A divorce encouraged by Mao
- Source: Global Times
- [20:32 July 27 2009]
- Comments
By Zhang Lei
Zhang Hanzhi and Hong Junyan in 1956.
Divorce in China is quite common these years. However, for 77-year-old Hong Junyan, his poignant and much publicized divorce from his well-connected wife, Zhang Hanzhi, during the Cultural Revolution marked him for life.
After 30 years of silence, Hong's memoir Unbearable to Recall: My Divorce with Zhang Hanzhi was published in Hong Kong in August 2007 and the simplified Chinese version released on the Chinese mainland last month.
After being born out of wedlock, Hong’s ex-wife Zhang Hanzhi was adopted into a powerful family. Her adoptive father Zhang Shizhao was a lawyer and scholar who served as the Minister of Education in 1920s. As Party Chairman Mao Zedong’s life-long friend, her father once raised 20,000 silver dollars to help Mao go in for revolutionary activities. In the 1960s, Zhang Hanzhi became Mao’s short-term English tutor and interpreter when Mao was meeting US President Richard Nixon during his historic visit to China in 1972. She caused a scandal by divorcing and marrying Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua, who was 22 years her senior, in 1973.
Written in an austere style, Hong said that his memoir was intended to restore the historical truth against the distorted facts of the divorce published in several of Zhang Hanzhi’s bestsellers that were released over the past 15 years.
Scarcely mentioned in Zhang Hanzhi’s memoirs, her first marriage with Hong ended with an scandalous divorce in 1972, which she wrote was suggested by Mao himself. Zhang said that Mao told her, “Why don’t you liberate yourself? Your man is unfaithful to you and your marriage is already over!”
In Unbearable to Recall Hong reflects that he was astonished to find that Zhang had made him the scapegoat of their failed marriage. He said that nobody knew that Zhang had actually betrayed him in the first place in 1966, when the Cultural Revolution began.
Hong and Zhang met each other when they were teenagers. They got married eight years later, were together for 17 years and had one daughter.
“People have long held the initial impression that I ruined the marriage, which is completely untrue,” Hong explained in his book. “I didn’t want to mention it after so many years, but my friends and relatives said I should tell the whole truth.”
An earlier version of Hong’s memoir was serialized by the Hong Kong-based Ming Pao Daily in February 2004. The serial was aborted after three days when Hong and Zhang’s daughter Hong Huang, a writer and publisher, told her father that it was not a good time to dig up old memories as her mother was seriously ill. Zhang died in Beijing four years later.
In his book, for the first time, Hong outlines his version of the times. He describes years of persecution by the Red Guards including his house being ransacked, public beatings and humiliation, imprisonment and being sent to do heavy physical labor in a diseased area. Hong was accused of being a Rightist because he was the son of a rich banker.
Hong said that to make an insufferable situation even worse, his wife turned her back on him and was having an affair.
“I was not afraid of the beating and insults because I knew I had done nothing wrong. Compared with the political persecution, Zhang hurt me even more,” Hong wrote.
“It was the same revolutionary idealism that brought us together as aspiring youths devoted to engaging in political movements,” Hong stated. “In the end, Zhang tried to make herself look better by praising her second marriage, covering up the true reason for her divorce with me.”
Both Hong and Zhang have been labeled as political victims and the demise of the relationship a reflection of the tumultuous times.
“The book is much more than a family’s tragedy,” writer and Hong’s former classmate Dan Chen commented. “During the Cultural Revolution, numerous families fell apart, ridiculously enough it was in the name of the holy revolution.”
“Human nature was the most horrible during the Cultural Revolution. Young people were made into ruthless devils while intellectuals lived in shame and degradation. In order to survive, people went against their will,” Hong wrote.
Unbearable to Recall: My Divorce with Zhang Hanzhi was published by Henan Literature & Art Publishing House in Chinese in June and is widely available.
