Leo Kwan: How Tea Has Chosen Me

Grandpa standing in for Dad in this family portrait. My father was absent from home so much that I saw him very few times in the early years. Mom’s perseverance must have given us the optimism and emotional strength that pulled us through all those difficulties during childhood. I guess it has much to do with the strength of character in all my sisters too. Yes, that expressionless kid on the wooden horse was me.

Cultural Revolution: triggering my connection with China

Throughout the infamous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, our relatives in Communist Mainland China relied on my mom to bring them meat, rice, oil, and other provisions. We had little for we were poor, but these people had even less and they could not buy anything even if they had cash.

The summer before I began high school, I went with Mom to the Mainland on one of her usual supply trips, bringing with us a big Horlicks glass jar filled with fried pork chops, which I thought could have been left home for me and my sisters. One of the cousins I met for the first time took me on his bike to town for longan (the Chinese summer fruit the size of grape with a thin shell and translucent, sweet juicy meat) and I saw something that had since defined the incomprehensible stupidity of Cultural Revolution.

A thin man was chained to a pole in the town center, wearing a tall conical cap. It must have been four feet above his dusted, uncombed thick hair; I had to look up to read it even I was quite a few yards away from him. “Down with the ox and snake devils!”, one of the usual contemporary denunciation slogans, had been brushed hastily in black ink on the vertical length of the head piece. The man half dropped his head to look into the dirtied stone pavement a yard in front through his wrinkled and drooping eyelids, hiding his colourless and expressionless face in the shadow of the mid-day tropical sun.

A country without conscience

Millions lost their lives to the violence during Cultural Revolution. So far, no official figures has been released nor any formal investigation has been conducted. Proposals for a museum have been buried. Above: Ren Zhong Yi, a top political leader and a suspect by Mao, was humiliated in one of the millions of damnation gatherings. What appears in the photo is “civilised” already; much brutality and evil acts happened to people of all ranks and positions in Mao’s plot to reinforce his personal power. Photographer unknown.

On the right an exhibit showed the evidence of his ‘guilt’. A lamp with a red plastic shade dangled 2 ft above an old wooden table from a stick. The table top was perhaps 3 by 5 feet, which perimeter was roughly fenced a few inches high with rough wooden strips. A few eggs laid on top of a thin layer of hay on it, two were cracked already; the hatchlings struggling through the tangled straws with no seeming direction.

The man was condemned of being an American capitalist trying to profit by changing Nature. I was shocked that such an accusation could at all be established, and in front of the thousands of people in this town. I was more confused, though, that such degradation of the human dignity, even if his little “invention” were really illegal, should ever take place, and in Zhongshan, what had been an image of the civilized home town of Dr Sun Yat Sen, my childhood hero.

It was obvious to me, even as a young teenager, that China was what it was because the country seemed to be operating without a conscience. The people without souls. I had not known at that time, however, that atrocities of much more dramatic degree and scale had been happening throughout my parents’ home country. The excitement of high school soon took up all my attention…