Zhang Zuozhong

Tonight I stopped in to see Ruth's parents (about a 45-minute walk from my flat by the university), and ended up having a long chat with her dad.  An interesting conversation!

Ruth's dad grew up in the countryside, a two-hour drive from Qingdao, in Shandong Province.  With the imminent arrival of troops, he fled at 8 years of age to Qingdao, where his father was living.  He was living a life of relative opulence - his family owned land for generations, and his grandfather had become dissolute, addicted to opium and "women."  His flight to Qingdao was followed four years later with further flight, this time to Shanghai, Fujian Province, and Taiwan, where he has lived for 60 years.

Despite his own hardships and the "terrible cruelty" (很慘) of the Chinese Communist Party, he said something surprising to me:  "I really thank the Communist Party (我感謝共黨); if not for them, I would be dead (不是他們，我一定沒有活到五十歲)" - addicted to drugs, to leisure, and a good-for-nothing life with no understanding of the outside world.  The social inequality that his family enjoyed, he said, was cruel, eternal, and unfair - had it not been for the Communist revolution which ended a closed, unalterable system (封閉的社會).

He plans to return in September to the countryside where he grew up.  Last time his older sister, who still lives there, pointed out building after building, "That was our land, that was our land."  Now everything has been transformed, "returned to the nation (還給國家的)".  But he said all this with a bemused expression, actually contented - it wasn't right, he said, that we had so much when others had nothing.  "People were too poor; I saw people die of cold right outside our door.  It was too cruel.  It wasn't right."

I really admire my father-in-law for saying that the people who persecuted his own family were ultimately right, though their methods were too cruel.  "People today have no idea what it was like."