Elmhurst woman recalls the day soldiers seized her mom and
her home

STORY BY TARA MALONE | Daily Herald Staff Writer
PHOTOS BY PATRICK KUNZER | Daily Herald Photographer

A security officer watches over students who prepare for dismissal at the Jing Wulu Primary School in Ji’nan, the same school Xiao Meilin attended as a child until the day no one came to walk her home.

JI'NAN, China — Autumn 1948: Xiao Meilin marches out of one of the city's most exclusive schools, swept along in a tide of yellow-capped students.

They walk in pairs, shoulder-to-shoulder with bundles of books dangling from their hands.

Beyond the Jing Wulu Primary School gate, regimented rows of 7-year-olds quickly fade. Children race into a crowd of waiting parents, grandparents and servants who congregate along the tree-lined Wei Sanlu road.

Meilin runs with them, searching for the servant her mother sends at 4:30 p.m. every day to take her home.

She finds no one.

No adults at least.

Meilin spots her 4-year-old baby brother. She is just 7, but she knows enough to grab his hand. Together, they walk up and down Wei Sanlu. Again, and again. They wait two hours. Still, no one comes.

As twilight gives way to darkness, Meilin and her brother turn toward home — alone.

It's less than a mile, but they've never walked on their own.

Why did no one come, she wonders. What happened?

When Meilin and her brother turn onto Jing Qui Road, she finds out.

Communist soldiers surround her brick home — the one with the porch and garden pond at 333 Jing Qui Road.

• • •

Nearly six decades ago, communist soldiers took control of Xiao Meilin’s childhood home, above, at 333 Jing Qui Road.

Now 64, Meilin forces herself to remember the day she spent years trying to forget. Rarely has the Elmhurst woman allowed herself to flash back to that day 57 years ago when her family and home were ripped apart, eventually leading her here, one of nearly 52,000 Chinese immigrants living in Chicago and its suburbs.

Meilin was born into a China gripped by civil war. Communist and nationalist forces dueled for control of a nation divided by economics and geography. Discontent among poor rural workers fueled a rebellion that carried communists to power in 1949.

Their victory divided her family and countless others caught in the crossfire.

• • •

Autumn 1948: At her house at 333 Jing Qui Road, communist soldiers carry out antique chests from the living room, carpets from the bedrooms and Western gifts her father received while working as a translator for U.S. Gen. George Marshall during World War II.

They let no one inside.

Xiao Meilin reflects on the traumatic day as a child years ago when her home was confiscated by soldiers and her family was divided amid China ’s political turmoil. Now 64, Meilin, an Elmhurst resident, does not often dwell on her past.

Meilin's 12-year-old brother, Jivhong, who came home from a different school to stumble upon the soldiers, finds her and her brother in the horde of neighbors watching the spectacle unfold.

Adults whisper their mother is gone. Soldiers took Xiao Yunxia when they could not find her husband.

Meilin's father, Xiao Wangyuan, they murmur, fled to America two months ago with the three eldest children when a communist victory seemed certain.

"Traitors," some say in hushed tones.

"Fangeming," whisper others. "Counter-revolutionaries."

The words wash over Meilin.

She stands quietly at the gate between her brothers, watching soldiers seize everything she has known as home for seven years.

She doesn't understand. Still, she knows her life changed in the hours since she shared a morning bowl of porridge with her mother.

"Auntie," Meilin calls to a neighbor who knows her mother. No answer.

"Auntie," she calls louder this time, thinking her voice hasn't reached the house. "Auntie."

Auntie never answers.

"To help a traitor," Meilin recalls years later, "you become a traitor."

• • •

Summer 2005: Three red suitcases fill the cramped living room.

Xiao Meilin leafs through old pictures with her 21-year-old daughter, Janet, in their Elmhurst apartment on the eve of their annual pilgrimage to Ji ’nan.

Meilin and her 21-year-old daughter, Janet, leave Elmhurst tomorrow for their annual pilgrimage to Ji'nan.

A quarter century after she left the city renown for its fresh springs, Meilin still calls Ji'nan home, despite the memories.

"I try to bring her back to China as often as I can so she can speak Chinese," Meilin says of Janet, a Northwestern University senior. "So she can have the Chinese flavor."

That Janet speaks Mandarin is not enough for Meilin.

She wants her suburban daughter, born during a brief marriage, to know the country of her heritage. She wants her to know her cousins raised half a world away. She wants her to know the smell of Shandong province dumplings.

"The thing is when I go to China," says Janet, a slight woman who speaks with American frankness, "I'm not Chinese. I can speak like them, but I can't read beyond a sixth-grade level."

• • •

Winter 1948: Forty days.

Meilin drifts between Ji'nan's alleys, backyards and doorsteps for 40 days.

Xiao Meilin as an 18-year-old in Ji ’nan, China.

Big homes with sheltered front gates — like the one she lived in — make for the best outdoor sleeping, she and her brothers learn.

And begging.

Meilin learns to knock on kitchen doors and dig garden vegetables to eat.

It is eggplant season. She hates eggplant.

Every night, when her brothers cannot see, when they cannot hear, Meilin cries.

For her mother.

For her father.

For her classes and friends at Jing Wulu Primary School.

One day, an uncle finds the three vagabonds huddled in the covered entryway of a home. For 40 days, Xiao Fengxi searched for them after learning of his sister-in-law's capture.

Xiao Fengxi knows communists who seized control of Ji'nan likely will do the same in Beijing. He knows life may become dangerous for him, a Christian minister. Ties to the children's father, Xiao Wangyuan, the English translator and Christian minister who fled to America, will not help him.

Staring at Meilin and the boys, Xiao Fengxi decides none of that matters.

He takes Meilin and her brothers to his church, where he lives with his family in an adjacent home. Space is tight, the reserve of yuan (money) even tighter. Xiao Fengxi can't support them all, so he sends the youngest, Jiqun, to live with distant relatives on a farm. It is seven years before he can return.

Stigma surrounds the children.

It is too dangerous for Meilin and Jivhong to return to school, their uncle decides. The Bible doubles as their textbook; they practice writing Mandarin characters by copying scripture line by line.

"In China, it's all about family," Meilin remembers. "My mom is in jail. My father fled the country. I shame my name. I just have to stay quiet and stay out of the way."

• • •

Summer 2003: Meilin hunts for the church whose name she cannot recall.

Sun sets on the downtown skyline of Xiao Meilin ’s hometown, Ji ’nan, the capital of China’s Shandong province.

The Christian chapel on Ji'nan's outskirts where she lived with her uncle is as much a part of her past as her family home at 333 Jing Qui Road.

In the small, cramped home next to the chapel, she learned to cook, clean, read and write.

So on an August afternoon thick with heat, Meilin searches for a piece of her fragmented childhood. She recruits her uncle's granddaughter, Zheng Jie, to help.

In her 53 years in Ji'nan, it has never occurred to the granddaughter to visit the church where her mother grew up along with Meilin.

A nurse in the Shandong province hospital, Zheng Jie is not one for scavenger hunts. But practicality never trumps family loyalty.

The women, one tall with a strong stride, the other shorter with a faltering walk, know two things to guide their search: the church sits in the heart of the Huiyin district and the late Xiao Fengxi ministered there.

They canvass the remote neighborhood searching for the church whose image blurred in Meilin's mind over time.

A child ends a school day at Jing Wulu Kindergarten, housed in the same building where Xiao Meilin attended class years ago. This is where Meilin, now a 64-year-old Elmhurst woman, waited for someone to walk her home on the day in 1948 when communist soldiers seized control of her home and imprisoned her mother.

After they walk in circles for hours, a local woman confirms what they suspect — the church fell years ago to one of the country's five-year development plans. The plan, a blueprint for economic growth borrowed from the Soviet Union, razed aged buildings, including churches, to make way for apartments and businesses.

For Meilin, another piece of her childhood is lost.

Of her aunt who survived that childhood, Zheng Jie says, "She never bends her head. When there is difficulty or danger, she never is defeated by it. She is that kind of person, full of courage."

• • •

Spring 1962: The woman with the wrinkled face looks nothing like the one Meilin last saw over a bowl of porridge 14 years ago.

Her mother, Xiao Yunxia, has not seen the outside of the Zhaoyuan work camp since communist soldiers took her from her home in 1948.

The hands once used to embroider now are chapped, peeking out from the sleeves of her blue-and-white prison shirt.

Her hands and face say more about her 14 years mining gold in prison than the quiet woman ever will.

Now 61, Meilin's mother is ill.

Only because of her illness is Meilin allowed to visit. She traveled for nearly three days on a worn bicycle to reach the prison, bringing with her money to buy medicine.

With guards hovering, they dare not mention the husband and father they last saw on the August Moon Festival in 1948.

Meilin's mother knows only that her husband and three oldest children escaped China safely. That her husband may live freely while she is here — because of him — does not bother her.

"This is the cross God gave me," she tells her daughter.

Meilin, now a nurse relegated to a rural clinic because of her shamed family name, knows a bit about the heavy burden.

During the years since 1948, communist leader Mao Zedong silenced the first hint of dissent within party ranks. Stoking a revolutionary fervor, communist forces expunged everything of Western capitalism.

Books were burned, temples desecrated. Old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits were targeted.

A decade of cultural repression, known in history books as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966, sent businessmen to re-education camps and university students to the countryside.

In her Elmhurst living room, Xiao Meilin watches a videotape of her brother, Jivhong, playing accordion during a performance on Ji ’nan television in 1985. The pair grew up in a musical household in Ji’nan, where their father played piano and accordion.

The upheaval delayed Xiao Yunxia's release until 1979, 31 years after she was imprisoned.

"I pity her," Meilin says of her mother years later. "She knew how to embroider. She knew how to raise children. I pity her because my mother didn't know what is going on."

• • •

Autumn 2005: Meilin never said goodbye.

When her father left Ji'nan on Aug. 15, 1948, he was in a hurry. He said it would be only a short trip. She knew nothing of his destination.

Her father needed to leave before the communist forces arrived en route to Beijing. Having served as translator to Marshall during World War II and later to the nationalist governor of Shandong province, he would be a prime target for soldiers.

He and his wife decided he would take the oldest three children with him to Chicago, where he had graduated from the Moody Bible Institute in 1931.

Xiao Wangyuan arrived in America empty-handed, hoping his Christian friends might help him. They did.

It was not long before Xiao Wangyuan — known to his U.S. colleagues as Samuel — headed Chicago's Chinatown Christian Church, his sermons often broadcast on television.

"He was supposed to come back," Meilin recalls.

History interfered.

Mao Zedong and his revolutionary Red Army seized control of China, village by village, province by province.

With Shanghai about to topple into communist hands in early 1949, Kuomintang leader Chiang Kaishek escaped to Taiwan.

Beijing — the political heart of China — slipped easily into communism, the entire country slipping with it. And on Oct. 1, 1949, the People's Republic of China was born, abruptly shutting a door to the West.

Diplomatic ties with the United States ended. Borders closed. Chinese living abroad could not return home. Chinese at home could not leave. A bamboo curtain of silence remained for more than three decades, dividing the Xiao family and thousands of others.

That her father did not take her hurt. It still does, the daughter concedes.

"I never blamed him. It was not his fault, but he didn't take me," Meilin says. "Before, my father liked me the most."

Xiao Wangyuan died in 1964.

He never knew whether his wife and three young children in Communist China survived.

• • •

Spring 1971: Meilin denies she has a sister in America.

Local officials find Meilin in the rural hospital where she works. A man in an expensive-looking suit stares at her a moment before reaching into his pocket for a photograph.

"Do you know this person?" he asks, pointing to a woman whose features mirror her own.

"Do you know Xiao Mailee?"

Meilin glances at the image, seeing her older sister for the first time in 23 years. Before a hint of recognition betrays her, she answers with a curt, "no."

She hurries away before he prods further.

With the Cultural Revolution continuing, Meilin knows admitting any connection to the West could worsen her family's already tenuous standing.

Claiming Xiao Mailee as her sister — a sister who fled to America on the revolution's eve — could land her in jail, she fears.

Meilin hurries home to ask her brother's advice.

This tree-lined alley feeds into Jing Qui Road, near the childhood home of Xiao Meilin. Meilin walked home with her little brother along this narrow roadway at dusk in 1948 to find her mother gone, communist soldiers in her home and her childhood interrupted.

Speak up, says her younger brother, Jiqun.

"You already are halfway in the grave," he says, referring to the high blood pressure and heart disease that plagued her since childhood. "What's the harm in admitting it?"

Officials find her again the next day. Again, the man in the nice suit draws out his photograph. This time, Meilin nods.

"She is my sister," she says.

"She is my wife," the man in the suit, Wang "Ben" Chang, replies.

After 23 long years, Meilin's family members in America connect with their other half.

Letters with money soon begin to arrive from Xiao Mailee, who now lives in California. Her older brothers, Xiao Jimin and Xiao Deshen, also write, describing a life that unfolded in a place called Chicago.

For nine years, letters flow between them, chronicling their family's history.

As they wrote, the nation inched toward change. President Nixon was the first U.S. president to visit Communist China in 1972. Mao Zedong died and, in 1977, Deng Xiaoping, a dissident leader renown for his economic pragmatism, took control. China's doors to the West soon unlocked. Economic opportunity might have been the crowbar, nonetheless the opening paved the way for families divided by three decades to reunite.

On March 18, 1980, Meilin and her mother board a jet bound for Tokyo and then Chicago.

The pair settle into an Elmhurst apartment where Meilin still lives 26 years later. Meilin works at a restaurant and as a baby sitter to support her aging mother. In 1988, her mother dies. Meilin and her siblings bury her next to her husband in Chicago's Rosewood Cemetery.

"The ultimate goal is to come to this country," Meilin says, "so my mother could see my father's grave."

• • •

Elmhurst, Autumn 2005: Meilin made a deal with herself years ago: Do not look back.

In the kitchen of her Elmhurst apartment, Xiao Meilin prepares pork dumplings whose flavor and scent remind her of China. Meilin left her native Ji 'nan in 1980, creating a new life in Chicago’s suburbs.

Dwelling on the house that no longer is hers, the father she never really knew or the mother who spent 31 years in prison only distracts her from her driving focus these days: her daughter, Janet.

"What's past is past. I don't need to think about it anymore," Meilin says. "You have to learn to be happy with what you have. You have to learn to be thankful for what people give you."

Janet Xiao — known to her Chinese cousins as Maomao — will graduate Northwestern University in June. She already has signed a two-year job contract with a consulting firm in Beijing. She hopes to parlay the international experience into acceptance at one of America's top business schools.

When that happens, the Xiao family again will be divided by 7,000 miles. This time, though, it will be by choice.

"I'm very happy," Meilin says, "but I tell her to be very, very careful."

That Janet might be affected by her family's turbulent history with the communist government does not concern Meilin. Not anymore. These days she worries Janet's Western frankness could offend her Chinese co-workers.

While Meilin might not dwell on the past, she also does not forget it.

On her crowded bookshelf sits a book of historic homes in Ji'nan, including the brick house with a porch and garden pond at 333 Jing Qui Road.

Nearly 60 years after soldiers stormed the house and arrested her mother, the building still is occupied by the communist government.

The memories resurface when Meilin purposefully retraces her childhood steps home from school as she sometimes does during her summer trips.

With childlike clarity she recalls images from inside the home: the piano room where her father played, her sister's room which Meilin preferred to her own, and the garden pond filled years ago when Jing Qui Road first was paved.

"I'm not angry," she says. "It's just a feeling of injustice."

Continue:
• A childhood interrupted
• Keeping the faith can be a test of it
• Strung together