After the invasion my grandfather was the quietest thing. He ate the egg at the mooncake’s center and felt so sad for its loss. Every night he listened to the owl sing. He wanted to cut down a tree; he wanted to cut down a forest. He wanted that movement, that wild and red arc crushing the heart of something soft. Its white bone splintered in his hair, a grief that could itself be killed.

Under General Yu Hanmou, the Fourth Route Army had fought and died. My grandfather was still a boy so he cried for these men. It hurt much more than having living heroes, but idols were never chosen. It wasn’t so simple. Instead parts of your heart roughly dislodged and clung to someone, dead or alive, soldier or bean curd seller, sometimes without you even knowing, unaware of your own devotion, of where in time and space those parts of your heart lie.

Yes, my grandfather was a boy when the dragonflies flew low under the sun, skimming past his round face like a pond’s. A storm was coming into Guangzhou. He saw ripples at the surface. My grandfather and his sisters and brothers ran from the fields into the village as the wind blew hot behind them and the sky bruised dark like something pressing on the wall of this world from the other side. That was the summer the Imperial Japanese Army cut open everyone he knew.

Storm coming into Guangzhou. It was monsoon season and water flooded the streets into canals. My grandfather was a teenager who swam to school in the morning, shirt stuck to his skin and eyes stinging, quivering as he gasped breaths between each slice of each arm into the heaving water. A sort of contained violence.

My grandfather was nearly grown when he moved north to Harbin, a city on the border between China and the Soviet Union. Churches with onion domes sprouted about the city. Sunsets were sterner, clouds stiffer, the air rawer, chafing his cheeks. It was a good city to be lonely in. In the university library, he studied stories in Cyrillic about young Russian heroes. The symbols looked like mysterious coded missives from a spy, or from deep within himself, as if he’d dreamt them. They seemed ancient, organic, naked. Read aloud, they seemed like mantra.

Mao Zedong was a man standing on a golden stage in 1949, the birth year of the Communist Party, face full like a peach, like a young poet. In school he had sat in the library for hours reading Darwin, Mill, Rousseau, and Spencer. He admired the Western men named Washington and Bonaparte, with their long coats and long legacies, who rode through valleys echoing with cries. He wrote poems about eagles and snow. Yellow barley. The most joyous thing the people could do: march through frost into battle to die. He stood on that stage and looked my grown grandfather in the eye and smiled, jubilant, seeing the future:

My grandfather’s face, streaming with blood. The bat swinging down, crack, sparrows startled, crack, taking flight, crack, crack, crack, curving across the sky. My grandfather’s mouth was crushed against the dirt, his lips smeared brown. It may have been afternoon in Harbin, after class. He may have been teaching at the college. He was not the only man in China longing to split something open, but Mao said the learned class deserved it the most.

They had him kneel on rice. They burned his books. Then they packed him on a rusting train to a countryside — it resembled that of his childhood — to feed pigs and till earth. Only a poet could have devised such a plan. Look at its symmetry.

In the labor camp my grandfather raked lines into the thin, hungry soil. It was winter. One day, a man stole a sweet potato from the canteen. He and his wife and his son were beaten for half a day. They died as night fell.

My grandfather scraped the earth and it was the only thing he could wound. He scraped and scraped and scraped the earth until he was commended as a true patriot. How to identify a true patriot:

1. He can tighten his belt to the innermost hole.
2. He does not need to breathe in to proudly show his ribs.
3. See the black on his hands. Is it from dirt? It is indistinguishable.

The laborers were using farming techniques devised by two Soviet scientists named Lysenko and Maltsev, by whom Mao was inspired. How apt that it was winter, the season of Russia.

Was it winter when my grandfather married my grandmother? The nights smelled like fresh snow. They had no wedding; the Party banned such decadence. Jiang Qing had married Mao in the winter too, in late November. They had a wedding where Jiang Qing smiled her actress smile, her pale arm wound around her new husband, twice her age. Her favorite movie was Gone with the Wind. She would almost never see her busy husband, but the people called her Madame Mao and it pleased her. Love in service of the Party.

My grandmother taught at a middle school in the south while my grandfather taught at the college in the north, and they lived alike and apart like this, writing letters to each other. Perhaps they wrote, what have you been eating? How cold is it? Perhaps they did not write, when will I see you? Do you miss me? Do you feel lonely too while sunlight streams through the windows of other lovers?

Every village, every night was illuminated by flashlights and the cold, bright sound of pickaxes against the earth. Just as thousands of ants together may build cities, so the people worked together to move the earth. Gashes of irrigation canals crossed the countryside. The people of Qingshui and Gansu called them killing fields, because when they died of exhaustion, their bodies fell, like trees snapping, into these freshly carved ditches.

The canals would bring water, said Mao, and yes, Yellow River awoke that spring. In her winter sleep she had grown fat and bloated. She stretched and yawned and her waters poured out of her great womb into the canals, billowing out of the canals, submerging the tile-roofed houses, the thatched beds within, the little wooden toys left upon the floors, the stone bowls. She carried family pigs to her surface so that dozens of them swam, their pink flanks heaving, through currents of yellow silt until they grew tired, too.

One by one, the sparrows fell from the sky in exhaustion. The people banged pots and pans and drums to scare them from landing. They tore down their nests, broke their eggs, snapped their necks. The sparrows deserved it: they ate grain seeds and robbed the people of their food. When the sparrows hid in the Polish embassy in Beijing the people surrounded it with drumming. Two days later, the Poles were using shovels to clear the embassy of dead birds.

Mao said to kill flies and rats and mosquitoes too, but the people chose to shoot sparrows. Sand-colored belly, white ruff around the neck, pink toes, round, round eyes, timid breath, all quivering. A death that could be watched. Without sparrows, the fields became quiet, then louder and louder and louder. That beautiful yellow line on the horizon — what is that? That roar?

Without sparrows to eat them, locusts swarmed through the countryside, turning grain to dust. Poplar and willow tree to ash. Fields glittered with their bright shells. The people were so tired of metal that they sold all of their pots and pans for food. They were so hungry that they tried to eat the locusts. By the time my grandmother gave birth to my father, thirty million farmers had died of starvation.

My father was a boy in the autumn of 1968 when the foreign minister of Pakistan arrived in Beijing with a case of mangoes. The minister gifted these astonishing fruits to Mao. What was a mango? The people had not heard of it. In the Beijing Textile Factory, the workers received a mango as a gift from Mao. Its lovely yellow skin seemed to glow. They placed it on an altar and solemnly bowed to it each time they walked by. Later, when it began to rot, they boiled the precious fruit and every worker drank a spoonful of its water.

A poem in the People’s Daily cried:
Seeing that golden mango
was as if seeing the great leader Chairman Mao…
Again and again touching that golden mango —
the golden mango was so warm

Soon all of China knew of the man guo. Beheld in their palms, this miraculous fruit in its round flesh seemed to pulse like a human heart. Plastic and wax mangoes in glass cases were gifted to the people to display in their homes. Mangoes decorated enamel mugs, washbasins, and plates; huge baskets of mangoes sat in parade floats; a plane full only of mangoes flew them to tour far-flung provinces. It was Mao’s fruit, a talisman of immortality, a relic. The dentist in a small village who compared a mango to a sweet potato was tried for slander and executed.

Hunger ripens in silence. Like a bubble distends then bursts in opaque water, so emptiness opens into emptiness.

My mother was a girl when she read the novel My Childhood by the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky. It was a sad, violent story, but not the way Tolstoy’s or Pushkin’s stories were. It was about a Russian city where the people did not so much struggle to escape poverty as feel it flood seasonally over them.

It opened with Gorky as a boy staring at his mother as she cried over his dead father. My mother, only half clad in a red petticoat, knelt and combed my father’s long, soft hair, from his brow to the nape of his neck, with the same black comb which I loved to use to tear the rind of watermelons…

There was another book the Party allowed everyone to read, a small red book with a hard spine called How the Steel Was Tempered. It was written by Nikolai Ostrovsky, who had lost his right eye fighting for the Bolsheviks in the war. There was nothing else to read but these books. Their lovely, cold words nursed a whole generation of Chinese children.

My mother was nearly grown when she discovered the novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. Soldiers stationed in the countryside had read the book behind blackout curtains, at night when darkness hid the color of its cover. It was a sad, violent story, almost familiar. She could not understand why it had been banned.

Mao died of a heart attack. The people cried before his flag-draped body and shot guns, rang sirens, blew whistles and horns across China for three minutes during his memorial.

A band in Tiananmen Square surrounded by millions played “The Internationale:”
Il n’est pas de sauveurs suprêmes
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun.
There are no supreme saviors
Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune.

Fifteen years after Mao’s death, my mother and father heard shouting outside of their college dorm in Harbin. They ran out into the white morning light and saw buildings covered in red banners, flapping in the wind: A COMMUNIST PARTY WITHOUT CORRUPTION. They followed the sound and color to the center of campus, where a student wearing a clean button-down shirt screamed slogans into a megaphone. A crowd chanted A NEW DEMOCRACY, A NEW FUTURE, A NEW CHINA, again and again, A NEW DEMOCRACY, like a mantra, A NEW FUTURE, like hypnosis, A NEW CHINA.

Then a friend rushed to my mother and father, face white. The military was on its way. Go, go, go. Run now. My mother and father fled the chanting crowd. Twenty minutes later, tanks rolled in, soldiers in helmets sitting atop with pointed guns. It felt like the last and first day of something. Down at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, thousands of students were split open by the guns.

As a child I lived in an apartment complex in Beijing called Pearl River that looked like glass cosmetically grafted onto the city’s face. Beautifying, unreal. A crystalline world even pigeons avoided, rarely resting on the ledge outside the kitchen window. There were brief squares of grass in front of Residential Building 5 and Gym 2 and the grocery store labeled Happy Every Day, lurid and strategic bursts of green in a concrete world. Flowers bloomed where they were told to.

There, my grandfather painted calligraphy. He was the quietest man. His students said that he was a scholar, a thoughtful man, a gesture of un-calloused hands. He had not been back to Guangzhou in decades, but he sent money every year to clean his sisters’ and brothers’ graves there. He still called Russia su lian — the Soviet Union.

When he painted calligraphy he painted Mao’s poems:
The whole icy sky is white and we are marching in the snow.
No green pine. Mountains tower over us.
As we climb the pass
the wind plays open our red banners.

My mother was a girl when television channels broadcasted the same seven movies, again and again, each canonizing a war hero. In primary school, she read the stories every schoolchild in China read. There was the one about two cattle-herding girls who were out in the fields when a snowstorm struck and they heroically lost their legs protecting the cattle. The one about little boy Wang who sacrificed himself by leading Japanese troops into a trap where they were all killed. The one about avaricious landlord Zhou who made the farm’s rooster crow at midnight so that his laborers had to wake earlier and work longer. This story had a just ending: the laborers caught him in the act and clubbed him to death.

To my mother’s hot embarrassment, her last name was Zhou. Her classmates teased her about it throughout primary school.

That was the worst, she said, grinning, to my father as they prepared dinner one night in Pearl River. The evening news on CCTV 1 was muted in the background. Don’t you remember? Anyone named Zhou had it bad.

Of course I do, he said between laughs and peels of potatoes. Didn’t everyone call you Landlady Zhou?

Yes! It was the worst! Landlady Zhou, what’s the homework? Landlady Zhou, lend me a pencil? They both broke down in laughter.

My grandfather and I would go to watch the flag-raising ceremony in Tiananmen Square at sunrise. Red flag, red sun, red cheeks of Mao in the huge portrait that hung at the Gate, as red as when he stood in the square more than half a century ago. The square was always quiet as dust when the flag rose. Sometimes smog obscured it and we stood in that woolen air, imagining its ascent. Or rather, I imagined it. I looked up at my grandfather and could not see his face.

When they all stand up screaming and clapping, is it because they love him or because they’re scared of him? I asked my mother. Half and half of both, she said.

My parents were teenagers in 1985 when Wham! played in Guangzhou on a humid evening in April. They were the first Western band ever to play in China, allowed over Queen after their manager had presented Party officials with two photos: George Michael as a clean-cut, button-down-shirted youth, and Freddie Mercury bedecked in sequins in a flamboyant pose.

In the opening act, a Party-appointed singer sang edited versions of Wham!’s songs in Chinese:
Wake me up before you go, go.
Compete with the sky to go high, high.
Wake me up before you go, go.
Men fight to be first to reach the peak.
Wake me up before you go, go.
Women are on the same journey and will not fall behind.

Then Wham! jumped on stage. The people had never seen anything like it before. George Michael gyrated on stage to a saxophone solo that screamed like an exorcism, his feathery blond hair electrified by neon purple stage lights, his bare chest gleaming with sweat beneath a white blazer. The lights swept over a stunned audience that wore pale blue, green, and gray — that, on the street, would avert their eyes when they saw a man playing a guitar because he was surely up to no good. In the vast concert hall, they did not sing along and did not clap along. Police officers stood throughout the hall. But under their seats, their feet began to tap against the floor.

That murderer doesn’t deserve your respect, my mother said to my grandfather at dinner on a hot night over sour cabbage and fish soup. I sat beside her and watched my feet hover above the tiled floor.

Mao changed China for the better, he said.

No, he brainwashed you into thinking that.

You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Think of how you were treated, think of —

There’s nothing to think about. Sit down.

I don’t understand how you can have gone through something so awful and say —

Just get out. Get out. Get out —

I don’t remember what I said, but I remember the static on my tongue. My right cheek, hot against the slap, my left cheek, cold against the tile floor. My grandfather had flung his finger at my mother, but I had said something children did not say to their grandfathers. I may have told him to sit down or that it was impolite to point. Certainly it doesn’t matter so much what I told him as that I told him. My glasses lay on the floor beside my face. I do remember saying Okay, like a plea, a word that shriveled into itself. I remember looking up at my grandfather, who seemed so tall in that moment and so still.

In 2004 the air in Beijing’s subway trains was hotter than a feverish breath, caressing everything from the blue straw bags of men in sooty shirts to the bare bottoms of toddlers wearing little yellow shoes — so hot the trains became tropical, full of bellowing and screeching, and teens in green school uniforms cupping their hands under armpits while sweat beaded on their wispy mustaches, babies howling, those sooty factory workers baying in laughter, half-mad from the heat, the journey home that was bright and wet and warm like a red beating heart.

I think I am a historian of my own silence, of what is void. Or a genealogist — I am trying to find what I’ve inherited, or what I haven’t, or how a family can age and settle, a rooted tree indifferent to time. So much that lies under the city remains.

One day after school, I emerged from the subway station outside of Pearl River and went home to see my grandfather cutting a plate of pears. When he saw me he smiled and offered me them. I watched him tenderly slice the pears into wedges in a soft, downward movement with the knife. This memory is tiny yet clear. I ate a slippery wedge while l watched the sunlight twirling above the window while my grandfather watched me, a thousand unsaid things inside our mouths.