Lives of the Family by Denise Chong

Author:Denise Chong [Chong, Denise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36125-7
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2013-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

A VILLAGER COULD NOT BE faulted for choosing the familiarity of his home over the British colony of Hong Kong. Even Loo-shee, Chong-sam’s wife, was drawn irresistibly by tradition. While waiting to hear from her husband back in Canada, she too had relocated to Hong Kong with their two sons. Although she took comfort in the knowledge that people for villages around regarded her highly as the district high school teacher, she’d worried that the family’s three-storey house might attract the Communists’ attention. But then, she felt the need to return to stand in for her husband at the reburial of his grandmother’s bones, after they’d been exhumed, cleaned and placed in an urn. On the eve of the ceremony, two villagers, now ranking Communist Party cadres, showed up to whisper a warning: “Tomorrow, the Party is going to come to ask you to donate lots of money to the People. You better get out, now!” By dawn, she and her sons were safe again in Hong Kong.

Jasper’s worst fears about Fuen’s vulnerability were borne out. His brother had left Hong Kong and returned to the village for opium, an indulgence—possibly an addiction—for him that could not legally be satisfied in Hong Kong. The British, after regaining control of the colony after 1945, had declared opium a dangerous drug and subsequently banned its sale.

Fuen walked right into danger. Party cadres charged with classifying the peasant households in Jasper Hum’s village labelled his as that of a rich landlord. When the cadres arrested his brother, they demanded that he turn over the Hum household’s gold. When he denied the family had any, they accused him of hiding it. The more he protested, the more ghastly was his torture. His captors cut off his ears, then they broke his hands, then his feet. A few days later, Fuen died of his injuries, spared the knowledge of the even more gruesome cruelty inflicted on his wife and his sister-in-law, Jasper’s wife.

Cadres in the village subsequently confiscated Jasper Hum’s house, land and clinic, and banished the evicted wives and their children to a windowless, empty shed on their property. The men charged with administering punishment to the two women rounded up the two wives and their four children: Jasper’s daughter, Ling, not quite two (the eldest, a teenager, was away at school in the north of the province); and Fuen’s three: Shui-dan, Hee-jeung and Haw-wong, aged seven, five and four. Forcing the children to watch, they bound their mothers at the ankles, strung them upside down, and took a burning torch, dipped in fat, to their feet and legs. The men showed no compassion, the better to demonstrate they were not obstructing the Land Reform campaign.

After the torturers cut down the women, they tossed them back into the shed; severely burned, they lay moaning and immobile on the dirt floor. The children were left to fend for themselves. At night, the eldest, Shui-dan, trying to keep the other children and their mothers alive, crept out of the shed to scrounge for food and fetch water from the river.

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