In July, my cousin called to tell me that his mother, my fourth aunt, had passed away in her Home in the Northeast. Although I had never met my fourth aunt, her death still made me sad.
I had actually only met my fourth uncle once, more than 50 years ago, around 1954. Uncle Four came to our home in Beijing, dressed in a green uniform with a sign on his chest that read “Chinese People’s Volunteer Army”. I was eight years old, in the second grade, when I was worshipping my uncle, the volunteer soldier who fought against the United States and supported the North Korea. We all wrote letters to our volunteer uncles as instructed by our teachers, and wrote on the envelope “Received by Volunteer Uncle”.
The fourth uncle was retreating with the troops back home. Our hometown originally belonged to Heilongjiang Province, but was later transferred to Jilin, in a place called Dalai on the banks of the Nengjiang River, about 230 kilometers from Changchun. After Uncle Si left, we seldom contacted each other, and occasionally heard the old man mention that he taught in the school in his hometown after demobilization.
When the Cultural Revolution came, news came from his hometown that he had been killed on the river bank, and his aunt and three minor children dragged his body back home. Wasn’t he a volunteer, the most lovable man? I couldn’t figure out what this was for. It took an old man in the Family to tell me some of Uncle Four’s experiences.
It turned out that fourth uncle Pan Xuewu was born in 1923 and married at the age of nineteen. The fourth aunt, Liu Yufen, was born in 1922 to a family of a gentry in Dalai, whose uncle was the president of the Dalai Chamber of Commerce. She was a good reader, and although she had no formal Education because she was a girl, she often listened to lessons outside her brother’s classroom, and later her brother agreed to “listen” to her in the house. So the fourth aunt can read and write simple letters, although there are many misspellings.
The third year after the Marriage of the fourth uncle anti-Japanese victory, with the support of the fourth aunt to study in Shenyang, began to attend teacher training school, he did not like much. Although it is said to come from a landlord, but after the war the family economy is very embarrassed, my father assisted him to go to school in Guanzhou. In August 1948, he enrolled in the 23rd class of the Whampoa Military Academy in Chengdu, which was the last batch of Whampoa cadets recruited by the Nationalist government in the mainland. In October of the following year, he joined the People’s Liberation Army in Chengdu and continued his studies at the Southwestern Military University in western Sichuan, and in 1951 he was integrated into the 60th Army Teaching Corps.
On March 17 of that year, this unit of more than half of the recruits, student soldiers and insurgents, led by army commander Wei Jie and political commissar Yuan Ziqin, crossed the Yalu River and entered the North Korea to fight. In April, the army assembled in the area of Ichon, Korea. It participated in the Fifth Campaign.
Fourth Uncle served as a first class clerk in the mechanical office of the 54nd Regiment of the 60th Army. The 592nd Regiment of the 60th Army was artillery, and Fourth Uncle was responsible for calculating artillery aiming. At that Time, the battle in Korea was very tragic. The 180th Division of the 60th Army was completely wiped out by the U.S. Army in the Fifth Battle. More than 7,000 men were killed in action, separated and captured. The 542nd Regiment was later attached to the 181st Division, which was integrated and formed. In the battle of June 10, 1953, when they attacked the 883-7 heights, they suffered more than 2,200 casualties, and more than 30 of them were burned alive by fire or bled to death from cold artillery attacks. At that time, without air support for ground operations, a portion of the field artillery was pushed up into the mountains using the darkness of night and quietly into the pit fortifications. Most of the artillery, in stages and batches, was pushed into a miscellaneous woods a few kilometers from the enemy front. Not only did Uncle Si survive, he also received third-class individual and second-class collective merit.
After the war ended, in July 1953, Fourth Uncle was transferred back to China with the 60th Army. By this time, he and Aunt Si had not seen each other for ten years. When she finally found out that her husband was in Sichuan, she made a long journey to Sichuan to look for her relatives. It was not until they were demobilized in 1955 and returned to their hometown of Dalai (the name was changed to Da’an during the Cultural Revolution and has been carried on ever since), where Uncle Si was teaching in an elementary school, that they finally had a stable family Life.
Fourth aunt attended literacy classes. At that time, the government built a canned Food factory in Dalai to supply food to the Soviet Union for export to the Soviet Union. At that time, canned food was a precious commodity in China, and it was impossible to provide it for domestic consumption. The fourth aunt worked as a worker in this factory, which was a good position.
Their first child was born in 1955 and they had been married for thirteen years, which shows the ups and downs of their lives. The second child, a girl, was born in 1959. In order to take care of her husband and children, Aunt Si resigned from her very good local position in 1957 and went home to become a housewife. This was also a result of the streamlining of the army encouraged by the government at that time, about to solve the unemployment problem at that time. Those who retired were also awarded one hundred yuan, which was not a small amount. Aunt Si used the money to buy a sewing machine and mend clothes for her family.
Their third child was born in 1965. Little did they know that the unprecedented Cultural Revolution would begin the following year, in 1966. As a one-year national government cadet school experience, Uncle Si’s bad luck came with him.
In fact, the reason why Uncle Si was demobilized and returned home was because he was an insurrectionary non-commissioned officer, plus he came from a landlord background and joined the Kuomintang en masse in Huangpu, so he was not trusted by the troops and became the target of purge.
In 1968, when the Cultural Revolution was underway to clean up the class ranks, he was taken out and criticized, his house was raided and he was tortured. His main crime was twofold: one was a historical problem, because he had studied for a year in the National Government’s officer school and was still a member of the Kuomintang; the other was that his old husband, who was homeless after the land reform, was living in the house, which was harboring landlords. Of course his own origin as a landlord is also a congenital sin.
The county revolutionary committee first sent people to raid the house and took away the certificate of merit and the certificate of revolutionary soldier from the fourth uncle. Then he was given the sign of counter-revolutionary elements to struggle. He lost his teaching qualifications and was reformed through labor in school. On September 6, 1968, he was criticized from the afternoon until eight o’clock in the evening. After dinner, the revolutionaries tortured him and forced him to confess that he had joined the Kuomintang as well as the Three Youths. Fourth Uncle had joined the Kuomintang en masse at Whampoa and had never concealed it. But it was true that he had not joined the Young Men’s League. His denial brought heavier torture, stripping off all his clothes and beating him. At that time, two other people, one named Li Xianglin and the other named Li Fanchun, were raised and told Uncle Si to expose them. But the fourth uncle simply do not know them, can not say what people need material. Until midnight, only to let Uncle Si go home.
When he was beaten, Uncle Si said: “I heard that people who have joined the army can not be beaten”. But the people of the Revolutionary Committee said, “People who have done more than you have all been knocked out, so what are you!”
On the evening of September 7, the day when revolutionary committees were established in all provinces of the country, the school held a celebration party. Three people in the school who were struggling were of course not entitled to attend and were asked to clean up their rooms. According to the Revolutionary Committee, Uncle Si finished his work, said he was going to the toilet, and went to the nearby black fish bubble and committed suicide by throwing himself into the water. That day was the famous day when the whole country’s mountains and rivers were red. The People’s Daily published a celebratory editorial and the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications issued a commemorative stamp entitled “The whole country’s mountains and rivers are red”. Since Taiwan could not be made red, on the map of the stamp, mainland China was red and Taiwan was white, which smacked of two Chinas, the stamp was urgently recalled the next day, and only a small amount was kept, which became the most valuable stamp in the future, with the highest price being over one and a half million yuan, and the person who kept the stamp made a fortune. But Uncle Si was the most insignificant stepping stone in this historical event.
The revolutionary committee at the time was so to four uncle made the conclusion: people die guilty, something poisonous, family problems are not finished. The things mentioned here are the military service certificate of Uncle Si, because the resistance to the United States was commanded by Peng Dehuai, and since Peng Dehuai is against Chairman Mao’s three rebels, the documents issued in his name are of course toxic.
How exactly did the fourth uncle die, but now it is not clear. There are many wetlands in the Northeast, locally called bubbles. Black fish bubble is such a wetland, the water is not deep, it is difficult to envisage can jump into the river here to commit suicide. Four uncle’s head temple and tooth bed full of bruises, but the clothes on the body but no mud, no mud on the socks, shoes can not be found. The fourth aunt is to the water to the fourth uncle’s body out, get muddy, to go home to change clothes, in order to pull the fourth uncle home together with the thirteen-year-old son, clean up and burial.
The county revolutionary committee people simply do not admit the matter of criticism and torture, but only said that the fourth uncle to write confession materials, he resisted the mass movement, fear of suicide.
When the fourth uncle died, the fourth aunt forty-six years old, the family instantly without any income, but also with the fear of suicide of the counter-revolutionary family hat, the three minor children raised, the youngest boy was only two years old. The pain and suffering she endured can be imagined.
The fourth aunt wrote a letter in December of that year to her only remaining contact, the fifth uncle, but did not dare to tell him that he had been persecuted to death, but only politely said that he was in very poor health and that she would accept future letters as convenient. She was afraid to tell her brothers about the death of their closest relatives, and her children were too young to say anything to them, so how much pain she had to bear inside.
According to the relatives of the old family, when the fourth uncle just died, the fourth aunt also once lost confidence in life. One night, Auntie Four suddenly said to the children: “Why don’t we go find your father?” The two older children knew that the family had encountered a disaster, but also know the weight of the adult’s words, the two-year-old son could understand: “Mom, let’s not die, die like Dad can not come back.” At once the family burst into tears. The cries alarmed the neighboring grandmother Zhou, the old man came to persuade the night, and then the grandmother often go to the fourth aunt to look at the door before going to bed late.
She went out to work every day and carried back firewood at night. She cut grass, planted saplings, picked vegetables, and endured hardships that were unbearable for men. During the decade from 1970 to 1979, in order to give her children a better living and education environment, she pushed more than 500 pounds of coal with a rickshaw each time and walked more than 60 miles every day to deliver coal to each family.
At that time, some people advised Aunt Si to remarry and find a “good” origin, life will be better, Aunt Si ignored this. The fourth uncle has a cousin, we should call him the old uncle. During the land reform, he was designated as a “fugitive landlord” for studying abroad and was sent to work in the countryside, which happened to be about ten miles away from his home. The old uncle learned of the bad news of the fourth uncle came to visit, said he could adopt the child, so that the fourth aunt remarried. The fourth aunt resolutely said, “Brother, do not worry, I can afford to live, I can not afford to take the child to find him (referring to the fourth uncle), I will never let the child change his surname.”
In this way, even though life was hard, she did not let her children miss a day of school. It was her perseverance that made the family survive the hardships, and it was her strength that made her youngest son enter Jilin University in 1983 and become the pride of the family.
The Cultural Revolution was the second ordeal of her life for Aunt Si. When she was 24 years old, she suffered a lot of mental and physical torture in 1946 when she was caught up in the land reform. With the support of the working group, the rebellious landlords interrogated the wealthy families one by one and forced them to give up their money. The fourth aunt was the second oldest, and it should have been the eldest sister who answered the interrogation. But she knows that the elder sister is weak, can not help but beat, took the initiative to go on behalf of the elder sister. The interrogators hanged Auntie Four on a beam in an attempt to force out the non-existent floating money, but she never screamed or said anything. The fourth aunt’s back was smashed, a distant relative of a good man carried it out and administered Medicine so that it did not become infected, and it took a week to recover from this disaster while lying in bed, unable to move.
In the ten years after the land reform, other relatives managed to leave the old home one after another, while the fourth aunt’s children are young, forced to make a living, can not go out, so they have to endure the humiliation in Daan. When the Cultural Revolution, the fourth uncle was killed, she was even more unable to leave. When she heard that the ancestral tomb of the Pan family was going to be bulldozed and occupied, Aunt Si resolutely took up the responsibility of her daughter-in-law and, despite political pressure, traveled dozens of miles to take out the bones of her father-in-law and mother-in-law with the assistance of distant relatives in the Pan family’s weija, and pushed them with a cart to the cemetery in Dalai County for reburial, thus preserving the only trace of the Pan family in the past. Now the cemetery of grandparents is the heart of hundreds of descendants of the Pan family, and is the root of the descendants who are wandering around the world.
At that time, the watch was a very valuable thing, one of the few items that could be exchanged for cash in case of emergency. However, in 1969, Aunt Si gave Uncle Si’s watch and the only tweed pants to Uncle Wu as a souvenir.
After the Cultural Revolution, Uncle Four was “rehabilitated”. On December 10, 1978, the Da’an County Revolutionary Committee, equivalent to today’s Da’an County Government, said, “Comrade Pan Xuemu was stopped from working and reflecting on his participation in the Kuomintang during the 1968 purge. He died in South Lake. It has been verified that participation in the Kuomintang for the general party members, has concluded that the general history of the problem. Pan’s persecution by Lin Biao, the Gang of Four counter-revolutionary revisionist line to death, should be treated as a death in the line of duty.”
As a subsidy rather than compensation, the government gave two hundred yuan for funeral expenses, two hundred and eighty yuan for compassionate care, and four hundred yuan for outstanding debts. Arrangements were made for the eldest son to work for thirty-nine dollars a month and for the daughter to work in a collective enterprise. At the same time there was an allowance of less than thirty yuan per month.
The whole conclusion was completed on a pink piece of paper. There is no mention of the confiscated family property, no mention of the torture that Uncle Si was subjected to, not even the cause of Uncle Si’s death. When an insurrectionary sergeant, a volunteer officer thus became a victim of the Cultural Revolution, the fourth aunt went on to work as a cow for the Cultural Revolution.
Today, if we look at the government’s conclusion, we will see that the persecution and death were treated as “death in the line of duty”. The “public” should be the government’s business, which is the same as admitting that so many living souls were killed by the government back then, but also told the truth.
After the robbery, the fourth aunt took care of her children and started to take care of her grandchildren, and sent them to college. She gave care to many relatives and friends, and received the gratitude of many of them. The people she helped have not forgotten her wherever she went.
This year, in 2008, after more than a year of paralysis from a stroke, Auntie Si left this world, and friends and relatives from as far away as Hainan, Suihua, Daqing, Jinzhou, Changchun, Jilin and all over the world all rushed to join in the tribute. She was the most ordinary rural woman and the daughter of a landlord, or more precisely, the last of China’s gentry. She embodied in her the best part of traditional Chinese Culture. Fourth Uncle, also the child of a landlord, or rather the descendant of the earliest family to run a business in the northeastern countryside, was also the so-called most lovable man who went to Korea to fight against the United States and died in nine lives. His one-year training as a non-commissioned officer at the Whampoa Military Academy allowed him to master artillery techniques that the average soldier in a hurry to enter Korea did not know, for which he took war credit. But his origin, his training was still a fatal wound that he could not get rid of in any way. On the first night before his death, Auntie Si asked him in disbelief, “Didn’t you do a good job for the Communists?” She certainly couldn’t understand the three representations of China. Of course she couldn’t understand the three representatives of the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, I don’t understand either.
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