B&W

The lives of those who have lived in China through the past seventy years are very interesting to me. They were alive to see the birth of a nation. Their parents and grandparents talked around the dinner table about the emperors and the fall of a dynasty. They have seen their nation go from a weak one that was abused by western nations to one that all the western nations look to for help when dealing with troublesome locals such as North Korea and Burma.

My wife's grandparents are such people. Her grandfather was a child living in the countryside near Changchun City when Mao Zedong came and besieged it, starving out the Japanese occupiers. He remembers Japanese soldiers, intent on winning the hearts of the Chinese in the northern occupied regions, giving him and other Chinese children candy: one piece of candy for speaking one word or phrase in Japanese, two pieces for two words or a longer phrase.

For a long time I had been wanting to see Grandparent's old memorabilia. Finally, during the recent vacation, they showed us their old pictures. Grandma sat and mended an old quilt and talked about her memories while my wife and I looked at the pictures.

The earliest pictures are from the 1950s when Grandparents were in their 20s. There were only three or four pictures going back that early. One of them was a formal portrait of Grandfather’s father. He wore a dark blue or charcoal colored traditional Chinese shirt (Tangzhuang) that buttoned up all the way to the top and had no collar. He looked like your stereotypical old Chinese man with his thin white goatee.

He was a landowner in the old days before “landowner” was a bad word in China and was pretty well off. However, almost all of his wealth was in the form of land rather than money. After the revolution landlords were denounced and their lands were redistributed, so he and his family lost most of their possessions. If he had had his wealth in cash, he would have possibly been able to keep it. Some landlords were very clever before the revolution and, seeing that the future leaders would be Marxist, sold all their lands and stored up the cash. After the revolution, these former landlords could keep all their wealth and go around denouncing other landlords with the rest of the people.

While my wife and I were talking about her grandfather’s family, her grandmother looked up from her mending and said smiling that her husband’s class status had put her through a lot of trouble. She was born to a poor family in the countryside, but then she married a son of a landowner. After the revolution, she wanted to join the party, but they suspected her, because she was married to someone who belonged to the landlord class. She said that she went through twenty years of observation and testing before they finally let her join the party.

I guess she did pretty well for herself in the party when she finally got to join. She was a party leader of some kind in her workplace. There were a couple pictures of her sitting behind a speaker, who was speaking at some sort of party function in the factory. There was another picture of her at work, where she assembled an electrical component for cars. On the wall behind her was a large picture of Chairman Mao inscribed with an exhortation to work hard for the sake of society.

From looking at the photo album I could guess the family’s favorite vacation destination: Beijing. There were four or five pictures of various family members standing in front of Tiananmen, the red gate over which the painting of Mao Zedong hangs. The earliest Tiananmen pictures were from 1958(?), and in them you can see that the name of the country is written in traditional Chinese characters rather than the newer simplified characters. There were also pictures from the 1970s of the Summer Palace and the Beijing train station. The old Beijing train station was a beautiful building. It had had two clock towers on either side of the front entrance. Above the doors, framed in a large arched window, was a big painting of Mao Zedong.

There was a variety of settings, but not a variety of clothing. Almost everyone wore dark blue or green or grey Mao suits. Several people wore green military hats with a red star on the front. Everyone wore dark colors. This was the patriotic way.

In fact, the whole album exuded patriotism. Right beside the photo of Uncle So-and-so was a photo of Chairman Mao sitting at his desk with a calligraphy brush in his hand. It was as if he was one of the members of the family.

Commonly the pictures were developed with Chinese writing on the front that told the date of the picture and/or a description of the picture. Sometimes the description reflected the political fervor of the time. One picture of Grandfather and two of his friends said, “A Revolutionary Friendship.” Another interesting one was a baby picture of my wife’s aunt. The baby wore a white dress and a big metallic medallion with the chairman’s face on it. To the side of the picture it had three sentences going from top to bottom. They said something like, “Forever support Mao Zedong. Forever follow Mao Zedong thought. Forever fight for the revolution.”

Next time I go to Grandparents house I'll have to ask Grandpa if he still has his badge from when he was a policeman for the Communists. Or better yet, ask Grandpa's brother if he still has his badge from when he was a policeman for the Nationalists.