A series of posts from traveling in China and Taiwan 2019-20
From Yanggu County, Shandong Province
山東省陽穀縣
Dad and I at Shizilou 獅子樓, one of the settings in the Outlaw of the Marsh, which is now a historical landmark.
I always thought it was an absurd omission to say that I am “Chinese.” Sure, it is our ancestral homeland, but China is such a diverse nation that it would be grossly negligent to leave it at that.
Our part of China is the cradle of Han civilization, which is the dominant ethnic group and 92% of the population. Confucius hails from our region, Taishan is a holy mountain that is visited by many emperors since at least 200 BC, and Outlaws of the Marsh (Shuihuzhuan), one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, is based on a collection of local stories. The Han people, blessed by the geography of zhongyuan, literally, the Central Plains, through countless wars of conquests, invasions, migrations, and assimilations, made China as it is today.
Legend has it that at the end of the Ming Dynasty, millions perished in a devastating combination of drought, famine, and corrupt governance. People ate whatever they could find, leaves, roots, tree bark, and when all the greenery was plucked from the land, starving parents exchanged their own toddlers with those of others. When even that was consumed, they swallowed the local soil - a type of clay that was soft when wet but soon hardened in the digestive tracts of their victims, to hasten the inevitable.
It was in neighboring Shanxi province, epicenter of the worst of the suffering and death, that an elder of the Kuo clan gathered up his offspring and told them that the land that had sustained them for generations could no longer, and that in order to live, they must leave. He got out one of the biggest metal pots the village had, now devoid of any food, and shattered it into a hundred pieces, and told each of them to take a sliver, and that if the clan shall ever reunite, the metal pieces would fit like a puzzle and that's how they would know they were once family.
We do not know the names of the ancestors who left the desolate land that day, or what generation they were. At least some of them traveled east into Shandong until they arrived at the fertile nexus of the Yellow River and the Grand Canal, and here, they decided it was suitable for their new home. The prosperity of the region naturally lent itself to a name - Sunny Grains, or Yanggu, which was known in the literature since at least 657 BC.
Some of my living relatives still residing in Yanggu. They are tall and burly Northern Chinese folks as seen with my three second cousins (one to my right and two to my left), and two second cousins, once removed (far left). Mom is Southern Chinese and is much shorter, so I’m a mutt by local standards.
Starvation was a fairly common occurrence until well into the 20th Century. During Mao’s Great Leap Forward, local communist party officials made up grossly exaggerated production figures to meet government quotas, and when the central government sent inspectors, they gathered up the harvest from all the surrounding farmland and told the inspectors it came from just one plot. The delighted inspectors reported the figures to Beijing, who then gave the order to ship grain that did not exist to the cities at a time when drought ravaged Northern China. 30 million people died between 1959 and 1961. Some of my relatives starved to death in their beds. When one of them was buried, his son had to take his pants off because it was the only pair of pants the family had left.
A section of the Grand Canal near Dongchang fu 東昌府 (present-day Liaocheng 聊城), which is where Northerners got onto boats, since the canal had become unnavigable farther north.
My grandfather grew up in Yanggu. The Yellow River carried large amounts of sediment from Western highlands, living up to its namesake, and until modern times overflowed its banks regularly. In 2,500 years of recorded history, it overflowed 1,593 times and changed course 26 times. An untold amount of manpower was spent building dikes and controlling flooding. The Grand Canal was built by an emperor who was so intent on traveling that his exploits eventually wrecked the dynasty and resulted in his own execution by hanging, but in an agrarian society, it greatly improved north-south shipping and resulted in the prosperity of China for the next 1,000 years. This nexus of natural circumstances resulted in a highly productive region, visited by all sorts of people who traveled via the Grand Canal, and provided food for millions.
The family graveyard. The closest grave is my grandfather’s brother, the tombstone behind is my great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather is near the wall. He does not have a headstone because no one accurately remembers his name.
My great-grandfather was a gambler and by the time my grandfather was born the family had fallen by the wayside. Had circumstances never intervened, my grandfather might have been content to till the fields and have a bunch of farm town children. But he was drafted as a teenager into a local warlord's army as a replacement for a rich person - that person did not want to enlist, so paid for a poor farm boy to go in his place. My grandfather attended boot camp at the Sanshan huiguan, a temple for guangong, a deity of prosperity and meeting place of travelers who did business along the Grand Canal.
Sanshan huiguan 三陝會館. The Grand Canal was right behind where I was standing.
Grandpa slept on the floor at this very spot on that night someone called his name. A statue of guangong presides over the room.
One night while he slept on the floor of the temple, he heard a voice yell out his name, "Kuo Zhenguang! Why aren't you home?" This was odd, because since he was a sub, no one should have known his real name. The same voice called out to him three times and he decided he had had enough. The next day, the recruits were training in the corn field when he ran off and never returned. His excuse was a timeless one - he had to go use the bathroom.
He couldn't go back home because surely they would come looking. He stayed with a relative until my great grandmother could come see him. She gave him some of the silver the family got from the rich person for draft-dodging, and he boarded a train to Shanghai.
The year was 1925.