Content warning: The below story mentions wartime atrocities and violence, sexual assault, and pregnancy loss.
I’d like to think that both my children are growing up in a “stable” environment. That I am being a “stable” parent. Not impossibly static and completely predictable. But knowable, trustworthy, and fundamentally loving. Even so, I can see clearly that my two children, three and a half years apart in age, are having vastly different childhoods. Part of it is about who I am, and who I continue to become. And part of it is about who they are and how they experience the world.
When they are older and reading back through the tea leaves of their childhood memories for answers to present-day questions, I wonder if they will try to triangulate a new understanding of who I am—or who I was, as their mother—the way I do now sometimes with my sister.
She is brilliant, beautiful, and four years older.
A few years ago, I was filling out a “Life Review,” a pre-work assignment for a workshop that promised to help me reflect on my past and shape my desired future. (It lived up to its promise, by the way; this would be the workshop that helped unearth, among other things, my lifelong desire to revisit my family’s stories and histories.)
One of the first prompts in the assignment was this: Overall, would you say your childhood was happy or unhappy?
I was stumped. So naturally, I called my sister.
“I was thinking I’d say ‘yes,’” I told her. “What would you say?”
“I would say ‘no,’” she said.
I was shocked. The difference between “yes” and “no” felt like a tragedy—a twist of fate and temperament.
Now I consider my mother and her two older siblings. The difference between their childhoods was more a rift in history, a generational divide forged in the space of 10 years. My mother was to be the only post-World War II baby in her family, born after most (but, of course, not all) of the truly horrible things had already been endured.
As best as I can now understand, this is the story of what happened to my grandparents—my mother’s parents—and my mother’s two older siblings during the wars of the day. It’s a story that has felt to my sister and me like a kind of origin myth for our family. But it’s all true.
My mother’s maternal grandparents were among the many grandparents—in those days, the 59- and 60-year-olds—who suddenly died the year before the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War. “That year, a lot of people just dropped dead in my hometown, Zhenjiang,” my mother remembers hearing from my grandmother. “They died for no apparent reason at all. It was as if they knew a war was coming, and they died so that their children could run away and be refugees without being burdened.”
My grandfather was working for the Nationalist government at the time. After war began in 1937, the government relocated from Nanjing to Chongqing, which would serve as the deep inland, wartime capital until the end of World War II. Where the government went, so went my grandfather. He was still young and strong at 27; perhaps along the way, my mother speculates, he was even called upon to strip and join the dozens of men needed to physically tow and guide each boat up the treacherous rapids of the Yangtze River as whole industries migrated west to safety.
My grandmother, who was 23, stayed behind in Shanghai to take care of a full house of “dependents”: her mother-in-law; her two toddlers (i.e., my mother’s two older siblings); and two older sisters-in-law, who were technically my grandfather’s step-sisters. One was my grandfather’s oldest step-sister, who had been intellectually impaired ever since receiving an overdose of medicine from doctors when she had scarlet fever as a child; and the other was another step-sister who had been widowed five or six years prior.
With its international enclaves and foreign concessions, Shanghai seemed a plausible safe haven. But any semblance of safety evaporated after Japan invaded Shanghai in mid-1937. And so they fled.
She was pregnant at the time. At some point, she miscarried.
My grandmother managed to shepherd everyone to her hometown of Zhenjiang, northwest of Shanghai. There, she found that everyone was hurriedly marrying off their daughters on the eve of war, in hopes that marriage would confer some degree of protection in the ensuing days.
A close relative was married one morning. Japanese soldiers arrived that evening. Seven or eight of them raped the new bride, then left. The next morning, the bride’s mother-in-law cooked a pot of rice porridge for her. It was an act of sympathy, meant to provide some emotional and physical comfort. But the young woman had scarcely eaten one bowl when the Japanese soldiers were back at the doorstep. This time, they came to take her away.
From this, my grandmother realized there would be no safety in Zhenjiang, so she took her makeshift family and fled again.
Where the army went, so went the war refugees. But which army: the one heading west to Nanjing (Nanking), or the one heading south? If she had gone to Nanjing, this story would likely have ended there. Instead, my grandmother followed the army that went south to Jinhua, a city more than 280 miles away, where she was able to buy a small house.
From Chongqing, my grandfather had somehow been able to continue sending periodic financial support to my grandmother, but at some point, war severed all lines of communication. My grandmother was now running out of money. She had no choice but to go and find my grandfather. Leaving everyone in the house under the care of her mother-in-law, my grandmother set off on the 945 miles to Chongqing.
My mother remembers my grandmother sharing a vivid memory from her trip: at Nanchang, in Jiangxi province, she had to switch trains. She was wearing white, the Chinese color of mourning, since her own parents had died less than a year ago. A bomb exploded near the train station when she arrived. She was uninjured, but she had to walk through the aftermath of the explosion to get to her next train. When she got there, she looked down and saw that her white pant legs were red with blood.
Now it was the summer of 1938. One afternoon, back in Jinhua, the mother-in-law took a nap. She was around 60 years old. At 5pm, she was still napping. My mother’s older sister—my aunt, a 3-year-old little girl, younger than my daughter is now—went in and tried to wake her grandmother up. She wouldn’t wake. The little girl remembered being told (imagine the world in which this was a relevant ‘life hack’ to share with children) that if you put a handkerchief over a person’s nose and the handkerchief doesn’t move, the person is dead. She applied the handkerchief test, and that’s how she knew her grandmother was dead.
(“That is why Ayi [Aunt] doesn’t like people taking naps to this day,” my mother said. As I write this, I am having a flashback. It was after school, and I was taking a nap on the sofa at my aunt’s house next door. Perhaps it was during one of the times my sister and I were living with her, while my mother was away in Taiwan with my grandmother or grandfather. Or perhaps we were just spending the afternoon there while my mother was busy with hospital appointments. Actually, it’s not the nap I remember as much as the abrupt, forced waking from the nap, which my uncle achieved by putting a cold, wet towel on my face. I have never woken up in such a rage.)
The only person who could plausibly be responsible at that point was the widowed sister-in-law. In contrast to the mother-in-law—who was said to be easy-going, sympathetic, and gullible; she became a Buddhist late in life, which is why my grandfather was also a Buddhist—this sister-in-law was known to have “a temper” and for always wanting “to do things quickly,” which I can imagine only guaranteed even more childhood distress.
Overall, would you say your childhood was happy or unhappy?
And then, this temperamental sister-in-law also abruptly died, it seemed, of severe diarrhea. My mother’s older brother, 2 at the time, who didn’t remember the other death, did remember vividly this death. The body was wrapped in a green army blanket and buried next to the mother-in-law.
The whole town seemed to be ill and dying. Epidemics and plagues were newly rampant. Only many years later would a probable cause, the horrifying scope and scale of Japan’s biological warfare in China (and the work of its Unit 731), become evident.
The two children were now on their own with the intellectually impaired sister-in-law. A next-door neighbor—an ex-concubine who had long since been deserted by her wealthy patrons—seized the opportunity to take over the house. She kicked the sister-in-law out to beg on the streets and sold the two children. The siblings were to be separated, with the girl destined to be a servant or nanny. But the boy was sick with malaria, so the children were allowed the reprieve of a stay until he recovered.
He was given heavy, heavy doses of quinine to treat his illness. “During those days,” my mother said, “they did not adjust dosage for kids. There were no pediatricians.” She has wondered aloud if that contributed to his unusual, heartbreaking decline and death later in life, from a rare neurodegenerative disease. Or perhaps it was something else he was exposed to during the war.
Meanwhile, my grandmother had found my grandfather. In the wake of their reunion, she became pregnant again. Then she became ill—too ill to make another trip, so it was up to my grandfather to journey back to Jinhua to find his children. Disguised as a peasant farmer, he traveled barefoot, carrying an umbrella which concealed a large stash of money in its bamboo stick handle. At one point, he was detained by Japanese soldiers, but they decided the peasant farmer wasn’t worth their while and let him go.
Imagine him arriving to find that my grandmother’s house had been co-opted by a complete stranger (the ex-concubine, who at some point tried to convince my grandfather to take her with him), that his mother and eldest step-sister had both died, that his other step-sister was missing and begging on the streets somewhere, and that his two children had been sold off and were now who knows where.
My grandfather wasted no time. He set about looking for his step-sister and his children, paying small fortunes to settle fake promissory notes from people who claimed his mother owed them money, in return for precious information. (My mother says she still has some of these notes in a briefcase.)
When he finally tracked down his children (and paid another fortune to buy them back), they naturally didn’t recognize their own father. But he was “a nice man,” and that was enough for them to go willingly with him on the hard, long journey all the way back to Chongqing.
When my aunt was finally, joyfully reunited with my grandmother, she hatched a clever plot to share with her: “Mama, this man is very nice to us. Let’s take his money, and then we can run away!”
Miraculously, my grandfather also managed to find and rescue his step-sister from the streets, where she had clearly suffered much. She traveled with him back to Chongqing, and there she died not long after.
My aunt has vivid, visceral memories of the exhausting travel. She remembers walking alone behind a hand-pulled rickshaw, desperately focusing every ounce of energy on keeping up and staying close. She remembers feeling that if she accidentally got separated, she would be left behind and lost forever. But most of all, she hated crossing the narrow paths across the watery rice paddies: whenever she looked up, she would invariably see, strung up on the electrical wires around the fields, human heads. To this day, she cannot stand to look at rice paddies.
It was while my grandfather was across the country looking for their children in Jinhua that my grandmother suffered another pregnancy loss. She had been so ill that a doctor gave her a potent medicine that caused her to miscarry.
But unbeknownst to her and the doctor, she had been carrying twins. The second baby was eventually stillborn, and my grandmother nearly died in carrying and birthing it. She would tell my mother later that as she fought to stay alive, she knew she could not die. She had to live for the two young children in Jinhua who still needed her. It was this experience that she would refer to 47 years later when she told my mother she was not afraid of the radiation treatments for her lung cancer, because she’d “been through worse.”
Together at last, the family stayed in Chongqing until the war ended in 1945. My grandfather continued to work for the government while also managing what sounds like an extremely dangerous side hustle shipping mercury on the Yangtze River. The pressure to hustle was high. Numerous “friends” and “family” came calling to impose on his good will and relative prosperity at a time when there were shortages of nearly everything. There were at least two step-sisters, two brothers, and another couple who stayed with them more or less permanently. But at various times, there were also close cousins, distant cousins, a grandmother’s godson, and “friends” of “friends.”
The little girl, my aunt, was furious with all the freeloaders. They were like leeches. If my grandparents were also feeling put upon, no doubt they didn’t feel they could express it. In fact, my grandmother would close my little aunt and uncle up in the back room and not allow them to come out, lest they be rude and cause trouble with the guests. This only served to fuel my aunt’s anger and indignation, and who could really blame her?
After World War II finally reached its awful conclusion, the government moved back to Nanjing in 1946 and my grandparents moved with it. My grandfather was now working for the National Resources Commission (國家資源委員會; guójiā zīyuán wěiyuánhuì), a large bureaucracy which Wikipedia tells me played a significant role in post-war industrial development, foreign trade, and economic “reconstruction.”
One of his first official post-war duties was to go to Xibei (literally, “west-north”) in northwest China and help represent the government in ceremonially accepting Japan’s surrender and taking back the land. When he came back from this trip, my grandmother chided him for having visited the place in China to buy anything woolly, and not even thinking to buy a nice wool blanket to bring back home!
He was also asked to help represent the government in reclaiming the hydroelectric power plant at Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan. At the government’s behest, he continued to fly often to Taiwan in those days, and my mother knows that he was there during the February 28 incident of 1947, or the "228 massacre”: an anti-government protest that was violently suppressed by the Nationalist government that had taken over the governing of Taiwan after 50 years of Japanese colonial rule. Thousands of civilians died. My grandfather never talked about it. “It was a forbidden topic,” my mother remembers. He stayed safe, thanks to “Taiwanese friends who protected him.”
A few months later, my mother was born.
Two years after that, my grandmother and her three children would walk out of an apartment in Shanghai with a shopping basket on her arm and leave everything behind to flee another war.
But my mother would say, yes, overall, her childhood was a happy one.
Incredibly moving. A beautiful treatment of complex, dark and fully human experiences.