Lost Underground, Chapter 2

LI MEI LING SPEAKS OF HER FATHER

I worshiped my father. As a very small child I would leap with my tiny feet into his giant footprints as he strode across our courtyard to smell the blossoms and listen to the bird songs. He taught me the love of beauty and poetry which as a young teenager I carried to the underground salons of the Misty Poets. Here we deflected the hunger pangs of the country’s starvation gorging ourselves on art and poetry.  

My father came from a wealthy family. He could have led a leisurely life, but as a young man his growing ideals soon overcame his inherited luxuries. In 1917, at the age of 17, my father chose to risk everything in the name of the Communist party to save China. As a young leader of the party, he had many identities: some secret, some famous. But to me, he was simply “Li Fan.” My dad, my hero, and my security. And I was his “favorite child”.  

At only 20 years old, known as the regional Secretary General of the Communist underground, my father and his childhood friend together led student rebellions. But in the end, their passion, and dreams of saving China were dashed, and victory was not theirs for the taking.  

In the name of Mao Zedong, he spent much of his youth as a vice commissar of the peasant uprisings trying to save China.  

Shockingly I found my father laying close to death in a make-shift hospital bed, unattended and labeled as a traitor by the Communist Party. I sat beside him, hearing him moan and watching him dream, while I wondered what was going on in his head and in his heart. 

LI FAN

They say I suffered a stroke. Here I am trapped in this bed forsaken by the angels. My youngest daughter Li Mei Ling sits by my side hoping I will awaken and be ok. She is more like me than any of my children, and as a child, adored and admired me. I regret that she has to witness my suffering and see me labeled as a failure and a traitor now. 

My left side is lifeless, and while I can think, I cannot speak. Once again, I am a prisoner. But this time, I am imprisoned inside myself. When I was young and strong, people followed me when I spoke. Now, I can only lie in my bed with silent thoughts of my accomplishments, my failures, and my regrets.  

My youth flashes before my eyes like a blinding light. It darkens and flashes again and I can see only fragments of that past: 

Our family was the wealthiest in the village. As children we roamed the 200 Chinese acres where 30 family members also resided. My best friend, from a well to do family nearby, was seven years older than me. He looked out for me wherever we went and taught me about our land that grew the best sesame in all of China. He told me stories of dragons and heroes, and his dreams of leaving the good life to seek his fortune. He promised that someday we could do that together. He loved me as his little brother, and I followed him everywhere.  

My father owned a factory where they made sesame oil for cooking. My three brothers and I worked in the factory using an old family recipe for milking the oils from the tiny seed to coax it into that golden amber liquid treasured by everyone.  The aroma of the warm sesame oil would travel in the air for miles. Sesame represented our life. The roots of the sesame grow deep into the soil. Those deep roots make the sesame resilient. While other crops wither and die under the hottest summer, the sesame uses only half as much water and can stand droughts. My youth was like the sesame. My family roots helped me survive in times of personal disaster. I was strong and I was invincible, and I knew I could save the country.  

Baoding was a military center outside of Beijing where I attended school. The center’s name is roughly interpreted as “protecting the capital”, a reference to the seat of government not far from the school. I was 17 years old and a young radical there in 1927. Our conversations questioned who could save China…Mao Zedong’s Communist Party or Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist Party’s Democracy? 

At that time the Communist doctrine spoke of Nationalists then in power as the devil. There were 7 of us student radicals so strong and so earnest in our beliefs that one day we led a student rebellion in the school against the Nationalist government.  

In the thunder of our running feet through the hallways of Baoding, I heard shouts of “Down with Chiang! Our shouts and threats drove the principal out of the school. Shoving and shouting more anti-Nationalist slogans we commandeered the building. Our victory was short lived. That same day the authorities stormed the school and threw us out. I felt no shame, only more determination to succeed with our student rebellions. All 7 of us students went to Beijing to petition the school for our reinstatement. We rented an apartment near Tiananmen Square where I found enough work to help support our cause. We lived there for about 8 months from fall to summer. Unfortunately, only I had clothing suitable for the freezing temperatures of a Beijing Winter. We made do with whatever we could steal for the cause and some of us completed our education in that same school a few years later. 

At 20 in 1930, I was accepted into the Communist Party where membership is by invitation only. Two years later, in 1932 while the Communist committee was in Baoding, I was appointed as the regional Secretary General of the Communist underground with my old childhood hero and best friend as my leader. He was 29 at the time and I was 22. Our assignment was to create a peasants’ rebellion. We stormed and occupied the Baoding school again, but this time for a whole month. The Nationalist Army tried to starve us out, allowing no food to enter the building. Fortunately, people on the outside helped our cause and smuggled food in to keep us alive. After a month, deciding they had waited long enough, Chiang Kai Shek’s Army stormed the school, killed several students, and arrested the others. My leader and I escaped their notice and plotted our next move.  

At that same time, various areas of China were controlled by independent Warlords.  They ruled through a total reliance upon military power to maintain their turf. Many had the backing of foreign powers, most notably Japan who had already taken control of Manchuria in 1931, seeking raw materials to fuel its growing industries. Japan controlled large sections of China and war crimes against the Chinese were commonplace. A short distance from us, the warlord controlling this area murdered the rebel students and arrested 30 or 40. Killing the students was their big mistake. The intellectuals along with people from all fields marched down the streets around the area in protest. It forced the warlord to proclaim a formal apology to the students along with reparations, but it was too little, too late because the Red Army had already established itself throughout the south and planned for the first attack.

Peasants and students began the uprising headed by a Party leader from the central committee and all the local leaders. The rebellion lasted 5 days and 5 nights.  

The first day of the fighting we had only 60 people, a few guns confiscated from the enemy, and our red flags.  

By the 3rd day we controlled 20 villages, and our Red Army Guerrilla force grew to 300 people and 120 guns. We all wore a red ribbon on our forehead to show our determination and sacrifice.  

The fourth day was the peak of rebellion. We caught some armed landlords and burned their unfair tax deeds, distributed their land and food to poor peasants and marched to a marketplace for a public assembly. Thousands of peasants gathered there, and several hundred joined them. Our Red army formed a headquarter and land reform committee. I took my place as one of the uprising’s vice commissars. 

The fifth day was the last day. In the shroud of night, the enemy surrounded us, shooting and hacking off heads with sickles. Sticky blood splatters and the smell of gunpowder saturated the area. Deafening screams permeated the night. Peasants returned the favor with the same venomous attack beheading the warlords who resisted. In the end, we were defeated by a troop hired by a yet more powerful warlord, Zhang Xueliang, who controlled the area.  

Our failure resulted in total annihilation. Four leaders were guillotined, their heads decapitated and publicly displayed. I looked around to see blood-soaked headless bodies everywhere. The stench of death pervaded the air. I was arrested during the massacre and my beloved friend and leader was among those missing in action. The battle lasted two hours. I was able to hide my identity as a communist leader by pretending to be a student looking for an old classmate. 

I was given an 8-year prison sentence. Imprisonment for me meant hard labor, starvation, torture that included extracting my fingernails, and beatings that broke my bones. When my emaciated body eventually gave out, I knew I would soon be executed. I thought I would never see my family again. I tried to dream about my wife, my children, my brothers, and my father. But the beatings took everything I had in me, and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t remember their faces.  

After two agonizing years, my older brother sneaked a message to me. I learned that my father sold everything he owned…the glorious land where the sesame grew, the sesame oil business…everything to free me. The golden sesame oil I once knew since childhood was now being used to grease the palms of many in his plan to free me and I learned what I was to do. In the early evening, I pretended to be sick. As a small boy I discovered that if I inhaled as much air into my lungs and then exhaled as fast as I could, repeating it several times, I would pass out.  

To facilitate my escape, I decided I would use this trick to pretend I was very ill. It didn’t take much to pretend because my body was already frail from starvation, hard labor, and multiple beatings. The first time I passed out, someone came to my aid. After causing myself to pass out this way several times, I was taken to the hospital where an accomplice pronounced me dead on arrival. My presumed dead body was placed into a hastily made coffin and dumped into a ready-made grave for prisoners. Evening fell and a great darkness descended around me as I felt the thud of the lid drop.  I could hear the pebbles rumble on top of my coffin with each shovel full of dirt, and the dust from it filtered through the cracks in the lid and into my eyes. As the air inside the coffin grew thin my own hot breath vaporized, clinging to my skin, and soaking my hair. I felt the itch of salty droplets pool together at the back of my neck. As each labored breath brought the walls of my lungs closer and closer together, I finally saw the faces of my family clearly. Then nothing. I had been buried alive.  

The grave diggers with their pockets jingling full of my father’s gold, returned soon after to shovel the dirt from my freshly buried coffin. They had buried me in a very shallow grave so under the cover of night it didn’t take long to retrieve my limp and nearly lifeless body from the coffin and return me to Beijing.  

When I awoke from this nightmare, I was in my father’s home with my brother standing over me. He had helped my father sell nearly everything and orchestrated my escape from prison and pending execution.  My parents had sacrificed their lifelong dreams in order to save me. I remained close to home for two years allowing my broken body and spirit to mend. During my recuperation my brother died having worked so hard in the sesame fields. His dreams disappeared with my father’s gold that purchased my freedom. 

After escaping with my life, I lost track of my old friend and leader. He had changed his name many times as I had, having left his wealthy home in Guangdong province in 1920. I spent the next 6 years looking for him but failed. Exhausted, I returned to my home. Only much later did I learn that he was one of those executed outside the capital city at the age of 29. He along with those early martyrs have been buried along with their pure idealism and disappeared into the smoke and dust of history. My beloved friend and leader died so young. Unable to trace his identity, his family never learned his fate. 

By 1937, I joined in the fight against the Japanese invasion of China. The battlefront was my hometown.  The Japanese burned our village and jailed my entire family. My father was not spared. Forced to participate in the public “struggle meetings” he was required to kneel down in humiliation and confess to crimes he didn’t commit.  He refused to kneel so one leg was sacrificed and yet he never made a sound.  

I left home and several dozen youngsters followed me to the Communist center for Anti-Japanese war. I spent 3 years in training and followed Yang Xiu Feng, a former professor in Beijing. Yang had established a guerilla army made up by his following of students. We fought the Japanese without armament of any kind.  But each victory provided us with weapons from the dead Japanese soldiers. 

Anti-Japanese resistance forces, or the Kuomintang, accused the Communists of contributing too little to the war effort against Japan and that they were only interested in expanding their own power base. In reaction we planned to stage a great offensive to prove them wrong and mend relations between our two armies.  

The “Eighth Route Army” began with 20 regiments but grew eventually to 80 then to 100. Our guerilla army became one brigade of the 129th division of the “Eighth” heading the War of Resistance against the Japanese led by Communist leader Deng Xiao Ping. The first attack took place in the northern province of Hebei 150 miles from Beijing and was the main force of the Communists against the Japanese. We blew up bridges and tunnels and ripped up 600 miles of railroad track. We destroyed the Jinxing coal mine, which was important to the Japanese war industry. That battle became known as the “Great Campaign with One Hundred Regiments. “  

1966 was the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Mao felt that his own personal power was linked to the transformation of his country and of his people. He found ways to defeat enemies through many means including finding or creating scapegoats to distract the attention of the populace or reinforce his position as the distinguished leader. He used the masses and warlords under his control, to do the work for him, labeling the victims as traitors. 

Li Mei Ling

The image of my father in that hospital bed still haunts me. When I arrived at his bedside, seeing his condition I was heartbroken and angry to the point where I could see and feel blood rise behind my eyes. After dedicating 40 years of his life fighting for Mao and leading his communist armies into battle, I found a large poster hanging over his bed labeling him a traitor. On his head was placed a cone shaped hat bearing the painted word “traitor”. His face was marked with bold black letters screaming betrayer and defector. A heavy wooden sign describing his crime was hung around his neck by a thin piece of wire that sliced into his flesh and disappeared. I tried to relieve the weight from his neck, since he was too weak to do it himself. I dared not remove it for fear of the spies that would report it and make it worse for all of us.  

I learned later that Chairman Mao turned on my father when he needed a scapegoat. He declared him an enemy of the revolution because during one of the many skirmishes he was captured by the Nationalists and escaped, surviving imprisonment. He claimed that if he was a true Communist the Nationalists would have killed him. His survival meant he had to be a Nationalist spy. So condemned by Mao, the label of traitor followed my father for the rest of his life and forever affected the lives of our entire family. Good schools and jobs were denied all of us because of this family history. 

Years later after the Cultural Revolution ended, my siblings and I forged a document that allowed us to examine some historical records which we believed would clear his name. Eventually we succeeded and he was officially proclaimed innocent. Sadly, he died before we could prove his innocence.  His dreams of saving China had been buried alive.