A Village with My Name by Scott Tong

Author:Scott Tong [Tong, Scott ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-33905-4
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

Guangzhou honey prices are low. Shanghai prices also fell 10 percent. But that’s okay. As for needles, we can’t sell #22, but we can ship over #32. If the price is good, let’s pursue that.

He was arrested, as best we know, at some point in the next year. Mildred wrote in 1951:

There is still no information from my husband yet. About a couple weeks ago I tried to get in touch with him indirectly. But in vain. . . . No letter came since April. War brings us bankruptcy and separation.

By then, two purges were under way on the mainland. Mao unleashed the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries in October 1950, exhorting citizens to turn in spies, agents, journalists, students taught abroad, foreign company workers, Catholics, and remnants of the old GMD and Wang Jingwei regimes. Many were executed, as Chairman Mao set execution quotas of 0.1 percent of the population in some areas.

This campaign overlapped with another, called the Three-Antis Campaign, whose triple targets were corruption, waste, and profiteering government officials. Bureaucrats deemed crooked were fined and tortured, and sometimes executed. Bankers famously committed suicide by jumping out of high-rises, prompting Shanghai’s mayor to ask, “How many paratroopers are there today?”

The exact date of Carleton Sun’s arrest remains unclear to me. The records in various Shanghai offices conflict—or at the very least, they don’t go together. Property records in the neighborhood police station near the Light of the Sea School show he was sent to prison on March 26, 1952. An officer at the city’s central police station in Shanghai told me my grandfather was arrested in July 1951, and then convicted in July 1953 as a counterrevolutionary. He was sentenced to fifteen years, Aunt Lily recalls, based on conversations with mainland relatives in the ’70s.

It was also very confusing to Mildred and the children in Hong Kong. In June 1952 she wrote: “I got the definite information three weeks ago about Carleton’s custody in Shanghai. More than a year ago he lost his freedom. That’s why I could not get his letter.

“For the sake of the children this is really a great shock to me. The last time when he was here, I persuaded him to stay. He refused and urged us to go back with him. If I did go back, I am sure I will be put in prison too. It is very easy for anyone to lose one’s freedom or to commit suicide.”

The question is, who turned in Carleton Sun? During our trip in 2013, my mother and I found the chief suspect in a document found at the police local station. The household registration book lists the various tenants of Alley 431 South Xiangyang Road over time:

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