Two Lives, Two Different Paths

The twin brothers are standing on a railway platform in Hengyang, saying what they think is their final farewell. It is a spring morning in 1949, and they are surrounded by refugees and wounded soldiers. China's civil war is reaching its climax. The 16-year-olds have received a letter that is to change their destinies forever. It is a message from their father Yang Deyuan: "You two take different roads, so no matter which side is going to win or lose, I will have a river on my left and on my right."

With China's future in the balance, Yang, a wealthy landowner with three wives, is breaking up his family. Yang Peiyuan, the older twin by half an hour, is to return to their hometown and join the communists. Yang Peiji, the younger twin, is to go south to join the Kuomintang (KMT) and fight in their Nationalist army. The train is about to leave. Peiji tells his brother to try to persuade their father to escape to Hong Kong. They hug, and Peiyuan boards the train.

For decades neither knows if the other has been killed. Fast-forward a half-century. The twins have survived. Peiyuan, politically maimed from the Cultural Revolution, lives quietly on a small pension in Changsha, the gray, polluted capital of Hunan. Peiji, who made his way to Taiwan with the retreating KMT, lives very unquietly in neon-struck Taipei. He is president of CTS, one of Taiwan's main TV networks. As boys they were indistinguishable. Now their faces tell very different stories: Peiyuan's face, thin and ravaged, is the story of a China that Mao wrought, with its famines, executions, and harsh labor camps. Peiji's face, fleshy and grinning, is the story of another China, a military dictatorship that became the industrious and democratic society of today's Taiwan.

But the plot is not black and white; despite his ordeals, Peiyuan is more self-assured, more confident of his Chinese identity. His brother Peiji, the eminent achiever, broadcasts insecurity and a trace of guilt at the good life he has enjoyed. Peiyuan is resigned to China's failings. Peiji has indigestion from Taiwan's success. Tell their family story, and you also start to tell the story of China over the past 50 years, with all its contradictions, betrayals and unburied ghosts. Confucian thought has always seen the family as a model of the state. Obedience to the father was a model for loyalty to the Emperor. In his quest to create a new China, Mao tried to destroy the family: children informed on parents, ancestral graves were desecrated, meals were eaten in work groups, not at home. But the family survived. As China puts itself together after the ravages of Maoism, the family is one of the few institutions that people believe in.

"The family is the most important thing. If you destroy the family, how can society exist?" says Peiyuan, sitting in a car on the road to Yueyang, five hours north of his home in Changsha. This is a journey into the dark past for him. Yueyang is where he was sent to prison in 1969 for 11 years during the Cultural Revolution, accused of being an antirevolutionary rightist. His wife left him because he was politically tainted, taking their three-year-old son with her.