A Tear and a Feather
Book Review: Tear and a Feather published in China Rights Forum 2007, No.1.t
Every evening through the autumn of 1965, a seven-year-old Chinese girl hid under her little brother’s crib to listen to her father tell stories to her brothers. She hid because this was a privilege reserved for sons and denied to daughters. Her father was a superb story-teller, and held his little audience spell-bound with traditional Chinese tales and Western classics he had read as a student in America. One evening, when the boys had gone to bed, and the girl was still hiding there, the genial story-teller sat talking to himself in a very different tone: “It’s not over. It’s coming…I see it…” A victim of the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957-58, he sensed that new trouble was brewing, for him and others. Within a year that trouble would burst out, in the form of the Cultural Revolution.
Nearly 30 years later he would publish an account of the suffering inflicted on him, his wife and children, from 1954 to 1979. Now his daughter has written her part of the family’s story.
Each book stands very well on its own, a memorial to the trials of its author’s generation. The father tells the fate of those patriotic intellectuals who wanted to build the New China after 1949, but were soon either brain-washed into political slavery or persecuted, and his daughter recounts how the sons and daughters of these intellectuals lost their childhood in the Cultural Revolution and then, as teenagers, were banished to remote and primitive villages “to learn from the poor and lower-middle peasants.”
These memoirs have much to tell us of suffering under the oppressive rule of China’s Communist Party, but they are also testaments to the resilience of the human spirit under oppression when sustained by love, courage and faith. Neither Wu Ningkun nor his daughter Emily ever preaches to us, and we learn from them all the better for that. Fine books on their own, they gain from being read together.
Ningkun chose for his daughter the name Yimao (“One Feather”) while he was in a labor camp. Long years of being tossed in a storm awaited this feather. Besides her name, Ningkun would in time impart to Yimao his love of Chinese classical poetry, which would sustain her when she in turn was “sent down” to
learn from illiterate peasants, and his gift for story-telling, which would enable her, with the expert help of Larry Engelmann, to give us this gripping book. Yimao first set eyes on her father on her third birthday, when he was still a political prisoner. At the end of their brief meeting he told her, “You are a determined young lady, like your Mama. Someday, this little Phoenix will sing at heaven’s gate!”
Feather in the Storm is Yimao’s account of what childhood and youth were like for the child of a “Rightist.” She was born into the Great Leap Forward, a time of mass starvation. From the age of eight, during the Cultural Revolution, she was bullied and ostracized, and witnessed the brutal maltreatment of her parents, their friends and colleagues. At 11, she and her brothers were separated from their parents for over a year. When the family was reunited, it was to live for four years among peasants in rural squalor. At 18, she was parted from her family again, when she was sent to a mountain village.
The Wu-Engelmann partnership tells the story through the eyes of Yimao (who chose the name Emily when she moved to the U.S.) as she was at the time, not embellished by sophisticated hindsight. The story-line and style are kept simple; the physical descriptions are vivid, and the dialogue direct. This simplicity adds to the impact of the book. The reader lives, page by page, Yimao’s heart-break of family separations, her defiance of brutal bullying, her solace in friendship, her horror on finding the mother of her best friend hanging dead from the branches of a tree, her trance-like experience when that friend’s mother speaks tenderly to her from beyond the grave, and her surprise at compassion from unexpected quarters.
Having, as a British diplomat, read many authentic but unpublished travelers’ tales, I can vouch that the experiences recounted by Yimao were the very stuff of life for educated youth in those years.
Ningkun was already two years into his doctoral thesis on T.S. Eliot at the University of Chicago when China entered the war in Korea in 1950. Politically innocent, he readily accepted an appeal to abandon his thesis and take up a professorship of English literature at Yenching University in Beijing. He was a brilliant and dedicated teacher and translator of English classics, but his political innocence persisted, with the result that when the Communist Party assured intellectuals that they could speak out in the Hundred Flowers Movement without fear of retribution, he believed it, and was sentenced to reform through labor.
By then he had married a Roman Catholic from the port city of Tianjin, who had borne him a son and was carrying the future Yimao in her womb. This was a family bound together by their love for each other, their courage and their faith in life. Indeed, these characteristics saved the lives of Ningkun and their daughter. Without the loyalty of his wife, Li Yikai, and her persistent and daring interventions on his behalf, Ningkun would have died from starvation-induced sickness while in captivity. Likewise, only her parents’ loving attention saved Yimao when she was denied proper medical treatment because of her father’s political history.
The family’s love and courage were underpinned by a faith in life. Ningkun was not a religious man, and his faith owed much to his reading of Chinese literature, both classical and modern, and the English-language canon. He found
sustenance particularly in Hamlet: the “Prince of Denmark” was his alter ego. And in the still of the night, on the eve of being sentenced to labor reform, he remembered the passionate voice of Dylan Thomas reading at the University of Chicago:
“Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
And death shall have no dominion.”
Beside a lake in the Great Northern Wilderness, he and a fellow prisoner read to each other from the novels of Shen Congwen, whose “transparent and candlelit” voice, tender rhythm and music, made them forget their sorrows. Du Fu had never been Ningkun’s favorite poet, but now he found that “a great poem of Du Fu ennobles us with the tragic grandeur of life.” His first encounter with an assembly of several hundred fellow prisoners led him to recite in silence the words of T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land: “So many, I had not thought death had undone so many.”
Ningkun has always been averse to self-dramatization, but his heart had been roused in high school while reading how Patrick Henry had galvanized the Virginia House of Burgesses to commit troops to the fight against British rule with the cry, “Give me liberty or give me death!”
Yikai, on the other hand, had converted to Christianity at the age of 15. Her faith was quietly steadfast. Assuring Ningkun that “heaven never seals off all the exits,” she prayed every night and every morning, read The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, baptized Yimao in secret when her daughter was close to death, and, again in secrecy, taught her the essentials of Christianity when Yimao was sent to the countryside at 18. But as their story unfolds, it becomes evident that their faith in life cannot be simply attributed to his education and her religious discipline.
I first met Ningkun and Yikai in 1986, when they were returning to China via France after Ningkun had profited from a six-month stay at Cambridge University, and I was in our Paris embassy. Richard Bernstein of The New York Times had promised to bring Ningkun to my apartment for dinner, and I was expecting to meet a man on whom the long years of suffering would have taken their toll. As my wife and I chatted with our other guests, I heard gusts of laughter echoing up the stairs and through the outer rooms, followed by the entrance of a short, stocky bull-dog of a man who turned out to be Wu Ningkun. I soon discovered that he had developed what the editor of this magazine has called “a capacity to find hilarity in the grotesque absurdity at the base of what ruined so many lives.”
That evening Ningkun told me he had invented the formula “I came, I suffered, I survived” to describe his experience in communist China. But was it suffering in vain? He believed that to be worthy of the suffering and survival, he must render an account of it that would contribute to a better understanding of men and history. Richard and I encouraged him in this resolve. Two years later, when I saw him again in Beijing, he was finding it impossible to write in the
“sterile climate” of China. It was only in 1991, when he and Yikai followed their children into exile in the U.S., that he could resume the project.
The result is a book that deserves to be recognized as a classic. I know of no richer, deeper or wiser account of the suffering inflicted on patriotic Chinese intellectuals than A Single Tear, nor any more damning account of the “mass intellectual castration” (Ningkun’s words) perpetrated by the Communist Party of China. Of his title, Ningkun has written, “The ordeal of my family is but a single tear in a sea of suffering.” "But how sparkling and crystal clear is this single tear,” commented the Hong Kong poet C. R. Huang, “which contains all the elements of suffering of a whole generation!"
I do not know of more moving testimony in our time to the way faith can transform suffering from a passive, soul-destroying ordeal into what Ningkun calls “a life-sustaining gift.” This political innocent, this impulsive teller of truth, whose only weapons were those of the mind and heart, defied every attempt by the world’s mightiest machine for thought reform to wrench away his pearl of great price – his freedom of spirit – and came out to tell the tale. Mr and Mrs Valiant-for-Truth wake each morning now to the peace and beauty of Hunters Woods, in Patrick Henry’s home state. Their daughter breathes the free air of California.
Reviewing the life and writing of Ningkun, Yikai and Yimao, I find myself driven to the conclusion that their suffering and survival were not a matter of chance. From the individual events and the overall pattern of their lives, it is evident that a spirit has been at work that is more than human. A purpose has been served that gives meaning to life: Ningkun and Yikai kept faith with each other and with their highest values; strapped to a wheel, they did not break, and Yimao grew up to sing at heaven’s gate. Through these lives, light has shined in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
