Awaken: the Memoirs of a Chinese Historian transports readers into the turmoil and transformation of China in the 20th century through the eyes of a rare survivor, the Chinese Christian and scholar, Gu Chang-sheng. His memoir is the riveting and inspirational journey of a man who retained his independent spirit against crushing odds. Missionaries rescued the Gu family from poverty and starvation and Chang-sheng grew up as a member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. At the mission school, Chang-sheng endured hunger, back-breaking work, and humiliation in order to get the precious education he needed for medical school. The Communist Revolution dashed his dreams. The government of the People's Republic dictated that Chang-sheng's new career would be that of historian of Christianity in China. Under Mao Ze-dong, Chang-sheng survived beatings, "re-education" sessions, imprisonment and hard labor. After the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, he chose freedom in the United States in order to speak out for human rights. Many books have been written about life in China under Communism. Awaken: the Memoirs of a Chinese Historian spans almost the entire 20th century, giving Western audiences a unique perspective on eight decades of religious and secular life in China before the birth of the People's Republic as well as during the Communist regime. Gu Chang-sheng's memoir parallels his youth under the authoritarianism of Christian missionaries with adulthood under the Chinese Communists. He renounced the dogma of the Seventh Day Adventist Church but never joined the Communist Party. His independence meant imprisonment and forced labor at worst; it was a balancing act at best. No matter what his circumstances, Gu Chang-sheng lived true to his motto, "Seek truth from facts" and continues to do so today.

Awaken

Memoirs of a Chinese HistorianBy Gu Chang-Sheng

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2009 Gu Chang-Sheng
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4490-0617-4

Contents

Prologue.........................................................................viiChapter 1: Remembering My Parents................................................1Chapter 2: My Education..........................................................17Chapter 3: The Civil War Years...................................................34Chapter 4: Living Under the People's Republic of China...........................52Chapter 5: Jobs Assigned by the Communist Government.............................69Chapter 6: The Cultural Revolution...............................................95Chapter 7: Starvation in Anhui Province: a Survey................................122Chapter 8: Academic Life at the East China Normal University.....................136Chapter 9: A Visiting Scholar at Yale University.................................157Chapter 10: An Unexpected Return to the United States............................178Epilogue.........................................................................200Acknowledgements.................................................................214

Chapter One

Remembering My Parents

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Wuxi: Life In A Slum

I can trace my life back to when I was four years old and lived with my parents in a slum area at the foot of Huishan Mountains in the city of Wuxi (Wooshi), China, which is located about sixty miles north of Shanghai. One very warm summer afternoon, my father asked me to go outside to play and not return until he called. The other poor kids and I played hide-and-seek and other games together in the dirty ground. It was not until dusk when my father looked for me and took me home. I heard a newborn baby crying in our little hut.

My mother, Liu Lin, gave birth to twelve children in eighteen years. Among them, seven died at early ages and two were given away to orphanages. Only three of us survived.

I was born in the village of Jiangying, east of Wuxi on July 19, 1919. My parents were desperately poor. My father, Gu Zhiling (Koo Tsu-ling), owned no land. He got a job running a small ferryboat that paid very little.

When I was about nine months old, I became very ill. My mother took me to the nearby temple on top of a hill to pray to a female Buddha, Guan Yin. While my mother was crying and kowtowing to the Buddha, an old monk approached her and asked, "Why are you crying so bitterly?"

She replied, "I have already lost two babies. This is my third child, a boy. He is very ill. I have no money to see a doctor for him. So I came here to ask the gracious Buddha to save this little boy."

The old monk picked me up from the ground and held me in his arms. He looked at me closely. Then he asked my mother, "What is this boy's name?"

"My husband gave him the name Hong Bao," my mother replied. Hong Bao means "great treasure."

The old monk felt keenly for me. After a moment of silence, he said to my mother, "From now on, do not call this boy Hong Bao. You should call him Chang-sheng. It means 'long life.' He will survive and live a very long life."

My mother kowtowed to the Buddha for her blessing and returned home with me, where I recovered.

When I was three years old, my father decided to move our family to the city of Wuxi to look for jobs. We settled in a slum area in the east of the city. My father bought some reed mats and built a small hut without any windows. We all slept on the straw-covered ground.

Although my father worked part-time jobs here and there to earn some money to support the family, we lived in abject poverty. One summer, he got a job sawing large tree trunks with another man. Working with the scorching sun directly overhead, my father suddenly came down with sunstroke. The other man kindly helped my father to our hut. I heard my father groan to my mother, "I am dying!"

My mother would pick wild herbs and dry them for the purpose of curing illness. I saw her take some dried herbs from her collection, put them in our big wok, adding a lot of water to boil them. She fed my father this concoction and told him to rest. Then she took some of my father's copper coins and went out to buy several catties (a catty equals 1.1 pounds) of sweet potatoes. She boiled the potatoes to feed us, and sold the rest to our neighbors. While my father remained ill, my mother continued to sell boiled sweet potatoes downtown in order to support the family.

One afternoon, while she was selling sweet potatoes near the market place, my mother heard music coming from a nearby school. She thought that she could sell more potatoes there. When she arrived, she saw several foreigners playing musical instruments in front of a big canvas tent. A tall, elderly, white woman greeted her and invited her into the tent "to listen to Jesus."

My mother refused. "Oh, no! I can't go in there. My husband is very ill. I must go home right away."

But the white woman pushed her inside the tent, saying to my mother, "Just sit down here. Jesus will save your husband. After the meeting, I will go with you to your home." She kept her promise and accompanied my mother home to the slum where we lived. Playing outside with my little friends, I suddenly saw a white woman walking with mother into our hut. I was scared because it was the first time that I had ever seen a white person and my mother did not tell me what was going on.

The next morning, I was inside our hut when the white woman returned. She told me not to be afraid of her. I saw her give some pills to my father, instructing him to take them three times a day. She also brought my father some food. Before she left, she asked all of us to kneel down with her and close our eyes. I heard her murmur words that I did not understand. Nevertheless, thanks to the white woman's visits with medicine and food, my father gradually recovered.

Several days later, the white woman returned to our hut with a middle-aged Chinese gentleman. She introduced him to my parents as a pastor. She asked my mother to attend Bible study with the Chinese pastor at his church in Wuxi. She said to my parents, "We foreigners must return to Shanghai. May Jesus bless you."

The Chinese pastor's surname was Lee. He was a very nice man. My mother went to his church and studied Bible with him. Because my mother was illiterate, she just learned some basic stories about Jesus from Pastor Lee. Two months later, my mother was baptized and became a Christian. Pastor Lee asked my father to study Bible, but my father refused.

In the winter of that year, I developed an infection under my nose. It was very painful. My mother took me to see Pastor Lee at the church. He examined the infected spot and told my mother, "I know Chinese medicine. This infection is called a miliary vesicle because it is no bigger than a millet seed. It may be small, but it is dangerous. Luckily, you brought Chang-sheng to me. Otherwise he would have died." Pastor Lee went to his commode, scraped off a little bit of leftover stool, and mixed it with some Chinese medicine. He spread it above my lip. A few days later, the infection was totally cured.

My mother told me, "if I had not taken you to the monk when you were less than a year old, you would have died. Now, you are nearly five years old and you got this disease that was nearly fatal. If I hadn't taken you to the pastor you would have died this time. You have escaped two...