Flood

When I reached my thirties, especially after attending a pizza party run by Oxford historians (though, some of them thought I was a Japanese high school student), I became aware that my family history in Hunan, Mao’s hometown, was comparatively unhappy, but not unusual.

My grandpa was the only son born to a ‘landlord’ who was put on a dunce’s cap and stoned to death. My grandma, who was picked for Central Art Troupe but fled, was said to be ‘the sassy daughter of an old bourgeois with his second wife who was over twenty years his junior’. My grandparents discovered they deserved each other, so they worked together in civil engineering, married, and had children. Procedures were screened and approved by local Communist Party members, and some of them, in my grandpa’s words, were ‘illiterate’ and ‘baneful’. My grandma was once sent to a wrecked maternity ward to get an abortion; she fled, again.

However, my father, whose ‘future’ was utterly smashed by the Cultural Revolution, pursued my mother with great caution: she was an orphan with a trackable peasant background; she was poor but superior in blood to my father; she was adventurous to date my father, who was born with such political stains and deeply humiliated. They were young and good-looking; they had their own romance, or, at least, before they had me. Then, I was born, the only daughter, thanks to the ‘one-child policy’. My mother had an abortion when I was four. She seemed only physically hurt, though she said, ‘It’s a boy’.

Along with my peers, I was raised in a peaceful new era. We were the cultivated generation called ‘Nation’s Flowers’ or ‘Morning Sun at 9:00’: no history, no memory, innocent, beautifully brainwashed, without any bitter imagination to harm the state’s self-drafted global vision.

When my grandpa was still a bit optimistic or probing a way of self-anaesthetise, he repeated an old saying in China: ‘Neither wealth nor poverty can survive three generations’. I am the fourth generation since the family’s fall, though, a girl, with no privilege to inherit either wealth or poverty. I own freedom.

However, my father, a radical critic of any of his father’s feudalistic thoughts as well as his peers’ ‘vulgarity’ but, unfortunately, passed away before his father and peers, kept warning me that ‘this is a cursed land, you can only leave here through real modern education, you must hop out by yourself, alone’. He also stressed that ‘no single snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.’ He seemed cynical and claimed that ‘all men (including himself) are superficial’. When I almost fully grew up, I found it probably because he hid The Picture of Dorian Gray (translation, of course) under his pillow, whereas in his peers’ pockets, there was only Mao’s Little Red Book. He worked for the local justice department as a popular non-partisan and fully unleashed his talents on arranging fishing and Mahjong parties during workdays. He existed as a lively irony to the system.

When my grandpa was still alive, there was no context for me to understand his frequent traumatic narratives and meaningless mutterings about how ‘kind’, ‘intelligent’, ‘wealthy’ and ‘respected’ my ill-fated predecessors used to be. Most people had no idea or did not care why the old men were cranky before they were really gone. All my relatives joked with my grandpa that, genetically, I am a duplicate version of my grandma: sassy.

Since I have left there by winning scholarships and having the greatest mentors and supervisors but seemingly not as hardworking enough as those ‘crazy hardworking Asians’, I usually wonder if I am extremely lucky.

Six years ago, I travelled to my partner’s hometown, an urban village in Shanxi, a historic but economically undeveloped province that houses various unprotected cultural relics. A local Buddhist master (my partner’s old friend) was staring at me, seemed awed by my credentials, no matter what a terrible student I was in my partner’s jokes. They were drinking liquor, biting, chewing and gulping down cold dish beef. At last, the master said: ‘I can see that your family ancestors’ tombs were very well placed on a mountain, especially opposite the very good orientation, which would only benefit a girl in your family.’

I remember that master’s face in the dim glow of electric light looked firm and sober. My partner believed. We lived happily ever after.