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YEH YEH’S HOUSE
By Evelina Chao, author of Gates of Grace
In 1972, after President Richard Nixon renewed American relations with
China, Evelina Chao’s eighty-four-year-old grandfather wrote asking
her to visit him in Beijing. Evelina’s brother, who had just returned
from China, reported that their grandfather, an eminent poet and philosopher
who had written letters throughout Evelina’s childhood urging
her to remember her Chinese roots, had recently been arrested and interrogated
by the Communist Red Guards. You have to go see Yeh Yeh, her brother
urged. Time is running out. Despite repeated appeals from Yeh Yeh over
the next several years and her own desire to see her grandfather and
the land of her ancestors, Evelina continued to postpone her visit due
to the overwhelming demands of her budding career as a professional
classical musician. Then, at 92 years of age, Yeh Yeh—feeling
depressed and lonely following the death of his wife and the devastating
after-effects of the Cultural Revolution–took his own life by
taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
In her new memoir, YEH YEH’S HOUSE (St. Martin’s Press,
December 14, 2004) Evelina Chao, author of the critically acclaimed
Gates of Grace, writes about her belated visit to China several years
following her grandfather’s death and how that visit brought her
face to face with her relatives remaining in China, giving her a new
understanding of her heritage as well as her enigmatic Chinese-born
mother, who accompanied her and served as her guide on the trip. Evelina
explores more deeply why she never went to see her beloved grandfather,
and why, even after his death, she still felt the pull to China, even
as the country seethed in the midst of turbulent change. With unstinting
candor, Evelina Chao describes the transformation of a people stripped
of their intellectual and artistic traditions and the painful sights
of a China being swept clean of her ancient symbols and structures.
And as she and her mother rushed to reach Yeh Yeh’s Beijing house
before it was demolished to make way for a new high-rise apartment,
they discovered a sense of connection that had eluded them throughout
their lives, enabling Evelina at last to understand the woman who raised
her and to inhabit her own skin as a first-generation Chinese American.
With YEH YEH’S HOUSE, Evelina Chao paints a vivid picture of growing
up in America as the daughter of Chinese immigrants–as well as
laying bare the journey of young woman in search of a deeper connection
to her family’s roots. The book documents the convoluted, often
tortured path of a China in rapid transition, one that came to a violent
end in the Tiananmen Square uprising two years following Evelina’s
trip. YEH YEH’S HOUSE is a dramatic, heartfelt story about one
woman’s self-discovery and eventual connection to a family and
culture she had never before fully acknowledged or understood.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EVELINA CHAO is Assistant Principal Viola of the Saint Paul Chamber
Orchestra, performing frequently as soloist. Author of the novel Gates
of Grace, she is also a certified Life Coach. She lives in St. Paul,
Minnesota.
YEH YEH’S HOUSE by Evelina Chao
St. Martin’s Press Hardcover
ISBN: 0-312-33077-4
Price: $23.95
Publication date: December 14, 2004
BEHIND THE STORY OF YEH YEH’S HOUSE
In 1972, when relations between the United States
and China were renewed following a prolonged hiatus, my eighty-four
year old grandfather wrote to me from his home in Beijing asking me
to go see him. My brother, who had just returned from China, reported
that Yeh Yeh, as we called our paternal grandfather, had recently been
arrested and interrogated by the Communist Red Guards. You have to go
see Yeh Yeh, my brother insisted. Time is running out. Soon there’ll
be no Mandarins left.
Though I had heard rumblings of the purges sweeping through the ranks
of intellectuals and artists in China, I had no idea of their extent
and impact on my grandfather and uncles and aunts living there. I promised
my brother I would go. In the ensuing months I received another thin
blue aerogram from Yeh Yeh urging me to go see him. I wrote back promising
that I would.
But I didn’t.
A year later, Yeh Yeh’s letters abruptly ceased. Despite China’s
repression of news about her internal affairs, word of her full-blown
Cultural Revolution reached the United States. We heard a smattering
of details and caught the scent of terror, but as in the Holocaust could
not begin to grasp the true horrors until much later.
In August of 1978, two years after the end of the Cultural Revolution,
I received a letter from Yeh Yeh. This time his handwriting on the thin
blue aerogram was barely recognizable. It was spidery and shaky, his
last line veering toward the bottom of the page like the trail of a
sinking moth. By this time I had heard from other family members who
had gone to see Yeh Yeh since the end of the Cultural Revolution what
he had endured in that disastrous ten-year period. The Red Guards had
strapped a mattress onto his back and forced him to walk down the street
on his knees before the entire neighborhood to show that scholars like
him were no better than the proletariat. A dunce cap was placed on his
head and he was made to recant all his beliefs, confess his transgressions
against the state and apologize. The entire body of his written work,
volumes of poetry, treatises on theology, the first Chinese biography
of Jesus Christ, among others, was piled in the street and burned.
By the time he wrote his last letter to me he was ninety years old,
deaf, nearly blind and crippled with arthritis. His wife of seventy
years had just died. He was lonely and despondent.
Dear Sung Lien, he wrote. Come see me soon, before it is too late, for
I am failing.
I requested leave to go to my grandfather but was turned down because
I was in my first probationary year as a violinist in a symphony orchestra.
The earliest I could go was during Christmas break. I wrote to Yeh Yeh
promising that I would see him in December.
A month later, in October, as I was raking leaves in my yard, my mother
called. Yeh Yeh was dead. He had taken sleeping pills. I collapsed in
tears and regret.
Why hadn’t I gone see my beloved grandfather? Why had I kept putting
off going to China?
Yeh Yeh’s House is my attempt to answer these questions.
* * * * * * * * * * *
In the Fifties we were the only Chinese family in Arlington, Virginia.
White Americans glared at us believing we were Japanese and therefore
to blame for World War II. Perhaps they thought we were Korean, the
cause of trouble in the Korean War. In the Sixties during the war in
Vietnam we were enemy gooks. Or so it felt.
Still, my family settled in as Americans. We bought a Ford sedan, watched
The Wonderful World of Disney and American movies on television and
thought McDonald’s hamburgers were a refreshing change from stewed
chicken gizzards and rice.
Every now and then a blue aerogram would arrive from China, addressed
by my grandfather in his tiny, meticulous script. My mother informed
me he was a world-famous scholar, poet, theologian and teacher. At age
nine I began a correspondence with him, thrilled that words could fly
thousands of miles to a place called China. Yeh Yeh returned my letters,
marking them bloody with his corrective red pencil and his thunderous
edict: DO NOT SPLIT YOUR INFINITIVES! I began to view him as a figure
of incontrovertible authority, as mighty and awesome as the Wizard of
Oz.
Yeh Yeh was also benevolent, counseling patience and forbearance in
the face of prejudice and my view of myself as foreign and irreparably
different from my peers and indeed, the majority of American society.
He urged me to remain modest and humble, adhering to the Chinese way.
Though his advice flew in the face of my chosen career as a concert
violinist, particularly when I studied at Juilliard where the mantra
was to distinguish oneself, become a star, I drew immeasurable comfort
from my grandparent’s presence in the form of his letter, which
I carried in my violin case.
Each time Yeh Yeh wrote asking me to see him I thought I provided creditable,
albeit selfish excuses: I had auditions to take, concerts to prepare,
professional engagements requiring travel all over the world. Yet when
he died I had to face the possibility that other reasons held me back—--that
I feared our relationship was based on mythology and fantasy, that China
was like the faraway land of Oz and my grandfather merely an imagined
character tethered by weightless blue aerograms dropped from the sky,
and that to actually face him in person would destroy this precious
romantic construct of my childhood. Or that as a child raised in America
I could not see myself measuring up to what I imagined his expectations,
as a Mandarin, were of me. I was hardly a scholar or poet. I was embarrassed
not to be able to speak Mandarin. It seemed that I was neither American
nor Mandarin, incapable even of determining what was truly one or the
other. I felt bound to China in a fundamental way, yet was unable to
identify, much less grasp the links. I was ashamed to present such a
sorry self to my grandfather.
To this day I am grateful that my uncle and aunt who lived with my grandfather
in Beijing were undeterred either by shame, old age or the thousands
of miles separating us. Both came to St. Paul, Minnesota, where I lived,
to rouse me from my self-pitying stupor to make my long overdue pilgrimage
to Yeh Yeh’s House to face the ghosts of my ancestors and stand
in the place of myself.
In 1987 I asked my mother to accompany me, as she already had my brother
and sister, to Yeh Yeh’s house in Beijing. Again it was at the
eleventh hour as all of China was being transformed from primitive state
to modern nation virtually overnight. Private homes and entire neighborhoods
were being razed to make room for cheap public housing. My grandfather’s
house, one of the last private houses remaining in Beijing, was slated
for demolition. It became clear that all that remained of my grandfather
and his era would soon be swept away. Throughout, Chinese students protested
oppressive government policies and agitated for democratic reforms.
In fact, two years later the Tiananmen Square Uprising would take place.
This time, I made it.
My mother, with whom I never had an easy relationship because of our
differences in language, cultural and social outlook as immigrant and
first generation child, served as my translator and all-around emissary
on our trip. Though I relied on her for everything and she all but held
my hand, I could not look upon her as my connection to China. From the
first we were thwarted, unable to reach Beijing from our entry city
of Shanghai. For five frustrating weeks we caromed from place to place,
deterred by Chinese bureaucratic shenanigans from securing train or
plane tickets to Beijing. However the people and places I saw along
the way including relatives, historic archaeological sites such as Xi’an’s
terra cotta warriors and the natural wonders of the Yangtze river gorge
became as significant and memorable to me as the elusive goal itself.
Such experiences shared with my mother, a native returned to her homeland,
enabled me to see her in a new light.
Yeh Yeh’s House is the story of my search for what connected and
still connects me to China even today. It is an inquiry to my dilemma
of having to wear the face of a Chinese but the sensibility and perspective
of an American, and how it is to exist as a foreigner wherever I am.
Though the book has many chapters it is one chapter. Many of my questions
have been answered by unexpected people and sources. Yet many questions
remain. For this I am strangely thankful.
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