A Family Lost in China's Communist Rise

choi

Te-Ping Chen, A Family Lost in China's Communist Rise; A chance find of old letters spurs a reporter to find out what happened to her great-grandparents, who had hoped for a new era of democracy in China. Wall Street Journal, Mat 9, 2019 (in the Review section).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chi ... -moment-11551974189
http://zonahollywood.com/news/'China-Could-Have-Been-a-Very-Different-Country.'-A-Search-for-Family-Reveals-a-Lost-Moment

Excerpt in the window of print: 'I know you're excited to find me, but I have no feeling left toward my family.' LIANG QUAN[,] Cousin of the author

Note:
(a)
(i) About Te-Ping Chen. Newspapers in China (such as Chinese-language 环球时报) list her name in English. However, her  Chinese name is 陈德平.
(ii) Compared with print, the second URL (which is probably the online version) differs in the following instances.
(A) online: "Born in Guangxi, he had lived in Japan before moving to Hawaii to work for an overseas Chinese newspaper that * * *"   The clause "Born in Guangxi" is not found in print.
(B) "Not long after seizing power, the Communist Party began branding intellectuals as rightists."  The clause "Not long after seizing power" is no longer.
(C) "In the 1930s, he co-founded a small party that promoted democracy and human rights, amid a period of warlordism and political strife.  When Chinas civil war broke out in earnest between the Communists and the Nationalists in 1946, he penned antiwar odes and inveighed bitterly against the two sides' leaders, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. He especially feared the cost to China's traditional culture, which he loved deeply, with all its artifacts. 'He is doing his best to save the old city and the lovely old buildings from being destroyed,' my great-grandmother wrote in 1948, as the war threatened to encroach upon Beijing."

The clause "amid a period of warlordism and political strife" is gone in print, so is the sentence "He especially feared the cost to China's traditional culture, which he loved deeply, with all its artifacts."
(D) In print, the sentence "As platters of braised black fungus, fish and fried lamb circulated, mentions of my granduncle elicited shakes of the head" was deleted.
(E) For the following five paragraphs that appear online, only the first paragraph remains, as the last paragraph of this session.

`````````````
"We sat eating and drinking for several hours, but he couldn't share much history. My great-grandfather had died before Liang Quan was born, and by the time he lived with my great-grandmother, her spirit seemed broken and she barely spoke.

"At last, he brightened. He remembered one story about Shih-Chia Hutong. Long ago, a family of yellow weasels, considered a symbol of luck, had lived at the family compound. They were unusually friendly and used to sun themselves in the courtyard, but his father saw them as a nuisance. One day, his father caught them in a sack, took them to a park miles away and set them loose. From that day on, he said, the family’s misfortunes began. My great-grandfather went blind. My great-grandmother mentally unraveled.

" 'Ever since then,' he concluded with something like relish, 'our family's misfortunes have followed.'

" 'I thought the misfortunes followed after the Communists took over,' I said, only partly in jest.

"He shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'It was the yellow weasels.' "
```````````````````
(F) "In August, with just weeks to go before I left China, I finally reached Hsien-chang's son, Liang Quan, after a local police officer agreed to help me track down his phone number."  The clause "with just weeks to go before I left China" was dropped.
(G) "Yet after spending so much time revisiting my great-grandfather's era * * *"   The first word "Yet" evaporates.

(b) "The trunk, my maternal grandmother's, was locked * * * Inside were * * * a cache of letters written on wispy paper with a return address in Beijing, spelled in the old style, Peking [apparently the addressee's address in the envelope was English, because the grandmother was in US at the time. See next].  My mother hadn't told me much about her family's history. Her parents, who had moved to the US from China, didn’t like to speak of the past. * * * Their author—my great-grandmother—was writing to her daughter [who is obviously Chen's maternal grandmother] during the 1940s and 1950s. She [great-grandmother] wrote about the prices of cabbage and cloth, of ice-skating on the city's lakes, of her husband's penchant for writing poetry. The letters, simply signed 'mother,' bore an address: 57 Shih-Chia Hutong. * * * One weekend back in Beijing, my husband and I bicycled [= cycled] over."

Presently Beijing has either 史- or 施家胡同, but not 石家胡同. However, 施家胡同 looks shabby in Google photos. So it must be 史家胡同.
(i) 东城区史家胡同51、53、55号宅院
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/东城区史家胡同51、53、55号宅院
(ii) 杨耀健, 周恩来团结康心之 叮嘱其女不要暴露党员身份. 人民政协报, June 30, 2011
www.chinanews.com/cul/2011/06-30/3147896.shtml
("抗日战争时期，重庆金融巨子康心之的女儿康靓在女子师范加入地下党 * * * 康靓于1938年6月私自离家奔赴延安。* * * 建国后，康心之被安排为重庆市各界人民代表会议代表，1950年，他将煤矿等资产和领事巷10号私宅都无偿捐给政府，搬到北京史家胡同57号居住")

(c) The street now has a small historical museum.  In a back office there, my husband found something. A book about the area described a woman who had studied in Honolulu and her husband, who had been a poet and newspaperman. The pair, it said, had lived at 57 Shih-Chia Hutong. It was the first time I had ever seen my great-grandparents' names: Lo Woon Kyau and Liang Chiu-shui 梁.  My great-grandfather moved to Beijing in 1915 to work as a journalist * * * Born in Guangxi, he had lived in Japan before moving to Hawaii to work for an overseas Chinese newspaper that advocated political reform of the tottering Qing Dynasty. There, he met and married the daughter of a local Hakka merchant, and in 1911 they had a child, my grandmother"
(i) 历史人物 > 康有为 > 第224章 康有为与梁秋水. 中国历史网, Oct 29, 2015
http://l.zhuixue.net/renwu/kangyouwei/26590.html
("梁秋水（？—1963），字文卿，广西人，康有为第二次往桂林讲学时的学 [生]。早年受保皇会资助留学美。曾任檀香山《新中国报》、温哥华《日新报》编辑，北京《晨报》主 [编]")
(ii) With 梁秋水 妻 or 罗 or 楼, I google and found Te-Ping Chen's Twitter account (again). It on Apr 1, 2018 said 梁秋水's wife was 罗红庄, that 北京史家胡同57号 looks shabby also, and that the letters at issue had text written in English, and envelope in both Chinese and English.
https://twitter.com/tepingchen/status/980604017918144513

(d) "In the 1930s, he co-founded a small party that promoted democracy and human rights.  When China's civil war broke out in earnest between the Communists and the Nationalists in 1946, he penned antiwar odes and inveighed bitterly against the two sides' leaders, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. He especially feared the cost to China's traditional culture, which he loved deeply, with all its artifacts. 'He is doing his best to save the old city and the lovely old buildings from being destroyed,' my great-grandmother wrote in 1948, as the war threatened to encroach upon Beijing. * * * My great-grandfather's youngest son, Liang Hsien-chang * * * Hsien-chang's son, Liang Quan"
(i) 黃大受, 中國現代史綱. Taipei: 五南圖書, 1980, page number not shown
https://books.google.com/books?i ... p;lpg=PT261&dq=中國國家社會黨+梁秋水&source=bl&ots=JD3KUBb52K&sig=ACfU3U1Jh4SiG4KMeSiyvL9UAYoSedlUBw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi2yszMkoDhAhVsRN8KHUGSBRIQ6AEwAHoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&q=中國國家社會黨%20梁秋水&f=false
("中國國家社會黨[:] 九一八事變既起, 約集張東蓀、胡石青、湯住心、羅文幹、徐傅霖、羅隆基、梁秋水等九人,於二十三年成立國家社會黨")
(ii) 張東蓀
https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/张东荪
(1886－1973; "1932年（民國21年）4月，他和張君勱在北平成立了中國國家社會黨，並發行機關報《再生》月刊。 * * * 日本投降後，1946年1月他參加在重慶召開的政治協商會議，任軍事組召集人及綜合委員會委員，並在會議上提出「政治民主化」、「軍隊國家化」兩個原則。同年8月，張君勱領導中國國家社會黨同中國民主憲政黨合併成立中國民主社會黨，表明了支持蔣介石的態度。同年11月，中國民主社會黨出席制憲國民大會，脫離了民盟。倡導走「中間路線」、不滿中國國民黨一黨獨裁的張東蓀遂對張君勱發出絶交宣言，退出中國民主社會黨，繼續留在民盟。1947年1月，他在中國民主同盟一屆二中全會上當選為中國民主同盟秘書主任。1月21日，蔣介石接見中國民主同盟秘書主任張東蓀。4月5日，民主社會黨梁秋水、張東蓀由北平函伍憲子、胡海門，質詢參加政府理由。1948年底，在共軍攻勢下，他作為傅作義的代表與中共代表秘密談判，促使北平以和平的方式轉由中共統治") (citations omitted).