Falling Leaves Return to Their Roots by Adeline Yen Mah

Author:Adeline Yen Mah [Mah, Adeline Yen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0140265989
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-10-23T04:00:00+00:00

Oh! The melting melody of his words! I never went out with H. H. again.

The Cold War was at its height during the 1950s and 1960s. A few of my most idealistic contemporaries were asked to leave Britain in 1961 by the immigration authorities for being ‘undesirable’. Kim Philby had recently been revealed to be the third man behind Burgess and McClean: a circle of English spies spawned during their undergraduate years at Cambridge university in the 1930s. British authorities charged that Beijing was infiltrating secret agents among Chinese student circles in London, turning us into fledgling Communists.

C. S. married a Singaporean Chinese girl. He took her back to Shanghai and then taught and did research at the Academy of Science in Beijing. They were to suffer greatly during the Cultural Revolution. By the time I next saw him and his wife in 1980, C. S. had lost his hair and his patriotism. He no longer talked about rebuilding China but asked if I could help him obtain a post-doctoral fellowship in America. What concerned him most were education plans for his children and a pleasant retirement spot for himself and his wife. Not once did he complain about his decision to return to China. He remained warm, generous, honest and kind.

Others were less fortunate. H. H. was thirty-three and still single when he was told to leave. He went back to mainland China in 1962, against the advice of his parents. Months went by. No one ever heard from him. Some of us wrote to the address he had given us before his departure. There was never any reply. He had simply vanished into the bowels of China, swallowed amongst 800 million Chinese.

His ‘disappearance’ distressed and perplexed us. We knew that something was deeply wrong and suspected that events had not turned out well for him. For me personally, his silence shattered every fantasy of the glorious motherland and I never again seriously considered returning to work in the country of my birth.

Years later, we heard that H. H. had been persecuted and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. His gaolers were unable to believe that such an accomplished and highly educated young scientist would renounce his rich family in Hong Kong, his comfortable lifestyle in the West and his promising career in order to serve his country. They insisted that he had an ulterior motive and urged him to confess. H. H. refused and committed suicide in 1967, leaving a note with four Chinese words yi qin yi he (one lute, one crane), meaning that he was incorruptible and upright unto death. He was thirty-eight years old.

Others thrown out of Britain in the purge of leftist Chinese students fared differently. S. T. Sun (Little Sun), a graduate in architecture, was enamoured of Rachel Yu, one of my classmates from Sacred Heart boarding school days. When Little Sun was ‘asked to leave’, they were dating seriously. He returned to a Hong Kong in the throes of a building boom which went on for over thirty years and continues unabated.

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