My grandfather spent his childhood not far from where my home is now. If you leave our village and head southeast, pass the neighboring village, then keep going over a mountain, you reach the place where his family once lived.
The family line and where it came from
Our maternal family traced its roots back to Laiyang County in Dengzhou Prefecture, Shandong. During the Qing dynasty, a mother set out with her three sons. The four of them came by boat to the coast, but after landing, one of the sons was separated from the other three. The mother continued inland with the remaining two boys and eventually settled in this area.
No one can now say exactly when that branch arrived here, only that the family line took root and spread locally. Later on, one of their descendants became prosperous and wealthy enough to finance a search for the lost branch of the family. In the end, they did find relatives from the same ancestral line, and that coastal city became home to another branch of the clan.
A childhood that began in loss
My grandfather was born on the second day of the fourth lunar month in the yichou year, which corresponds to April 24, 1925.
His mother died when he was still very young. He was raised by his maternal grandmother in a very remote village in our area. That village was relocated a few years ago, and after the residents were moved out, a reservoir was built there to divert water. When floods come down from upstream and wash people away, bodies are often found there.
He returned to his own home when he was about nine or ten.
Three months of schooling
As a child, he attended a traditional private school for a time. In those years, that was no small thing. The tuition was one silver dollar for three months.
One of his classmates came from a nearby village that was already considered large by local standards. At the private school, they began with The Hundred Family Surnames, then moved on to The Three Character Classic, The Thousand Character Classic, and a commercial magazine. By the time they had worked through those materials, the three months were over.
Classes were only held for three winter months each year. The teacher had to farm the rest of the time and had no leisure to keep the school open.
Working in the provincial capital under the Japanese
When my grandfather was in his early teens, he went to the provincial capital to work, relying on one of his father’s older maternal aunts there. At the time, the Japanese were running a factory in the city.
It was a bottle factory, though my mother said my grandfather worked on parts there. No one in the family seems to have known exactly what kind of parts, and even when he told me about it himself while he was still alive, he never explained it very clearly. His younger sister also went there to work. She made pastries in a Japanese-run factory. Workers brought their own lunch tins, and the factory heated the food for them free of charge.
My grandfather earned one silver dollar a day, paid out at the end of each shift. His sister, making pastries, earned one silver dollar every two days.
To prevent workers from stealing goods from the factory, everyone had to be checked for metal items before leaving each day. After collecting their pay, they went home.
Near the end of one year, the factory offered a bonus of one hundred silver dollars, to be awarded by drawing lots. My grandfather drew the winning lot. At that time, one hundred silver dollars could buy a great many things.
His father’s older maternal aunt and her husband also worked for Japanese factories in the city. So did his father, who was especially capable and made good money doing work related to distilling liquor.
What he saw in a Japanese household
My grandfather worked hard at the factory, and because he also knew farm work, the Japanese manager there invited him, during breaks from factory work, to come to his home and grow vegetables. He was fed there as well.
My mother said that this was how my grandfather saw Japanese domestic life up close. The men sat and waited to be served. The women knelt to serve them. Only after the men had finished eating would the women eat. Since my grandfather was a guest, he was treated as an honored visitor in that household.
The invasion itself was shameful, of course. Even so, it was fortunate that the Japanese bosses at that factory had not entirely lost their conscience.
Returning to the countryside
While he was in the provincial capital, the family home was robbed, so he returned to the countryside. His father’s older maternal aunt and her husband came back as well.
Those were wartime years. Both the Japanese and the Nationalists conscripted ordinary people to build artillery towers or blockhouses. As far as I know, my grandfather was never taken for that work; at least, I never heard him say he had been. My second uncle once told us about people he knew who had been seized and made to build such fortifications, but he never mentioned my grandfather among them.
According to my second uncle, when the Japanese took people to build blockhouses, they paid one silver dollar a day and let them return home after the work was done. The Nationalists also paid one silver dollar a day, but they forced people to keep working overtime and exhausted them. The whole practice of dragging common villagers off to build military works was disgraceful.
Moving to the present village
In the 1950s, there was no longer enough room for the family where they had been living, so my grandfather moved with the whole household to the village where we live now.
The move happened because his grandmother wanted to go where her eldest daughter was. That daughter—my grandfather’s eldest aunt—had married into this village. At the time, hers was the only household with a proper house, and it had three rooms.
The formidable old grandmother
My grandfather’s grandmother was born in a year of the sheep. People said her fate was hard and unyielding. Every one of her sons, daughters, and daughters-in-law died before she did.
She remained physically strong well into her seventies. She did not stoop, her frame stayed solid, and she was tall. In her entire life, she lost only one tooth. That happened while she was holding a long pipe in her mouth and trying to open a window that lifted upward and had to be propped with a stick. The window failed to open and instead caught the pipe, wrenching out one of her teeth.
She was almost never ill.
Old Guotou and the curse of grave divination
After the family returned from the city, my grandfather’s father’s older maternal aunt died. Her husband, surnamed Guo—everyone called him Old Guotou—made his living in a rather unusual way: fortune-telling and selecting burial sites.
There is not much to say about fortune-telling, but choosing graves was considered no good trade. People who lived by grave divination were often said to end without descendants, and their households to meet miserable fates. There were too many examples for villagers not to believe it.
Old Guotou had two daughters and one son. Not long after the son married, he joined the army and never returned. No message ever came home. His wife remained in the village for another two years. Then Old Guotou told her to leave. He said that, based on the hour when his son had departed to enlist, his calculations showed that the man was already dead. After that, the daughter-in-law remarried in Dandong, Liaoning.
Of his two daughters, one had already been promised in marriage, but before the groom’s family came to take her, she died suddenly of illness. The other also died suddenly when she was sixteen or seventeen.
He ended his life alone.
During the collective production team years, villagers were allowed to collect corn and sweet potatoes for free; other grains had to be paid for. Even so, he would not go claim them. Before he died, he bought his own coffin, chose his own grave, and even had the burial pit prepared for himself. After his death, someone from the production team hauled him away for burial.
Death in the family and the famine years
In 1958, my grandfather’s father died of illness at the nominal age of fifty-six. My second uncle once remarked, in 2018, that it had then been exactly sixty years since his grandfather’s death. When my grandfather’s father died, his own mother was still alive. For him, it meant that he had to send off his mother’s coffin while he himself was already nearing the end.
Then came 1960, in the years of the so-called Three Years of Natural Disasters. People mixed elm bark, elm leaves, and oak leaves together to make flat cakes. They were almost impossible to swallow. No one could really eat them.
In those years, many of the elderly and many children in the village starved to death. What remained, for the most part, were young and middle-aged adults. When children died of hunger, their bodies were sometimes simply thrown onto the mountain.
My grandfather’s grandmother had gone her whole life without illness, yet in the end she starved to death during that time. My grandfather had to buy wood and have a coffin made for her anew.