When I was one year old, my mother received a package in the mail from Italy. Inside was a little baby sweater for me, pale yellow, with little holes knitted into little flowers. The person who mailed the sweater was Uncle Livio.
(1)
My mother and Livio met in Europe in 1951.
It was the beginning of the Cold War, and my mother was ordered by my father, my maternal grandfather, to go from the United States to attend the World Youth Gathering in East Berlin as an individual. Grandfather was an internationally renowned organic chemist and was doing research at Harvard University at that time. Since the beginning of the Korean War. He was very concerned about what was going on in China and always wanted to return to see the new China. He sent my mother to the World Youth Gala in order for her to see if she could contact any of the participants sent from mainland China.
My mother did not find anyone from the mainland in East Germany. Instead, she met Livio on a trip to Italy.
According to Mother, she met Livio in an inn in a small town in southern Italy. At the time, a couple of German brothers were arguing over who could take my mother out for a ride on a motorcycle. (Incidentally, one of the brothers went on to become a world-famous conductor and the other a high-ranking German government official.) During the quarrel, Livio, who was also staying in the hostel, couldn’t help but be curious. Over breakfast in the dining room, he asked his mother what was going on …… and that’s how they got to know each other.
Livio is a few years younger than his mother. He was long and thin, with a torch-like gaze, and always spoke with his arms waving in the air in front of him, typical of young Italians. He envied his mother’s good English and often asked her to recite Shakespeare’s sonnets to him. Hearing the emotion, he would burst into tears …… and thus, they fell in love.
Grandpa called. Mother returned to the United States. When she left, she told Livio that she must come back to Italy soon.
From left: Grandfather, mother, Livio
(2)
As I said earlier, maternal grandfather was a famous organic chemist. He invented the first chemical reaction in the world named after a Chinese person and was named after it. And it was a very troublesome thing for him to try to return to mainland China.
Prior to 1951, all foreign scientists in the United States could not reside permanently in the United States without cause. But, after the Qian incident, overnight, U.S. policy changed completely. The new rule was that all foreign scholars in the United States from post-war countries that had become communist could seek careers in the United States, but none were allowed to return to their respective countries. This was done for the express purpose of preventing the flow of American technology, especially high technology, to rival countries in the Cold War. In other words, today’s U.S.-China trade war is not something that happened only in the past two years, but in the middle of the last century.
However, China, for its part, has a special need for the return of overseas talents and has launched a strong propaganda campaign to call on overseas scholars to return to the motherland to “build socialism”. Although my mother did not get any news from the World Youth Gathering, my grandfather kept receiving letters from his old brother, my mother’s old uncle, who was still in China, asking him repeatedly to come back to China, “even if only for a visit”. In his letter, my old brother told Grandpa from the bottom of his heart that he was someone who had experienced the former Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China, even the Japanese and now the new China. “All experience tells me that we are going to have a brand new China, and a government that is very different from all the previous ones.”
Although the words of his oldest brother’s letter were true, he did admit to his grandfather years later that behind him, there were indeed instructions from the then central government’s top officials in southeast China who took great pains to operate.
Grandpa then decided to go back to China to “check it out” and asked his mother to accompany him. In order to deal with the U.S. government, he had to devise a “curved route” back to China. He wrote to his former colleagues in Germany and asked them to invite him to lecture in Germany, which prevented the suspicious U.S. government from restricting him from leaving the country. But just before Grandpa and his mother boarded a sea vessel for Europe, two FBI officers suddenly appeared in front of them.
“Mr. Huang, what is the reason for your departure from the United States?” Grandpa hastily replied, “To go to Germany, to teach in Germany.” The two officials obviously didn’t buy his story, but without evidence, they pestered him for a while, but finally couldn’t do anything with Grandpa and had to let him go.
However, one of the leaders warned, “If you end up in Communist mainland China, you will have to bear all the serious consequences, do you understand?” Grandpa hastily nodded again, “Yes. I understand.”
In fact, Grandpa was just a scientist, he really didn’t understand anything at that time. China was abandoning the United States for the Soviet Union, and the Cold War was heating up.
(3)
The first thing my mother and grandfather did after arriving in Europe was to go to the only diplomatic office of the mainland Chinese government in Europe, the Office of the Plenipotentiary of the Government of the People’s Republic of China in Geneva, Switzerland. They were greeted by an enthusiastic and fluent English-speaking official of the new Chinese government named Comrade Xiong.
In response to Grandpa’s question about whether he might never come back to China, Comrade Xiong confidently said something that Grandpa and his mother remembered clearly until their deaths and kept repeating over and over again: “New China – come. Go. Free. Freedom.”
But Livio did not believe that “freedom to come and go” could be trusted. While waiting in Europe for a ferry ticket and visas for the countries she would have to pass through on her way home, her mother returned to Italy. During this time, Livio repeatedly begged his mother not to be gullible and not to return to China. The Cold War was heating up, he said. He had read a lot in the newspapers about the Soviet Iron Curtain, and China, at the time, was an almost exact replica of the Soviet Union in its policies. The Soviet Union could go in and not come out, and China must be the same. But remembering the unmistakable clarity with which Comrade Xiong spoke, and the fact that Grandpa was old and did need her company, Mother did not change her plans. But she assured Livio that even if her father decided to stay after returning to China, she herself would definitely return to Italy as soon as possible after settling him down.
Livio listened to her, and even though he had a thousand reluctances, he could do nothing. He took his mother back to his home, met his parents and told them that he would be engaged to this Chinese girl.
In the 1950s, the world was still small and closed. At that time, Asians were almost non-existent in Europe. Walking down the streets of Italy with Livio, his mother often drew cold looks and even verbal accusatory attacks from passersby, especially in the traditional and old-fashioned Italian town where Livio’s family lived. Culturally, Italian women have an overwhelming sense of possessiveness and jealousy toward their sons. When Livio’s mother met my mother, she told her very clearly in Italian, “My son is the love of my life, and you have taken him away from me. Do you know that?”
But those who love each other are fearless. The mother and Livio were betrothed to each other for life on the old bridge in Florence.
(4)
The day of parting arrived.
There is no way to find out which port was the departure point of the sea ship on which Mother and Grandfather returned home. But I do know the following scene. On the side of the deck of the ocean liner stood an oriental woman, constantly waving her towel and tears below. Not many people on the pier to send off a Western boy running, constantly waving his arms upward …… the whole is a “Titanic” moment.
Woo-hoo.
After sailing through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Indian Ocean and Sumatra, Mother and Grandfather’s ship arrived in Hong Kong in the spring of 1952. After crossing the Lo Wu Bridge, which at that time was still a rudimentary wooden plank, Grandpa finally saw his old brother who had written to him repeatedly. When the old brothers saw each other after years of war and displacement, they were naturally saddened.
Behind the old brother, there were several cadre-like people.
The cadres were the first to say to Grandpa, “Huang Lao, the new China needs your help, we implore you to stay. In all fairness, the cadres did not push, and their genuine sincerity, and later the invitations of some top Beijing leaders, did eventually lead Grandpa to make the spontaneous decision to stay in China to “build socialism”, rather than being forced to ……
However, it must also be pointed out here that China, which was poor and backward at that time, was exactly the same as when Qian Xuesen returned to China, and did not have any of the infrastructure needed for a true return of high-tech scholars from abroad. The main purpose of inviting them back to China was still motivated by other factors: at the beginning of the new China, overseas Chinese were actively returning to China, which was a political necessity. During the Cultural Revolution, this need no longer existed, and my grandfather, who had a reputation for cleanliness, was criticized by the Red Guards for “brushing his teeth” with a toilet brush back and forth at his mouth and nose in front of a large audience.
Next, my mother. My mother’s situation was different. After settling in with my father and meeting her relatives after an eight-year absence, she asked to return to Europe. When asked her reason, she replied that she wanted to go back to the Mediterranean, to her Italian fiancé.
Comrade Bear has said that the freedom to come and go.
Ah …… of course, of course. But you have a master’s degree from the United States and we are short of English teachers …… We still want Miss Huang to live in the country for a while and see for herself the construction of our socialist motherland ……
Comrade Xiong has said that the new China, come, go, free.
Well, well, the new China, of course, is free to come and go. But the passport you have now is an invalid passport issued by the reactionaries in 1944, not a passport of the People’s Republic of China, so you will not be allowed to leave the country when you arrive at the border, you are a stateless person, this is not easy to do which ……
The mother got anxious and cried out. But to no avail.
Grandpa felt guilty and tried his best to help, but to no avail.
A year later, my mother was assigned a job teaching English. Later, she was transferred to Beijing. I don’t know if it was by chance or by necessity, but a leader named Comrade Xiong was transferred to her school’s higher leadership unit soon after. (In 1978, they met by chance in the party school. Talking about his confident commitment back then, the old leader couldn’t help but sigh …… This is also an afterthought.)
A few more years later, my mother married my father, who was originally from Beijing, and divorced shortly after giving birth to my brother.
My mother and the author as a child
When I was first born, my mother received the little yellow boy’s sweater mentioned at the beginning of this article. After that, the conflict between China and the West increased so much that the mail was censored, and there was no more news from Livio. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, my mother was similarly disgraced by the people in her unit.
One day during the latter part of the Cultural Revolution, I saw her staring at a painting of a European landscape that had been taken away from her family and returned to her. It was a reproduction of a European painting. Under the blue sky, a small bridge in the countryside. Under the bridge is the flowing water.
In 1981, my mother helped me apply for a scholarship to one of her alma maters in the United States, so I could go abroad. On the day I finally got my first passport back, my mother borrowed it and kept it under her pillow for the whole night.
Perhaps it was because of a special favor from God that I wanted to tell this story as fully as possible. It was my first year in the United States and I had enough money to come home to visit my family, so I was fortunate enough to be there when the family visited.
It was an Italian couple with a teenage son and daughter. The man was tall and fat, with huge diamond rings on his fat fingers, and always talking and waving his arms in front of him – my mother told me to call him Uncle Livio.
The woman was thin, nervous, red-headed, spoke English with a heavy accent, and gave the impression of being particularly whiny. As soon as she saw my mother, she started complaining about how bad and unreasonable Uncle Livio was, “God has really blessed you in heaven for not being with him!” The red-haired woman babbled to her mother in English with a heavy “R” sound.
A few days later, a group of five of them went on a trip together to the south of China. On the way, my mother witnessed the family’s boisterous antics and Uncle Livio’s bossing around his wife.
However, once when Mother talked to the red-haired, sensitive, thin woman about whether Uncle Livio loved her after marriage, the red-haired woman replied that how could she compare to Mother, who had not attended much school, much less recite Shakespeare’s poems?
In her later years, the old photo on the table is of her mother as a young woman
(5)
After Uncle Livio’s family returned to Italy, my mother kept up a correspondence with him. Perhaps it was during the last correspondence 10 years ago that Uncle Livio, with a hand that had begun to tremble from old age, wrote down the scene of his mother’s departure.
“After your ship sailed, I did not leave the harbor, but found a cafe facing the Mediterranean, sat down in front of the big glass window, lit a cigarette and just sat there, watching your sea ship go away.”
Uncle Livio said that his biggest, biggest regret in this life was that he smoked. Because –
“From the moment your ship sailed into the sea,” he wrote, “I said to myself that I would never lose you as long as it did not disappear from inside my sight. It’s absurd to say that this was a doomed effort. But at the time, I really thought that. And, miraculously, your boat, no matter how far it drove and how small it became, just wouldn’t disappear from my sight. I eyed you while saying countless words to you, previously said, previously not said …… for I don’t know how long, and your boat, it still refused to disappear. Its tenacity, coupled with my stubbornness …… seems to be true that we will never be separated.”
Just then, the light of Uncle Livio’s eyes, saw the cigarette in his hand the ash has been very long, about to fall down. “A thousand should not, should not, I instinctively at that moment, is so inadvertently lowered the eyes, the ashes in the cigarette jar just so a pop …… when I raised my eyes again, look back less than a second before the location of your boat that little spot, but I do not care how to find again, can not be found, only the blankness of the Mediterranean.”
“At that moment,” Uncle Livio finally wrote, “I knew with unmistakable clarity that I was lost to you forever.”
(6)
My mother passed away in 2015. A month before she left, I went back to Beijing to see her for the last time. 90 years old, she was not very clear. When she saw me, she looked at me for half a day and asked who I was.
Chinese people are traditionally introverted and do not show their love to each other with hugs, even to their own parents. However, knowing that my old mother’s days were numbered, and also because I was used to it after all the years overseas, I quietly came up to her and hugged her. I didn’t let go.
My mother did not move, and I hugged her face to face, like lovers, more and more tightly. After a long time, she sighed and whispered the name in my ear.
“…… Livio.”
I hugged my mother even tighter.
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