First Repatriation
My father, Wang Guifang, later changed his name to Wang Xinpu, was born in 1911 in Daduzhang Village, Zhaowangzhuang Township, Laiyang County, Shandong Province. My grandfather was a village teacher and his family had several acres of land and seven pear trees. My father was the eldest of six sisters, with four sisters and one brother. My grandfather earned his living by teaching, but no one in the family farmed the land, so the land was rented out.
My father studied for nine years as a child, and as a teenager he went to Jilin in the northeast to apprentice in a fruit store. Then he returned home and married my mother, whose family was from Wanglankou Village in the same county. My maternal grandfather went to Beijing to start a small business and opened a butcher store. There were no boys in my grandfather’s family, only two daughters, and then a boy was passed on from another family. My grandfather called my parents to Beijing to help him run the butcher store, and my father later opened his own noodle shop.
Longkou was famous for its vermicelli, so my father found a few skilled townspeople from Jiao Dong and started a vermicelli business together. He rented a courtyard outside Xizhimen, purchased some tools, a stone mill, a stove, an animal, a cart, etc., and named it Hongxing Vermicelli Factory. My father was both manager and accountant. With this small business, he brought my grandparents to Beijing, and my mother raised seven children. I had one sister, two brothers and three sisters at the top and bottom of my line, respectively.
From the 1930s to the liberation of Beiping, the business was uneventful. The family had many children, and life was not rich, but there was no change in the first few years after the liberation. The so-called public-private partnership was a joint venture in which the government sent someone to convert all the assets into money, called fixed shares, and then received interest at the rate of 5% per year on the fixed shares, called fixed interest, for ten years, after which all the assets belonged to the government. The amount of the fixed share is entirely up to the government, and my family’s fixed share is $1573. Our family receives $19.66 in fixed interest from the bank every quarter.
According to the rules, capitalists were considered to be those whose share fixing reached $1,500, while those whose fixing was less than $1,500 were small business owners. So my father had the status of a capitalist. On the one hand, the government called the public side, and on the other, the capitalists called the capitalist side. The government sent someone to be the director of the factory, and my father was assigned to be the deputy director, and later he was demoted to head of the production unit. At the same time, he was also made a member of the Standing Committee of the Beijing Municipal Federation of Industry and Commerce and Director of the Haidian District Federation of Industry and Commerce. Father’s monthly salary was 62 yuan, but the director of the Federation of Industry and Commerce was not paid.
At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, my father, who was both a factory owner (although he had no power at all) and a capitalist, bore the brunt of the struggle, being fought, beaten, had his head shaved, and had his family confiscated. Later, there were rumors that they wanted to expel the rich from Beijing, but my father, a capitalist, belonged to the national bourgeoisie and was not one of them.
A group of people from the factory told father that he had been put on the repatriation list, and that he would leave Beijing on September 9th and be sent back to his hometown. The factory sent some straw ropes to tie up his luggage. My elder brother graduated from junior high school and was assigned to work at the Changsha Radio Industry School; my second brother was a freshman at the Beijing Forestry Institute; I was a senior at the Beijing Erlong Road School; my elder sister was a junior at the Beijing Women’s No. 8 Middle School; my second sister was in elementary school; and my younger sister passed on to me at a young age. My uncle in Chengdu (he has no children). I was the only one left on the family register who didn’t move out, and my family’s house was sealed off, so it was hard for me to leave my household registration with a distant uncle in Beijing.
On September 9, a big truck came from the factory and a group of people, led by Hu Quanfa, came down to escort our family to the train station. Many people from the neighborhood came to watch. Hu Quanfa viciously pushed my father and asked him to kneel down, but my father obeyed and asked my grandfather to kneel down as well, and he did. I’m not going to be able to do anything about it,” he said. What kind of person are you? Then she told my mother to get a white cloth and ink, and said to my father, “You write! Father said, “Write what? Hu said, “Tell me yourself, what the hell are you?
He was afraid of being beaten, especially in front of his old father, his wife, his children and his neighbors, which would be an extremely unpleasant scene, and his only choice was to submit. My father said after a moment, “I’m an unreconstructed capitalist, okay? The worst thing that could have happened was that Hu said, “Fine, that’s what you’ll write,” and my father wrote on a white cloth, “No reformed capitalist. So my father wrote “unreformed capitalist” on a white cloth, and my mother was ordered to sew it on my father’s back. On another piece of white cloth I wrote “old capitalist” and sewed it on my grandfather’s back.
My father was a man I dared not get close to. He was very strict with me, and sometimes I would get into fights with my playmates outside, and people would come to my house, or I would play with a ball and break the glass in my neighbor’s house. My father’s status as a capitalist made us children feel discriminated against and resentful at school. Sometimes I would wonder childishly why my father wanted to be a capitalist and why he didn’t become a worker.
At the same time, I also felt from the details of ordinary life that my father loved us, he was a very conscientious, treating people very generously, hard to earn money to support a large family is not easy. At this time my father was leaving, I seemed to feel something, stepped two steps in front of him to say something, did not know what to say, just mumbled, go back to …… father said, I know. I also wanted to say, I’ll go back to see you later, but before I could say it, Hu Quanfa and his gang rushed away. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to do in the future, but I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to do in the future,” he said. I never thought that this would be the last time I would see my father.
When the family arrived at the train station, a group of Red Guards inspected the luggage. A bicycle ready to be checked in was confiscated, the bundled luggage was opened, and several old silk quilted jackets were confiscated.
Several dilapidated straw huts in the family home were used as storage by the production team and were vacated. After a few days of farm work, my father fell ill, first unable to eat, then suffering from ascites, his stomach felt like a drum, and he lay at home for several days getting worse and worse. All that was left in the family was the 14-year-old eldest sister, Yan Ming, the 12-year-old second sister, Yan Nan, the 70-year-old grandfather, and the nephew, Xiaokui, who was less than two years old. Yan Ming works in the fields every day, while Yan Nan cooks at home and takes care of her grandfather and nephew.
After many days without news of his parents’ departure, without phone calls or any means of communication, Yan Ming walked to the county hospital, where he learned that his mother had sent his father to Qingdao. I don’t know how my mother, a small-footed woman who can’t read or write, managed to get my father to Qingdao, but I later heard from my mother that a distant relative in Qingdao helped send him to the hospital. At first the doctor said it was hepatitis, but later he said it was probably liver cancer and there was no cure. So my father went back to Daduozhang Village.
My father was sometimes awake, sometimes in a coma, and once when he was awake, he said he wanted to eat grapes, but it was already the beginning of winter. My father ate the grapes, but his life came to an end and he died on November 28th at the age of 55, spitting blood. It was only 80 days from the time he left Beijing to the time he died.
The Second Repatriation
My second brother is still at Beijing Forestry College, and my sister in Xinjiang sends him living expenses. My older brother in Changsha sent me 12 yuan a month from his 30-odd yuan salary. I was lucky enough to leave my household registration in Beijing, but my uncle, who lived far away, took me in. In a time of crisis, my uncle’s family was good to me, and it was very inconvenient for me to stay with them and build a bed with wooden planks every night, especially since his family was full of girls. My uncle’s family was small business owners, and he lived with a lot of trepidation. I also knew my uncle’s difficulties, as it was the time of the big tandem, when I joined a long march to leave Beijing.
The Long March was organized by college students from the Beijing Agricultural and Mechanical College, and was to walk from Beijing to Jinggangshan, Jiangxi Province, then to Yan’an along the Red Army’s Long March Road, and from Yan’an to Beijing. The Long Marchers consisted of several hundred men, divided into companies and platoons, and consisted mainly of high school and college students from all over the country. The Long March team had a very atmospheric name: the First Front Army of the Red Guards of the Chinese Long March. In fact we only made it from Beijing to Lancao, Henan, where we were told by the central government to stop the big tandem and the Long March was disbanded.
It is said that 100,000 people were expelled from Beijing, based on an order from the Xicheng District Pickets of the Beijing Red Guards (the infamous Xicheng), and that most of those expelled were the so-called “land-rich anti-bad right capitalists” and their families. A few months after this breeze passed, many of those expelled returned to Beijing, demanding that the policy be implemented. My father had died, and my mother returned to Beijing with my two sisters and nephews. The original house had been sealed, and my mother approached the local police station and the temporary head of the street to open the door and move in, but they put the blame on each other and did not care. It was dark, it was winter, and the family had to sleep on the streets, so the mother was anxious, tore off the seal, broke the lock, and moved in.
My father’s former employer, the Beijing Qinghe Vermicelli Factory, gave him a small living allowance and food stamps to barely make ends meet. My family lived outside Xizhimen, and my elder sister, Yanming, went to the factory more than 20 miles away every week to get money and food stamps. On the issue of settling in Beijing, the factory said that there were many such people in Beijing, and that the problem should be solved in a coordinated manner. After more than a year, on March 18, 1968, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau issued a notice stating that rich landlords, anti-villainous rightists and capitalists with reactionary positions would be repatriated to the countryside.
My father was a member of the Standing Committee of the Beijing Municipal Federation of Industry and Commerce and the Director of the Haidian District Federation of Industry and Commerce, but he had never been designated as a reactionary capitalist. I didn’t expect that soon the factory would inform me that the Public Security Bureau had approved my father’s registration as a reactionary capitalist. The internal conflict of the people became an enemy conflict, and there was no room for justification, so the family was sent back to Shandong again. This time when he returned to Beijing from Shandong, my father’s title changed from capitalist to reactionary capitalist, and he had to be sent back to his home in Shandong again.
This time, I went back with my mother and sister. Jiaodong is a good place from the point of view of its climate and other natural conditions. The quality of all kinds of food, vegetables and fruits is very good, especially the Laeyang pear, which is famous at home and abroad, is excellent. After three years of famine, the people had just had enough to eat and started to learn from Dazhai. There was no electricity in the village, so every morning I woke up in the dark, my two teenage sisters followed the women’s laborers and I followed the men’s laborers to work in the fields. My sisters, who had grown up in Beijing, and I were obviously not very good at farming, so we had to work very hard, but the village people were very friendly to us. When hoeing, each of us was given a hoe, and those who could hoe quickly rested at the head of the field; I was the slowest, and someone was always in front to help me hoe.
The main means of transportation in the local countryside was a one-wheeled wheelbarrow, which was used to transport crops, fertilizer, and grain. The good laborers could push four or five hundred pounds at a time, and could walk fast on rough country roads, even where there were no roads. I also tried to push the cart, from pushing two hundred pounds at first to three hundred pounds later. So much so that later the production team used me as a laborer who could push the cart. However, I was not as skilled as the local villagers, and sometimes my cart would overturn during the work. Once the cart overturned, other people would stop to help me reload and fix it, and no one ever complained about me.
One of the most memorable times was when a group of us were pushing crops from the field to the village, and I overturned my cart when I crossed a dirt road. I didn’t expect a group of people to help me clean up, and none of them had any complaints about me.
The pears from my hometown are the best I’ve ever tasted, called Laiyang pears by outsiders and Chip (pronounced CI) pears, or Big Pears, by locals. They may not look like much, but they are so sweet and syrupy in the mouth, with a wonderfully smooth and delicate flavor. As the locals know, the authentic Laiyang pear is only produced in 11 villages along the Wulong River, where the fertile oil and sandy soil, crisp water of the Wulong River and favorable climate produce this fruit of great value. My family’s Daduozhang Village is one of these 11 villages.
But the most authentic of all is the 300 mu of pear trees in Lu’ergang Village. Every year before the National Day, the best pears from the 300 mu of land were selected and transported to Laiyang County in baskets, and then transported by helicopter from Beijing, directly to the table of the National Day Reception at the Great Hall of the People. That year Lu’er port produced a particularly large pear, weighed two and a half pounds. At that time, the production brigade decided to send this pear to Chairman Mao, and sent it to Zhongnanhai in Beijing through the post office. The parcel was sent to Zhongnanhai, Beijing through the post office, and there was no further information about it. I have always been curious to know whose stomach the pear ended up in.
The pear trees belonged to the production team, and the pear picking began on September 1st every year. But there were exceptions, once we were hoeing corn near the pear shop, and the old man waved to us, we knew there were pears to eat, and indeed the old man took out a small basket of pears from the hayloft for us to eat. He first talked about the guerrilla warfare in those years, and then talked about the way to eat pears. He said the best pears were from the wind, and rich people might not be able to eat them. He said that the best pear is the one that is in the limelight, and the rich may not be able to eat it. Unfortunately, the pear was not fully ripe at that time, and I remembered the old man’s words for decades.
Pears are not only delicious, but also cheap. When the pears are the size of a tennis ball, they have to be sliced in order to avoid overgrowing and overwhelming the tree. The sliced pears were already very sweet, and one day a neighbor brought some sliced pears to us, saying that the production team was selling such pears in the small temple in the village. The mother tasted it was really sweet, and went to buy pears in a small basket. The pear seller was a middle-aged man, who called my mother aunt on the basis of her seniority, and asked her how much to buy, and she said, “Buy one dollar. The man said, “Auntie, you go home first, I will find a cart to send you home. My mother said, “How much? He said two hundred pounds. The people really didn’t have much money in their hands, and the fruits and vegetables were amazingly cheap, to the point that the best pears and apples came down in large quantities for a few cents a pound. The pears that were selected, evenly sized, and wrapped in paper ready for export were sold to members for 16 cents a pound.
One time the PLA’s troops pulling the road through the village of Daotau Zhang, the village loudspeakers announced that each family take out two cabbages to send to the brigade headquarters to the PLA to eat. Every family has no shortage of cabbage, every family to come up with the best cabbage, my sister also held two cabbage to the brigade headquarters, did not expect the brigade headquarters people said, do not your family. My sister realized that our family has been classified into four categories of molecular class enemies, and the PLA does not eat food from the homes of class enemies.
The simplicity of the people is comforting, but under the inescapable political haze, even though you are innocent as water, you have indeed become a pariah of your time. The simplicity and friendliness of the villagers I felt may be only one side of the story. My fourth aunt, Guo Zongrui, was originally a student at the Kuomintang Military Academy in Qingdao, and later an officer in the Kuomintang Youth Army, who took my fourth aunt to Taiwan with the Kuomintang troops in 1949. My aunt’s father was a landlord in Hontuya Village in this county who was killed alive during the Cultural Revolution. How could an honest and kind farmer kill someone? The people of Shandong are well known for their generosity, but that was in the past, and after a political campaign, the simple and generous folkways have become increasingly thin.
My fourth aunt, Wang Guiqing, has lost contact with us since she left for Taiwan. After 1949, the two sides of the Taiwan Strait went their separate ways. The political movement on this side, the three anti-corruptions and five anti-corruptions, the public-private partnership, the anti-rightist …… class struggle, the fierce rain, the education I received is that our life is the happiest, there are still two-thirds of the people in the world living in dire straits, we have the responsibility to rescue them. As for Taiwan, most of the information I received was from the movies, and when Taiwan was mentioned, it was always associated with the American Chiang secret agents.
In 1964, before the Cultural Revolution, my father received a letter addressed to the address of his old business before 1949, and the post office delivered the letter to my father after several passes. The letter was sent from Barcelona, Spain, and it turned out to be a letter from a Taiwanese grandfather who was looking for his relatives, saying that they had emigrated from Taiwan to Spain. He said they had moved from Taiwan to Spain. I found out later that they were still in Taiwan and asked a friend to send the letter from Spain for security reasons. I’m not sure how much I’d have liked to see you do this, but I’m not sure how much I’d have liked to see you do this. I don’t know which level of leadership replied that he could write back, and since then my father has been in contact with my sister-in-law in Taiwan, as well as my father-in-law and uncle in Taiwan, who are also in contact with relatives in China.
After the Cultural Revolution began, my family suffered a terrible tragedy and was driven back to their hometown. We lost contact with Fourth Aunt for a while, but then we got in touch again, and she often wrote to her grandfather, who had been expelled to his hometown. One time she wrote to him that she had heard that she could send money back home, and she wanted to send money to grandpa too, but she was afraid that she would not receive it, so she sent him 20 US dollars first. My grandfather wrote a letter to my sister-in-law, saying that he would never send money again.
Some years later, the two sides of the Taiwan Strait were able to visit relatives, but Fourth Aunt had already passed away. The following is a conversation between my older brother and my Fourth Aunt.
Brother: “What was your position in the army?”
Fourth Aunt: “The platoon leader of the cavalry platoon.”
“Which unit?”
“Integrating 74th Division.”
“Isn’t that Zhang Lingfu’s unit?”
“Exactly.”
“Wasn’t the Battle of Montlake wiped out?”
“We were cavalry, we ran fast and escaped.”
After spending more than three months in my home in Shandong, I received a letter from a classmate in Beijing telling me that the school was going to resume military training and classes to start a revolution. On December 17, I went to Tianzhen County, Shanxi Province, to join the army. Four years later, at the end of 1972, I went to work as a miner in the Datong Mining Bureau. As an intellectual youth, I still had the opportunity to be assigned a job. In order to find a way out for my two younger sisters, I went to the Beijing Municipal Committee’s Letters and Visits Office, and they told me that my two younger sisters could be treated as returning intellectual youth. I quickly wrote to my sister, and Yan Ming led Yan Nan to the Zhiqing Office of the Laiyang County Party Committee, where she was recognized as a Zhiqing.
There were very few job openings for them, and they were divided into those who went to the countryside and those who returned to the countryside, and the few openings were given to those who went to the countryside. It wasn’t until 1976, after the defeat of the Gang of Four, that Big Sister was placed as a worker in a leather shoe factory in Laiyang County. That year, 10 years after she was driven back to her hometown, Yan Ming was already 24 years old, and Yan Nan was still working in the production team.
Yan Ming wrote several letters to the Beijing Zhiying Youth Affairs Office, which sent a letter back asking Yan Ming to contact his father’s former unit, the Qinghe Vermicelli Factory. Yan Ming wrote to the vermicelli factory, hoping that they would contact Laiyang County to help solve the problem of Yan Nan’s job placement, but there was no reply for a long time.
The rest of the story is a bit dramatic. 1978 saw a lot of good things happening in the family: first, my sister and her family were transferred from the Karamay Oilfield in Xinjiang, where they had worked for more than 20 years, to the East China Pipeline Bureau in Xuzhou, and in October I was admitted to the China University of Mining and Technology in Sichuan from the Datong Mining Bureau; in December, Yan Ming was about to get married, and at that time, Yan Nan was assigned to work at the county pharmaceutical factory. Yan Nan had only been working for a few days. Yan Nan had only been working for a few days when she received a registered letter from the Qinghe Vermicelli Factory in Beijing, containing the Beijing Household Registration Permits of her mother and Yan Nan, and a letter saying that the policy had been implemented and she could move back to Beijing.
Yan Nan told her mother the good news, but she did not expect that she would not return to Beijing, because after all these years of hardships and devastation, she was physically and mentally exhausted, and she just wanted to retire here with peace of mind. Yan Nan insisted on going back to Beijing, and that day was the third day after Yan Ming’s wedding. When Yan Ming heard the news, she had mixed feelings and strongly supported Yan Nan’s return to Beijing. The mother could not resist her daughter, so Yan Nan hastily resigned from the job she had just gotten and waited for more than ten years, and moved her newly-acquired urban household registration back to the countryside to apply for a household registration to move to Beijing.
When the family was expelled from Beijing in 1966, there were six of them. Grandfather and father had passed away, Yan Ming remained in the area, nephew Xiaokui had already returned to his parents, and twelve years later Yan Nan and her mother both returned to Beijing. Twelve years later, Yan Nan and her mother returned to Beijing. Yan Nan was assigned as a worker in a vermicelli factory, where mother and daughter huddled together in a dormitory. No one from the factory management came to visit, and no one apologized. When old neighbors and friends came to visit, some said, “It’s better to implement the policy.
Yes, it’s good that the policy is implemented. In the eyes of the damaged, implementing the policy is a word full of warmth and hope, a word with Chinese characteristics that hides the hegemony and arrogance of those in power behind it. The policy is always good, it was not implemented when you were persecuted, now it is, and you should be grateful.
A nightmare is in the past, I wonder if it will come again.
Written in Beijing in January 2018
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