SONS OF HEAVEN: The Story Behind the Book
by Terrence Cheng
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It was only when my grandparents started to die that I began to think about China and my family's story; before I lost them history never concerned me. First it was my grandfather on my mother's side; he was ninety-three. As a young man he had fought the Japanese on the Mainland during World War II as a member of the Kuomingtang. My mother used to tell me about my grandfather's scars, which was why he never took off his shirt. She was right: I had never seen him without something covering his back. It's a miracle he even survived, my mother said.
A few years later my grandmother died, my mother's mother, at the age of eighty-seven. She had been a member of the Kuomingtang in Taiwan, as she was in Beijing before Mao and the Communists came to power. My grandparents and my mother fled Beijing for Taiwan, along with Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomingtang, in 1949. My mother was six months old. She has never been back to Beijing. She will not say it, but it's because she believes in ghosts.
By the time I graduated from college and went to grad school, all my grandparents were dead and I had time to think about what they went through, time to hear the stories told by my parents about their struggle and the sacrifices that had been made by three generations of our family to get us to this point: here, in America, New York. It did not make perfect sense to me but names like Chiang Kai-Shek, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping were somehow mixed through my own family's history.
It was around the time my grandfather was dying that the student protests in Tiananmen Square were going on. Summer 1989, I remember watching on television the flames in the streets and limp bloody bodies being carried away. Soldiers marching through the darkness, shooting. Crying young men and women, pleading. This was not a movie. All the faces Chinese. But the image that continues to haunt me is of a young man, who, in broad daylight, walked in front of a line of tanks and stopped. The tanks, I thought, would run him over, but they didn't. They tried to go around him but he kept jumping in the way. He just would not move until people from the side of the street came and dragged him away. No one knew who he was, or what happened to him. To this day, no one does.
He amazed me: his power, his pride, and his fear. Even from a distance and only being able to see his back, I knew he was afraid. He was afraid and he was angry and he was proud and willing to die for his beliefs. What could make a man do what he had done? What had pushed him to the point, what kind of emotions make you so stupid and so brave and able to transcend in such a miraculous yet mortal way? The whole world was fascinated, but as the years went by that image and the cries over the Tiananmen Massacre (as it is known in the West; it is the Tiananmen 'Incident' in China) dissipated.
But the young man and those tanks never left me, the wonder about how and what and why.
Chinese history is a minefield so fully exploded you can barely make out that it has been detonated. Only if you look closely enough can you see the shapes of the craters, the depth of the scars. I wrote this book because Deng Xiaoping haunted me: his personal struggle and character, what influenced his decisions those fateful days before and after Tiananmen. How history was inextricably his life. The world blamed Deng for Tiananmen, but what was the whole story? The real story? The man and the tanks haunted me because he had no history. So I would attempt to create one for him. And at the same time understand my own family's history; all of it as one.
This book is not a political book, nor is it meant to be. It is about two brothers, two families, the braided history of peasants and soldiers, politicians, gods. It is about boys growing up learning to be men, and the spirit that grants us the will to survive.
I traveled to Beijing in 1999. I smelled the air, walked the streets, and ate the food. It was the place of my grandparents' birth, my parents' birth, and they loved it, as I did now. I visited the house my grandparents used to own, the house where my mother was born. I saw as much as I could possibly see. Everywhere I looked for ghosts. I found none, but could feel them.
I would be honored if I could believe that in these pages all the ghosts might live at least for a moment. Until they find a new voice, a new place, and decide it is time to move on.
(c) Copyright 2002, HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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