Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (24 page)

As I approached the village, I saw smoke rising from the chimneys. No one was outside and there were no footprints in the snow. Everything seemed tranquil and I imagined the happy families celebrating the festival together.

Just outside the village I crossed a narrow bridge over a rapidly rushing stream. It was constructed of three logs lashed together. The water was filled with chunks of ice. I remembered that when Chunying’s wedding party had crossed the bridge, she had lifted her veil momentarily and stared down fearfully at the water before she was pulled across by villagers. On this morning I was alone and afraid. If I slipped and fell, there was no one to save me. I summoned my courage and sidestepped slowly across the logs.

I pushed open the door to Chunying’s shed. “It’s me, Yimao,” I announced. “I’m here to see the new babies!”

My greeting was met by silence. I blinked several times to adjust my eyes to the darkness in the room. As my vision cleared I saw Chunying’s husband and father-in-law squatting in front of the stove, smoking. Neither looked up. I noticed movement in the middle of the room and was able to make out Chunying’s daughter, in padded clothing, staring at me. Her nose was running and there were bits of food on her chin and jacket. A hand touched my arm. I jumped and turned to see Chunying’s mother-in-law standing beside me.

“Where are Chunying and her babies?” I asked. She motioned to the next room.

I stepped into the bedroom. The only light came from a small window. “Chunying,” I said. “It is me, Yimao. I am here to see your babies. And I brought you candy from Tianjin.”

I moved to the side of her bed and looked for the babies. Chunying’s hair was matted, and a soiled white cloth was knotted around her head. She was thin and haggard. Her dark sad hollow eyes followed me. She watched me as if she’d never seen me before. “What is wrong, Chunying?” I asked. “Where are your baby girls?”

She didn’t reply. She just continued staring at me blankly.

A single tear rolled down Chunying’s cheek. I leaned down to her. Her lips moved slightly but I could not hear her. I put my face close to hers. In a weak little girl’s voice, she said, “Xiao Mao. Xiao Mao … you are here.” When we played together in the past, she called me Xiao Mao or Little Mao.

“Yes, it is Xiao Mao,” I said. “I came through the snow to see you and your new babies.”

“My new babies,” she said. She paused as if the words didn’t register. Then she said again, “Xiao Mao, you are here.”

“Where are your babies, Chunying?”

She turned her eyes to the wall and responded with a low broken moan. Her mother-in-law came into the room. “Chunying needs her
rest,” she said. She pulled the blanket up to Chunying’s chin. I laid the candy on the blanket and left the room with the older woman. “I’m leaving now, Chunying,” I said. “But I’ll be back.”

When we were in the next room, I asked, “Where are the babies, and why is Chunying so sad? She should be so happy.”

“Oh,” the mother-in-law began and paused to breathe a long sigh. “It is such a pity. It is just her fate. She has a bitter life. And now she brings bitterness to us. She already had a thing that we are destined to give away.” She pointed to the little girl on the floor when she said “a thing.” “We are poor. We cannot afford any more debt collectors.” By “debt collectors” she referred to girls, who cost a family money to raise and then married and left to join another family. “Those new ones were real debt collectors because they came on New Year’s Eve, the traditional time for collecting debts.”

I felt a chill as she spoke. A premonition of what she was about to reveal wormed its way into my mind. I wanted to cover my ears, to run, to put my hand over her mouth so she could not tell me. Instead, I stood before her and tried to wish away the awful truth.

“We let Chunying keep them on New Year’s Day for good luck. It was a difficult delivery. She held one in each arm. But she knew … she
knew
.”

“Chunying knew what?” I asked, trying to control my voice.

“Whatever one does on New Year’s Day determines what will happen the rest of the year. So we kept them for one day.”

The men listened, but neither looked up. The only move they made was to lift a cigarette to their mouths and then withdraw it. The rest of the time they seemed like statues made of mud.

“Where are the girls now?”

“Where are they? On the second day of the New Year … we took them from Chunying’s arms when she was sleeping and we threw them in the river.”

A sickness erupted in my stomach. I doubled over and my heart fluttered wildly. I covered my mouth, braced myself against the wall for
a moment and then rushed from the shed. I began screaming. The door slammed shut behind me. I fell to my knees sobbing.

Finally I stood and walked straight to the bridge leading out of the village. I hurried to the middle, no longer afraid of falling. I dropped to my knees and peered down into the freezing water and wondered if Chunying’s husband or father-in-law or both had thrown the babies in the stream. “Did they wrap you in a blanket?” I wailed. “What did you feel?” I asked, looking down. “Were you asleep when they took you from Chunying’s arms? Did you cry from the shock of the cold? Did you make a sound?”

I choked on the words. I wondered if the cold had killed the girls before they drowned. What were these men thinking? Had they regrets? Had they any feelings about this at all? Was it merely something they did, like throwing out the trash, with the same lack of thought or consequence? Did they feel bad because they had killed the little girls? Or did they feel bad because Chunying had given them little girls? There must be some guilt, I thought. Some regret. There had to be some little spark of human compassion, some warmth, some sympathy.

I began answering my own questions. “Not enough sympathy to keep you alive. Not enough sympathy to give you away. Not enough. This world of monsters.”

I wondered how many hundreds of thousands of other baby girls had been flung from a bridge like this. Some often met an even worse fate. Sometimes, I’d heard, peasants didn’t even bother to go to a river. They placed the naked baby outside and let her die of exposure. Or they held her upside down in a bucket of water or urine.

I whispered to the twins, “At least you died a clean death, maybe even a quick death. Maybe it was so fast you hardly felt it.”

That was the best thought I could conjure up as I knelt on the bridge looking down at the icy black water. I headed down the path toward home and wept. The tears froze to my face. I wondered what might happen if I ever married someone from this village, if I had a
baby girl. Could my husband do this? Kill my child? I decided at that moment that I would never marry in the countryside. I’d die first.

It started to snow. I looked into the thick white veil of snowflakes and tried to find an image of the girls, together now, playing, in a better life, in a better world. I was soon talking out loud to the twins again, in a nearly hysterical singsong voice, thinking and questioning and answering and clenching my fists and wiping away tears with my sleeve. I stumbled several times, blinded by my tears. Once I slipped and fell off the road. I got up without brushing myself off and continued on. When I got home I was cold and covered with dirt and snow.

As I walked in the door, Mama called to me, “How are the babies, Yimao?”

“Dead,” I said and burst into tears. “They killed them, Mama.”

My father was sitting at the table and looked up at me but said nothing.

“Oh, dear God in heaven!” Mama cried. She stepped in front of me and asked, “Are you going to be all right?”

“No,” I told her. “I am not.” I took off my jacket and trousers and crawled into my bed and cried for the rest of the day.

Mama never brought up Chunying’s babies again. Nobody did. This was not an uncommon practice. But it harrowed up my heart and left the deep furrow of a memory that would haunt me to the end of my life. Before that morning I’d heard stories, but they were just stories. Now I knew it was all real.

I met the village idiot early one morning while I was searching for manure. As I scooped up a pile of dog excrement, a voice behind me screamed, “Stop! That’s my dog shit! Don’t you dare touch it!”

I turned to see an unusually tall, heavyset young man. His hair was long and uncombed and his face was filthy. He looked like one of the wild animals I’d seen in the zoo in Hefei. Before I could respond, he approached, his eyes narrowed menacingly, and he shouted, “I saw you. I know what you are doing.”

“All right,” I said. “This shit is yours. I don’t want it.” I picked up my basket and fled.

When I got home, I was out of breath. My mother asked what was wrong, and I said, “A screaming guy said I was stealing his dog poop, but it was just dog poop that didn’t belong to anybody but some dog. Why is an adult collecting this? They are supposed to let the children do it.”

Mama smiled and said, “Oh, you just met Sun Jigui. He’s the village idiot. He’s a good boy. He’s big and loud, but he’s harmless.”

“Why is he called the village idiot?”

“I don’t know why,” she said. “But everyone in this village refers to him that way.”

A few days later a middle-aged woman came to our shed.

“Have you eaten, Sun Breast?” Mama greeted her.

I was startled to hear my mother use the Gao Village expression. The peasants referred to married women as “breasts.” In the city the common term for such women was “Auntie.”

“Sun Breast is Jigui’s mother,” she explained to me.

As they talked, I sat beside the stove and listened. Mama asked her, “Do you mind if I ask how Jigui became the way he is? What happened?”

Sun Breast took a deep breath and sighed. “It is difficult for me to tell you this. He is such a heartache for us. He is fifteen years old. He eats, he sleeps, he collects manure. Other than that, he doesn’t do anything but cause trouble. He was three when the famine began. His sister was five. In those days all of us ate in a public kitchen. There was a set portion of food for each person. We told everyone that his sister was sick and brought her portion home. Then we fed it to Jigui.

“She cried and tried to run out of the house. My man tied her to the bed and gagged her.

“When she died two weeks later, I dared not cry for fear that people might realize what we had done. We kept her body inside so we could still get her food ration. Eventually she started to rot and smell, and we had to bury her.

“It was difficult for us, but only in that way could we save Jigui.

“If we knew then how he would turn out, of course, we would have fed her instead. How much easier our lives would be if we had made that decision.

“The doctor said maybe he is the way he is because of those years. Maybe we still did not give him enough food.”

“Sometimes he seems normal,” Mama said. “Why don’t you take him to a different doctor?”

“Oh, we barely have enough to eat,” Sun Breast replied. “How
could we afford a doctor? When we eat our breakfast, we do not know where dinner will come from. We have never had enough money to see another doctor.”

After that I knew what to expect from Jigui. One day I was in front of our shed with my brothers playing hide-and-seek. He watched and asked if he could play. “Sure,” I said. “Turn your back and count to ten and then try to find us. You must say, ‘I am going to find you. I am going to find you.’ When you find us, touch us and shout, ‘You’re it!’ And then you get to hide.”

He didn’t understand. He thought you just ran around and hit people, and he loved that. So he ran wildly around the yard chasing us and hitting us so hard it hurt, shouting, “You’re it! You’re it!” He had a wonderful time.

While we were playing, Old Crab happened to pass by. Jigui dashed over to him and slapped him hard on the back of the head and shouted, “You’re it!” Old Crab stumbled and whirled around and bellowed, “You damned idiot! How dare you? How dare you lay a hand on a Communist Party member?”

He grabbed Jigui by the wrist and began beating him. Jigui fell down and Old Crab grabbed a rake and jabbed him with it. Jigui managed to get away, and Old Crab couldn’t catch him. As he disappeared in the distance, Jigui was yelling, “You’re it, Old Crab. You’re it.”

Old Crab went to the boy’s house and summoned his parents. “Your son tried to kill a Communist Party member,” he told them. “This is a crime against the state. Your boy is an anti-revolutionary. According to the Six Articles of Public Security, I can send him to jail.”

Jigui’s father was shaken by Old Crab’s words. “I am so sorry,” he cried. He begged Old Crab to spare the life of his boy. Sun Breast pushed a new package of cigarettes into Old Crab’s hand. “Please come back later for dinner, Team Leader. I’ll kill a chicken for you. I’ll beat Jigui. And we’ll make him kowtow to you.”

Old Crab hesitated before replying, “I’ll forgive him this one time. But no more.”

“Thank you,” Jigui’s father said. “He’ll pay for this, believe me.”

Three days later Jigui came to our hut. His face was swollen and bruised. “Old Crab said that I cannot come into your house,” he said.

“Why did he say that, Jigui?” Mama asked.

“Because you are bad people. You walk on the capitalist road.”

“I see,” Mama said.

“Old Crab said if I come into your house, he will break my legs.”

“In that case, you’d better not come in, Jigui,” Mama said.

“I kowtowed to Old Crab,” he said.

“Is that so?” Mama asked. “And did he forgive you for what you did?”

“No. He kicked me in the head,” Jigui said. “Is Old Crab a good man or a bad man, Teacher Li?”

Mama pretended that she hadn’t heard the question.

Suddenly, Jigui blurted out, “Teacher Li, Papa beat me because he is not my real papa.”

“I know your mama and papa, Jigui. They are good people.”

“No, you don’t. My real papa is Chairman Mao,” he said, his voice rising.

“What do you mean?” Mama asked.

“Chairman Mao is my papa,” Jigui said. “I have his Red Book. I have his picture. I love him.”

“How did you learn this?” Mama asked.