The Garden We Shared
There is a garden I carry with me — not one in bloom, but one bound by memory. It was outside our home in Tientsin, where the days seemed slower and the light more forgiving. In that garden, I spent many afternoons beside my great-grandmother, whom the neighbours referred to as “Old Madame Gao” [1] . Before entering the Gao family, her original name was Liang [given name redacted] [2] (literally: Liang the [translation of given name redacted]), but upon marriage, my great-grandfather renamed her Liang [name withheld for privacy] [3]. The new name was a wish: her husband hoped she might emulate the moral strength and teaching spirit of Mencius’s mother, the legendary figure celebrated for shaping her son’s virtue through example and environment. At the same time, my great-grandfather likely also introduced her to the lives of women celebrated in classical texts for their virtue, fidelity, and strength in adversity [4] , for those stories would quietly shape her worldview and conduct for the rest of her life, forming an inner code that she upheld even as the world around her collapsed into war and revolution. Decades later, these stories were passed down to my mother, who grew up in her care.
To me, my great-granny was simply the one who carried me when I could not walk, held my hand when I could not yet speak, and waited for me when I strayed too far into the bushes. She had already endured a lifetime by the time I was born. Revolution, war, occupation, widowhood, silence. But when I was with her, she was not a symbol of survival. She was simply mine. I remember the way she guided me through the garden — not by instructing, but by being. We matched each other’s pace. She bent to show me a leaf, or offered her hand when the path grew uneven. Her every movement was calm and dignified, but softened by affection.
It is difficult to describe what makes a bond deep. Perhaps it is not in the words exchanged, but in the thousands of shared gestures too ordinary to record. The quiet glances. The pauses. The fact that even in silence, I never felt alone.
Long before I was born, she had already passed this quiet steadiness down to my mother, who grew up under the same roof, in the same light.
In her youth, when the world still felt held together by the voices of elders, my mother would sometimes sit quietly as her granny and father spoke in low tones of a man named Gao Lingwei — her granduncle.
In the memory of my grandfather, Gao Lingwei was always referred to as “the fifth uncle” [5] , though there were only four brothers by birth. This was not a mistake, but a reflection of an old Tientsin custom: in some households, a doll was symbolically designated as the eldest son, often to protect the real child from misfortune. The actual firstborn would then be called the second, and so on. Thus, Gao Lingwei, though the fourth biological son of Gao Chihu, carried the title of “fifth uncle” all his life — a quiet trace of a superstition meant to shield, not deceive.
His name was never dwelled upon, yet it lingered, like the echo of a bell long after it has been struck. She sensed that he had once stood near the heart of things, though no one said quite how. Years later, as a young woman herself, she visited her former teacher Mrs. Kuo. There, in a quiet room filled with the scent of old paper and tea, she glimpsed a book, brought home by Mrs. Kuo’s husband, Mr. Ch’iao, who worked at the Cultural and Historical Documents Research Committee of Tientsin. Near the end of the book, my mother finally read the office her great-uncle had held — titles unspoken in her own household, yet printed with calm finality in black ink.
She asked to borrow the book, but could not. Still, she noted its name: Volume 20 of A Selection of the Literary and Historical Materials from Tientsin. And later, with quiet resolve, she asked a colleague to find it for her through the local library system. That book, once borrowed, was never returned. It has lived with her ever since, and today (the Fourth of May, 2025), she placed it into my hands, as if passing forward a question to be answered.
In 1981, the Tientsin Municipal Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference published Volume 20 of A Selection of Literary and Historical Materials from Tientsin. Buried deep within its pages is an essay titled “The Process by Which Gao Lingwei Became Chairman of the Puppet Vigilance Committee”, written by someone named Chang Talu. Its purpose is clear: to portray Gao Lingwei’s wartime decisions in a condemnatory light without regard for historical nuance, and to draw a straight line between temporary political compromise and moral condemnation.
The article accuses Gao Lingwei of collaborating with the Japanese occupiers during the early months of the Second Sino-Japanese War. It suggests he was eager to accept office under Japanese oversight, and that his motivations were rooted in ambition rather than necessity. In doing so, it sets aside a far longer career in public service, and it overlooks the harrowing complexities of governance under foreign occupation.
Before accepting such a reductionist portrait, it is worth recalling the depth and breadth of Gao Lingwei’s public service.
Gao Lingwei was Acting President of the Republic of China. He also served as Minister of Finance, Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, and held multiple provincial governorships, including Hunan and Chihli [6] . These were not minor roles. They were among the highest offices in the early Republican state. The article does not deny these facts; rather, it notes that Gao’s family omitted these titles from his obituary, listing only the offices held during the Japanese occupation. But silence is not always concealment. In times when political affiliation could endanger one’s descendants, restraint was often an act of protection. That the obituary was selective reflects the atmosphere of the era — not necessarily a statement of shame, but perhaps one of caution. The author’s comparison to the late Ming official Hung Chengchou [7] draws on a historical analogy that may obscure more than it reveals.
The article gives little consideration to the peril of refusal.
When Tientsin fell under Japanese control in 1937, many civic leaders were approached and asked, sometimes compelled, to take part in provisional local committees. Few were in a position to refuse without consequence. For those with families, with reputations long cultivated in service to the state, such choices were neither easy nor pure. To assume that every acceptance of office implies agreement is to overlook the difference between survival and surrender. Some took posts reluctantly to soften the blow of occupation, to mitigate violence, or simply to preserve a thread of order in a city suddenly adrift.
Family memory, quiet, apolitical, and wary of grand statements, remembers Gao Lingwei not as a man of betrayal, but as someone who chose dignity and restraint in difficult times. He had served his country before the war, and when war came to his doorstep, he did not run. That his experience was later framed as complicity may say more about the needs of narrative than the facts on the ground.
The article’s language reflects a particular moment in time.
Terms such as “traitor”, “a jackal aiding the tiger”, and “a monkey crowned in clothes” were widely used in the decades following the war, when national wounds were raw and the desire for moral clarity was strong. Yet such expressions, while emotionally powerful, leave little room for nuance. They do not ask what pressures a person faced, nor what quiet intentions may have guided their reluctant actions. Gao Lingwei, like many others of his generation, lived through the disintegration of empire, the rise of republic, and the agony of occupation. To reduce his entire public life to a handful of wartime months is to judge history from afar, without the weight of its burdens. Reflection benefits from language that opens rather than closes, that remembers not only what a person did, but also the silence in which they endured it.
History need not flatter. But it should listen. If Gao Lingwei made mistakes, let them be understood in proportion to the choices truly before him. If he remained quiet, let us ask what that quietness cost him — and what it may have spared others.
I do not write to dispute the past, but to widen it. To recall that before the war, there was a man of learning and service. That during its darkest years, he may have tried to cause less harm, not more. And that after his passing, no one stood to clear his name.
I write in his place not to vindicate, but to remember.
My great-grandmother, the sole companion of Gao Lingwei’s elder brother during the later stages of his life, was bound to him not by ceremony alone, but by the quiet constancy of shared days. Although she was not Gao Lingwen’s first wife — two earlier wives, both with the surname Yang, had passed away before she entered his life — she was his only companion for the rest of his years. Some older relatives of mine recalled her being referred to as a spouse of the secondary order [8] on some occasions, likely reflecting the formality of titles rather than the fullness of her role. It was a designation that belied her true place in the household, and in the story that followed. In reality, she functioned more like a principal wife in every way, and was often referred to as “The Eldest Madame” [9] by the rest of the family.
When she first entered the Gao household, my great-grandmother was not yet the matriarch she would one day become. In those early years, she was remembered as carefree — fond of outings, opera, and asking for spending money. Though the telephone had long been in the home, it was the first time she picked it up, and instinctively, she spoke in Cantonese, the language of her adoptive upbringing in Tientsin, leaving others in the household unable to understand her words. However, she was likely highly intelligent, and adapted quickly to the speech, manner, and rhythms of the Gao family. As the household evolved, and especially after the death of her husband, she quietly assumed responsibilities no one else could carry. By the time I knew her, she was the unquestioned centre of our family: respected, remembered, and obeyed. Her strength, like her silence, had been earned. My mother, who grew up in her care, never saw her as anything but his most important wife. And in truth, that is what she was: the matriarch, the moral centre, and the only spouse he ever lived with in the house we inherited.
My great-grandmother rarely spoke of politics, and was never aware of the exact office Gao Lingwei had held until the day she passed away. But when she spoke of Gao Lingwei, her tone was reverent and precise:
“He was a kind person who had no one’s blood on his hands, for otherwise people would have sought revenge after him, but no one did that.”
That kind of statement stands out in a family where silence about the past was more common than storytelling. In 1923, his name appeared in newspapers, government rosters, and proclamations — and then, almost overnight, it vanished.
She never spoke about Gao Lingwei with grandeur. Her stories came in fragments, in the margins of a quiet life: a name spoken at the mention of a place, a memory stirred by a letter, a sigh offered in front of an old mirror. And through her, his memory passed into me not as a history to study, but as a feeling to protect.
What does it mean to be powerful for only four months? And what does it mean to be misunderstood, even hated, by the public, while being remembered by your family as gentle and just? What I now write about Gao Lingwei is not abstract. It began in that garden, with a boy and an old woman, moving together beneath the trees. That is where this book was born. Not in the archives, but in her gaze.
My great-grandmother, who plays a central role in these pages, welcomed the new order after 1949 with dignity and adapted to it with grace. She served as a volunteer nurse in the Red Cross Committee of her neighbourhood, quietly offering warmth and care to those around her. She was respected and loved by her community not for her family’s past, but for her own quiet strength in the present.
This book is my attempt to reclaim the memory of Gao Lingwei not just as a political figure, but as a man who bore the burdens of a collapsing world. It is also the story of a family that served the Chinese state for over six centuries, from the Ming court to the Beiyang Government (a.k.a. The First Republic of China). And it is a story about loyalty, silence, and what survives when official history chooses not to remember. It is my hope that readers, regardless of background, will approach it with thoughtfulness, and find in it a spirit of humanity rather than division.
This book does not speak on behalf of any government, nor does it serve to justify any system that narrows the scope of memory. The Forgotten President was written in quiet defiance — against the erasure of memory, the loss of nuance, and the silencing of moral struggle. In an age where volume is often mistaken for truth, this work remains deliberately soft-spoken.
I was raised in the afterglow of stories once whispered, not shouted. Through the complex legacy of my great-granduncle, I hope to recover a deeper understanding: that in moments of national collapse, the burden of choice often fell not on the powerful, but on the ordinary — and that even today, history told from the ground up has something urgent to say.
In a time when simplified narratives risk reducing an entire civilization to a symbol or a threat, I offer this book as a quiet alternative. To those reading from afar: unless we learn to separate the human from the headline, the past from the propaganda, we risk losing not only our understanding of others — but our own ability to discern what matters in the stories we tell.
These pages were not written in the spirit of contention, but as a quiet act of remembrance. Gao Lingwei walked the margins of history, steadying what could not be saved, answering when others turned away. His story does not ask for praise, only for the courtesy of being heard in full. If, in time, these words should return to the land that once shaped him, may they do so not as echoes of dissent, but as notes in a larger harmony — seeking not to stir the past, but to understand its weight.
[1] In Chinese: 髙奶奶
[2] In Chinese: 梁 – – [given name redacted for privacy]
[3] In Chinese: 梁 – – [name withheld for privacy]
[4] In Chinese: 貞節烈女
[5] In Chinese: 五叔
[6] In Chinese: 直隸
[7] In Chinese: 洪承疇
[8] In Chinese: 姨太太
[9] In Chinese: 老奶奶