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"A smooth-flowing story that speaks to the emotions.”
Vancouver businessman Louis Han, youthful-looking at 42, was born in China. On his first day of school, as Luping Han, he was taught how to write, "Long live Chairman Mao." His mother, Li Qunying, 82, has had an extraordinary life. As a young woman, she joined China's Eighth Route Army in 1945 and, with no formal medical training, became an army doctor.
During the Chinese Civil War, she started learning to do surgery. In the Korean War, she helped as surgeons amputated wounded soldiers' limbs without anesthetic. She survived a famine on a diet of parched flour.
She was a Communist Party member and so was her husband, Han Wende, whose letters always ended with the words "Revolutionary salutations!" She married, gave birth to a son and, after leaving the army, worked in hospitals in Shandong Province. In 1959, her second son perished in a measles epidemic.
During the Cultural Revolution, the family became untouchable. Wende was denounced as a counter-revolutionary. In 1970, Qunying was interrogated and advised to divorce him. She refused and the family was exiled to the countryside.
Han, who came to Canada at 28, remembers this. "When I started to have a memory, at age 5, that's when my parents were prosecuted and sent to the countryside to reform through hard labour," he says.
In 1999, he decided his mother's story ought to be told. She speaks no English. At one point, she started writing a memoir in Mandarin, "but in the end," he says, "she was afraid to cause trouble and burned all her writing."
Han got a tape recorder and, making several trips to see her in the city of Jinan, interviewed her about her life. Then he translated what he'd elicited into English, shaping it -- with the help of wife Patty, who has a psychology degree -- into a smooth-flowing story that speaks to the emotions.
The Doctor Who Was Followed by Ghosts, published by Toronto's ECW Press, is a first-person true story with Li Qunying narrating. We see her in her 20s, burying severed limbs behind a field hospital. We're with her when her first child, then a toddler, asks, after seeing an elderly babysitter's foot, "Mom, why does Auntie have only one toe?" (Answer: Foot-binding.) We watch as she and Wende bury their small second son without a coffin, after which she is rebuked for having left work without permission.
ECW co-publisher Jack David says: "There are a lot of memoirs by people who lived through the Cultural Revolution, who came of age in the 1960s or '70s. But to have a story that goes back to the early '40s and to go back, marching with Mao into the Revolution and then fighting in the Korean War -- I didn't find anything like that out there.
"The span she covers is unusual and the closeness with which she relates what happened to her family gave me a better sense of what was happening in China than any broad overview. That's why I published the book."
