Freedom Swimmer
During China’s Cultural Revolution, thousands known as Freedom Swimmers escaped by swimming to Hong Kong. Mochi’s Cecilia To recounts her mother’s story and the decisions that shaped her future.
She was lying in a grave. Her breathing, hard and heavy from the recent incline, gradually slowed as she lay against the damp earth. Fatigue and weariness washed over her. Now that it was nearing dawn, the sun, approaching the horizon, cast a faint glow in the sky. They were fortunate to have found these graves, and my mother, Chun, and her three siblings laid low against the dirt walls, hiding from the border police out on patrol. Just hours before, in the mask of fog, they had mistakenly wandered onto a military base and had walked straight into the barrel of a howitzer before realizing where they were. Panicked, they stumbled backward, tripping over themselves to flee the premises, running blindly in what they hoped was the direction of safety. It was Zhou, my mother’s older brother, who had found the excavated mounds of fresh dirt and then the hollows in the ground, mined precisely to ensconce a human body. This is where they now waited out the daylight hours before they would continue their trek again at night.
Growing Up During the Cultural Revolution
My mother was 19 when she and her three oldest siblings escaped Communist China by swimming from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, a distance of about three miles. It was 1970, four years into the Cultural Revolution, a sociopolitical movement led by Chairman Mao Zedong, whose vision to cleanse the nation from opposing ideologies sent the country into a period marked by chaos, suspicion, fear, and turmoil. And it was about a decade after Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign, which propelled the country headlong into one of the deadliest man-made famines in recorded history.
Remembering their hunger, my mother relates, “Your gonggong — your grandfather — never had to spank any of us kids. One time, one of my younger brothers acted out, and your gonggong simply took one teaspoon of rice from the boy’s dinner bowl. My brother wailed and clung onto your gonggong’s leg, begging him to stop. It was the worst punishment.”
When her father, a teacher, was imprisoned for being an educated individual, and her mother was forced to work from morning to night to scrape together enough to feed the nine mouths at home, my mom, the second oldest of eight children and the eldest female became the matriarch of the family. Driven by hunger, my mother recalls the time she and her siblings laid a trap for their neighbor’s cat, and once captured, she skinned, butchered, and stir-fried it to perfection. She and her siblings licked up every last morsel and then expertly disposed of all evidence. “We felt bad when our neighbor came home and called to her cat, who never came,” she chuckles softly. “But we were so hungry. We had to survive.”
The Sent-Down Youth
In 1968, my mother and her older brother Zhou were two of the approximately 17 million young people who moved — some voluntarily, some by force — from their urban homes to rural farmlands between 1953 and 1978. Known as the sent-down youth, these young people were part of the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement, an attempt to re-educate capitalist and pro-bourgeois thinking that was common among city dwellers through humble yet rewarding farmwork and village life. My mother and Zhou were fortunate to have been sent to a southern village of Guangzhou, where escape, though treacherous, was at least a possibility; the British colony of Hong Kong, after all, lay just a few miles away past the expansive waters of Deep Bay.
In hushed whispers and coded letters home, they devised a rudimentary plan for escape: My mother and Zhou would wait for their sister Chee and brother Dei to be assigned to a village when they were of age. They would only be 17 and 15, respectively, when they were sent down to the countryside. On that day, my mother and Zhou would travel hours to the nearest town and wait for Chee and Dei as their bus passed through. They would smuggle the younger siblings back to their village and hide them in the countryside, and then that very night, the four would depart for Hong Kong. The routes were lined with guards, so they would hike along unpaved mountainsides at night and hide during the day. The trek would take eight days before even reaching the shores of the bay.
They would smuggle the younger siblings back to their village and hide them in the countryside, and then that very night, the four would depart for Hong Kong.
In the months leading up to their departure, they prepared the best they could. “We would play in the pond and kick around,” my mother recollects, “but we couldn’t be caught actually swimming. If a neighbor even suspected that we were swimming laps, they could report us. They would be handsomely rewarded while we could be punished severely for suspicion of escape.” Chee never did learn to swim, but my grandfather was resourceful and saved his inflatable donut-shaped pillow from a recent bout with hemorrhoids and tucked this deflated flotation device into the folds of Chee’s clothes.
Their window for departure was narrow: Chee and Dei received their village assignment two years after my mother and Zhou first arrived at their village. And they had to leave before the weather became too harsh for travel. “I remember the date exactly,” my mother recalls. “It was October 27 of 1970, right after the mid-autumn festival.”
Recalling the night of their departure, my mother remembers Han, a young man in her farming village who showed extra kindness toward her. “Back then, we didn’t have what you all call dating. A boy might carry a girl’s firewood, or they might go for a walk after nighttime chores, and everyone would understand that they had a special relationship.” The evening my mom and her siblings had planned to leave, the young people had gathered for a card game of Big Two; the loser would have to draw water for the pigs, a task which was especially odious at the end of a long day of farming. It was down to my mother and Han, and with her last hand, my mother laid down, with flourish, a straight. Han looked at her and, holding her gaze for a moment, threw his cards into the discard pile, face down.
“Ah, luck is on your side, Chun,” he said lightly. And then he jumped up to grab the water buckets and headed outside.
“I peeked at his cards after he left,” my mother says. “He had three jacks and a pair of fives. His hand was greater than mine.”
There’s a softness and wistfulness in my mother’s expression, remembering her first love, that I had never seen before, not even when speaking about my father in their dating years. Those stories are usually related with a nonchalant pragmatism, the only side I really know of my mother. (“I was a good cook. He spoke the best English of all the boys in our circle. We were a good match.”) But now, she smiles as she remembers herself so young once, drawing such simple kindness from a boy. A girlishness appears and is unmistakable even amid her wrinkles as she relives the past: The shyness. The nudges. The brushes of the hand. The gazes that held hers just a second longer than necessary that always made her blush. And the innocent romance that allowed, even amid great hardship, such gentle moments of tenderness.
But then her attention returns to me and this present reality. “But if I chose him, I knew my life would never go beyond that farm, beyond toiling for the Communist Party.” Forbidden to utter a word of their escape to anyone, she couldn’t even say goodbye to Han. Watching him retreat into the distance with the buckets, she knew she might never see him again.
But it was with resolve, a pressing pragmatism, and the drive for survival that she turned her back from him and the village and the home she knew to face the great expanse of the dark, the dangerous trek before her, and a future that was uncertain but flickered with hope.
But it was with resolve, a pressing pragmatism, and the drive for survival that she turned her back from him and the village and the home she knew to face the great expanse of the dark, the dangerous trek before her, and a future that was uncertain but flickered with hope.
A Miracle at Midday
My mother now lay in the grave, bone-weary from their last seven days of travel across uneven mountainsides, through rain and fog so damp and thick it equally plastered their clothes to their bodies. Just the night before, on a precipice that overlooked the coastal plains, they caught their first glimpse of the glittering waters of Deep Bay. Elated yet foolhardy, they discarded their packs and ran toward the shore, not realizing they still had at least a full day’s journey before reaching the water. They were now hungry and extra vulnerable, and they welcomed the cover and respite provided by these graves. The sun was starting to bake the earth, but the nearby trees cast a comfortable shade over their trenches. And soon, she drifted off to sleep.
It was sometime past midday when the first howl penetrated her consciousness, and her eyes flew open. Police dogs. Had she dreamt it? She stilled her breathing, all senses alert, and listened. The sun started to dip toward the west and streaked through the branches near their hideout. And then she heard it again — the baying and barking of two dogs, now three, four, maybe more. Her siblings were awake now, their breathing quick and shallow, their eyes as round as mooncakes. Through the gaps in the branches, they could see up the hill the silhouettes of guards and police dogs. The breeze was blowing from the southeast, and the dogs had clearly caught their scent. They were pawing at the air, barking urgently, pulling toward their direction.
“Everyone was praying to whichever god they believed in or had heard of. Maybe they prayed to all of them.” My mother didn’t grow up religious, but in that moment, she recalled a very kind elderly neighbor, Liu Popo, who would help my mother strap her younger siblings onto her back in the fabric carrier and lend them money to pay their bills. “Back then, the utilities bill collector would come at unset times. And when he arrived at your door, you had better have your payment, or he would shut off your water right then and there. He would often come when our parents were at work, and Liu Popo would always lend us the money, never making a fuss about it.”
Liu Popo had given them a wall calendar one year that depicted images of Jesus, with Bible verses inviting all to come to him. That night, my mother, desperate for a savior, prayed that Jesus would rescue them. “I cried out my first prayer that night to a God I had only met on a calendar! But Liu Popo was so kind, and I hoped this Jesus of hers would be the same.”
At that moment, something shifted. The winds changed abruptly, and my mother and her siblings were no longer upwind from the dogs. “It was a miracle,” my mother says with full conviction. “I truly believe it was a miracle.” Unable to detect their scent, the dogs soon lost interest and ceased their baying.
The siblings lay in their shallow ditches as still as stone, barely daring to breathe. Darkness descended, and they remained plastered to the dirt, petrified by their close encounter. When it was pitch dark, the moon shrouded by the clouds in the sky, they quietly ascended from their graves like ghosts in the night. Shaking, they continued downhill, tripping over the brush and branches. It was that night, though, that they finally reached the water’s edge.
On the Cusp of Freedom
The sound of the waves that crashed toward them on the shore was deafening. The expanse was wide; the water, frigid and deep. It had been eight days in the wilderness with little more to eat than the meager rations they had brought: knots of ginger they gnawed on to ward off the cold and small portions of loose, toasted flour mixed with a bit of sugar that they simply spooned into their mouths and washed down with water. Weakened from travel and years of malnutrition, they were unfit for an open-water swim, but here they were, at the water’s edge, staring at the far-off lights of Hong Kong that beckoned to them across the bay. My mother removed her shoes, and the cool sand under her weary feet sent a chill up her spine. Chee pulled out the hemorrhoid pillow and blew in to inflate it. They tied her to Zhou. Dei, the scrappiest of the bunch, stayed close to my mom. They had come all this way, but this next leg would prove to be the most treacherous of their journey.
“Were you scared, Mom?” I ask.
“No,” she says matter-of-factly, “you didn’t know to fear. There was no other way but forward.”
My mom’s eyes widen when she tells this part of the story, as if she’s encountering the tides again for the first time. “The waves were as tall as two-story buildings. They would take us up high and send us crashing down, our feet tumbling over our heads. There was no way of knowing what was up or down. In truth, we didn’t really swim — just stayed afloat. I learned to take a deep breath at the top of the wave and then held my breath as I was thrown back down underwater.” In this manner of being literally tossed by the waves, my mother and her siblings made their way across the bay.
My mother doesn’t remember how long the passage actually took. “Thirty minutes? An hour?” Her brow furrows in concentrated recollection. “It was all very fast.” In reality, her swim across the three-mile expanse was more likely four to eight hours. Some accounts of others who made the same crossing report upwards of 15 hours in the water. It’s no wonder that so many died making this part of the journey, whether it was from hypothermia, shark attacks, fatigue that led to drowning, or being gunned down by border patrol boats. From the 1970s to the early 1980s, the marine police would make daily sweeps of the bay to skim for dead bodies.
There was no way of knowing what was up or down. In truth, we didn’t really swim — just stayed afloat.
However long it took, the waves eventually threw my mother onto the shore of the coastal village of Lau Fau Shan, along the oyster beds the village is known for, the sharp shells lacerating my mom’s leg, leaving a nasty gash. The saltwater stung, and she winced in pain. Disoriented, my mother picked her way off the shells and collapsed onto the beach. She had been separated from her siblings in the water, and now her eyes scanned the beach for them. Eventually, Dei staggered toward her from the left. But Zhou and Chee were nowhere to be found.
“One young man stumbled toward us, calling out the name of his sister,” my mother remembers. “He grabbed a hold of my shoulders, but when he peered in my face and realized I wasn’t who he was looking for, he let out a wail and staggered off to continue his search. It was very sad. We knew a lot of people who didn’t make it.”
A knot of dread started to grow in her stomach. But she knew they had to continue on.
Intake and Interrogation
The dawn was just beginning to break when my mother and Dei dragged themselves away from the shore. As sunlight banished the darkness, they stumbled upon a farmhouse, the farmer and his wife just starting their day. “They were poor themselves and didn’t have much extra food, so I asked if we could have what they were feeding their ducks. They were so kind and let us eat the slop of vegetable peelings, browned ends of bok choy, scraps from dinner, burnt scabs of rice.” The siblings ate greedily.
Later, when they were securely situated in Hong Kong, they would visit this family every year at the mid-autumn festival, bringing gifts and food. They would share a meal and celebrate not just the harvest but also the day the siblings found freedom.
But that day, their first day in Hong Kong, my mother and her brother Dei were brought to the police station, where all refugees were detained and processed. “They put a pair of handcuffs on me, but I was so skinny that I could slip them right off my wrists! I remember asking the police officer if he had anything smaller, and he just laughed at my earnestness.”
It was there in the holding cell that my mom first spotted her sister Chee. In the crowd of refugees, Chee looked even smaller and more frail than my mother remembered, but she was alive, and my mother rushed over to her, overcome with relief and gratitude. Then she saw her brother Zhou, who had staggered to his feet and now had his arms around them. “I couldn’t believe that they were there,” my mother exclaims. “I was so overjoyed!”
It was a marvel that the four siblings had made it across alive, especially given that my mother’s sister couldn’t even swim. My mother laughs, “Chee became somewhat of a legend back at home. Everyone was newly inspired to attempt the escape, goaded by the mantra, ‘If Chee can make it, we can too!’”
My mother and her siblings were separated and then interrogated at all hours of the day and night to ensure they were telling the truth about their histories and reasons for seeking asylum. After four days, they were deemed a non-threat and were set free in Hong Kong — truly free.
“We didn’t quite know what to do with ourselves,” she laughs. Since it was right after the mid-autumn festival, the streets in Hong Kong were still laced with lanterns, and shop windows were laden with roast duck and ropes of Chinese sausages. “I had never seen so much meat, so much abundance.”
A New Beginning
When news of the siblings’ escape reached their hometown, their mother was forced to denounce them at the next criticism session: “I have done poorly and have raised children who have gone over to the enemy side.” But just as she feigned regret at her children’s escape, her neighbors feigned outrage; furtive smiles and kind eyes communicated communal triumph and even envy.
The siblings soon contacted a distant relative in Hong Kong, who generously took them in. My mother and her sister learned to sew and worked in a textile factory; her brothers ventured into business. In a few years, they would emigrate to the United States, setting up a new home in San Francisco, and would sponsor the rest of their four siblings and parents to come over, one by one.
The day my mother was lying in a grave, it truly was the death of the old, of everything she knew, of who she was, but it was also the birth of a new life, a new beginning, and so many new possibilities.
“I still have nightmares,” my mother confides. “Sometimes I wake with a start in the middle of the night, and in that moment in the darkness, I think I’m lying in that grave again or hiding in a field, awaiting capture. That fear that catches in my throat … I’ve known it practically my whole life.”
I think I’m lying in that grave again or hiding in a field, awaiting capture.
But regarding that moment when she faced the waters — a literal sink or swim — resilience and bravery prevailed: “You didn’t know to fear. There was no other way but forward.”
I think of my mom, now 74, imbuing this courageous, unflinching life philosophy at the tender and formative age of 19 that has forever colored her outlook, her life’s trajectories permanently altered and affected.
“There is no other way but forward” is what she must have said to herself when she emigrated to the United States, knowing not a soul in the new land. “There is no other way but forward” when she pushed herself to take community college classes in a language so unfamiliar to her native tongue. “There is no other way but forward” when she applied for her first job at a bank. “There is no other way but forward” when she had two babies and worked full time, delighting in their growth amid the comforts she never had, even while simultaneously lamenting their unmooring from the motherland.
I only recently learned that my mom and others like her have a name: the Freedom Swimmers — the tens of thousands who risked life and limb for a chance at liberty. They brought with them no material wealth, just their fortitude and grit, an invaluable treasure in its own regard. The strength they possess has been honed by hardship, but it’s marked by a humility that desires no ceremony. With their eyes ahead, they forged a road; with their hands, they created a home and harbor. If they look back at all, it’s only in remembrance of the spirit of their homeland, which still courses through the fibers of their being.
But along with it, woven just as closely, is a tenacious resolve. It’s quiet, but if you pay attention, it is amplified through their every thought, word, and action. Passing on this perseverance and wisdom to all future generations, they say it simply but absolutely: “There is no other way but forward.”
Illustrations by Lisa Wakiyama
That was so beautifully written and relatable to both of my parents. Thank you and your mother for sharing their story.