Chinese general's son who wrote epic novel of his life looks back
Hong Kong-born Xiang Ming tells Oliver Chou about the humiliation his parents endured during the Cultural Revolution and how turtles helped him survive the turmoil
P Other than being born in Hong Kong in 1937, I don't know anything about my early years. But I do know much about my parents: my father, Huang Qixiang, came from a Hakka family in Meixian, in Guangdong province. There, he befriended another native, Ye Jianying, who later became one of the 10 marshals of the People's Liberation Army. The two served together in the Fourth Army, father as commander and Ye as chief of staff, under the Nationalist government, against the warlords in the north.
Mother Guo Xiuyi's family were natives of Zhongshan (in Guangdong). She was born in Shanghai, where she became a great beauty. She was a pioneer in women's rights in China and best known for partnering with Soong May-ling, wife of Chiang Kai-shek, to shelter some 30,000 war orphans.
For the eight years after 1937 - when the full-scale war between China and Japan began - I followed father as a military dependent but was too young to appreciate many of the battles in which he fought and won.
Epic novel took Xiang decades to complete
After that war was over, father refused to fight in the civil war against the Communists. As a punishment, he was sent far away, to Berlin (in Germany), in a Chinese military delegation . My brother and I were sent to boarding school in England, where we stayed for a year. The English I learned there proved to be handy two decades later. Father did not follow Chiang's Nationalist government to Taiwan. Instead, he joined the People's Republic of China and led the Chinese Farmers' and Workers' Democratic Party, which is one of the eight so-called democratic parties. It advises the ruling Communist Party, which my father had thought was led by nice people like premier Zhou Enlai and his buddy Ye Jianying. He was wrong.
In 1955, I enrolled in Peking University, majoring in Russian, which was fashionable at the time, during the Sino-Soviet honeymoon period. It did not last. In 1957, I changed my major to French as premier Zhou said graduates in Russian would have problems finding a job.