The Five Brothers' Dream

People only knew that Zhao Youlan and her family now lived in the small town of Qianzhou in western Guangdong, and assumed them to be ordinary common folk. Very few knew that the roots of this family lay a thousand miles away in Jiangnan, the area in the lower land of the Yangtze River, around Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces.
The Zhao and Ma families had been old family friends in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang region.
The Zhao family had been scholarly for generations. Since the former Qing dynasty, their clan had produced many xiucai and juren. Though none had risen to the highest offices of court, the family had always upheld the maxim: “Pass down farming and study; establish oneself through poetry and ritual.” Within their residence were ten thousand volumes of books. Among the family, there were those skilled in qin, chess, calligraphy, and painting. Every Mid-Autumn Festival and Double Ninth Festival, the clan gathered in refined assemblies to compose poems and taste tea, while silk and bamboo music lingered beneath the beams. For a time, such gatherings became a cherished tale in the countryside.
The Ma family, by contrast, was known for industry.
From the generation of the ancestors, they had operated weaving workshops; later, they founded textile factories and also traded in silk and tea. The Huzhou silk they wove was fine as drifting cloud and sold throughout north and south. Their raw silk was white as snow and was transported overseas along trade routes. At the height of their prosperity, several hundred workers labored in the factory, machines roaring day and night, chimneys rising straight into the clouds. They became a well-known industrial family in the region.
Yet though the Ma family was wealthy, it had no habit of arrogance or extravagance.
The ancestral instruction consisted of only these words:
Righteousness before profit; virtue above wealth.
Whenever famine came, the Ma family opened their granaries to aid the poor. Bridges and roads in the countryside, private schools, and free medicine were often funded jointly by the two families. When the local people spoke of the Zhao and Ma surnames, none failed to praise them as “families that accumulated goodness.”
Later, Zhao Youlan married Ma Cunhui.
One was a young lady from a scholarly household; the other, a young industrialist. They were well matched in family and station, and after marriage treated one another with deep respect.
The first few years after their wedding were the most peaceful years of their lives.
Youlan (the given name means “the hidden orchid”) still remembered how, when they were young, Cunhui often sang this song to her:
I came down from the mountains, carrying an orchid plant,
And planted it within my little garden, hoping its flowers would bloom early.
Each day I looked three times, and watched the flowering season pass,
Yet the orchid remained as before, without even a single bud.
Seeing autumn arrive, I moved the orchid into a warm room;
Morning after morning I cherished it, night after night I could not forget.
I only wished the flowers would bloom early, to fulfill my long-held hope;
Then the courtyard would be full of blossoms, and how fragrant they would be.
They wandered together by the lakeside in spring, listened to rain by the window on summer nights, roasted tea and drank it in autumn, and read beside the brazier in winter. Ma Cunhui often said, “If we can pass this life safely and peacefully like this, I will be content.”
Who could have known that the storms of the age would be far more violent than the wishes of any individual?
As society underwent enormous change, public-private partnership began, and various systems were adjusted one after another. The industries that the family had operated for many years also faced unprecedented transformation.
The textile factory was brought into a new management system. The silk shops and tea firms also gradually ceased to be independently run by the family.
The business accumulated through several generations of ancestral labor underwent enormous changes within only a few short years.
The former glory of the Ma family was torn apart piece by piece in a dark and storm-stricken age.
In earlier days, though the Ma family did not dare claim to be the wealthiest in the region, they had at least been an honest merchant household. Their ancestors had started in Jiangnan, then gradually moved southward, relying on thrift, credit, and a pair of hands skilled with accounts. In their shops there was the clicking of abacuses, the fragrance of tea, the accountant bending over his ledgers, and villagers coming to buy rice or cloth on credit. During festivals, the Ma family would also aid several poor relatives and old neighbors. In those days, though human feeling had its warmth and coldness, there remained at least some measure of dignity.
Later, the times grew more and more vicious.
Overnight, thrift became a crime. Family property became a crime. To be literate, to know how to conduct business, to possess a few ancestral objects at home—all became crimes no one could clearly explain. Those who usually entered with smiles to borrow money, buy on credit, or drink tea suddenly changed their faces. Wearing red armbands, carrying sticks and ropes, they burst through the gate of the Ma family residence. The wooden doors were kicked until they thundered, as though the sky itself were collapsing.
Cupboards were opened. Chests were overturned. Account books were thrown to the ground. Porcelain handed down from the ancestors shattered upon the brick floor. Silverware, jewelry, calligraphy and paintings, old books, cloth, abacuses—whatever could be taken was taken; whatever could not be taken was smashed. Someone laughed while searching and said, “And you still say you didn’t exploit people? You hid it well!” Someone pushed over the ancestral tablets that the old madam had worshiped in the hall. Dust flew into the air. The incense burner rolled to the ground, and half a stick of broken incense still gave off smoke.
The Ma family stood in the courtyard like a flock of birds soaked by rain.
The men were dragged to the front platform for denunciation. Wooden placards hung from their necks, and their heads were pressed low. Some spat on them. Some threw rotten vegetable leaves. Some raised fists. Some used slogans to vent private hatred. They had clearly been neighbors yesterday, people who had nodded and spoken in the street. Yet today, it was as though they had suddenly been granted permission to take out all the worst things hidden in their hearts.
That evil was not the evil of one person. It was evil released by the age. It was not a moment of madness. It was a system giving madness a name, making humiliation into justice, robbery into revolution, and beating into a declaration of loyalty.
Ma Cunhui had only recently married then, and was still young. Hiding behind the crowd, he saw his father shoved until he stumbled, blood at the corner of his mouth, yet still gritting his teeth without begging for mercy. His mother wanted to rush forward, but someone pulled her away and threw her to the ground. She climbed up again, her hair loose and her clothes torn, but her eyes only fixed on her husband. Her lips trembled, and she did not even dare let herself cry aloud.
At that moment, Cunhui first learned that when fear reaches its extreme, it has no sound.
The brothers and sisters of the family were also scattered by that storm. Some were sent down to the countryside, some fled far away, some never dared write letters again, and some changed their names and surnames, asking only to survive. Ma Yuanhui later went to Taiwan, and for decades did not return. He became within the family a thread severed and yet not wholly severed. Those who remained learned to lower their heads, to speak less, to hide good things away, to swallow true words, and to force tears down into their stomachs.
The hardest thing to endure was not poverty.
Poverty could be endured. Cold could be borne. Hunger could be quieted for a while with water. The hardest thing to endure was that there was nowhere to seek justice. You knew it was unjust, yet could not cry grievance. You knew you had been robbed, yet could not call it robbery. You knew you had been humiliated, yet still had to confess your guilt before the crowd. It was as though a person’s dignity had been stripped from him, and he was then required to hold it in both hands and thank the one who had stripped it away.
Many years later, Ma Cunhui rarely spoke of these events.
Only now and then, deep at night, when rain struck the window lattice, he would sit beneath the lamp and wipe the old iron abacus. The abacus was not worth much money, but it was one old thing that had survived the chaotic age by chance. He polished the beads until they shone, like silent tears.
Sometimes Zhao Youlan would ask, “Are you thinking of the past again?”
He would only say, “It’s nothing.”
But his fingers would stop upon the abacus and remain still for a long time.
Then Zhao Youlan would ask no more. She would merely pour him another cup of hot tea. She knew that some wounds did not stop hurting; rather, they had hurt for so long that they had grown into the bones. To go on living, a person had to grind away the pain within the bones inch by inch, so that he might continue through the days, raise children, plant orchids, listen to Yue opera, and tell later generations stories that were not quite so heavy.
Yet the later children of the Ma family could still hear, within their father’s silence, the distant echo of that age.
That echo told them: the human heart can be good, and it can also be evil. If a system loses conscience, evil will dress itself in grand and proper robes. A family survives suffering not because it forgets, but because it endures. Not because the wound disappears, but because it remains willing, upon the ruins, to plant another pot of orchids.
In the remaining days, Ma Cunhui did not resist with violence.
He merely sorted the account books of the generations in silence, and placed the iron abacus left by his grandfather, the little copper scale, and the drawings of the looms one by one into a wooden chest.
When he finally locked the chest, he stood for a long time before the ancestral hall without saying a word.
Zhao Youlan knew that what the lock sealed away was not only a few old objects, but also the labor and memory of an entire generation.
Before long, the old residence too grew cold and quiet.
The factory buildings where machines had once roared stopped operating. The wide weaving workshop stood empty, with only a few swallows still building nests beneath the beams.
Most of the books in the ancestral home were scattered. The magnolia flowers in the courtyard still bloomed year after year, but fewer and fewer people remained to admire them.
On the day they left, fine rain fell like threads of silk.
After his father, Ma Ziqiang, and his uncle, Ma Weiqiang, had died under persecution, the Ma ancestral home was occupied, and the family, young and old, scattered in all directions.
When Ma Cunhui looked back with his wife Zhao Youlan and his elderly mother at the plaque bearing the words “Hall of Accumulated Goodness”, he said nothing for a long time.
Only when the horse cart had gradually gone far away did he hear his old mother sigh softly:
“A house may be left behind, but a person must not lose the family tradition.”
Ma Cunhui remembered those words all his life.
The Ma family truly left their homeland on a moonless night. After many turns and hardships, they journeyed south.
By then the family fortune had already collapsed. Shops had been seized, trunks overturned, and the ancestral objects long since scattered. The main hall was empty. In the corner remained only a broken bamboo basket, a few old garments, half a sack of dry food, and one iron abacus that had been hidden away by luck.
The Ma family dared not light a bright lamp. They left only a faint line of fire in the stove. The women wrapped the children’s clothes in old cloth. The elders hid the torn pages of the genealogy close against their bodies. The young people shouldered bundles and looked back once at the lintel of the ancestral house. No one dared cry aloud.
A cry would alert others.
And if others were alerted, they would not be able to leave.
They traveled southward by small roads, avoiding the main routes. By day they hid in ruined temples, bamboo groves, and behind desolate slopes. Only at night did they continue their journey. At ferries, they dared not speak too much. When questioned, they lowered their heads and said they were going to join relatives.
On rainy days, their soles were caked with mud. On clear days, their backs peeled beneath the sun. When the children were hungry, they dared not wail, but bit into the half piece of cold cake their mothers handed them. When the old people could no longer walk, the young supported them; when support was not enough, they took turns carrying them for a stretch.
The mountain road seemed to have no end. Ahead was mist, behind was fear, beneath their feet were stones, and in their hearts was a confusion no words could express.
The hardest thing was not knowing where safety might be found.
They had thought that by leaving the old place, they would leave disaster behind. Halfway through the journey, they understood that beneath the vast sky, there was in truth not one place of real security. In the cities there were eyes belonging to the cities; in the countryside there were tongues belonging to the countryside. If you dressed a little well, people suspected you of hiding money. If you dressed too poorly, people suspected you of being a fugitive. A family that once possessed dignity now found even dignity to be a burden. Gradually, the Ma family learned to speak fewer words, lower their heads, and hide the light in their eyes.
At last, they arrived in the mountainous region of western Guangdong.
There, ridges rose one upon another, and the clouds and mists were damp and heavy. Villages hid among bamboo groves, kapok trees, and lychees. When the Ma family first arrived, they did not understand the local speech, and the locals did not understand theirs. To buy a bit of rice, they had to gesture with hands and fingers. To ask for a road, they were often stared at for half a day.
Seeing their ragged clothes, strange accent, and large household of old and young, the villagers whispered behind their backs:
“Who knows where they escaped from?”
“Could they have committed some crime?”
“If they were a proper family, why would they run to this mountain corner?”
Ma Cunhui heard all these words.
He was not yet old then, but he had already learned to swallow grievance. Some people deliberately assigned them the heaviest labor: carrying stones, digging ditches, cutting firewood, hauling manure. Some hired them for work and then paid them only half the wages. Some borrowed things and did not return them, then accused the outsiders of being petty. Mischievous children followed behind them shouting “refugees” and “runaways,” throwing clods of mud at their door.
When the old Madam Ma heard this, her hands trembled badly. Yet she only closed the door and murmured, “Endure a little. Surviving is what matters.”
Surviving became the greatest principle of those years.
The Ma family had no patrons and no fellow villagers to rely upon. They could only rely on conscience and their own hands and feet. When they helped others farm, they never slacked. When they watched shops for others, they never took a single coin. When a household held a funeral, the Ma men helped carry the coffin and did not ask for extra money. When someone’s child struggled to learn characters, Ma Cunhui taught him a few words at night. When an elder fell ill, the Ma women went to the mountain edge to gather herbs and delivered a bowl of bitter decoction.
Whether others gave them kind faces or not, they acted the same. For they knew that if they too allowed their hearts to become bad, then that whole journey of flight and hardship would lose even its final meaning.
At first, the brigade leader in the village did not much trust them.
He was a man who had seen something of the world. He did not speak much, but his eyes were sharp. Whenever a member of the Ma family passed by, he always looked a few moments longer. Sometimes, when they met at the brigade office, he would ask, “Where exactly did you come from? What happened in your family? Why do you not return to your place of origin?”
The elders of the Ma family only lowered their heads and answered, “The times were chaotic, and we could not survive there. We are not bad people. We only ask for a mouthful of rice.”
The brigade leader did not easily believe fine words. He watched what people did.
One spring, during a shortage of grain, the brigade granary leaked in the rain. That night, violent winds rose, and many people were afraid of trouble and unwilling to go move the grain. When the Ma family heard of it, they put on straw rain capes and hurried over. The men carried sacks. The women held lamps. Even the children helped pass ropes.
Rainwater poured through the roof. The edges of sack after sack of grain grew wet. Ma Cunhui’s shoulder was rubbed raw, and blood seeped into his clothes, yet he gritted his teeth and carried the last few sacks to dry ground. The brigade leader stood at the doorway and watched for a long time without speaking.
Another time, a wooden bridge at the village entrance was washed out by a mountain flood, and several children were trapped on the opposite bank. The water was rising rapidly, and no one dared cross. A young man from the Ma family took off his outer garment, tied a rope around his waist, and went through the muddy torrent, carrying the children back one by one.
After that day, the way the village looked at the Ma family changed slightly.
Later, at a brigade meeting, that leader finally spoke a few words on behalf of the Ma family.
He said, “This family from outside speaks little, works hard, and has upright hearts. We cannot always make them live in a broken shed and take odd jobs. They did not come here to be idle. They came here to survive.”
Someone objected, “Their origins are unclear. Why should land be assigned to them?”
The leader struck his pipe against the table and said, “Because they have harmed no one. Because they are willing to work. Because they saved the village’s children. You say their origins are unclear—but whose ancestors did not migrate here from somewhere else? What the mountains lack are people willing to work, not people skilled at wagging their tongues.”
In those years, such words were already rare.
Not long afterward, the brigade allotted several mu of marginal wasteland to the Ma family for their own cultivation. The land was not good. There were many stones, the soil was thin, it lay near the mountain, and the water supply was unstable. But to the Ma family, those few mu were like a small mercy fallen from Heaven.
The old people crouched on the ridges and grasped handfuls of earth, their fingers trembling faintly. The women turned away to wipe their tears. The children did not understand and only ran through the fields, splashing mud and water everywhere.
Ma Cunhui stood at the edge of the land for a long time without speaking.
He knew this was not wealth, nor was it true security. It was only a plank of wood floating up from the bitter sea. Yet with those few mu of land, they could grow sweet potatoes, peanuts, and a little vegetables. They could have a harvest of their own. They could slowly repair the broken shed into a house. They could let the family lie down at night without feeling like wandering refugees who might be driven away at any moment.
From then on, the Ma family dared slacken even less.
They went to the fields before dawn and returned only when the moon had risen. Stone by stone, they picked the rocks away. Patch by patch, they pulled out the wild grass. Bit by bit, they nourished the poor soil. What they planted in spring was grain; what they harvested in autumn was not only grain, but a little dignity.
The Ma family pressed suffering into silence, buried humiliation in the earth, and from that earth grew a new road by which they might live.
Later, life finally became slowly more settled.
They put down roots in western Guangdong, built a simple house, and planted several camellias, orchids, and osmanthus trees. They could not return to the ancestral home, and the scattered members of the family might never be found again. But rice still had to be cooked, children still had to be raised, and lamps still had to be lit.