Inside The Cultural Revolution

By Jack Chen

Published by MacMillen Publishing Co., Inc.  (ISBN 0-02-524630-5)

Copyright 1975

Page 3:

To and From a Distant Land

1850-1916

My Paternal grandparents were Hakkas, or Kechia as they are called in the Peking dialect.  This is one of the minority nationalities of south China.  Driven from their homelands in ancient times by the dominant majority nationality, the Hans, these new arrivals, or "guests" as the world Hakka means, left central China and went south to Kwangtung Province.  Finding the best lands already occupied, they were forced to settle in the hill ands and the barrens.  There they barely eked out a living and their hard life made them a tough and stubborn and rebellious people.  They had been crowded out and it rankled.  They did not like to be pressured.  A patient, long-suffering people, hardworking and frugal, they would stand so much, and then no more.  Their anger would burst out against their oppressors in ungovernable fury.  In the 1850s their fate made them willing volunteers in the armies of the Taiping revolutionaries, who dreamed of over-throwing the Manchu Ching emperors* and setting up a Kingdom of Heavenly Peace on earth.  The leader of the Taipings was a Hakka.  Hakka quarrels with their neighbors often got them into trouble with the authorities.  The difficulties they faced because of hard natural conditions were bad enough, but they were compounded by the social conditions of old China in the second half of the nineteenth century.  Beaten in the two opium wars instigated by the British in the 1840s, defeated by the French, humiliated, forced to pay indemnities and cede territory to the foreigners, the imperial government in Peking could no longer govern. Rapacious landlords took more then half a tenant farmer's crop as rent.  Greedy, corrupt officials and outright bandits added an intolerable burden of graft, bribes, and tribute to the trails of a hostile nature.  When labor contractors appeared in impoverished Hakka villages the people listened eagerly to their spiel:  laborers were needed on the plantations of the West Indies and of Hawaii, lush islands on the two sides of the American continent.  Their families would receive a lump sum, and the indentured laborer would get regular wages and housing for a term of five years.  After that he would be able to return home to his Hakka village, rolling in wealth, acquire a wife and buy himself a farm.

There were excited discussions in Hakka homes in those days.  True, there were men who had left the ancestral homes to seek their fortunes in other lands and had never been heard of again.  Some said they had perished.  Some said they had prospered and did not want to return to barren Hakka settlements.  It was known that hundreds had indeed found wealth and happiness overseas.  Some had sent home money by returning travelers.  The cash down payment was real enough.  There ware always-bold spirits ready to venture out into the unknown world overseas.  They dismissed the stories of overcrowding and filthy conditions on the ships.  They were tough.  The hardships and miseries of life at home were ever present and there was little prospect of betterment staying at home.  Hope at least glimmered overseas.

My grandfather, a harassed veteran of the Taiping uprising, with no education and illiterate, "signed" his contract by pressing his thumbprint on the paper.  Without a cent to his name, with just his native wit and energy, he left China on a journey of 12,000 miles for Trinidad, the Caribbean isle in the British West Indies on the other side of the world.  There, after many adventures, he married a Hakka woman.

The Hakka were needed as laborers on the sugar and cocoa plantations, which provided the main cash crops of the island.  The Spanish conquerors had quickly killed off the native Carib people and Arawaks.  Some they slaughtered to establish their power and prove their superiority.  Most of the rest, without resistance, died of the diseases imported from Europe:  syphilis, smallpox, and pneumonia.

My grandfather and grandmother, tough, wiry little Hakkas, worked well.  They squirreled away their earnings, and by the time their indentured term was up they had saved enough money to buy a miniscule plot of land.  They planted cocoa trees and coconut palms, mango, guava, and avocado pear and cultivated a vegetable plot on which they raised yam, corn, peppers, and poultry.  Near the wooden frame house they built, they planted an orange tree and all the males of three generations pissed under it to make the fruit sweet.  They reared a family of five sons and one daughter.  When the oldest son, Eugene, was entering his teens, grandfather died.

Ma Chen's spirit matched her resilient frame.  She was not one to be downcast for long by the death of a husband and the prospect of single-handedly rearing a young family of six.  A peasant, she knew they could not starve as long as they had land and could enjoy its fruits.  Clothes were a simple matter in that genial climate.  Eugene (or Yu-ren in Chinese), born in 1878, was a bright lad and would soon be earning money.  Ma Chen sent the boys shinnying up the coconut palms to knock down nuts.  She grated the white meat, boiled it up with sugar and made coconut cakes.  She rigged up a large umbrella sunshade out of three poles and sheet, made a trestle table at the crossroads in front of the house and set up business.  China's future foreign minister was reared on coconut cakes sold by an illiterate Hakka housewife at a crossroads in an obscure British colony in the western Atlantic.

The full story of Eugene Chen is a separate one that I shall tell in detail in a later book.  Here I relate only what closely concerns me.  Suffice it to say that he won a scholarship to St. Mary's College, one of the best schools run by Irish Roman Catholic Fathers in Port-of-Spain, the capital of Trinidad, became of the island's first Chinese solicitors and married a beautiful French Creole woman named Agatha Ganteaume.

This was a rather extraordinary match for those times.  Because of their need for self-defense against a hostile nature and society, Hakkas, wherever they find themselves, are a clannish group.  And in the race-ridden, caste-ridden, prudishly Victorian island society of the 1890s it was extremely difficult for a Creole girl of good family to meet a Chinese boy and get to know him well enough to marry him.  But Agatha, or Asy as she was known to her friends, was a young woman of great resource and determination.  She and Eugene fell in love and were married.  And while it was a runaway love-match it was also surely a most advantageous one.

The Chinese community naturally flocked to the first young Chinese to open a solicitor's office in Port-of-Spain and so did the Creoles, delighted to help a local girl make good.  Furthermore they saw in Eugene a man who had not forgotten where he came from.

Eugene's practice flourished.  He put his two brothers through school and they too became solicitors and entered his office.  He invested in land and built a new house in St Clair, the most opulent residential district in the city.  Eight children were born.  Four of them survived.  One died, one lived, the next died, the next lived.  The fifth died, the next, born in 1908, lived.  That was me.  I was one of the lucky ones.  Ma Chen refused to leave the old farm and we went to see her regularly.  As soon as we got there we threw off our city clothes and shoes and played around just as our father had in his day:  cutting cane to chew on, knocking nuts off the coconut trees, feeding the chickens, lazing along the long trail to the sun-drenched beaches.  Ma Ganteaume helped Asy to look after us children, but it was Ma Chen who taught us the work ethic though she never called it that.  I loved the country-side and when fifty years later I went to live on a Chinese commune farm I felt I was going home.

By the time he reached his mid-thirties, Eugene was wealthy enough to retire and take his young family to England to get their education.  The law office and estates were left in his brothers' care.  They provided an adequate income for all.  Eugene was long remembered by the common people of the island, who knew him not as China's foreign minister, but as a brilliant scholar, a successful professional man, a devoted son, a good man.

In London we lived in St John's Wood, in those days a very genteel middle-class area.  We went regularly to spend our holidays at Brighton, Hastings, Hove, and Eastbourne, or at a farm near Cambridge where one could eat fresh-laid eggs and real cream and drink fresh milk, still warm from the cow, and much saffron cakes with homemade black-berry jam - and learn to love England.

We were all sent to "good schools."  My elder brother went on from University College School in Hampstead, where I followed him, to London University itself and Middle Temple to become a lawyer.  My elder sister attended a ladies' finishing school in the Isle of Wight where she learned to ride sidesaddle (riding astride in those days was considered slightly vulgar for women) and studied dancing, music, and elocution.

It was in England that Eugene first became China conscious.  He was extremely well read.  I know this because when I returned to Trinidad in 1921, I used his old library.  It was there that I read Dumas, Macaculay, Walter Pater, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Walter Savage Landor, the works of Bernard Shaw, the plays of William Shakespeare, Montesquieu, Mill, the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  But I found little about Asia and China among the books he had read in the early part of his life.  His was the library of a cultured middle-class English liberal of his day.  China and things Chinese at that time played a small part in his thought.  His interest in China was a sudden development in early middle age.  What he saw when he went to China appalled him precisely because he was liberal and a humanitarian.  As an honest liberal he had to become a revolutionary there.