The March - The Sino-Japanese war broke out toward the end of my father’s first Guangzhou era and rendered him to move north across the Canton and Hunan border right before Guangzhou fell into the Japanese hands. Unlike his younger (and the youngest) brother who joined the air force right after the war broke out to become a fighter pilot, my father didn’t join any regular force but assume the role of a political officer attached to some resistance group operating around the mountain range of northern Canton. Exactly what he did wasn’t totally clear to me; I heard bits and pieces of stories about organizing the performances of patriot plays here and there and some other activities commonly practiced by the young intellectuals of that era. He might have received some basic military training but I don’t think he had seen any real action. When you think of the size of China, it’s quite conceivable how one might never get to see a single enemy throughout the entire war; plus, my father was never the warrior type. One war-time story he did tell me was how no paper money was ever issued to them (and would have been quite useless anyway even if they were). All purchases, be it supplies, ammunition, or prostitutes, were conducted with raw opium as currency, which soon became the universal standard honored by both the Chinese and the Japanese sides of the territory. With the war dragging on both sides ended up fighting the same losing battle against one common enemy - the inflation, which came out to be the sole winner of the conflict. Von Clausewitz would have taken that lesson to heart had he actually fought a war.

[22] Sino-Japanese war 中日戰爭

[23] fighter pilot 戰鬥機飛行員

[24] patriot plays 抗日時期的愛國話劇

[25] might have received some basic military training but I don’t think he had seen any real action  受過基本軍訓，但未曾與敵人交戰過

[25] paper money 紙幣

[26] All purchases, be is supplies, ammunition, or prostitutes, were conducted raw oppium as currency  戰地所有的買賣，不論是物資、軍火、或是嫖娼，皆以鴉片為交易的貨幣。

[27] Von Clausewitz 克羅塞維斯，19世紀前葉普魯士軍事理論家，著有《戰爭論》

Somewhere in the middle of his guerrilla warfare phase my father got married, not to my mother but to his lady-comrade lady-P whom he had got acquainted during his Guangzhou era. She was highly praised for being extremely talented among their circle of intellectual friends but she didn't have much look. I saw her picture taken in the 70s and concur with the notion that one would have to be benevolently generous in his opinion about women to call her plain-looking. My father, on the other hand, was widely regarded as one of the most handsome man of Canton during his time so I gather it could only have been love that pulled them together. One other little twist: the marriage between him and lady-P turned out to be his second one. Before moving to Guangzhou my father had another marriage back in his home village - this one previously arranged for him before he was even born. Whether that first marriage had been consummated remains also a mystery to me. I didn't learn about it until after his death in 2009 and all I was told about that unlucky child-bride was she had stayed with my paternal grandmother on the family estate as the ‘tradition’ would have demanded until 1950, when she was forced to remarry by the communist regime for the sake of her being ‘liberated.’ No one knew anything about her after that. 

[28] guerrilla warfare 游擊戰

[27] lady-comrade lady-P: 女同志P女士，乃作者父親的第二任妻子。稱P小姐，固為隱其名，卻也讓我聯想起民初流行的文藝腔。當時文藝青年寫信，總是 Miss P, Miss W 這般稱呼。

[28] one would have to be benevolently generous in his opinion about women to call her plain-looking.  古人說女子有“德言容工”四德，P女士應該是三德出眾，唯容貌頗遜。

[29] that unlucky child-bride  作者父親的第一任妻子是胎裡就定下的。此不幸的女人一直跟著作者的祖母同住，直到1950年，因為被“解放”了而被迫再嫁。其人不知所終。

Hu Lancheng, the pro-Japanese 'traitor' husband of Eileen Chang, depicted in his book 'Time of the Earth' the patriotic young intellectuals during the war time - people like my father and lady P – as carefree idlers hiding comfortably behind the frontlines far beyond the reaches of the Japanese artillery and doing nothing but making out to one another all day long. Does my father's marriage in the middle of the war certify Hu’s opinion? I don't know; maybe yes or maybe not. They are all dead now so who's to say that one had been right and the other wrong, or we will never repeat what they had or had not done one way or the other?

[30] Hu Lancheng 胡蘭成；Eileen Chang 張愛玲。Time of the Earth: 應該指胡的作品《山河歲月》

Toward the very end of the war my father carried out a one-man mission. He sneaked back into the occupied territory to persuade a Japanese sympathizer, some former mafia boss, to cooperate with the KMT government for the taking-over soon to come. He told us it was a dangerous mission, double-o-seven-like if not exact. But given how thinly stretched the Japanese force must have been by that time I truly think the risk of him getting captured something quite slim. And it would have been even less likely for the local Japanese collaborators to double-cross him and turn him in. Knowing the days of Japanese occupation were numbered these perpetual survivors would be more than happy to do everything possible to earn a few brownie-points from their future masters.

The war ending in 1945, my father wrapped up the first phase of his life. Now in his mid-20s and married with one kid (my eldest half-brother was born around 1942) he returned home a war hero.  Representing now a new generation of nationalists endorsed by the KMT party, he emerged as a political figure to be reckoned with. My father would now set his eyes on the future; a future with its superficial but blinding brightness would elude him and millions like him, and would one day destroy them all.

[31] a one-man mission 個人策反行動

[32] a Japanese sympathizer  在日本佔領區與日本人合作的通敵者

[33] double-cross him 出賣他

[34] perpetual survivors  擅於見風轉舵、任何環境中都有辦法存活的人

[35] earn a few Brownie points from their future masters  向未來的新主子討好輸誠

[36] endorsed by the KMT  以國民黨做靠山

[37] a political figure to be reckoned with  有份量的政治人物

[38] a future with superficial but blinding brightness  一個表面上極為光明的未來，讓許多人睜不開眼、受了蒙蔽

The Parade - Endorsed by the KMT party my father won a series of local elections between 1945 and 1946, which eventually led him to the winning of the national assembly seat representing his county in 1946. As a senate he would be laying down the constitutions and acting as the Electoral College for the coming presidential election. The senatorial seat he occupied had a very bizarre substitution rule that if the one elected couldn't fulfill his duty for whatever reason, the runner-up from the same election would take over the seat and carry out his duty, and the same principle applied down to the third, the forth, and how many others waiting in line. The runner-up from that year’s election was his best friend who had spent some time living with us when I was little. I remember calling him uncle-B but neither I nor my sisters really knew the exact relationship of uncle-B to my father until some 50 years later.

The heyday of my father's political career arrived with his winning the senatorial seat. He returned to Guangzhou and was now received as the fastest rising star in the Cantonese political arena.  To support this claim, I have a story told to me in the late-80s, right before I came to the States, by an old widow-mistress of a once-famous warlord General G whose mansion I frequented as a child with my parents, who spent countless Sunday nights playing Mahjong there. This widow described to me how my father’s tribute-paying visit to the general, right after his becoming a member of the congress, had created such a commotion inside the general’s harem that all the general’s concubines filed out and hid behind a long Chinese room dividers (known as Ping-Fong or the wind-blocker) to have a peek at the handsomest young career-politician of the time. 

[39] national assembly seat  國民大會席次

[40] Electoral College （總統）選舉人團

[41] the runner-up from the same election 選舉得票次高者

[42] heyday of my father's political career 政治生涯的巔峰時期

[43] the once-famous warlord General G  我真想知道這個軍閥是誰 ...

[44] tribute-paying visit  拜碼頭

[45] the general's harem  軍閥的後宮

[46] concubines filed out and hid behind a ... Ping Fong to have a peek at ...  妻妾魚貫而出、躲在屏風後頭，偷瞄當時最年輕俊帥的政治明星

Other than that little anecdote I have little idea about my father’s stay in Guangzhou prior to the opening of the national assembly in 1946. I knew he had enrolled into a training camp set up for all the newly elected KMT congressmen. Were they there to discuss and plan the constitution word by word, or just to learn how to become the KMT party’s perfect rubber stamps? I have no proof either way. When I was really young I asked my father which one among the god-know-how-many Republic of China constitution chapters he could claim his own invention. He didn’t answer me but then I didn’t know what I was asking either. He had explained to me a few times, all quite briefly though, about his idea of a democratic government. All his ideas ran along the principle of ‘Western in utilization, Chinese in essence’ and thoughts like that would usually characterize him as someone progressive in behavior but reactionary at heart. However, it wasn’t fair for me to describe my father’s political theory as something backwater or dogmatic; I would have scored much worse were I born and raised in his time and given the elements that he had to deal with.

[47] rubber stamps 橡皮圖章

[48] Western in utilization, Chinese in essense  中學為體，西學為用

[49] progressive in behavior but reactionary at heart 行動進步、腦子反動

[50] backwater 閉塞不明

[51] the elements 環境因素

Having graduated from the KMT political boot-camp, my father headed north with his class of congressmen for the opening of the first national assembly held in late 1946. They travel first by train all the way up to Han-Kou and then switched to a steamer sailing downstream along the Yan-Tze River to Nanjing the national capital. My father considered that trip the high-point of his political career as he kept recalling and describing in vivid detail to us about how memorable the trip was. The steamer skipper, taking it as the highest personal honor and responsibility to show these young congressmen some good time, made arrangements for them to have egg and ham breakfasts on the upper deck in open air with the best view in sights; only his chef took the order of ‘getting the best ham’ a bit too much to the heart and actually used the highest graded aged Kim-Hwa ham whose ultra-high salt content wasn’t really meant for the dish; but my father believed firmly that it was the thought that counted.

While powering down his sodium-rich breakfast my father noticed a stairwell leading to the lower deck. Now he might have gone down the stairs to take a peek for himself or he might have played the whole scene out of pure imagination, but he told us years later, vividly and repeatedly, how the stairs would lead to a gate made out of high-gauge iron bars and behind which lay a hell incarnated from a few hundred low-fare passengers jammed inside an interior cabin built originally for the ship’s cargo bay. Whenever he told that story he always emphasized the one giant padlock and the thick iron chain that held the door fast. He would keep describing to us how red and as big as his fist that padlock was and how thick and unbreakable those chains were, using the circle formed by touching the tips of his thumb and middle fingers together as example.

[52] steamer （蒸汽推動的）輪船；Han-Kou 漢口市；Nanjing 南京，國民政府首都

[53] Kim-Hwa ham 金華火腿；這段好笑！

[54] lower deck  甲板下層

[55] high-guage iron bars 粗大的鐵條。

[56] a hell incarnated ...  幾百個付低價船票的旅客，擠在貨艙中，構成一幅人間地獄景象

[57] giant padlock 巨大的鎖頭

Once I interrupted and asked him, before the story could move on to his Shanghai days, whether he had ever thought of the day when all those poorer passengers would break the chain, destroy the lock, storm the gate, ascend the stairs, sweep the deck, and send him and his colleagues running for their lives? He paused for a moment and said that he did, but only for just a bit and a flash of moment. He said he felt helpless about the unjust faced and endured by the greater majority, and feared for the first time that China’s problem might be far beyond his or any single person’s ability to fix.

I could not have been more than 10-year old at the time so why did I ask him a question that sharp? Given how I was born and raised in a traditional Mainland Aristocracy family (more about that later), right-wing to the extreme in the prime time of the cold-war, and living on an island most eagerly to act as the vanguard of American capitalism, that question shouldn’t have come about at all as no channel had ever existed for me to acquire any socialist notion or to develop one. But the question did come out and now that I think of it, would it not be possible that deep down inside my father had conceived certain guilt and resentment toward his own powerlessness of making any real difference because he knew he might have been, after all, just another puppet controlled by strings held by his masters? Wouldn't it also be reasonable to assume that subconsciously he felt the urges to reveal what he had always felt untouchable and uncorrectable to me through all these stories so he could keep the idealist part of him alive?

During the last quarter of his life, when I had gradually grown into my adulthood, my farther must have perceived that I would eventually become a socialist at heart (yet lousy at practices just like him.) But he never once volunteered his political opinion to me, not even remotely; and if I tried to corner him into uttering something definite, he would simply retreat and close his mind’s shutter tightly. I didn’t know what was truly hidden behind it and now I never will.

[58] a traditional Mainland Aristocracy family 傳統的大陸上流菁英家庭

[59] the vanguard of American capitalism 美國資本主義的先鋒

[60] socialist notion 社會主義思維

[61] guilt and resentment towrd his own powerlessness  對自己的無能為力感到罪咎及憤怒

[62] corner him 把人逼到角落