultuous days of Baby-lift: "There were large sheaves of papers and batches of babies. Who knew which belonged to which?"

The Baby-lift lawsuit argued that many of the children in the airlift were not orphans, had been given up under duress during wartime, and that the U.S. government had an obligation to return them to their families. Attorney Tom Miller said that he brought Vietnamese birth parents into the courtroom to plead for their children, but to no avail. Judge Spencer Williams eventually threw out the Baby-lift case, declaring it to be 2,000 separate cases, and not a class action suit. "He sealed the records, and told us we could not contact any of the Vietnamese families and let them know where their children were," said Miller.
Only in cases where parents had found their children independently could Miller's group represent them. Eventually only twelve children were reunited with their Vietnamese parents, but only after many years and lawsuits. Many children were caught in court battles between their birth parents and their adoptive parents.

For a number of Baby-lift adoptees, finding their birth parents is essentially impossible, because no records exist. In recent years, many have established connections with each other based on their shared experiences.

Part 1

People & Events: Operation Baby lift (1975)

Operation Baby-lift, A U.S government plan to transport Vietnamese orphans out of their war-torn country began in disaster. The very first flight to leave Saigon, on April 4, 1975, crashed several minutes after takeoff, killing 138 people, most of whom were Vietnamese children. Critics in Washington questioned the Ford administration's political motivations. Others criticized the government for assuming that the children would be better off in America. But perhaps most disturbing was that many of the children were not orphans at all. snatching
During the final days of the Vietnam War, the U.S. government began boarding Vietnamese children onto military transport planes bound for adoption by American, Canadian, European and Australian families. Over the next several weeks, Operation Baby-lift brought more than 3300 children out of Vietnam.

As the Communists advanced into South Vietnam, rumors about what they would do were rampant. Many South Vietnamese were desperate to escape. Children fathered by American soldiers were rumored to be in particular danger. Heidi Bub's birth mother, Mai Thi Kim, feared that her daughter would "be soaked with gasoline and be burnt." For a mother desperate to protect her mixed race child in the face of an advancing enemy, a chance to send the child to America was a ray of hope.

From the start, Americans debated the Baby-lift's purpose, execution and justification. American Ambassador to Vietnam Graham Martin claimed that the evacuation "would help reverse the current of American public opinion to the advantage of the Republic of Vietnam." President Gerald Ford made use of the photo opportunity, standing before television cameras on the tarmac at San Francisco airport to meet a plane full of infants and children.

Bay Area attorney Tom Miller, who would become involved in litigation over the Baby-lift, called it "one of the last desperate attempts to get sympathy for the war." A Congressional investigation suggested that there was "a total lack of planning by federal and private agencies." Newspaper headlines asked, "Baby-lift or baby-snatch?" and "The Orphans: Saved or Lost?" And a Vietnamese orphan character appeared in the satirical "Doonesbury" cartoons of G. B. Trudeau.

Operation Baby-lift some Americans asked whether fear made it right to take children from their homeland. A Vietnamese American journalist, Tran Tuong Nhu, wondered, "What is this terror Americans feel that my people will devour children?" Some felt that guilt may have been a motivation. Relief agencies in Vietnam were accused of being "Saigon's baby business." The New York Times quoted a Yale psychologist, Dr. Edward Zigler, who said: "We've been ripping [the children of the airlift] right out of their culture, their community... it's some kind of emotional jag we are on."

From US Agency for International Development, Operation Babylift Report 1975:

"On April 29, 1975, a class action suit was filed in the Federal District Court in San Francisco on behalf of Vietnamese children brought to the United States for adoption. The suit seeks to enjoin adoption proceedings until it has been ascertained either that the parents or appropriate relatives in Vietnam have consented to their adoption or that these parents or relatives cannot be found.
The Complaint alleged that several of the Vietnamese orphans brought to the United States under Operation Babylift stated they are not orphans and that they wish to return to Vietnam.
The action has been brought by Muoi McConnell, a former Vietnamese nurse, who allegedly interviewed Vietnamese children at the Presidio in San Francisco. The suit is supported by an ad hoc group called The Committee to Protect the Rights of Vietnamese Children. Spokesmen for the Committee are Thomas R. Miller, an attorney, and his wife, Tran Tuong Nhu, who is the head of an organization known as the International Children’s Fund. . . .
INS and the adoption agencies should be able to establish clear orphan status for most of the children brought to the United States under their auspices. Where records have been destroyed, such as those lost in the crash of the C-5A, the process of verifying the true orphan status of certain of the children may be time-consuming. There may, of course, be other children who were not transported in haste to the United States with inadequate documentation to vouch for parental consent to their adoption or to demonstrate that they are without parents or relatives. The search initiated by the INS will seek to clarify all these cases. . . .
Special Problems: Public Reactions
Not everyone was in favor of the babylift. There were allegations at the time, often based on faulty information, that the U.S. Government was engaged in a wholesale effort to remove Vietnamese children from their culture, to save them from communist ideological influence, to satisfy the desires of Americans wishing to adopt children, and to gain sympathy in the Congress for last-ditch appropriations for military and humanitarian aid to the tottering Government of Vietnam.
None of these allegations approaches the truth. The fact is that the departure of these children from South Vietnam was the continuation of an intercountry adoption program that had been going on for some years. The movement of the children was accelerated due to the growing crisis in Vietnam. But, with negligible exceptions, the children met the criteria for intercountry adoption and virtually all of them were in some stage of processing when the decision was taken to speed up the movement. . . ."


Gloria Emerson, whose book on Vietnam, Winners and Losers, won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 1978, offers a sharply critical view of “Operation Babylift” in this excerpt. The effort to “rescue” thousands of Vietnamese children on the eve of the U.S. evacuation was mounted by a number of U.S.-based agencies and organizations, including Holt Children’s Services, the Pearl Buck Foundation, World Vision, and the International Social Service. It was widely publicized and hotly debated after a military transport plane carrying around 300 passengers crashed on April 4, 1975, shortly after take-off from Saigon. More than 100 children were killed, along with at least 25 of their adult escorts. For other views of “Operation Babylift,” see the text of the New York Times ad that ran on April 7, 1975, the “Statement on the Immorality of Bringing South Vietnamese Orphans to the United States, April 4, 1975,” and Agency for International Development, Operation Babylift Report, 1975.
Operation babylift became a carnival: tearful, middle-class white women squeezing and kissing dark-eyed children, telling reporters that their new names would be Phyllis and Wendy and David. It is not over yet. A spokesperson for AID, the government agency providing military aircraft for the private agencies bringing the children here, and said it was an “open-ended operation.” The arrival of nearly 2000 children from Vietnam—I won’t call them orphans since we now know that some of them did indeed have parents—has aroused some of the emotions felt in 1973 when the American prisoners of war came home at last. Many people, so moved and so grateful, forgot that if the United States had not gone on bombing there would have been no prisoners. This time, only two years later, there is the same self-congratulatory spirit, a feeling of winning something at last, the need to prove to ourselves what decent people we really are. It is almost forgotten during these excited, evangelical scenes at airports that it is this country that made so many Vietnamese into orphans, that destroyed villages ripping families apart, this country that sent young Vietnamese fathers to their deaths. Now we have decided the Vietnamese we will “save” and “love” must be very pliant, very helpless. . . .
Now the welfare of a few thousand children has become a most successful propaganda effort for us to defend and support the diseased government of Nguyen Van Thieu despite the opposition to him in the South. Babies are a nicer story than the 26 million craters we gave South Vietnam, nicer than the 100,000 amputees in that wretched country, more fun to read about than the 14 million acres of defoliated forest and the 800,000 acres that we bulldozed. It does not matter at all that on television a Vietnamese foster mother sobbed bitterly and strained for a last look at the child she had cared for as Vietnamese infants were put on a plane at Tan Son Nhut. There are clearly no attempts being made to find foster parents in Vietnam who could take a child; we do not want to give money for that. . . .
Vietnamese living in the United States have tried to reason that all children in their country must be helped and this can best be done by ending the war. The first step would be to stop sustaining the government of Thieu. “You have been killing us with your kindness for twenty years,” Le Anh Tu, a 26-year-old Vietnamese woman living in Philadelphia, says. On a recent local radio talk show, called the “Saturday Night Special,” she asked listeners in favor of adoption if they really cared for the welfare of Vietnamese children, if they would be willing to return the children once peace came. The answers were shocked refusals at such an idea. . . .
We will never have the happy ending we want. President Ford’s chief refugee coordinator, Daniel Parker, the administrator of AID, suggested at a congressional hearing that 3000 to 4000 more Vietnamese children be airlifted to the United States. The confusion is immense. The argument grows a little louder, but not loud enough.
On the day of the crash of the U.S. C-5A transport plane carrying 243 children and 43 accompanying adults, a South Vietnamese army lieutenant spoke his mind. “It is nice to see you Americans taking home souvenirs of our country as you leave–china elephants and orphans,” this officer said. “Too bad some of them broke today, but we have plenty more.”

Above from The New Republic, April 26, 1975 pp.8-10.




USAID Report 1975

Background
For the past several years, seven private international and U.S. adoption agencies (Holt International Children’s Services—Holt; Traveler’s Aid-International Social Services of America—TAISSA; Friends for All Children—FFAC; United States Catholic Conference—USCC; Friends of Children of Vietnam—FCVN; Pearl S. Buck Foundation—PBF; World Vision Relief Organization—WVRO), licensed by the Government of the Republic of Vietnam, have been arranging for the adoption of Vietnamese orphans in the U.S. While AID provided some general financial support for four of these agencies, the agencies themselves were responsible for selecting orphans qualified for adoption, obtaining unconditional releases from legal guardians, obtaining the consent of the Vietnamese Government, obtaining U.S. visas, and selecting qualified U.S. parents. State agencies and state courts must, of course, ultimately approve adoptions. From 1970 to 1974, over 1,400 adoptions of Vietnamese children in the United States had been arranged this way. . . .
Operation Babylift was initiated on April 2 in response to the emergency situation resulting form the communist military offensive in South Vietnam. Prospective adopting U.S. parents were concerned that Vietnamese orphans already selected for adoption, who might be physically endangered by active hostilities, would not be able to leave Vietnam expeditiously if normal, lengthy Vietnamese exist procedures and U.S. immigration procedures were followed. . . .
Orphans Processed
Information obtained from the adoption agencies or processing centers indicates that a total of 2,547 orphans were processed under Operation Babylift. Of this total, 602 went on to other countries, leaving a total of 1,945 in the United States.
Information received from the adoption agencies brings out a number of interesting facts about the orphans processed: over 91% were under the age of eight; 57% were male and 43% female; and 20% or 451 orphans were racially mixed of which 173 (39.2% of the racially mixed) were of Black paternity. . . .
One disappointing figure is that only 34 (19.6%) of the 173 Black-fathered orphans were placed in Black homes. . . .
Deaths
Of the 2,547 orphans processed under Operation Babylift, there were nine deaths; seven whose ages were known were 20 weeks of age or younger. Considering that 51% of the orphans were under two years of age and that many of the orphans were in poor physical condition, the medical services provided during Operation Babylift were very effective. . . .
Special Problems: Adoption Lawsuit
On April 29, 1975, a class action suit was filed in the Federal District Court in San Francisco on behalf of Vietnamese children brought to the United States for adoption. The suit seeks to enjoin adoption proceedings until it has been ascertained either that the parents or appropriate relatives in Vietnam have consented to their adoption or that these parents or relatives cannot be found.
The Complaint alleged that several of the Vietnamese orphans brought to the United States under Operation Babylift stated they are not orphans and that they wish to return to Vietnam.
The action has been brought by Muoi McConnell, a former Vietnamese nurse, who allegedly interviewed Vietnamese children at the Presidio in San Francisco. The suit is supported by an ad hoc group called The Committee to Protect the Rights of Vietnamese Children. Spokesmen for the Committee are Thomas R. Miller, an attorney, and his wife, Tran Tuong Nhu, who is the head of an organization known as the International Children’s Fund. . . .
INS and the adoption agencies should be able to establish clear orphan status for most of the children brought to the United States under their auspices. Where records have been destroyed, such as those lost in the crash of the C-5A, the process of verifying the true orphan status of certain of the children may be time-consuming. There may, of course, be other children who were not transported in haste to the United States with inadequate documentation to vouch for parental consent to their adoption or to demonstrate that they are without parents or relatives. The search initiated by the INS will seek to clarify all these cases. . . .
Special Problems: Public Reactions
Not everyone was in favor of the babylift. There were allegations at the time, often based on faulty information, that the U.S. Government was engaged in a wholesale effort to remove Vietnamese children from their culture, to save them from communist ideological influence, to satisfy the desires of Americans wishing to adopt children, and to gain sympathy in the Congress for last-ditch appropriations for military and humanitarian aid to the tottering Government of Vietnam.
None of these allegations approaches the truth. The fact is that the departure of these children from South Vietnam was the continuation of an intercountry adoption program that had been going on for some years. The movement of the children was accelerated due to the growing crisis in Vietnam. But, with negligible exceptions, the children met the criteria for intercountry adoption and virtually all of them were in some stage of processing when the decision was taken to speed up the movement. . . .
Attachment A: ADOPTIONS—VIETNAM


http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adoption/archive/AIDOBR.htm

A Chinese soldier Remember the Sino-Vietnam conflict

I went down to Vietnam in 1979 in January. The war started on the 29th of January. I was there for one month, from the 29th through the end of February. There were so many troops there. These troops were infantry troops located in Chengdu. That these were also fighting troops. We had railroad troops, construction troops, and these were fighting troops from the army. I think these troops, there were so many new soldiers that were enlisted. The civilians knew that it was a very intense situation along the Vietnam border and that their possibly would be a war, so they sent their sons to the military and they made sure their troops did not go into the Kunming, Chengdu or Guangzhou regiments which were on duty to fight in the border area. So if their children didn’t go to these armies under these commands, then they should be fine. These were the military headquarters. So it was the military regional headquarters. They made sure that the officers children weren’t there. They knew the inside story. The civilians didn’t. They had this trick where they could have all these soldiers transferred out. And so they took the children of the officers and the leading political powers and sent them to the northwest or the northeast far from the border area, but they sent the peasants there. The peasants wanted their children to go into the army to “grow height.” The peasants were so short, shorter than the city dwellers, because of their diet. But when they sent their sons into the army they had a good diet and they grew taller. So they always wanted their sons to go into the military to grow taller and become bigger people. So the peasants wanted army food and to grow to your full height. Then they switched. The rotated out the officers and soldiers from good families and rotated in peasants. But these new soldiers didn’t know they were going to the front. They panicked when they learned they were going to the front to fight. The first night they carried out the attack on the Vietnamese positions I was there. I was a war correspondent at that time.
They lacked war correspondents. I always wrote a nice diary or love stories or whatever. And they just had me in charge of writing about the war. They had put me in charge of the newspaper for our unit in Chengdu. These were sheets that were put on the wall with the news of the singing and dancing soldiers. I was in charge of the publicity for them.
I was sent in the morning, I was going to the military entertainment dance school, the to learn choreography each morning. I was 18 years old at the time. So for each thing I choreographed, I had to write the draft of the story line of the choreography, and sometimes the account was mingled with song, so in order to write the lyric, I had this skill and it came to me very naturally, and some of them were pretty good and they recognized me. They said your brain seems to work better than your body at this age, they found I was a better person to create things than to do things by order and the leader said, why don’t you just go ahead and create more. So my writing skill and all these things, then I applied for the job at the front, and said I was willing to go.
We were very close to the Vietnamese front and they were not posting much about it. But you heard things. When the fighting was about to break out, we could tell and this was all the talk of all the soldiers.
You don’t know exactly, but you kind of know, after New Year, Chinese New Year, there will be a war, and you know this, and you know suddenly the shortage of personnel as individuals are shipped off to the front. And officers from the headquarters newspaper came to our unit and talked to us and requested personnel for the approaching fight. That is when I volunteered. I didn’t know what fear was at that time. I still don’t know. Maybe fear of blood and guts, like Saving Private Ryan, but when it comes to the issue of losing life or dying, I had no concept of that nor did any of the others in our unit. There was a guy in the performing troop also who volunteered as a correspondent. His job in our unit was to write lyrics and to create ideas for the troop. The stories went to the newspaper, the War Banner, it’s always there, an old newspaper, it belonged to our military headquarters in Chengdu. Each headquarters had their own newspaper, we had military headquarter districts and each had its own newspaper. Beijing controlled Mongolia and Shanxi. Nanjing controlled Northeast and Anhui and Henan belonged to Guangzhou. Which controlled the sea and the south China Sea and Guanxi. Hainan island was controlled by Guangzhou. Xinjing belonged to Beijing. Getting to the front was easy. They gave us a special military special pass and you showed this to any train and they made a bed for you, you got the best compartment on the train, any train at any time. I went very fast and we didn’t have any trouble at all. We said we were told we would have everything provided for us when we reached the front. I just brought my military canvas bag. No money or anything. Everything is provided. We controlled the Kunming Front, called the Hong He front, the Red River front, from Yunnan province, the Red River front, but I didn’t go across the River into the other side. We had this military battlefield hospital on this bank of the Red River. That is where I needed to work and wanted to go. The battlefield was along the bank of the Red River. When I arrived there, I didn’t see many troops. I saw troops passing through by train with their artillery on the flat cars and I only saws many wounded soldiers coming back to the hospital. It was like 1000 soldiers were wounded the first night. But not many of them we noted, had lost their right arms below the forearms. We were told that the Vietnamese had mines hanging on the branches of the rain forest so when the soldiers were walking through the forest, they used their right hand pushing aside the forest growth and branches, and the branches had mines on them and exploded and blew off their arms. So many soldiers had their right arms missing. We knew this was a very cruel strategy. We were told that the Vietnamese never intended to kill the Chinese. What they sought to do was to maim Chinese and to send the handicapped people home to be a hardship to the remainder of society.
You have to live with so many wounded and handicapped forever, that’s going to be your burden forever. So and some soldiers had their legs blown off. Others were wounded by not so seriously. Very early in the fight they were wounded. Quickly. The military hospitals were filled with these soldiers. There was so much death. The surgeons had to be on duty for 72 hour shifts. And they couldn’t leave for the bathroom so they had them wear plastic pants so they could relieve themselves in the pants. Because you have no idea. They prepared enough surgeons, but they didn’t expect to see so many wounded soldiers. They didn’t expect the strategy to be like that, deliberately to maim you.
There was screaming and noise. But in a time, the soldiers didn’t make noise. If they could help it. But blood was so present, the floor was damp all the time and the weather was humid and hot. And the blood attracted so many red ants. And when the soldiers woke up from being wounded they found themselves covered with these red ants that were already devouring the blood and burrowing into their wounds. The smell of the blood attracted ants. One soldier had an arm missing, but he managed to crawl back, his jaw was missing. All down his throat, he couldn’t close his mouth, and ants had all crawled down his throat and covered his face and he was choking when he came in, crawled back from the front. He crawled for 11 hours, they said. I was so touched and moved. And it reflected to me, why is it necessary for these boys who are my age, 18 and 19, just out of high school and peasants. Why are they here? It was so quick it happened so quickly they had no time to respond to what was happening. It was our invasion, we invaded Vietnam, across the Red river. When I arrived, the first battle was already finished. But in the background there was always the rumble and rattle of guns. It never occured to me that we might be overrun. There were very few females around, most of the soldiers were boys. The females were not supposed to be sent into combat. They were male doctors and nurses, primarily.
I went to the front in March. I went a second time to a hospital, which was much nicer. After the first treatment they transport the soldiers to the military hospitals far from the battlefields, in safer places. These would be in Yunnan and Sichuan province, along the highways. These places, these soldiers, were much more sophisticated and knew how to complain when the food was too bad. I met a person who was a very experienced correspondent from the PLA Daily. When the wounded soldiers protested for the food, he was the leader. All the fresh food went to the visitors and the correspondents, people who came from higher power. And some officers made appearances, and they had the good food, they came to show their care and comfort, and all the fresh food went to these people, which we called the comforting group. Sometimes they were led by high ranking officers. So the military hospitals, each night they had big banquets for these comforting groups. So the soldiers ended up eating canned food or powdered eggs and stuff like that. All the fresh food and fresh meat and fresh fruit was transported to them from all over the country, just for them, but they didn’t get to eat it, they had only canned food. So this correspondent from the PLA Daily plotted this big protest and parade, he organized the soldiers, he was also wounded and lost his right arm. And I think then he got himself into trouble. Because some officers from much higher power got him removed from the hospital the right after this protest. They didn’t like anyone to agitate with the soldiers, they were considered treason. The result was that there was a compromise, they improved the soldiers food for a couple of days. When the noise died down, of course, they went back to the way they had been, the original standard. And I saw a soldier who was 19 or 20, who was a first lieutenant, just out of military school, infantry school. He had been an orphan and adopted by this farmer’s family. The farmer’s daughter was his childhood friend and when he grew up, the parents, made a decision that they should marry each other, these two children. They were getting along very well, they loved each other. So this man had put all his hope, all of his dreams into this family and some day marrying this girl and having his own family at last. He didn’t have family or anything else to comfort him. During the war he stepped on a mine and he got his testicles blown off. He was so depressed, he didn’t want to write to his fiancé and said, if I cannot marry this girl I have no family and no hope. My life is worth nothing any more. So the doctors in the hospital and the political officer said to me, You are a woman, you tell him how rich and fortunate he is. You must tell him that many women are dying to marry him and his fiancé will not care if he has testicles or not. You have to convince him of that. I was only 19 and I didn’t know these things. I didn’t think I should be talking about anything like this, even being told this. I thought I would be embarrassed to death. This officer said that this solder was hiding a broken surgery blade somewhere in the room and they felt that he might try to kill himself. They said they wanted to encourage him and that it was my political duty to talk to him and cheer him up and to save his life. So I finally agreed and I went to this soldier’s ward and he was very quiet and very nice, very timid. He was so small, I thought, and he seemed even younger than I was and shy. I was about to cry when I sat beside him. The tears were rolling down my face and I could not speak. And before I could utter any word an old nurse came and she was giving him a check up and a bath. And she tickled him a little and he burst out laughing. She kept tickling him and he brushed her hand away and laughed like a little child. So I watched this and I thought, OK he doesn’t need to hear my bullshit. So I said OK you should get a good rest and you’re such a nice boy. I didn’t say anything about what I was supposed to say. Next morning I heard that he had sliced his own throat during the night and died. Bled to death. I should have said something. I thought I could have saved him. And the officers came to me and said, did he say anything to you last night about wanting to take his life, and what dcd he say when you talked to him and told him that any woman would want to marry him. And when you talked to him, what did he say? Was there any hint about his feeling? No, I said, he seemed to be very happy? They asked, did you say what you were told to say, I lied to them and said, I did. I said what you told me to say. And? And he believed me and I thought he gave up that idea. What did you say to him? I said, if I were your fiancé I would marry you and live happy my whole life. But I think he made up his mind he wanted to go. Nobody could save him. And from this experience I really had misgivings about the war. I thought maybe a lot of lives were sacrificed, and for what? These two countries were friends? These two countries are supposed to have eternal friendship and they supported each other and were both communist for so long, why all of a sudden they turn guns on each other and kill each other. While they are still fighting in the border areas, If I have no match, no match, a soldier on the other side will throw a box of matches. They were so still so very used to good relations. But they were confused to fight each other on the front. So young lives are lost for no good cause that I could see.
I wrote short stories, two short stories, and three poems about life at the front. One poem was published in the PLA Daily and a short story published in our headquarters newspaper. Others were criticized and returned with criticism. You are making a sharp knife dull, they said, they accused me of making soldiers at the front cowards rather than heroes. I had made a sharp knife dull.
One story was a story was of a soldier who was stationed on the border before the war broke out, stationed there in the time when we had a good relationship. He met this Vietnamese girl and they went to the same street bazaars, and the same theater to watch movies. And during the war the girl was killed and by one of his comrades at the front. Just a very short story to express the irony of war and the fact that people are so used to peace and good times that they shared here. And they are so confused when they are fighting. So the army had to remove all of these soldiers that were border guards and to use others, because they had friendly relations with others on the other side and they could not bring themselves to fight. And they replaced them with peasants from outside the area. The more confused the better, when it comes to soldiers.
When I was sent to the place, the peasants were all removed from the area. So the people there had no disagreement. But the soldiers didn’t voice disillusionment, but from their facial expressions, they seemed all the time to be dumbounded or stunned by what they experienced. What is this, they seemed to ask. They could not figure out what was going on. They didn’t understand it.
I asked one young soldier, What did you do to the other side. What did we do to them? We did to them what the Japanese did to us. We killed their chickens and boiled them and ate them. We killed people when we saw them. We pierced all their farm animals with our bayonets and we took everything we didn’t kill. Just like we had seen in the movies of the Japanese. We cooked the chickens in our helmets.
He was sarcastic. He was very cynical. That was in March when they were already quieting down and suspicious about the government’s goals.
Well, it was like overall, what we were told is that we had to stop the Vietnamese in Cambodia because that is our friend. So we have to divide their military strength so we can pull them back and help a friend. They have to deal with us, so that will give Cambodia a chance. There were no fear of the Soviet Union, we were told that the Soviet Union equipped the Vietnamese, and they had better weapons than we did, actually. And the irony is that so many high ranking officers in Vietnam were trained by Chinese schools, in Beijing, where you have all the very high generals trained, not just Chinese but from all over, from the National Defense University. Vietnamese generals had been trained in that school and so they knew all of our military strategy. That is why they were so tough to deal with.
16, 17, 18, 19, those were the ages of the soldiers. Most were 18. But some young kids were so eager to join the army that they lied about their age. I lied about my age, too. I said I was 14 but actually I was 12 when I joined the Army. Since they didn’t get my civilian identification card, they didn’t know.
I was never afraid near the front. It was funny. When I had this patriotic feeling it was like nothing can touch me. I wanted to go right away. When I was told to return to my base at Chengdu, I went back. We could not talk on the phone or use the telegraph. You had to carry all of your correspondence back. They didn’t have telephone lines. All of them were occupied by the military for their use.
We didn’t use the air force, we were told, as that this would escalate the war. We only used infantry, level 3, and air force would be level 1, four dimensional war, and we didn’t want that. The Vietnamese also didn’t use an air force. But we used tanks.

I visited soldiers in the hospitals near the front. Some soldiers were wounded and lying in the hallways. And I said I didn’t see you yesterday, how did you get here. And they said we can’t talk about it. I tried to find out what had happened and discovered they were wounded by our own troops, and they felt dishonored and didn’t want anyone to know. They were casualties of friendly fire. They said they didn’t teach us that each tank should be followed by a squad of soldiers, when the tank attacks it is after the soldiers go to occupy the place. We walked by the tanks, rushed by them. And the soldiers in the tanks yelled, hey what are you doing and we said we don’t know we were just told to advance, so they passed the tank, we passed the tanks, and then the tanks received the command they should shoot the soldiers in front of them, so they shot the soldiers, these soldiers were supposed to stick with the tanks, they didn’t know, they were so ignorant of military maneuvers that they were not trained soldiers, they were so far ahead of the tanks, and in the evening when they saw these men on the horizon, they fired. Their own men, they were supposed to work with, miscommunication and inexperience. So many wounded and killed by these tanks.
The weather there was very humid and hot with lots of mosquitoes and big ants, and lots of fields of growing sugar cane, and the soldiers broke these and ate it. When I came back from the front, I went there twice, the second time I was awakened. And soldiers were from the front, when they went back to Chengdu to give talks to high school students and they made themselves out to be heroes, but in private they told us horrible and frightening stories. They talked about the soldiers and generals transferred to other areas right before the war. They really expressed their doubts and their cynicism toward war. They joked about everything. They still lied, however, to the high school students. When you were supposed to talk in public it was always different. Just they talked to raise moral, patriotic education. When they got back, they were not like the soldiers going to the front anymore. They became hoodlums. They had experienced life and death. When they returned to Chengdu and other cities, they ordered things in the restaurants without payin.g They would eat big meals and drink and when they got the bills they behaved like party officials. You want money from guys like us, they would say. I almost gave my life for you. What are you doing? Go charge the party secretary of the county, he will pay. So they were bold, very demanding, when they went to the public bathhouse they refused to stand in line, You want me to stand in line. Do you know how many medals I have. I went to fight for you, you pigs. So they became like bad news to the cities, trouble and problems.
From all these, they were, yes, they fought for no reason and no cause, no big cause, but for something they totally didn’t understand. So they came back with such tempers, you know.

The Bumpkin

The Bumpkin











I am already a singing flower
Upon your breast
Stirred by the breeze of your breath
As the moonlit fields are stirred.

Cover me, please
With your wide palm
For the time being.

Shu Ting







My first cousin came from the countryside to live with us when she was seven years old. She was not truly my first cousin by blood. We were not supposed to say that, openly. But it was known. And the adults, clearly, showed even less affection or attention to her than they did to us, their real children.
But the children in the family were told always to refer to her by that title. Her story was unusual but hardly unique in our county. During the years of the great famine from 1958 to 1962, which the government called The Great Leap Forward, as many as 40 million people died of hunger – most of them peasants living in the countryside, the very people that the Revolution was supposed to serve. Families with too many mouths to feed turned to horrific ways to make their numbers more manageable. Children were abandoned by the roadside. They were taken into the city and left on the street or in public buildings. In some cases parents reduced the number of mouths to fee by killing newborns, especially but not exclusively girls. There were stories that peasants traded children, killed their new ones and ate them. Several instances of this cannibalism were reported and it was spoken about on the street. Or parents sought to sell their children, their girls primarily, at markets on the street.
My cousin from the countryside had been purchased by my aunt and uncle at a market in a village in the countryside. It was said, later, that they thought she was a cute little girl and that she just might grow up to be a beauty and at that stage she might make a strategic marriage that would benefit the entire family. She was a kind of investment in a better future, even though it was difficult in the short run to find enough food to feed her and the other members of the family. She was always the last to eat, she worked the hardest, she was most ignored.
The child was purchased for only a few yuan in order to provide a wife for the son in the family that bought her. She was purchased by a peasant family to become the wife of their son. Her fiance was four years younger than she. So they raised their daughter in law to make her a good servant in the future. She was on my mother’s side, very remote. When my grandmother needed help in the household, she came, and she was very pretty, with almost fully grown. Very pretty. She had the hairdo of the forties, a country girl in the 1940s. Long braid with threads weaved in it, with red silk threads, very neat and tight, like the thread extended beyond the braid, there was another ribbon at the end. Very much like we wore in the dance called ‘White Haired Girl,” it looked to me more like a costume than everyday clothing. The clothing she wore she had made herself on a loom. She dyed the material cloth, and made the clothes for herself, a deep navy blue and pants, top and pants, with bright red piping on the jacket, and the same red cloth bottoms. It was very pretty to me. I was fascinated by her the first time I saw her. She was I remember at one point, she was singing.
She was illiterate and she listened to me sing. Later I heard her singing my song. She caught on very fast. All of a sudden she was doing house chores and all of a sudden she was singing the songs that I had been singing on the previous day. It made me sort of angry, since she was a very fast learned and was very bright and had this lovely voice. I was jealous. So I dashed into the room when I heard her singing, jumped on her, she was like my mother’s size, and pinched her cheeks hard, and demanded, You have to tell me what the words mean, tell me exactly what you are singing or you are not allowed to sing them. You are not entitled to sing words you do not understand. She was frightened since she was the maid of the family. She begged me to teach her, she said you are very luck to know so many words when you are still so young. And I replied, No, I am not going to teach you anything. Why should I?
Before she came we learned that she had suffered from TB. Pretty soon she was red in cheeks and filled out and gained some weight. But my grandma still said, Don't touch her, she has germs. Don’t play cards with her. The only game she knew how to play was a very simple card game. And she had to play with one other person. And sometimes I would take the other side. But she had a habit of licking her finger before picking up a card. My grandma was very worried, and she saw this, and said, you can’t play cards with her because she gets saliva on the cards. So I would scold her and tell her to stop that, you have to drop this otherwise I won’t play cards with you. I called her La Jie, December sister. And around the house, she was a very much underpaid maid. Because she needed some place with living conditions better than at home, for her to recover from her TB. She also needed to be up. The custom was that before you were married you had to go away for a while from your husband to be, or fiance. To get married, the new bride, the brand new bride cannot stay in the household all the time and the next day you are husband and wife so for her to go away is more proper at that time.
Her father in law, is party secretary of the commune where she lived in a mountain area along the coast of Jiangsu. It was a very backward place, we could tell, by the way she dressed. It was a very backward countryside area. So she needed to get away before she reached 16, the marriage age for girls at the time. But when she came, she kind of had a fantasy that she could get away for good, and leave the countryside. She started to cut, my mother always had materials from my aunt who left behind from my aunt who had fled to Taiwan. So mother sometimes would cut material for a dress. But there was always some left over. So she made clothes for herself, in city style, but in her own dimensions, but with several different kinds of materials. This made it very oddly beautiful and colorful. And she divided her braid into two, and in three months she was transformed into a very pretty city girl. So she and its like one night I remember she was sleeping in a little bed, which was made of bamboo, with the mosquito net over it. And she called me. Do you want to hear some good stories from the countryside. Yes, of course I do. And she had her own space, in part of the kitchen where her bed was. But it was kind of strange for her to ask this, since she always avoided me in the past. She tried not to have anything to do with me, as much as possible, since I always mistreated her. So she called me, and I was very surprised and happy and said, OK, and I went to her bed and she pulled open the mosquito netting and I got in next to her.
But I could see in the darkness that she was nearly naked and was wearing only a very thin home made set of pajamas, like a camisole and shorts. And she was in very funny stage. I thought. Her cheeks were red and moist. She said, she touched me on the arm, and I was a child and wasn’t that sensitive to someone touching me. She said, OK, now I’ve touched you, do you want to touch me? And I said, yeah, and I didn’t think much of that. I touched her shoulder and she like moved my finger gradually down to her breasts and her nipple. Then she said, you feel different. I said, yes you are different, you are like my mother. She said, Do you want to see it. And I said, OK, I was kind of, felt the same heat, hot and nervous and curious. So she turned on the light. And she closed the door leading to my grandma’s bedroom. Very lightly in her bare feet crossed the floor. Then she was kneeling on the bed, and she pulled off her shirt and let me see her chest. It was very unusual to me. She said, touch it again, you can touch it harder this time, and this will make it change. She placed my hands on her breasts again and she held them against her nipples and I felt them grow bigger and tighter and harder and the nipples were standing up. I was seven at the time so I didn’t know anything. But I felt excited, but I didn’t know why. I touched her and she was getting more and more sweaty and her skin was red and I could feel her body getting hotter. She said, you know there is a very comfortable thing to do to touch some other parts, she said. I said, where. She said, do you want to try it. She was whispering. I said, yeah. So she touched me, between my legs. And I felt so, nervous and excited and I could hardly explain, I didn’t know what to say. I suddenly said, no I want to touch you. Like I wanted to get back at her. And she was, I could see lit up. Very warm. She plotted to touch me first, as a child would say, you beat me and I beat you back. I touched her and she said, do you want to watch it too. And I said, yeah. And she pulled down her shorts and dropped them at the foot of the bed, and I saw lots of hair, like my mothers. Not like mind at all. And it was so strange to see so much hair. And she said, you can see more clearly from behind. She turned her back on me and and was on her knees and lowered her head to the bed. The she told me where to touch and guided my hand around between her legs, through the layers and the like flower petals between her legs, and she manipulated my hands. She was so excited. Now I recall how excited she was. And the next morning, when I went back to my grandmas, at about 2 we were so excited we couldn’t get any sleep, and my grandmother said, what are you up too. You are moving around so much you’ll push the mosquito netting off. So I returned to my grandmother’s place. In the morning I awakened from a nightmare. I said to grandma, La Jia wanted me to touch her last night and I touched her. She said, What did she want you to touch? I told her what I touched and what it felt like. And my grandma just jumped up immediately and rushed into the kitchen where she was sound asleep and slapped her hard across the face. How could you teach a child to do such a filthy thing, she asked. You put filth into this little pure child. How can you do this.
She cowered and said, I didn’t do anything. What are you talking about. That is her imagining. She was dreaming. She cried very loud, and howled as grandmother struck her. But I thought I was wrong, that I must have dreamed that. But I wasn’t sure. I had so much knowledge now about women, not about girls my age, but about women. And how they respond and get excited and get hard, and I wondered how I know this. It must have happened, it must be true, that is how I got that knowledge. I said, you are lying. She shot back, you are lying, I never did this to you. She said, well it’s a very funny feeling, I thought, we were from this point on we were most hostile to each other and at the same time much more intimate with each other. I hated her, but in secret depths of my heart, I loved her too. There was something her I could not explain. So I liked to take her out with me. Take her with me, sometimes I said, let’s go somewhere to buy some cloth, I want to make a selection, do you want to go with me, and she would say yes, and i’d have her select the material or fabric for me. And when she did, I laughed at her and said, this is a peasants’ taste or something. But it is funny that I wanted to get closer to her than before, although I still teased her. This kind of feeling was lasting for a couple of months. And until, she was treating me better, always protecting me, when dinner was ready, she would come out and call me back, when I was playing with the other children. She served me larger portions.
One afternoon when I was in the first grade, that was my first year of schooling. After that it was the cultural revolution and the schools closed. So I just had one year of education. It was raining very hard, and a storm came. And I was expecting my grandfather to come and bring me an umbrella. Other children had relatives bring them umbrellas and give them to the teacher. But my grandpa didn’t come, and this was unusual. The rain turned harder and harder and I began to wonder who was coming to bring me home. At this point, I saw her face outside the window of the glass door. She was utterly fascinated by the class room. She had never gone to school and never had seen a classroom before. She was fascinated and envious, her expression was one of utter fascination. I could tell she had forgotten what she came here for, she was lost in listening to our lessons. She was watching us. I made a gesture for her to come in and give me the umbrella and leave. I sensed it was a shame for us to have such a young and beautiful maid at home. No one else had a maid like that. But she missed my gesture, and she was enchanted by the classroom. She kept looking at us. And I sighed and was angry. Then the teacher turned and saw her and went into the hall. Are you the maid or the sister of any of our students? She asked. She said yes, I am here to bring an umbrella to someone. And I thought, Oh, come on, don’t bring any ugly umbrella, big and thick and made of oil cloth, people will make fun of me. I know how many ugly umbrellas my grandpa owned. Every time I left I told him to send a specific umbrella. The others had lovely umbrellas and I didn’t want to have an ugly one. If she told the teacher she was my maid, and she handed her that ugly umbrella, I will kill her after school. And she looked at me and sensed my impatience and seemed to understand and she had the ugly umbrella, but she didn’t say who it was for. She said, I was told to give this to one of your students and she will recognize the umbrella. But it was the most beautiful umbrella in our home. I was so grateful.
The relationship changed gradually into a close sisterly relationship. Until the next May, when the swimming suits started to appear in the market. I wanted a swimming suit. So much. Which was scarlet with white polka dots on it. It was expensive, by our living standards, so each day I went to the department store to see if anyone bought it yet. I didn’t know if they had many of them, which they did. I save up all my money that my grandparents gave me for popsicles on the street, but I still as very far from buying it. Then I found where La Jie kept her money. She kept it in a little purse she made under her pillow. All of her belongings were made into her pillow and beneath the pillow was a small bag where she kept her money. My grandparents paid her 5 Yuan per month, less than one dollar. I found the purse and removed a 5 Yuan note from it and went to the store and bought the swimming suit. When she found it missing she came to see me. She waited outside the house for me. I returned from shopping and saw her standing outside the house. But she was odd, as though she had done somethng wrong and not me. She said, Did you by mistake take any of my money. I said, are you out of your mind, La Jie, I would take your money. But I was just returning from swimming, with my friends, my hair was dripping with water, and I was holding this new swimming suit. I had been admired by all of my friends in the class who went swimming with me. And when I got back she was waiting for me and said, Where did you get the money to buy that swimming suit. It’s not your business, I told her. I have money of my own. She said, You know, I saved this money I have a younger brother who wants to go to school so badly. And in my lifetime, I don’t have hope to go to school. But I want him to go to school. I said she never talked about her brother and I didn’t believe her. She said he still lived in the countryside. He is the only other living member of my family. My parents died. And I want a good life for him. I went to your cousins daughter in law because I wanted my brother to live like a city person. I want him to be an accountant or some kind of a good job. To her that was the best job she could think of. It was a white collar job, and the only profession she could name was an accountant. And I saved up and I don’t spend any money here. So please, she begged me, give me back that money. If you can’t give me the money now, why don’t you give me a little money every day. We can make it a loan or something. I told her, you are out of your mind. I would never take any of your money, get that through your thick peasant head, OK?
So she gave up and went back to her bed and cried. And that made me feel bad when I listened to her, and I felt guilty. But I could not admit that I had stolen her money, and I didn’t want to have to return my swimming suit, and I didn’t want my grandmother to find out, so I said, stop crying, maybe you just didn’t have that 5 yuan note. She said, I know I do. I count my money every night. Each month they paid her 5 yuan, her salary. So she said she could not be wrong. I said, again, well, I don’t steal money. To hell with you. So she gave up. Then it was a new year came. And when it was national day, and all the friends, all the people went to a celebration. In the big theater in the city. And I saw there a beautiful actress who was the number one actress in Anhui province. She had made movies, and her picture was everywhere, and she had the same last name as me, Yan. She was very nice to me and she had no children of her own. On one occasion she said to my father, I really want your daughter to be my real daughter. Everyone would like to be her daughter or to be her husband. That kind of woman. Her way of smoking a cigarette was so elegant and beautiful and very flirtatious. That kind of provocative posture she had. She came out with a long gown, and a cigarette, smoking, a qipao, and her way of walking was so sensual. She came to me and said, Oh, Geling, you never told me that you have such a beautiful sister. My maid was with me, next to me. And she was dressed in a city girls dress she’d made for herself. I didn’t realize until this point that she was totally a city girl now, very pretty and in her prime, she was 16, and much more fuller in her figure than this actress, and she, the actress said, is this your sister. You know you do look a little bit like each other. And I was jut about to answer and I glanced at La Jia and saw her face, she was blushing brightly, and she couldn’t speak. She said, Oh, ah, nice to meet you. I’ve seen your movies. I see your posters everywhere. And the actress, said, you have such a beautiful voice. Can you sing, and La Jie turned to look at me, and she was afraid that I was going to say something like she’s illiterate, and I didn’t say anything. And she said, yes I can sing. And the actress said, why don’t you come to visit me. Do you want to become an actress? Do you want to become a high school student. Only the illiterate want to be an actress like me. She said that. And La Jie was so nervous, she looked at me, and said, I want to see you if you can take me as your understudy I would like that very much. And the actress said, you little ghost to hide such a beautiful sister from me for so long. Why did you hide this treasure from me. You are a naughty girl. I was on the edge of tellinge her that this was my maid. But I saw La Jie sweating, and I thought her life would be ruined if I said that. I said, she’s not my sister. I sensed La Jie hold her breath when I said that an grow every tense. I paused for a moment and said, She’s my cousin.
Ah, she breathed a sigh of relief. The actress said, someday, when you have time, you come to see me. But she was just flirting with male and female admirers. But she was genuinely struck by the presence of such a beautiful young girl in the audience. But she wasn’t serious about taking an understudy. But La Jie was very serious. She asked, when can I see you. The Actress aid, Oh yes, when you have time and I have time, I can call you and we can talk then. And she moved on through the crowd, flirting with others. And then she was gone.
And La Jie from that time on was very serious about becoming an actress. She got up at 4 the next morning and disappeared. Then she came back and, I asked where did you go. And she said, oh nowhere, I was just out checking the chickens and this and that. But after several days, one of our neighbors asked my grandma, what is wrong with your maid. She was in the public bathroom at 4 in the morning, in the public toilets making these screaming sounds every moening. Is she insane? She sounds like a female cat in heat in the morning. We were shocked by this. But the neighbors said they were awakened by her and they wanted grandma to say something to her.
She was practicing her singing in the public bathrooms, improving her voice before she went to see the actress, trying to sing the scales and strengthen her voice, she did it in the public bathroom because it was the only place, in the morning at 4, where she could practice and not be seen. But people were living very close to each other and they heard this strange and odd noise in the morning, and they said you have got to discipline your maid, she is really annoying and she is waking us up. But at first they said we didn’t know what that terrible noise was, but when we went to check, we saw she was facing the wall and doing that with her voice, and she was screeching so high, she scared us and woke up the animals.
And grandma said, what is in your mind to do something like that. What do you want to do, become an actress? Actresses are whores, didn’t you know that? You have better start thinking of getting back to your father in law’s house and becoming a serious wife to your future husband. Actresses are no good, they are whores, and you should know that.
She wasn’t listening. She was lost in her dreams. She was tensed up and was getting herself dignified, watching the way she walked, and my grandmother became worried. So she sent a telegram to the countryside, to the father in law, and I don’t know how she got the message to him, but she said, if you don’t come to claim her, she is going to fly away. She is going to go wild and I will not be able to control her.
So one day several weeks later, I came home and here was this red-faced peasant sitting on our chair. And grandma said, this is La Jie’s father in law. He has come here to take her home to marry her off to his son. He has raised her. She will leave with him tomorrow.
Oh, I immediately, I just, she was sitting there very docile and making no sound. She was very Chinese in accepting her fate now. And I immediately burst into tears and realized that I was crying, involuntarily, and I said to grandma, I cannot live without her now. She said, don’t be silly. She doesn’t have a city residence card, she can’t stay here any longer. She is ready to get married, she is 16. That is what she was sent here for and that is why they took her in and bought her. And I became wild and shrieked, no you cannot do that, you can’t let her go, I can’t live my life without her. Why did you first call her in, now I can’t live without her and I don’t know what to do with myself, my brother is so far away, and I don’t have a playmate and she is my playmate, and now she is going, are you trying to kill me. And in the back of my mind was, I had sympathy and compassion for this girl. I know that she was gradually realizing her dream of becoming a city person and an actress, and this was just finished, now, her dream. And I realized how sad it would be for her. So I just made this noise, I knew I could live without her. So and my grandmother said, that’s the way it is. Don’t make it any harder for her. She is leaving tomorrow morning before 5. That night, she changed back, into her peasant clothes and braided her hair in one braid again. She put on the clothes she had worn to the city. She was accepting her fate already. I said to her, well,you can still go to the actresses house, tonight, if you want. I can help you escape. Do you want to, I whispered. She said, you told me she wasn’t serious. I said, but she is serious. I lied to you, La Jie. I know I was lying, but something had changed, I wanted to change her fate, give a twist to her fate. I said, you know you can run there, I know where she loves, and tomorrow morning you can be somebody else. You don’t have to go back to the countryside to marry this man. I said to you even like him. She said, I think of all the people I hate the worst, it is him. I hate him. I said, see, I know you don’t like him, then run away. Become an actress. She said, it’s too late, I think I was born to this fate. I can’t do otherwise. I said, OK. Now I see her with tears on her face, just two tears running down her cheeks, and running down her face. I wiped them away with my finger and then left her. I returned to my bed, and was tossing back and forth and was restless. And I told my grandmother, can I have a 5 yuan. She said, why. I said, I forgot that the tuition at school, it isn’t 5 yuan, it is 10 yuan. And the teacher asked me to bring the rest tomorrow and I have to make it up. And grandma said, that’s odd. You don’t know your tuition and half a year has passed. I said, I really need it tonight for the morning. So she got into a purse and gave me the 5 yuan. She said, you must have spent your tuition on something else. But i’ll help you this time. You must have bought treats for all your friends. I said, well, whatever. I need the 5 yuan now. She was sorry for me because I felt so bad for La Jie. Then I returned to La Jie’s bed, it was very dark. I pulled back the mosquito net. She was sound asleep now. I reached under the pillow carefully without waking her, and slipped the 5 yuan note into it. Then I looked at her in the moonlight. I touched her hair and then kissed her on the forehead. She still didn’t awaken. I returned to my bed and cried for her the rest of the night. Finally I fell asleep and when I awakened in the morning she was gone.

Later on when the red guard movement became really wild, we heard that La Jie cut her braid off, and by then she was already a married woman. She wore her hair in a bun instead of a braid. She cut it off and made her hair red guard style, and ran away to the city to join the red guards. Weeks later she returned to her village as head of a group of red guards. She called out her father in law and husband and accused them of being feudal in their ideas. She had them taken in front of their house. She was so angry, crying as she accused them of misusing her. She slapped each of them across the face. Then she poured a bucket of glue, the kind used to put up posters, poured it over their heads. When she was finished with them she left for the city again with the red guards, waving little red books above their heads and singing patriotic songs. We never heard of her again.








"The heart may be tiny
but the world's enormous"

Shu Ting




I have thought of her often. And when I am in China, I look for her, but I never saw her again. She used the revolutionary movement to liberate herself. This young woman stayed in my mind, even though she was only with us a little more than a year. There were no more sexual encounters. Now I realize, that as a young woman she had this need, this passion, but she was too ignorant to know what to do. It was like she was on fire, she had strange feelings and had no idea how to deal with them.

Massacre in Tianjin, 1966

Tianjin Massacre

The Revolution spread from Beijing like poison. Millions of Red Guard units in other cities climbed aboard trains and went to Beijing to mass in Tiananmen and be greeted and blessed by Mao. This was the Great Contact. These returned home with even more fervor and commitment and heartlessness. And Red Guards began traveling by train to other cities, to learn from each other, and to aid each other in purging the country of its enemies. Wave after wave of Red Guards descended on Beijing to meet and be blessed by the Great Leader.
The Guards waved the Little Red Book of Mao Quotations, put together and distributed under the direction of Lin Piao, defense minister and confidant of Mao. The first edition of the book was printed in May, 1964.
And even though the things that happened to my father and my mother in the early days of the Revolution, hurt us and separated us, Mamma could say later that we were lucky we had been transferred to Hefei, far away from Beijing. She had no doubt that had we remained in Beijing, we would have been among the first to be killed by the Red Guards. In this case, distance brought some safety for us, and perhaps life itself. Still, it was difficult for me and for my brothers to take heart in our condition in Hefei. We suffered there, too. But we never suffered as badly as Mama’s family in Tianjin and Beijing.
In the autumn of 1966, following the official blessing of the Red Guards by Mao in mid August, and his acceptance of the title of head general of the Red Guards, the organization went on a rampage they called “The Red Terror,” striking down enemies of the people. Mama’s relatives in Tianjin were convenient helpless targets of the brigands.
News of the destruction of Mama’s family came to us only in bits and pieces over several weeks. The details were perhaps hidden at first to ease Mama’s suffering at hearing of their fate, or perhaps neighbors and friends in Tianjin were simply too terrified to describe what had happened and what they had seen. But she did learn of it, after father too had again been removed from our home and sentenced to life in a cowshed, with other undesirable and dangerous elements.

The problem with our Tianjin relatives were not the same as Papa’s problems. Papa had been the the United States and had once worked, during World War II, for the Flying Tigers in Kunming. Mama’s relatives had been successful under the old regimes, in business and in landownership. And success in the past was now cause for undoing.
Mama’s paternal grandfather had been a successful capitalist and philanthropist. He owned several factories and he donated large sums of money to repair public roads and bridges in Tianjin. He in other words saw the responsibility of his wealth also. In difficult times he was known to set up large reed mat tents in front of his home and order the cooking of large pots of porridge to feed the crowds of poor people in the city. That would be remembers and resented later.
Grandfather’s first wife – the mother of my mother’s grandfather – died and left behind four sons and a daughter. Mama’s father was the fourth son. Grandfather married again – this time a young widow of but 20. He fathered a daughter with her, and died within the first year of the child’s birth. The girl was very beautiful, I was told, but contracted polio when she was very small and consequently walked with a decided limp. Because of that disability, she was unable to find a husband when she came of marrying age. She therefore stayed with her mother and studied traditional Chinese painting. She became an accomplished painter in Tianjin, specializing in landscapes and portraits of beautiful and physically perfect young girls.
For the next forty years, grandmother and her special daughter, lived alone in the big house grandfather had built. They lived off the inheritance grandfather left for them – not lavishly, but also not in need.
During the war against Japan paper money began to lose its value. When the war was over inflation continued at a spectacular rate, virtually wiping out the value of the Nationalist paper currency. Inflation rose, eventually, in 1948, to nearly 3 million percent. In order to salvage some of their wealth, Grandmother and her daughter bought gold on the black market and kept it in their house. In that way they were able to preserve some of their wealth. But more than half of it was lost in the inflation. They continued to live on what they’d saved through the first 16 years of communist rule.
Then the Cultural Revolution began. That autumn, in September, the Red Guards went from house to house in their neighborhood, chanting, shouting, smashing windows and braking down doors. They had a list, it seemed, of enemies of the people. Grandmother and her daughter were terrified. As the mob approached the gate of their house, she and her daughter unwrapped some of the gold that they had remaining to them and wrapped it to their legs and their bodies, with long pieces of cloth. Then they quickly put on their trousers and tops again. Just as they’d finished, the Red Guards, local youths, kicked down the door and poured into the house. “You god damned capitalists,” they shouted, “We are here to seize your contraband for the revolution.” They began to open cabinets and closets and overturned the beds and tables and chairs. Grandmother and her daughter stood against a wall trembling. When the head of the Red Guards demanded that they leave the house, they both moved very slowly and gingerly – and he suspected at that moment that they were concealing something inside their clothing.
“Stop!” he demanded, in a bellowing voice. “Stop right there! What are you concealing under your clothing.”
My aunt said, “Nothing…we have nothing to hide.” Grandma was apparently too frightened even to speak.
“Are you lying to the representatives of the people?” he asked.
“No,” my auntie said. “We are concealing nothing.”
Deciding to have some fun, the head of the pack of guards, a local boy of about 17 who they had seen on the street nearby many times, and who knew them by name, told one of the other guards to bring him a knife from the kitchen. Excitedly, one of the guards left the room and returned with a long butcher’s knife.
“You are concealing nothing?” he asked again.
No, auntie replied. We are law-abiding citizens.
As the two women stood in the middle of a tight circle of the youths, the boy stepped forward and held the blade of the knife against grandmother’s face. Her teeth were chattering and tears were streaming down her face. Then, quickly, he grabbed her jacket and bloused and slit them apart with the knife and just as quickly cut the cord tying her trousers and her underwear and ripped the clothing away. Grandmother now stood nearly naked before them – her legs and stomach and breasts concealed by the long cloth wrapping the bars of bold. He then grabbed her and again cut the cloth free and the gold clunked to the floor. The guards began shouting and laughing at Grandmother, and quickly snatched up the gold and confiscated it. My auntie moved to help cover her mother’s body, but before she could, several of the red guards grabbed and restrained her and the young man cut away her clothing and the cloth and more gold fell to the floors. The Red Guards denounced them, laughed at their frightened gestures, and laughed out loud at their nakedness. Then, they dragged both women out of the house and into the street. They led them to a small park near their house, threw them to the ground and summoned other Guards from other residences in the area. The two naked women huddled together while the Red Guards denounced them and chided them, pulled away their hands as they tried to conceal their nakedness. Struck them when they attempted to flee. Then they bound them both, naked, to a bicycle stand and left some of the guards to watch them. Passersby saw them standing there naked and weeping and begging to be released. But no one paid any attention to their pleading. The guards laughed at them.
The rest of the crowd returned to their home. They summoned two large trucks that arrived within the house and they removed everything that remained in the household – every piece of furniture, the clothing, cooking utensils, jewelry, pictures – everything. Nothing remained but an old wooden stool that one of the guards stood on to take down the pictures and the curtains.
The Red Guards then returned to the park and again beat and cursed and spat upon them. They were now called Class Enemies and secret bourgeois conspirators against the people. The more they denounced and pummeled the two helpless women, the more the rest of the crowd encouraged them, shouted denunciations, demanded more and more and more. The 17 hear old, wielding the knife yielded to the blood lust of the crowd. He grabbed my aunt by the hair and then quickly cut off most of her long hair with his knife. The crowd shouted for more. He cut off a handful of grandmother’s hair. He probed between their legs with the knife, as the crowd cheered him on. The women were nearly paralyzed with fear. Then he turned savagely on my aunt, who was crying loudly and begging still for mercy. He pulled her head to one side and sliced off her ear. She howled and shrieked but her cries were drowned out by the laughter and the chanting of the crowd. Blood poured down her face and body and she howled in pain. The young man picked the ear up from the ground, but his knife through it and held it over his head in triumph. He walked around the inner circle of the crowd, displaying the ear and then turned, with another idea, and attempted to force it into my auntie’s mouth. She turned her head, screaming still as he tried again and again to stuff it into her mouth. Finally, tired, he gave up and flung it into her face and turned and strode away. The others followed him, shouting, cheering, delighted by the show. Auntie and Grandmother were left alone tied to the bike stand in the park. After several minutes and the crowd had disappeared, one of the neighbors ran out of her house and untied the two women and helped them return to their empty house.
They had always been on good terms with their neighbors. They had no enemies, they thought. They had lived quiet and unobtrusive lives. Aunties paintings were smashed and torn and lay scattered in the street in front of the house. Some of the old ceramic figures they’d kept over the years, also lay shattered in the house and in front. Nothing was left for them.
Neighbors, who told mother of the incident, said they two women went into one of the bedrooms of the house to be alone. Still naked. They were heard weeping and howling for the next hour. Then they were quiet. A neighbor, later, brought clothing for them and left it in the entryway to the house. The door had been torn away. There was no sound from the bedroom.
The next morning the clothing was still in the doorway and the bedroom door still closed. A neighbor knocked softly on the door and didn’t hear a sound. She decided to enter in order to see if she could help the two women, believing they were too frightened to answer the door.
When she pulled the door open she saw the two women. Grandmother and auntie were both hanging from a ceiling beam. The neighbor said it appeared they had used the long strips of cloth cut from their bodies to commit suicide. There was but one stool in the house and in the room and she guessed that Grandmother had first hanged herself and then a few feet away from her, Auntie used the same stool and hanged herself. They were both still naked.
One of Grandmother’s sons heard, the next morning, what had happened. He rushed home only to find several neighbors gathered in the house and the dead bodies of the two women, now covered, lying on the floor, the neighbors wailing and crying. And at the same time they were terrified that the Red Guards might return or they might be reported for lamenting the fate of these two good women.
The police were summoned and removed the bodies. My uncle tried to make arrangements for the women to be buried or cremated, but the authorities would have nothing to do with that. “Waste fuel or land on these monsters?” they asked. “Are you one of them? Are you crazy?” He no longer protested, but one of the policemen gloated and said that the bodies would be disposed of in the rubbish heap near the western gate of the city, where the bodies of all traitors were thrown to be eaten by the dogs.
Brother stayed in the house that night, and again, the neighbors heard the sounds of crying from the house. One of them brought food to him but he didn’t speak to her, but simply sat on the floor in a corner of the house crying. He was inconsolable. When Red Guards heard that he was occupying the house, they came the next afternoon for more fun. They were armed with knives and sickles and cleavers and they were in a mood for punishing more traitors. But uncle had deprived them of their joyful afternoon. When they burst into the house they found him hanging from the beam in the bedroom where the bodies of his sister and mother had been earlier. They cut him down and dragged his body to the street where they dropped it. Then the leader of the group gave a shrill speech denouncing my uncle for committing suicide, telling the others in the large crowd that this was evidence of guilt, that this was yet another traitor who sought to deprive the people of information on the valuables, stolen from the people, that this family had concealed. He kicked the body several times, as did others in the crowd, then they moved on looking for more traitors, leaving my uncle’s body to be taken by the authorities to the dump outside the western gate, to join his mother, and his sister, the artist.(Make more of her artistry)
But now the Red Guards had a family name, and they used city records to find other relatives, believing that these people too must be concealing wealth and treasures from the people. They must be found and they must be punished, the Red Guards insisted.
Mama’s brother was next on the list of the Red Guards. He lived with his family in family residence on Zhengzhou Road. The home was in an expensive section of the city where the British trade representatives and diplomats had formerly lived.
Prior to 1949 my uncle owned a large lumberyard and made a large amount of money in his business. But then the Red Terror made that a legacy and a problem for him. The Red Guards came from house to house in his neighborhood. They also carried with them a written list of specific individuals and families who were to be targets of their searches and intimidation. My uncle was on their list.
Mama was told later that there was not much hesitation, this time, or courtesy as there had been in the case of my grandmother. They simply stormed into the houses and with knifes, cleavers and cudgels murdered the class enemies who were the inhabitants. She was told that in the section of the Little White Buildings – called that because of the western style homes there – the blood ran into the streets and formed streams that puddle in the gutters. The butchered bodies of the residents were thrown into the street and their homes were ransacked.
My uncle and aunt had nine grown children who worked and lived in other cities. They lived, in 1966, in their home with their eldest daughter and her husband. Both were, by that time, in ill health.
The Red Guards invaded their home in the middle of the night. They broke down the doors before they could be opened and seized the four inhabitants. My aunt and uncle were tied up and beaten and tortured on the first floor of the home and their daughter and son in law on the second story. The house, which had been built for a British family had a western style flush toilet. But because the plumbing was primitives and the toilet paper was coarse, the paper could not be flushed down the toilet but had to be deposited in a container and thrown out. The Red Guards, it seemed, had never seen a flush toilet before – and were amazed by it when they saw it. The concluded, despite the fact that it was a new device, that it was definitely one of the “four olds” that they were striking out against.
The bound the hands and feet of my aunt and uncle and dumped the used toilet paper from the container over their heads. Then they decided to demand that they eat the paper. When they refused they were both beaten to the floor with clubs and with bicycle chains. They screamed and writhed in pain, which seemed only to encourage their detractors. They were beaten unconscious as the crowd set upon them stomping and beating and finally stabbing them. All four were beaten to death. The house was ransacked and the bodies were left on the floor of the home where they had died. Neighbors were afraid, for several days, to do anything about them, or to enter the house. Finally the police came and removed the bodies and had them sent to the dump. The Red Guards had secured in the house a letter from one of their daughters. She lived in another part of Tianjin. Her home was raided, she was beaten, stripped and tortured and, finally, leaped from the second story window of her house and killed herself. The Red Guards ransacked her home also and threw her body into the street to be removed later by the authorities to the dump.
Thus the family was eradicated and the purity of Tianjin increased as hundreds and then thousands of class enemies were hunted down by the mobs, encouraged and sanctioned and organized by the government from among students and workers who nightly celebrated their triumph and the onset of their new revolutionary order in China.
In Beijing about this time the city residents were informed by workers at the Beijing Municipal Blood Transfusion Center east of Beihai Park that no hospital in Beijing was to be allowed to provide blood to a member of the” landlord elements, rich-peasant elements, reactionary elements, hooligans, rightist elements, capitalist and black-gang elements.” Those groups also were not to be allowed to donate blood in the city. The nation was now being divided into people and nonpeople and our family was among that large group of nonpeople. Although in the late summer of 1966 in Beijing Liu Shaoqi, the president of the PRC did insist to a gathering of party members that “human beings not yet executed are still human beings.” In Beijing the still human beings not yet executed, 77,000 of them, were expelled from Beijing in order to purify the city, and ordered to return to their home cities. Similar copycat measures were immediately taken in other cities, and as a result of those measures, my elderly grandmother – my father’s mother – was ordered expelled from our home in Hefei.



(Added Story: My grandmother kept a goose in her yard. It learned to follow her everywhere, almost like a dog. She would go out in the morning or the afternoon and the goose would walk in the street for several blocks behind her. Then it would wait for her and follow her back into the yard. She fed it every day and it remained close to her. The neighbor children, too, were fascinated by it, called out to it, fed it, and laughed often at it as it waited outside for grandmother to return.
When my uncle came to grandmother’s house and discovered the bodies of her and of my aunt hanging in the bedroom, he also found the goose in the entryway. It’s feet were nailed to the floor and a piece of wood had been forced into it’s throat to keep it from making any sound. The animal was no longer struggling, but lay in a heap on the floor, moving only slightly as uncle stepped over it. After cutting down his mother and sister and wrapping their bodies in rugs, he came downstairs. He pulled the nails from
the feet of the goose and delicately removed the stick from it’s throat. He brought some water to it and carried it into the yard. But it was too exhausted, shocked and ill to drink. It died later that day and lay a heap of feathers near the entryway to the street.]