My uncle had naïvely, heroically, stupidly distributed the essay to the public.
Weeks prior, my teenage uncle had criticized Mao Zedong in writing for manipulating the innocent people of China by pitting them against one other, just to centralize his power. Three years later, my seven-year-old father watched as his eldest brother was placed under arrest. To this date, the actual death toll from the purges remains unspoken and, worse, unknown. Even for a country marked by storied upheaval, the next decade would bring unparalleled turmoil. It is 1966 and China’s Cultural Revolution has just begun. He sees on the dirt ground a single character written in blood: The stench of decomposing flesh floods his nose.
In the muggy late-summer air, mosquitoes and flies swarm the hanging corpses. He approaches slowly, pushing past the knees of adults encircling the tree. There he halts, arrested by curious, swaying shapes that he is slow to recognize: two men dangling from a muscular tree. In my father’s earliest memory, he is four years old, shooting a toy gun at nearby birds as he skips to the town square.
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