Memoirs From Communist China - How My Father Became a Revolutionary Cadre and How Grandfather Was Punished For Being A Landlord

My mother is an incredible story teller. Many family friends frequently invite themselves over for dinner just to hear her old stories from China. She was an American Literature major in graduate school, but hasn't written for ages. Upon hearing about Steemit, she had the idea of writing down her stories and sharing them with all of you. After the success of her first story about her name, she has been full of excitement and joy with the new prospects of story telling on Steemit. She plans on writing short stories such as the one below, sharing them all exclusivley on Steemit, and eventually combining all of the stories into a memoir book. I hope you enjoy the following words from my mom!

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A photo of my father lovingly adoring his first born daughter (1957). There other two children on the side of the photo were my father’s nephew and niece.

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My father was born in June of 1929 into a prosperous landlord family in Suining county, in the southwest region of China. His great-grandfather Cai Ming Xuan (1845 – 1942) was a well-known artist of Chinese traditional painting and collector of Chinese art and calligraphy. Cai Ming Xuan had five sons, two daughters and about thirty grandchildren. When my father was born, the whole family was overjoyed to add another son – a symbol of good fortune and lasting family linage. Before my father, my grandparents had three children – my father’s oldest sister, older brother and second older sister. The birth of a son called for a big celebration. A grand banquet was prepared for the whole extended family right after my father was born. My grandmother took a bath and dressed up beautifully for this big happy occasion. Shortly after the banquet, she became extremely ill and died of puerperal fever. The source of the bacteria was the untreated bath water.

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Two paintings by my father’s great-grandfather Cai Ming Xuan hung at the museum of Suining City, my father’s hometown. Bamboo was his favorite subject since it symbolized strength, resilience and persistent life force.

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My grandfather married again shortly after this. His second wife died not long after the wedding from a sore on her foot infected by an accidental peck of a rooster. My grandfather married again shortly after the death his second wife. Sadly for my poor father, the third wife my grandfather married to was a manipulative, jealous and small-hearted woman who did not love my father because he was not blood related to her. The mistreatment of my father from her intensified after she gave birth to her own son three years later.

Because my father and his half-brother were close in age, they played and went to school together. However, my father’s step-mother would dress her own son with clothes of expensive silk while my father only wore clothes of plain cotton. When the servants sent lunches to the two boys at school, the food in my uncle’s lunch box would contain lots of meat and fish while my father’s would have coarse food with pickled vegetables and very little meat. Both my father and my uncle were very talented with Chinese traditional painting, but only my uncle received special tutoring and he later became a professional and well-known artist of both Chinese traditional painting and Western oil painting.

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A painting by my father’s great grandfather printed onto a silk handkerchief. On the right top corner are the names of his sons, grandsons and great grandsons. This painting was done in 1934. My father, his older brother and younger half-brother were his only three great grandsons born then. My father’s father and step mother had four children total, two boys and two girls, the youngest was a son whose nickname was “Double Happiness” because he was the second son to his parents. Please note that my father’s great grandfather had daughters and many granddaughters but none of their names appeared on this handkerchief because of their gender.

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My father’s grandmother loved him very much and would try to protect him from too much abuse from his step-mother. My father was emotionally attached to his grandmother. Once when my father was a teenager, the women in the household were playing Majiang game. My father’s step-mother lost and his grandmother won. My father showed much happiness and excitement for his grandmother and somehow this evoked the bad feelings from his step-mother. She yelled and asked my father to leave, and threaten to spit on him. My father said “I dare you!”. To his biggest shock, his step-mother actually spit right onto his face! This spit stayed in my father’s memory the rest of his life. He never forgave his step-mother. He was very angry with his father for allowing this woman to mistreat him this way. His father would not do anything to stop his wife, instead he would try to pacify my father by saying to him “好男不与女斗”， a Chinese expression meaning “A good and virtuous man should not fight with a woman”.

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A photo of my father with his classmates in high school taken in October 1947 in Chengdu, Sichuan.

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My father left his hometown and went to Chengdu to attend high school, and later on he was accepted by Chongqing University majoring in textile studies. As a young man he was idealistic and was attracted to Communist ideology. He joined the Communist periphery organizations. Despite his landlord family background, he was recruited by the Communist party because he was ideologically progressive and rejected his landlord family. He remained in Chengdu and worked for different government agencies until he retired in 1987.

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A photo of my father (in the middle) with his older brother (on the right) and younger brother (on the left) in front of the oil painting painted by my father’s younger brother who was the artist of the family. The painting was the portrait of Mao Ze Dong on his way to organize the workers movement in AnYuan in 1921. This painting was on display at the government agency where my father worked during the Cultural Revolution in 1968.

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Right after the establishment of People’s Republic of China in 1949, the government started the “Land Reform” movement. My grandfather’s land was confiscated by the government and distributed to the peasants. During two years of the Land Reform (1950 to 1952), the government mobilized the peasants to “fight the landlord”. They confiscated land and physically abused and executed the landlords. Many were executed during this time. My grandfather was kidnapped, blindfolded, and taken to an execution site. Here, he was forced to witness the executions of other landlords, unknowing if he would be next. He was also forced to stand between two pinwheels with two fans blowing air on him from both sides until he fell down. He went home that day and became very ill. He died shortly after. During the Land Reform movement, the Cai family also lost all their property and personal belongings. One of my grandfather’s cousins had to hand over eight trunks of valuable Chinese traditional paintings and calligraphy collected by my father’s great-grandfather to the government.

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A photo of my parents right after they got married in the early 1950s. They were posing in front of a government building with Chinese characters which stated “The Proletarians of The World Unite!”

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As a child, I have never heard my parents mention anything about my grandparents. I only learned that my family was from the “evil landlord class” from other children in our neighborhood when we were having a fight. However I was not bothered too much by this stigma growing up because my father was a middle level cadre and had a respectable position working for the government. Growing up in the sixties and seventies in China, children had to fill out all kind of forms to attend schools or participate in various activities. All the forms would always have an item we needed to fill out: 家庭出身” Class Status of The Family”. During the Maoist years Mao Ze Dong instructed the nation that “We need to talk about class struggle yearly, monthly and daily”. It was a huge embarrassment, humiliation and disadvantage for any children who had to fill out “landlord” or “capitalist” and any “bad elements” of the society as their “Class Status of the Family”. In my case, I would always proudly put down “Revolutionary Cadre” as the class status of my family. I became curious about my father’s family background only after I became an adult living in the United States. On one of his visits to my home in California, I sat down and interviewed my father and he shared with me stories of his childhood with enthusiasm. I am writing here to share my father’s story with you and I hope you have enjoyed it.

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Two cards that my father painted for me when he visited me in California in 1990. He received no professional training but he taught himself how to draw Chinese traditional paintings and was an amateur artist.

My father posing for a picture with my oldest sister at the People’s Park in Chengdu 1958.

A photo of my father and I in 1990 at my home in California. My father was sharing with me his stories and I taped his stories on the audio tape. My father had a great sense of humor and he had just made me laugh with one of his jokes. This photo was taken by my husband Bill Baumeister.