my mother's ghost

Before my mother died, she wished to be back to her hometown, so the relatives drove two cars all the way came from Sichuan to pick her up, when the doctors in Shenzhen announced that she showed no more sign of bodily living. We are told that it is not the right thing to do, when taking the dead body onto the air, because the spirit then would get lost and unable to find the way back home. Certainly it is a totally illogical nonsense, if we keep our thought rationally. How could people assume that the spirits are as impotent as physical bodies? Nevertheless, anyway, it is at least good that there is nobody suggested something like what the old Zhaodi, in My father and mother of Zhang Yimou, had insisted, that the body should be carried step by step and to be informed of all the bulges and creeks on the way.

Yesterday, when talking on the phone with my sister, I said that mother is probably quite happy, when there are so many people whom she loved are now accompanying her back home. 'Yes,' my sister said, 'we are singing the anthem of the volunteer army to her, as if we are crossing the Yalu river.'

Yes, crossing a river, but the river of forgetting rather than the river Yalu. There is no more fear for my mother to show her love to her parents now, finally, after nearly 60 years being away from her home village. No more fear, only when the spirit of somebody is no longer being bound with the body, therefore no need to worry and suffer from bodily torturing and humiliation any more. How good that the ghost would not feel the coldness of the spring wind, and the coldness of the animal world. What a relief.

She wanted to be buried together with her parents, even though it means that she would have to be apart from her husband and her children. Her preferences had been always following her own logic, which I hardly able to catch a slice of its trace. But I sometimes believe that that was due to her sixth sense, as I experience my own sixth sense as well from time to time, though I insist finding logic on all things and happenings. My mother's love to her parents was something which had been deprived from her by the political force, and she was not even allowed to show any sorrow concerning the matter. 'Your grandpa was shot,' she said.

That was not too long ago, when she was retelling the story of a TV series, in which the founding of the people's republic of China executed so many lives, only because they were guilty for owning certain properties. That was the very first time, and the only time, that my mother touched the topic of family history in conversation with me. The family background had been always a shameful scar in her deep heart, I think. I saw that scar from her panic and anger when the word 'landlord' was occasionally mentioned under whatever circumstances. The word 'landlord' is a kind of taboo in our family, as it is the most severe curse above most harmful insulting. I remember that my grandma was forced to go back home, around the time when I was just born, due to that her presence would influence the political career of my parents, the 'organization' warned, my mother told me. I can imagine the anguish and helplessness of my mother, when she had to send her mother away. I can imagine the questions toward the 'organization', which she never dared to ask. I can imagine her strong wish of self-defence. But I never aware of the fact that my grandpa was one of those landlords who had been executed.

How many people had been killed without more sin than most of other human beings?

There are so many countries nowadays, which have abolished capital punishment already, although it remains a controversy philosophically. Basically, I do not have problem with that. But what if one is killed with wrong judgement? What kind of pain would have to be carried by people who are intimate to those whose life was put to an end unnaturally?

By joining the army, my mother was trying to protect herself from being accused, subconsciously, I guess, because she had never become a true revolutionary through out her whole life, even though she had been running through the battle field of Korean War, washed bandages in the icy water of Yalu river as a glorious soldier. and injured her bones during the 're-education' phase of culture-revolution, as a revolutionary official in middle level administrative structure. Nobody had taught her that politic is the most ugly thing in the world, and to survive under the totalitarian power, one has to be able to 'think', to analyze, and to sacrifice. She was just too simple, too naive. She was trained by the army to obey but she never really understood the meaning and its extension of obedience. She had never understood that the power does not only require one to sacrifice one's energy, but more importantly, one's true 'self'. The power would not be fooled, if one does not want to give up the true self, and not even able to hide it. She had kept her family identity in her blood without her own awareness. So, no wonder that she had been constantly refused by the party, although she was trying desperately for becoming a member of it. The party is invincible.

No more need to please anybody, no more need to remember the rule of games, no more need to be bothered by the concept of right or wrong, no more need to carry the burden of responsibilities. The daughter of once a 'landlord', is finally able to show her love to land, to her condemned parents, freely, when body is vanished and requires no more honorable identity. No more barrier.