Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (22 page)

“Of course,” Papa responded deferentially.

Old Crab studied him and added loudly enough for everyone outside the hut to hear, “You are a piece of meat on my chopping block. I can slice you. I can dice you. I can cut you any way I want. And I will when I feel like it.”

“I understand,” Papa replied, and the rest of us stood around close-lipped, listening to Old Crab’s tirade.

“And one more thing,” Old Crab added. “Do you have any cigarettes?”

Papa withdrew a pack of Big Iron Bridge cigarettes from his pocket. As he was about to pull one out, Old Crab snatched the entire pack, shook out a cigarette and stuffed the rest in his own pocket. “Match?” he asked.

Papa lit the cigarette with a wooden match, and Old Crab turned and left. The others followed.

During the next days Old Crab spoke with Papa at length about his background. He was delighted that Papa could read, write and do math and was also completely under his thumb. Old Crab needed someone literate to help him, he said. “I’ve always hated depending on a man from the brigade level to do our numbers. They don’t appreciate our local problems. Now I have you.”

He put Papa in charge of recording work points that he assigned to every individual in the village. Papa was given the account book, which Old Crab retrieved from brigade headquarters, and told how the work points were to be distributed. Each male was given ten work points for a day’s labor. Women were paid seven, and children were paid three. Ten work points were worth twenty fen. Old Crab assigned himself ten work points a day. He told Papa that his work for the Party and supervising others was the most important job in the village.

After only one month in the village Papa became so sick that he could not walk to Old Crab’s hut to fill out the account book. He’d
contracted malaria. So Old Crab brought the book to him each evening. There was always a lot of illness in the village. People washed their clothing in the same pond where they drew their drinking water. On the opposite side of the pond, villagers washed their night soil buckets. We poured alum in our water before boiling it. Mud and other solids collected at the bottom of our water jar. We used only the top portion before emptying it and drawing fresh water.

After that, Papa ran a high fever once a month and often became delirious. He tossed and turned in the bed and was drenched with sweat. During these lapses, he repeatedly shouted in English, “Long Live Chairman Mao,” then laughed hysterically at his own words.

I understood a little English and recognized what he was saying. Mother worried that he might shout something in Chinese and someone might hear and report him. He could get into serious trouble because of the tone of his laugh. He might be labeled a current counterrevolutionary. As long as he stuck to English, the villagers thought he was speaking nonsense and he was safe.

I was the sickliest child in our family. Every few weeks, I became so ill that villagers had to carry me to the commune clinic on a bamboo pallet. On my first stay at the clinic I found, when I went to use the latrine, that a copy of
David Copperfield
was about to be used as toilet paper. As I squatted over the concrete platform, I picked up the book and read the first page. I realized how much I missed the written word and remembered my excitement at discovering the little hill of books outside the building in Hefei. I kept reading until I heard someone coming. I then stood up and tucked the book into the front of my underwear and pulled my shirt over it. Another woman entered, saw me, looked around for the toilet paper, found nothing, and left. As I went out the door, she reentered the latrine carrying another large volume.

I kept the book under my pillow. In the following days I was able to rescue parts of
Anna Karenina
and
A Tale of Two Cities
. I brought them home with me when I was well. Each time I stayed in the clinic for one illness or another, I stole several volumes of “toilet paper.”

————

Not long after Papa arrived, Old Crab received funds from the Commune Settle-Down Cadre Office to build our family a new dwelling. He pocketed the money and ordered the villagers to construct a hut. It consisted of mud walls and a dirt floor and was partitioned into three rooms. Old Crab did not want to build our home on good rice land. The area where they built our shed, we learned, was the old Gao family cemetery. The villagers were superstitious about this plot of land and Old Crab ordered that no one was to tell us that we were living over the bodies of the Gaos.

Gao was the name of the family who had founded the village hundreds of years earlier. Many of them fled during the Taiping Rebellion a century before. Still more fled during the war against the Japanese, and some of those who stayed behind were murdered. Some fled during the civil war. With the victory of the Communists, those who remained were arrested, charged with exploiting peasants and executed. Others were sent to prison camps. During the great famine, we learned, the last Gaos had starved to death, deprived of food by a decision of Old Crab. By the time we arrived, there were no more Gaos in Gao Village. The dominant family names now were Li, Sun, Zhang and Chen. Not far from our newly constructed shed was a narrow drainage ditch that was part of the irrigation system. It carried water from a pond to the rice paddies. A tall gravestone with the names of Gao family members etched on it lay on its side and served as a bridge over the ditch.

Other huts in the village were built more sturdily than ours. The villagers had used real fired bricks for their own structures and mud for ours. They had not bothered to create a window, so the only light entered through the open front door. This was what Old Crab had ordered to save both time and money, and we could not object. Once the workers were done, Papa had a neighbor help him punch a small hole through the wall at each end of the house, a rudimentary window
for additional light and ventilation. Mama hung material over the holes to provide privacy and protection from the elements.

The door remained open throughout the day. If we closed our door, villagers whispered that we were doing something secretive and suspicious. Before long Old Crab would come along and kick the door in to make sure nothing was happening that he didn’t know about. My parents never complained openly about our treatment or our living conditions. We tried to live like the peasants. We worked in the fields, attended every village meeting and did as we were told by Old Crab.

The allotment of food we received in exchange for our work was never enough. So we augmented our diet, as many of the villagers did, by raising chickens. We started out with ten chicks Mama bought at commune headquarters. They matured and laid eggs and hatched more chicks. They lived with us in our quarters. My older brother and I shared responsibility for raising the chickens. We kept them in a coop that he made. Just before dark, when I called to them, “Coo, coo, coo,” they came running to the house to be fed and kept beside his bed. They were healthy and became legendary in the village for their number and size.

Within a year we had more than a hundred chickens. The secret of our success was that we raised them scientifically. Papa had discussed raising chickens with a doctor whom he befriended at the clinic during one of his visits to me. The doctor told him about antibiotics that could be given to our flock. The doctor provided him with some. I injected them into the chickens. But our success made some villagers jealous. They wanted to raise chickens in large numbers, too, but failed. So they turned to stealing ours. Old Crab didn’t have to steal. Whenever he wanted a fat chicken for his pot, he merely stopped by and took one of ours.

The village collectively owned four water buffalo. The animals were highly valued because they were the only real labor-saving device available to the peasants. During the famine, villagers ate the water buffalo, and men yoked themselves to plows. Families with teenage
girls were assigned the care of the buffalo. In exchange, they were given work points. The girls tended the animals when they grazed, took them to streams to drink, fed them hand-tied bundles of rice and straw and fenced them in their yards at night.

Our neighbors, the Chen family, were assigned the care of one of the village animals. Chen Chunying, who was fifteen—three years older than me—led the buffalo into a pasture every afternoon. Soon after meeting her, I began to accompany her. We rode together on the back of the buffalo and steered into a grazing area near the river. Then we sat on the ground and talked and sang while he foraged nearby.

One afternoon Chunying began making a pair of shoes. Peasants wore shoes only on special occasions or during the winter, and they always made their own.

“Where did you learn to make shoes?” I asked, fascinated by her deft cutting and sewing.

“My grandmother taught me,” she said. “Didn’t anyone teach you yet?”

“My grandmother died. And my mother doesn’t know how.”

“Then I’ll teach you,” she said. “You can watch me, and after you learn, you can make shoes for yourself.”

So I watched and listened to her instructions. She made the shoes from old clothing. Shirts and trousers that were too ragged and patched to be used anymore were cut up into small flat pieces of material. Chunying meticulously glued them into thin layers with paste made from a mixture of flour and water and laid them out in the sun to dry into a hard material. Then she made hundreds of tight little stitches in them to hold the pieces together. I watched as the sole and the top of the shoe slowly took shape. The work took several weeks. I was fascinated by her patience and artistry.

One night I asked my mother for rags so I could make my own pair of shoes. “Making shoes?” she asked. “What in the world is that good for? Read books. That will give you a future.”

I told Chunying I was not allowed to make shoes. She thought for
a while and said, “How about this? I’ll make you a pair of shoes and you read to me while I’m working.”

“Really? You will do that?” I asked excitedly.

“Yes, I will,” she answered. “Read me beautiful stories and I’ll make you beautiful shoes.”

We had brought a few books from Hefei—Papa’s prized copy of
Jean-Christophe
and
Les Misérables
—and I had stolen some from the latrine at the commune clinic. Mama kept our books in a pile beside the stove and told any inquiring visitors that these were for fuel. I carried a copy of
Les Misérables
with me the next afternoon. We sat on the grass and Chunying sewed and I read aloud to her. She loved the passages describing the life of Cosette. She often asked me to repeat the words slowly, and she closed her eyes and listened to me. One warm lazy afternoon, she said, “I admire you for being able to read, Yimao. How can you do that? And such fat books.”

I told her, “If you come to school with me, Chunying, you can learn to read, too. It’s not as hard as making shoes!”

“My parents tell me it’s a waste of time,” she replied. “I have wanted to go, but they refuse. I’ve always been curious, though.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “My parents say making shoes is a waste of time.”

“What do you think? Do you think we’re both wasting our time, Yimao?”

“No, I don’t,” I told her.

She smiled at me and said, “But you will be unless you keep reading.”

“Where are my shoes?” I asked, and we both laughed.

Each day that summer we took the water buffalo to the pasture and I read
Les Misérables
to Chunying. When my eyes tired, I sang her the songs I learned in school. She was so easily amused. It was as if I were an opera performer and she was my only audience. I had been taught the songs from Madame Mao’s approved operas, and I sang them to her and told her the stories. She listened and smiled.

When summer vacation was almost over, she completed making my shoes. They were exquisite. The soles were white and the tops were embroidered with tiny colorful flowers.

“How beautiful,” I gasped when she handed them to me. I could hardly believe they were mine. I ran my fingers over the little flowers and admired the elegant stitching on the white soles.

“You must wear them only on special occasions,” she said. “On New Year’s Day or for a visit to relatives in other villages.”

That night, before I went to bed, I washed my feet in a basin. Then I put on the shoes. I didn’t want to soil them on the floor, so I lay on my bed and held my feet over my head and walked through the air with them, as if I were on a cloud.

The next morning I asked Mama to take me to visit our relatives in Tianjin. She told me it was too far away. I said, “But I want to go. I have to show them my new shoes. Mama, I’d be happy to walk barefoot just to put on my shoes when I get there.”

“Those shoes have made you silly,” she said. “Put them away.”

I knew of no place to wear them in the countryside. So they became a special unused treasure. I took them out every night and put them on and walked in the air. They never touched the ground.

Ten months later there was a special occasion for me to wear my shoes. As we sat in a field tending the buffalo, Chunying began to sob.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I’d never seen her so sad.

“I’m going to be married,” she said.

“Then why are you crying?”

“Because I have to move to another village. Because I’ll never see you again. Because I’ve never even seen my man.”

“I’ll visit you,” I said. “No matter where you go, Chunying, I’ll visit you.”

Her marriage had been arranged by her parents, as was the custom in the countryside. According to village tradition, a bride and groom were not supposed to see each other before they wed. Their first glimpse of each other came on the wedding day.

Because Chunying’s family was poor, they had worked out a special exchange of weddings with a family in nearby Bao Village. They agreed that Chunying would marry the son of the other family, and the daughter of that family would marry Chunying’s brother. No dowry was involved. The arrangement was considered balanced and fair. Chunying worried because she knew nothing of her future husband or his family, only the name of their village. She hoped that he would not be cruel or ugly. She hoped he would not beat her.