Tomb Festival and Family
Memories
It was almost time for the Tomb Festival. This was the traditional day set aside for the Chinese people to worship their ancestors.
It was also the time of year for the rainy season in Hong Kong.
Some of the mainland boys had gone up to the hills in the restricted border area overlooking China and burned joss-sticks, with the intention of releasing the souls of their classmates and friends who had died while attempting to escape. The fires that dotted the hillside everywhere seemed to symbolize a silent protest.
I took time to remember my own family, none of whom believed in anything spiritual. Naturally, we of the younger generation who for twenty years had been educated in materialism, would laugh at such superstitious practices. But in spite of this, we would still take time to worship our ancestors and wish for their blessing as had been the Chinese tradition for thousands of years.
However, after three years of upheaval during the Cultural Revolution, when countless families were broken up and many young people uprooted and sent into the country, people naturally became worried about both their own fate and that of their nation. It was a spiritual problem that continued to grow despite many efforts by the communists to suppress it. For them, it represented many years of wasted propaganda and education. As the Chinese proverb goes, "When a thing reaches its limit, it begins to return."
Fortune tellers once again found themselves in business,
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and ancestor worship became like dead ashes burned over again. Strange to say, the people who were the most earnest in this regard were the youth who themselves had been the pioneers of "breaking the old morals" to give place to materialism and idealism.
He who was in school would consult a fortune teller to know if he was going to be transferred. He who had been transferred already to the farm would call upon his god for good luck. Most of those planning to escape played with cards in an attempt to determine in advance whether they would succeed or fail. It was quite understandable that since they were no longer to plan, or even control, their own futures, people would seek out whatever god or spirit they thought might help them.
It is quite true to say, then, that the Cultural Revolution, rather than breaking down the old morals and customs, had built them up again. That could only be described as a great irony.
During those years that I worked on the farm I also made an exception and, for the first time in my life, went to worship my ancestors. I remember, one day, standing in front of the grave of an ancestor I had neither seen nor known. I prayed to him for blessing and for his help in getting me out of my present situation. In my heart, however, I was doubtful that he, who had passed away hundreds of years before, could ever help me. But if I couldn't pray to him, to whom else could I turn?
Once again it was the Tomb Festival. Mentally I reviewed all that I had done during the last months since leaving China, things that would make my ancestors proud of me but also ashamed at the same time. One would have thought that I should have been satisfied with my present situation. My extra income alone had been over a thousand that month, and I had plenty of confidence about my future.
But there was one thing that I had to admit to myself when I finally put away my paint brush and sat down..... I felt terribly empty in my heart.
I saw myself as a locomotive out of control, running into
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the darkness, ready to come off its tracks and tumble into the abyss at any moment. This feeling not only scared me but annoyed me, too. It even began to haunt me during my working hours.
One day, during break time at the studio, I had just finished a coke when I saw a young Hong Hong boy, who had just joined our studio, coming in the door. Looking for trouble I tried to provoke him.
"Did you know that I used to take away some people's families when I was a Red Guard?" I asked him.
He looked at me and giggled, not really understanding what I was talking about.
Then, without saying another word, I took the coke bottle and dashed it hard against the cement floor, breaking it in a thousand pieces. The sound of smashing glass unexpectedly brought me untold pleasure and a great sense of release.
The poor boy looked quite shaken, his face pallid. I laughed wildly.
Whatever had come over me? I didn't know, except that something was eating me up inside. Sometimes I made a conscious effort to control my emotions, but that would only last two or three days. Then the same old feeling would return even stronger than ever.
I became filled with uncontrollable anger, looking all the time for someone on whom to pour it out, using the least excuse for a fight. I found, moreover, that it was not only I who had this problem, but also many other young men from the mainland.
Finally I took a day off; in fact, it was because I had a cold. Chao urged me to see Dr. Hong but that seemed unnecessary. Instead, he obtained some medicine for me from Dr. Hong, then made me some Chinese porridge.
As I lay upon my bed I tried to analyze my mind in search of the source of my "sickness." What was wrong with me? Was I too busy . . . or too tired? Maybe, for I was not only working eight hours a day in the studio, but also putting in
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many hours a day at home on the side. All that work must surely contribute to my exhaustion. But that was not the whole reason, for it did not explain why I was always more irritable when I sat down after getting off work.
Could it be that life here was too hectic? There were always so many things to worry about. If you were a worker on the mainland, on the other hand, you didn't have to think about your job or daily life, because the government made all the decisions for you, and you were even deprived the freedom to choose. There you didn't have to give so much thought to what you were going to eat or which movie to watch. You would just eat whatever you could buy with your ration stamps or whatever the market happened to offer that particular day.
Here in Hong Kong, however, life was different. You might have to move often. For example, the landlord might notify you at the end of the month that he wants his house back for his own personal use. To someone brought up in the free world this would be no great problem, but for someone like myself who had gotten used to the simplified pattern of life in a communist country it represented a heavy load, enough to make my head feel like it would explode!
The second problem I discovered was that a large, empty "hole" had developed in my mind, my thought world. For more than twenty years communism had occupied the highest place in my thinking. It had greatly influenced me such that it had become the idol of my mind. Now that idol lay shattered in pieces. For me, that idol was Mao. You might wonder why things pertaining to ideology were so important to me. You might even reply, "Okay, but millions without an ideology still live very well." Maybe. But to the youth, especially those who've lived under communist rule, it is very different.
We might even say that their minds, brains, their whole thinking system, has been "created" by the communists, conditioned and shaped according to their mould. Thus, when faced with a certain situation, they can only respond in
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the communist way. For instance, whenever they would see the color red, it would bring forth connotations of "good" and "revolutionary." Similarly, the word "rebel" would evoke good connotations rather than bad, the traditional Chinese literary understanding of the word.
It was not that those responses were the result of any conscious effort, but rather a kind of unique instinctive understanding. We had been conditioned into thinking this way ever since we were children with clean, empty minds, and apart from this kind of learning, there was nothing else. Thus, if we were to reason that the thought process is an actual yet invisible part of every human being, this would imply that the whole communist outlook and method had, in reality, become a part of our bodies. They oppressed us by covering over our traditional ethical conception of our original humanity to the point that we became the kind of people who even treated our parents as strangers, functioning as mere cogs in the gargantuan communist machine.
Once this thought process had become a part of our bodies, it was almost impossible to change, much less conquer! It was my feeling that the difficulties the mainland escapees were experiencing in Hong Kong were far greater than merely adjusting to new surroundings. I knew how my own communist idealism had grown as I grew up. When I was still in primary school I remember my teacher asking me, "What is your ideal?" I stood up so boldly and declared, "My ideal is to be a man who fights for the success of communism and the liberation of the whole human race!"
But now, ever since the Cultural Revolution, this ideal of mine had vanished. The idol, which was our great Leader Mao himself, lay broken in my heart because of his terrible, inconsistent conduct and actions.
Now both ideal and idol were gone, leaving two great "holes" in my mind. And that really destroyed my whole balance of thinking. You see, unconsciously, I still thought and acted according to the communist method, but I did not have any ideal or clear purpose to which I could be loyal,
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which I could love, or even to which I could happily offer my life. the idol I had lost had been to me something worthy of my adoration not unlike a pagan idol feared and respected by some primitive tribe. Without it I was bewildered, frightened, hurt and on the point of despair.
Like millions upon millions of Chinese young people I was wandering blindly in a fog, surrounded on every side by unseen pitfalls. Perhaps, if you have never had an idol or hero which you have worshipped with your whole heart and mind, you may not fully comprehend these feelings. Suppose someone were to suddenly prove to you that your dear mother was not a true mother, but an imposter. How would you feel? You could well be badly hurt or lose your mind!
After the Cultural Revolution, there were Red Guard leaders who killed themselves since they could find no other way out of the traps created by their own thinking. Their deaths were all in vain, but they took this route because they were not their real selves.
There was still another problem I was aware of, and that was the lack of family love. You might well wonder why a young fellow with my background should be bothered by such thinking. But the point was this: family love was something that I had been forcibly deprived of. To have given it up voluntarily would have been one thing, but to be exiled from my family was quite another, even as a nineteen-year-old.
Under the communist regime, both parents and children were regarded as being equal. Old men did not have a special position in the family by virtue of their age. On the contrary, children despised them because it was thought that the old generation was too conservative to ever change, and they lacked the revolutionary spirit. Children who were born into families with a "bad" political reputation would be required to make a clear boundary between themselves and their parents by criticizing them, betraying, or even openly fighting against them.
We were taught that "in class society everyone lives as a
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member of a particular class, and as a result, all thinking without exception bears the brand of that class." It was thus reasoned that parents loved their children so that they would adopt that same class. In other words, they loved them for this purpose alone. We all believed this theory, so we neither enjoyed our parents' love nor respected them. We didn't know that a red apple placed on a blue cloth reflects a blue tone, though it still remains a red apple in essence.
And so it was with our parents' love. It would inevitably contain some class element because we all live in a class society. But at the same time, as human beings we are all equal; this is a natural law in the universe from which we cannot escape. Strictly speaking, any element of class contained in our parents' expression of love is only the result of the external circumstances, but the natural content of this love is the result of internal causes.
It was too late when we realized the big mistake we had made in rejecting our parents. When we were banished to the farm, to the wilderness, who was there to help us with all our baggage or to mend our clothes at night? Nor did we eat well on the farms; we did not have enough money! It had been our parents that hitherto had provided for us by saving their meat, their food stamps, their money. Why did they do this? Because of their great, great love for us! What possible ulterior motive could they have had? I saw none, for if they had, it would only have been to bear out silently the awful pain of this misunderstanding between themselves and their children. Yet, in spite of this, they continued to give out of their own instinctive, yet limitless, love!
When a small child comes to ask for something from its mother, this expression of confidence demonstrates a beautiful human relationship. And although this relationship may be darkened or suppressed for a period of time, it will surely, given the opportunity, be reinstated to become a beautiful thing.
But now I had lost everything of the happiness of this familial love. I had received it every day and taken it for granted.
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Then I did not fully appreciate it. However, today, having lost this love, I felt deeply impoverished in this particular dimension. But now it was too late to rediscover how precious it was. Every time I realized that I could never again step through the doorway into our humble yet familiar home, an awful feeling enveloped me, almost as if the end of the world had come. This fact was so hard to accept I felt it would haunt me forever.
What should I do now?
I stood up and looked out of the window. Outside were the closely packed rooftops and the noise of the traffic in the street below just as usual.
"I have to go on living and get used to it," I told myself. "I have already survived many difficulties so I'll be able to overcome these, too. Perhaps, as days go by, I'll forget all those things, and the wound in my heart will be healed."
Very soon, however, I was to find out how.
