Where He Lived, Where He Died
My great-grandfather was going to be a prominent man. But then China changed.
By Michelle Yuxiao Gao
In 2003, when I was 12 years old, my father took me to the village where my great-grandfather was born, and where, in this ruined house, he returned to die alone.
The only thing I can remember from that trip is the small room in this photo. Only later would I learn his story, and how it was that a young man born into a prominent family could die as he did, far from his wife and his children.
What happened to him? Was his fate a result of who he was, or was he simply a man overwhelmed by the great forces of history?
My great-grandfather was born sometime in the early 20th century — no one knows the precise year — to the great Guo family in Shanxi Province, China. The family owned a large tract of land. When my great-grandfather was still young, he inherited the family’s land and lived there in a big house.
My great-grandfather’s name was Guo Zengxian. His father, whose name is lost to history, was known as “Guo Juren,” or “Guo, the First-degree Scholar.” That title was bestowed on those few fortunate enough to have passed the entry-level Chinese Imperial Examination. The rare title brought the Guo family fame and prosperity, and land. The family grew wheat, cotton, corn and also harvested dates — which, years later, has become a favorite in my family.
Guo Juren lived during the Qing Dynasty, the last dynasty of imperial China, and his was said to be the last generation of the first-degree scholars. The title was abolished in 1905 when the Qing Dynasty was about to end and modern China was about to rise. It was the end of more than two thousand years of imperial China.
Imperial China was beset by defeat and corruption. It had fought and lost two Opium Wars to the British, which resulted in opium being legalized; Hong Kong had been ceded to the British, and many port cities were forced to open to foreign powers. People started rebelling against the Qing government. Finally, in 1912, Sun Yat-sen established the Republic of China, and Puyi, the last Qing Dynasty emperor abdicated. This is the world into which my great-grandfather was born.
When he was about to enter Peking University — the most elite in the country — students there were beginning to study Marxism, hoping to find a new path for the country. A group of students from Peking University founded the Socialist Youth League of China. My great-grandfather studied law at the university. I do not know if he was caught up in the political ferment.
In 1921, the Communist Party of China was officially founded by the same group of people who founded the Socialist Youth League of China. Around the same time, my great-grandfather finished his studies and returned to his home — and land — in Shanxi Province. He married my great-grandmother. I was told that their marriage was a fully blessed one. My great-grandmother was from a wealthy family as well, the daughter of either a high-ranking warlord or a landowner from out of the province.
They remained happily married for a few years. They lived in the big house on my great-grandfather’s land, and had four daughters and a son. My grandmother was the youngest of them, and my great-grandfather’s favorite. He named her Guo Anna — a western name.
But then, in 1937, the Japanese occupied China. The streets of the nearest county, Pingyao, once prosperous and busy with small businesses, became empty as the nation was plunged into war. My great-grandfather’s world was crumbling. He did not work because he did not want to serve the Japanese occupiers. His marriage began falling apart. He began smoking opium.
But my great-grandmother, I was told, was practical — in surviving wartime, and what followed.
China’s troubles did not end with the defeat of the Japanese. The country was soon plunged into civil war between the nationalist government and the Communists. My great-grandfather was a landowner, and the Communists saw landowners as enemies of the peasants. With the defeat of the nationalists, Mao Zedong embarked on an aggressive land reform movement, whose goal was to confiscate landowners’ land and fortunes and give them to the peasants. My great-grandmother had been running the house and the land, perhaps as a result of my great-grandfather’s opium addiction. So, when the Party’s local official came and knocked on the door, it was her who was taken away for “investigation” instead of my great-grandfather. She was kept in custody for only two years, I am told, because the local peasants spoke well of her generosity toward them. Others were executed.
But the land that had been in the Guo family for generations was gone. My great-grandmother, I have come to believe, had probably seen it coming and prepared. Before her arrest she had hidden the family’s jewels. When the Party officials released her, she quickly collected the jewels from neighbors she had hidden them with, sold them, and with the money she took her two youngest children to Beijing. My great-grandmother thought their wealth was too conspicuous in the small village of Shanxi Province, and thus the family was naturally vulnerable to persecution; they would be better off in a big city like Beijing, where they could hide their identity and be safe. The three elder daughters, meanwhile, were taken care of by the Communist Party after the Party seized the land. They joined the Party’s school.
It was unclear when my great-grandmother divorced my great-grandfather, or if they had ever legally signed divorce papers. With the money from the sale of the jewels, my great-grandmother managed to support both my grandmother and her elder brother until they both finished college. Meanwhile, my great-grandfather became a teacher in Shanxi Province, and level of political sensitivity in China started to escalate. His eldest daughter was said to have risen to a prominent position in the Party. She married another rising Party official when they were still students. When they moved to Chengdu in Sichuan Province a few years later, my great-grandfather left Shanxi Province and lived with them for a while. But because he had been a landowner, my great-grandfather’s presence threatened to undermine their position in the Party. They ordered my great-grandfather to stay away from them. My great-grandfather had nowhere to go, and so returned to the small village in Shanxi Province.
He came to Beijing once, in 1963, to visit my grandmother when she was in medical school. They had not seen each other in a long time, but did not even have time for lunch. My great-grandfather simply asked my grandmother if her school life was going well, and talked for a little while in her dorm room. He left Beijing the same day, and returned, once again, to his village.
My grandmother graduated and started working as a doctor, and soon began sending her father five Chinese yuan every month. He had by now become homeless. He ate food given to him by his neighbors. The whole village still recognized him, and they took turns feeding him and giving him a place to stay. Five Chinese yuan allowed him to eat well in a small Chinese village in the 1970s, but my great-grandfather, I learned, would spend all the money at once on alcohol. My grandmother would have to send the money to the head of a local primary school who would give my great-grandfather the money little by little, to prevent him from wasting it all.
On the last day of my great-grandfather’s life, he seemed to know that his time had come. He had some uncooked flour dough left with him, that he probably bought from a market in the village earlier in the day. He went to the family that had been helping him in his later years, and left the flour dough wrapped on the steps of their house. He walked back to the small room, that once was in his big house, and died there alone.
I tried my best to gather the pieces of his story, but there are mysteries that I cannot yet answer. My grandmother does not know why, for instance, her father came to visit her that day in 1963. I have no way of knowing what my great-grandfather was thinking, as he wandered the land he owned when he was young. Did he recall once thinking his future would be promising as a law student from the best university in the country? Was he blaming the time he was born, or was he blaming everything else that seemed to undermine his life? Was he wondering how his wife could adjust and thrive in the worst historical time for the family? Or was he simply feeling nostalgic for the old days?
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