"Dad, tell me about communism." My father looked up from his newspaper and gave me a puzzled look. "What for?" he asked. "I have this assignment," I told him. "Where I have to write about where we came from. And I thought it might be interesting to write about communism because you always talk about how bad it was and how grandma and grandpa were teachers but they had to work on farms because of the Cultural Revolution and all of that stuff." My father sighed and took out a yellowed book from a shelf of journals, letters, photographs, and history books. The yellowed book was one of the history books.
I was in fifth grade when I had to do that report on my family's background. Every year, I manage to get an assignment where I am forced, by the will of the assignment or by my own curiosity, to ask my father about his past and my grandfather's past, and then write about it. Growing up, my father would occasionally bring up our family's plight during Mao's purge of the bourgeois. He would talk about those crazy collective farms and how mad the country's leaders were to suggest that everything, from cow pellets to the cows themselves, could be shared. He was even more angered at the fact that the government really thought that peasants were the future of the country and attempted to do away with intellectualism in the country.
I thought perhaps my father was the one who was insane. His rants painted a picture of a destitute totalitarian country, where leaders thought they knew what was best for the people. I was intrigued by what seemed to be a fairy tale-like story of a demonizing king and his lowly helpless subjects. I wanted to know how my grandfather played into this story. As part of an annual Chinese ritual, I paid my respects to him by praying in front of his portrait. He was almost a god or at least, a figure that exuded a sort of mysterious and inexplicable aura. I wanted to know more about him, but every time I received an assignment on my family and I asked my father about him, he would always reach for the history book. He would never answer questions I had about my grandfather, about why he was blacklisted or why my family ended up on a communal farm, for the truth is a terrible thing. Perhaps my father was afraid to explain the realities of what he went through. Or maybe it was just the opposite--that my grandfather's story wasn't as glamorous as I made it out to be. Or perhaps he didn't want me to understand for what might be understood there was a reproach to me.
In this way, my father opened a Pandora's Box. Somehow, I wanted my grandfather's story to have an effect on my life. It seemed to be the case with so many of my friends. Grandparents who survived the Holocaust, grandparents who fought in World War II, grandparents who went through the Korean War--I wanted such a story, and I wanted to feel a connection to it. Like Jack, I was intrigued by the actions and motives of a long-lost relative and I wanted to understand them. I wanted to know that maybe he was like me, that maybe our passions crossed. I didn't want our lives to be two twitches, two vastly different generations that never knew each other and never affected each other. Somehow, I felt that our lives were part of an enormous spider web and if I touched it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration would ripple to the remotest perimeter.
But my father would never budge from his usual retelling of that chapter in his life. He wouldn't tell me more than what the history books wrote and still today, I am left sifting through textbooks and wondering what went through my grandfather's head when his family was pushed out of their home in the city to a farm in the countryside. As a consequence, I am left with a story that perhaps isn't true, one created from my endless pursuit of knowledge. Whenever I ask my father to confirm what I think really happened, he will simply say that they were blacklisted. For him, the burden of the past lingers and the awful responsibility of Time still beckons. For me, the main concern continues to be knowing my dead grandfather. After all, the end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing I can't know. I can't know whether knowledge will save me or kill me. I will be killed, all right, but I can't know whether I am killed because of the knowledge which I got or because of the knowledge which I haven't got and which if I had it, would save me.
Perhaps my father is only trying to save me from myself. He knows I have an idealized picture of my grandfather and maybe he wants to keep it that way. Perhaps if I discovered how ordinary my grandfather was, my relationship with him--the spider web connection--would fade and he and I would be nothing more than two twitches in the Huang family timeline. Just as Willie's story was Jack's story, I'd like to keep my grandfather's story mine, whether or not my conception of it did happen. Soon though, I too may have to succumb to the awful responsibility of Time. I will, at some point, have to realize that in the midst of the process I tried to discover the truth and not the facts. Then, when the truth was not to be discovered, or discovered, could not be understood by me, I could not bear to live with the cold-eyed reproach of the facts.
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