Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (26 page)

Sun Breast began moaning, “Look what they did to my son!”

“What are you crying about,” Old Crab said. “Your good fortune has finally arrived. The idiot is good for something. This driver, he’s a good man. And his work unit compensated us for the medical expenses. And look here,” he said, pulling a roll of cash from his pocket and holding it out for everyone to see. “They even gave us money for all the trouble they caused.”

Jigui’s father stepped forward and held out his hand to take the money. Old Crab peeled two hundred yuan from the wad and thrust it into his palm. “That’s all?” Jigui’s father protested. “My boy lost his leg. He’s my idiot.”

Old Crab stuffed the remaining money into his own pocket. “Hey,” he said, snorting, “I got you this. You were trying to kill him when he ran away. He was worth nothing to you. But I lost a team member. This is mine!”

Jigui’s behavior changed after he came home from the hospital. He sat alone outside the family shed on a bundle of straw for hours each
day, paging through his Little Red Book. One might have guessed from watching him that he was literate. He hobbled around the village on crutches and none of the children teased him. Whenever someone asked what he was doing, Jigui smiled and said, “I’m waiting for my real papa to make my leg grow back.”

His mother brought him his meals and sometimes squatted and talked with him. His father and Old Crab ignored him.

After completing fifth grade in the brigade elementary school, I moved on to the commune middle school. It was a forty-minute walk from home. That year Teacher Lu returned to being an itinerant peddler. He decided it was less trouble selling his wares than teaching children. In his place the brigade hired a young man who had finished middle school the previous spring. He was sixteen years old and had never taught before. Unlike Teacher Lu, who was patient with the children, he was a strict disciplinarian. He held a ruler tightly in his right hand, and whenever students spoke out of turn or answered his questions incorrectly, he struck them. When I heard Yicun complain about the new teacher, I was happy I’d moved on but was sorry for him and the other children. Yet there was nothing I could do.

The middle school was larger than the elementary school. It consisted of three structures rather than one, constructed of bricks and tile rather than mud. There were three teachers. Best of all, there were two other girls in my class. One of them—Li Bingzhi—was in class because she was crippled. When she was small she contracted polio and one of her legs withered. She walked with a crutch and was unable to work in
the fields. Her family concluded that if she continued on in school, she might learn how to become an accountant and have a better chance of finding a husband. She was useless as a peasant and therefore not desirable to the village men.

The other girl in our class, Liu Chaoping, was the daughter of a settle-down family in a nearby village. Her father had been a colleague of my parents. Each of us was supposed to bring our own table or desk and a stool to school. Bingzhi brought a small square table. I brought my little stool and shared the table with her. Chaoping brought her own stool and shared the table with Bingzhi and me. Our table had shorter legs than the others, so the teacher had us sit in the front of the class. During recess the three of us played together.

It was difficult finding teachers for the country schools. Consequently, the commune leaders solved this problem by employing the educated youth to do the job. The educated youth were middle school and high school graduates sent to the countryside at Chairman Mao’s order to be reeducated by the peasants. But instead of being reeducated by the peasants, they were employed to teach the children of the peasants.

Our English teacher was a young woman from Nanjing named Ying Zaizhou. She was chubby and soft-featured and looked like a city girl. She had pale skin and short curly hair, which was unusual in the countryside. When she smiled, her eyes became two lines across her face and almost closed. She spoke with a heavy Nanjing accent and we often had difficulty understanding her. Ying Zaizhou had only a high school education, but she did her best to teach us. As peasants, we wondered what use we might have for English. But it was a requirement.

Papa helped me with my English lessons. When I arrived home in the afternoon, he’d say, “Read me your English for today.” And when I read it, he’d say, “No, no, no, not like that—like this.” He’d read the sentences and words with a completely different pronunciation.

When I read English words aloud the way Papa pronounced them
for me, the teacher ridiculed me. “Why do you think the word is pronounced like that?” she’d ask. I was frustrated. I hated English. Eventually Papa figured out what was wrong. Ying Zaizhou was pronouncing each English word as if it were derived from a Chinese character. She had never actually heard the proper English pronunciation. Papa laughed when I read to him and said, “I’m afraid you are learning a language that is spoken only by your teacher and her students. No one else in the world can understand a word you are saying!”

The temperature inside and outside our classrooms was always the same. In the winter, each class period began with warm-up exercises. We rubbed our hands together, did jumping jacks and patted ourselves on the arms and legs. In the summer, we sat at our desks and perspired until we were completely drenched.

After the first few weeks of class I was told that I was eligible to apply for membership in the Communist Youth League. In elementary school in Hefei, I had been ruled ineligible to join the Little Red Guards because of my family background. But in the countryside the ruthlessness of class consciousness was tempered. I had been classified as an “educable child of problematic parents” by the Communist Youth League members who examined my background. They invited me to apply. I was cautioned that I must prove I was truly qualified for membership. I had to demonstrate that I was a good student and a good Communist, and I had to try harder than everyone else because of my family background.

I wanted to join. The Communist Youth League represented a sort of liberation for me. I did not believe a word of the phrases I memorized or any of the lines from the
Quotations of Chairman Mao
that I recited. In fact, from my last days in Hefei, I knew it was all a lie—fairy tales and fantasies justifying cruelty and brutality. Yet I needed to join the believers to keep them from hurting me further. It was a way of insulating myself from the stain of my family’s political past. I thought China would never change, that the Cultural Revolution would go on forever. Therefore the only way for me not to live exactly as my parents
lived was to come to an accommodation with the ruling powers rather than hide and cower constantly.

I worked hard to qualify. I volunteered to sweep the floor of the school every afternoon. I cleaned the blackboard for the teachers after each class. I kept the classroom tidy. I assisted other students with their homework. At the end of each week, I was required to write a “thought report” to the CYL branch chapter. I wrote things like: “I read Chairman Mao’s slogans again this week. These were the most relevant to me …” Then I’d repeat a dozen or so sayings. Of course all of this was very formal, even the commentaries I made on their relevance to my experience. I knew what I was expected to write, so I wrote it, robotically.

After several months of showing my sincerity and enthusiasm for membership, I was told that I had passed the test and could be admitted. A formal induction ceremony was scheduled. I was to be sworn in and to pledge my allegiance to the Party and to Chairman Mao in front of the other members. I was told the date and the time of the ceremony.

I was willing to work to become a member, but I refused to stand before the other students and swear allegiance to the organization that had persecuted us. I could not. When the day of the ceremony arrived, I pretended to be sick and stayed home. It was my way of maintaining some integrity. On the following day, when I returned to school, representatives of the CYL handed me my membership certificate and congratulated me. I was never required to be sworn in publicly. I told my parents that evening what I’d done. I emphasized that I hadn’t sworn allegiance to the Party. They congratulated me.

I attended weekly CYL meetings after that. And I posed with other members for the CYL group picture. Everyone seemed convinced that I was a good Communist.

The age for marriage in the village was sixteen. Long before a child turned that age, however, the parents arranged for a marriage that might be advantageous to the family. Jinlan’s father came to an agreement with Old Crab to marry his daughter to the team leader’s son. After the announcement of the engagement, both Jinlan and Shuizi were very sad. Shuizi’s father approached Jinlan’s father and asked if there might be some way to break the other arrangement. “You know that everyone has always expected my son to marry your daughter. You’ve seen them together. You know how they look at each other. You’ve heard him sing for her.”

But Shuizi’s family was among the poorest in the village. Although Shuizi’s father had attended school and done well and might have become a country scholar, he had gone into the army during the Korean War. In late 1953 he returned to the village a changed man. He was not interested in becoming a Communist Party member, even though, as a veteran, he was asked to join. And he was no longer interested in school or books. He was different, people said, from the bright young man who had marched away in 1950. He was quiet. He worked
hard. He married a village girl and had Shuizi. He raised his son alone. He had no connections, no Party membership, and no prominent relatives in other villages or towns. He had nothing to offer Jinlan’s father except an old tarnished medal for heroism and empty words. So Jinlan’s father told Shuizi’s father to find another girl for his son. But soon afterward people whispered that they’d seen Jinlan and Shuizi walking along paths near the village, laughing and talking as if they were betrothed.

The rumors and stories angered Old Crab. He went to Jinlan’s father and demanded, “What’s going on here? Do we have an arrangement or not?”

“Of course we do,” Jinlan’s father assured him. “The stories are not true. Jinlan is a good girl. She will marry your son.”

Several days after that, Old Crab returned from brigade headquarters and went to the village warehouse. As he approached the building he heard a woman’s voice. He slipped inside silently with a large lecherous grin. He peeked around the mud wall and spotted a pile of clothing on the floor. He inched closer until at last, atop several sacks of rice, he saw Jinlan and Shuizi. They were naked and entwined in each other’s arms. Old Crab’s lecherous grin turned into a grimace. He let out an ear-piercing bellow of rage. Shuizi and Jinlan leaped to their feet. Jinlan tried to cover her nakedness, and Shuizi grabbed for their clothing. Old Crab grabbed a hoe and yelled, “Shuizi, I’ll kill both of you if you make another move.” They clung together. Jinlan cried hysterically, and Shuizi tried to comfort her and protect her. Old Crab snatched up their clothing and flung it outside. He summoned a group of villagers working nearby to witness what he’d found. When they came running, he ordered them, “Go to the fields and get the others. Hurry!”

He went back inside the warehouse and stood over the mortified girl and her companion, waving his hoe menacingly and spitting out a long litany of choice obscenities and threats. Scores of peasants arrived from the fields and huts. Old Crab called the men into the warehouse
but commanded the women and children to remain outside. When the men saw the naked youngsters, they were both embarrassed and appalled. They seemed unsure why Old Crab needed them.

“Tie them up!” he ordered and motioned toward several lengths of rope in the corner. Old Crab pulled Jinlan out of Shuizi’s arms and pushed her into the hands of the men. He held the blade of his hoe against Shuizi’s neck and said, “Now you’ll get a dose of revolutionary justice, you sneaky bastard.” Shuizi glared defiantly back at him as the men bound his arms. He looked at Jinlan as she frantically tried to cover herself, and he spat at Old Crab, “Let her go, you heartless old fart! I’m the one who did this! I am guilty. She’s not.”

Old Crab made a swipe with the hoe near Shuizi’s mouth and hissed, “I’ll cut your damned tongue out if you say another word.”

He instructed the men to throw a rope over the beam in the ceiling and to bind Jinlan’s hands over her head and pull her into a standing position exposing her private parts. She screamed and begged to be released and pleaded for the men to kill her instead. Old Crab pulled the rope taut himself until only her toes touched the floor. Jinlan squeezed her eyes shut and turned her face to the ground as the men stood around her.

“I caught them here,” Old Crab said. “They were both shirking their work and coupling like rutting pigs.”

He stepped in front of Jinlan and grabbed her between the legs. “And to think that this whore wanted to be my daughter-in-law!”

She let out a cry.

“Please forgive her, Team Leader,” a voice rang out. It was Jinlan’s father. He’d been the last to enter the warehouse. “She’s not that kind of girl, Old Crab, and you know it. Shuizi must have lured her here with his music and his sweet words.”

Old Crab’s expression changed as Jinlan’s father spoke. He appeared to find the words convincing.

“Let me take her home,” Jinlan’s father continued. “All she needs is a good beating.”

This was followed by a hum of assent among the men.

Jinlan’s father stepped outside and gathered up her clothes while some of the other men untied his daughter. She kept her eyes glued to the ground as her father covered her with her clothing and led her away.

Once they were gone, Old Crab turned to Shuizi and asked, “So what do we do with a rapist?”

There was no response. The silence appeared to anger Old Crab even more. “Let me show you what we do,” he said. He raised the hoe above his head and brought it down hard on Shuizi’s skull. The young man let out a moan and his eyes closed. Blood streamed down his face and shoulders and he slumped to the floor. Before Old Crab could strike him again with his hoe, several men stepped in front of him. “You’ll kill him if you do that,” one said. “He doesn’t deserve to die.” Old Crab threw the hoe aside and pushed past the men and kicked Shuizi again and again while the boy lay motionless on the ground. At last the other men pulled Old Crab back and said, “Enough! He’s learned his lesson.” Old Crab tried to shake them off at first but finally yielded to their restraint. He spat on Shuizi’s body. “I’m not finished with you,” he muttered. Old Crab pushed his way through the crowd and strode outside into the sunlight. Several men picked up Shuizi and carried him home.