Scott Tong is a Marketplace correspondent based in Washington, and was Marketplace‘s founding China bureau chief.
His latest venture is more personal. In his new book “A Village with My Name: A Family History of China’s Opening to the World,” Tong explores his family’s history in China — from his great-grandfather to his adopted daughter — and tries to provide a greater understanding of modern China.
“I got the wrong impression of China when I first got there in 2006, and I’m Chinese,” Tong (@tongscott) tells Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson. “I went to international school in Taiwan, and I was forced to learn Mandarin as a kid, so I thought I knew what to expect.”
- Scroll down to read an excerpt from “A Village with My Name”
Interview Highlights
On whether people get the wrong impression of China
“What I got when I first went there is this disease people talk about called ‘skyscraper syndrome.’ You go and it looks like Dubai, it looks like Manhattan, it looks fancy and China just looks like the story of today. It’s a right-now story, or the story of the future. And really what you lose is the longer story of where China has come from. And so it took me really a while to try to understand the right question to ask, and it really wasn’t until I left China four years after being there as a reporter that I thought, ‘You know what I really don’t understand well enough, is the longer story of how China got here,’ and I had a hunch that some of my family members were part of that story, and so that’s kinda what led me to start this book project.”
On trying to find Tong village, where his great-grandfather lived
“A lot of Chinese villages are disappearing now. So when my dad and I went to go find the Tong village, we weren’t sure it really existed. It took us a full day of asking around, asking people in the street, and in the end, we stumbled upon a person who said, ‘Oh I think I’ve heard of this place, and I know a guy,’ and he pulls out his phone, and then comes into the van, we pick up the next guy who also comes into the van and then we pick up a third guy, and this is kinda how it is in places like China. The third guy happens to be the party secretary, so he’s the most important person there, and he leads us to this village, which is 100 or 200 people along this kinda sad-looking creek, and it’s like a lot of villages in the world. There’s no indoor plumbing, there is electricity there. It’s a pretty basic existence. But, you know, on the other hand, it’s really something where you finally see where you’re from.”
On challenges he faced researching the book, and resorting to sending a young girl into a school his grandmother attended to take pictures
“Most institutions in China are gated, and they tend to have a guard. So I tried to go in, and I had my story prepared in Chinese, of this grandson of China going back, and this is the school my grandmother went to, it was run by American missionaries back at the time, and the guard didn’t let me in. I failed, which happens a lot. I tried to talk my way in and I failed. So, you know, I’m not really thinking very clearly. I’m just desperate. I hand my iPhone over to this 12-year-old, trusting that she’s gonna do what I say, and she actually goes in and she snaps a bunch of pictures for me, runs back out and does the little favor.
“It’s one thing to be a foreign reporter in China, and it’s a more adversarial relationship. A lot of Chinese people are pretty nationalistic, and they think the foreign media have something against the Chinese people and the Chinese government. But when I went back to research, work on this book, as, you know, ethnic Chinese from overseas coming back a couple generations later, I found the reception in China to be a lot different. I mean that was just kind of one of several moments where kind of the soul of China came out a little bit, because very often, people will not do something just to help you, just to kinda do you a favor — culturally it doesn’t happen very often. It happened a lot when I went and I said, you know, ‘I’m just trying to understand my longer family story here. Will you help me out?’ ”
On why he says news Chinese people get about the rest of the world is distorted
“The framing of it is often that, ‘A lot of the world is against us,’ and the U.S. kinda factors in the center of a lot of those conversations. So in the state media, it’s very often an us-against-them kind of narrative that the Chinese people have. So that really doesn’t tell the whole story, obviously, of what’s happening in the world. The reason it works I think is because there is very often a national pride in China, because not too long ago, a couple generations ago, a lot of the world seemed to be against China. China was unbelievably weak at the end of imperial China in the early 20th century, it was going through wars, a lot of other either attacks from the outside or self-made problems there. So China was really weak and left behind by modernity, and that mindset I think … a lot of people still have that mindset in China. So what the official media organs play to is ‘us against the world,’ and that often is how it’s portrayed.”
On how sure he is that what he discovered about his family in China is true
“I didn’t get the whole story, and certainly Chinese nationals — because of the recent past — have reason to not always tell the whole story. The centerpiece of how Mao [Zedong] controlled China was to pit people against one another, and undermine trust in society. So that lack of trust is still embedded in mainland culture today. It’s a pretty low-trust society. So people have understandable reasons I think to not always tell you the whole story.
“So I just took my communication, independent thinking, critical thinking, journalism skills, whatever I had in my pocket, and tried to apply them to what I was hearing from different family members. Now in some cases, there were documents that would support what I was finding that were consistent with what I was finding. When it was just one or two persons kinda telling me the story, there is uncertainty to that. And I try to be pretty clear with you, the reader, that I think this is what happened with the story. But in general, with the key members, kinda the five people across five generations in my family that I kinda try to build the story around, I’m pretty sure of most of the story, because it’s confirmed in a bunch of different ways. But like reporters going anywhere, you have to have the healthy skepticism, even when it’s your own family.”
Book Excerpt: ‘A Village With My Name’
By Scott Tong
Globalization drifts in and out of fashion, often quickly and without warning. As I write this in early 2017, we are living in quite a moment here. The modern connected age of open borders and markets is being vilified in ways I’ve not seen in my adult life. Raising drawbridges appears on the ballot wherever I look, and in the States, the handy new epithet is “globalist.” Where this all leads is impossible to know, and in any event I’m not in the predicting business (there are books and investment advisors for that kind of thing). But one thing is clear: much of the angst, ambivalence, and outright hostility toward today’s interlinked world has to do with China.
Without question, the mainland has benefited from global interconnections, paradoxically because its workers have been poor for so long and thus willing to work for what you and I consider peanuts. It seems to have happened quickly. China frequently is cast as a newcomer powerhouse to the top division, emerging out of nowhere. You know the framing of Instant China: Mao dies in the mid- 1970s, Deng Xiaoping takes over soon after, and the story starts there. Anything relevant is After Deng, AD.
Instant China makes for snappy, compelling stories. If you’re reading this, there’s a reasonable chance that you, like me, have parachuted into the mainland for a few days and heard a memorable life story of a cabbie, bond trader, or grubby dumpling seller. That person’s fortunes turned dramatically after Deng’s policy reforms, known as “reform and opening,” or gaige kaifang. Well- intended mainlanders can gaige kaifang you into submission: Gaige kaifang delivered economic and geographic mobility. It allowed for private property, for nobodies to open vegetable stalls and electronic workshops. Gaige kaifang brought meat to the table. The implication is, whatever preceded gaige kaifang was a lengthy period of numbing suffering that amounts to China’s Old Testament: famines, pestilence, floods, wars, colonialism, political witch- hunts, bound feet, and hyperinflation. The fall before the gaige kaifang redemption.
It’s a very clean story I myself told at times on the radio. My first big profile story in 2005 was of a poor, barely literate farmer in the western province of Sichuan. Mr. Xu, a sinewy man with a deep outdoor laborer’s tan and a crewcut, hailed from the village of Guang’an, the home of Deng Xiaoping. He sought his fortunes in the metropolis of Chongqing, finding grunt work as a porter; he roped people’s goods and boxes to a bamboo stick slung across his shoulders, carrying them to the appointed destination for a negotiated fee. Part human, part mule. He slept in a drafty group house in a shantytown, on the bottom level of a barracks- style bunk bed for twenty. I joined him on a return trip home to his village. Suddenly, Mr. Xu transformed into Big Man on Campus, the self- made tale of a village boy who went to the big city and made good. Mr. Xu used his savings to build the tallest house in the village. Stopping at a neighbor’s house for lunch, he caught me admiring a gigantic wok in the kitchen, perhaps four feet across. Mr. Xu pointed at it and declared: “Mine’s bigger.”
This telling serves multiple constituencies. For the ruling Communist Party in desperate search of legitimacy, it undergirds the essential founding myth that an economic miracle occurred on its watch. For international reporters, it provides a clean narrative to make sense of a big, chaotic place. But I am not so sure now. It’s like taking a snapshot of a flower with a closeup fish- eye lens, blurring the background. The picture is devoid of context.
There is a phrase that captures this context- less view of China, a phrase I’ve appropriated from a global banker and author named Graham Jeal: skyscraper syndrome. Wowed by a masculine highrise, trophy bullet train, nineteen- course feast, or airport auto- flush toilet, an observer looks at China and vacates rational thought. He or she moves on to a series of regrettable business or personal decisions, and returns home convinced the mainland has taken a controlling stake in the universe. China is, well, different. Eventually for those who stay, the fog begins to lift. The toilets in the trophy high- rises aren’t fixed quite right. The buildings stay vacant, and the workers inside underperform. A more nuanced picture starts to come into view.
At this moment in time, it’s worth looking at China and its place in the world with fresh eyes. A Village with My Name is my own pursuit of a useful historical perspective, a project that began after I returned to the United States in 2010. It’s a tricky undertaking, given there is so much history to consider. “The Chinese people have five thousand years of history,” one of my first Mandarin teachers lectured to me in 1980— a line that has been repeated to me five thousand times since. But how can a new story about China be so very old? How relevant is all that mind- numbing history of emperors and dynasties to today? Where did today’s China really come from?
My suggestion here— which, to be honest, reflects the thinking of many intellectual historians— is that critical roots go back to a prior heyday of globalization: the century before World War I. Going back at least to the nineteenth century, self- interested Chinese (and foreign) nationals took the seeds of modernity and sprinkled them on mainland soil. As it turns out, some of these first movers are on my family tree. If you know anything about China’s recent past, you know that only some people were rewarded for looking outward. Others paid a heavy price when political winds changed and a newly xenophobic China slammed its doors to the world.
The upshot of that decision was to delay progress. Fundamentally, China’s is a story of coming late to modernity. Many Chinese have told me: We came late to the industrial revolution, late to the digital revolution. We are not going to miss the next one.
My reporting job at Marketplace now focuses on environment and energy issues, and periodically this work takes me to the energy capital. The oil business is of course a boom/bust sector for unabashed risk takers, so it’s fitting that Grandmother Mildred lies at rest there. For decades, her ashes lived in a crowded Hong Kong cemetery, but when Aunt Lily moved to Texas in the early 1980s, she brought the urn with her. On a late autumn day in 2016, about a dozen of my family members and friends gather before her tombstone at the Forest Park Cemetery on Westheimer Road. At my behest, we have come to remember someone else: her late husband, Carleton Sun, my maternal grandfather, six decades after his passing. For the first time, there is a place in the world where he can be remembered.
My parents and older brother have flown in from the West Coast. Also joining us is a distant cousin of mine from California, whose grandfather was Carleton’s brother. When this brother died in his early twenties, Carleton took care of his widow and his brother’s three daughters, bringing them out of the Hubei village to live in Shanghai. At this ceremony we have no remains to bury, though I’ve brought the soil I scooped up from the mass grave site at the Delingha prison labor camp. Since then, I’ve waited three years to bury my grandfather, symbolically, on the advice of the woman bureaucrat in the Qinghai provincial prison department.
My Houston- based cousin Marjorie says a prayer, and then I’m given five minutes to summarize everything I’ve learned about Carleton Sun, which is impossible. So I race through a timeline of his life, interspersing quotes here and there from family letters: his birth into a merchant family in the dying days of imperial China; his meeting the daughter of his father’s work colleague (“we two were small friends”); confiscation of his family’s land (“his family property was occupied by the Communists for nearly seven years”); his participation in college student protests against foreign imperialism. My attempt to lighten things up by mentioning his mediocre college grades falls flat. No chuckles.
I take a breath. Then I mention his fateful decision to work for the Japanese occupation of China during World War II. A couple of nods. This is when I mount his criminal defense, which may matter only to me. Looking back, I say, we know the victors from that period— the Communists, the Guomindang— got to write the history we read today. I cite the argument of convicted collaborator Chen Bijun, who won a courtroom ovation for arguing it was actually the collaborators who fed the local people. They were the ones who traded land for peace and halted the killings. They were the true patriots, Chen’s argument goes, not the other parties who retreated like cowards.
A couple of heads nod again, but mostly the audience remains stoic. That is the Chinese way, but it also tells me it’s time to move on. In framing his story on the right or the wrong side of history, I am playing the Chinese Communist Party’s game— on their turf. In challenging the party’s historiography about who the true patriots and enemies are, I am viewing the past through their lens. The older generation here has long moved beyond this fight. It’s me who has come late to understanding my grandfather’s life on his terms, not anyone else’s.
My five minutes are up. I close briefly with what I learned about his arrest, sentence, and imprisonment, and end with this anecdote: he rewarded his children for taking cod liver oil with ten peanuts. But don’t eat the nubby seed of the nut, he warned, “or else peanuts will grow out the top of your head.”
It’s now Aunt Lily’s turn to speak about her father. She ends up speaking directly to him. She leans forward in her chair and faces a large, grainy photo of Carleton Sun we’ve blown up from his 1950 passport picture. She says: “I am going to speak jiali hua.” Family dialect. What she spoke at home to her parents is a jumbled mix of Mandarin, Hubei, and Nanjing dialect that is remarkably easy for me to understand. “In 1950 you dropped us off at the train station,” she begins. “We went to Hong Kong and you stayed behind. Then we heard you were locked up, and we were so worried. You took such good care of us.”
Then she proceeds to update him on the last six decades, as if it’s a family Christmas letter to catch him up. “The three of us children are still around. Anna and I live in the United States; right now we are in Houston. Brother Eddie is in Hong Kong. I saw him last year. Anna will likely go visit him next year. You don’t have to worry about us any more— we are all doing very well. Every day I write ink- brush characters, but not as good as you.” It is odd to hear an eighty- something aunt speak this way, even though she is speaking to a father she last saw at the age of seventeen. She says that because of the information I have found, “we finally can have an understanding of your life. This is the burial ground of your wife. And my husband. And for me. Before long we can see each other again, and I can call you ‘Father’ one more time. Thank you that you married a woman who could take care of us all these years.” Then Aunt Lily yields to my mother, who stands and reads from her iPad.
My mother speaks with a quiet anguish that makes me wonder if she’ll make it through. “After I came back from my trip with Scott from China, I was incredibly saddened,” she says. “I was saddened for my parents for their hard lives, and the unthinkable torture my dad had to endure while he was in prison. So to this dark place I rarely dared to venture.” The wound from her childhood never really healed. So many Chinese people of a certain age walk around with these same wounds just beneath the surface. In my mother’s case, her reckoning began with therapy, convincing her “to stop feeling so guilty” and to focus on her parents’ essential hope: for their children to have better lives than theirs. “To remember them and thank them.” It’s a cliché in America that a parent wants his or her child to have a better life, but in the early 1950s China, it was hard to imagine what that might have looked like.
My mother concludes by holding up his passport from 1950, with a blue cover and visas stamped inside for Argentina, Chile, and the United States. In the end, he never left China. “Even though it never materialized, this is the passport. And after sixty years, he is here. So my wish for my mom and dad is to finally rest in peace together, in a place they didn’t get to come when they were alive.” Her words bring to mind an image: when she and her siblings left Shanghai during the war, they set out with a heavy trunk full of family photos and heirlooms. But on the long journey south, they had to get rid of the chest— perhaps to keep moving. In the same way, my mother has had to slough off this heavy burden of guilt in order to continue forward.
After the last speaker, a four- person Chinese choir sings the Mandarin version of my mother’s favorite hymn:
When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
At the end, we each place a yellow Texas rose at the base of my grandmother’s tomb stone and then sprinkle a handful of Qinghai graveyard soil on top. It’s the closest we can come to burying him, at least for now (I will continue looking for any records of his life and death). At some point Carleton Sun’s name will be etched on the same stone. We have spoken his name aloud so many times this day, and I wonder when the last time was that my mother and aunt did that. His name for so many years had only been whispered in shame.
Reprinted with permission from A VILLAGE WITH MY NAME. Published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2017 Scott Tong. All rights reserved.
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