Memories of home
By Mu Qian (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-06 10:07
 |
Large Medium Small |
Around 2 million people left the mainland in 1949 with the Kuomintang, expecting to return in five years. It's now 60 years. A new book chronicles their lives. Mu Qian reports
The birth of the novel Going Home (Hui Jia) was a unique experience for both Zhang Huimin, the author, and Gao Binghan (Kao Bing-han), a prototype of the novel's hero, also named Gao Binghan.
For half a year, Gao spoke online from Taipei to Zhang in Beijing, about how he left the mainland as a teenager more than 60 years ago and about his life in Taiwan.
Every time Zhang finished a part of her novel, she would send it to Gao. Zhang's writing blurs the borders between biography, novel and report, as she blends Gao's narration with stories of other people whose destinies also changed in 1949, the year the People's Republic of China was founded and some 2 million people left the mainland with the Kuomintang for Taiwan.
As Gao read Zhang's drafts, he found that the Gao in the novel had moved beyond him and become representative of his generation. Zhang toyed with the idea of giving the hero a fictional name, but Gao asked her to keep his name.
"The core of the character is me. Although some stories in the novel are not about me, they are all real stories about the millions who went to Taiwan from the mainland; I'm one of them," he says. "These other stories could very well have been mine."
It was in 1948 that Gao's mother asked him to leave his home in Heze, Shandong, to continue his studies in Jiangsu province. Gao's father, a Kuomintang member, had just been killed in Heze, where the Communist Party and the Kuomintang were engaged in seesaw battles.
Remembering his mother's words to follow the Kuomintang army, Gao left the mainland for Taiwan in 1949, when he was 14. The Kuomintang vowed to counter attack and retake the mainland in five years; young Gao did not expect that this parting from home would last so long that he would never see his mother again.
Without anybody to support him, Gao took on various jobs so he could go to evening school in Taipei. His hard work saw him through law in university and become a court martial judge, after graduation.
The military court that Gao worked at was located in the Lesser Kinmen, an islet just 2.3 km from Xiamen, on the mainland's Fujian province, at the nearest point.
The first case that Gao heard was about a deserter who tried to swim with a tire across the Straits at night to see his mother in Xiamen. Unfortunately, because of the whirling waves, he lost direction and found himself back on the shore of Lesser Kinmen the next morning.
That was in 1964, 15 years after Gao had left his home. He understood only too well the feelings of the deserter, as he himself yearned to see his mother.
"Had Heze been located where Xiamen is, I would have tried to swim to the other side of the Straits before him," Gao says.
However, in a frontier area like the Lesser Kinmen, desertion meant execution, and Gao had no choice but to order the death penalty.
"I was performing my duty according to the law, but I can't describe how restless and lost I felt," he says.
To ease his nostalgia, Gao wrote a lot of poetry and prose while at the Lesser Kinmen, where he could see but not touch the mainland. "Where is my home? I'm a vagabond here, while mother is grieving on the other side. Beyond island is still island, and beyond sea is still sea," he wrote.
Gradually, he lost hope of returning to the mainland, like most people around him.
"At that time, we thought we were faced with only two possibilities. One was to be killed by the PLA army when it attacked Taiwan. The other was to stay in Taiwan for the rest of our lives. There was no hope of going back home either way," he says.
In 1981, an acquaintance, who moved from Taiwan to Argentina and became an Argentinian citizen, was able to go back to the mainland after more than three decades. When he asked Gao what he wanted from Heze, Gao asked for the soil of his homeland.
Three kilograms of soil from Heze were brought to Taipei, and Gao divided them among more than 100 others like him. Of the two spoons of soil that he got, Gao put one half in his safe, and drank the other half with tea, over a week.
He remembered that when he left home, his mother told him to keep the soil from his shoes, and make a drink out of it if he found his body disagreeing with the new environment.
"I cried so much as I drank the tea with soil from home that my tears were no less than the water I drank," he says.
In 1979, when there was still no postal service between Taiwan and the mainland, Gao managed to send a letter through a friend in the United States to his mother in Heze. When he got a reply from his sister a year later, he learnt that his mother had died in 1978.
The pain that Gao experienced was shared by many who left the mainland for Taiwan in 1949. It was only after nearly 40 years, in 1987, that people could finally begin to travel from Taiwan to the mainland.
Going Home, that puts together Gao's story, as well as those of others like him, was published in January.
Books dealing with cross-Straits issues have become popular in recent years. Taiwan author Liao Hsin-chung's Our Taiwan in These Years is a bestseller in the mainland. Lung Yingtai's Big River, Big Sea - Untold Stories of 1949, although not available in the mainland, has been read by many on the Internet.
Going Home has been bought by Red Ants Books Co Ltd of Taiwan and will be released in Taiwan.
Zhang did much research on Taiwan while writing Going Home, and says she is now more concerned about Taiwan, although she has never been there.
"Now I pay more attention to TV news about Taiwan," she says. "I hope to go there soon and see it with my own eyes."
As for Gao, he can't remember how many times he has visited the mainland since 1987. He is now in Heze to sweep his parents' tomb and attend the Peony Festival of Heze on April 16.