“Hong Cheng” is a labor of love between a father, Hsueh Chi Pei (Chi Pei from now on), and his daughter. The father shared his life stories from China during turbulent times in Mandarin, and the daughter translated them into a memoir.
Hsueh Che Pei was born in 1914, right after the Qing dynasty collapsed and China entered a period of ongoing wars, including civil wars between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China, as well as the Anti-Japanese War, which officially became part of World War II after the Attack on Pearl Harbor. After Japan’s surrender, civil wars broke out again between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party until the Communist Party established the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Against this background, Hsueh Chi Pei began his life in a quiet village at the foot of the snow-capped sacred mountain of Nyiso-la in the Himalayan range, as he mentioned, on the border between Sichuan, China, and Kham, Tibet. Today, this border is officially recognized as the provincial border between Sichuan Province and Tibet.
Hsueh Chi Pei’s father was a high-ranking Han official, serving as the governor of the far western and southern regions of China. In peacetime, Chi Pei would have enjoyed a prestigious life with a secure future. But conflicts and wars changed everything. It should be noted that his memoirs focus on his personal stories. Historical events are mentioned only briefly when they directly impacted his life. For those unfamiliar with China’s history during that period, this book is best read as a collection of personal stories.
As a Han boy living in a town near Tibet, Chi Pei experienced ethnic tensions from a young age. Han children and Tibetan children were separated, even though they lived in the same town. Chi Pei recalled, “We were antagonistic toward each other at the best of times and always teased, bullied, and fought in ‘normal’ times.” At one point, their fight led to torching a hill. He didn’t explain the root of the tension, which seemed to be accepted as a normal part of life.
As the firstborn son in a Han family, he received a traditional Confucian education and learned English from a young age. Due to unrest and his father’s constant work in remote regions, Chi Pei had to take care of his large family as the head of the household. He later moved with his family to Chengdu, a lively inland cultural and commercial hub in Sichuan. There, he continued his secondary education. From Chengdu, he traveled to Nanjing, a major river port city, to pursue higher education. After graduating, he joined the Opium Prohibition Department of the Kuomintang government in Nantong, a river port city near Nanjing. In this role, he witnessed the devastating effects of opium addiction. Here, he also fell in love with a girl, although neither of them declared their feelings.
Perhaps it was no coincidence that Japan decided to invade China at this time, when China was torn apart by internal conflicts and ravaged by opium addiction. To escape from Japanese troops, Chi Pei chose to escort his “female friend” to her hometown because it was too dangerous for a single woman to travel alone. During the war, everything was simplified and hurried. But love triumphed. Two large red candles sealed their marriage. The war also changed his career path to military logistics. He saw both the horrors of war and the courage and resolve of the Chinese people fighting against Japan’s invasion.
Despite many hardships, separation from loved ones and friends, and loss of family members at a young age, he also found moments of joy during turbulent times. Sadly, his memoir was abruptly halted in the middle of the war because he passed away. It’s unclear when, how, or why, but he eventually settled his family in India, which is not a common destination for a Han family migrating. His move to India would make for an interesting story, especially since he grew up near Tibet.
I was puzzled by the title “Hong Cheng (which in Pinyin means a red city), memoirs of a turbulent life through a rose-tinted dust storm.” After reading the book, I realized that the title was a literary translation of the Chinese word “Hong Chen, which literally means “red dust,” and has no direct English equivalent. “Red dust” figuratively refers to our mundane, material world, in contrast to the clean, peaceful religious and spiritual realm. But such is the challenge of translation.
As Chi Pei noted at the end of the book, he focused on the “insignificant” events of his personal life (in the mundane world) and deliberately chose not to connect them to the horrors of war or frame them in historical moments. I noticed that the author used phonetic transliterations of place names and people’s names rather than the official Pinyin system. Despite this, it offers an interesting and easy read to see how a person lived in a completely different world from ours in peacetime (more or less), yet underlying human values remained the same.
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