Sheng Shicai’s branch of the Communist Party was a quite different affair from the Communist Party of Zhu De and Mao Zedong. The former had once actually advocated that Xinjiang, with almost half its population being Muslim, become independent from China. Fang Lijun’s father not only betrayed the Communist Party, however, he was also closely involved with criminal gangs in the Northwest and was responsible for training people with “special skills” for them. Fang Lijun was born in a historic old Daoist temple on the east side of Beijing. After liberation, this temple was taken over by the Ministry of National Security-that shows how vigilant the Chinese communists were about Daoist supernatural techniques.
After they took power across the entire country, the Chinese communists started a Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries. From 1950 to 1953, they cracked down severely on clandestine nationalist agents, organized crime, and members of religious organizations and secret societies. Anyone possessing Daoist-style “special skills” was liable to be considered part of a counterrevolutionary secret society. Mao Zedong suggested that one out of every thousand Chinese fitted these counter-revolutionary categories, and that the Party should first execute half that number. Large numbers of people who had worked for the nationalist government but then had surrendered, and even people who had worked underground for the Communist Party in the White areas, were also executed at this time. They included the writer Jin Yong’s father, Zha Shuqing, and the essayist Zhu Ziqing’s son, Zhu Maixian.
After the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the criminal gangs and religious secret societies went into hiding and their voices were silenced throughout the land for quite some time. The leaders who had escaped most promptly went to Taiwan or Hong Kong. Fang Lijun’s father was implicated in all forms of counterrevolutionary secret activities, and so he went to Taiwan. Fang Lijun’s mother, who was a Daoist secret society “Big Sister,” was not so fortunate-she died in a Beijing prison.
As for Fang Lijun, the offspring of a counterrevolutionary nationalist spy and criminal-gang member father and a religious secret society mother, he grew up in an impenetrable Daoist temple where there were no longer any religious activities. He was raised by an old gatekeeper, and later helped the old man with many temple repairs. He finished upper middle school in the process.
Fang Lijun was not allowed to go to college due to his shady family background. Because he was a few months too old, he was also not eligible to be sent to the countryside with the “old three classes” of 1967, ’68, and ’69. He was even less eligible to become a Red Guard. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, then, he’d been assigned to teach in an elementary school in the Mentougou district of Beijing. But before he could even start, the Cultural Revolution reached a more intense level, and he was sent off to work as a coal miner in the Muchengjian mine, and there he stayed for several years.
According to his account, one day in September 1971 he suddenly got the urge to see the Summer Palace. He had heard so much about it, but he had never visited it, and he thought it might be a long time before he would have another chance to go. When he got halfway there, however, the road was closed. He guessed that there was something going on, maybe some troop transfers, at the restricted military area on Jade Spring Hill near the Summer Palace. When he got back to the workers’ dormitory, he told everybody something big was going to happen in China. And it certainly did. In a short time the shocking news was broadcast that Chairman Mao’s designated successor, General Lin Biao, had betrayed the nation and attempted to flee, but his plane had crashed in Outer Mongolia.
Fang Lijun refused to go to work again after that. He told me that he believed “history had come to an end.” He wrote a small note and went to the bridge between Zhongnanhai Party Headquarters and North Lake, where he stuffed the note into a slit in the white-marble railing. The note said, “History has already come to a halt and will no longer move forward. From now on, all new revolutions will be counterrevolutions. Don’t try to fool me anymore. What right do you have to make me dig for coal?”
His asthma flared up again and he stayed in the dormitory. No matter how much his work unit threatened him, he would not go into the coal pit again.
He could not be sure whether it was in 1971, when United States Secretary of State Kissinger visited China twice, or in 1972, when President Nixon came, but anyway the Americans brought with them a list of relatives of Chinese American citizens who were being detained in China. At this time, when American-Chinese relations were thawing out, and in order to show their goodwill, the Chinese allowed a group of people to leave the country. One of them was Fang Lijun-because his father had long since left Nationalist Party political circles, and had been granted asylum by the American government as a pro-American political refugee.
When Fang Lijun received the notice, he went to the Public Security Bureau and was given a folded-up transit pass. He still strolled around the Summer Palace and the North Lake, enjoying the sites for a few days. Then he went back to the Daoist temple on the east side of Beijing to say good-bye to the old man who had raised him.
When the old man heard his story, he was very worried. “Why don’t you hurry up and leave?” he asked. “What if the policy changes and you can’t get out? Go and buy a train ticket to Hong Kong right away today.” The old man dug up a few pieces of gold leaf buried in one corner of the temple grounds. They were left over from some temple repairs, and he’d kept them there all these years. “Take these and trade them for money for your journey,” he said. “Your mother was the temple’s great benefactor. When she was in prison, she took our secrets to her death and firmly maintained that this Daoist temple was involved only in religious activities and had nothing to do with any reactionary secret societies. It’s because of her that this seven-hundred-year-old temple still exists.” Today he could finally pay back the temple’s godmother by helping Fang Lijun. The old man had raised Fang Lijun, but he had not revealed the truth about himself and the temple until this last moment. That’s how wary people were of each other in those days.
It was a good thing he took some money, because when the train south reached Guangzhou, Fang Lijun had to stay there a week, waiting to join in the quota for Hong Kong passengers. In Shenzhen, he had to wait two more days before entering Hong Kong. Without a passport or an identity card, carrying only a transit pass, Fang Lijun finally went through customs at Luo Wu station, where they took his pass and allowed him to enter Hong Kong.
When Fang Lijun went to the American consulate in Hong Kong to apply for a visa, he ran into a technical problem: he had not entered Hong Kong illegally, but he had left China only on a transit pass, therefore he was not eligible to be a political refugee, and the Americans could not immediately issue him with a visa. He would have to apply formally for a visa on the grounds of family reunification, with his father.
Fang Lijun found temporary lodgings in a cheap guesthouse in the Chunking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui. He stayed there the better part of a year while the American visa process dragged on. While living in that guesthouse he certainly broadened his horizons. He met backpackers and small-business operators from as many as fifty different countries. There was an American hippie who was tired after spending several years in Goa and was now going back to America to join a hippie commune and continue to live his carefree, self-reliant life. Fang Lijun was extremely envious of him.
Eventually Fang Lijun went to Los Angeles and met his now quite elderly father whom he hadn’t seen since he was a small child. When Fang Lijun’s father had run with Sheng Shicai and the Nationalist Party, he had harmed quite a few people. He was very afraid that someone would take revenge on him, and so he hid at home in Monterrey Park most of the time. He built a high wall around his house and even installed an iron door to his bedroom. The father had remarried, and Fang Lijun lived with them less than a month. Then he took his father’s advice and moved to Texas, to the Houston Chinatown, to seek help from one of his father’s former subordinates. He worked as an accountant on the second floor of this man’s furniture and antiques store. There was a teenage daughter, and the two families fondly hoped that Fang Lijun would marry her. She, however, was completely Americanized, and when she got wind of what her parents were up to, she refused even to eat with Fang Lijun at the same table. He took his meals alone in the shop’s storage room. This certainly was not the kind of American Chinatown life he had imagined.
A few months later, Fang Lijun made contact with his hippie friend and left Houston for New Mexico to join the commune. It was located on a large piece of agricultural land where the members cultivated fresh organic vegetables. They also made their own clothes, raised bees, and made jam and candles. They felt like they were self-sufficient, but their seeds, raw materials, tools, and other everyday high-tech items, and their medicines, like Fang Lijun’s corticosteroids for his asthma, were all purchased in the city.
Living on a farm, they could not escape hard physical labor. Those hippies were all from middle-class urban families and they found it pretty tough going. But Fang Lijun was used to hard work in China and he was good at it,
