Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (31 page)

Zhou Jing sat down on one of the beds and asked us to sit on the other. After sitting down I noticed a woman standing in a shadow in the corner. When we were seated, she quietly came forward and sat beside Zhou Jing. I flinched as she approached. Her appearance was utterly horrifying. The entire right side of her face was a purple and blue twisted scar. The eye on that side was bloodshot and watery. The left side of her face was quite beautiful, and the eye on that side was entirely normal. I felt my jaw drop open. I felt light-headed and was tempted to rise and leave.

We sat silently. The woman looked at me and then my partner. She saw the look of shock on our faces. Finally she said in a low, almost toneless voice, “What?”

“I am Wu Yimao,” I said. I had to clear my throat before I continued. “And this … this is Xu Yuqing. We are cadre from Zhou Jing’s class. We are here for a family visit,” I said in a tremulous voice.

Zhou Jing said self-consciously, “These are my classmates, Mama.”

I was so stunned by the woman’s appearance that I simply could not continue. I sat gaping at her face, that unnerving combination of beauty and ugliness.

After a long, awkward silence, Xu Yuqing said, “We would like you to know that Zhou Jing has been excellent in her studies. And she participates in school activities productively.”

“It’s good to hear this,” her mother said. “Thank you for coming.
We have never had visitors before. So excuse me for being nervous. You are cadre. You are important people.”

She waited for us to reply. But neither of us said a word. When the woman realized we were tongue-tied, she continued. “Let me tell you, since you are cadre, what life is like for Zhou Jing and me.” She looked straight into my eyes, as if telling her story to me alone. “Look at my face,” she said. Of course, I could do nothing else. “I was not born like this.” She watched for our reaction. We were glued to every word and we wanted desperately to hear her story. But at the same time it was painful to see and to hear. Her left eye blinked. The right eye did not move but maintained a steady gaze.

“When I was your age I didn’t go to school. I wanted to. But I could not. I am from a poor family. I was sent to work in the factory when I was twelve. I worked at the textile factory throughout my teenage years. I was good at my job. And I was a pretty girl, as you can tell from the left side of my face. In fact, the textile factory employed many pretty young girls. But I was considered the prettiest of them all.

“At the end of the shift each evening, there were always boys waiting at the gate to flirt with us. I had many handsome boys chasing me.” As she said this, there was a glint in her eye, and the hint of a smile crossed half of her face. She had been emotionless, but as she remembered what she once looked like, she came alive.

“I had several marriage proposals. But I always thought I could do better. I turned them all down. I waited for someone special.

“Because I was a good worker I was soon promoted to supervisor. I walked around the shop checking everyone else’s work. One day one of the large machines froze. I had been working there so long I knew a lot about weaving machines. And since it took forever for the mechanic to arrive when there was a problem, I decided to fix it myself.

“I began poking around inside the device, trying to see where the problem was. Suddenly it started, like a wild animal that had just awakened. I have only a vague memory of what happened next. All I
remember clearly is that one second I was looking inside the machine, and the next I was in the hospital.

“I was told that the machine, inexplicably, kicked into life. It caught one of my long braids and pulled it in and ripped off my entire scalp. Half of the skin on my face went with it.

“I was lucky, they said. Someone else stopped the machine or it would have torn my entire head from my body. Many times since then I have wondered if that might not have been better. Who can tell?”

When she said this, Zhou Jing touched her hand, and she grasped it and squeezed it. Each began sobbing. The woman released her daughter’s hand, dabbed at her tears with a handkerchief, composed herself and continued.

“I was in the hospital for seven weeks. They would not let me look in the mirror. My face was wrapped with bandages. I was fed through a tube. I had no idea what to expect. I hoped for the best. I never could have imagined how horribly I had been injured. I could, however, watch the expressions on the faces of the nurses and doctors who attended me when my bandages were changed. They were sickened by what they saw.

“And so the day arrived when the bandages were removed and I was allowed to see myself. A nurse handed me a mirror, and I held it up and looked at myself. Who is that? I wondered. Who is that? I put the mirror down. I must be having a nightmare. I waited for a moment and held it up a second time. I moved my lips to make sure it was me in the mirror. It was. I nearly passed out. I had gone from being the most beautiful girl in the factory to being the ugliest girl in the world. I had become a monster.

“Boys stayed away from me after that. There was no one to talk to me, approach me or of course date me.

“You can never imagine how lonely and empty my life became. My girlfriends—the ones who remained my girlfriends, anyway—worried that I might take my own life. A friend of a friend, however, said she knew this man who worked at Anhui Teachers University. He was an
instructor there. He had a bad family background and he could find no wife. He had few friends. My friends said, ‘Listen, he is a nice person. He will not mind your looks. He will see what is inside you. He wants to meet you.’

“I bought a wig. I bought a scarf. I did what I could to look, well, human. Human! And I steeled my emotions and agreed to meet him.

“He’d been warned about my looks. He didn’t express shock. He was kind. We got along well. He could look into my face—what remained of it—and talk to me, sweetly. I told him the story of my life. He listened sympathetically. When I cried he dried my tears.

“He came back to me. And after we’d seen each other for several months and talked for hours, we decided to marry. He brought me something I thought I’d never have again. He brought me happiness.

“Within weeks of our marriage I became pregnant. But then the Great Leap Forward began, and my husband found himself in political trouble. He was labeled a rightist. They came for him and took him away to prison. One week after he was taken from me, Zhou Jing was born. She never met her father. One year later, in 1959, I was told he’d died in a camp in the Northeast. They didn’t tell me how he’d died. They just sent me a piece of paper saying he was dead.

“He was a good man with a bad fortune.”

I was mesmerized by her words. In many ways she was describing my father and our family. I wondered if her husband had been in the same camp with my father. The difference was that my father had survived and her husband—Zhou Jing’s father—had not.

I began crying, and so did Xu Yuqing. The mother continued her tale dispassionately, in a low, slow monotone. It was as if she were describing the life of someone else. She seemed to have become numb to the terrible sting of her own words.

“Those were famine years. We had no food. We had no relatives to turn to. A friend introduced me to the cook in our factory. He was very red, she said. He was from a working-class background. But more important, he could feed us.

“He stole food every day, smuggled it out after his shift and brought it to us.

“When he proposed marriage to me, I said yes immediately. What choice did I have? Yet no sooner were we married than he began beating Zhou Jing. Whenever he was unhappy about something, he turned on her and beat her. She was just a little girl. I tried to stop him. I pulled him away, but then he beat me, and when he’d finished beating me, he beat her again.

“Zhou Jing inherited her father’s intellect. She wants to read all the time. She is very quiet. She rarely speaks to anyone. She lives in her own world.

“She is in love with books. But she needs money to buy her books and clothing. If she asks, her stepfather becomes enraged.”

As her mother spoke, Zhou Jing held her head lower and lower and wept quietly. Her tears fell to the floor and her body convulsed.

“In the last year, it became worse,” the mother continued. “When he feels like it he squeezes her breasts and touches her between her legs. But there is not a thing I can do about it because nobody believes me. He is a worker with a good background. I am the widow of a rightist. I complained once to the Party secretary of his work unit. The man became enraged. ‘No one with his good background would do that,’ he growled at me. ‘Stop imagining things. If you continue making up rumors about revolutionary workers, I’ll have you arrested.’ That was his advice.

“You two are in the Communist Youth League. Can you help us? Can you help me? Can you help my child?”

At that she bowed her head and wept.

I didn’t know what to say. There was nothing we could do. Zhou Jing just sat across from me, holding her head in her hands, crying.

Zhou Jing’s was a cruel fate. But I could not change it. Xu Yuqing and I stood. We thanked Zhou Jing and her mother. They didn’t look at us or say a word. They sat together on the bed, desolate and inconsolable. On the way home neither of us could stop crying. We sat on a bench under a lamppost and consoled each other.

In the next few weeks I was extra nice to Zhou Jing in school. I tried to draw her out. I gave her pencils and notebooks. One afternoon I pulled her aside and handed her my treasured copy of
David Copperfield
. “Keep this, Zhou Jing,” I said. “It has kept me company when I was lonely. Maybe it will be your friend.”

Following graduation, Zhou Jing was sent down to a distant village. I thought of her often after that. But I never saw her again.

While I adjusted quickly to the routine of school, life at home inside the church was not without unpleasant surprises and difficulties. The church had been built on a small rise called Fenghuangshan (Phoenix Mountain). It was surrounded by apartment buildings. A single public latrine in the neighborhood was shared by nearly two hundred families. It was a five-minute walk uphill from the church to the latrine. Our only source for fresh water was a single faucet outside the church. The water did not flow on a regular basis. Some days and some hours there was water. Some days there was not. Often there was so little pressure that the water merely dripped from the faucet.

One of our neighbors in the church was a low-ranking cadre who desperately wanted to be promoted. He was fifty years old and extremely thin. He looked like a walking skeleton. His cheeks were sunken, his skin was sallow, his hair was thin and white. For years he’d striven to rise within the Party, but something had held him back. We were cautioned by our neighbors that in order to ingratiate himself to other Party members, he had become a sneak and an informant. From the day we moved in, he took a special interest in my parents.

We often entertained visitors. The cadre was always curious about them. He intercepted them when they arrived or left and struck up an awkward conversation. He asked their names, their occupations and the nature of their business with us. Then he hurried back to his apartment to write a meticulous report for higher Party cadres. He could also listen in on our conversations inside the church. The church was designed for good acoustics and not for privacy. Whenever anyone even expelled gas in one of the units, we all heard it—and giggled. The cadre seemed tireless and was alert twenty-four hours a day. His copious detailed reports went into my parents’ files. And those files grew thick with his observations and suspicions.

We learned of his activities because one afternoon, when he was rushing off to a Party meeting carrying a thick sheaf of papers, a page from a report came loose and fluttered to rest a few steps from our front door. I found it when I returned from school. I saw the names of my parents and a list of the hours of the day and a summary of their activities and conversations. I gave it to my father. He read it. He showed it to Mama. They were unsure what to do with it. They did not want to be caught with it because they would doubtless be accused of theft. So they tore it into small pieces and burned it in our stove. Later that day I saw the man lurking outside the church, head down, scanning the ground for something. He looked up at me and scowled. I smiled and went back inside to do my homework.

While the cadre was a disconcerting annoyance, the Chen family who lived next to us was never a threat. The father was employed in the university barbershop. The mother worked at Wuhu Textile Factory. They had three children. The oldest, Yuanyu, was the one I’d heard crying through the reed wall. Night after night, we would whisper to each other through the wall until someone in the building shouted for us to shut up. She attended my school, where she was one grade ahead of me. We became fast friends. She was about my size, a very pretty girl, with small eyes, full lips and fair skin with freckles. We each had two brothers. We got up at the same time every morning. Whoever awakened
first tapped on the mat softly to awaken the other. Then we dressed and grabbed a basket for grocery shopping and walked to the market together. The government market was cheaper than the black market, but the quality of the food was bad and it was rationed. Most of the time we went to the government market. There was always a long line. We stood in line together, and while we waited, we talked and combed each other’s hair.

The first morning we walked to the market, Yuanyu leaned close to me and whispered, “Do you see him?”

“See who?” I asked, since hundreds of other early shoppers surrounded us in the street.

“Our crazy neighbor. He’s following us.”

I looked back but noticed nothing out of the ordinary. “I don’t see him,” I said.

A moment later Yuanyu turned quickly and then said, “He hides sometimes when he thinks you know he’s there. Wait for a minute and then look again.”

I did as she said and I saw him: a strange figure darting back and forth to conceal himself from us. Our eyes met for a moment before he crouched behind a group of pedestrians. He was a young man, his hair was tousled, his shirt was fastened only by a single button and he had a silly guilty grin on his face.