Sons of Heaven
A Novel
by Terrence Cheng
List Price: $12.95
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060002441
Publisher: Harperperennial
Terrence Cheng's grandmother was a senator in the Chinese Nationalist Party, and his grandfather was a prisoner-of-war captured by the Japanese during World War II. Both survived and moved their family to Taiwan after the Communists came to power in 1949. Cheng was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1972, and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1973. He earned his MFA in Fiction at the University of Miami, FL, where he was a James Michener Fellow. Director of Corporate Website Marketing for Random House Inc., he also teaches fiction at Lehman College-CUNY. He has lived most of his life in New York.
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Q: Tell us about your family background.
TC: I was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1972 and moved to the United States with my parents in 1973. Growing up, I always heard stories about my grandparents‹my grandfather had fought the Japanese and been captured during World War II, and my grandmother was a senator in the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party, and worked alongside Chiang Kai-Shek. They were forced to leave Mainland China when Mao Zedong and the Communists came to power, so my family fled to Taiwan in 1949.
My grandparents didn't die until they were in their late eighties and early nineties, so I was very close to them, even though they lived in Taiwan. I was in college when they had all passed away, and it was only then that I started to connect the dots between their lives and history: Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-Shek, Deng Xiaoping. China and Taiwan. I realized my grandparents had lived through, and had possibly even helped to shape, history.
Q: Where were you when you first saw the image of the man standing in front of the tanks during Tiananmen Square?
TC: The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened during the end of my junior year in high school. I saw the man standing in front of the tanks on television and right away I thought, 'Who is he?' I was shocked because I had been following the Democracy Movement and hunger strike during the last several weeks. When the massacre happened, it was a kind of global tragedy that leaves you speechless, thoughtless even. I was mesmerized, amazed by this man who had the guts and selflessness to sacrifice himself for the cause. I wanted to know what happened to him and why he had done it. Even today we talk about his heroism and courage, but what else was he feeling? How scared was he? How angry was he? I wanted to know all these things.
Q: You were living in America in 1989 during Tiananmen Square. Did you feel a greater sense of connection to, or separation from the events because of this distance?
TC: In 1989, I'd never visited mainland China for myself. Seeing Tiananmen Square happen on television, for the first time in my life I felt a true emotional connection with China, the original homeland of my family and ancestors. But I also felt separated, even a sense of guilt because I was comfortably living the American Dream, while young Chinese men and women were fighting and dying for that same dream: freedom and democracy. I was seventeen years old. These were my peers on the other side of the world, and I kept thinking, 'Would I be brave enough to stand up and fight like them? Would that be me if I was over there?'
Q: How did you come up with the idea for Sons of Heaven?
A: As I grew older I started making connections between my American self and my Chinese heritage, seeing how history had affected my own family's history. I was continually searching for missing pieces. By studying Tiananmen Square I found many of those pieces. The more I read about Tiananmen Square, the more obsessed I became with the man standing in front of the tanks. It had been nearly 10 years since the massacre, and still I was haunted by this image of the man standing in the middle of the street waiting for the tanks to run him down. The calmness and defiance, the rage and fear emanating from him. Even as the years passed, I could not get the image of the man standing in front of the tanks out of my head.
I realized that, very easily, my life could have gone many different ways. If my grandparents had not fled China for Taiwan in 1949, I would have been born and raised in China. I could just as easily have been a part of that democracy movement. The man standing in front of the tanks became a symbol to me of so many things: democracy versus communism, the clash of east meeting west, history meeting the present. As well as my own search for identity: my American self and my relation to my Chinese heritage. Some of the questions that drove me to write the book were, "What was going through him when he walked in front of those tanks? What had happened in his life that had brought him to this point?" The impulse and need for me to write this book and tell this story is a part of my bridging the gap between my American identity and my Chinese heritage, recognizing the risks and fear and danger experienced by people searching and fighting for a better way of life.
Q: In Sons of Heaven you have created a life for this nameless, faceless hero who stood in front of the tanks. Talk about how you began doing that.
TC: My protagonist--who is inspired by the man who stood in front of the tanks--is called Xiao-Di, which means 'little brother' in Chinese. He is a student who experiences free life in America, but returns to the oppression and hypocrisy of China to take care of family obligations. Xiao-Di has a hard time reassimilating to China; he's frustrated and resentful and angry because he has tasted democracy and freedom. He sees how his grandparents live, and he recognizes that they have struggled and suffered their entire lives just to be poor. For Xiao-Di, the hypocrisy is evident everywhere.
Q: In Sons of Heaven, your protagonist has a brother, a soldier in the People's Liberation Army, who is assigned the job of capturing Xiao-Di. What does this soldier brother symbolize in the book?
A: In Sons of Heaven, the protagonist's brother is a soldier that symbolizes the old regime in China and the older generation's way of thinking. They have been taught their entire lives to follow tradition, not to challenge authority, to protect traditional values of filial piety. They cannot be objective in viewing other ways of life. They are single-minded in their commitment to staying the same. Xiao-Di and his experience represent the new generation that wants to learn and develop and grow. They are a direct threat to the old regime and the old way of thinking, which is why Tiananmen Square 1989 happened.
Q: Deng Xiaoping is also a character in Sons of Heaven. Talk about the challenges involved in writing from his point of view and what his story means to the book.
A: Deng was a complicated man, driven by a genuine passion to create a better society for the Chinese people. After Tiananmen, the world was quick to cast Deng as a monster, and that is not true. At least I don't believe it. I wanted to examine him. What had happened in his lifetime that made him who he was? What did he think? What did he feel?
Deng's experiences are all inextricably linked with important points in history, which affected how he handled Tiananmen Square in 1989. He and his family suffered during the Cultural Revolution, particularly his son, Deng Pufang, who was paralyzed by Red Guards. I wanted to show that Deng was not a monster, but a man with a family, and a leader with a vision for what a good life for the Chinese people should be. I believe Deng was so scarred by the Cultural Revolution and the turmoil that China had gone through, that he felt threatened by any drastic change. The students and their cries for democracy represented an effort to tear down what he had dedicated his entire life to creating and protecting. Deng's experience had ultimately taught him only one way to deal with such a threat. Sons of Heaven tries to demonstrate how the lives and histories of common people, like Xiao-Di, and Deng Xiaoping, a renown world leader, are all tied together by choices and not just fate.
Q: You visited Beijing in 1999, 10 years after the massacre. What did you find there?
TC: I visited Beijing in April, 1999, 10 years after the massacre. I had not written one word of the book. I had most of the plot and plenty of ideas, but I needed to feel and taste and smell Beijing before I could make it real in a world of fiction. China was beautiful, and I saw some marvelous things, but I remember most clearly the heavy air of oppression. An invisible fear and sense of control in everyone you met, everywhere you went. An underlying hostility and anxiety. There were so many poor people who lived in true poverty, who had no way to bring themselves out of it. Like any kind of ambition had been sucked away.
When I got in cabs I would ask the drivers in Chinese if anything was going to happen in memorial to Tiananmen Square. More than a half-dozen cab drivers ignored me. The hotel staff where I was staying did the same. It wasn't until my seventh or eighth cab driver who finally said something. At first he ignored me, like the others, but after a few minutes of silence, he looked in the rear-view mirror and said, "What happened back then...it was very bad." That was all he said. The driver's paucity, I thought, was more powerful than any tirade or rant could ever be.
Q: Do you think Sons of Heaven is a political book, or that it will be viewed as a political book? Do you fear any repercussions?
A: Sons of Heaven is not a political book, nor is it meant to be. It's about two brothers, two families, the braided history of peasants and soldiers, politicians and gods. It's about boys growing up and learning to be men. I started writing Sons of Heaven with questions in mind about the massacre, about the man and the tanks, about the leaders behind the scenes and the decisions they had to make to turn the People's Army against the people, to shed their own nation's blood.
I don't fear any repercussions, but I won't be traveling back to China any time soon. In today's political climate, and given China's recent history with America and Chinese Americans, it's not a risk I'm willing to take. The book is not meant to make a political statement, but it will to some readers. For me, Sons of Heaven is a family drama set during one of the most remarkable and turbulent periods of our time. But its themes--about brothers, family, courage, faith and love--are universal.
Excerpted from Sons of Heaven © Copyright 2009 by Terrence Cheng. Reprinted with permission by Harperperennial. All rights reserved.
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