Fear hovers in China

It’s lovely to be the child of a Chinese Revolutionary Martyr. It means your parent died especially heroically for the Communist cause. I had a friend who was such a son; his father, a high-ranking Chiang Kaishek army officer, came over to the Maoist cause and died fighting for it against his former comrades. The big thing for the son was that he had access to his dang-an, the official dossier containing the personal and political details of individual Chinese, which is closely guarded by the security apparatus. Few ever see their dang-an — which can make or break your career — but my friend could add favourable facts to his and excise damning ones.

It follows that it is a very bad thing to be accused of not being the genuine son or the grandson of a RM, especially if you once enjoyed many good things, including career advantages and public esteem on the strength of such a pedigree. It makes no difference if you believed you were genuine.

Such are the fates in The Boat to Redemption of Ku Wenxuan, the son of the woman martyr Deng Shaoxiang, and of her grandson Ku Dongliang. A secret courier for the Communist side during the civil war before Mao’s victory in 1949, Deng was hanged by the enemy, leaving behind, it was always stated, a baby son with a fish birthmark on his backside.

When baby Ku grew up, famed for his lineage and his birthmark, he became a big shot in Milltown, a smallish place on a river. But doubts grew about his authenticity, which he himself had never questioned; after many other boys and men flaunted similar birthmarks he was disgraced. He spent the rest of his life working on a river barge with his similarly disgraced son, but never stopped sending letters to officials begging for reinstatement as a RM.