1949 was a year when the land of my ancestral country was turned upside down and the whole world was shaken. It was also the year when this young bird first took wing, a turning point in my life.
I. A Childhood Dream
The dreams of childhood were many-colored. At one time I wanted to be a gardener, leading innocent and lively children through the garden of knowledge to search for treasures. I also wanted to be a tractor driver, riding an iron ox across the liberated fields. But what I longed for most was to become a journalist, to travel the world interviewing and writing, like Zou Taofen, author of *Notes from a Journey through Europe*.
When I was in primary school, our family lived on 31st Street in Rangoon. This was the second year after we had moved back to Burma from Kunming following victory in the War of Resistance. After three years under the iron heel of the Japanese invaders, Rangoon had a hundred things waiting to be rebuilt. Supplies were scarce and life was extremely difficult. Father was forced to leave us behind and return alone to Kunming, hoping to make two trading trips, rebuild his resources, and reopen his tailor shop.
In 1946, National Primary School reopened on 21st Street. My eldest younger sister, my second younger sister, and I went to school every morning through a market filled with the fishy smell of seafood, then walked home again in the blazing afternoon sun. Day after day, going to school and coming home was almost mechanical. What would I do in the future? I had never thought about it.
It was not until the following year, after I entered middle school and came into contact with more of the world, that news of events in society and of the student democratic movement in China began reaching us, and our young minds were stirred. There was the movement at Overseas Chinese Middle School to protect the school, the beating of progressive students there by right-wing elements, and the founding of Nanyang Middle School under conditions of extreme financial difficulty. All these things shook us awake from our ignorance. Together with classmates Xiao Yongji, Li Huiwen, and others, I transferred to Nanyang Middle School. The whole school had only a little over two hundred students, including both middle and primary school, but it established a small library. There were not many books, yet for those of us hungry for reading, it was enough.
The librarians were middle-school students serving voluntarily. The supervising teacher was Wang Yimang, a short-haired woman who always wore a smile. She often recommended Chinese and foreign classics to me, such as *The Iron Flood* and *Tsushima*. At the time, however, I was not interested in foreign novels and found them difficult to understand. Those long strings of names—father’s names, husbands’ names, personal names, and so on—left me completely confused. My lack of knowledge of foreign history and unfamiliarity with the background of the times were other reasons I could not understand foreign fiction.
I read some Chinese novels. Ba Jin’s books seemed thick and long to me. His *Torrent Trilogy*, for example, took many days to finish, and afterward I felt as if a wad of cotton were lodged in my chest, leaving me oppressed. I liked Ai Wu’s *Journey to the South*. It gave me the feeling of struggling upward out of hardship. My favorites were the Border Region literature series published in Hong Kong, books such as *Li Yong Lays a Great Minefield*, *Changes in Lijiazhuang*, *Liu Qiao’er’s Reunion*, *Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang*, and *New Heroes and Heroines*. These books opened before me an entirely new world. In front of my eyes appeared a brightly shining lighthouse.
That lighthouse was Yan’an, the sacred land of revolution.
As I read more books outside class, my childhood dreams grew richer and kept changing. At that time we read Gorky’s *Song of the Stormy Petrel* and hoped that, like the stormy petrel, we too could cry out in the storm: “Let the storm rage still more fiercely!” We sang: “You are the lighthouse, shining over the sea before dawn!” How we longed to go to that place, to receive the baptism of struggle, to search for our dream, and to live a vigorous kind of life entirely different from that of colonial capitalist society.
Our second-year class used “Lighthouse” as the name of its wall newspaper. Li Huiwen was good at drawing and naturally became the art editor responsible for illustrations. Zeng Shaozhi wrote neat, square characters, so he did the copying. Other classes had wall newspapers called *Prairie Fire*, *Torrent*, and *Stormy Petrel*. Whenever a new wall newspaper was posted, students from every class crowded into the corridor to read it, pointing here and there and talking about everything under the sun. It was great fun.
Perhaps because I had read so many books outside class, my compositions improved without my noticing. Once, in a writing competition on the theme of vacation life, I won first place. I no longer remember what I wrote, but at the time it greatly increased my interest in writing.
In the spring and summer of 1949, the new school term began.
As soon as we arrived, we heard that Director of School Affairs Li Xingjian had disappeared. Our homeroom teacher Wang Pengnian and school-bus driver Zheng Guosan had also disappeared.
Everyone guessed and argued about what had happened.
Only many years later did I learn that Teacher Li had secretly returned to China after receiving a summons to attend the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in Beijing. Wang Pengnian and Zheng Guosan had gone back to Yunnan to join Zhu Jiabi’s Borderland Column and take part personally in the liberation of Yunnan. I wrote *He Left in the Dark Night Before Dawn* to commemorate my teachers’ courageous actions and also to express my own hopes and ideals.
During the term before graduation, I tried submitting pieces to the newly founded *Chinese Commercial Daily*: *Graduation*, *A New Life*, and *Night*. The first was about the anguish and conflict I felt over what to do after graduating from middle school. Should I follow Father and spend my youth bent over a sewing machine all day? Or should I go into the vast sea of commerce and stain myself with the smell of money? The second was written as a prose poem describing the awakening fields after the liberation of the motherland. It was completely petty-bourgeois sentiment. The last was written in the form of a short story about a mother waiting late into the night for her son to return. Under the White Terror, how many mothers were worrying over the fate of their sons?
I used the pen name “Grassland,” but Chen Banzeng, who had graduated the year before, saw through it.
“That piece *Graduation* was yours, wasn’t it? I knew it had to be you.”
One day when he ran into me, I hesitated. I wanted to deny it but said nothing, and only smiled. Inside, I felt the sweet pleasure of eating “ye ge zi”—crushed ice.
II. Returning to China in Search of a Dream
As graduation approached, everyone in our class was thinking about what to do next. At that time, only Overseas Chinese Middle School had a senior-high division. In private, classmates confided their thoughts to one another. Go to an English-language school? None of us wanted that. Become teachers or go into business after graduation? Those were choices only if there were no other way. Return to China to continue our studies? That was best of all! We were all at the age when young eagles were waiting to fly, and we dreamed of the liberated areas, where one could breathe freely. But the motherland was thousands upon thousands of miles away, and the journey required a great deal of money. Going overland through the border was also dangerous because Yunnan had not yet been liberated. If we ran into bad people, the danger would be great. So all we could do was wait and quietly watch how events developed.
Jiang Jingxian had an older brother who sent several copies of *People’s Daily* from Shijiazhuang. The newspaper carried admission notices for North China University and the Military and Political University. Tuition and other school fees at those schools were completely waived, relieving us of the worry that we had no foreign exchange. His brother Jiang Zhongxian had studied at Overseas Chinese Middle School and, if I remember correctly, had been in Teacher Zhang Xuelin’s class. After the peaceful liberation of Beiping, Teacher Zhang Xuelin and our schoolmate Guo Huanzhen returned to China. Perhaps Jiang Zhongxian left Rangoon at that time as well.
A few ordinary newspapers created a small stir among us. Returning to China became our goal after graduation, our road forward. Returning to China to study was our future. In private, we agreed that each of us would go to the Chinese Embassy in Burma—still under the Nationalist government at the time—to apply for a passport. We would list Hong Kong as our destination but not mainland China, for fear they would make trouble for us.
Mother worried about my returning to China and did not want me to go. At the time, I was the eldest of seven children and the only boy. My younger brother was not born until after I had returned to China. The burden of the whole family rested on Father’s small tailor shop. There were many mouths to feed. Beyond daily living expenses, the monthly school fees for four or five children were already a large sum. Father always worked silently like an old ox. From morning until night he kept pressing the treadle of his sewing machine and did not turn out the light and stop until eleven or twelve at night. Sometimes after school I helped clean the ash from his iron and add charcoal. At night I helped light and pump up the gas lamp. Mother worried that after I left there would be no one to help. The rest were all girls. What would they do?
Father, however, supported my return to China. Perhaps he thought that if I stayed in Rangoon, I would not have much of a future. He also did not want me to inherit his trade. He never asked me to learn tailoring. He wanted only for me to study hard.
Our ancestral home was Taishan County in Guangdong Province. Father could never forget the hard life he had known in the poor countryside. The family had one broken mud house and two *fen* of barren farmland. He had no chance to attend school when he was young and instead went to the market town as an apprentice. After three years learning tailoring, he followed a traveling broker across the sea to Rangoon alone to make a living.
When some relatives and friends heard that I was going back to China, they blamed Father.
“Uncle Ye, how can you feel safe letting your son go back? That’s the Communists’ world now.”
Guangzhou was liberated on October 14, 1949.
Father merely smiled calmly at their warnings.
“How could the Communists be bad? They’ll divide up the land!”
Having grown up in the countryside, how deeply Father longed for land.
Father and Mother had told us about Tangshan—the old country. In our village, the Ye ancestral hall distributed fish and meat every year. The shares depended on how far the sons of each family had gone in school. Anyone who had attended primary school received a share. Someone who had attended middle school was considered quite remarkable and received even more. I was already a middle-school student. If I returned to the village, I too would bring honor to the Ye family.
If our family could also receive some farmland, Father would have something to depend upon if he returned to China in old age. That was Father’s simple way of thinking, and it was also his reason for letting me go. How deep was the love that people from Tangshan held for their native soil.
At that time, passage by ship was very expensive. Even a third-class berth from Rangoon to Hong Kong cost more than three hundred rupees. Father’s earnings from his labor were limited, and he could not produce such a sum all at once. Thinking also of the money I would need after reaching China, he borrowed five hundred rupees from Old Mrs. Huang across the street and exchanged it for foreign currency for me. Then he scraped together money here and there to buy my ticket. It was an enormous sum.
With tears in her eyes, Mother quietly told me, “Your father borrowed from a moneylender. Ah, how long will it take us to pay it back?”
I was still too young to know the taste of sorrow. Learning that Father had gone into debt to finance my return to China made my heart tremble a little, and I felt sad. But the sadness was soon overwhelmed by the joy of knowing that I was about to take flight.
After I returned to China, my eldest younger sister wrote to tell me that Father worked day and night to repay the debt. He also made ready-made clothes and had Mother set up a stall on Guangdong Street to sell them. My third younger sister had been in senior high school for only one year when she left school to stay home and sew. My fourth younger sister would come home after school and go straight to the stall to help Mother watch it and collect money.
Father’s labor day and night wore down his body. He often coughed. When Mother noticed blood in his sputum, she urged him to go to the hospital for an examination, but Father refused because he was afraid of losing business. He only bought some patent medicine. Before long his cough became worse and worse. My eldest younger sister, who was teaching in the countryside, returned home, saw that something was terribly wrong, and forced Father into the hospital. As soon as his condition improved a little, he hurried home again and went right back to work. Not long afterward, the illness returned. Mother urged him to enter the hospital, but again he refused. His body grew thinner day by day until he was little more than skin and bones. Mother called my sister home, and once again they forced him into the hospital.
By the early 1950s, tuberculosis could already be treated, provided the patient rested properly and had adequate nutrition. But Father was anxious about work and kept laboring. Treatment was delayed. In 1955, he died far too young, at the age of fifty-four.
Even now, remembering this makes me deeply sad. For my future, Father went into debt and worked himself to exhaustion until his death. I wronged him. Even while he was ill, he kept thinking of his son far away. Yet this unfilial son never repaid him in the slightest. When Father was gravely ill, I was powerless. I could do nothing to ease his suffering. I owe Father far, far too much.
But let me return to the story.
One day, the supplement editor of *Chinese Commercial Daily* sent me a letter asking me to come in. I went wearing wooden clogs on my bare feet, with a white shirt tucked into yellow khaki shorts. A young man with a smooth complexion and a Zhejiang accent received me. He was Zhu Zhongyu of Shaoxing, Zhejiang—editor’s note. After asking about my school, he said that few people in the Burmese Chinese community were willing to write, and those who wrote well were rarer still. He encouraged me to write more and practice more.
When he learned that I would soon be returning to China, he said with some regret, “So soon? Life in China is still very hard. You should be mentally prepared.”
“I’m not afraid,” I said. “I’m willing to endure hardship.”
To tell the truth, I had no idea what hardship in China actually meant. I could not imagine it and had never really thought about it. The impulsiveness of youth sometimes makes one forget everything else.
I wanted to return to China. I wanted to return and enrich myself. I wanted to go to Beijing and see our great capital. I wanted to contribute my own small share to the motherland.
III. Reluctance Before Departure
When Teacher Xu Richen learned that we were going back to China, he gathered us at his home in the second-floor dormitory of Nanyang Middle School’s Bahan campus and gave us a simple but abundant farewell dinner.
The loft was narrow. Two school desks had been pushed together. Around them sat our second-year classmates Chen Bo, Li Huiwen, Wu Zhuoguang, the brothers Xiao Yongjian and Xiao Yongji, Jiang Jingxian, and me, together with Lin Sheran from the fifth-year class. The light inside was dim, while shadows of trees swayed outside the window. Dimples appeared in Teacher Xu’s plump face as he smiled and kept urging us to take more food and not stand on ceremony. Teacher Wang Yimang, plainly dressed and with short hair, went in and out bringing us dish after fragrant, steaming dish.
“It didn’t turn out very well,” Teacher Wang said with an apologetic smile.
The serving dishes were the large plates and bowls used at banquets—perhaps they had been borrowed. There was fish cooked with red fermented rice, twice-cooked pork, lion’s-head meatballs, and stir-fried mixed vegetables. It was almost like a formal feast. There were dishes I had never tasted before. Perhaps the sadness of parting had already filled our stomachs. We scarcely moved our chopsticks.
“In a few days, you will be returning to China,” Teacher Xu told us after the meal. “You are the first group of overseas Chinese students from Burma to return after the founding of New China. Congratulations!”
Again and again he reminded us: “After you return, study hard and learn real skills. The overseas Chinese here have high hopes for you. If you make contributions to New China, that will bring honor to the Chinese in Burma. You must do them proud.”
Teacher Xu also warned us to pay attention to safety along the way, to remain alert, and to guard against sabotage by bad people and secret agents. He said that students from Overseas Chinese Middle School would be on the same ship, along with students from the countryside, and that we should unite and help one another. It would be best to organize into small groups. Away from home, caution came first.
He also said that the son of a Chinese community leader, Chen so-and-so—I have forgotten his name; perhaps he was Chen Zhanmei’s son—was older than we were and attended an English-language school. He would be traveling second class, so Teacher Xu asked him to lead us.
Teacher Xu spoke to us with deep earnestness, warning and advising us again and again. We were moved and silently nodded. I have never forgotten what he said to us before we left.
The campus was utterly quiet. Trees and grass were dim in the night. Most of the boarding students had already gone home to the countryside.
Nanyang Middle School, cradle of our growth—we had depended upon one another. Amid the insults of the right wing, we had stood upright. Under conditions of extreme financial hardship, we had endured and survived.
Nanyang, you were about to become a memory in our hearts. In what year, in what month, would we ever return?
IV. Farewell to Rangoon
All his life, Father had made wedding clothes for other people. This time he hurried to make something to my own measure: a khaki Zhongshan suit suitable for wearing in China. He put on his one gray-blue Western suit, which he wore only when attending banquets, and took me to a photography studio for a portrait of father and son. That black-and-white photograph became the memorial of my final parting from Father. The merciless years separated us. More than sixty years have passed. Never being able to see my beloved father again is the greatest and most painful regret of my life.
Father bought me a canvas suitcase and a travel bag for my blanket. He also sewed me a double-layered jacket that could be worn on either side. He said Tangshan was colder than Rangoon, and I could wear the jacket in winter.
I packed a few changes of clothes into the suitcase and also stuffed in some books I loved and a box of old postage stamps.
“Take fewer books and bring a few more clothes instead,” Mother said, sadness in her voice. “What are you taking those old stamps for? You can’t eat them, and they take up space.”
But I insisted on bringing the stamps. They were my beloved treasure, the result of years of collecting. On Sundays and at the end of school terms, my classmate Zeng Shaozhi and I, sometimes joined by my street friend Situ Yan, would go far, far away to the Indian quarter and dig through piles of wastepaper behind a bank building. We soaked old envelopes in water, carefully peeled off the brightly colored stamps, spread them out, and let them dry.
After all the trouble I had taken to collect those stamps, how could I bear to throw them away? Never in ten thousand dreams did I imagine that years later, during one political movement after another, those thumb-sized stamps would become stumbling blocks in my political future. But that is another story.
For several days, Mother had been unhappy. You could see it in her eyes. Yet I could not think of anything to say to comfort her. I did not understand the pain in her heart. For more than ten years she had loved and protected me, her only son, while I had simply opened my mouth when food arrived and stretched out my arms when clothes were brought. I had never given a thought to how hard Mother worked.
Our home was on the upper part of 18th Street. Eight people crowded into one long workroom. The tailor shop was in front and the sleeping area in back. Two wooden cabinets stood in the middle. One held cloth, the other thread, sewing supplies, and all sorts of odds and ends. Beside them, a hanging curtain separated off a passageway. What we called the bedroom held only two double beds. Every night after Father finished work, I unfolded a canvas cot in the front and set it between the sewing machine and the cutting table. That was my bed.
Every day I went in and out on my way to and from school and noticed nothing special. But once I was about to leave, every single thing there seemed so dear and so hard to part from.
Before the morning birds had begun to call, Mother silently finished cooking pork congee. She fried a plate of eggs, sliced a dish of fragrant Chinese sausage, and called all the children to wash their faces and eat breakfast. My eldest, second, and third younger sisters ate and left for school with their bookbags. Father sorted cloth on the cutting table.
With reddened eyes, Mother said to me, “Call your father to eat.” Then she lowered her head and slipped into the kitchen.
“Dad, come eat,” I called softly.
Father came over, ate one bowl of congee, and went out. My fourth and fifth younger sisters sat on the threshold holding their bowls and staring at the street. They were not playing noisily as they usually did.
After a while, a four-wheeled horse carriage stopped at the door. An Indian driver with white cloth wrapped around his head and a face full of whiskers followed Father’s instructions and loaded my luggage onto the carriage.
Mother came over and pressed a red lucky-money envelope into my palm. Her eyes were wet, and her voice choked.
“Take care of yourself away from home... Write back often...”
My two little sisters looked first at Mother and then at me. They still did not understand what separation in life and death meant. Their wide eyes held both puzzlement and sadness.
At that moment I did not know what I was thinking either. My feelings seemed like the hard blocks of ice in the cold-drink cases on the streets of Rangoon. My eyes were dull and dry. I said nothing because I did not know what to say. I simply climbed silently into the carriage.
The driver flicked the reins, and the carriage started forward through the morning sunlight.
At the docks, people stood in clusters here and there. Our classmates and the relatives and friends seeing us off were already there talking and waiting for us to board. Everyone was excited. After passing customs inspection, the passengers went up onto the deck one by one. We all leaned against the rail and looked back toward shore.
Among those seeing us off, I saw Father waving to me. People on shore shouted words of blessing, and people aboard shouted back. As the ship pulled away, Father’s figure gradually blurred. My excited heart suddenly seemed covered by a shadow. I felt as though I had lost something, and there was a sour ache inside me.
Goodbye, beloved Father.
Goodbye, Rangoon, my second homeland.
V. Toward the Motherland
We traveled aboard the *Tengnanla*, a merchant ship of nine thousand tons. Our berths were in the large third-class dormitory compartment, with our luggage spread out in one corner below deck.
Among the overseas Chinese students traveling with us was Zeng Jichang from Overseas Chinese Middle School. We had been classmates at National Primary School, and during vacations we had secretly hidden in his home to listen to news broadcasts from the Xinhua News Agency radio station. Zhang Tingkai was also a student at Overseas Chinese Middle School. After Teacher Zhang Xuelin returned to China, Zhang Tingkai made up his mind to save money for the journey. His parents would not allow him to go, so for the sake of his ideal he ran away from home. Huang Zhiming came from the countryside. He was the younger brother of Huang Kaichang, a reporter for Rangoon’s *People’s Daily*. Zhong Guohong was the younger brother of Zhong Yuebo, a Burmese-language teacher at Nanyang Middle School. After returning to China, he worked in the Burmese-language section of the Central People’s Broadcasting Station.
After several days sailing across the Indian Ocean, the ship passed Singapore at the Strait of Malacca and entered the South China Sea—the China Sea over which China had no jurisdiction.
We reached Hong Kong in late November 1949. As soon as the ship dropped anchor, many small boats crowded around us. Some sold food, some hawked hotel rooms. People shouted, pulled, and tugged. It was terribly chaotic. Remembering our teachers’ instructions before departure, we piled our luggage together for safety and stood around it to guard it, refusing to let strangers seize our bags in order to win our business. The students leading our group negotiated with them, and only then did we transfer to a small boat.
Once ashore, we discovered how crowded the prosperous little island of Hong Kong was. The hotel where we stayed was completely full. More than ten of us had only one room, and when that was not enough, extra beds were set up along the corridor, one after another. After Guangzhou was liberated, overseas Chinese from around the world returning to visit family, overseas Chinese students going back to study, wealthy people fleeing outward, and officials of the old regime all poured into Hong Kong, making the city seem disorderly and overcrowded.
We stayed in Hong Kong for a week. All of us went to a photography studio and took a historic commemorative photograph of overseas Chinese students from Burma returning to China.
An older student leading the group used a letter of introduction to make contact with the proper people. A young man wearing a peaked cap came to meet us. He led us across by ferry, into Kowloon, onto a train, and finally to Lo Wu. Who was this young man? No one asked. In any case, he had been sent by Hong Kong’s underground organization to escort us safely across the border.
Lo Wu and Shenzhen were separated only by a small river. It was late autumn, the dry season, and the riverbed was exposed. The river was not very wide, and the bridge was not very long. It was built of wood and had no railing. As soon as the train stopped, passengers shouldered their luggage and swarmed toward the bridge. Every one of us had two or three pieces of baggage and could not move them alone. Porters carrying ropes and shoulder poles circled around us looking for work. To prevent cheating and confusion, the student leaders agreed on a price, selected the porters, and we followed them across the bridge.
On the other side stood a customs inspection building. When the officials saw that we were students, they did not inspect us. Other travelers were searched by border personnel at the roadside, where their trunks were opened and lids lifted. Any printed materials published outside the country were confiscated without exception.
Shenzhen was nothing more than a tiny rural settlement on the border. There were only a few thatched houses and a patchwork of footpaths and fields. Not far away, water buffalo grazed in the countryside, lazily swishing their tails.
High above us, the Five-Star Red Flag fluttered in the wind.
Ah! This was the motherland, the New China we had longed for day and night!
Women soldiers in yellow-green uniforms, with “Liangguang Column” badges on their chests and short hair showing beneath their caps, looked bold and spirited as they helped women in gray uniforms maintain order on the railway. Nearby, People’s Liberation Army soldiers stood guard wearing five-pointed-star cap badges, puttees around their legs, and rifles on their shoulders.
The sun was warm. The air was fresh.
Shenzhen, greetings to you!
Morning of the motherland, greetings to you!
In Rangoon I had read *The Story of Shrimp Ball*. I had read Han Xiao’s poems of battle. Today I had come in person to this land of struggle, this liberated land. How happy I was.
Motherland, we have come home!
