This article was originally published by The Emancipator.
The month my yeye passed, he complained that he couldn’t sleep. “Too many ghosts in the room.”
My father’s father was a prolific writer and an extrovert whose constant stream of chatter never ceased. However, one subject he never delved into was what he did as a regional spymaster during the Chinese resistance against Japanese imperialism in the 1930s.
My father was able to piece together parts of the narrative through conversations with people who knew my yeye better.
He operated behind enemy lines.
He ran a bookshop that served as a secret base.
He was instrumental in a major operation that potentially sent hundreds to their early grave.
All of my grandparents were revolutionaries in the literal sense; they were activists, organizers, and spies. They operated amid the kind of violent tumult unimaginable to most of us and did unspeakable things to try to save their country and for their own survival. The personal price they paid – and continued to pay long after the revolution was over – is something that history books don’t make room for.
For much of my life, it didn’t occur to me to connect our family’s private tragedies with their youthful heroics.
My laolao (maternal grandmother) was recruited into the resistance underground in the 1940s at the tender age of 16. She knew full well that if she was exposed, it would endanger the lives of her entire family. There was an older leader from her cell that laolao spoke fondly of who was captured and executed. She was 19 years old.
Several years ago, I asked laolao about risking a horrible death not only for herself but also for her doting parents and precious baby brothers. She shrugged. “The country was completely rotten and that couldn’t be allowed.”
I tweeted about it at the time, preening about descending from a true revolutionary. That was years before the swift dismantling of America, my adopted country, began to take place before my disbelieving eyes. In the abstract, I hoped to be cool enough to be like her if the occasion called for it. I never thought I’d have to seriously wonder what I’d do in her shoes.
In the weeks since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, I have seen quite a few people compare Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution to the new Trump/Musk regime and cite resemblance in the purges and theatrics.
I do not long for revolution’s full destructive force, especially when there is so much we can do to resist the encroaching tide of fascism, to mend the cracks in this republic and build it back stronger.
Tens of thousands of federal workers at every level have been summarily ejected from their positions. Zealous young sycophants, drunk on their newfound power, gained access to government servers hosting the classified data of millions. We are, however, a far cry from the Cultural Revolution’s impact – mass death and wide-scale economic collapse.
I have also observed a disquieting stir of bloodlust on the left. Old friends hailed Luigi Mangione as a hero for his alleged assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. Even my own mother, who scraped through the volatile chaos of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, says she wants to see Elon Musk and Trump’s antics fracture major U.S. institutions because it may inspire people to rebel against authoritative impulses.
It may seem strange for me, a descendant of revolutionaries, to be squeamish about the potential for brutal escalation, especially in the face of existential rot that is rapidly destroying the American democracy itself. Am I soft? Have I become too attached to my cushy little life in the burbs? What would my grandparents say?
I mean, I am probably soft, but my understanding of revolutions fundamentally changed when my parents finally spoke to me like an adult about the difficult reality of being raised by revolutionaries who were never allowed to feel anything but positive about their deeds. They each dealt with their pain in ways that birthed more pain. In my yeye’s case, it involved beating my father to a pulp when he was just a boy. For my laoye, my mother’s father, it was the gross neglect of his family’s well-being to prove his ideological purity. Through these conversations, I began to perceive the lived human cost of blood-soaked revolutions beyond tallied figures. Karl Marx believed such sacrifice is essential for human progress, but for better or for worse, this type of revolution destroys lives.
In becoming revolutionaries, my grandparents sacrificed their innocence. In helping bring down the oppressive regimes they loathed, the aftermath was a postrevolutionary Chinese government with few guardrails against petty politicking under Mao Zedong, a bombastic demagogue who commanded a vicious army of wanton opportunists.
I don’t believe any of them ever regretted what they did for their country, but I doubt they knew what they were signing up for. My parents were raised by people with deep scars they dared not resent. I would not go as far as saying yeye’s mysterious past directly led to him becoming a cold and abusive figure in my father’s life, but I have my theories. While only one grandparent remains, the societal and familial trauma lives on in me. It is something I do not wish to pass on to my young children.
I do not long for revolution’s full destructive force, especially when there is so much we can do to resist the encroaching tide of fascism, to mend the cracks in this republic and build it back stronger.
Violent revolution is the very last resort when all other societal remediations are no longer on the table; when it’s no longer possible to fix what is broken without burning it down. And I do mean a literal, all-consuming conflagration nearly indiscriminate in what it will turn to ash. For people who only know such revolutions through stories, it’s easy to see them as a vehicle for hope while being blind to the horror. Beneath those heroic tales, the bodily memories sit heavy in my bones.
My elders took the heavy mantle on their skinny teenaged shoulders because that was the only thing they were empowered to do. There were no civil liberties left for them to exercise, it was endure or fight, as neither offered a better chance for a positive outcome. If I am ever presented with only these options, I hope I will have the resolve – and the claws – to do whatever it takes.
Until that dark day comes, let us not romanticize the despair that drove them to radical action, let us keep angry ghosts at bay.
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