Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (3 page)

That evening Second Uncle and Papa set up a white wooden crib. Mama put me in it. My new brother, whose name was Yiding, slept with my parents in their bed and Second Uncle slept in a bed beside the crib.

I lay in my crib and listened to the adults in the next room.

“I remember when you brought her to Tianjin,” Second Uncle said.

“February 1960,” Mama said. “It broke my heart, but … what could I do? If I’d kept her with me, we would have all starved.”

“I know.” Second Uncle sighed.

“She was one and a half,” Mama said.

“She has been with us for two years,” Second Uncle said. “We’re the only family she knows. She’ll need time to adjust.”

I heard the scratch of a match and smelled cigarette smoke.

“Our mother starved herself for Maomao,” Second Uncle said. “I tried to stop her, tried to get Mother to eat her food, but she found a way to give it to Maomao. We talked about it—the brothers and sisters. We concluded that the best solution was to bring Maomao back to you.”

His words reminded me of an episode a few days earlier. I had been playing hide-and-seek with my sisters. I crept into my bedroom and hid behind the clothing inside a large wardrobe. I heard footsteps. A moment later Grandma and Second Uncle started talking a few feet from me.

“She is killing you,” Second Uncle said.

“No,” Grandma replied. “She’s no trouble. She’s a blessing.”

“I know what I see,” Second Uncle said. After a pause and a rustling of paper he said, “I bought these at the black market. You give her most of your food. She’s healthy and you are not. Promise me you’ll eat these.”

“I will,” she promised.

Second Uncle left. I stepped from the wardrobe. Grandma looked up and smiled. “Come here,” she whispered. I hurried to her, and she said, “Eat these, quickly!” She held out a small pack of roasted peanuts wrapped in newspaper.

I stuffed some in my mouth. Grandma held the others as I chewed and swallowed, and she urged, “Quickly!”

Before I was finished, Second Uncle returned. “What’s this?” he asked. He smelled my breath.

“Maomao is my granddaughter,” Grandmother said, as if that explained everything.

“This cannot continue,” Second Uncle said. Then he left the room.

Grandma fed me the remaining peanuts one at a time. She watched as I savored them. Her expression changed from delight to melancholy. She pulled me to her and stroked my hair and cried. She rocked me back and forth and repeated, “I don’t want them to take you away, Maomao.”

As she whispered the words, I cried. “I don’t want them to take me away, Grandma. I want to stay with you.” I was unsure who “them” were and where they might take me. But I was afraid and I clung to her.

After several minutes she brushed away her tears and wiped my face clean. “Go play with your sisters,” she said. “Grandma needs her rest.”

Voices from the next room interrupted my memory of Tianjin.

“I’m sorry,” Mama said.

“Mother lost weight. She became listless. We brought in a doctor to examine her. He said she had edema as a result of malnutrition. Most of her food was going into Maomao’s mouth. We could not let her die for her granddaughter.”

“You did the right thing,” Papa said.

“How did Mother react when you said you were bringing Maomao here?” Mama asked.

“We couldn’t tell her.”

“So … you … said nothing?” Mama asked.

“Yikai,” Second Uncle said, “we decided they’d break the news later. She’ll cry and sulk. But in time she’ll accept it. Then she’ll start eating and regain her health.”

“How serious are the food shortages in Tianjin?” Mama asked.

“We don’t have enough,” Second Uncle said. “Nobody does. But we’re alive. It’s the same everywhere. This famine,” he went on in a lower voice. “Four years of it. Four long years! Peasants come into Tianjin. They sell what they have. They beg. They sell their children. And when they can’t find a buyer … I don’t like to think about it. We find them on the street. Along the rivers. On the train tracks.”

“It’s the same here,” Mama said. “The black market is all that separates us from starvation. Nothing else. The three of us—I mean the four of us now—the four of us have to live on my salary.”

“Will you work again, Ningkun?” Second Uncle asked Papa.

“I don’t know,” Papa answered. “No work. No salary. No medical care.”

“How many have died?” Mama asked.

Papa said, “Many millions. Many. That’s what I’ve heard and I believe it.”

“I’ve heard it, too,” Second Uncle said.

“Why?” Mama asked. “Can you explain it?”

“Haven’t you heard? It’s the weather,” Second Uncle said. “That’s the
official
explanation.”

“What about the weather?” Mama asked.

“Has your weather changed?” Second Uncle asked. “Is there a flood here? A drought?”

“No,” Mama and Papa answered at the same time.

“It’s not the weather,” Second Uncle said.

“Will it ever end?” Mama asked.

“We can hope,” Second Uncle said.

“All we have left is hope.” Mama sighed.

“Yes,” Second Uncle responded.

There was a long silence. Then the light was switched off, and Second Uncle came into the room and lay down on the bed beside my crib.

“Papa?” I said.

“Maomao,” he answered. “You’re still awake?”

“Are we going to see Grandma tomorrow?”

“Maomao,” he said, “I am Second Uncle, remember?”

“Second Uncle,” I said, “aren’t we going to see Grandma tomorrow?”

“No. We are not.”

“Are we going to stay here?”

“This is your home. You are going to live here.”

“But I want Grandma,” I cried. “Take me home to Grandma, please. I promise I will never eat her peanuts again.”

“Go to sleep, Maomao,” he said. “Good night.” He turned away and covered himself with a blanket.

The next morning the man who had been my papa and become my second uncle was gone. I was alone with my new family.

Mama gave me a bowl of rice porridge for breakfast. “You’re going to be happy here,” she assured me. “Today we will do something special. Just Maomao and Mama.” She smiled and brushed my hair out of my eyes. “You’re coming to work with me.”

Mama was a typist in the university’s Foreign Languages Department. She was forbidden from teaching, despite her fluency in English, because of Papa’s political crimes. In the office her colleagues swarmed around me and agreed I was a very pretty girl.

“Go ahead, tell them your name. Tell them how old you are,” Mama said.

“My name is Maomao,” I said. “And I am … almost four.”

The women giggled. “Listen to that accent!” one of them clucked as she cupped a hand to her ear. “How old did you say you are?” another asked, leaning close to me in wide-eyed anticipation.

“Almost four,” I answered, and the two women repeated my words, imitating my accent and laughing.

Mama smiled and patted me affectionately.

That evening Mama said that I would stay with Papa each day
while my brother was sent to the university’s child care center. “We simply can’t afford to send both of you,” she explained.

After Mama left for work, Papa swept the apartment. After he’d finished the daily shopping, he cooked lunch for us. After that, when the weather permitted, he took me for a walk around campus. Sometimes Papa played hide-and-seek with me or told me stories. But after a while he’d tire and read his books. His spirits revived when he retrieved my brother from the child care center.

Our apartment was small—three rooms and a kitchen. One room served as a bedroom for my brother and me. Another functioned as a living room and dining room as well as a bedroom for our parents. A third room, about the size of a Ping-Pong table, was used for storage. Our few pieces of furniture were rented from the university, with the exception of the crib, which had been passed down through two generations of Mama’s family.

After dinner my brother practiced writing Chinese characters at the desk and Papa sat nearby on a stool using a chair as his desk. When my brother had finished his homework, Papa moved to the desk where he worked late into the night.

I listened to Papa typing, adjusting his chair and paging through his books and papers. Mama fell asleep while he worked translating English novels into Chinese. Now and then he came to the door of the bedroom and stood silently watching us sleep. “Papa?” I’d whisper, and he always responded, “Go to sleep, Maomao. You’ll wake up your brother.”

Papa smoked cheap cigarettes, Big Iron Bridge brand, which he bought for nine fen per pack. They left an acrid aroma lingering in the air and a permanent amber residue on Papa’s fingertips. They also left a memorable impression in the wool rug under the desk, a wedding gift from Grandma.

Late one night I was startled by an unusual commotion and cries of alarm from the next room. The apartment began to fill with smoke. Papa had fallen asleep at his desk and let his cigarette drop to the rug. It
eventually ignited in flames. Mama extinguished the fire quickly with a thermos of water but not before a hole had been burned in the rug.

Our table, on the other hand, was special because we gathered around it for our meals and often played games on it. Through yet another blunder, Papa left his special mark on the table as well.

Papa often took me to the street markets with him. Sometimes we walked to them, and other times, if they were far away, he propped me in front of him on our old bicycle and we rode. The rationing of food and the fact that Papa had no income limited our choices.

Food was scarce and money was more scarce. Mama was paid in cash once a month. There were mandatory deductions from her pay—rent for our apartment, rent for the furniture, and fees for water, electricity, coal and union dues, and the child care center for my brother. Her salary was fifty-nine yuan per month, or about 196 fen per day. Eggs cost fifty to sixty fen each on the black market, so our budget was the equivalent of less than four eggs for the entire family of four each day, before deductions.

One morning Papa found a merchant selling tiny fish. They were each about half an inch long. In normal times these were food for cats. Papa bought two pounds for us. Later, I watched him meticulously clean each fish with the tip of a knife. “They are a bargain and they are rich in protein,” he pointed out. “They are good for our health. Sometimes little is good.”

“Like little Maomao?” I asked.

He grinned and said, “Ah, you understand. Yes, like little Maomao.”

As he cleaned the fish, Papa taught me how to count and corrected my pronunciation, helping me lose my accent. He laid the fish out on the table. There were just over four hundred. He showed me how to arrange them in perfect rows twenty by twenty, all facing the same direction, until they formed a square. The half dozen that remained he placed in a line along the bottom of the square. He stepped back and observed his work proudly and told me, “When they’re dry, we’ll have a banquet!”

They dried quickly. But there was to be no banquet. By the time Papa tried to remove them, the skin of each fish had bonded to the red paint of the table. As he peeled them off, a small impression in the image of each little creature remained on the tabletop. It looked as if a master craftsman had etched the table with an intricate pattern. A school of four hundred tiny fish—all swimming in the same direction in an orderly square with a few stragglers at the bottom—covered our table like perfect fossils in shale. When my brother and I ran our fingertips over the tabletop we could feel the slight impression where each fish had dried. We were delighted, even though Papa had to clean the fish again, peeling away the skin and paint so that nearly nothing was left to eat.

My brother and I turned the tabletop into a maze for some of our games. We also used it for counting and math. My brother was able to use part of the design as a chessboard. The table provided us with endless hours of games and diversions. The joy the fish brought us in drying was far greater than our joy from eating what little remained of them.

In the summer of 1962 Papa was given permission to teach at Anhui University. He was accepted back into the academic fold as a man whose partial redemption had been achieved through three and a half years of labor in a concentration camp. He was assigned two classes—one in English composition and another in reading English texts. He was not restored to the position he had held in Beijing as a professor. He was classified as a temporary employee and his contract was reviewed every three months. He remained politically suspect and he still wore two “caps” or labels. In the eyes of the state and the university, he was both “ultra-rightist” and “an element under corrective education.” His salary of sixty yuan per month was less than one third his previous pay. He was not granted fringe benefits such as medical care or use of the university pharmacy.

I was enrolled in the child care center that autumn, and my brother was enrolled in the first grade at Meishanlu Elementary School. Shortly before classes began, Papa’s stepmother moved in with us. She had lived with Mama and Papa previously in Beijing. She shared the small bedroom with my brother and me.

Papa was a wonderful lecturer. Students and teachers from Anhui University and nearby universities came to his classes. His lecture room filled early and eager students spilled into the hallway. Others gathered to listen outside the windows. Some students began writing notes telling him how much they enjoyed his lectures and how he opened their minds to the wonders of literature. Papa destroyed the notes and warned the students never to write to him because it could get them all in trouble.

Within a few weeks, as a result of the jealousy of other faculty, Papa’s classes were restricted. Only faculty members and students from Anhui University were allowed to attend. A few junior faculty were ordered to monitor the political content of his presentations and to keep a detailed record of every word he said.

Mama worried about Papa’s popularity. She reminded him that “a big tree catches the wind” and that he should seek security in anonymity. Papa acknowledged that his passion for his work attracted the critical attention of faculty and administrators, and along with the attention came risk. He was “skating on thin ice,” he said. Yet he believed that in time his detractors might accept the simple fact that his intention was to enlighten and inspire his students. He forgot that thin ice cracks and breaks with only a slight rise in the temperature.