"Our Origin," by Dr. Weimin Mo.

I have long encouraged Dr. Mo to write about his experiences.  He began to write about the Cultural Revolution one time but couldn't continue, it was too painful. The C.R. does that, did that, to people. Dr. Mo recently sent me the beginning of a family history and I immediately asked him for permission to publish it. 

In September 1981, I came to America as a visiting scholar, sent by my university in China for two years on an exchange program. I was so attracted to America that I decided to make it my adopted country. In 1986, I brought my children to this country and eventually we became Americans. 

Even though I was born and brought up in Shanghai, my family was originally from Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.  According to my father, long ago in history, my ancestors came from Julu, Hebei Province. I never did any research on it and am not able to prove it.

I don’t know how to spell my grandfather’s name. He passed away long before I was born. Women’s formal names were seldom used at that time, so I don’t know my grandmother’s name. They lived somewhere in Shatianli, Hangzhou (沙田里， 杭州). They owned what local people called salted fish store (咸鲞店). Actually, according to what my eldest sister described, it was a kind of dried food store which sold all kinds of preserved fresh-water fish and seafood. The couple had a daughter and three sons. My father was the youngest of the three. I don’t remember my father’s sister’s name. I simply called her niangniang (aunt).

My grandfather on my mother’s side owned a coffin shop and lived at somewhere people at that time called the City Moat of Genshanmen, Hangzhou (杭州艮山门城河). My mother had an older sister. I don’t know her name and just called her “niangniang” (aunt), too. They lived at Huangjiajing of Genshanmen, Hangzhou (黄家井). During WWII, her whole family ran away from the Japanese troops and went as far as Shanxi Province (陕西省). By then my parents had settled down in Shanghai; our whole family lived in the French Settlement of Shanghai. I remember my mother’s sister well because in the 1950s, she came to Shanghai and lived with us for quite a while and my father helped her son and granddaughter find jobs and eventually settle down in Shanghai.

In Chinese tradition, parents usually favored the oldest son and would either pass their business or most of their inheritance to him. Therefore, my father came to Shanghai by himself at a very young age in an attempt to find his own space in the world.

My Father and His Business

My father was a self-made man. He didn’t have much education. When he was little, he was sent to an old-style clan/family school to learn how to read and write for a couple of years. I believe what he learned there was something equivalent to today’s elementary school.

Hangzhou was the capital of silk in China. Raising silkworms or doing silk textile business was popular in that area. When my father came to Shanghai around the age of 20, naturally he got into the silk-making business. At first, he worked as a pattern designer. One pattern he designed became very popular at that time. I have never seen it but according to what he described to me, it was something like a pattern of poker dots with some curve lines to connect them. Anyway, he was doing well in Shanghai and saved some money. In the 1930s, he started his own business. New technology brought synthetic fibers to the textile industry and the newly invented materials were more inexpensive and easier to take care of than purely silky materials. Besides, a richer variety of patterns could be designed to go with the new products. Therefore, my father made use of the new technology and opened his synthetic fiber textile manufacturer Mei Sheng (美生)，The first Chinese character in the name meant beautiful while the second one was short for his name. The factory basically made synthetic fiber materials which were basically silk woven together with rayon imported either from Japan or from Italy.

When he made a little fortune in Shanghai, his brothers and sister felt Jealous. First, my second uncle pestered him to invest in a fabric store in Hangzhou named Tianxing (天星) and let his oldest son to manage it. My cousin was only a teenager, fresh from middle school and knew nothing about managing business. Not surprisingly, people began to take advantage of the greenhorn. Contractors ran away with money and employees stole fabrics from the store. Before long, the store was forced to close and my uncle took home what was left in the store. No wonder my mother made the comment when she talked about the fabric store: we didn’t get even a piece of diaper from the investment.

Since the business failure didn’t cause their financial losses, it didn’t discourage them from trying again. It didn’t take long before his two brothers and brother-in-law told my father that they didn’t want to live in the country anymore and wanted to move to Shanghai. They asked my father to help them with business. Therefore, in spite of my mother’s opposition, my father invested in two more synthetic textile manufacturers, Mei Yi (美益) and Zhong Guo (China). The reason there were only two new factories instead of three was because my older uncle was an opium addict and didn’t care about anything except opium. He died in 1944, the year when I was born. As a matter of fact, these relatives knew nothing about factory management, so, basically, my father took care of the management in all the three factories. Those relatives were, to the best, working as foremen there. Unfortunately, shortly after the factories were opened, WWII broke out and it was immediately followed by the Civil War; my father had problems with both the supply of raw materials as well as the market for products, so again he lost money in the investment.

China’s economy was on the verge of bankruptcy when the communists took over the power in Mainland China in 1949. In order to restore economy, the government encouraged entrepreneurs to expand productivity. Therefore, they talked my father into letting some small business people, who were almost bankrupt by then, merge into his company and he agreed. When the economy began to pick up, everyone was chasing cash for investment. I remember even restaurant chefs and public bath workers tried to curry favor with my father in hopes that he would agree to loan them money or invest in the business they dreamed of opening, to say nothing of relatives. My brother-in-law successfully asked my father to invest in the pharmaceutical factory he wanted to open and my father named the factory Mei Jia (美嘉). The first character represented my father, whose factories names all started with the character “Mei” except the one he opened for his brother-in-law and the second character was short for my brother-in-law’s name. Soon the factory made good money and my brother-in-law was elected as one of the nation’ young promising entrepreneurs and was received by Mao Zedong at the National Young Entrepreneurs Conference in Beijing in 1956.

The same year, Gong Si He Ying (公私合营), the nationalization movement began, communist officials began to be assigned to all privately-owned companies to be the CEO and the entrepreneurs were given empty positions in their own business. The following year, the Anti-Rightists movement began and my brother-in-law was labeled as rightist, a class enemy, and was demoted. Since then, together with the whole nation, the ordeal of my family never ended over the following 20 years or so. These were the bloodiest pages of China’s history with millions of millions of people being persecuted, jailed, exiled, or killed in one political movement after another till Mao died in 1976.