Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (4 page)

A young faculty member oversaw Papa’s thought reform and instructed him in Communist Party doctrine. In turn, he received instruction in English literature from Papa. It was a strange situation for each of them. The young man composed book reviews and literary essays for Papa, and Papa wrote political essays and self-criticism for him.

After two years of outstanding teaching, the Party secretary notified Papa that his political status would be revised. His two caps—“ultra-rightist” and “element under corrective education”—were to be removed, and a political instructor would no longer be assigned to him.

On July 4, 1964, the third anniversary of his return from the concentration
camp, Papa was officially “decapped” and he was “returned to the ranks of the people.” But this was not really true. Instead of becoming a citizen and faculty member in good standing he was merely a “decapped rightist and element under corrective education.” He exchanged one derogatory label for another. And it was understood that caps were held in reserve by “the people”—meaning the authorities. They had the right to replace them whenever they wished.

Papa was told that his changed status came with substantial financial compensation. And it meant that Mama was allowed to teach English to the non–English majors in the university. The job reassignment for Mama took effect immediately, but the announcement of the new salary was postponed until the last week of the year. Papa was notified that in recognition of his “progress in thought reform” and excellence in teaching, he was awarded a raise of ten yuan per month. It was disappointing. We had hoped that we’d be eating better. Yet Mama said we should be grateful for small blessings. “Ten yuan,” she reminded us, “is better than nothing.” It meant a few more eggs each month and a little more meat now and then.

The university campus was surrounded by a high wall. Four gates provided access to the campus. Within the wall were several classroom and administration buildings; living quarters for the faculty, staff and students; a clinic; stores for the university community and a child care center.

The center was a single-story concrete structure at the north end of the campus. Nearly two hundred children attended the facility. They ranged from infants to seven-year-olds—the last age before children transferred to the elementary school outside the university wall, a fifteen-minute walk from campus. Mama enrolled me there in the autumn of 1962, when I was four.

Children were separated by age in the center and assigned to one of four classrooms. Each classroom was tended by two teachers. In addition to the classrooms, there was a kitchen where a daily meal was prepared. The children were served food in the classrooms. The teachers and supervisors were all women. The only man in the building was the cook, whom we called Uncle Liu.

Our day was devoted primarily to simple academic exercises—learning
to read and write Chinese characters, basic math problems, drawing, and crafts such as paper folding. Part of each day was also allotted to organized games on the playground. The children three and under played tag or amused themselves on the slide or merry-go-round or dug and built in the sandpit. The children aged four to seven played Chinese jump rope, which required improvisation, since we had no real rope. Children brought rubber bands to school and wove them into a single thick line that served as our rope. Whenever our rubber rope frayed and broke we wove it together again with newer rubber bands.

I learned to chant and count on the playground and gradually became adept at skipping over the rubber line. Soon I could skip over it without actually seeing it, by merely watching the movement of children in front of me. We learned to jump in unison and avoid getting out of step and being snagged. The play seemed nothing more than an enjoyable diversion at first. Yet in time I found that our game was an ideal preparation for what was expected of us in this world of socialist uniformity into which we had been born.

When I was enrolled in the center, I had three problems.

First, I spoke with a distinct Tianjin accent. Students and teachers were sent into fits of laughter when I spoke.

My second problem was equally distressing. I threw a ball, picked up my chopsticks and wrote with my left hand. This was forbidden. As in almost every facet of life under Communist rule, uniformity was required, even in the hand one used for activities. Everyone was required to use the right hand. Being left-handed was considered a “wrong choice” and had to be corrected. The teachers spotted my deviance. At first they removed the writing brush or chopsticks from my left hand and put them in my right, but invariably I returned them to my left hand. They started slapping my hand. “Stop that, Wu Yimao!” the teachers snapped over my shoulder. “Why can’t you learn? Why can’t you be like everyone else?”

Finally, in their exasperation, the teachers assigned another girl,
Qin Xiaolan, to sit beside me and watch during lunch or writing exercises. When I tried to use my left hand, she whispered, “You’re doing it again, Maomao.” She was patient and persistent, and gradually, with her reminders, I developed facility with my right hand. But I was never very good at calligraphy, and I have difficulty to this day manipulating chopsticks with my right hand.

My third problem could not be corrected. I was from a “black” family. Children from black families—those accused of rightist or reformist or anti-revolutionary leanings—bore the guilt of their parents. We were quarantined in our own peculiar circles. I did not become aware of my membership in this group until I first heard the words whispered by students at the center. The teachers knew my family background and carefully steered me into the circles of children from other black families. We understood we were bad seeds. Being from a black family was like carrying a contagious disease that could contaminate others through social or physical contact.

Children of “red” families—those of Party members and highranking university officials—formed their own closed group. They sat next to each other in classes, played together on the playground, ate together during lunch, and walked back and forth to the center together. Xiaolan was assigned to help me not simply because she was a diligent student but because she was from a black family, and it was deemed acceptable for her to have a close association with me.

I slowly overcame my initial difficulties. I learned to use my right hand to write and to hold chopsticks, and I lost my accent. I knew my family was black and there was nothing I could do about it. I accepted my new parents and my brother as my real family. When my new grandmother arrived from Beijing, I accepted her, too.

But I never forgot my Tianjin family. I thought of my grandma often. In my dreams, for a long time, I was back on Happiness Lane in Tianjin.

My second brother was born on July 2, 1963. Papa named him Yicun, meaning “one village.” His name was taken from a poem by the classical poet Lu You. In the poem, the “one village” signified renewed hope.

The birth of another brother meant I was relegated to a less important position in the family. My father entertained a traditional Chinese conceit valuing boys more than girls. His sons were his pride and joy. His daughter was another child. He cared for me, but not as much as for my brothers.

Papa devotedly helped my older brother with his homework and doted on my younger brother. I was never asked how I was doing in school or what had happened to me each day. I wasn’t questioned about my playmates. It was expected that I should fill a role of secondary importance to my brothers, that I should watch over them, take care of them, do household chores, and serve them and my parents and grandmother.

Mama taught me to sweep the floor and to wash and dry the dishes and to set the table. Papa taught me how to shop and bargain. My first solitary task was purchasing eggs and carrying them home. Papa
handed me one yuan and sent me off to the nearby street markets. On the way home I watched where I walked to avoid tripping on paving stones. When I returned with unbroken eggs and a bit of change, Papa congratulated me and assigned me additional shopping duties.

I collected the milk ration for Yicun each morning. At dawn an elderly vendor riding a bicycle pulled up outside our apartment building and called out, “MILK! POUR YOUR MILK!”

When I heard the milkman’s cry, I rushed downstairs carrying a small pot. I put my pot on the ground, and he handed me two bottles of milk. The top of each bottle was covered with blue-and-white waxed paper. A rubber band held the paper in place. I removed the rubber band and slipped it over my wrist and pulled off the waxed paper. Under it was a small cardboard disk sealing the mouth of the bottle. The underside of the disk was coated with slick rich cream. I removed the disk and licked it clean. I poured the milk into my pot, put the lid and paper back on the bottle and returned them to the milkman. The rubber bands I kept to make jump ropes.

Sometimes the old milkman asked wryly, “Didn’t you miss a drop, little girl?” I’d stop and examine the bottle to make sure nothing more could be shaken from it, and he’d laugh. I carried the full pot up a flight of stairs, never spilling any. I learned how to light the fire in our stove with kindling and coal in order to heat the milk.

In the afternoons after I’d finished sweeping and cleaning the pots and pans, I played outside. There was a shallow sandpit beside the sports field, and I built little cities and canals and my own miniature Great Wall in the sand. I met other girls from the neighborhood who came to the sandpit, and we played together. We talked about our parents and our brothers, and I discovered they had lives like mine—the same inattention and expectations, the same duties and the same diminished status relative to our brothers. We became friends.

When I returned home from the child care center, I sometimes saw Grandmother outside watering or weeding a small vegetable garden of tomatoes, beans and turnips that she had planted between the apartment
buildings. I recognized her because of the way she walked. Her movements were slow. Her feet had been bound when she was a child. This was the traditional Chinese practice of breaking and tightly wrapping a girl’s feet in cotton bandages in order to keep them as small as possible. As a consequence, she hobbled around the garden with a peculiar rolling gait.

One evening when she was washing her little feet, I noticed she had six toes on her left foot. “Grandmother, why do you have six toes?” I asked her. I stared at her remarkable foot.

“It means good luck,” she told me.

I examined my own feet and found only five toes. I felt along the edge of one foot to see if I might sprout another toe when I grew older, but I found nothing. I concluded I was not lucky. I asked Papa about it.

“It’s an old superstition,” he told me. “It means nothing, Maomao. Nothing at all.”

I remembered the phrase and again asked Grandmother about it. “I know it means good luck,” she insisted. “I am living with my son and his two sons. That is good luck, Maomao. That is six-toes good luck.”

I asked Xiaolan and she said her mother had told her it did not mean good luck at all. “It means a cruel fate,” she said.

My Hefei grandmother was not at all like my Tianjin grandma. When she came to our home, the famine was ending but there was still a food shortage. Each morning Grandmother was given an egg—a rare treat in those times—because she had diabetes and Papa said it was essential for her health. After warming the milk for my brother, I fried one egg for Grandmother. This stood the world as I’d known it in Tianjin on its head. There, Grandma had been my protector and had denied herself food in order to feed me. My mouth watered as I watched Grandmother eat.

One morning when my parents were at work and my brothers and I were home with Grandmother, I fixed her an egg and stood across from her at the table. Instead of eating it, she called my brother Yiding.
She asked him to sit beside her, and then she cut her egg into small pieces and fed them to him while I watched. I could almost taste the egg. I had leaned forward to see better when, suddenly, Grandmother stopped, looked at me sternly and snapped, “Go to the other room. This is not for girls.”

It was unfair. But I learned that the best food, the best everything, in our household and others like it, was for the boys first and for the girls last.

Four days after Papa’s decapping, on July 8, 1964, we received a telegram from Second Uncle in Tianjin. It read: “Mother sick. Come now. Hurry. Bring Maomao.”

I was excited by this unexpected chance to see Grandma for the first time since my return to Hefei. I had asked often if I might visit Grandma or she might visit us. Mama responded by telling me how expensive such a trip was—costing nearly a month’s salary for a single ticket—and how difficult it was for Grandma to make a long journey at her age.

We had received letters each month from Grandma and Second Uncle. Sometimes Mama called me to her side when she read them and told me, “Grandma says she misses you, Maomao.” My heart skipped a beat when I heard that, and I replied, “Tell Grandma I miss her and tell her to eat all her peanuts!”

Mama packed a few items, and the next morning we boarded the train to Tianjin.

I could not stop talking during the journey. I told Mama everything I planned to say to Grandma, the songs I would sing to her and
the games we would play. Mama’s thoughts were elsewhere, however, and she only nodded at my words. I stayed awake most of the night looking out the window, watching the other passengers, talking to my doll, making plans for Tianjin.

We arrived at the house on Happiness Lane the next morning. Second Uncle somberly greeted us. I made my way to my old bedroom to look for Grandma. The bed was tidily made and Grandma’s clothes were stacked neatly in the old wardrobe, but there was no sign of Grandma. I glanced at myself in the ancient flaking mirror and smiled and spun around, the way I used to do. I recognized the sandalwood scent of the place and the creak of the plank floor when I crossed the room.

I returned to Mama and the others, who were gathered in the foyer. Second Uncle said that Grandma had been in great pain and was taken to the hospital. She had immediately gone into surgery. “The doctor found she had liver cancer and it had spread,” he said. “She was bleeding internally and the doctor said there was little he could do except try to alleviate her pain. After I heard that I sent the telegram.”