Things That Must Not Be Forgotten (2000) is a revealing and compelling memoir of the late Canadian Michael David Kwan’s first twelve years of life in China, stretching from the Japanese occupation to the cusp of Communist takeover. Born in 1934 to a Cambridge-educated Chinese father, who had diplomatic immunity along with positions of high influence, notably as a railway administrator, and to a young Swiss mother who deserted the child while he was still a toddler, Kwan grew up knowingly Eurasian, a “half-caste”, as it was so politely put to him - by those outside his family.
His first memories were of considerable privilege at Beijing’s Legation Quarter where he was regarded as a curiosity piece by Caucasian children because of his light brown hair, “foreign nose”, and otherwise Chinese features. Throughout his young life he always had trouble making friends, perhaps because he was the product of a Chinese man and western woman, considered lowest status of all, outside of, maybe, plain peasantry – this, despite his father’s importance. As the Japanese advanced, destroying Kwan’s “magic circle”, the family retreated to the seaside at Qingdau, where the boy befriended his only close peer at a Catholic school, Shao, also of similar mixed parentage.
Behind the
scenes Kwan’s conveys the activities of his father, now Commissioner of Finance
in a Japanese-sponsored government, who, while residing next door to a Japanese
Admiral and his wife (central to the child’s newly recreated magic circle) continued
to intrigue and lead the resistance against the Japanese. The family also took
in a U.S. airman (who reappears later in he story) to deal with his month-long
recovery, at considerable risk to their lives, but, as Kwan senior cleverly figured,
no one would suspect a thing precisely because of proximity to their
distinguished Japanese neighbour.
One of the
most remarkable aspects of the book is the great sense recall and detail by
Kwan as the family is buffeted by both the Japanese and KMT (and implicitly by
the Communists), as well as by Kwan’s schooling, which makes it a pleasurable
read that develops with advancing interest. A powerful family with fine food always at the
table (save perhaps for the very end), it is worth observing that the boy’s
most memorable meals were with his father’s tenant farmer outside the family
villa at Beidaihe (now a summer resort for the Communist elite). An anti-Japanese guerrilla combatant who
suffered at the hands of Korean collaborators, Xiao Hu, had introduced him to
the delicacies of roasted grasshopper.
Of
particular historical note is the chapter “Bulldog’s Dozen” which marks Kwan’s
entry into China’s so-called Boy Scouts, which was itself motivated in part by
efforts to get his father released from detention by the KMT. Kwan’s activities were more reminiscent of the
Hitler Youth - or they anticipated Mao’s Red Guard of the Cultural
Revolution. To elucidate Kwan’s own
point consider the following scouting activity: ”Forcing our way into strange
houses, turning rooms upside down, taking armfuls of books and pamphlets
without bothering to see what they were, and burning them in street-corner
bonfires gave me a tremendous charge.”[1]
Clearly there were elements of Nazi
Germany in China’s Republican phase under Chiang Kai-shek.
Another point
of interest is the fascination KMT soldiers had with the flush toilet at the Kwan
family residence in Qingdau, which they came to occupy. Those soldiers wishing to wash rice only
ended up flushing it down the toilet.
This is reminiscent of Russian troops at the end of the Second World War
discovering similar modern facilities beyond the range of Communist experience in
what was occupied East Germany – a problem for Stalin’s propaganda machine.
Things That Must Not Be Forgotten is a book that must not be
forgotten. In the maelstrom of war Kwan
brings attention to the particular and a long view – over twelve short years - that
some observers of modern China might miss.
For example, it helps give perspective to Jan Wong’s observation in Red China Blues as to why Communist
bureaucracy extracts from the remaining family the cost of the bullet (amounting
to a few cents) for each execution. Kwan
notes the same: alleged traitors were shot and hung by the KMT from lampposts,
and remained there until family members paid for the bullet. In other words, it might belong to a tradition
of Chinese justice, however peculiar. With his rich survivor’s account of an
outsider who speaks like an insider Kwan’s memoir deserves to be on your reading
list.
[1] Michael David Kwan, Things That Must Not Be Forgotten: A Childhood in Wartime China (Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2000), p. 206.
