She was lying in a grave. Her breathing, hard and heavy from the recent incline, gradually slowed as she lay against the damp earth. Fatigue and weariness washed over her. Now that it was nearing dawn, the sun, approaching the horizon, cast a faint glow in the sky. They were fortunate to have found these graves, and my mother, Chun, and her three siblings laid low against the dirt walls, hiding from the border police out on patrol. Just hours before, in the mask of fog, they had mistakenly wandered onto a military base and had walked straight into the barrel of a howitzer before realizing where they were. Panicked, they stumbled backward, tripping over themselves to flee the premises, running blindly in what they hoped was the direction of safety. It was Zhou, my mother’s older brother, who had found the excavated mounds of fresh dirt and then the hollows in the ground, mined precisely to ensconce a human body. This is where they now waited out the daylight hours before they would continue their trek again at night.
Growing Up During the Cultural Revolution
My mother was 19 when she and her three oldest siblings escaped Communist China by swimming from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, a distance of about three miles. It was 1970, four years into the Cultural Revolution, a sociopolitical movement led by Chairman Mao Zedong, whose vision to cleanse the nation from opposing ideologies sent the country into a period marked by chaos, suspicion, fear, and turmoil. And it was about a decade after Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign, which propelled the country headlong into one of the deadliest man-made famines in recorded history.
Remembering their hunger, my mother relates, “Your gonggong — your grandfather — never had to spank any of us kids. One time, one of my younger brothers acted out, and your gonggong simply took one teaspoon of rice from the boy’s dinner bowl. My brother wailed and clung onto your gonggong’s leg, begging him to stop. It was the…
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