Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (21 page)

“She just nodded. She was too busy eating even to look at me. I walked to the door of the restaurant, turned and watched her eating at the table. Then I left. I never saw her again. That is how I remember her. Sitting at a small table, alone, eating eagerly. She was happy.” Teacher Lu looked up at me, his eyes moist. “I think she must look like you today.”

He continued eating and I sat quietly across from him. When he was done, he stared at his empty bowl until I lifted it from his hands and carried it outside to wash it.

After school each day the children immediately went to work. Their principal task was collecting animal droppings for fertilizer. I learned how to do this and soon was working beside them. This was my first real job. I wanted to be like the other children. I carried a small basket and a rake and prowled the edge of the village looking for animal droppings. For every ten kilograms I delivered to the production team’s sewage pool, the accountant recorded one work point for me, which was worth two fen.

The first time I joined in the work I wore a pair of “liberation sneakers.” The other children saw me and pointed and laughed. “Look at the city girl,” they said, “collecting shit with shoes on.” I went home and put my shoes away. As long as we lived in the village, I went barefoot most of the time. It hurt at first. But soon the soles of my feet hardened with calluses and I could go anywhere painlessly. I was even able to walk across hot stones in the summer or climb on sharp-edged rocks.

Some afternoons I was accompanied on my searches by a neighbor girl named Little Rabbit. She was only five but very intelligent for her
age. She had a baby brother who was bound to her back every morning. Carrying him, she trudged along beside me as I did my work. I began to spend most of my spare time with Little Rabbit. Slowly she took the place in my life that Xiaolan once filled.

She reminded me of myself when I was five, doing the household chores and caring for a younger brother. I taught her some of the games I’d played when I was her age. I made a length of rope from straw and tied one end to a post and turned the other and taught her how to jump rope. She was delighted. I also showed her how to make bird nests out of grass roots.

Little Rabbit taught me how to catch fish in the irrigation ditch. The water ran swiftly from the pond to the rice fields when the dikes were open. She knelt at the water’s edge, leaned down and blocked a section of the ditch with a bamboo basket to snag fish. Within minutes she pulled up half a dozen fish. We called them
can tiao
, little white fish. They were only about three inches long. We cleaned them and cooked them and made a feast for ourselves.

Little Rabbit was not healthy. She tired easily. On our shopping trips to the brigade store, she often had to stop and rest and complained that she had a headache. Sometimes I tried to help her and had her transfer her baby brother to my back. She behaved like an old woman rather than a child. I did everything I could to cheer her up. I remembered how I had become ill and my energy had drained away. But I’d eventually been taken to the hospital. Someone had cared for me and wanted me to live. Little Rabbit appeared to have no one like that. Her parents and grandmother were indifferent. She liked me to tell her stories. When we sat together making straw fuel bundles for the stove, I’d tell her stories and sometimes she’d tip toward me and rest her head against my shoulder.

I talked with Mama about her and she said Little Rabbit should go to the clinic at the commune headquarters. She suggested this to Little Rabbit’s mother, who told her there was nothing wrong with the child and that she had always been listless and quiet. One morning Little
Rabbit came to our shed and asked me to walk with her to the brigade store. Her grandmother wanted her to buy soy sauce. I also had to go to the store to buy salt. I scooped up a few fen and joined her. But when we had walked only a short distance, she stopped and said she wasn’t feeling well. She appeared unusually pale. She also had the burden of her little brother strapped to her back. I touched her forehead and told her, “Your skin is hot, Little Rabbit. Go home. I’ll get your soy sauce.” She handed me her money.

I hurried to the store and bought the supplies and saved a single fen. The store had yam candy for sale, one fen each. I bought a piece for Little Rabbit. I ran most of the way home, imagining the broad smile that would bloom on her face when I handed her the treat. As I entered her front yard, I saw her lying in the straw with her little brother tied to her back, sleeping soundly. Little Rabbit was on her side with her legs drawn up, clutching an unknotted thatch of straw.

I called to her, “Little Rabbit. I have a surprise for you.”

She didn’t move. I thought she must be asleep. I sat down next to her on the straw, unwrapped the candy and held it out to her. Only then did I notice that her eyes were half open. I touched her face and found she was cold.

I cried out and ran to the door of her shed and summoned her grandmother. She hurried outside and saw Little Rabbit and scooped her up in her arms and began calling to her and stroking her forehead. The baby boy tied to Little Rabbit’s back began crying. I loosened the cloth that bound him to Little Rabbit and held him. Little Rabbit lay as limp as a rag doll in her grandmother’s arms. The old woman began wailing. Other women heard the commotion and came running. When they saw Little Rabbit in her grandmother’s arms, they, too, began screaming and crying. I continued staring at Little Rabbit in disbelief, still clutching the candy I’d bought for her.

That evening several men dug a grave outside the village. They
wrapped Little Rabbit in a blanket and lay her in the grave and covered her. There was no marker. There was no ceremony.

During the next weeks I walked to her gravesite every day. Once I found that animals had scratched away at the surface. I piled more dirt on the grave and stomped it down. When I was finished, I sat down and talked to Little Rabbit.

The twenty-five families of Gao Village were a “production team” that was part of a “brigade” composed of several village production teams. The brigades were organized further into communes. The commune headquarters had a general store, a middle school, a clinic and a meetinghouse for Party officials. It was a thirty-minute walk from Gao Village.

Old Crab, the team leader, was the only Communist Party member in Gao Village. He dressed in a tattered green uniform that was always caked with dried mud and bits of food. With his Party membership and his appointment by the brigade as team leader, he acquired absolute power over the villagers. Although the peasants sometimes made fun of him, they also feared him. They carefully courted his favor and never pushed their barbed jibes too far. If he felt anyone was challenging his authority he threatened them and waved a copy of the Party rules in their faces. “I can have you shot!” was his common warning. And everyone knew he could. If he passed our house and smelled food, he invited himself inside for a meal, always helping himself to the largest portion.

Mama had brought two beds from Hefei to Gao Village but there
was space for only one in the quarters assigned to us. She kept the second bed with the farming equipment in the storage section adjoining our living space in the shed. One afternoon I heard someone rummaging clumsily in the storage area. I peered over the low wall dividing the space from ours and saw Old Crab. He looked at me and mumbled, “I saw an extra bed here. My nephew is going to be married and he needs it. I am borrowing yours.”

Of course Old Crab never
borrowed
anything. He
took
what he wanted or needed, and it never reappeared. If he took our second bed, I knew we would never see it again. As he pulled it from a stack of our belongings, I blurted out, “You can’t have that.”

He eyed me and was highly annoyed by my objection. “Shut up,” he spat at me. “Why don’t you go collect some shit?”

As he turned to leave with the bed, I scrambled over the wall and grabbed a corner of the frame. “This is my bed,” I yelled. “And you cannot have it.”

He attempted to jerk it away from me, but I hung on and screamed, “Don’t you dare steal my bed.”

He tried to pull and kick me at the same time. We moved out the door to the area in front of the shed, each hanging on to an end of the frame, Old Crab kicking and trying not to lose his balance. “Damn you, let go. This is mine now. I’m the boss,” he shouted. Although he was accustomed to intimidating adults, I don’t think he’d ever been challenged by a child, especially not a determined eleven-year-old girl.

He planted his feet to make a final pull on the frame to force it from my hands. As he did, I released my grip. He stumbled backward and fell flat on the ground. He let go of the bed and jumped up with his fists clenched to beat me. I ran inside the house, closed the door and blocked it. He pounded on the door, unable to force it open, and threatened to kill me. After a string of obscenities, he left me alone, picked up the bed and stumbled away. As he did, I opened the door a crack and shook my fist at him and yelled, “You can’t keep my bed, Old Crab! I’m going to come and get it back!”

At my words, he dropped the frame and rushed the door. I
slammed it shut and blocked it. After hitting it twice and threatening me, he resumed his theft.

————

Old Crab exempted himself from common labor. He declared that it was his official duty to make sure everyone else worked. Each morning, just after sunrise, he marched through the village blowing a whistle and banging on his broken gong, shouting, “The sun is shining in your asshole! Get up! Go to work! Go to work!” As the villagers emerged from their dwellings, he told them that their daily assignment was to go to this or that field and do this or that.

Once the villagers had begun their daily tasks, he walked to the brigade headquarters or the store where he might find Party officials from other villages and confer with them. After a few drinks and a few cigarettes he made a circuit of the fields, checking to see that everyone else was working. After that he returned to the village and searched for men who might be shirking their duties or women who were alone.

One autumn morning I overslept and departed for school late. As I passed one of the small huts near the edge of the village, I saw a shadowy figure crawling next to the back wall and then disappearing around a corner. I became curious. I left the main path and padded to another hut and peeked around the corner. I saw Old Crab on his hands and knees, looking around the corner of the next hut. I suspected at first that he was about to steal something from one of the villagers, but it was unusual for him to do it so secretively. His normal tactic was merely to walk in and take whatever he wanted. I followed him and saw him approaching a young woman who was nursing her baby. She was seated on a pile of straw facing the morning sun. Old Crab approached her stealthily from behind and bent down and wrapped his arms around her. She struggled for a moment but stopped when she saw it was Old Crab. She put her baby down on a blanket and turned to him. Her full breasts swung lose from her open blouse.
“Don’t worry,” Old Crab slurred. He covered her breasts with his open hands. “I won’t squeeze them hard enough to steal your milk. I just want to have some fun.”

He circled her waist with one arm while he loosened his trousers. She lay down on the straw beside her baby and said, in mock protest, “No, no, no, no, you shameless old man.” At the same time she was smiling. “And what do you have for me?”

“How would you like … ten work points today?” he said as he kneaded her breasts. She loosened the waist of her trousers, and when she lifted her hips to pull them down, she began to turn her head in my direction. I jumped back before she could see me and hurried to school.

Old Crab was both the law and the chief law enforcement officer of the village. He dictated reports to brigade officials about the villagers who behaved suspiciously in his eyes or who were not sufficiently revolutionary. These people were called in for questioning and Old Crab’s complaints became part of their record. He brought news of Party policy and rules back to the village. The illiterate villagers knew only what he told them about dictates and commands from Party headquarters in Beijing. Several women whispered to Mama that Old Crab had become a Party member because “he was the cruelest man in the village, and local Party officials were looking for a cruel leader during the famine years.”

Party officials at the brigade level appointed him team leader and gave him control over the distribution of food in the village. He decided who received food and who did not. He determined whose children lived or died. Food was kept in a central storage facility, and anyone caught trying to steal was shot in the head on the spot. No one forgot those years. Half the villagers starved to death during the famine. All members of Old Crab’s family survived. When the famine ended he was granted Party membership in a lavish ceremony at brigade headquarters and praised for his selfless service to the nation, the Party and the people of Gao Village.

Papa unexpectedly arrived in Gao Village one spring day. He had taken the bus to the nearest main road junction and walked the final few miles.

He told us that before releasing him from Nan Village, Communist Party authorities had one final humiliation in store for him. His work contract with the university was canceled. Not only was he deprived of income, but he also was denied access to the national medical care system. In the eyes of the state he had become a non-person.

At the same time university officials discovered the deception that had allowed me to stay in the PLA Hospital in Hefei. They billed my mother for the cost of my medical care. The charge was two months of her salary. We never learned if Comrade Pan and the kind PLA representative had also been disciplined for their role in saving my life.

Father had been in our hut only a few minutes when Old Crab arrived with a number of villagers trailing behind him. Father presented his release papers to Old Crab, who scanned them but could not read them. After pretending to examine them, he crushed them in his hand contemptuously. “The most important thing for you to remember,”
he spat at Papa, “is that I am in charge here. You do what I tell you. You obey me.”