My parents, as newlyweds, lived with my father's six brothers, their wives, his two sisters and their children, a total of over twenty people crammed into a six-room house. My mother was the youngest daughter-in-law, so her status in the Li family was the lowest. Family hierarchy had to be respected: she would work hard to prove her worth.
Often my mother would not see my father until late in the evenings, because he worked in two jobs, either away in the fields or carting building materials, all day long. Then the family would sit for dinner under the candlelight (there was no electricity in the village then), with men eating at one table, women and children eating at others. My parents hardly set eyes on each other during that first year of marriage. Sometimes, in the dim candlelight, my mother would even mistake one of her brothers-in-law for her own husband.
The women of the house would sew, wash, clean and cook. My mother was meticulous and efficient, and the speed and quality of her work won her mother-in-law's approval. To cook well was a sign of love and care. My mother was often the one sent to deliver the food to the men in the fields too, because of her unbound feet. Then she could see her husband in the daylight, and her sisters-in-law secretly envied her such freedom.
My mother's mother had died within the first year of my parents' marriage, so my mother would visit her father once a year with gifts and special food she cooked, even though she was never loved by her father in the same way as he loved his sons. A son could work in the fields. A son could bring home a daughter-in- law. A son could carry on the family line. To fail to have a son was considered the greatest betrayal of one's ancestors.
The people who lived in the New Village had been forced to move there during the Second World War from another village about twenty miles north. The Japanese had occupied Qingdao and built an airport where my father's family used to live. The New Village was still small then, with just over three hundred and fifty families, a two-roomed office and an open square. Later, loudspeakers, from which Mao's official revolutionary doctrines were broadcast, would hang from poles or sit on people's rooftops. The houses were attached to each other in long rows with a gap of about four feet between each row.
My parents continued to share a house with my father's family-as the family grew and more children arrived, they simply built more adjoining rooms. Their first son had arrived about a year after their marriage, their second just over two years later, their third two years after that, and then their fourth, Cunsang, in 1955. But Cunsang was lucky to have survived his first week in the Li family. When he was only a few days old, there was an accident. Two of the bigger brothers were playing, stacking up chairs, and the chairs crashed down upon Cunsang's head. He started having seizures. My mother took him immediately to the hospital where the doctor told her that he most likely had brain damage, but was too young to have any treatment. All my mother could do was take him home.
For several days he did not feed, he cried non-stop and the seizures continued. Finally, in desperation, my mother wrapped him in a little handmade blanket, took him out into the snow, and left him on the Northern Hill, close by our village. She thought somebody with magic power might save him. She cried all the way home.
My father's mother, Na-na, came by later to check on her new grandson. Na-na was a kind, tiny little woman. When she found the baby missing, she begged my crying mother to tell her where he was. Eventually she did, and Na-na rushed on her crippled, bound feet to the Northern Hill. She found Cunsang and took him home. He was blue all over, nearly frozen to death, and had a severe fever for several days. But then, miraculously, Cunsang stopped crying. The seizures ended and he seemed to recover. He too grew up with the rest of his brothers in that crowded house, and my mother eventually came to be known as "that lucky woman with seven sons".
My family's house looked into the back of someone else's house and that house looked directly into theirs. It had a small front courtyard which was enclosed, in years to come, by six-foot stone walls. People with money had the stones delivered and secured with mortar, but my family was too poor, so my father and some of the older sons went to the mountains to bring those stones back themselves, by horse and cart. You could see through the holes in the wall and spy on the neighbours and once part of the wall fell apart.
My family's property had no backyard. The house itself was built with big stones and bricks, with German-style terracotta tiles, made locally. Inside, my parents and their sons had four rooms: two small bedrooms about eight-foot square, a slightly larger bedroom about ten-foot square and the kitchen-cum-living room, which was about the same size as the larger bedroom. It had two built-in woks with big windboxes attached to make fire. Those woks occupied three-quarters of the space in that room. Crockery cupboards were built into the walls, and a small freestanding wooden pantry, made by my father, stood in one corner. There was no refrigeration and no running water, only a huge clay pot for storing drinking water. If both woks were in use at the same time, there would be no space for people to pass through that room without having to move aside whoever was operating the windbox.
The woks backed onto the bedroom walls, which were covered with newspaper "wallpaper", and which contained the chimneys. Fire and smoke would travel through under the mud-brick beds and escape through the walls on the other side. The mudbricks were supposed to retain heat but they were not very effective: as the night wore on the beds became colder.
The floor was a reddish earth. During the wet weather, water always seeped through the earth and my father would have to take out the wet floor and wait for a dry day to replace it, every inch with new earth, pounding it down with a huge wooden hammer. The harder the floor, the less chance there was for the water to penetrate.
There were no wardrobes in the house. Clothes were stored in papier-mâaché boxes my mother made, stacked on the two small beds during the day and moved onto the floor at night. There was also a main bed about the size of a small double bed, and eventually my parents and all their sons had to share those three beds. The main bedroom was also the room where my family ate, and the only room with an attic: it was my father's secret hiding place for important things like money. Others were forbidden to go there.
After waking each morning on the freezing beds, everyone would fold the blankets into rolls and tuck them neatly away. What remained was a bamboo mat. A wooden tray about two foot by four, passed down from my father's ancestors, would be placed on top of the mat and the family would sit around it, cross- legged, knee to knee, to eat each meal. Three of the older sons had to sit on wooden stools by the edge of the bed because there wasn't enough room around the tray for everyone.
My family had to go to one of the village wells to fetch water, carrying it back in two buckets that hung from either end of a bamboo pole balanced across the shoulder. The adults and the big boys would carry big buckets and the little boys had smaller buckets. Water was heated in the big wok, and wooden or clay basins about three-foot wide and a foot deep were used for baths. There was one public bath in the commune shared by over ten thousand people, which my family couldn't afford, and no bathroom in the house, only a toilet, which was a hole in the ground in the front courtyard. You had to stand or crouch on two wooden boards, one each side of the hole. There was no roof, so it was freezing cold in the winter. Half of the toilet was inside the wall, and half outside, to allow the lowest class of labourer in the village to collect the waste, which was used in the fields as fertiliser. He'd use a wooden spoon-like scooper and pour the waste into two wooden barrels that sat each side of his wheelbarrow. The shit-man pushed his wheelbarrow through the narrow streets every day, and if people were coming towards him, they'd move aside and allow him to pass. One day the shit-man had a collision with a bicycle. The foul contents of the wheelbarrow ran all over the street. What a smell! Even after the neighbours washed the shitty area over and over with water, the dreadful smell remained and everyone avoided that street for a long time. Neighbours complained to the head of the village and tried to have the shit-man replaced, but no one else wanted to be the next shit-man.
My family had to utilise every inch of their front yard. There was a small vegetable patch, climbing beans on the stone walls, and a pigsty with a couple of pigs, but there was never enough food to feed the people, let alone the pigs, so the pigs were always very thin. Eventually they were sold to the commune. There was also a chicken yard, but again, the chickens never received enough food to produce many eggs, and the few they did lay were sold in the market for badly needed cash.
The commune allocated each family in the village a piece of land.
My family's was one twentieth of an acre, halfway up the Northern Hill, about fifteen minutes from home. It was so small that it could only be used to grow essential foods, such as corn and yams. On Sundays, which was the only day my father could spend at home, the entire family, including the children, worked on this land with him. All the land in Li Commune was divided into small, stepped terraces, and everything was done by hand using shovels, picks, hoes, sickles and ploughs. At one stage the village had the luxury of two old, starved oxen, which were used for ploughing, but they were slow and often refused to walk, despite constant whipping. They too eventually died, one after another.
My mother's earnings, as with all the peasants', depended on the weather and luck. They had no say in what to plant: the central government in Beijing decided that. My family's area planted mainly wheat in the winter, corn, yams and sorghum the rest of the year. The government would get the first and biggest portion, at the government-set price, and the rest was divided among the peasants according to the number of members in each family and how many points the family earned during the year. This apportioned food would be counted against your earnings at the end of that year. Every day, the head of each working group in the village would register who worked and for how many hours. Then, at the end of each month, all the peasants would gather and decide how many points each person was entitled to. The most a man could earn in a single day was ten points, which was about one yuan or roughly seventeen US cents then. Women normally received about half a man's earnings.
One year, there was a severe drought and nobody was paid a single yuan for a whole year. The village had to borrow some money from the Qingdao government to lend every family so they could buy food to survive. It took the people in the village more than two years to repay that loan, and still the peasants had to eat anything that moved, and some things that didn't. Often they couldn't even find any bark to eat.
My family was very poor, but there were even poorer people than the Li family in our commune. By the time I was born there was deprivation and disease everywhere. Three years of Mao's Great Leap Forward and three years of bad weather had resulted in one of the greatest famines the world had ever seen. Nearly thirty million people died. And my parents, like everyone else, were desperately fighting for survival.
I was my parents' sixth son. I was born on 26 January 1961. By then my parents had been married for fifteen years and the Li family had grown to become a large extended family. Our na-na, my father's mother, lived next door, and his fourth brother (we called him Fourth Uncle) lived next to her. Our third uncle's family lived in front of us, but he died of an unknown disease in his early thirties and left four young girls and a boy. My father, who we called Dia, and our fourth uncle, became their de facto fathers.
It's a Chinese custom that the mother stays in bed for a month after giving birth. Their babies are delivered at home by a local midwife. To get out of bed and work before the month's end was supposed to be bad for the mother's health and it could do unthinkable harm in her later years. But I was born just twenty days before the Chinese New Year and this was the busiest time of the year for my mother, my niang. Because of my birth she was far behind in her preparations for the feast. She had no daughter to help her. Our na-na tried to help but she had bound feet. So my niang didn't have the luxury of staying on her kang for that first month.
My life began with near tragedy for my parents. When I was just fifteen days old, my niang left me on our kang and wrapped me in a cotton quilt before going to the kitchen to make her bread rolls for the Chinese New Year. Mothers in China always wrapped their babies' arms tightly against their bodies and laid them facing up, so the baby's head would grow to the normal shape. That day my niang had so many rolls to steam that the kang where I was lying got boiling hot. I was probably suffocating in the tightly wrapped quilt. I struggled my right arm loose, and the kang badly burnt the middle of my arm.
When my niang first heard my screams, she thought I was crying for milk. She had none left in her breasts so at first she did not respond. By the time she came to check on me, the whole elbow area of my right arm was severely burnt and blistered.
The burn quickly became infected. Two days later, my entire right arm had swollen up and turned bright red. My parents had no appropriate medication. They could not afford to take me to the hospital. The burnt area gradually became full of pus and I developed a dangerously high fever. I screamed constantly day and night.
They finally had to borrow some money from our relatives and friends to take me to the hospital. "Your son has a severe infection," the doctor informed my parents. "He is too young to take any medication. You should have come earlier. Your only alternative is to apply some herbal medicine. But I can't guarantee this will work."
"What will happen if it doesn't work?" my niang asked, desperately afraid.
"He may lose his right arm. As soon as you see the infection spread, bring him in and we will have no choice but to cut his arm off," he replied.
My parents looked at their tiny son and couldn't believe that he might grow up with only one arm. My niang's guilt was beyond description. My dia kept telling her that there would be a cure somewhere. They took the doctor's prescription and purchased the herbs from a local medicine shop. My niang followed the doctor's instructions and stewed the herbal ingredients in the wok. They applied the dark liquid to my arm. It didn't help. It made the infection worse and the redness began to travel away from my arm.
My niang started to panic. She took me to see many healers who lived in our area and tried their different secret family recipes, to no avail. Then my fourth aunt said to my niang, "An old healer told my mother once that bai fang helps infections. Why don't you try it?" Bai fang was a meat tenderiser that looked like white rock salt. It was full of acid. At first my niang didn't take the suggestion seriously, but with all other options exhausted she decided to give it a try.
When she first applied the bai fang I screamed like a stuck pig. She couldn't bear to see her son suffering such pain and she seriously doubted whether a meat tenderiser would ever work, so after a few tries she stopped the treatment.
But my fourth aunt believed strongly it would work. "Ni tai sin yuen la!" You are too soft-hearted, she said to my niang. She locked her door, crushed the bai fang into a powder and rubbed massive amounts onto my raw, exposed muscles. She was literally rubbing salt into an open wound. I screamed non-stop the whole day. Every hour she would wash my arm with warm water and reapply masses of bai fang.
Years later my niang confessed, "I was outside your fourth aunt's door and my heart bled each time you screamed. The sound of your cries was like a thousand sharp knives cutting into my guilty heart! Several times I banged on your fourth aunt's door, trying to take you away. Thank the gods for your fourth aunt's determination. She just ignored me."
My fourth aunt wasn't really sure whether this bai fang would work either. She nearly gave up many times that day. But she knew this was the last chance they had to save my arm.
By the end of that day I had lost my voice completely from screaming. But my aunt's determination saved my arm. The infection slowly went away. A large scar remained, and in years to come, in moments of crisis, I would always touch it. It would become my link to my niang and a reminder of her love.
Three years later, my niang gave birth to her seventh son, my youngest brother Cungui, who we called by his nickname Jing Tring. My parents knew they couldn't provide enough food to feed the sons they now had, and as far as I can remember there was never enough food. Meat, seafood and eggs were all on a strict quota system, along with oil, soy sauce, sugar, salt, wheat and cornflour, rice and also coal. Every family was allocated a very small quantity of these items each month, but often they were not available at all.
We ate a lot of dried yams. They were the easiest things to grow, so most of our land was used for yams. I was often woken up at five o'clock in the morning by my niang to go to the yam fields with my big brothers before they started school for the day. We each carried a shovel and a bamboo basket made by our dia, to dig for any yams that might have been overlooked by the peasants during harvesting. We were cold and hungry but the hope of those yams for breakfast always kept us going. Often the fields had already been turned over by others in equally desperate circumstances, and we returned home with empty baskets.
During summer, every family's front yard and roof was covered with slices of these yams drying in the sun. They looked like snowflakes. Some people even laid them out on the street. But if rain came, you had to quickly pick them all up, for if they got wet they soon went mouldy. Once they were dried, the sliced yams would be stored in a huge clay pot in my older brothers' bedroom or in our dia's attic.
Dried yams were our basic food for most of the year. We occasionally had flour and corn bread for a treat, but those were my niang's special reserves for relatives or important visitors. We had dried yams, steamed or boiled, almost daily, week after week, month after month and year after year. Dried yams were the most hated food in my family, but there were others in the commune that could not even afford dried yams. We were luckier than most. We were luckier than the thirty million who starved to death. Dried yams saved our lives.
One year, I remember that our commune experimented with growing peanuts on a few small pieces of land, but it was a disappointingly meagre crop. After the peanut field had been harvested, a group of boys my age, about five or six years old, followed some of the older boys with spades and bamboo baskets, trying to find peanuts in the ground that, like the yams, might have been missed by others. None of us found many peanuts after hours of earth churning, but on the edge of the field one of the boys discovered a rat hole, a lucky find for starving boys! He immediately started digging. We gathered around him as if he were a magnet: rats always stored food for winter, so we were all excited and envious of the boy's find. We knew not to kneel by the rat hole because local superstition told us that if we did the rat tunnel would disappear. So the boy dug as fast as he could, with his arse in the air. Several times he nearly lost the tunnel because the rats tried to block it. Then he found that it branched out in different directions and soon he discovered three stores: one of peeled peanuts, one of half-peeled and the third of unpeeled peanuts. We never saw the rats; we thought they had a secret escape route.
That lucky boy gathered almost half a basketful of peanuts, but secretly I felt sad for the rats, losing their food like that. They too might die of starvation that winter. What a cruel world, I thought, where we had to compete with the rats for food.
Mealtimes in my family were always sad for my niang. There was often nothing for her to cook. We would look at what little food there was on the wooden tray and, out of respect for our elders, always wait for our dia to start. One day, when my niang served dinner, it was clear there was not enough food for everyone.
"I don't feel hungry," our dia said casually. "I had a rather big lunch today. You all go ahead."
Each of us had our chopsticks in hand, ready to swarm on the food. But we hesitated. Our niang was next in line. She quickly gave our dia an annoyed look and made "zhi, zhi, zhi" sounds with her tongue. "Don't you dare not eat! Your health is our entire family's security. We will all only be drinking water if you starve yourself to death!"
"I really mean it. I'm not hungry," our dia protested innocently.
"Don't annoy me, you liar!" our niang admonished, and she picked some food up with her chopsticks and put it in our dia's bowl. We started to eat only once he took the first bite. Our parents always ate their food slowly to allow us more food. On many occasions our niang told us to leave the best food for our dia because he was our main breadwinner. But our dia always made excuses and told us we should give the best food to our niang: if not for her we would all have only "north-west wind" for dinner.
We rarely ate meat. Once a month we would wait in long lines at the market for the fattest piece of pork available. Our niang would extract lard from it to use for cooking later, but everyone else wanted the fat pork too, so we didn't get it very often.
One afternoon, my niang heard that the meat shop in our commune was selling pork, but only for a few hours. She borrowed one yuan from my fourth aunt and told me to run to the meat shop as fast as I could in case they ran out, which they often did. It was a good half-hour away. There were three long lines of people waiting by the time I arrived. An hour later I handed the cashier my money and our ration card, and I was given a small piece of fatty pork. I was so excited! I knew my niang would be happy with such a fatty piece.
She was ecstatic. She immediately cut the pork into small pieces and started to cook them to extract the lard. I was her windbox pusher. The delicious fragrance and the sound of sizzling pork made my tummy rumble. She was in high spirits. "What a good piece of pork! This amount of lard will last us a while," she said, and handed me a bowl with a small piece of pork crackling in it. "Don't burn your tongue," she warned. The crackling melted in my mouth-nothing in the world could taste as good.
My niang also cut up a cabbage to cook. "This will be a nice surprise for your dia!"
That night, when the cabbage dish was served, we could actually see the traces of precious oil floating in the sauce! My second brother found a small piece of pork in the cabbage too, and put it into our dia's bowl. Our dia immediately passed it to our niang. Our niang passed it back to him. "Don't be silly!" she said, "I especially cooked this for you. You need it for your strength at work."
My youngest brother was sitting next to our dia. Our dia turned to him and said, "Jing Tring, let me see your teeth." Before our niang could say anything, he put that piece of pork into my brother's mouth. There was silence, and a long, sad sigh from our niang.
It was always like this. Often a small piece of meat in a vegetable dish would be passed from person to person because it was so scarce. Seven pairs of hungry eyes would look at our parents, begging for more. But no begging words were ever spoken because we all knew how difficult it was to get any food at all. There was simply nothing more to cook. My parents didn't know where the food for our next meal would be coming from.
To survive, my niang worked every spare hour she had in the fields, as well as cooking and looking after her boys. She cooked three meals a day, every day. We never dreamed of going to a restaurant. There was only one restaurant in our area anyway, and it mainly served the government officials. Often my niang had to bury her pride and borrow food from relatives or neighbours. She was an extremely resourceful cook and could make delicious dishes from anything, except dried yams. I hoped never to see another piece of dried yam as long as I lived. They looked whitish before cooking and turned pale grey afterwards. They had no taste and stuck in our throats, so we normally had a bowl of hot water to help get them down, or if we were lucky we would get a bowl of watery rice, wheat or corn congee. Congee is like thin porridge, with very few grains in it.
I loved watching my niang cook while I pushed the windbox. This was a special time for me. I could talk to her alone then, and have a little bit of undivided attention. I was her favourite windbox pusher, the fastest among my brothers to make the fire. I was also the most patient. My joy and sadness fluctuated along with my niang's. She would be in such a happy mood when she had oil, seafood or especially if she had a piece of pork. I would ask her many questions about the cooking, and I learnt when to add certain spices and how to be a good cook.
Food wasn't our only problem of course. Even the water we used had to be boiled. We were not allowed to drink unboiled water. We were told that unboiled water from the village wells could give us worms. My brothers and I all had worms many times throughout our childhood. We would get knotted stomachs and bad pains, and our parents would wake us up and give us some sweet medicine to chew. We called them "the vomitable worm killers". They came in the form of candies shaped like miniature pyramids. The first taste was bearable, with some sweetness, but after five of them I wanted to vomit. And I was only halfway there: I had to eat ten of them! My poor older brothers suffered even more, because the older you were the more worm killers you had to chew. We took them at night while our stomachs were empty and the worms had nothing to eat except the vomitable worm killers. After that, for the next few days, we had to be on a strict diet of warm food, warm water, no sweet, salty or oily food, and no seafood. That meant only one thing-dried yams, meal after meal. Sometimes the worms didn't come out for days and we had to repeat the whole process. Most of the time the worms came out still alive, usually many of them and all about a foot long. The older brothers hated their younger brothers for this horrible ordeal because we, most likely, caused the annual drama by not washing our hands regularly. They had no choice but to go through this process each year.
But despite our poverty, our parents always taught us to have dignity, honesty and pride. Never to steal or do things that would harm others. Our good family name was most sacred and should be protected with all our might.
I tested this one day when I was playing at a friend's house. I was about five. Sien Yu was the same age, and his uncle, who lived in the city, had brought him a small toy car when he'd visited the day before. It was the first time I had ever seen a toy car. I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life! Sien Yu let me play with it for a while. I loved it so much. When he went inside to get a drink, I took it and ran home.
"Where did you get that?" my niang asked suspiciously.
"I… I found it on the street."
She knew I was not telling the truth. No one in our area could afford to spend money on a toy. "Who did you just play with?"
"Sien Yu," I replied.
She took my hands firmly and pulled me back to Sien Yu's house. She said to his mother, "Sien Yu's niang, is this your son's toy car?"
Sien Yu's mother nodded.
"I'm sorry, I think my son has stolen your son's toy car," my niang said.
"Don't get upset," Sien Yu's mother replied. "Your son is too young to understand."
"I'm ashamed, I'm ashamed of what my son did!" said my niang, and apologised profusely. She tried to make me do the same, but I felt too embarrassed and refused, and wished I had never seen that toy car. I wished for a hole in which to hide. I wished for thick skin to cover my face. I felt the blood rushing to my neck. I tried to escape from my niang's firm grip. I wanted to run away and never come near Sien Yu's house again. I hated my niang for embarrassing me like this. She shouted. She wanted the entire world to know I had stolen my friend's toy car. I screamed and kicked as she dragged me home. "I want a car! I want a car!" I yelled.
As soon as we went inside our house, with despair in her eyes, she pulled me to her chest, hugged me tightly in her arms and sobbed. It was as though she had suffered as much humiliation as I had. "I'm so sorry to do this to you," she whispered tenderly. "I'm so sorry we are too poor to buy you a toy car." After a brief moment she continued. "I'm too stupid to have all of you in this cruel world! You don't deserve this suffering!" I felt her tears streaming onto my hair. "We are too poor! The gods in heaven won't answer our prayers, and even the devil below has abandoned us. We are born with a hopeless fate," she sighed.
"Stop saying that! Don't say anything!" I begged her. I hated to see her so sad.
She continued as though she hadn't heard me. "How I wish I had the money to buy you a toy car! But we don't even have enough money for food."
"I'll have enough food for you one day! I swear!" I said to myself.
She hugged me tighter as she sobbed. I didn't know how long she hugged me but I didn't want her to stop.
That evening, at dinner, after she had told everyone what I had done, my dia started lecturing us. "Although we have no money, no food, and can't buy clothes, and although we live in a poor house, one thing we do have is PRIDE. Pride is the most precious thing in our lives. Throughout our forefather's struggles, the Li family always had our pride and dignity. We have always had a good reputation. I want every one of you to remember this: never lose your pride and dignity no matter how hard life is."
Memories of my niang and my dia are always related to how hard they both worked. Our dia was often up before five-thirty in the morning, which meant my niang had to be up even earlier to cook him breakfast. With all the cooking, washing and sewing she had to do, she hardly had time or energy to pay each of us much attention. We all fought over her love and affection, and she was constantly exhausted. She cooked every meal, made all our clothes for every season and made all our quilts and blankets too. She carried the laundry either to the stream about twenty minutes south of our house or to a dam about half an hour away up on the Northern Hill. The stream often had little water in summer, and our big clay water-pot would be covered with ice in the winter. Yet she had no alternative for washing the dishes and clothes.
We always had to be extra careful that we didn't run out of coal for cooking and heating in the middle of winter. There was a great shortage of black coal throughout China so we never had enough, not even half-burnt coal, to heat the water for my niang's huge amounts of washing. Each family was apportioned a small quota of black coal on strict rations, but we only used it to ignite the half-burnt coal, which looked like little pieces of grey sponge. This coal had already been burnt once by factories or power stations, and if we saw some on the side of the road or in the garbage we would pick it up and take it home. Half-burnt coal was very hard to light. It needed black coal to keep it burning. Using the windbox, my niang first lit some dried grass, which was gathered and stacked during summer. Sometimes it could take up to fifteen minutes to light the fire. On windy days, the smoke from my niang's cooking would fill the house and we would all wake up in the morning coughing.
The small amount of black coal that was allocated to us we would try to keep for winter heating. The temperature in Qing-dao could go as low as minus fifteen degrees Celsius, and often the inside of our house felt colder than the outside. We'd mix the black coal with some dirt to make it last longer. Even heating up some water for the washing was a luxury for my niang. But our patched clothes were always clean. She took immense pride in making her seven sons look well cared for.
Every aspect of life was hard for my parents. We even had to sleep in the same bed. Jing Tring and I slept with them until I was eleven. All four of us, head-to-toe. I hated my brother's smelly feet right by my face and he must have hated me more since I was taller than he was. Sometimes he'd end up on my side of the kang with the quilt all to himself, and I'd have to grab the quilt back. But I loved sleeping with my parents. It felt so safe. I often wondered why my niang always looked for her hairpins on my dia's side in the mornings and imagined what they were up to while we were asleep. So often I tried to pretend that
I was asleep in order to find out their secrets, but I never managed to stay awake.
I rarely saw a smile from my niang, but when I did, my heart would blossom like a lotus flower. I would have given anything to make her smile. Occasionally, in my naïve way, I tried to cheer her up with stories. When I was only little, my second brother had done some jobs for someone in the village and he'd paid my brother with a young goat. We put all our prayers into that goat, hoping that when she grew up she might produce some milk for us which we could sell for cash. I loved that goat. I took her anywhere I could to feed her grass and I brought grass home for her every day.
As I passed our main bedroom window one day, I overheard one of my niang's friends telling her, "I heard there is a rare and special goat that will sneeze out a worm sometimes. This worm can cure some rare diseases. The government in Beijing would pay a lot of money for it!"
Not long after, as I was going to take the goat to eat some grass before sunset, my niang said, "Just look at this skinny goat! Do you think anyone in their right mind would give away a milk- producing goat?" I knew she was in despair over our shortage of food that day, and she was short-tempered. I tried to think of something that would cheer her up and suddenly remembered her friend's tale about the goat.
I put on my best innocent face. "Niang, I saw our little goat sneeze out a worm the other day."
She looked alarmed, and asked me excitedly, "What does the worm look like?"
"A whitish caterpillar about the size of my finger." I stuck out my second finger.
"What happened to the worm?" she asked eagerly.
"The goat ate it very quickly," I replied casually.
"Next time when she sneezes out the worm you must pull the goat away from it and try to capture it. This kind of worm is worth a lot of money!" She became happier then, and seemed to dream. "Maybe this is our saviour goat," she murmured to herself, and she would forget about her despair for a while.
But one day I told the same story once too often and she realised I had been making it up all along. "Get lost! Don't think you can fool me again!"
What a shame, I thought. Now I would have to think of a cleverer tale to cheer her up.
And the goat? She eventually died, from starvation, the following winter.
My niang was also recognised as one of the best seamstresses in the village. Sewing was one of the most important pastimes for the ladies. My parents simply had no money to buy ready-made clothes, and my niang didn't have a sewing machine. So the older ladies would teach the younger ones, and they often gathered together as a sewing group in our small, crowded house, even though they knew we were very poor, to share their secrets, drink tea and gossip. The women of the village loved to come and share their happiness or their problems with my niang, and her sewing skill was admired by many. Her stitches looked as if they were made by a sewing machine-small and perfect. Once she was asked by a friend to redo some machine-sewn zippers because he preferred my niang's delicate stitchwork.
My niang's warm personality was well liked and respected by people of all ages in the surrounding villages. Like my dia, she always tried hard to help others. Besides that "lucky woman with seven sons", she was also known as "the live treasure". Men occasionally stopped by our gate to have a chat with her: most women would have been intimidated and embarrassed, talking to men other than their own husbands, but not our niang. For this, Na-na often fondly called her "that wild girl".
But my niang was also an open-minded person, receptive to new ideas. Mao's Cultural Revolution boasted that one of the great achievements of the Red Guards had been the establishment of evening schools. These were especially aimed at teaching the uneducated peasants Mao's communist ideas. We were all given copies of Mao's Red Book. I was six years old then and I remember two enthusiastic young Red Guards coming to teach my niang to read. She never learned to recognise individual words, but she could memorise entire paragraphs of Chairman Mao's sayings. She would practise while she was washing, cleaning, sewing and cooking: I often saw her lips moving as she silently recited passages from her book. She was considered a model student.
One day, while my niang was trying to make a fire to cook dinner, two young Red Guard girls came into our house to check on her reading progress. She was having a terrible day and couldn't get the half-burnt coal to light. Smoke filled the whole room. My niang was a sensible, fair woman: she was polite and explained that she didn't have time to talk just then and asked them to come back another time. So the girls left and she pulled all the unlit half-burnt coals out and tried again. She asked me to push the windbox for her. But just as she was going to start cooking, the two girls came back. They kept insisting on testing my niang on her understanding of Mao's Red Book. They had to report back to their group leader that evening they said.
I could see my niang's anger growing. Eventually, she told me to get up off the floor and asked one of the girls to push the wind- box. She handed the second girl her wok flipper and asked her to take over the cooking. The two girls just stood there and looked at each other, very confused. By now my niang was frustrated and at the end of her patience. She roared at them. "I could learn Chairman Mao's sayings every day, all day long, until I die, but who is going to do my cleaning, washing and cooking? Who will bath my sons, sew their clothes, provide my entire family with three meals a day, every day of the year? Who will cook things out of thin air? Do you think Chairman Mao's words will fill our stomachs? If you can come back every day to help me do all of these things, I will learn whatever you want me to learn-and more!"
The two girls left, red-faced. That night my niang told my dia what she'd said to the two girls. He just smiled. That was the end of my niang's educational adventure, and the two girls never returned to our house again.
By the time I was eight, the hard work and poverty had begun to wear down even my niang, strong as she was. She woke up one morning complaining of dizziness and a headache, and she didn't eat any breakfast. My youngest brother Jing Tring and I were home with her. She had planned to do a lot of washing that day but found the water in our storage pot frozen hard. So she packed up a heavy clay washing-basin full of clothes and, carrying a wooden washing-board under the other arm, she headed to the man-made dam on the steep Northern Hill.
I knew she didn't feel well. I begged her not to go. "I'll fetch you some water so you can do your washing at home."
"It will be slippery at the well with all the ice around it! Do you want to die in the well?" she replied impatiently. "I have to finish these clothes, or your brothers will have to wear filthy clothes to school tomorrow." She walked out the door. "If I don't get back before your dia gets home, tell him to come and help me carry the clothes back."
A couple of my friends came over to our house to play that morning. Then, around noon, a neighbour rushed to our house, shouting, "Hurry! Your niang has fainted halfway between the dam and your house!"
My dia was not yet home from work and often he had to finish his quota of lifting heavy materials for the morning before he was allowed to take his lunch hour. Most of the time he wouldn't come home for lunch, but that morning he'd said he would try to get back because he knew our niang wasn't well.
I asked my friends to look after Jing Tring, then rushed to my fourth uncle's house to see if he was home. The door was locked.
In a panic I rushed to another neighbour's house, but realised immediately that she would not be able to help: she had tiny bound feet. It would take her all day to walk up the Northern Hill on the rough dirt road.
I ran to a couple more houses and found no one to help. Then I ran as fast as I could towards the dam. Tears streamed down my face. I was afraid that I would be too small to be of any help.
I found my niang lying on the side of the road, her clay washing- basin broken in pieces, the pile of washed clothes scattered around in the dirt. She looked so pale. I threw my body on top of hers and shook her violently. "Niang! Niang, wake up!" I shouted, panicking, fearing she was dead. When my face touched hers, I felt it burning and she lay in my arms, motionless.
A few minutes later she slowly opened her eyes and asked me, in a weak whisper, "Where is your dia?"
"He is not home yet!" I replied, frightened, but relieved she was still alive.
She sighed. "Where are your elder brothers?"
"They are not home from school yet."
She sighed again. It seemed hopeless. "Help me up," she said.
My earlier fears were correct: I was too small to be of much help. I held one of her hands to support her but it was not enough and after a few slow wobbling steps, she crashed to the ground again. I felt useless. I wished that I was big and strong enough to carry her on my back. I wept in desperation.
"I'm going to have a little rest here," she said. "Go home and see if your dia and any of your brothers are back."
I flew home. No one was there. I rushed out of our house in all directions trying to find help. Eventually I saw a middle-aged man riding his bike home. "Da… Ye! Are you in a hurry?" I stuttered, the words like bullets out of a machine gun.
"Not particularly. Why?" he replied, puzzled.
"My niang fainted on the Northern Hill and can't get home. Please help her. She is dying! Please! I beg you!" I spoke so fast and stuttered so much that he had to ask me to repeat myself, but when I tried my stutter just got worse. I wanted to show him my urgent heart inside my chest. Finally, out of desperation, I began to stamp my feet. That helped the rhythm of my speech and he eventually understood.
"Where is she?" he asked.
I pointed towards the Hill.
"Don't worry, leave it to me." He hopped onto his bike and pedalled off as fast as he could, with me running behind. He reached my niang before me and was already on the way down with her, motionless, propped on the back of his bike. I quickly went back to gather all the clothes but found nothing to carry them with. What to do? I wrapped all the long pieces of clothes around my neck, waist and arms, and carried the small pieces against my chest on the wooden washing-board. The muddy clothes were extremely heavy, and made me twice as big, but I was going downhill, and I managed to get everything home.
By the time I arrived, my fourth aunt and some other women had already begun to put cold wet towels over my niang's forehead. One of the ladies told me to get some boiled water to make a ginger drink, to help with her high fever. I took two thermal bottles and a coupon and headed for the hot-water depot. The village shared one hot-water boiler. I paid one fen for every water-bottle filled, and the old shopkeeper stamped two little red squares on our coupon.
That was the first time I ever saw my niang ill. She couldn't get out of bed for nearly a week. The "barefoot doctor" in our village gave her a dozen different kinds of medicine and she had to take a handful three times a day with warm water. We were always told to take medicine with warm water. The barefoot doctor was one of Mao's inventions, a product of the Cultural Revolution. They were supposed to live among the peasants, live like peasants. Their precious shoes wouldn't be useful in the muddy fields, so they were known as barefoot doctors. By the early 1970's, facing a severe shortage of doctors and nurses in the countryside, Mao ordered clinics and hospitals to train as many people as possible and send them to the countryside. He criticised the medical profession for avoiding the communes and refusing to share the experience of the peasants' lives. Many people were rushed through a short training course. They read The Barefoot Doctor's Manual and were declared qualified doctors.
But despite the barefoot doctor's medicine, my niang's fever wouldn't recede, and she kept having dizzy spells. Her lips became covered with white blisters, she lost weight and her eyes sank deep under her brows. I often placed my hands onto the frosted window and then onto my niang's burning forehead to help cool her down.
That week, my dia had to cook, wash, clean and get my brothers ready for school. He didn't have a minute to himself. He rose very early to cook us breakfast and rushed home to see my niang and cook us lunch. Dinner was always late since he had to finish his day's quota before he could come home. My dia's cooking was basic and often flavourless, but nobody complained. We knew how serious my niang's illness was and how hard it was for my dia. I was so frightened that my niang might die. "Look after your dia if I don't make it," she said. "Maybe I will die young, just like my mother."
Everyone in the family, all the way down to five-year-old Jing Tring, was expected to pull his weight. My niang was so worried that my dia might get sick from overworking: we would not survive if he got sick. He was the breadwinner, the rock and spine of our family. But he never showed any signs of frustration or fatigue. He spoke even fewer words than usual that week. He just worked and worked and worked.
We had no money to take my niang to the hospital, and the medicine from the barefoot doctor was cheap and ineffective. So my dia chopped huge amounts of ginger and garlic into tiny pieces, boiled them in the wok with some sugar borrowed from my fourth aunt, and gave it to my niang. She drank massive amounts of this steaming hot mixture and immediately covered herself from head to toe with layer upon layer of thick cotton quilts to make herself sweat. Then Cunfar and I were sent to the big grain grinder about five minutes away in the eastern section of our village to grind some wheat to make her some noodle soup as a treat. The grain grinder was a round platform pieced together from several thick granite stones. On top was a huge heavy stone ball with a hole in the middle and a strong bamboo stick through it. A person on each side would push the stone ball around to crush the wheat. My brother and I pushed the ball in a circle until the wheat was finely crushed, and when we returned with the bowl of cracked wheat, my dia used a fine wire sieve, which he'd made himself, to separate the flour from the cracked wheat shells. He mixed the flour with some water and rolled it into a thin pancake, then patiently folded it into many layers. Then he cut the pancake into noodles with a big cleaver. He even used a few drops of my niang's precious oil-and two eggs! But my niang noticed immediately that the colour of the soup was rather strange and after the first taste she asked my dia, "Have we run out of salt and soy sauce?" At first my dia didn't understand, then all of a sudden he realised he'd forgotten the most important ingredients. They burst into laughter. Even in sickness my niang had a sharp sense of humour, and a brilliant, contagious laugh.
It was wonderful to hear my parents laugh again. Niang called Jing Tring and me over. "Help me eat some of these noodles. Your dia has made too much." We all knew that she'd hardly eaten anything the entire week. We all knew she could have eaten twice as much as our dia had made. "Get out of here!" our dia said. "Your niang will never eat her noodles in peace while you're here." Our niang protested, but our dia gently pushed us out of the room and forced her to finish her soup.
Over the next few weeks, my niang gradually recovered, but we never found out what she'd had, though exhaustion and starvation were the likely causes. Her health was never quite the same, and she suffered from dizzy spells ever after. My dia wanted my niang to stop working in the fields, but in her usual strong way she argued back. "We can't afford for me to stay home! Your wage is not enough for all of us to survive."
"If we only have water to drink," he said to her, "it would still be better than you working yourself to death. Our family could never survive without you, either."
But the reality was that our family couldn't live on my dia's wage alone. He eventually agreed to my niang working in the fields only part time, to ensure our survival.
Every day except Sundays, my dia would ride his old bike to work in the town of Laoshan. It was a good half-hour away. He paid someone in the flea market ten yuan for that beloved second-hand bike. It needed a lot of fixing before he could ride it, but he was a resourceful handyman and could fix anything. It was so precious to him that we were never allowed even to touch it. He had to carry all kinds of heavy materials-huge grain sacks, big pieces of stone-as part of his job. He was the tallest and strongest among the crew of five, so he was called upon to carry the heaviest materials. He was also the driver's right-hand man: when the truck had to reverse he would guide the driver, sitting alongside. I was very proud of him. A truck was impressive-most transport was still done by horse and cart in the communes. His job was also considered one of the better-paid jobs in the county and many people were envious of him. He was paid thirty-five yuan per month, almost US $4.20 then! I wished that I could be a truck driver one day, but I knew at the bottom of my heart that my destiny lay in the fields as a labourer, like hundreds of millions of others.
It was often well after seven in the evening before our dia came home in those days. He would be worn out, and my niang often had to massage him at night to prepare him for the next day. As long as I could remember, he never missed one single day's work, even when he didn't feel well.
Apart from my dia's few brief days with a teacher, my parents never went to school when they were children, so they could not read to us. But night-time was still story-time, and our dia would tell us his stories and fables, always simple and basic, but we constantly begged him for them and we always listened eagerly.
My brothers also played their own version of I-spy. One of them would select a word from the newspapers glued all over the walls and ceiling, and whoever spotted this word first would have a turn to select the next. Sometimes we would not find the word for days. Later, once I'd learnt to read a little, one of my words held the record for the longest time it took to find. We always thought it was sad that our parents couldn't join in because they couldn't read.
One year, a friend of our dia's who worked in a Qingdao printing factory gave us some Deer cigarette labels. They were green and we used them as wallpaper for the ceiling. Our dia could not afford cigarettes. Instead he smoked a wooden pipe and cheap tobacco, but he often joked to his friends that he had the luxury of enjoying Deer cigarettes every day because of the labels on our ceiling.
My dia was always patient and emotionally controlled, sometimes stubborn, and always good tempered. The only time I remember him losing his temper with us was when my fourth brother's teacher came to report to our parents about his bad school marks that year. Cunsang knew his teacher's report wouldn't be good. He gathered together my fifth brother Cunfar, my youngest brother Jing Tring and me and said to us, "Let's make chaos! I hate her, and she doesn't like me either!" We thought the teacher was a disruption to our nightly playtime anyway, so we needed little encouragement. The teacher sat on one end of the kang and my niang on the other. Our dia poured them a cup of tea each. As soon as the teacher started to tell my parents of my brother's poor school progress, my fourth brother gave us the signal, and we began running from side to side on the kang and yelling at the tops of our voices.
Our dia gave us a dark look. "Be quiet," he said.
"I'm sorry about our misbehaving children," our niang apologised. "They are tired tonight."
After a few quiet seconds, Cunsang whispered in our ears. "She let out a loud fart the other day and pretended it wasn't her! It was the worst smelling bomb!" We laughed uncontrollably. "Farter, farter, smelly farter!" we shrieked.
The teacher pretended she didn't hear, but our parents were so embarrassed. As usual, our dia left all the talking to our niang. "You will be in trouble if you make any more noise!" she threatened. She turned to the teacher. "I'm very sorry. I can't wait to send these boys to school, so you can teach them proper manners, but they are too young right now."
"Not only yours," the teacher replied. "All boys are wild. I don't know how you're coping with so many of them."
A few minutes later I knocked the teacher's cup over and spilt some tea onto her clothes. We were like three wild animals. We even broke one of the supporting mud bricks on the kang because we were jumping up and down like monkeys. My parents kept warning us, and apologising to the teacher.
Eventually the teacher had had enough humiliation. "I have to go now. I have other families to visit tonight," she said, giving us a disgusted look. By now we were completely out of control and sensed victory. My parents continued apologising to the angry teacher on her way out and begged her to come back another day.
As soon as the teacher was gone, my niang turned to my dia. "Lock the door!" she screeched. "Kill these wicked boys! I can't believe how bad they are!"
Jing Tring started to cry, so she removed him from the kang. "The little one is too young to understand. It's not his fault. Just kill the big ones! See if they dare do it again!"
My dia stormed into the room with a broomstick in his hand and closed the door. I had never seen him so angry. He was tall by Chinese standards, and a scary sight. His face was frightening enough, let alone the flailing broomstick, and he shouted as he swung it at us. "See if you dare to behave like this again!" He hit us with that broomstick so hard that I wanted to dig a hole in the ground and hide.
My niang kept urging him on from the other side of the door. "Hit them harder, hit them harder!"
We kept screaming, "Wouldn't dare do it again! Wouldn't dare do it again! We promise!" We screamed so loud that some of our neighbours came and knocked on our door, begging for leniency, but my niang explained what had happened and our neighbours finally left the matter to our parents.
Our niang's head popped in and out of the room like a yo-yo. "Hit them harder! Teach them a lesson! See if they will ever dare to do it again!" I thought it was strange that her head came in and out like that. We didn't know then that she thought we looked so comical she was laughing her head off outside, but she had to at least pretend she was angry with us and was on our dia's side. What a lesson that was: we never misbehaved like that again.
I can only remember my parents fighting once, and it turned our family upside down. Our dia was invited to a relative's wedding and after a drink or two of highly alcoholic rice wine, he would open up and become a chatterbox. He stayed longer than usual that afternoon, which worried my niang. She was afraid he would lose dignity from over-drinking. She sent us to collect him several times, and he kept assuring us that he would be home soon. Finally, she sent her three youngest sons to get him. He'd clearly had too much to drink by that time and was angry when he got home. He was embarrassed by her sending us so many times and felt that he had lost face in front of his friends and neighbours. They argued quietly at first, trying to keep it to themselves. But neither of them would back down and it soon became a shouting match.
I was so scared by their raging at the tops of their voices that I ran to our na-na's house next door. She followed me back, hobbling quickly on her bound feet, and shouted at my dia, calling him by his nickname. "Jin Zhi! Jin Zhi, what do you think you are doing? Stop that! You'll bring shame to Li's name." Our na-na adored both her youngest son and daughter-in-law. My parents had enormous respect for her, and in her presence they temporarily stopped their argument. But the bickering continued all week.
That week, even though the house was small and they had to sleep on the same bed, they refused even to look at each other. I could see both of them were miserable, but nobody knew what to do. My dia got up even earlier than usual and left the house without breakfast on those days. The atmosphere was tense and all of us behaved extremely well, with the older boys looking after the younger ones. Our kind-hearted na-na was concerned about us. She came to help out. She tried to be the mediator, but to no avail. "I can't believe I have such a stubborn son and daughter-in-law!" she'd utter to herself. "It's hopeless, it's hopeless!"
During the day, little things would trigger my niang's tears and her eyes became swollen from crying. Life was hard enough for my niang, I thought, but this only added more sadness. I kept asking her what I could do for her, but she would just look at me and shake her head. "If only you could help," she said.
Once she suddenly slumped down to the ground and sobbed, and I rushed to her and hugged her as tightly as I could, and tried to wipe her tears away with my small dirty fingers. She gently brushed my hands away from her face and sat me on her lap. She hugged me, and I felt her warmth seep through my whole body. For a while there were no words spoken, just her sad sighs. I wished that our hug alone would give her enough comfort to get her through the day. "My fate was meant to be unlucky from the day I was born," she said eventually. "I was born poor and will die poorer. My life will be as short as my niang's. Promise me that you'll burn enough incense and money for me when I'm in my grave."
"Niang, stop! Please stop saying that!" I cried, and quickly put my little hand over her mouth. I cried, not only with tears, but also with my heart. I was soaked with sadness. I didn't want my niang to leave me, ever. The thought of losing her made me feel utterly wretched. The only thing I wanted was her happiness. I wished I had magical powers to grant her that happy life. But if my parents couldn't solve their differences, what could I do? I was just a little boy.
But I did think of something. Later that day, I waited at the entrance to our village for my dia's return. I waited until it was pitch black. He'd finished work late and was surprised to see me standing there by myself. Before he could ask me why, I said to him, "Niang is worried about you and she sent me here to wait for you." Of course this was not true, but I wanted him to know that she loved and cared for him. Without a word he lifted me onto the back seat of his bike and pedalled home.
My niang was already waiting anxiously by the gate. She was relieved to see us both. "Thank you for sending Jing Hao to meet me," my dia said.
My niang was surprised. She looked at him, then at me, and suddenly understood what I had done. She lifted me off the bike and hugged me so tight that I felt my bones crack. She burst into tears and laughter. "You little smart devil! You little smart devil!" she kept saying.
My dia was puzzled. "What's all this about?"
"I didn't send him to meet you!" my niang said, laughing her contagious laugh. "Who cares about you? It's all his doing!"
"I thought it was strange that you didn't send one of the older boys," my dia said with a rare smile. "I'm starving, what's for dinner?"
"North-west wind!" my niang joked.
My parents were speaking to each other again, the first time in over a week. The next morning Niang was looking for her hairpins on my dia's side of the bed again.
By 1969, when I was about eight years old, the poverty around Laoshan and our commune had worsened. I remember going with several of my friends to the beach one day, an hour's journey away by foot, to find clams and oysters or, if we were lucky, a dead fish that was washed up on the shore. We each carried our own bamboo basket in our arms and a small spade over our shoulders. My parents always warned us never to go into the water because of the rips.
Many people were already there, also searching, by the time we arrived. After about half an hour, we'd found nothing except empty seashells. The beach was so clean and bare it was as if even the sea creatures had abandoned us.
Halfway home I suggested to my friends that we should make a slight detour and sneak into the nearby airport to try and find some half-burnt coal. During the Second World War the Japanese had built this airport as one of their main cargo facilities. Now there were only a few People's Liberation Army guards and some old cargo planes left. The Japanese used coal and half- burnt coal as part of the filler under the runway, and the outer part of the runway had already been dug away by desperate people. Since then the guards had tightened security.
I had only been there once before, with one of my older brothers. There was a line of big trees along the edge of the airport and a small ditch for water drainage. The ditch was dry at that time of the year and we crept along it for about fifteen minutes, bending our bodies down into the ditch so the guards couldn't see us.
There was still evidence of half-burnt coal there, about half a yard below the surface, and very hard to loosen. But digging half-burnt coal was like digging gold for us. We had no sense of time and we eventually had our baskets full. Carrying heavy baskets with a bent body, though, proved too difficult for us eight-year-olds. About halfway out, one of the boys slowly straightened up and was spotted by the military guards. They immediately fired bullets into the air and started to chase us. We were scared witless. We dumped our baskets and spades, and ran for our lives.
I rushed breathlessly home. It was half past one in the afternoon. "There is some food in the wok for you," my fifth brother Cunfar said. Niang had left some dried yams and pickled turnips for me.
"Where is Niang?" I asked him as I ate my lunch.
"She went back to work in the fields," he replied. Cunfar only had morning classes at school that day. There weren't enough classrooms for everyone to go for a full day.
"Where have you been?" he asked me.
I told him what had happened at the airport. He frowned. "You dropped your basket and spade there?"
"Yes, I had no choice! The soldiers would have killed us if they'd caught us!"
"No, they wouldn't," he replied.
"Yes, they would! They even fired bullets at us!"
"You have to go back and get your basket and spade. We cannot buy new ones-our parents have no money," he said.
"I'll never go anywhere near that airport again!" But he did eventually talk me into going back. At the edge of the ditch I refused to go any further and pointed to where we'd dropped our baskets and spades. He went to look, but the guards had confiscated them. Only some half-burnt coals were left scattered around the ditch.
Our winters in those days were bitterly cold in Qingdao, but as well as having to cope with the lack of coal, we also had to deal with lice. They lived with us in our cotton quilts, coats and pants. Unlike our summer clothes, which our niang washed regularly, our quilted winter coats and pants couldn't be washed because they were painstakingly made with loose cottonwool pieces that would have shrivelled into balls in the water. The only proper way to wash our winter clothes was to take them apart and restart the whole messy, tiring, time-consuming process of making them all over again. Our niang would spread the cottonwool on our kang and the fibres would fly everywhere, like white dust. She'd have white fibres all over her black hair and clothes. She'd look like a white cotton ball herself. But once they were made, our winter clothes would last the entire season.
The only real way to combat lice was to keep clean. Every weekend our niang would heat up huge woks of water for us and tip the water into an old wooden washing-basin. Each of us had a piece of thin washing-cloth, and we'd soap our bodies and help to wash each other's backs. If one family member had lice, the rest of the family would too: they bred and multiplied so quickly. It wasn't just our family-lice were everywhere in China. Everyone scratched constantly. In the evenings after we took off our clothes and got under the quilts, our niang always flipped our clothes inside out, trying to kill the lice with her thumbnails. By the end of the evening her thumbnails would be covered in blood. She was such an expert at killing those little bloodsuckers: she had the most incredible eyesight, despite the dim light. We had a single twenty-watt bulb hanging down from the ceiling in each room (electricity had come to our village the year before I was born). Generally, the commune would cut off power at eight every night. Then Niang would light a small kerosene lamp and patiendy continue her work. But she could never get rid of the lice completely because they lived inside the seams of the fabric. They only came out to suck our blood during the day when we wore our clothes.
I have so many vivid childhood memories like these, but I do not ever remember going to a doctor or hospital as a child: not that I didn't get sick, but we could never afford it. The only time I got close to a medical person was waiting in line for a barefoot nurse to give us smallpox shots. We had to wait in long lines in our commune square with our sleeves rolled up. The nurse used the same needle to inject everybody, and small pieces of alcohol- soaked cottonwool to clean the needle heads and skin. Mothers held screaming babies in their arms, but children aged five or over were expected to be brave enough to go up the line by themselves. Crying wasn't an option, no matter how much it scared us or how much it hurt. When I cut myself I was told by my parents to swipe my fingers on the windowsill to gather some dust to put on the cut and stop the bleeding. This was our Band-aid and antiseptic all in one.
Our niang's remedy for severe coughs, however, involved a snakeskin collected in the fields during autumn when snakes shed their skin. She would wrap the snakeskin around a piece of green onion and make me eat it in front of her. All of it. The snakeskin was like tasteless plastic and it looked disgusting. It always made me want to vomit, but it was the most effective treatment for sore throats and coughs we had.
One day my face and neck swelled up for several days because of infected glands. Niang took me to a neighbour and he brought out a calligraphy set. He ground the black ink stick in an ink plate and mixed in some water. He dipped in his paintbrush. I thought he was going to write a secret recipe to cure my infection, but instead he asked me to close my eyes and he started to draw on my face. As he drew, he uttered some strange words to the god of healing. I didn't understand the words, but I enjoyed the cool sensation of the ink on my skin. I felt as though someone other than my niang was pampering me for the first time in my life. Eventually my entire face and neck were black. I looked scary, comical-like an evil Beijing Opera character.
I had to keep the ink on my face and neck for two whole days. I refused to go outside. My brothers just kept laughing at me. Luckily I hadn't started going to school yet, so I didn't have to face teachers and classmates as well. My swelling disappeared within two days, but still I wonder if the swelling would have gone away anyway, without the embarrassing made-up face.
Another childhood ordeal for us was warts, which we called "monkeys". An elderly man in our village, who we called the "Wuho man", told my niang that the best way to eradicate monkeys was to wet them on the grain grinder on the day of rain. The Wuho man was in his late seventies. He was a funny old man with a good sense of humour. He had poor eyesight, rotten teeth and a long silver beard. He always had a palm-leaf fan in his hand and smoked an ancient pipe. His walk was rather stylish, with his hands folded behind his back, and he coughed and spat a lot.
He told our niang that for this treatment to work we had to keep our mouths shut on the way to and from the grinder.
So, just after rain one day, my niang said to me, "Take Jing Tring to the grinder and wet your monkeys with the water from it."
"But you promised me that I could play with Sien Yu after the rain stopped!" I replied. I didn't want to go. I thought it would be a waste of time. And I hated always having to look after Jing Tring.
"You can't go and play with Sien Yu unless you take Jing Tring to the grinder first," she threatened.
I so eagerly wanted to play with my friend that reluctantly I agreed.
Before we left for our five-minute walk to the grain grinder, our niang reminded us, "Remember, don't talk to anyone! This treatment won't work if you utter a single word on the way there and back."
I was very annoyed. I felt it would be an easy task for me not to speak but it would be hard for Jing Tring. He was still so little. "I'll kill you if you open your mouth, do you understand?" I said to him just before we stepped out our gate. He just nodded. I took his hand and embarked on this special mission.
The first couple of minutes we managed to keep our mouths shut because we didn't meet anyone. But once we'd gone about halfway, we saw Sien Yu's mother coming towards us. "Ni hao, liu su. Ni hao, qi su," she said politely, acknowledging us as sixth and seventh uncles. "Sien Yu is waiting for you at home. Are you on your way there?" she asked.
"Ni hao, zhi xi fu." I returned her acknowledgement, greeting her as my nephew's wife. "I'll be coming soon!"
I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe I was the stupid one, not Jing Tring. We had to go back and start our journey all over again.
Jing Tring was very unhappy and didn't want to cooperate. He kept saying, "I'm tired! I'm tired! I'm too tired to walk!"
"If you don't go," I threatened him, "your monkeys will spread all over your arms, your body, your face and maybe even in your eyes!"
"I don't want to go again! I can't!" he said.
I was desperate by this time. I didn't want to miss out on playing with Sien Yu. "Tell you what, I'll take you with me to Sien Yu's house if you finish this task with me." Jing Tring always wanted to do exactly what I did.
"You promise?" he asked excitedly.
"Yes, I promise," I replied.
"You dare to spit on it?" he asked again.
Annoyed, I spat on the ground and stamped my foot on it so that if the promise wasn't kept it would bring me unthinkable bad luck.
We went back home and started our journey again. Just as I thought things were going smoothly, we saw Sien Yu coming towards us, excitedly shouting, "What's taken you so long? I was on my way to your house to get you."
Just as I put my finger to my mouth to tell him to keep quiet, Jing Tring shouted happily, "My sixth brother promised me that I can play with you after our secret mission!" We had failed on our second try, and the old Wuho man had said that we were only allowed to try this journey three times in a single day. It was just like Jing Tring to ruin everything, I thought.
This time my little brother adamantly refused to walk. Even my promise of taking him to Sien Yu's house didn't work. "I want to stay home, I want to stay home!" he screamed.
"You children, the only thing you know how to do well is eat!" our niang said to us when we arrived back home for the second time. "Don't tell me you can't even keep your mouths shut for a few minutes."
This time, out of desperation, I carried my little brother on my back. "Shut your eyes. Close your mouth. If I hear a single sound from you, I will throw you into the well and you can spend the rest of your life with the frogs!" That scared him so much that he did as he was told. This time we completed our task, and a month later our warts had completely disappeared.
Despite our hardships, however, there were occasional joys too in our childhood. The one time of the year that we all looked forward to, the one time when we would be guaranteed wonderful food, was the Chinese New Year.
Our niang had to make and steam many bread rolls for the Chinese New Year, as gifts for our relatives. She made them in the shape offish and peaches, representing peace and prosperity, and gold bars representing wealth. Making the bread was time-consuming. The bread rolls would split if the dough had not been kneaded perfectly. She would be too embarrassed to take the split ones to our relatives, so we would keep those for ourselves. I always wished for more split ones, but she was such a perfectionist there would be very few of those and she rarely had sufficient flour to make enough bread for the gifts, let alone for us. During the holiday season we often had corn bread, second best to wheat bread, and it was such a treat.
Before dark on New Year's Eve, my dia and my fourth uncle would take me and my brothers to my ancestors' graveyard. We took bottles of water, representing food and wine, and stacks of yellowish rice paper stamped with the shape of old gold coins, which symbolised spending money. We took many bunches of incense, representing gold bars, and carried paper lanterns. All the children had pockets full of firecrackers. We spread the rice papers and stuck the incense on top of each grave. After we lit the paper money and the incense, we would kneel in front of each tomb and kowtow three times, calling out each ancestors' name, following a strict order, starting with the eldest of us and ending with the youngest.
"Dia, how can the dead people hear us if they are dead?" I asked.
"They know," he replied with his usual brevity.
Just before we left the graveyard to go home for our special dinner, we asked each of our ancestors to follow us home for the New Year's holiday. Our dia and our fourth uncle poured the bottles of water in front of each grave. On the way home we made sure our lanterns were brightly lit, so our ancestors' spirits could see clearly the road ahead. The children lit the firecrackers to wake the ancestors up. "Xing gan wo men hui jia. Lu bu ping. Man man zou." Our dia and our uncle would ask our ancestors to walk slowly and not trip on the uneven road. They talked to our ancestors as though they were still alive. My brothers and I thought this was funny but we had to take this occasion very seriously. Our ancestors' spirits lived on, like gods in a better world, because they had been kind people before they died. They had the power to help us, influence our well-being and our fate.
The meal that night was Niang's favourite to cook, because this was the only time she had enough good ingredients. She had saved all year long for this. Cold dishes came first: marinated jellyfish with soy sauce and a touch of sesame oil; seaweed jelly with smashed up garlic and soy sauce; marinated salty peanuts and pig-trotter jelly. Then hot dishes: fried whole flounder, and we always pushed the head to our dia's side of the plate. It was the most precious part of the fish to have. But our dia didn't touch it until our niang came to sit down, and then he would push it to her side of the plate. Then there was a steaming egg dish with green chives and rice noodles. There would have been at least ten eggs in it! It was so delicious that it just melted in my mouth. There were several vegetable dishes too and they all had small pieces of meat in them. The aroma of all this delicious food, mixed with the Chinese rice amp; wine, the incense and the pipe smoke, was unforgettable. It was so distinctively the Li family smell. And it only occurred once a year, on that special Chinese New Year's Eve.
I always volunteered to help Niang push the windbox on those nights. I dearly wanted to stay on the kang to feast on her delicious food with the rest of the family, but even more I wanted to be with my niang on this special night. I didn't want her to be cooking alone. She would bubble with happiness while she cooked. "Da kai huo tao. Rang ta tiao wu." Let the flame dance now, she would say. Or, "Rang huo tao man xia lai." Slow down the fire, let it simmer. Even pushing the windbox was fun.
That night we would use black coal, not half-burnt coal, and the flame would flare immediately with each push and pull of the windbox. I often wondered if the god of fire, if there was one, was happy that particular night. I wished he would be happy all the time.
Everything was special and magical that night. Each dish tasted better than the previous one served. Everyone chatted enthusiastically, but the one who talked the most that night was our dia. Happiness filled up everyone's hearts. We would forget hardship. We felt privileged. There were always too many dishes to fit on the wooden tray and many would end up on the kang. I wondered why we didn't spread these delicious dishes throughout the year. How much could we eat in one night?
The meal always ended with steaming pork-and-cabbage dumplings, all handmade by our niang. They looked precious and smelt exquisite! I always saved plenty of room for them. They truly were a labour of love. Our niang would put a one-fen coin into a dumpling and whoever found it was destined to have luck throughout the year. One year nobody found that fen, even though our niang swore she'd put it in. Did someone eat it without even noticing? we asked. Nobody was surprised. We swallowed those dumplings as if we were wolves.
The very first bowl of dumplings to be served was lucky food, for the gods of the kitchen, of harvest, prosperity, long life and happiness. The second bowl of dumplings was for our ancestors. Before our niang placed each bowl of dumplings at the centre of the table, with incense on either side, she would pour some broth onto the ground in four directions. "Gods, my kind gods," she would murmur, "please eat our humble food. We are blessed by your generosity." The square table was always placed in the middle of the room, against the northern wall. Before Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution we would have displayed a family tree and a picture of the god of fortune too, on the wall just above the table. But this was an old tradition now, a threat to communist beliefs. Any family doing this would be regarded as counter-revolutionary and there were heavy penalties, including jail.
Nobody was to touch those dumplings my niang left at the centre of the table, but they always mysteriously disappeared overnight. "The gods and our ancestors have eaten them," our niang would say. I thought this was incredible, and believed her wholeheartedly.
After the meal we would go from house to house to pay our respects and wish everyone a happy and prosperous New Year. Every gate in the village was wide open. Nobody was supposed to sleep. We would play tricks on our friends if we caught any of them sleeping. Once we tied a firecracker to a friend's ankles and when he moved his legs in his sleep the firecracker went off and gave him a dreadful fright.
After midnight, firecrackers could be heard everywhere and would last throughout the night. Thousands of small red-and-white pieces of firecracker paper splattered around the streets. Many of the firecrackers we made ourselves. My favourite was the "double kicker". It was as long as an adult's finger, and once we lit it the first explosion happened in our hand and it would shoot off for about ten or fifteen yards, when the second explosion would go off.
On New Year's Day we would sleep until midmorning. Everyone was exhausted, but nobody cared. The holiday spirit lived on.
On alternate years, we went to one of our aunties' houses on New Year's Day. I loved my aunts, but my youngest auntie's house had more action, and the meals in her house would sometimes last for three or four hours. She was a beautiful lady and a good cook, with three girls and a boy, and a husband who would sing and tell us stories. He was one of the best furniture painters in Qingdao. Often he would tell us about the knowledge and tradition behind painting a piece of wood. He was very funny. He loved drinking rice wine and once he'd had one small glass his voice would rise an octave and he would begin to sing tunes from some of the old Beijing Operas. He also had many photos of himself taken in different cities around China. I loved looking at them. It was unusual for a person to travel so much in China then. Most people never left the city they were born in, but because of my uncle's painting skills he was invited to attend painting seminars throughout China. I was fascinated by these beautiful photos, by the places he'd been to. We only had a few photos in our house, and I asked my parents why. "You will lose a layer of skin with each photo taken," our dia replied, "and you only have so many layers of skin to lose before you die."
"Then why did my uncle have so many pictures taken? He is still alive and well," I asked.
"Just wait," our dia would say ominously.
Our niang always sighed upon hearing our dia's explanation. She knew we were simply too poor to afford them.
The second day of the New Year was the day we farewelled our ancestors. We would light lanterns and incense and show our ancestors the way back to their graves. We would shower them with more symbolic food, drink and money, and wish them a year of good fortune and peace.
On the third day of the New Year, married daughters would visit their families. Our niang would take two or three sons with her, dressed up in our best clothes, and she would make a huge fuss about how we should behave. She took two basketfuls of bread rolls for her father and eldest brother. This was an important day for her. It was as though she had to show her family how well she'd done being married to the Li family.
We left our house before half past seven in the morning to catch the eight o'clock bus to the city. The rickety old bus was always crowded with people squeezed tightly in. We often sat on each other's laps for the one-hour trip because the elderly always had first preference for seats, and the old bus clucked and chuckled along so slowly that it seemed as if the wheels would fall off or the engine would stop any minute. The bus door had to be pulled hard to open and shut it. At each stop, people pushed their way on or off, but many people couldn't get on at all because there was no room and many missed their stops altogether. One time we all had to walk because the bus really did break down halfway there. When the next bus arrived an hour later, it was as full as the bus we'd just been on.
After our niang's mother passed away, her father married a country girl the same age as our niang and moved his family to Qingdao City. Better times had come for him. He was a carpenter. The city people could afford to pay more than the country peasants for his carpentry work.
My grandfather's place was on the top floor of a very old three- storey concrete building that looked as though it would crumble any time. The stairs were badly chipped, and it probably hadn't been painted since the day it was built. His apartment had two small rooms. My grandparents' room was the slightly larger room, and our niang's stepbrother and stepsister slept in another room on a tiny double bed made by my grandfather. There was no storage space. Clothes and other things had to go under their beds or hang from the ceiling or be kept under a piece of plastic outside.
About twenty families on their floor shared one bathroom for men and one for women. Both bathrooms had two toilets-concrete holes in the ground-and they always smelt dreadfully, even from my grandparents' apartment and theirs was the furthest away! I couldn't imagine how much worse the smell would be in summer. We only visited during the Chinese New Year when the weather was cold. One of the toilet holes at least, sometimes both, was blocked and occasionally all the overflowing shitty stuff even froze to the steps. I would always find an excuse to disappear onto the streets when I was desperate for a wee.
But the toilet smell wasn't the only smell we had to contend with at their place. My grandparents both chain-smoked pipes and their two tiny rooms were constandy filled with smoke. Luckily we never stayed inside long. In fact we always made sure we didn't by making lots of noise while the adults were talking. Sometimes our grandfather would tell our niang to control her "undisciplined brats". But we never really got into trouble. Niang was just as relieved as we were to leave that stinking, miserable place.
Our second stop on that trip was at our niang's eldest brother's house, Big Uncle's. He was three years younger than her and they were very close. Big Uncle was the most educated man in our niang's family. He was politically astute, and the head of the propaganda department for the Building Materials Bureau in Qingdao. He had a son and two daughters. Their living standard was much higher than ours: we considered their three-room apartment very luxurious.
Big Uncle loved card games and also enjoyed playing a word guessing game between the adults. The loser had to keep drinking rice wine, and the more they drank the more likely they were to lose. All the children would form a circle, cheering the adult they wanted to succeed.
"I won! Drink! Drink!" Big Uncle would declare.
"Shui shuo ni ying le? Zailai, zailai!" The opponent wouldn't agree with Big Uncle's declaration, and they would get into heated arguments. Often they were shouting so loud the women had to ask them to quieten down. Afterwards I would ask Big Uncle what story each word represented, and sometimes he would tell me a famous fable. He was an animated storyteller, humorous and witty. I thought maybe that was why he was head of the propaganda department.
The fifteenth day of the New Year was always dreaded. It marked the end of the Chinese New Year and the beginning of our harsh life once again. We were told this night was traditionally enjoyed by the emperor's family as the "Night of Lights". Beijing and other big cities would display magical lights and set off many fireworks. But the best we could do was to make torches from can-dlewax. We would walk around the house and shine the torches into every corner to keep the evil spirits away. Our fourth uncle always took huge pleasure in making the torches for us. We gathered wooden sticks and he would wrap pieces of white cotton tightly around the tip and dip them into a big pot of melted candlewax. Sometimes he even let us do some dipping if we behaved ourselves. I loved watching the wax harden on the tip of the sticks, and even more I enjoyed running and twisting the torch around, making different shapes in the dark. My favourite shape to make was a dragon, and I pretended my torch was a magical Kung Fu weapon as I twirled it around.
Our parents always warned us to keep the torches away from the piles of dried grass or hay which were used to ignite the coal and which every family stored in their front yard. Once I remember a neighbour's house nearly caught fire because a five- year-old boy hid in their haystack with a lit incense in his hand. The boy barely escaped from the burning haystack alive.
Chinese New Year was our dia's only holiday. Since the weather was normally very cold and the fields frozen at that time of the year, there was not much work to do on our little piece of land. Our main outdoor activity during these days was kite flying. I often sat myself apart from the other kite-flying boys. For them this was just another game, but for me this time was special. My kite wasn't ordinary. It was my messenger to the gods, my secret communication channel.
Our dia was an expert kite-maker. He made very simply shaped kites: a square, a six-pointed star and a butterfly. He used an ancient Chinese cutting knife, the size of a Swiss army knife, to thinly slice the bamboo sticks. Then he'd tie the corners with thread and glue rice paper over the frame. To counter the weight we would hang long strips of cloth on the tail. The kite string was pieced together from anything we could find.
I adored making kites with our dia. This was one of the few playful times I could have with him. He would take us up to the fields on the Northern Hill and he'd sit next to me and tell me stories from his childhood. I never wanted these special moments to end.
At this time of the year there was always thick snow in the fields. The freezing, howling wind felt like small sharp knives cutting into my skin. The fields smelt, as always, of human manure. My dia would help my kite into the sky, then stand up, ready to leave. "Are you all right now? I'm going home. I've got work to do."
"Dia, can you tell me a story before you go?"
"I've told you all the stories I have."
"Please tell me `The Frog in the Well` story again," I begged. He sat next to me, put his arm around my shoulder, and began:
There was a frog that lived in a small, deep well. He knew nothing but the world he lived in. His well and the sky he could see above it were his entire universe. One day he met a frog who lived in the world above. "Why don't you come down and play with me? It's fun down here," the frog in the deep well asked. "What's down there?" the frog above asked. "We have everything down here. You name it. The streams, the undercurrent, the stars, the occasional moon, and we even get flying objects coming down from the sky sometimes," the frog in the well answered. The frog on the land sighed. "My friend, you live in a confined world. You haven't seen what's out here in the bigger world." The frog below was very annoyed. "Don't you tell me that you have a bigger world than ours! My world is big. We see and experience everything the world has to offer," the well frog said. "No, my friend. You can only see the world above you through the size of the well. The world up here is enormous. I wish I could show you how big it is," the frog above replied. The frog in the well was angry now. "I don't believe you! You are telling me lies! I'm going to ask my dia." He told his dia about his conversation with the frog on the land. "My son," he said with a saddened heart, "your friend is right. I heard there is a much bigger world up there, with many more stars than we can see from here." "Why didn't you tell me about it earlier?" the little frog asked. "What's the use? Your destiny is down here in the well. There is no way you can get out of here," the father frog replied. The little frog said, "I can, I can get out of here. Let me show you!" He jumped and hopped, but the well was too deep and the land was too far above. "No use, my son. I've tried all my life and so did your forefathers. Forget the world above. Be satisfied with what you have, or it will cause you such misery in life." "I want to get out, I want to see the big world above!" the little frog cried determinedly. "No, my son. Accept fate. Learn to live with what is given," his dia replied. So the poor little frog spent his life trying to escape the dark, cold well. But he couldn't. The big world above remained only a dream.
"Dia, are we in a well?" I asked.
He thought for a while. "Depends on how you look at it. If you look at where we are from heaven above, yes, we're in a well. If you look at us from below, we're not in a well. Will you call where we are heaven? No, definitely not," he replied.
I thought about that poor frog in the well many times. I felt sad and frustrated. We were all trapped in a well too, and there was no way out.
So I would use my kite to send messages to the gods. I found refuge from the freezing wind in a ditch and I carried a pocketful of small paper strips. I wet both ends of the paper with my tongue and looped it around the string of the kite. The strong wind pushed my paper loop up towards the kite.
The wish I sent up with my first paper loop was for my niang's happiness and long life. I told the gods that she was the kindest, most hardworking niang, but she was so poor and deserved better. I challenged the gods and said that if they really existed and were as powerful as people were telling me they were, then they should change my niang's situation and grant her a happy life. Suddenly I would get angry with the gods for not being fair to my niang. Then I would become frightened, and beg them for forgiveness. After that, I would send a second wish, for my dia's good health.
But my last wish was my most important of all. I looped a third piece of paper around the kite string, and wished to get out of the deep, dark well. I confessed to the gods all my inner feelings. I made my secret wish. I daydreamed about all the beautiful things in life that were not mine. I begged them for more food for my family. I begged the gods to get me out of the well so I could help my family. My imagination travelled far beyond the far-away kite into my own special land.
My messages to the gods often got stuck at the knots in the string along the way. I had to shake and jerk the string to get my messages past the knots. Sometimes I would have many messages stuck at different knots on the kite string, and often I was the last one to leave the freezing-cold fields on the Northern Hill. But the cold always gave in to my imagination. It was my imagination that kept my heart warm and my hopes alive.
My brothers and I were like all other boys, fighting at times and getting on each other's nerves. But the bond between us was strong: we were expected to love and care for each other, to be happy for each other's achievements. The older brothers were expected to look after the younger ones and the younger ones to respect the older.
Our dia and his fourth brother grew up very close too, although my dia was nearly eight years younger. My fourth uncle and aunt could not have children, so out of love and compassion my parents agreed to let them adopt their third son. So, before he was two years old, my third brother Cunmao was given to my uncle and auntie a couple of houses away, and we always thought we were cousins.
It wasn't until years later, when he was a teenager, that he found out the truth.
I was feeding our hens that day with what little grain we could spare, when Cunmao stormed into our house. "Where is my seventh niang?" he shouted, which was what he called our niang.
"She is sewing on the kang," I told him. He looked so strangely emotional that I quietly followed him, and listened.
"Why did you give me away? Why not one of the others?" I heard Cunmao demand angrily.
"This was decided even before you were born," our niang replied gently. "You were not singled out. I love you just like my other sons."
"I want to come back!" he said.
There was silence. "No, you can't," our niang said at last, her voice quivering.
"You're my niang and I'm your third son. I want to come back!" I could hear his shaking voice. He was close to tears.
Our niang let out a long sigh. "I beg you to forget that I'm your real mother! Do you think this is easy for me to see you around every day? Go back and love your parents. Be good to them until they die. They love you like their real son. You're luckier than your brothers. At least you have enough food to eat. Just look at how poor we are!"
"I'd rather be starving with you than living apart from you!" Cunmao said.
"What has been done is done. Your parents would be destroyed if I took you back now! I'll always love you as one of my sons whether you're living with us or not. But you must first love them and bear a son's responsibilities towards them. You may then love us too if you desire."
There was silence again. After a brief moment she said, "Come here." And through the window I could see them hug each other, sobbing uncontrollably.
I ran away then, and hid in a cornfield. I couldn't believe my third cousin was really one of my own brothers. My heart felt wretched. My eyes filled with tears, and from that moment on I regarded Cunmao as one of my real brothers. I stayed in that cornfield for the rest of the afternoon.
Cunmao's pursuit of returning to his real family broke my parents' hearts, as well as my uncle's and aunt's. But in the end Cunmao respected my parents' position, and he remained a faithful son to my uncle and aunt. I could not imagine what emotional trauma he went through though, especially as we lived so close.
My eldest brother, Cuncia, we called Big Brother. He was thirteen years older than me. I didn't really know him when I was growing up, because I was only four years old when, in August 1965, he left for Tibet. The central government called for hundreds of thousands of young people to go to Tibet to help advance the government's political agenda: they wanted people like my brother to influence Tibetan culture in the dominant Mandarin way. His journey to Tibet, riding buses, trains and horses, would have taken him more than a week. In his absence, my second brother Cunyuan took on the responsibilities of the eldest son. But Cunyuan wanted to be free and different. He too wanted to go to Tibet, but my parents refused. They needed his salary, and they were desperate for a daughter-in-law to help our niang with the domestic duties. So they arranged his marriage to a girl from our first auntie's village. Our aunt told our parents that this girl was hardworking and could cook, and would be a perfect match for Cunyuan. And now, under Chairman Mao, they could even meet each other before their wedding day to "talk about love".
But Cunyuan was in love with a classmate instead. Her father was a county official. When she found out about the arranged marriage she immediately came to our house. "Uncle, Aunt," she said to my parents, "I've known Cunyuan for nearly four years now. I love him and he loves me too! I beg you not to force him into marrying someone he doesn't love."
"Young girl," my niang replied, "you're too young to understand what love is or what is required. You don't understand him. He is not worthy of you. There is no future working in the commune."
"Aunt, I do know what love is! I will follow him to the end of the earth. I'm willing to eat only grass for food as long as I can be with him."
"You don't know our son's temperament. You wouldn't suit each other," my dia replied.
"Please give us a chance! I know we'll make each other happy."
"You come from a different background to Cunyuan's," my dia added. "You won't like our poor commune life."
"Yes, I will! I'll get used to it. I promise you I'll be a faithful wife and a good daughter-in-law!"
But my parents felt strongly that this girl came from a family that was too good for us. Cunyuan needed someone who was sturdier, to rein him in. "You're a beautiful girl and you will find a nice husband in the city one day. That's where you belong. We hope you will understand our decision and leave our son alone," my niang said.
By this point the girl was in tears. "Is there any chance for me to marry Cunyuan?" she asked weakly.
"No. He is engaged to someone else," my dia said.
The girl covered her face with a handkerchief and flew out of our house. I can recall it vividly: I'd felt my heart throbbing. I'd wished my parents had given in. I never saw that girl again.
Cunyuan had many emotional fights with my parents over this girl. He resented our parents for arranging his marriage and his relationship with my parents suffered terribly.
I remember my fourth brother Cunsang could carry heavy grain sacks on his shoulder and could balance and push a heavily loaded cart with ease. He wasn't the cleverest among us, but our niang always had a tender spot for him. She often blamed the accident he'd had as a baby, when the chairs crashed down on his head, for his poor school results. I loved my fourth brother: he was kind, honest and loving. He always smiled, and he was the only older brother of mine who didn't mind me sitting beside him while he played his card games.
It was my fifth brother Cunfar who was the closest to me, however. We were two and a half years apart-and we fought over everything. I was notorious in the family for loving food, and if any food was missing they would always blame me first. Cunfar seized upon this and sometimes nicked food and blamed me for it. But I loved him. He was my protector against the bullies, my partner in games and my rival in races.
Cunfar always won our wrestling matches because he was stronger than me. No matter how hard I tried I'd still lose. But I was a faster runner. I'd make him mad by running away from him, calling him Cunfar instead of the more respectable "Wuga" or Fifth Brother which I was meant to use. He'd stop chasing me because he had asthma, and by the time he caught his breath I would be miles away. Then I'd make him even angrier by copying his coughs and his strange running style. He'd pick up stones to throw at me and swear to kill me ten times over if he ever caught me. "You'll have a silver beard all the way to the floor by the time you catch me!" I'd call back.
Cunfar would often have severe coughs and asthma when we were growing up. My parents tried everything to cure him. Once we had to find a young rooster and feed it a mixture of millet and cooked toad. Twenty-four hours later my niang cooked the rooster and Cunfar had to eat everything, including the bones. I wanted to eat his rooster so badly that I stole some from him. I don't know whether it was the toad or the rooster that worked, but a month later his asthma had gone.
So I grew up with my brothers, playing outside, under the sun, in the rain and even in the freezing winter-a wild street boy. Summer was my favourite time because I could play and run in the village and the countryside with nothing much on. Except in winter, I hardly ever wore any shoes for the first nine years of my life.
One day, late in the afternoon, the sun was setting and we were playing hide-and-seek. I was climbing on people's walls and roofs, trying to find a good place to hide. I climbed over our six-foot-high stone wall, over our toilet, trying to get behind the three-foot clay pots where the pigs' food was stored. One of the pots stored fermented millet waste and the other contained wheat shells from the soy sauce factory. But this day my foot slipped on the loose stones of the wall and I lost my balance. I fell headfirst, right into the pot of fermented millet waste. It was thick, gooey stuff and I was only about seven or eight years old and only just about a foot taller than the pot.
Our niang was busy cooking dinner and my fourth brother was her windbox pusher. By chance, Cunsang looked out and noticed the shadow of a pair of feet struggling upside down on the toilet wall. He immediately rushed to the pots and pulled me out. "What are you doing? You could have found a better place to die than the millet waste pot!" he said.
I was gasping for air, covered with the thick, gooey millet waste, seconds away from losing my life.
But nothing would stop our outdoor activities. The streets, the riverbank, the dam and the hilly fields were our playgrounds. We made our own spinning tops with carved wood and played games with marbles. Of course, we often had to help our dia too, working the small piece of land that the commune allocated to us. Sometimes we worked on it in the rain, trying to capture as much rainwater as possible. We used all the buckets and pots we had. In winter though, we didn't have to help our dia on the land, because it was always frozen hard, and the fields were covered with snow. I loved playing in the snow. We built snowmen and had snowball fights, chasing each other wildly around in the thick, thick snow. Often we would fall on the uneven roads or fields. We would roam wild, for hours, in this white world, in the vast open space of the fields, with the snow still falling around us. We would return home covered with snow, sometimes with our clothes torn, our ears, nose, hands and feet bright red from the cold, and our bodies steaming with sweat under our quilted cotton clothes. More washing and mending for our niang.
One game I especially liked was "fighting on the one-legged horse". We'd divide into two groups. Everybody had to hop on one leg and try to knock their opponent off-balance with the other bent knee. If you were knocked down you were out. We usually played it on hills to make it more difficult. Another game we played used an empty can or half of a used corncob as the "object". Every player had a bamboo stick. The middle player had to use his stick to push the object back into a hole, but any player could strike the object and hit it away. Sometimes both the object and the bamboo sticks would be flying frantically at each other and the game would become dangerous. We liked using an empty can as the object much more than the corncob because of the noise the metal made, but we didn't often have that luxury.
One Sunday, in the middle of a summer drought, my brothers and I had just finished helping our dia carry buckets of water to the yam crops. The earth was dry and the ground was cracked. We were sweating and the hot sun burnt our skin, so our dia allowed us to go to the dam near by to cool down. I was the fastest runner and when I got there some of the older boys of the village were already swimming and splashing in the middle of the dam. The water level was low. The other boys were treading water, so it looked like they were standing and, without thinking, I dived in. I had never learnt to swim, and I panicked when I couldn't touch the bottom. Every time I tried to yell for help, I would swallow some water, my head going up and down, up and down. Luckily, one of my cousins was with the group of older boys and he noticed me struggling and quickly swam to me and pulled me out of the water. A minute later I would have drowned.
On another hot day that summer, a popsicle seller rode his bicycle into our village. This was a rare treat! Several of my friends had money to buy popsicles, so I ran to my niang and asked her for three fen.
"I don't have a single fen," she replied.
I knew it was true. She never had any money.
I ran to my grandmother's house. Na-na, our dia's mother, was eighty-four years old by then. We loved our na-na. She often shared treats with us. She had no teeth left, so she could only eat soft food and she often asked us to peel her apples or pears so she could scrape them with a spoon, and she would let us eat the skin and the left-overs. Her eyesight was bad and she was hard of hearing: many times she got us all mixed up, calling us the wrong name. Zhang guan li dai, we called it: putting Zhang's hat on Li. She often complained that things were not as good as in her era. She disliked the chaos and change caused by Mao's Cultural Revolution. She used to save her falling hair, twirl it into a little ball, and exchange it for money or sometimes sewing needles. She just might have a few spare fen, I thought.
"Na-na, would you like a popsicle?" I didn't want to ask her for the three fen too bluntly.
"No, they are too cold for me. I haven't had a popsicle for years," she replied.
"Niang doesn't have three fen for me to buy a popsicle," I said. "My dia has the money. Can you lend me three fen?" I asked, and quickly added, "All my friends have bought popsicles!"
Na-na searched around, but had no change, only a one-yuan note.
"I would be happy to take a yuan if you could spare it. I'll pay you back later! I promise!"
She thought this was very funny, me having the audacity to borrow one whole yuan, and saying I could possibly pay her back. "Ah, one yuan!" She laughed and laughed. I was sure that if she'd had any teeth she would have laughed them off. But she ended up giving me the yuan anyway and I kept my promise. Of course I only used three fen, which I repaid a few days later. I picked up as much scrap metal and gathered as much hair as I could and sold it to the commune scrap-shop for a few fen a time. When I had saved ten fen, I would change them into a note and hide them between different pages of my copy of Chairman Mao's Red Book. After I'd paid Na-na back, I surprised my niang by producing the rest of my savings to buy some bean curd, which she loved. She questioned me at first-she thought I had stolen the money from my dia.
During those summers, some of the nights were unbearably hot. We had no fans in our house, and the breezes were too slight to blow away the swarming mosquitoes. To keep us out of mischief during these hot summer nights, the adults always told us stories. The most popular storyteller was the Wuho man, who had given my niang the cure for our warts. We loved him. He told good Kung Fu stories and countless fascinating fables. When he died a few years later, I went to see his body lying in a simple coffin. It seemed as though his body had shrunk. He had no children, so his coffin was donated by the neighbours and his burial ceremony was simple. I missed him and his enticing stories-they had a profound effect on my life.
One of my favourite activities on those summer days was catching dragonflies. They would rest on the water in the dams and I would sit by the edge and wait for them, a bamboo broom at the ready. I would tiptoe up to them, sweep them with my broom into the water, and then lift them out. Then I would tie the females to a wooden stick and circle the dragonfly aloft, so she would attract male dragonflies. I would pull down the mating pair, slowly, in circles, and catch the male when it was within reach. I caught flies or worms to feed my dragonflies, and I would let them go at night.
I also liked to catch crickets, but only male crickets, which we used in cricket fighting competitions. I loved the sound the crickets made-it was just like music or singing. Night or day I would follow the crickets' singing until I caught one, but we had to take care because we often looked in dangerous areas where there might also be snakes. The crickets were smart little creatures: they concealed their homes well, and would stop their singing long before I got close. A lot of patience was needed.
I was kind to my crickets and tried to provide them with the best food and housing I could. I kept them in glass bottles with rocks, dirt and even grass, along with their water and food, but often my brave cricket fighters would become big and lazy on the good food I fed them. I would reward my top fighter with a female for company. It is not surprising then, that one of my favourite fables the Wuho man used to tell us was about a cricket. We would sit around the Wuho man in a huge circle, mostly with no clothes on because it was so hot, and he would begin, one hand smoothing his long silver beard, his ancient pipe in the other:
Once there was a Chinese emperor who loved cricket fighting. Each year the emperor required the governors in each province to donate their best crickets. To win the emperor's favour, each governor ordered his people to search for the best crickets all over the land. Under a mountain in a small village lived a poor family, with one ten-year-old son. They named him Brave Hero. His father was a courageous hunter and his mother was kind. They loved their boy. He was the sunshine in their eyes. One day the father came home from the mountains with his biggest catch, a beautiful cricket. He named the cricket Brave Hero, after his boy. The father was relieved-he would have been fined heavily if he hadn't found a cricket within twenty-four hours. The young boy was beside himself with this cricket. He begged his father to allow him to look at it. At first his father said no, but the boy kept begging and he eventually relented. Just as the boy opened the bamboo tube in which the cricket was kept, the cricket jumped out and hopped away. Their rooster near by ate the cricket up. The boy's father was in such a rage over the loss of the cricket that he ordered his son to find another cricket or else never return. The poor boy went into the mountains. They found him next day lying on a big rock, almost dead. The father cried his heart out. As he picked up his son's limp body, a small and ugly cricket jumped on the boy's pale face. The father brushed the cricket off and carried the boy home. The parents wept over their dying boy. They placed him in a coffin in the middle of their living room waiting for the last breath to leave him. As they prayed in front of the coffin, they heard the faint sound of a cricket. It was the same ugly cricket that the father had brushed away from the boy's face before. The father was very annoyed and threw it outside. Moments later the governor came to collect the cricket and the father told him that he had none. Just as the angry governor was ordering his guards to burn down the house, they heard a cricket singing from the house. Its sound was strong and loud. They followed the sound to the bamboo tube and found the same little cricket inside. The governor thought the hunter was playing a joke with him when he saw this ugly little cricket and he threw the cricket towards the rooster. Just as the rooster was about to eat the cricket, the cricket jumped onto the rooster's crown and after a brief struggle the rooster dropped dead. The governor was very impressed. He asked the hunter if he had a name for the cricket. The hunter told him that he called it Brave Hero. Brave Hero quickly became the number one fighter in the kingdom. He never lost a fight. He even beat the emperor's fighting roosters. The emperor treasured him. Back in the mountain village, the boy was still breathing. As long as their son breathed the couple would keep him lying in their living room. As the cricket-fighting season drew to a close, the emperor ordered the governor to reward the original finder of the cricket with some gold and silver because the cricket had given him such pleasure. But the parents' sorrow was too deep. Material things could not bring their son back. One day, Brave Hero mysteriously disappeared from his royal cage in the palace. On that same day the boy became alive again. The little cricket was Brave Hero's spirit. He had turned himself into the cricket to save his family.
I loved this tale. I loved the boy's bravery and I wished that I too could turn myself into a cricket and save my family from poverty. What a shame Chairman Mao didn't like cricket fights.
Our childhood in the Li Commune could never be just games and fables of course. It was around this time that the Cultural Revolution reached its most chaotic period, from about the middle of 1966. Jing Tring and I were too young to participate-six, seven, eight years old. But my three eldest brothers did. They would go out in the evenings and return late at night. They would tell me horror stories about the young Red Guards, how they burnt and destroyed anything that had a Western flavour: books, paintings, artwork-anything. They tore down temples and shrines: Mao wanted communism to have no competition from other religions. Communism was to be our only faith. The young Guards would travel to other regions and investigate possible counter-revolutionary suspects. They only had to mention Chairman Mao's name and the Red Guards would not have to pay for a thing. For a brief period, those young Guards nearly bankrupted China and the country teetered on the edge of civil war as different factions of the military supported different government leaders. But back in the New Village, we knew little of that wider picture.
My parents tried their hardest to persuade my brothers to stay home on those evenings. They even threatened to lock them out if they returned too late. But in reality there was nothing they could do-there was an unstoppable political heatwave sweeping through China. Emotions ran high and wild, especially among young people and especially in the major cities.
Then, one day, the well-respected head of our village was accused of being a counter-revolutionary. My brothers and I watched as a group of counter-revolutionaries were paraded through our village, with heavy blackboards around their necks and tall, pointed white paper hats on their heads. Their crimes were written in chalk on the boards around their necks and their names were written on their hats. They had to stand on a temporary platform in the centre of the commune square and confess their crimes to the massive crowd. We went along to watch. The officials and Red Guards handed out propaganda papers. The noise from the crowd was horrendous. One man kept shouting propaganda slogans with a hand-held speaker. People were shouting and jeering. During their confessions the accused had to lower their heads to avoid the objects that were thrown at them. If anyone looked up, he would be regarded as arrogant or too stubborn to change and too deeply influenced by capitalist filth. They could do nothing right: if they spoke softly they were smacked and accused of hiding something, and if they spoke loudly they were kicked and accused of having an "evil landlord-like attitude". Their confessions were often disrupted by the man with the hand- held speaker, who shouted revolutionary slogans such as "Knock down and kill the capitalists!" or "Never allow Chiang Kaishek and the landlords to return!" or "Never forget the cruel life of the old China and always remember the sweet life of the new China!" And of course there were the endless "Long live Chairman Mao! Long, long live Chairman Mao!" slogans. The revolutionaries constantly pulled the counter-revolutionaries' heads back up to humiliate them even more. Often their hats would come off-almost all of them had shaved their heads to avoid their hair being ripped out.
My parents told us that the head of our village was a good man. I was confused. I couldn't understand what crime he could have committed. A few days later, however, the communist revolutionary leader led a big crowd to the head villager's house. Only then did I realise that he'd been missing from the group of accused during the parade and rally.
The door of his house was locked when we got there and the leader banged on it, screaming, "Open the door, open the door! Otherwise your crime will be increased ten-fold!"
Eventually the door opened. His wife stood there, begging mercy for her husband. She told the communist leader that her husband was so sick he couldn't even get off the bed. The leader didn't believe her. He demanded to see him, but when he did he became convinced that the head villager was indeed very sick. A few years later, I remember seeing our head villager sitting by his gate on a little chair. He looked pale and motionless. He'd lost all his hair. Even his eyebrows were gone. I felt desperately sorry for him, but by that time I was one of Mao's young Guards too, and I felt guilty for even thinking that way.
I witnessed many rallies and parades during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards said they were killing the class enemies, which included the landlords, factory owners, successful businessmen, Guomindang Party members and army officers, intellectuals and anyone who might pose a threat to the communist government. But there was one particular rally that still, to this day, makes my heart bleed. It was a huge rally. My friends and I went along as usual. We heard the communist leader read out the sentences for about fifteen landlords, factory owners and counter-revolutionaries. Then they were loaded onto a truck. We could see their pointed white hats, with their names written on them in black ink and with a huge red cross struck through each name. They were taken to a nearby field. Despite the adults' warnings, my friends and I followed as fast as we could. By the time we got there, an excited crowd had formed a semi-circle around the accused. There were so many people that nobody noticed us peeking through the cracks between the crowd's legs.
I saw the men standing against a mud wall. Someone started counting. Two of the men crumbled onto their knees. One started to scream, "I'm innocent, I'm innocent! I didn't do anything wrong! Please let me live!" Another screamed, "I have young children! They'll starve to death without me! Have mercy for my family!" Then I heard someone shouting, "Yi, er, san!" One, two, three… Guns fired. The sound ripped through my heart. I saw blood splatter everywhere. The bodies fell down. I screamed, and ran home as fast as I could.
I wished I had listened to the adults. I wished I'd never witnessed this. It haunted me in many of my dreams.
Chairman Mao's regime not only changed the way we lived: it also changed the way we died. Even the treatment of the dead changed under Mao's rule. Everything changed under Mao.
One day when I was still about eight, I wanted to impress my niang by cooking lunch for the family myself, when she was late coming back from working in the fields. So I placed some of the leftover food on a bamboo steamer and tried to be creative by adding a couple of my niang's precious eggs in a seafood sauce. The fire was hard to make that day, and the room soon filled with smoke. To see if the food was properly cooked, I lifted the big, heavy wok cover. I was so short that I had to stand on a little stool, and the wok cover was engulfed in steam. As I lifted the cover the stool fell from under my feet. Steam from the wok gushed out at my face. I crashed forward onto the scalding edge of the wok, burning my skin, and my niang's six precious newly purchased plates were knocked to the floor, smashed.
I was terrified! I knew it had taken my parents all year to save enough money to buy those plates. And now, there they were, in a thousand pieces on the floor at my feet.
I ran to Na-na's house next door. If we were ever in trouble, we'd go to Na-na's. My parents would never yell at us in front of her. Was I ever in trouble now!
"What's wrong?" she asked when she saw my frightened face.
"I've broken Niang's new plates!" I sobbed.
"How many did you break?" she asked.
"Six."
"How many?!" she shouted. I wasn't sure if she hadn't quite heard me or if she couldn't believe I had broken all six. My niang had proudly shown the plates to Na-na only the day before.
I repeated the number louder, and stuck out my thumb and my little finger on my right hand to indicate the number six.
"Oh! Wo de tian na!" My god! she exclaimed, with an expression of disbelief. "How did you manage to break that many?"
I quickly told her what had happened. Niang would be so upset when she found out.
"Don't worry. I'll take care of it. You can have lunch with me." Na-na looked at me reassuringly. "You broke those plates by trying to help your niang. You're a good boy. You shouldn't be punished for this." Then she murmured to herself, "What a world we're living in now. A mother of seven has to work in the fields! I've never heard of such a thing!"
She had already cooked her lunch and was placing some food on her wooden tray as she spoke. When I saw the amount of food on the tray, I knew she only had enough for herself.
"You go ahead and finish the food," she said. "I'll wait to eat with your niang later."
I hesitated. Na-na's food was provided by my parents and my uncles and aunties. Her food was always better than ours.
"Your niang will be home any minute if you don't hurry. I wouldn't be around when she gets back if I were you!" she said.
I gobbled up her delicious bread roll quickly and ran out. When I returned home late that afternoon I found my niang very upset. I heard her sigh to my dia, "Our niang was trying to help cook our lunch. She accidentally slipped off the stool and broke all our six new plates! She is getting on in age."
"Is she all right?" Dia asked, concerned.
"Yes, miraculously she didn't hurt herself at all," my niang replied.
I was eternally thankful to my na-na for saving my skin. I quietly slipped into her house that evening and whispered in her ear, "Thank you, Na-na!"
"What?!" she shouted.
I was so afraid others might find out the truth if I said it any louder, so I just gave her a big kiss on her bony cheek and went back home.
My na-na's health became progressively worse for the next half year. My fourth brother Cunsang, who always had a special bond with her, began to sleep in the same bed to watch over her. But still she worsened-she couldn't walk, she became unable to eat, lost her bowel control and gradually slipped away from us. She died about a year after I broke the plates.
As was the local custom, her body was laid in a coffin, in her living room, for three days. The smell of incense filled our houses.
"Why does Na-na's body have to stay here for three days?" I asked my third brother Cunmao.
"In case she comes alive again."
"How can a dead person come back to life?"
He told me a story then, which he'd heard from a friend: "A couple were looked after in their old age by their only son and daughter-in-law," he began. "They were not well cared for. Most of the time they were given leftovers to eat."
"Shouldn't they have been kind to their mother and father?" I interrupted.
"Not all people are kind to their elderly as we are in our family," he continued. "One day, a distant relative of the old couple took pity on them and quietly slipped two hard-boiled eggs into their hands. They were so excited that they quickly peeled the shells off and just as they were going to eat them they heard their daughter-in-law coming towards their room. The wife told her husband to hurry up and eat his egg. Fearing their daughter- inlaw would accuse them of stealing the eggs, the old man quickly put the egg in his mouth and swallowed it whole."
"Why didn't he chew it?" I asked Cunmao.
"He didn't have any teeth left," he replied. He knew by that stage I was gripped by his story. "Let's stop here," he said. "It may be too scary for you."
"Please, please! I promise I won't get scared!" I begged.
"Only if you promise me that you won't tell our parents I've told you this story if you can't sleep at night because of it!" he said.
"I promise, I promise with all my heart!" I pounded my fist on my chest.
"You swear?" he asked.
I spat on the ground and stamped on it with my foot.
"All right," he continued. "The old man choked on the egg and instantly stopped breathing."
"Was he dead?" I gasped.
"Of course he was dead!" Cunmao replied. "So they bought him a cheap coffin and had a cheap burial. In the meantime, the old lady didn't want to remain in this world without her husband and begged her son to bury her as well."
"Did they bury her?" I asked.
"No! It's illegal to bury a live person," he replied.
I could tell the best part of the story was still to come.
"The old lady's only treasure was a pearl necklace her husband had given her and she wrapped it around his neck. She begged his soul to find a peaceful resting place and then come back to get her. The old man's son didn't wait for the three-day period. He buried his father on the first night after his death. The word spread wide about the buried treasure around the old man's neck. At midnight, a robber dug up the grave and opened the coffin. He could see the pearls reflected in the moonlight. The robber made sure the old man was truly dead before he took the necklace by punching hard on the old man's chest three times. Just as he reached for the necklace…" Cunmao stopped. "Guess what happened?"
"The old man's son showed up?" I guessed.
"Ha-ha!" Cunmao laughed heartily. "Are you sure you won't be scared?"
"I already promised you, hurry up!" I urged him.
"The old man suddenly opened his eyes wide and said in a loud voice, `What do you think you're doing, young man?` The robber, as if he had seen a ghost, jumped out of the grave and bolted away witless."
I sat there petrified to the spot. This was the last outcome I'd expected. Cunmao opened his eyes big and wide, just like the old man's.
"Why did he become alive again?" I asked, terrified, gasping for air.
"I knew you wouldn't get it!" Cunmao scoffed. "The egg got stuck in the old man's throat and when the robber punched him, the egg was knocked loose so he got his breath back. And that's why we have to leave Na-na's body here for three days in case she comes alive again too."
"Then why didn't anyone punch our na-na three times?"
"Do you think our elders would do it in front of us? Okay, go and play now."
I still had a lot of questions I wanted to ask, but I could see Cunmao had had enough of me. When I asked my second brother Cunyuan about the reason for our na-na's three-day staying, he told me it was just to allow relatives who lived far away to see her before she was buried. But I thought Cunmao's story was much more satisfying.
I was stricken with grief at Na-na's death. At the beginning I didn't mind seeing her pale, motionless face in the coffin, but as time wore on, her face turned strange and very scary. I had nightmares for several nights.
Na-na didn't want to be buried near my grandfather because his first wife was also buried there and she didn't want any fights. She said the first wife always had priority. But she did say to my parents, a few days before her death, "If there is one thing I want you to do for me when I'm dead, it is to bury me properly." She firmly believed that her spirit would live on in a different world. So my dia and uncles asked a good carpenter to make a special coffin, carved with birds, flowers, trees and water. Our youngest aunt's husband painted it, the one who was the furniture painter and had lots of photographs.
It wasn't easy to obtain permission for Na-na's traditional burial however, since this was now considered an old, unhealthy tradition. The government had just started forcing people to cremate the dead. Our elders had to do a lot of lobbying, at different levels of the commune leadership, but none of the leaders wanted to take responsibility. Nobody officially gave us permission to bury our na-na. But nobody said we couldn't either, so she was buried as she had wished. "This shows how important it is to be honest and kind," my dia said to us. "If it wasn't for the Li family's reputation, we couldn't do this." Na-na's burial was to be the last one allowed in our village.
The village leaders let us select the edge of a ditch for Na-na's burial site. It was a water escape channel from the fields. Any place with water was a lucky place. It lay north of our house, halfway up the Northern Hill.
Before she died, Na-na had personally chosen her funeral clothes, shoes and other essential burial items. She'd made her own clothes and shoes so she'd feel comfortable in the other world. After she died, she was washed with a warm cloth to represent "cleansing her of the filth of this world" so she'd have a clean start in the new world. Na-na's own daughters then dressed her in her burial clothes, a dark greenish-blue cotton jacket, and black shoes with flowers stitched on the soles. The man with the best writing in the village was fetched to write Na-na's name on a large piece of white paper, the same shape as the stone nameplate on the graves. Once a person died, his or her spirit would linger, looking for the place where they belonged. This temporary nameplate would show her that this was her place. If we didn't have Na-na's nameplate put up quickly, her soul might wander away and become lost for ever. The man with the good writing also wrote Nana's name and her date of birth and death on a piece of white silk, large enough to drape over the coffin. At least one person would stay by the coffin at all times during those three days, to "keep the beloved company". Any person related to Na-na or our family had to cry loudly as soon as they walked into the room, regardless of their age. The person who was "keeping the beloved company" had to cry as well and as they cried they would call out the visitor's name so Na-na would know who was paying her their respects.
On the first night after Na-na's death, we used sorghum stems and blue rice paper to make some figures of a cow and a horse, and several child-size figures. A painter would then paint some faces onto these, not human faces, but half-human faces. The models represented food and servants for Na-na to use in her new world. Na-na was so poor in our world, I thought to myself, and yet she is meant to die so rich. In reality, when she died, her only possession was a chest of drawers.
As soon as the sun went down on the first day after her death, the entire family formed a procession. Everyone cried loudly all the way to a temporary miniature temple, about ten minutes away from our house. The Red Guards had destroyed all the real temples, so my dia and uncles had to make this one themselves. It was only about a yard or so high-it looked like a toy temple to me, but here the local god would determine if our na-na was worthy of a happy life. If there were a god and he were fair, he would definitely look after my na-na. She was the best na-na in the world. I couldn't imagine anyone kinder.
This procession was repeated again on the second night after sunset, and very early on the third day, the funeral day, just before sunrise. Skilled diggers then went to the burial site to prepare for the coffin.
The funeral itself was expensive. Some families would spend up to a third of their savings on it. Our family hired many people, even though it cost us dearly: coffin carriers, dancers on stilts, musicians, blanket-and-quilt-carriers, even people to carry mirrors, combs, cups, food, drinks and, most importantly, a lot of fake paper money.
On the day of the funeral, the procession began from Na-na's house, with my eldest uncle carrying a big clay pot on his head. At one point he had to drop the pot on the ground. The pot broke into pieces, the signal for everyone to begin crying, one of the only occasions when crying in public was acceptable. Only men were permitted to go to the burial site. The women were left to cry in the house and cook the feast.
The Li funeral entourage was very impressive. Many distant relatives appeared, some we didn't even know existed! The procession moved very slowly behind the coffin, all the way to the gravesite. It seemed to take for ever. I had never heard or seen my dia cry before, and haven't since, but there was more crying to come at the gravesite. We had to kneel in front of Nana's coffin and kowtow three times before she was lowered into her grave. I remember seeing the little window-like holes in the grave to hold her mirror, her cups and other possessions.
The closing of the grave was the worst moment though. My heart throbbed. I tried so hard to drive away that last frightening image of her dead face lying in the coffin. My fourth brother was the worst affected. Cunsang cried for days. He slept on Na-na's old bed for many months afterwards.
We had to wear something white for a whole year after Na-na's death. Our parents wore white shirts, but for us children the only things our niang could afford were white strips of cloth, which were sewn onto our shoes. We often went to visit Na-na's graveyard with our dia and fourth uncle, so she wouldn't be lonely in her new world. Each time, we brought her lots of symbolic money, gold and food. I loved going back to her grave to wish her a happy life, but it always saddened me too.
Within a month of Na-na's death my niang suddenly fell ill with vomiting and a high fever. Despite seeing a few local healers, her sickness persisted and on the second night she had a strange dream: Na-na accused her and my dia of not looking after her. She complained that her house was shabby and that the roof leaked. My niang tried to reason with her. "We looked after you to our best ability while you were alive and gave you a lot of money for your new world. What else can we do?"
"Who told you I'm dead?" my na-na snapped, and turned her back on my niang.
The next morning my niang told one of her sewing friends about her strange dream. "Maybe she needs help," her friend whispered in her ear. "Why don't you do a test to see if I am right?"
"I'll do a test, but why do you have to whisper?"
"There are too many loose spirits! If they overhear our conversation they might play tricks on you!"
After her friend left, my niang took out a pair of chopsticks and a raw egg and placed the chopsticks pointing north on her kang. She lit two sticks of incense, closed her eyes and called out, "Niang, mother of Li Tingfang, if it was you who showed your spirit last night and if you are in need, please show your spirit again now." Then she placed the egg between the chopsticks with the pointed end down. The superstition held that if it was Na- na's spirit calling for help, the egg should stand up on the pointed end all by itself.
My niang opened her eyes and was stunned. The egg was still standing up! Even for a deeply superstitious person like my niang, it seemed a little scary.
For a few moments she didn't know what to do, until the egg fell and started to roll towards her. She grabbed it in her hand, as though it were Na-na's spirit, and immediately kowtowed three times in the direction of Na-na's burial place. "Niang! We will come to see you soon and bring you food and money! Please forgive us for our sins!" she murmured.
When my second brother arrived home from school that day she asked him to take two of his younger brothers to check on Na-na's grave straightaway. Three of us raced each other to the burial site and found a large round hole there, dug by an animal. We were not aware of our niang's dream then, so we simply filled the hole with the loose dirt and told Niang what we'd found. As soon as our dia came home from work, she said to him urgently, "Go to our niang's grave with some food and money, and make sure the hole is properly secured and patched up."
My dia was about to ask what this was all about, but my niang stopped him. "Just go now and I will explain later!"
At first my dia was reluctant to go because all of us were waiting for dinner, but after he saw how serious and determined she was, he went back to the grave, carrying a lantern, a shovel, a bottle of water and some incense and paper money.
Later that night our niang finally told us of her dream and her experiment with the egg. All of us children laughed and thought she was just being superstitious, but our dia was more thoughtful. "One cannot fully believe it and yet one shouldn't disbelieve it." That's what Confucius would have said, I thought. But even so, our niang's fever receded the very next day.
My parents discussed this incident often. So did our niang's group of friends, whose superstitious beliefs gave them hope beyond the harsh reality of daily life.
But one question which bothered my parents for many days after this incident was why Na-na didn't send her message about her leaking grave to my dia instead. Perhaps, my parents considered, Na-na wouldn't have thought he would take this dream too seriously, or perhaps she thought he would have been too tired to even dream. But most importantly, they believed that Na-na wouldn't have had the heart to strike down the main breadwinner of our family with sickness, her youngest and most favourite son.
The death of Na-na was the first time in my life that I had lost someone I loved dearly. Every time I entered or passed her house, tears would stream down my face. I kept hearing her sweet voice. I dreamed about her often. I missed her for many, many years.
The year my na-na died was the year I was supposed to start school. The compulsory age was eight, but there was no room for my group that year, so I didn't start until later.
It was February 1970. I had just turned nine. For my first day at school, my niang dressed me up in my best clothes, a new black cotton, quilted winter jacket and hand-me-down cotton pants with patches on the knees and the bottom, and a hat for winter of cotton and synthetic fur. She also made me a simple schoolbag from dark blue cloth. My dia bought me two notebooks, one with pages full of squares for practising Chinese characters, and another one for maths. He made me a wooden pencil box containing one pencil, a small knife and a round rubber eraser. Of course, one of the most important requirements was Mao's Little Red Book.
"This is a special day for the Li family!" my niang jokingly declared at breakfast.
"Why?" our dia asked.
"The Li family has one more scholar today," she tilted her chin at me. "I hope you'll study hard. We're not sending you to school to play. I hope you'll learn more than your dia and your brothers have learned from school."
"Mmm," our dia said. "It wouldn't be too hard to do better than your dia."
"Listen to your teachers, follow their instructions, be a good student. Don't lose face for the Li family. Make us proud," said my niang.
I felt apprehensive throughout breakfast. School meant the end of my carefree days. It meant that I had to wear clothes and shoes and conform to rules. School would teach me how to read and write, but deep down, like my dia and my brothers, I wondered what use an education would be to a peasant boy who was destined to work in the fields. How would school help my family's food shortages? I didn't need an education to be a good peasant.
The school we were supposed to go to was about a mile from our village, but there wasn't a spare classroom there at first, so our village donated an abandoned, run-down house as a temporary classroom. I knew this house. It was always vacant. I was told that a childless couple had lived there, and had mysteriously disappeared when they went to another province to visit their relatives. Our commune officials made repeated inquiries to the police but all investigations had failed. Rumours spread that the couple were spies and had secretly escaped to Taiwan. We used to throw stones at the house and the older boys told us it was haunted. I always wanted to peek through the window and see what was inside, but I chickened out each time. And now this mysterious house was going to be our temporary school.
So, on this first day, a small group of us, around twelve neighbourhood friends, walked to our school, excitedly chatting about the house and guessing what would be inside. Halfway there, we met some older students. "Here come the new scholars!" one teased. "Aren't they in for a treat?" another remarked, and they all laughed at us.
Forty-five new kids from four villages were enrolled that year. When we arrived at our school, all forty-five of us gathered outside. One teacher introduced the man beside her as our sports teacher and introduced herself as our Chinese and maths teacher. Her name was Song Ciayang.
"Students, this is an important day for you all, a new beginning in your lives! I hope you will treasure this opportunity Chairman Mao gives you. I hope you will study hard, and not let our great leader down. But before we can start our lessons we must clean this place and set up your workbenches." To my disappointment, the contents of the old house had already been cleared out, so we never did discover what had been inside.
Nearly the entire house was made of mud bricks, with German-style roof tiles. There were two small wood-framed windows, but the thin rice paper pasted onto them had long ago been broken by our stone-throwing. The ceiling was low and the room was depressingly dark and damp. It smelled of ancient dust, mildew and animal shit. It was revolting. We spent that entire first morning cleaning the floor, scrubbing the walls, and pasting new rice papers onto the window frames. Teacher Song brought pictures of Chairman Mao and Vice-Chairman Lin Biao, and we pasted them onto the middle of the front wall. Under these we hung a make-do blackboard. There were no chairs or desks so we were asked to bring our own foldable stools which our fathers had made for us. We also had to make workbenches from used wooden boards which were full of splinters.
We didn't learn anything that first morning. We were divided into several small groups and Teacher Song selected two captains. The girl captain was taller than nearly all of us who lived in our area. The boy captain, Yang Ping, lived in the east part of our village. He was considered privileged because his grandfather had been in Mao's Red Army and had died in the civil war. I never played with him because of the strong territorial pride within our village. And besides, my eldest brother had once been kicked by Yang Ping's father from behind during a fight, and even though Yang Ping's grandmother had apologised profusely and had shown kindness towards my brother, I was determined not to make friends with Yang Ping. And anyway, by the time we had selected our own spot and placed our stools next to whoever we wanted to sit with, our first day of school was over.
Next morning we started at eight o'clock. Teacher Song called out our names one by one from her roll-book and we all obediently answered, "Ze!" Then she picked out the boys and mixed us in with the girls, which I thought was cruel, because I had chosen a spot at the back with two of my best friends. Now I was sandwiched between two girls I didn't even know.
Teacher Song handed out our textbooks. "Students. Welcome to your first official lesson," she paused. "Do you know who this person is?" She pointed to Mao's picture on the wall.
"Chairman Mao, Chairman Mao!" we all shouted excitedly.
"Yes, our beloved Chairman Mao. Before we start our first class each day, we will bow to Chairman Mao in all sincerity. We should wish him a long long life, because we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him. He is our saviour, our sun, our moon. Without him we'd still be in a dark world of suffering. We will also wish his successor, our second most important leader, our Vice-Chairman Lin Biao, good health, forever good health. Now, let's all get up and bow to Chairman Mao with your heart full of love and appreciation!"
We all stood up, took our hats off, bowed to Mao's picture and shouted, "Long, long live Chairman Mao! Vice-Chairman Lin, good health, forever good health!"
"Before you sit down," Teacher Song continued. "We need to perform one more school rule: I'll say `Good morning, students,` to you and you will say `Good morning, Teacher,` in reply. Now, let's have a practice. Good morning, students!"
"Good morning, Teacher!" we replied in unison.
"Good! Now sit down," she smiled. "Raise your hand if you have Chairman Mao's Red Book."
Most of us raised our hands.
"Those who don't have one, please ask your parents to buy you one from town. I want you to have them tomorrow. This is very important. We should follow Vice-Chairman Lin's example and never go anywhere without Chairman Mao's Red Book. The Red Book will give us guidance in our lives. Without it we will be lost souls."
We placed our Red Books on the left-hand side of our workbenches, as instructed.
"I'll be your teacher for both Chinese and maths," Teacher Song continued. "You will learn how to read and write. Raise your hand if you can already read or write." I looked around. Very few students raised their hands: mostly girls, and I was relieved. I, for one, couldn't recognise a single word in my textbook.
"Good, we have a few smart kids here. Now, please open the first page of your textbook," Teacher Song instructed.
A big coloured picture of Chairman Mao stared out at me, occupying half the page, with shooting stars surrounding his face, as though Mao's round head was the sun. The bottom half of the page had words on it, which just looked like a field of messy grass to me. Whoever invented them must have been a peasant, I thought.
"Can anyone read the words on this page?" the teacher asked. The same girls raised their hands again.
"What does the first line mean?" Teacher Song asked the girl sitting to my right.
"Long, long live Chairman Mao!" replied the girl in a proud voice.
"Good, very good!" Teacher Song paused. She glanced over the class. "Yes, we want to wish Chairman Mao a long long life, because our great leader saved us. I'm sure your parents have told you many stories about the cruel life they lived under Chiang Kaishek's Guomindang regime. They were cold, dark days indeed. That government only cared for the rich. Children like you couldn't even dream of sitting here, but Chairman Mao made it possible for everyone in China to have this privilege. Today, I'll teach you how to write, `Long, long live Chairman Mao, I love Chairman Mao, you love Chairman Mao, we all love Chairman Mao.` I'll now write them on the blackboard. Pay special attention to the sequence of the strokes." She turned to the blackboard and wrote several lines with furious pace.
I was stunned. I didn't get the sequence of strokes at all! I turned to look at one of my friends. He just drew a circle around his neck with his right hand and pulled upwards, his eyes rolling and tongue hanging out, as though he were being hanged.
"Okay, now I want you to repeat each phrase after me." The teacher pointed to the first line of words with her yard-long stick. "Long, long live Chairman Mao," she read.
"Long, long live Chairman Mao!" we repeated.
"I love Chairman Mao!" she read.
"I love Chairman Mao!" we replied.
We repeated the phrases again and again until we had memorised them for life.
The next hour, Teacher Song explained in detail how to write each stroke of the words and the sequence we had to use. I picked up my pencil and realised that I didn't even know how to hold it. I looked to my right and copied the girl next to me, but I pressed too hard and broke the tip. I quickly took out my dia's knife, but as I tried to sharpen the tip, it broke again.
"Here, you can use mine," the girl next to me said.
"No. Thank you," I said, embarrassed. "I'm all right."
"I have three. You can use it for this class and return it to me later," she said in a soft voice.
Three? She must have come from an official's family to have so many pencils!
"What's the matter?" Teacher Song suddenly appeared in front of us.
"He broke his pencil," my desk-mate answered.
"Oh dear, and you haven't written a single stroke yet," she said.
My face swelled up like a red balloon. I reluctantly took the girl's pencil. Under Teacher Song's gaze I carefully placed the tip on the paper and to my horror the strokes popped out of my uncontrollable pencil like popcorn, ugly and messy, in all directions. They looked nothing like what was written on the blackboard.
"I can't do it," I conceded hopelessly.
"Let me help you," Teacher Song said patiently. She placed her hand over mine and we finished "Long, long live Chairman Mao" together.
"Good. Now you know how, repeat these words five more times and you'll be fine," she said, and went to help some others. I quickly looked at my friend behind me. He shook his head in disgust at the words he was supposed to write, and made funny faces. Another friend in front of me kept grunting and kicking his workbench. Others gave him dirty looks. It was as though he was a trapped tiger, but my friends' reactions made me feel better. At least they felt the same as me.
It might have been cold outside, but all through class that day I felt agitated and hot, beside myself with frustration. It felt like I was sitting on thousands of needles. My whole body itched.
I wasn't sure if it was paranoia or lice. All of the students scratched, even our teacher scratched herself occasionally. Itchiness became a permanent feature of our class for the first few years of my schooling. That day I itched so much I couldn't sit still, and before I knew it a huge splinter from the bench stuck right into my thumbnail. Nobody could pull it out and blood gushed everywhere. I cried all the way home with my bloodied hand. My fourth uncle was there, home from his nightshift, and he managed to pull only half of the splinter out with a pair of pliers. The other half was left in there until the nail fell off a few weeks later. My niang smacked a thick layer of dust on the wound and, with throbbing pain, I was sent back to school.
The class was only halfway through the third hour of Chinese when I returned. The rest of the day went by excruciatingly slowly, and we only had a ten-minute break between each hour. Teacher Song's sweet voice went in one ear and out the other. The lessons were far beyond my comprehension. My thoughts were instead out on the streets and in the fields. I felt trapped and bewildered. I couldn't wait for each ten-minute break to arrive.
During the final hour of our lessons that day, as I continued to try and write with my bloodied finger, I heard a bird chirping outside. My heart immediately flew out and joined it.
I was always fascinated with birds when I was a child. I would watch them and daydream. I admired their gracefulness and envied their freedom. I wished for wings so I too could fly out of this harsh life. I wished to speak their language, to ask them what it felt like, flying so high. I wondered which god to ask or indeed if there was such a god who had the power to transform humans into animals. But then I also thought of the constant danger of being shot down by humans or eaten by larger animals. And the birds never seemed to have enough food to eat either, because they were constantly nibbling human faeces. Without food, life as a bird might not be much better than life as a human. And if I became a bird, I would not see my family again. This would surely break my niang's heart. Sometimes I thought I might be able to help them more as a bird, flying high in the air and spotting food for my family. I sat at my desk that day and remembered a tale my dia once told me:
Once upon a time, a hunter shot down a bird, his arrow injuring one of its wings. The hunter could speak the bird's language and when the bird begged him not to kill her, to her surprise, the hunter said, in her own language, "I don't want to kill you, but I have no other food to eat." The bird promised him that she would return his leniency by finding food for him once she could fly again. The bird had only one condition: the hunter had to share any findings with her. The hunter agreed. True to her word, the bird passed on information to the hunter. "There is a dead squirrel up the mountain by the big rock." The hunter was ecstatic. He followed the bird's guidance and found the squirrel. He happily shared it with the bird. The bird went on to provide the hunter with other food and their sharing arrangement continued. But gradually the hunter became greedy and stopped sharing with the bird. The bird wanted revenge. One day the bird told him about a dead mountain goat. The hunter followed the bird's instructions and rushed to the location. From the distance he could see a white object lying on the ground, surrounded by a small group of people. He was worried that those people who had arrived before him would take the goat. He rushed towards the goat. "That's mine, that's mine! I killed him!" But the white object was not a goat. It was a man wearing a white shirt. The hunter was charged with the man's murder and was sentenced to death by a hundred cuts. The hunter told his story about the bird, and appealed to a higher court. The higher court judge didn't believe that this hunter could speak the bird's language, so on the day of his execution, the judge asked the hunter, "What are those two birds saying up in the tree?" The hunter replied, "The birds are angry about their missing children and said, `Judge, judge. There is no animosity between us. Why did you hide our babies?`" The judge found the hunter innocent and released him, for the judge had secretly removed the young birds from the nest, to test the hunter's innocence.
I liked this tale and its moral: that it's important to keep one's promises. I also liked the fact that the little bird had outwitted the powerful hunter.
That day at school I continued to daydream about my birds while others practised their writing. I scribbled mindlessly on my practice pad, my thoughts interrupted only by Teacher Song's voice. "All right, that's enough for today. I want you to practise what you've learned at home. It is called `Homework`. Tomorrow, I expect you to remember what we've done today. Do you understand?"
"Yes!" we replied.
"Good. Now I'm going to teach you a song. You would have heard it before. It is called `I Love Beijing Tiananmen`."
We'd heard this song many times over our village's loudspeakers. So Teacher Song led and we sang:
I love Beijing Tiananmen,
The sun rises above Tiananmen.
Our great leader Chairman Mao,
Lead and guide us forward.
The singing became my favourite part of our day.
On the way home we exchanged our feelings about that first day of school.
"What a boring day!" one of my friends said.
"Boring? It's horrible!" said another.
"I hate sitting next to girls."
"What about the bird?" I asked.
"What bird?"
"Didn't you hear it? On the windowsill during the last hour," I said.
"I was struggling so much trying to write `Long, long live Chairman Mao`, why would I hear a bird?" another friend replied.
We stopped at a sandy bank by the little stream south of our village and were surprised to discover that Yang Ping's group of friends had beaten us there and were playing "horse fight" already. This was one of our favourite games, and I soon joined in with my friends. One person would sit on another's shoulders and opposing groups would try hard to unseat their opponents. Both Yang Ping and I were physically similar and were the "anchor horses" at the bottom. That day we were the last two standing on each team. We fought one another tooth and nail until we dragged each other down in a draw, totally exhausted, muddy and with our clothes torn. Yang Ping and I immediately struck up a good friendship after that, and our after-school gatherings became frequent. My niang cursed me for my irresponsible behaviour though, because my clothes were always either torn or dirty or both. One afternoon, after our usual "horse fight", Yang Ping and I went on wrestling, tripping and pushing each other to the ground. Yang Ping went down hard on one of his arms and broke it. I felt so bad and afraid that his family might make my family pay his hospital costs, so I kept the accident a secret. When my parents did find out, from one of my other friends, they were livid. "Why didn't you tell us?" my niang demanded.
"I was afraid his parents would ask us to pay for his medical bills."
She sighed. "What a silly boy you are! Yes, we are poor! But we can't lose our dignity over this, even if it means we have to borrow money from our relatives." But when my parents offered them our assistance, Yang Ping's family politely refused.
The only real pet I ever had was a bird which I caught myself during that first week of school. In the springtime of each year, groups of beautiful birds would arrive at the small stream south of our house. Sometimes my niang would do her washing there, and my friends and I would splash or skip stones over the surface of the water.
On this particular day, I'd taken an old pot with a lot of holes in the bottom and a piece of my kite string. I tied the string onto a wooden stick, placed the pot on the sandbank by the stream and supported it with the stick on a forty-five degree angle. I left a few dead worms under the pot and hid in a ditch about twenty yards away, holding the other end of the string.
Some birds flew near my pot a few minutes later. One hopped under and began to eat the worms. I pulled the string excitedly, trapping the bird inside. I could not believe how beautiful this bird was. I was convinced it was female because its feathers were too colourful for a male. I named her Beautiful River Treasure. My second brother Cunyuan made me a simple wire cage for her. I didn't want to leave my Beautiful River Treasure. I was obsessed with her. I collected worms for her on the way home from school. I showed her off to my friends. I even promised them a baby bird each, if I could catch a male bird and get her to mate. I thought she was the most beautiful bird in the world. One day she might teach me her language, I thought, or she might learn ours. I imagined her flying above me and landing on my shoulder whenever she wanted to, spotting food, just like the bird in my dia's story.
I told everyone that she was such a happy bird, because she chattered and sang all day and all night. She drove my whole family crazy though. "She isn't singing, she is crying, `Let me out, let me out!`" Cunfar said, acting as though he was the poor bird.
"Don't be silly, she loves me. I'm her saviour. Look at all the food she gets."
But in reality she ate very little. After school one day that week, I rushed home with some worms in my hands and found my Beautiful River Treasure dead in her cage. I sobbed my heart out. I blamed every member of my family for her death. I thought they'd killed her because of her singing. I had lost my first and only pet. My heart was broken. Deep inside I knew I was responsible for her death. Instead of helping her, I had taken her freedom away, and I hated myself for it.
I made a beautiful box as her coffin and took her back to the bank of the stream where I had caught her. I buried her under a large tree where there was good Feng Shui. I knelt in front of her little tomb and apologised for my stupidity and told her that she was the only pet I'd ever owned and loved. I never tried to catch another bird to keep as a pet again.
We spent our first two weeks of school in that stinking temporary classroom until a room became available at the proper school. This consisted of single-storey brick and stone classrooms joined to each other just like commune housing. I knew the local school well because sometimes I had secretly climbed over the walls and played there with some of my friends on Sundays.
But today was different. At eight that morning, the head of the school welcomed us and we were led by Teacher Song to our official classroom. It was a square room with two rice-papered windows on the outside wall, and a window and a door on the inside. There was slightly more natural light here than in the temporary classroom, and the ceiling was high and the air fresh. Pictures of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin were glued on the back wall. On the front wall were large pictures of Chairman Mao and Vice-Chairman Lin Biao, smiling warmly to us from above the blackboard. The blackboard was already filled with the words we were to learn that day. Under the blackboard was a foot-high concrete platform, and we had desks and small benches to sit on. This was luxurious compared to the temporary classroom!
My fourth and fifth brothers were also at the school and this gave me comfort. It was my fourth brother's sixth and final year before he moved to the middle school, and my fifth brother was in his third year.
After the first two weeks of school, I still had no idea what I'd learnt or why I should study. Listening to Teacher Song babbling on just made me sleepy, especially if we had afternoon classes, which went from two until six. The only thing that kept me awake was the thought of playing with my friends during those ten- minute breaks.
After our second class one day, we were told to go out onto the school-ground to have our first fifteen-minute physical education class, with all two hundred and fifty students. The sports teacher stood in front of everyone with a loudspeaker in hand and shouted out the eight exercise routines accompanied by recorded music. They were simple arm and leg stretching exercises which took no more than five minutes. The new students were placed in the last line and we simply followed the older students in front of us.
I found my fourth brother Cunsang as soon as we'd finished. "How is it going?" he asked.
"It's boring! I hate it!" I replied.
"Join the tribe. Why did you think I wanted you to make chaos when my teacher came to our house that time?" He was reminding me of the time we received the broomstick beating from our dia.
"How can you understand the writing? It all looks like grass to me," I said.
He burst into laughter. "That's what I thought the first few weeks. It will get better, I promise."
I didn't believe him. "What's the use of learning words anyway?" I asked.
"I don't know," he replied honestly.
I followed him to my fifth brother's classroom on the opposite side of the school-ground and found Cunfar in the middle of a pile of bodies, wrestling each other onto the ground.
"How was your first lesson, scholar?" he teased breathlessly, as he dusted off the dirt.
"All agony, no fun," I replied.
"The maths is even more fun!" Cunsang gave a wicked smile.
"Can't be worse than Chinese," I said.
"Just wait!" he replied, as the bell rang for the next class.
I had prepared myself for the worst in our maths class, but to my surprise the numbers were more bearable than the grass-like Chinese writing. But even so, numbers represented nothing to me and I still preferred to dream of running wild outside and playing games with my friends.
The journey to and from school was much more interesting than the study itself. Besides stopping at the sandy bank to wrestle and play horse fights, we occasionally detoured to a local butcher shop that only killed pigs. The heart-piercing screams of the pigs were horrible. We would watch as our own pigs, with their legs tied, were carried away to be killed for meat. The pigs always seemed to know what was about to happen to them: they would refuse to eat, even if given better food. I would hear their desperate screams and would press my hands hard against my ears and run away to hide rather than witness this unbearable scene. The thought of our own happy pigs being sliced up by the butcher always made my stomach churn.
I wasn't the best student in my year, but I did earn enough votes among my classmates to become one of the first Little Red Scarf Guards in our class. We wore a triangular red scarf around our necks, and for this honour we had to qualify in Mao's "Three Goods": good study, good work and good health.
I didn't learn much academic stuff at all during my time at school, except the many propaganda phrases and songs, and many of those I didn't even understand. I learnt how to write simplified versions of the Chinese characters and some basic maths equations but I really only lived for the two weekly sports classes. I was good at the sporting stuff. We had rope-hopping, and track-and- field which was mainly running, and by the second half of our second year Teacher Song had selected Yang Ping as the captain of our class and me as the vice-captain.
By this time I was ten years old and the campaign to "Learn Lei Feng" had started in all the local schools. Our textbooks were full of Lei Feng's inspiring stories. He was a humble soldier who did many kind deeds. He helped the disadvantaged and especially the elderly, not for personal glory but because, he wanted to be a faithful and humble soldier of Mao's. Lei Feng's diary showed how devoted he was to Mao's ideals. Extracts from his diary were published and included in our textbooks. Everyone of all ages in China was encouraged to learn from him. Everyone wanted to be a "Living Lei Feng". We learned a song that encouraged us to "pick up the screw by the roadside and give it to the police", to contribute to our great country in any way, from the smallest contribution, such as the little screw, to the great sacrifices of one's life, like Lei Feng himself.
One day a student from our school found a coin on the road and gave it to his teacher. He was instantly praised by the headmaster as a model student. His action was what Lei Feng would have done. From then on, much money was found by students by the roadside and the headmaster's money jar quickly filled up, until one day a parent complained that his child had taken all their savings and given them to her teacher.
For a brief period some students stopped attending school or were late for classes because they said they were helping the elderly and the needy just like Lei Feng. But they were just being lazy, and the teachers soon found out. A moral, a "tonic story", for these students was told in our classes:
One day, Lei Feng was late for his military activity because he was carrying home an elderly lady with bound feet. The head of his army unit criticised him without knowing the real reason behind his tardiness. Lei Feng apologised and wrote in his diary that he should be able to do kind things for the needy as well as carrying out the normal required activities.
After this, the school demanded that all kind deeds should be conducted outside school hours.
I, like many of my classmates, wanted to be a hero like Lei Feng. The things he did deeply moved me. His spirit of "forgetting himself to help others" was my living motto. Some classmates and I often went to veterans' homes to help them sweep their yards or carry water from the wells. We even picked up horse droppings from the street and took them to the fields as fertiliser. We needed to do at least one kind deed each day and write it down in our diaries. I thought maybe someone would read my diary after I'd died and realise I'd done even more kind things than Lei Feng. Then I would be a hero too! But I was only ten years old. I didn't think of it as another propaganda campaign to secure our loyalty to Mao and his communist state.
During those school years of mine, the central government released Mao's newest propaganda campaigns one after another. Our regular classes were constantly disrupted and we were ordered to study Mao's latest magical words by heart. Often our school organised rallies when we would march around the villages playing drums, cymbals and other instruments, carrying gigantic pictures of Chairman Mao and waving red flags. Everyone carried Mao's Red Book, and we marched with pride and honour. I felt so happy to be one of Mao's Little Red Scarf Guards. Once I was chosen to lead the shouting of the political slogans. When we passed our village, I glanced around and saw my niang and my fourth aunt standing in the middle of the crowd. I shouted at the top of my voice then. "Long, long live Chairman Mao!" Other leaders shouted at the same time. Different sections of our class followed different leaders. It was completely chaotic, but we all wanted our mothers to see and hear us.
"Niang, did you hear me?!" I asked her when I came home that day.
"How could I hear you? It was like a zoo out there!" she replied.
One day at school, during lunchtime, some shocking news about Mao's chosen successor came through our village's loudspeakers. Vice-Chairman Lin Biao's plane had been shot down over Mongolia. It was October 1971. Lin Biao had been trying to flee to the Soviet Union when his evil motives were discovered. There was speculation that the plane he was on contained many top-secret documents. The most nerve-racking speculation was that there were factions of the military loyal to Lin Biao who could be attempting a coup to topple Mao's government.
As young boys we were told how close Lin Biao was to Chairman Mao, how devoted and trustworthy he was to Mao's political cause. After all, he had written the foreword in Mao's Red Book. Lin Biao was said to have always had the Red Book in his hand.
When we returned to our school that afternoon, all scheduled classes were suspended. We were summoned to the school-ground. Two speakers were set up by the headmaster's office. With microphone in hand, the headmaster read out a document from the central government. Lin Biao had been planning a major coup for a number of years and Chairman Mao had narrowly escaped several assassination attempts. How fortunate it was that our great leader was safe and that we would still be able to enjoy our sun, our rain and our daily oxygen! We must study harder to strengthen our resolve so we, the next generation of communist young guards, could carry the communist red flag forward.
After this speech, he ordered us back to our classes to study Mao's Red Book for the rest of the afternoon. I, like all my classmates, was truly scared that if Lin Biao had succeeded, we would all live in the dark ages once more. This only made me more determined to be a good young guard of Chairman Mao's. At dinner that night, all of my brothers talked excitedly about Lin Biao's demise. But our parents' reactions were different.
"Who cares about Lin Biao!" our niang said. "All I'm concerned about is food on the table."
"Your niang is right," our dia chipped in. "Who has time to worry about the government? What we need is enough food so we can survive."
Our parents were not alone in taking little notice of Lin Biao's fate. But at school in the following days we had many discussion sessions about the Lin Biao incident. When there was no more information from the central government, the school eventually resumed its normal schedule.
During my second year at school, we learned how to write "We love Chairman Mao' and "Kill, crush Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and the class enemies". I still wondered how useful all this talk about Liu Shaoqi the Chinese president and his right-hand man Deng Xiaoping was meant to be. Sometimes we'd write these things in chalk on the walls of people's houses. Over time, with people scribbling over each other's writing, all the words became muddled. Some of the older boys often wrote rude remarks about people they didn't like, and common family names such as Zhang, Li, Wang and Zhou often got mixed up in the scribble.
One day, an education official from the Qingdao government passed through our village and noticed some of the writing: "Kill, crush, Mao, Zhou and Lai", it read. The official charged into the village office and demanded a thorough investigation. Many people were questioned by the police. And for the first time I could remember, mass hysteria began in our commune.
The next day, in the middle of our maths class, our headmaster and two policemen came in and asked all the students who lived in the New Village to stand up. We didn't know what was happening. The headmaster told us to follow him to his office. The door was shut behind us and we were divided into two groups. The police questioned us, one by one, for a whole morning. To my great surprise, the topic was about the writing on our village wall. I thought it was going to be about something much more important! Did you write on the wall? What did you write? Did you see anyone else write on that wall? Have you seen any strangers in your village lately? Do you know anyone who may dislike Chairman Mao or Premier Zhou? I was so puzzled. I couldn't imagine anyone not loving our great leaders, and anyway, anyone who was a counter- revolutionary would surely have been shot already.
Without any success, the officials eventually let the matter go. But the police appeared in our village quite frequently after that, and none of the children ever dared write anything on the walls again.
It wasn't long after this, on the way home from school, that I found something that was to become my secret treasure. It was a book. Only about forty pages, lying on the street near the garbage tip. I picked it up with the intention of taking it home so our family could use it as toilet paper, but somehow I started to read the first page and couldn't stop. It was a foreign story translated into Chinese. I couldn't understand all the words but I could make out that the story was about a rich steel baron, in some place called Chicago, who fell in love with a young girl. I'd just got to the bit where he used his money to build a new theatre when the pages ran out. How I wished I'd had the rest of the book! It was such delicious reading! Love stories were hard to find. I would have given anything to read the whole thing. But the Red Guards destroyed any books that contained even a hint of romance or Western flavour. You would be jailed if such books were found in your house.
I kept those forty pages for a long time, locking them like a treasure in my personal drawer, never realising the danger I'd put my family in. I read it many times. I pored over the words. I wondered how the people in the story could have such freedom. It sounded too good to be true. But even after hearing years of fearful propaganda about America and the West, the book was enough to plant a seed of curiosity in my heart. I asked some of my brothers if any of them had read such a book and hoped that one of them could tell me the rest of the story. But none of them did. My fifth brother even accused me of making it all up, but still I was not going to divulge my sacred find.
To satisfy our need for stories, some friends and I turned to the opera and ballet storybooks which our older siblings were given at school. We would act out different characters, and especially loved the scenes with guns, swords or fighting. Acting out the dying scene was always a delight! Everyone wanted the hero's role but we had to share that over different days. We play-acted like this even before we started school in the mornings. We couldn't read many of the words in the books, so we based the plot on fables we'd been told or we made up stories and dialogue as we went along.
More stimulus for our hungry imaginations came from the touring movies. Once or, if we were lucky, twice a year, a small group of people from the Qingdao Propaganda Bureau would come to our village to entertain us with a movie about things like Mao's Red Army triumphing against the Japanese army, or Chiang Kaishek's Guomindang regime, or the struggle against the class enemies, or touching stories about Mao's revolutionary heroes. There were also popular opera and ballet movies such as The Red Lantern and a ballet called The Red Detachment of Women, but the first half-hour of every showing always screened documentaries about Mao's faithful followers-unbelievable but inspiring stories for us youngsters to absorb.
The day before the movie was to be shown, our village had to put up a temporary wooden frame to hang the movie screen from. We set our little stools or bamboo mats in front of it as soon as the frame was up, to secure our places and, to prevent anyone from stealing our belongings, at least two of my older brothers would sleep there overnight. Arguments often flared up about whose place was whose, but as soon as a date was set and the names of the movies were known, we would discuss nothing but the coming event. I could hardly contain my excitement! I was such an emotional mess at the movies. Everything would make me sob. My emotions would linger for many days afterwards as I went endlessly over the details of each movie in my mind. My devotion to Mao and his ideology was greatly intensified. I wanted to be a revolutionary hero! Another child of Mao! But I loved the Beijing Opera singers as well, their singing, dancing, fighting and acrobatic skills. They were as close to a Kung Fu movie as we would ever get. The Kung Fu masters were the heroes of my imagination, but the Kung Fu books and movies were banned in China then. We had only the folktales told by some of the elderly people in our village to keep that passion alive.
I liked the stories and the fighting in the Chinese ballet movies too, but I really thought the people looked funny standing on their toes, and they didn't speak any words, so opera always won over ballet when it came to choosing a play for us to act out. Secretly I held a dream-one day I would be able to sing and do the Kung Fu steps that the opera singers did. But I knew deep in my heart that this dream would never come true. It was the commune fields for me.
I was nearly eleven years old when, one day at school, while we were busy as usual memorising some of Chairman Mao's sayings, the headmaster came into our freezing classroom with four dignified- looking people, all wearing Mao's jackets and coats with synthetic fur collars.
I immediately thought of the incident about the writing on the wall. Not again. What's wrong this time? But to my surprise, the headmaster introduced them as Madame Mao's representatives from Beijing. They were here to select talented students to study ballet and to serve in Chairman Mao's revolution. He asked us all to stand up and sing "We Love Chairman Mao":
The east is red, the sun is rising.
China 's Mao Zedong is born.
Here to give us happiness.
Hu lu hai ya.
Our lucky star who saved us all.
As we sang, the four representatives came down the aisles and selected a girl with big eyes, straight teeth and a pretty face. They passed me without taking any notice, but just as they were walking out of our classroom, Teacher Song hesitated. She tapped the last gentleman from Beijing on the shoulder and pointed at me. "What about that one?" she said.
The gentleman from Beijing glanced in my direction. "Okay, he can come too," he said in an off-hand manner, in perfect Mandarin dialect.
The girl with the big eyes and I followed Madame Mao's people into the headmaster's office. It was the only room with a coal- burning heater, a handmade contraption cobbled together from a bucket, with pipes attached in all directions like spider legs. Despite this luxury though, the room was still extremely cold.
There were other children already in the room when we arrived- ten children had been chosen altogether and we all wore our thick-quilted homemade coats and pants and looked like little round snowballs as we stood together in the freezing room.
"Take all your clothes off except your underwear! Step forward one by one! We are going to measure your body and test your flexibility," a man with glasses ordered.
Everyone stood there nervously. Nobody moved.
"What's your problem? Didn't you hear? Take your clothes off!" our headmaster barked.
"I'm sorry," one of the boys answered timidly, "but I don't have any underwear."
To my surprise, I was the only child who had underwear, hand-me- downs from several older brothers, multi-layered and patchworked with mending by my niang. All ten of us during that audition had to share my one set of underwear.
The officials measured our proportions: our upper body and our legs, our neck length, even our toes. I watched a few of the students being tested before me, and they cried out and winced. One of the officials came over to me and bent both of my legs outwards. Another official held my shoulders to stabilise me and a third pushed his knee against my lower back, at the same time pulling both of my knees backwards with great force to test the turnout of my hip joints. It was so painful it felt like everything would break at once. I wanted to scream as well, but for some reason I didn't. I had a stubborn thought: I didn't want to lose my dignity, I didn't want to lose my pride. And I clenched my teeth.
By the time they'd finished testing everyone, only one boy and one girl were selected to go to the next level. I was that boy. I was excited but frightened. I didn't know what was going to happen. The officials mentioned ballet, but all I knew about ballet was what I'd seen in the movie, The Red Detachment of Women. I had no idea what ballet was all about.
The audition was a hot discussion topic both at school and in our village over the next few days. At first my parents didn't pay much attention. There was no way in the world anyone in our family could have any artistic talent. Several of my brothers and my classmates teased me. "Show us a ballet step! Show us a ballet step!" But they knew I had no idea. For me, the most exciting aspect of it all was not the ballet but the possibility of going to Beijing to be near our beloved Chairman Mao; the possibility, however unlikely, of getting out of my deep well.
I went to the commune office a few weeks later to go through the next level of audition. This time they sent notices to parents beforehand, asking candidates to come dressed with underwear.
This audition was much harder. The girl with the big eyes from my class didn't pass this round: she screamed when they bent her body backwards and was disqualified for inadequate flexibility of her back. Then it was my turn. One teacher lifted one of my legs upwards, two others held my other leg steady and straight. They kept asking me if it hurt. Of course it hurt: it was excruciating! But I was determined to be chosen, so I kept smiling and replied, "No, it doesn't hurt," as they lifted my leg higher and higher. Be strong! Be strong! You can bear the pain! I kept telling myself. I did bear the pain, but the hardest thing was pretending to walk normally afterwards. They had torn both my hamstrings.
After the audition at commune level we went through to county, city and provincial levels. Each time there were more children who auditioned and each time more were eliminated. During the physical examination at the county level, the scar on my arm from the burn I received as a baby nearly disqualified me. One of the teachers from Beijing noticed it and referred me to a medical examiner.
"How did you get this scar?" the doctor asked.
I didn't want anyone to think of my niang as irresponsible, so I told him I'd cut my arm on a piece of broken glass and that the cut had got infected.
"Do you have any funny sensations, like itching on rainy days?"
"No, never." I looked straight into the doctor's eyes. I prayed he wouldn't eliminate me. I prayed for my niang's sake. She would be so sad, feel so guilty, if I was disqualified because of this scar. She didn't need to suffer any more.
After the examination, as I was putting my clothes back on, I overheard the doctor talking to a tall teacher from the Beijing Dance Academy. The teacher's name was Chen Lueng. He was the same gentleman from Beijing that Teacher Song had tapped on the shoulder that day at my school. "That boy's scar will definitely get larger as he grows," the doctor said. My heart sank. My only chance of getting out of my deep well was gone. I would be disqualified. I made up my mind never to tell my niang it was the scar that did it. The scar was from an accident. My niang was the best mother with the most loving heart. No one should take that reputation away.
When the physical tests were completed, we were tested for other abilities: our response to music, our understanding of Chairman Mao's ideology. They also checked our family background three generations back. Chairman Mao's communist theory about the so- called "three classes of people" was crucial when selecting us. All three classes had to be represented-peasants, workers and soldiers. Children whose families were associated with wealth and education anywhere in the past three generations were classified as class enemies and were disqualified. Madame Mao wanted to train us to be faithful young guards, so our backgrounds had to be pure, safe and reliable.
The final hurdle in the selection process was for the officials to meet my family. They wanted to meet everyone: parents, brothers and grandparents, to check out their physical proportions. I was nervous that they might have a problem with my niang because she was short, but her larger-than-life personality, and my dia's good figure, saved the day.
Days passed, weeks passed. No news from Beijing. The hope in my heart gradually dimmed with each passing day. I felt disappointed, then devastated. I became quiet. I shrank into my own cocoon. I kept looking at my scar, convinced it was the sole reason that I'd missed out. I wanted to cut my arm off to rid myself of the scar. But still, I didn't blame my niang. It wasn't her fault. It was just my unfortunate fate.
Everyone in my family had also given up hope by now. I could tell they felt sorry for me, because they all went out of their way to be nice. This only left me feeling sadder.
Then one day, just as my dia was going back to work after lunch, a group of village, commune, county and city officials suddenly came into our small courtyard, for our door was always open. They had broad smiles on their faces. My parents offered them some tea. Some sat down on our crowded kang, others just stood around. Eventually one of the officials asked my niang, "Which of your sons is Li Cunxin?"
My niang pointed at me.
The city official turned back to my niang. "Your lucky son has been chosen for Madame Mao's Beijing Dance Academy."
I was stunned. We were all stunned. A whole month had gone by! How could this be? My mother was speechless, but her face smiled like a full-bloomed flower. "Thank you! Thank you!" was all she could say.
My dia poured more tea for the officials, and then more, and then still more. His face was filled with pride.
When all the officials had left our house, all my dia said was, "I'd better get to work. I'll see you tonight." But he looked at me in a strange way, as though he was seeing something new.
After everyone had gone, my niang and I were left to ourselves. She looked at me for a long time, lost for words for the first time in her life. Finally she said, "My lucky boy, I'm so happy for you. This is the happiest day of my life!"
"I don't want to leave you," I said.
She looked at me with a slight frown. "Do you want to stay here and eat dried yams for the rest of your life? My dear son, this is your lucky chance to escape from this cruel world. Go, go and do something special with your life! Become someone other than a peasant boy. Don't look back! What is here? A leaking roof, your brothers' smelly feet and an empty stomach?"
"Stop it!" I said. I put my hand over her mouth. Happy tears welled in her eyes. She pulled me close and hugged me tight. I heard the loud beat of her heart, as though any minute it would jump out with joy.
She hugged me for a long time. I was too afraid to move. I wanted us to stay like that for ever. My entire body melted under her warmth.
"What about you?" I eventually asked. "Can you come to Beijing with me?"
"Do you want me to come and wipe your bottom, silly boy?" she replied with a chuckle. "You are the lucky one. Don't you think your brothers would love to have a chance like this? No, I can't go with you, but my love will. I will always love you, with all my heart. I know you have your secret dreams. Follow them. Make them come true. Now, go and play with your friends." She gave me a gentle push, but just as I was disappearing into the streets, she called out. "Don't forget to come back and help me push the windbox!"
A few days after this, we received a letter notifying me that I had been awarded a full scholarship and that I was to leave for Beijing in four weeks, just after the Chinese New Year. For the reopening of Madame Mao's new Beijing Dance Academy, fifteen students had been selected from Shandong Province. Fifteen from over seventy million people. Twenty-five students from Shanghai, three students from Beijing and one student from Inner Mongolia were also selected. It was February and I had just turned eleven.
The whole village came to congratulate my parents. There would be one less mouth to feed and now at least their sixth son had some hope of escaping from the poor living conditions and of making a decent life for himself.
Several of my niang's lady friends gathered on our kang one day, shortly after this, to sew, gossip and drink tea as usual. One of the ladies said to me when I walked into the room, "Jing Hao, take off your shoes, let me see your feet."
I was puzzled, and hesitated to take off my smelly shoes.
"Ah ya, come on, don't be shy," my niang urged me. "You can't be a dancer if you're shy!"
I reluctantly took off my shoes. The lady took my feet in her hands, like a doctor examining a seriously sick patient. Suddenly she shouted with excitement, "Look at this, I was right! Look, just look at his three long toes! I knew his feet would be different. This is the reason he was chosen! These three long toes will help him to stand steadily on his pointe shoes."
All the ladies, including my niang, nodded their heads and praised her wisdom. As I was putting my shoes back on, another lady added, in a more serious tone, "I heard it is very painful to stand on your toes. You must have a high pain threshold."
"Yes," a third lady said. "I heard dancers often get bloody toes from standing in their pointe shoes all day long. It must be like binding your feet and standing on top of them!"
I couldn't imagine my toes growing together and walking on my heels like Na-na used to. I began to worry. Eventually I had to tell myself not to think about it until I had at least tried on the pointe shoes. Then I'd know.
News of my selection spread quickly throughout our commune. Our usually quiet village sprang to life. People began to talk about me. "A smart kid." "That boy was born with a lucky look." I was embarrassed by all of these comments. I especially felt uncomfortable with my niang's friends' constant examinations.
Besides my three long toes, they were convinced that my double- folded eyelids, which made my eyes appear larger, were a factor too. It was true that many of my friends in the village had eyes that looked smaller than mine, but now people would stop me in front of my friends and examine my eyelids. One of my niang's friends even believed that the teachers of the Beijing Dance Academy had specific roles in mind for a dancer with a scar on his arm.
Our Chinese New Year was extra special that year. My eldest brother was home from Tibet. Everyone gave me firecrackers as gifts. It was a joyous time.
A few days before New Year's Eve, however, one of my "double kicker" firecrackers went wrong and exploded in my hand. It nearly tore off my whole thumbnail, and blood gushed out from under it. My parents immediately worried that this could jeopardise my chances of going to Beijing, so as an extra precaution they took me to the hospital to get my first tetanus shot, an expensive luxury. If it wasn't for Beijing, nobody would have bothered. "Put some dust on it," my niang would have said.
My last dinner at home. Nine of us sit around the food tray. My niang has cooked a delicious meal. She's made an egg dish with bits of dried shrimp, and Chinese cabbage with a few pieces of pork. We also have a cold dish-marinated jellyfish-and she has used her precious flour to make some mantos. My dia and my older brothers drink rice wine while everyone talks enthusiastically about my bright future.
I am quiet. I can't eat much, despite the good food. My stomach is too full with anxiety and dread. I am too afraid to look into my niang's eyes because if I do I know my tears will flood out.
As soon as dinner is finished I announce that I am going to my friends' houses to say goodbye.
"Why don't you do it tomorrow?" my fifth brother Cunfar says.
"I won't have enough time tomorrow," I lie.
"Stay! We can play your favourite card game," Cunfar persists.
"Why didn't you show Jing Hao this kind of passion before?" my fourth brother Cunsang says, which makes everyone laugh.
"Speedy return if you want to go tonight," my niang says. "You should get some good sleep in your own familiar bed. Who knows if you can stomach the luxurious life in Beijing."
I quickly slip off the kang and go outside.
"Who couldn't stomach a luxurious life!" I hear my second brother say as I hurry into the darkness. I have no intention of going to my friends' houses. I just want to be alone. I walk through the usually scary, dark narrow lanes between the houses and I pass my friends' places but don't go in. You should be happy, I keep telling myself. And I am, deep inside, happy about this god-given opportunity, but I am overwhelmed by the sadness in my heart as well. I don't want to leave my niang, my dia, my brothers and my friends. Already I feel so alone. I can't imagine how alone I will feel in Beijing. I look up at the stars, and even they are few and distant tonight.
Eventually I wander home. All my older brothers have gone out. My parents have already spread the quilts on the bed and are waiting for me.
"How are your friends?" my niang asks.
"Fine," I reply. I look at her eyes for the first time that night. They are moist.
"Sixth Brother, can I sleep on your side tonight?" my little brother Jing Tring asks.
"Yes," I reply. For the first time I am happy about that. I wish I could put him and the rest of my family in my pocket and take them to Beijing with me.
Tonight, as Jing Tring is sleeping, I look at his content and peaceful face. Suddenly I feel a rush of brotherly affection for him. I wish I'd been kinder to him. I wish I'd taken time to enjoy his company more.
My niang has made me a black corduroy jacket to take to Beijing, but I know my youngest brother loves that jacket. I know my parents don't have enough money to make him one too, so in the middle of the night, I pretend to get up for a wee, and quietly take my new jacket out of my bag and tuck it inside one of the papier-mâaché clothes boxes-Jing Tring will find it there after I'm gone.
The morning finally arrives. I've had a restless night and I wake with the first sound of the rooster's call. My dia rose earlier, to pack my belongings in two string bags. They are net bags, loosely woven, so you can see clearly what is inside. Many of my relatives, friends and neighbours have given me presents: souvenirs or some local specialty food such as dried shrimp. The shrimp has a strong "dead fish" sort of smell and it makes the bags stink.
Some of my classmates and friends have chipped in to pay for us to have our photos taken together. They also give me a beautiful diary with many pictures of Chairman Mao in it. The photo means a lot to me because my parents can't afford to waste money on such a luxury. We have very few photos, and only one family photo-a black-and-white one of my niang and all her seven boys. There is also my niang's handmade quilt, a thin futon-like mattress, two small handtowels, a metal washing-basin, a metal mug, some clothes, apples, pears, and a Qingdao specialty called "sorghum sweet", a soft lolly made from the grain. My niang has also packed some dried snakeskin. No one has noticed that I have taken out the new corduroy jacket.
After he finishes packing my bags, my dia quietly hands me five yuan. "I wish I could give you more, but this is all we have. Be good. Don't let the Li name down." He leaves for work, saying he'll try to make it back for lunch so he can see me one more time before I leave.
My niang is busy making dumplings this morning, as a special treat to send me on my way. I want to stay with her for every remaining minute, but I can't. I know if we look at each other we will not be able to control our tears. So I walk around the village, bidding farewell to my friends. I ask several of my niang's friends to come to our house after lunch to keep her company. I don't want her to be sad and on her own. I go to my na-na's grave and to our ancestors' burial place and kowtow. I want to smell the earth, the air, to remember the surroundings and take everything in. This village has been my life for my whole eleven years. Even the things I hate about it are suddenly not so bad. My heart feels as though it is hanging in mid-air. I return home for lunch.
My niang has made many dumplings for my last lunch and although they are my favourite, I can't eat even one. A hot ball of emotion is plugged in my throat. All six of my brothers are at the table. Everyone pushes their bowl of dumplings in front of me, but still I eat nothing. I want to say something special to each of my brothers, but few words are spoken. Time seems to run so fast and before we know it, it is time for me to go. Now I have to say goodbye to my niang and my brothers.
My brothers take my bags outside. My dia did not make it back for lunch. I look at my niang for the first time today and we both burst into tears. We can say nothing. We just hold each other. Then some of her friends come into our house, as I had asked them to, and I go quickly into the street.
My oldest brother Cuncia is to come with me as far as Qingdao City, and as a special honour our village has provided us with their only tractor to take us there. The admission letter from the Beijing Dance Academy said that all fifteen students chosen from Shandong Province are required to meet at a dormitory where we will spend the next eighteen hours before we embark on our train journey to Beijing. As the tractor pulls away from our house, three of my brothers run after us in the dust, crying and shouting goodbye. I can no longer hide my emotions; I sob and sob, all the way to the city.
The tractor journey takes us over an hour. The ride is bumpy, but I don't really notice. Finally we reach our gathering place, a kind of dormitory divided into six rooms. Everything smells mouldy and dusty, and the rooms are dark with only small windows. It feels foreign and unwelcoming. Nothing feels right. I am shy. I already miss my parents and brothers.
The time at the dormitory allows us to meet the other students. Four are from the countryside and others are from the city. There is something different about the city students. They seem more worldly than us country kids. There is also a man wearing a military uniform. He is called "the political head". And there's one of the teachers who auditioned us. They have come to Qingdao to collect us and will accompany us on our train trip to Beijing. We are briefed by the political head about certain rules and expectations the academy has for us. I have trouble understanding some of the terminology because they all speak in the Mandarin dialect.
By the time night comes, I still have not eaten since breakfast, so my brother peels me an apple. It's the first time I've ever had a whole apple to myself. I feel so lucky and so special. We settle down for the night. My only real comfort is my big brother, sleeping on a small bed next to mine.
Early next morning, we take a bus to the train station, an old building crammed with hundreds of people. I have never been to a train station before. I've only seen trains from a distance. Our train is a steam train, puffing out volumes of smoke and making an enormous noise. Our teachers push their way through the crowds and onto the train, and we pass our luggage through the windows because everyone is fighting their way on at the same time.
I leave my brother standing on the platform and find my seat on the train. Then, five minutes before departure, the loudspeakers announce that all family members and friends are to leave the platform. This is my last chance to say goodbye to my brother. He extends his hand through the window. As I grasp it I feel him give me something. It is a two-yuan note, his cigarette money. He will have to go without his beloved cigarettes for the next few months. I know how precious his cigarettes are to him. But he quickly runs into the crowd before I can say anything. I hold the money in my hand, tears streaming down my face, and watch Cuncia disappear into the crowd.
I listen to the sound of the train. With a sudden jolt, a massive puff of steam swallows our carriage and Qingdao Station slowly slips away. With the click-clack sound of each passing section of the track I know I am moving further and further away from my parents. My heart races along with the gathering speed of the train. I don't know how I am going to survive the next twelve months before seeing my niang again. I long to sleep next to my parents. Even my brother's smelly feet don't seem too bad now.
We have reserved seats on the train, but being Chairman Mao's good children, we give our seats to some elderly people who can only afford to buy standing-room tickets. Five people are squeezed on a bench for three. The overhead rack is overflowing with luggage. A couple of times the train makes a sudden jolt and some bags crash down onto unfortunate passengers below.
At first, the trees and fields flashing by are familiar sights, but then the landscape changes and the trees, crops, even the smell of the air, become different and unfamiliar. Even though it is winter, the windows are open to allow the fresh air in.
At almost the halfway point in the journey, the train stops at Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province. Here the station is grander than Qingdao 's, and well lit. Our teachers tell us that we can go and stretch our legs. There are peasants selling smoked chicken, steamed bread, roasted peanuts, sunflower seeds and sweets. Most of the students from the city buy something but the country students like me just watch.
Later, back on the train, the political head and the teacher lead us to the dining car. Not many people are allowed in this car. In fact, only government officials are allowed, but we are Madame Mao's students, so we are invited to go along. We occupy nearly half the car. There are two cold dishes on each table, a plate of pickled peanuts and some thinly sliced marinated beef. The beef is tough but delicious-this is heavenly food! We quickly demolish the cold dishes and then three steaming hot courses arrive: a whole fish, stir-fried pork with green chives and a mixed vegetable dish. We each have a bowl of rice too. The rich and delicious smells take my breath away. Every dish is shining with oil! Even the sauce for the vegetable dish is full of flavour. I have never seen so much meat in my whole life! We devour the food like hungry tigers. I wish for more, but I am too embarrassed to ask.
I hardly sleep for the entire twenty-four hours of the train journey. Just before we pull into Beijing Station, our teachers warn us that it will be very crowded. Stay very close, or we will get lost.
I am stunned when I see the sea of people at the station. There is no way our teachers could have prepared us for such a scene. Instead of hundreds of people, I see hundreds of thousands, all pushing and shoving in a huge open space. The ceiling is so high and bright, almost blinding me with its many fluorescent lights. It is so grand. Even the passageways are chock-a-block with people, sleeping on the floor while they wait for their next train. The sound is deafening-hundreds of thousands of people all talking at the same time. The smell too is indescribably strange-virtually everyone carries some kind of hometown delicacy: I have my apples, pears, sorghum sweets, snakeskin and dried shrimps, but who knows what others are carrying. The smell makes me want to escape this place as quickly as I can, but my bags are too heavy and I can only move slowly. I try so hard to keep up with my group. I enter a tunnel, but when I come out the other end, the familiar faces of my fellow students are nowhere in sight. My two bags are pushed and pulled by the crowd, and several times I nearly lose my balance. I look around. I don't know which direction to take. I am exhausted and desperate, so I move to the side, out of the way of the fast-moving people. I sit down against a wall, lost.
I am frightened. I want to go home to my niang. I start to sob. A soldier comes up to me and asks me why I am alone. I tell him I have become separated from my group and don't know which way to go. He kindly takes one of my bags and leads me to the exit. I am so grateful to him, this Lei Feng-like soldier, and as I step out of the crowded train station I am relieved to see one of our teachers from the Beijing Dance Academy.
It is Chen Lueng, the tall teacher who auditioned us, and he is with a couple more teachers from the academy who are at the station to greet us. A bus is waiting too and I am the last person to climb on. The students from Shanghai had arrived an hour before and are already impatiently waiting on the bus.
I hear one of the teachers tell the driver to close the door. I want to be helpful, so I start to pull the door closed, but the driver has pushed the control button and the door closes automatically in front of me. It takes me by total surprise. The buses at home don't have doors like this. I stumble back and fall. Everyone laughs. I have made a fool of myself within the first few minutes of being in Beijing. I feel desperately alone. At this moment I realise I have entered a completely new world.
Throughout the eleven years of my childhood in Qingdao, I'd always lived with the harsh reality of not having enough food to fill our stomachs, of seeing my parents struggle, of witnessing people dying of starvation, of constantly being trapped in that same hopeless, vicious cycle as my forefathers. I had been determined to get out of that deep, dark well. I cannot remember how many times I'd wanted to let go of my life and relieve some of my parents' financial burden. I would have sacrificed my own life to help my family, but would it have made much difference? Who did my life belong to anyway?
But somewhere deep in my heart there is a buried seed, a seed of hope. It isn't even a light. I can't see any light to guide me out of this cruel and unfair world. But that seed of hope has always existed, and it implants itself in my mind. Its power is strong. It makes me feel that one day everything will be all right. It is my escape, and my secret dream.
Beijing is my chance. I am scared to leave my parents yet I know this will be my only chance of helping them. I am afraid of what is waiting for me yet I know I have to take that first step forward. I can't let my parents down. I can't let my brothers down. I am carrying their dreams as well as my own. My niang said never look back.
I pick myself up off the floor of the bus, and walk down the aisle towards my seat.