Publisher’s Note: “New York attorney and regular ARTES contributor, Linda Y. Peng shared with me a remarkable story about her recently-deceased uncle. With so much emphasis focused on China’s role as a growing economic power, together with the rapidly emerging market for Chinese art on the international stage, it is important, at times, to set aside our concerns and put a human face on a nation and its people.

With Linda’s testimonial to Peng Teng Yun, we have a means to directly connect with a distant part of the world—one in rapid transition. Setting politics and policies aside, this is a narrative about personal sacrifice, separation from loved ones and devotion to duty—rare qualities to be found today, made all the more relevant because they touch the life of someone who we, here at ARTES, call family.”

IN MEMORY OF UNCLE PENG TENG YUN

(b.Taiwan, March 12, 1925 – d. Beijing, May 10, 2011)

One day when I was a young girl in Taiwan, my mother revealed a family secret to me about a lost uncle, the number five son. She recalled that as a young bride, like other daughters in-law marrying into a large Hakka household, she had to cook and clean for everyone, and he, of all others, lent her a hand and chopped a pile of kindling wood for the cooking stove. Then one day, he suddenly approached and bowed to my mother saying that he had to leave and apologized that he could not help to take care of parents. He then disappeared. It was 1946.

The name of Peng Teng Yun was whispered about very softly in the Peng family for fear of the Kuomintang agents, who at the time arrested any Taiwanese under suspicion of being against the Kuomintang or sympathized with the mainland Chinese.

Some 32 years later, after Nixon visited China, a short wave radio report floated across the Taiwan Strait with a message that a Peng Teng Yun was alive, married with three children living in Beijing. My father received word and immediately went through the various U.S. Embassies in Asia and PRC diplomatic channels to locate his brother, who apparently had permission to be found. The brothers happily united in Beijing. Uncle Teng Yun confessed that he was a little nervous when first meeting my father, a professor-doctor living in the wealthy and powerful America. In his pride, he wore his best and only Mao jacket to show that, even though China was so poor and backward then, there was dignity and a new future.

He recounted that on that fateful day in 1946, he barely escaped from Taiwan to Fujian on a small airplane arranged by underground operatives. The Kuomintang agents who trailed him could not believe that he would have access to a plane.

His was a story of a young man whose impulse against injustice and whose love of a ravaged nation became convinced that only under the leadership of the CCP could China be saved. He joined the PLA and a guerrilla troop. The support of the peasants moved him to tears, as when faced with near starvation, they still put aside precious food to feed him and other soldiers.

To Jiling in the Northeast was Peng Teng Yun then dispatched. Jing Yu and I saw the airplane repair shop where the older workers still remembered him with respect as a capable and fair manager, and the old grey dormitories where he and his family lived in a small space sharing with several other families one kitchen and bathroom. We walked the dry rice paddies where he took Jing Yu to catch field toads for food when there was not enough to eat. The building was still there where he was jailed during the Cultural Revolution for being an intellectual, an engineer with a college education, and maybe a Taiwanese who suspiciously could speak Japanese. We saw the small village where he shoveled manure and repaired a tractor that removed an obstacle of a large mound of earth and cleared the land. He won the hearts of the village people and caught the attention of party leaders.

He, despite having weathered the political vicissitudes of the CCP, remained true to his conviction, stuck to his sense of humanity, firmly grasped the context and time in which he lived, and possessed a sweeping perspective of history.

When China opened up under Deng Xiao Ping, Zhou En Lai’s wife and others brought Uncle Teng Yun to Beijing to assist in leading an association of Taiwan compatriots. His mission was to travel the world to communicate with the Taiwanese diaspora, to convince them that China wanted to trade, to do business and catch up with the West. They picked the right man for the job. He was handsome, charismatic, knowledgeable and skillful in explaining and debating with skeptics and winning them over about new China and the One Nation Two Systems policy. He was a man of integrity and his word and a man of action who helped as many as he could. He was not afraid to criticize corruption and unfairness. He knew that reunification was a matter of time. And as an unwavering dialectical and historical materialist, he believed that China had to go through this period of uneven capitalist development.

He cried profusely during the telephone call with my mother when my father died in California. In his final years, he enjoyed his role as an elder Peng uncle, and quietly gave money to help his second brother and his widow, who had supported him in his escape to China long ago. He acted in kindness and gratitude, as much as in a vindication to show that the path he had taken for himself was not wrong and that his life’s bet on China proved to be prescient.

Last October when I visited him in Beijing, even though ill and weak, he insisted on going to the Olympic Park for the first time. Walking slowly with a cane and a hand in my arm, as a slight breeze tossed about his full white hair, he turned his head to me with a slight smile on his pallid face and said, “Well, Linda, don’t you think our Olympic Park can now compare with your Central Park?”

By Linda Y. Peng, Contributing Writer

May 19, 2011

New York, New York