The Last Parades
In the summer of red flags and empty slogans, history came knocking not with books or scrolls, but with fists and bricks.
It was sometime during the height of the Cultural Revolution when the Gao family’s ancestral home, a traditional siheyuan courtyard, was assaulted not by soldiers, but by boys and girls in armbands. Red Guards, eyes lit with borrowed righteousness, came to erase what they didn’t understand.
They tore the past off the walls.
Paintings, scrolls, family portraits, the spiritual relics of a once-illustrious household, were ripped down, heaped into basins, and soaked in water until they melted into pulp. Each image defaced was a memory destroyed. No nameplates, no ancestral tablets, no calligraphy survived.
Then they turned to the living.
My great-granny, known to the neighbours as Old Madame Gao, was the widow of Gao Lingwen — educator, poet, and elder brother of President Gao Lingwei. She did not have bound feet, though she had nearly been subjected to the practice. When foot binding was abolished, she had just begun and was fortunate to have her feet released — a small mercy in a life that would demand extraordinary strength.
She was escorted into the streets with a brick strung around her neck, wearing a pointy paper hat that the Red Guards created for her — a cruel parody of shame. She was made to march, jeered by strangers and neighbours, while her past was paraded as if it were a crime.
The Red Guards posted a slogan on the wall of her courtyard: “The white-haired oldie Liang holds high the red flag only to oppose it”.
It was slander disguised as revolution. The household fell under surveillance. Red Guards lingered outside, peering through the windows like crows, watching who came and went. When my mother, then still a girl, ventured out to buy breakfast for the family, she had to be escorted by Red Guards, as if her bowl of porridge might contain sedition.
A nephew of my great-grandmother’s was slapped in the face not for anything he’d done, but for the name he bore. One day, the humiliation reached its breaking point.
In front of the Red Guards, in the courtyard where so many quiet meals and whispered lessons had once passed, my great-granny leapt up, shouting in her own defence not with ideology, but with the voice of a woman whose only wealth was pride in her work.
“I am a person who does the labour!!!” (「我是勞動人民！！！」）
That was her declaration — raw, furious, defiant. Not a plea for mercy, but a demand to be seen as more than a class label.
The Red Guards froze, stunned by her rage.
And what remains most chilling is this: they didn’t even know who she really was.
The ransacking wasn’t triggered by official records or revolutionary investigations. It began with a neighbour’s lie — a rumour that the Gao family had once been wealthy entrepreneurs, an easy target in a time when “capitalist” was enough to condemn a lineage. The Red Guards came looking for signs of bourgeois decadence. What they found, scrolls, paintings, heirlooms, they destroyed.
What they didn’t find, the truth, might have saved lives… or ended them.
Because had they known who she truly was, that her husband had been one of the most respected educators of his time, that her brother-in-law, Gao Linghsiao, had once received Empress Dowager Tzu-hsi and Emperor Kuang-hsu, that her family had produced a President of the Republic — the punishment would likely have been far worse.
In ignorance, they destroyed her dignity.
In knowledge, they might have destroyed her life.
Today, the house had long been sold to a peasant who possibly came from the rural outskirts of Tientsin. The scrolls are lost. The family scattered. However, their silence was never submission, and this book is proof.
I often wonder when the instinct to speak was born in me, but perhaps I already knew — because I had seen it before, even in the quiet rooms where she was expected to grow invisible.
In her final years, my great-granny entered a long-term care facility in Tientsin where, behind closed doors, abuses took place that most residents were too frightened, or too broken, to report. She was not among them. She spoke out. When we came back to China to visit her after a few years in Canada, she reported to us that she had been slapped, and we heard from others that she also reported having been ordered to perform acts that violated both her dignity and the basic standards of human care. She also told my mom and me that whenever family members visited, the staff became attentive and courteous. The moment the visitors left, that mask would fall away.
She was not young. She was not strong, but she still chose truth over silence.
There are those who would say it made no difference. However, I believe it did, not just because she demanded accountability, but because she left behind, for us, a final lesson: that no matter how powerless one may seem, to speak, even once, is to interrupt the cycle.