紅八月Red August 1966
In Memory of Grandfather Tien
Shu-Fan 田樹藩 1885-1966
By JUDITH TIEN LAU 田之雲
On August 31,
1966, 54 years ago as I write this today, August 31, 2020, my grandfather Tien
Shu Fan 田樹藩 and my aunt Hsu Shiu Ching 許琇清, his daughter-in-law who tried to
shield him with her own body, died at the hands of the Red Guards who whipped
them with belts for 3 days right before the eyes of the family including 4
young children.
Grandfather was 82 years old. My aunt was only 39. Their lifeless bodies were hauled away in body wagons from their home at Beizongbu Hutong (北總部胡同) and never found.
My grandfather 田樹藩 (c) with my aunt Hsu Shiu
Ching 許琇清 (leaning upon a rock)
Photographed in one
of the many courtyards of the Tien Family Home at Beizongbu Hutong (北總部胡同)
Initially, grandfather’s house, the
former residence of China’s foremost architect Liang Si Cheng 梁思成
and his glamorous poet wife Lin Hui Ying 林徽因,
was raided by the local neighborhood Red Guards who marked the house in tape
reading “properly searched” and contents as “confiscated” in what was described
as a rather courteous manner.
Hooligan Red Guards from other
neighborhoods, however, were not satisfied and returned to the house numerous
times and over the course of three successive such assaults, beat my
grandfather and my aunt to death.
Red Guards returned for a seventh
assault, but, fortunately, upon hearing the frenzied mob’s approach, my Uncle
Tien Bao Dong 田寶東, Tien Shu Fan’s youngest son, bundled up his children
and leapt over the back wall to escape into the night, the last of the Tien
family abandoning the family home forever.
The Tien Family Home
at Beizongbu Hutong, 北總部胡同
(Currently on the State
Cultural Protected Site Registry, designated for preservation and reconstruction)
Decades
following their passing, my grandfather and aunt were memorialized with
headstones over graves that hold no caskets or urns but only memories of those
nightmarish days which still provoke anguished tears from my surviving cousins
who witnessed the 1966 atrocities as little children.
“Red
August” 1966 was the bloodiest massacre of the “Red Terror” that began in the
capital and then spread throughout the country until September 1976.
Across
town from grandfather’s house, beatings were also inflicted on my aunt Tien Bao
Qin 田寶琴, the oldest daughter
of 田樹藩, and my aunt’s husband, Lu Chong Ying 陸仲英, a Columbia University MBA who had rushed back to his
homeland immediately after graduation in the US to help rebuild the newly
established Republic of China.
The
couple had been bludgeoned so badly, the Red Guards left them for dead. When each
regained consciousness, they found themselves in a mass grave pit and each of
them, thinking the other dead, had to crawl their way over corpses to escape somewhere
to safety and be nursed back to life by kind strangers. To joyous surprise,
they only found one another many years later.
Meanwhile
at Peking University, Beida, grandfather’s
oldest son Tien Bao Chi 田寶齊,
a professor of Russian Literature and Language, was protected by the Beida Red
Guard students who barricaded the campus from the roaming gangs of other
factions of Red Guards. Tien Bao Chi quietly took in two escapees of his
youngest brother’s children who had witnessed the deaths of their mother and
grandfather and safeguarded them for a time.
Originally,
official government statistics for Red August reported 1,772 fatalities, 33,695
homes ransacked, and 85,196 families expelled from the capital with only the
clothes on their backs. More recently, researchers have revised statistical
findings indicating 10,000 killings, 92,000 households ransacked, and 125,000
families expelled from Beijing.
Across
all of China, millions suffered torture, deprivation and death for ten more
horrifying years following Red August!
Grandfather with 7
of his 8 children at the Tien Family Home in Beijing (circa 1947)
(My father was
posted abroad in the U.S. as a diplomat with the Foreign Ministry)
Tien family at the Tien Family Home with Grandfather for
his granddaughter’s wedding (circa 1955)
I feel
unconstrained now to memorialize my grandfather 田樹藩 because last
week I was forwarded a sina.com review, as well as a short bio that described
his death in August 1966.*
Grandfather’s
books, new editions or collectors’ items, have suddenly appeared on the
market. Grandfather wrote over 1,200
poems, published more than 10 books of poetry and several books about obscure
and famous sites in the western hills around Beijing.
Though my grandfather and I never met, I am the only member of the family who has my grandfather’s handwritten letters – one which he wrote me in 1962 and another for my 27th birthday in July 1966, just a few weeks before he met his tragic death. Both were in poetry and handwritten by him with his calligraphy brush. His poems were a gift of gratitude for my humble cash offering each month, from 1962-1966, transmitted through a relative in Hong Kong. At that time, my husband B. Peck Lau was a struggling radiation oncology nuclear medicine medical resident at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. Peck had to work nights and weekends in various emergency rooms to augment his meager income and support our household of eight, but he unhesitatingly agreed to carve out a monthly relief
when I learned about my Beijing family
on the edge of starvation.
My grandfather’s
handwritten poem to me on my 27th birthday
During Red August 1966, the
several Beijing Tien households were ransacked and looted. Items that were not
taken by the Red Guards were destroyed or burned. Until the recent re-issue of
some of my grandfather’s books, the family was bereft of any scrap of
grandfather’s calligraphy or prolific writing, which make my 2 letters all the
more precious.
My
grandfather 田樹藩 was born in 1885 to a literati family. His great
grandfather Tien Fu Sheng 田楅生 was a teenage runaway from Laoling 樂陵 in Shandong Province 山東 to Beijing to escape mistreatment by his stepmother.
In the late 18th C, 田楅生 rose from a charcoal store lowliest laborer in straw
sandals to satin slipper wearing owner of all the businesses in Beijing related
to the production of white charcoal in the north forested mountains, transport
to the urban cities and sale in a chain of stores. White charcoal, preferred
for indoor cooking and warmth, emitted no smoke nor smell. 田楅生’s entrepreneurial
ambition extended to vast real estate holdings and stores.
My
father 田寳岱as a baby on 田寳琴, his sister‘s
lap, who is sitting between my father’s father 田树藩and
mother 劉淑芳
With
my father’s brothers 田寳陆 and 田寳齊standing behind
them (circa lunar new year, 1917)
田楅生’s greatest ambition, above all his other
accomplishments, in the ancient Chinese tradition, was for his offspring to
cultivate learning and secure social mobility. He believed “Ten thousand
possessions are but common; nothing is of greater value than learning: 萬般皆下品,
唯有讀書高”.
Within
two generations, several descendants of 田福生,
including my great grandfather, great grand uncle, grandfather and my father,
attained scholars status through the grueling 3 day gaokao 高考 National
Imperial Exams established since the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) also known as
Keju 科舉 until 1905.
My
great-grandfather 田仁甫
(jinshi 近士) and my grandfather 田樹藩 (juren 舉人) were Imperial Scholars, and my father 田寳岱 came
in first nationally in the 1935 gaokao examination, equivalent to an imperial
zhuangyuan 狀元. Each of them attended
the same university during the transitional era from the 19th C Imperial Ching
Dynasty to the 20th C Republic of China: Guo
Zi Jian 国子监, Jing
Shi Da Xue Tang 京师大学堂,
and in its modern form, Peking
University 北京大学. They lived comfortably in multi-courtyard homes in
Beijing and on their family estates in Shandong.
My
Great Grandfather 田仁甫 the first in the Beijing Tien family line of Imperial Scholars
When
one of the late 19th C great famines befell north China, my great grandfather 田仁甫 gradually sold all of the Shandong Tien farms, except
a simple family house, to provide a daily one pot meal 大锅饭 for the villagers and drop-ins for 2 years. In gratitude,
the villagers protected the Tien Shandong house,
shoulder to shoulder with clubs
and farming and carpentry tools, when waves of rampaging bandits regularly
pillaged and plundered the countryside. Because of the bravery of the villagers
and their coordinated response to the alarm of approaching marauders, the
bandits learned to bypass the Tien estates for easier victims.
Upon
my great grandfather’s death, a large stone stele was erected in Laoling to
honor him, 田仁甫, a
jinshi 近士 academic who adhered to the junzi 君子
teachings of Confucius.
Great
grandfather had cultivated a circle of like-minded intellectuals and the
epitaph carved on the 田仁甫
memorial stone was composed by renowned scholars of the period.
This memorial and the Tien Shandong house were also smashed during the Cultural Revolution but 3 citizens who learned of the impending destruction of the stele by the Red Guards, secretly took rubbings of the memorial, hid them for almost three decades and, then, quietly delivered the precious reproduction to the astonished Tien family in Beijing in 1996.
Copies
of the preserved rubbings of the stone stele erected in Laoling to honor 田仁甫, my Great
Grandfather
5000
years of Chinese history narrates the rise/ascent and fall/collapse of
dynasties, kingdoms and families as have the Tien family experienced.
The
Tien family that landed in Taiwan in 1949 is approximately 90 generations by
genealogical records from the first Tien: Prince Wan 完 of the Chen
陳 kingdom - who fled in 627 BCE for refuge to the
neighboring Chi 齊
kingdom during internecine power struggles in the Chen 陳 court during the Spring & Autumn period 771-476
BCE (春秋战国). Per historical
records, the Chen royal house were descendants of Emperors Yao 堯 and Shun 舜.
In 627
BCE, when Prince Chen Wan 陳完
escaped to Chi, he created the
plain name “Tien”田 (meaning field) to become a simple farmer. But the
king of Chi, impressed by the humility, intelligence and bearing of the young
refugee, had other plans for the youth. The king consulted the court augers for a marriage of his daughter to Tien
Wan. The court fortune tellers felicitously prophesied “鳳凰於飛，五世起昌 – When the pair of phoenixes take
flight, five generations will prosper.”
Since then, this saying has been popularly
blazoned at wedding ceremonies. But the augers also continued in their
prediction: “In ten generations, the couple’s descendants will be without
peer.”
Indeed,
The Princess of Chi and Tien Wan’s progeny rose in influence in the Chi court
and ten generations later, the Tiens usurped the Chi throne and ruled until 221
BC when Chin Shih Huang 秦始皇 conquered Chi in his unification of the Empire of China.
For
the following 1600 years, surviving through centuries of betterment or
bitterness, the Tien clan held a ducal fiefdom in Shoguang 壽光, Shandong.
In
1402, when Ming Dynasty 明朝 Emperor Yong Le 永楽 usurped the throne, slaughtered and purged the old
court clans, our Tien branch escaped from Shoguang 壽光 to Laoling 楽陵 250
miles in southwest Shandong.
For
the next 400 years in Laoling, the Tien’s lived as simple farmers until 10
generations later a teenage 田福生, my great great great grandfather, fled from his
abusive stepmother to Beijing, 300 miles westward.
By
genealogical records 族谱, my
grandfather 田樹藩 was
approximately the 90th Tien generation from Tien [Chen] Wan; the 13th
generation of the Tien family who escaped from the wrath of the Ming emperor
Yong Lo; and 4th generation (from 田福生) in Beijing.
Beijing,
Old Peking, provided a good home for the Tien family for generations, but in
1949, my grandfather 田樹藩
refused to leave Beijing and Mainland China with 2 of his 4 sons, and 3 of his
4 daughters.
Born
in 1885, Grandfather was convinced that he had lived through half a century of
wars and revolutions, the overthrow of the Ching Dynasty, the turmoil of
warlords, the Japanese invasion and the domestic civil war. He believed he
would survive his last years in the beloved city he had grown up in.
As the
popular song goes “I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn
and a king...” as have the ancestors of all families.
There
are somber shadows and brilliant light in our ancestries.
When
my father left Chungking in 1943, he could not imagine he would never see his
father, older brother and older sister ever again; nor did my mother, her
mother. However, my parents’ longing for their hometowns never diminished.
In
1988, on my first trip back to the Mainland, having left in 1943, my father
pressed me to visit his list of places holding memories for him in Beijing,
Shandong, Kunming, Chongqing, Japan and Taiwan. Father called it a “quest” on
his behalf.
I have
tried to follow my father’s re-”quest” and journeyed multiple ten thousands of
miles over 25 years by trains, planes and automobiles, dove into the family’s
albums, documents, and archives with the unstinting support of my clan – my
mainland relatives, my son, daughters, granddaughter, cousins, nephews, as well
as extraordinary friends, resulting in my father’s Memoir 田寳岱回憶錄 published by 中央研究院 in 2015, 5 months after my father passed away in Los
Angeles.
I
never met my four grandparents. This chronicle is a gossamer strand
weaving stories of just
one branch of the lineage of the Tien family’s origins, journeys, struggles, losses
and achievements.
Life
is patched from ever so many partings. Perhaps this fragment of family history
might be threads in the tapestry of life to leave to those who come after.
I
write this memorial about my grandfather, a man grievously lost to his family,
friends, scholars, the city, the adjacent hills and the country he so loved.
But his books and writings are now come back into the dawning.
Maya
Angelou, renowned American poet and writer, wrote in her book, Why the Caged
Bird Sings: “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer. It sings
because it has a song.”
My
grandfather does not offer answers, but he has songs and his songs are being
heard again!
My Grandfather Tien Shu-Fan 田樹藩’s fan
bearing his calligraphy and poem about an ancient pine tree