Two Generations in the Mountains: Great-Grandmother and Grandmother

1) Great-Grandmother: War, Hiding, and Survival (born around the 1910s)

Great-Grandmother was born around the 1910s into a landlord family and had an older brother. Although China was undergoing enormous changes at the time—the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic—those shifts did not seem to affect her household much, likely because they lived in remote mountain areas far from Beijing.

Around 1940, the Japanese invasion intensified. In Great-Grandmother’s recollection, the soldiers were extremely brutal. They carried rifles with bayonets and killed men, women, and children alike. Livestock were slaughtered and eaten, and houses were burned down.

To escape, Great-Grandmother and other villagers hid repeatedly:

• Smoke in a cave: Once, villagers hid in a mountain cave. Japanese soldiers piled grass and wood at the entrance and set it on fire. The people inside were trapped in smoke for an entire day and night. The soldiers may have assumed everyone had died from suffocation or smoke.

• A baby’s cry gave them away: On another occasion, villagers hid together, but a baby began to cry. The soldiers found them quickly and took everyone away.

• Even buried lard was stolen: Before fleeing, Great-Grandmother’s family buried the only remaining lard in a jar under the ground of the pigsty, but the soldiers still discovered and took it. When Great-Grandmother returned, there was nothing left at home.

• Separated from her family: During the last escape, Great-Grandmother became separated from her family. She ran deep into the mountains—she did not know how far—until she found a household that took her in. She survived by working there as a servant.

After the war ended, Great-Grandmother once considered returning to her hometown to search for relatives. But she was too poor, and the hope of finding anyone alive felt remote. In the end, Great-Grandmother passed away without ever returning to look for them.

2) Working for a Landlord Family and a Lifelong Bond

The household Great-Grandmother worked for was also a landlord family, yet they treated their servants kindly. Great-Grandmother, Grandmother, and that household maintained a friendship that lasted a lifetime.

The head of that household was a well-known local doctor, and his son later became a respected doctor as well. When Grandmother and my mother were children, they went to him for medical care. Even when I was young, my family still asked him to write prescriptions. When I was in my early teens, he was already over eighty; he died of intestinal cancer. Grandmother remembered him as gentle, compassionate, and highly skilled. People from dozens of kilometers around—young and old—came to him for treatment. He was deeply respected and warmly remembered.

Later, Great-Grandmother married my great-grandfather and had three children: the eldest son, Grandmother, and the youngest son.

Throughout her life, Great-Grandmother never lived in a hospital and never received tests such as bloodwork or X-rays. When she felt unwell, the village doctor treated her with traditional herbal decoctions. Great-Grandmother died without knowing her exact diagnosis. In her final stage, she could not keep food down—she vomited whenever she ate. My family suspects it may have been a serious stomach illness such as gastric cancer. Great-Grandmother passed away in her early sixties.

3) Grandmother: Born in 1950 in Poverty in the Mountains

Grandmother was born in the winter of 1950 in a mountainous region of China. Her family was extremely poor.

By then, the Communist Party was governing China. Grandmother’s family received land and no longer had to work as long-term hired laborers for landlords. Grandmother felt that rural policies were supportive of ordinary villagers, and she remained grateful for that. Even today, whenever she mentions Chairman Mao or Premier Zhou, she speaks with deep gratitude.

Grandmother once said that in childhood she had never seen a car, and there were no paved roads. To attend school, she walked about five kilometers of mountain paths, crossing several hills.

One day on the way home, Grandmother passed a small stream in a wooded area and noticed a muddy footprint that looked fresh, as if something had just stepped there. Curious, she told her mother. The adults were alarmed and guessed it might have been a tiger, because tigers were known to appear in those mountains at the time. The village’s adult men organized with hunting rifles to look for it, but they never caught anything.

4) Leaving School, Hunger, and Opening Farmland in the Deep Mountains

When Grandmother was in fourth grade, her father died. The family could no longer afford her education, so she dropped out and stayed home to help care for her younger brother.

Around that period, rural life was organized under a communal system: families turned in their grain, and the commune provided meals. In Grandmother’s words, the result was almost absurd—within half a year, the commune’s grain ran out, and there was nothing to eat in the second half of the year. Grandmother’s mother secretly saved a small amount of sweet potatoes and survived until the next year on those. However, families were not allowed to cook privately; if discovered, they could be publicly criticized and punished, accused of keeping “capitalist tendencies.”

The second year was still full of hunger, and people were not even allowed to plant crops around their homes. Only in the third year was this strict collectivist policy eased. It is said that during that famine, many people across China starved to death.

Later, Grandmother’s family was assigned to open farmland deep in the mountains. They lived in a crude shelter—a temporary hut built with grass. It is hard to imagine how defenseless the family would have been if wild animals attacked.

Once, Grandmother’s mother left for a week and only left behind a single ladle of cornmeal. Grandmother stayed in the mountains with her little brother. At each meal, she dared to cook only a small amount of thin porridge for him. The two children survived for a full week on that tiny amount of cornmeal.

5) Work, Marriage, Widowhood, and a Near-Death Illness

In her early twenties, Grandmother began working for the commune. Her first job was recording “work points”—tracking each person’s labor and output. Later, she worked in a small town, until she married my grandfather. Grandmother described that period as the happiest time of her life.

Soon after the marriage, my mother was born, and later my uncle. But only six years into the marriage, my grandfather died unexpectedly. My mother remembers that the snow that year was especially heavy, and the coffin was carried by many people across the snow-covered ground. From that moment on, Grandmother, my mother, and my uncle were left to rely on one another.

My mother recalls being only five years old. She sat quietly in the room watching people come and go. She knew something serious had happened, but she could not understand what it truly meant. A doctor from the local clinic stayed close to Grandmother the entire time, afraid that she might collapse.

Two years later, Grandmother faced another darkest moment: severe sepsis. Overnight, she became critically ill. By the next morning, she could not move. Fortunately, the clinic doctor recognized sepsis immediately. Within 12 hours, Grandmother received IV treatment and the correct medication, and her life was saved. Otherwise, my mother and uncle would have become orphans—something that was, sadly, more common in that era than it is today.

Recovery took two to three months. Afterward, the skin on Grandmother’s hands and feet peeled extensively. She got through that period only with help from relatives—my grand-uncle and my cousin-aunt, among others.

6) Supporting the Family, Raising Me, and Learning in Old Age

To raise my mother and uncle, Grandmother not only worked her regular job but also took on additional weekend work. It was exhausting. Only after my mother graduated from college and began working did the family’s financial pressure finally ease.

After I was born, Grandmother cared for me for many years. She always worried about me and often felt anxious about my relationship with my mother. Grandmother frequently blamed herself for not providing a better education for my mother and uncle. At the time, she said, she was focused on simply surviving—she lacked both time and schooling to “teach” in the way she wished she could have. My mother grew up independent, so it did not affect her as much, but my uncle remained Grandmother’s deepest concern.

In her seventies, Grandmother began teaching herself English to help my cousin—my uncle’s son—study. During summer vacations, she also taught my cousin and me to play cards and practice basic arithmetic with simple addition and subtraction games.

Grandmother is now 76 years old. When I finished this interview, she was truly happy. I have not seen her in three years. This summer, I will live with her for a while and continue listening carefully to her life story.