“Not everyone sees Mao that way,” I said.
“I highly doubt we can find legitimate scholars who’d argue otherwise.”
At our next Humanities meeting, I brought a pile of books, some condemning Mao, some defending him, one arguing there was a good Mao and a bad Mao, supporting the standpoint of Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping, who declared Mao was seventy percent right and thirty percent wrong, as if the character of a man could be determined by neat percentages.
I’d grown up thinking Mao was a vile tyrant. That’s the way my mother saw him. Both of my parents’ families had fled from China to Hong Kong before the communists took over. My mom’s family had immigrated seeking work. Bah Ba’s family had sought refuge. They were landlords, the wealthiest in their village, and they wanted no part of land redistribution, which the communists had promised upon victory. The problem was that Bah Ba’s grandma, my Tai Mah, wasn’t allowed to leave the mainland with the rest of the family due to immigration restrictions. Her opportunity to flee wouldn’t come until several years later. She had to remain in the village, the last Lam.
When Mao came into power, as expected, he targeted landlords. They’d exploited peasants for thousands of years, charging exorbitant rents. Peasants had little left to feed their families. In desperate times, many would sell a child into slavery to stave off the entire family dying of hunger. In the new China, landlords were to be stripped of their power and riches.
Anytime I’d bring up Mao, my mother would never fail to mention my Tai Mah. The communists tied her up, a rope around her chest. They led her through the village while peasants hurled insults and spat on her. She stood trial on her knees. The verdict: guilty. As punishment, she was made to stand in the brutal sun with a humiliating sign hung around her neck, her fingers forced into a medieval contraption. Sticks tightened around each digit, slowly crushing them. Her nails snapped off one by one. My Tai Mah screamed in agony as villagers threw stones and shouted epithets.
I showed my students a dramatization of this. It was an old propaganda film from Communist China, but its depiction of a landlord being tied up and having rocks thrown at him was similar to my Tai Mah’s story, if less sadistic. To complicate this portrayal, I passed around a book that depicted sculpted scenes comparing the life of peasants with the life of their landlords. In one scene, a mother who could not pay her rent is dragged from her baby to the landlord’s house. He’d take the baby’s milk for himself.
I asked the students: How should we respond to abuse? Do victimizers deserve compassion?
a man of few words
I called my father in Minnesota. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d phoned him in my life. I called him at work. I didn’t want to wait until he got home, scared I’d change my mind.
It was summer break, and death was on my mind. My aunt had passed away a month after Javon. I’d stood with my father next to his Ga Jeh’s casket. Bah Ba wore a suit a size too big. Each time I saw him he’d grown frailer. He had shaved off his moustache, and he’d dyed his graying hair a not-subtle jet black. Funerals were the only times we got together. In the last year, he had lost his father, mother, and now his sister. He was the new elder of his family, and Bah Ba swore he’d be the next to go.
He sent us an email after my aunt’s funeral:
Hello,
Thanks very much for the Father’s Day gift. It’s a precious memory for me since we do not meet each other very often.
Since your mother and me divorced, I felt hopeless, but I am happy now, because you are closer with me, at least I feel some hope, I still have my children around me, cheer me, encourage me which make me so comfort, and all my dirty mind was gone.
From my bottom of heart, I wish you all well, finally, I am proud because all my children were in the funeral of your Aunt. I think she is proud too!
Dad, thanks very much and may God bless you and family!
* * * * * *
Bah Ba hadn’t spoken much English to us growing up, and even in Cantonese, he was a man of few words. His only communication with me: curt replies or grunts. Bah Ba had few reasons to use English, the bulk of his days confined to the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, yet he could compose an email in English that expressed feelings he shied away from in Chinese.
My mother notes that Bah Ba was not uneducated. He completed high school in Hong Kong, studying English three hours every afternoon. A couple of years after immigrating to the States, Bah Ba went to the Chinatown campus of the local community college and took an ESL placement test. Based on his results, he was told he couldn’t register. His score was too high. A perfect hundred. All of the ESL classes offered would be too easy. Bah Ba’s writing was strong enough that when my mother showed Willie a postcard that my father had sent from a trip back to Hong Kong, Willie said, “Your husband’s a good writer.” Willie was himself an immigrant, but he’d arrived as a teenager, his Filipino accent hardly noticeable.
Bah Ba’s postcard was written in English, presumably not for the sake of my
