by Andrew Kwong
At the time, Shiqi was divided into several administrative districts, and ours was the Wonder River District. The Party-appointed district heads had control of our daily lives, including local policing and security, training of the People’s Militia (a local law-enforcement and army reserve force), political education and job allocation, as well as travel in and out of the district, and even marriages. They were also responsible for protecting their districts from any ‘undesirables’, such as petty criminals or spies from the colonies, and re-educating those with unfavourable family classifications, such as small landlords (those who owned less than an acre of land), capitalists (anyone who owned a business large or small), rightists, and intellectuals, including teachers like my parents. To assist them in these duties, the district heads formed local committees made up of one resident from each street whom they considered communistic, progressive and patriotic.
Our District Head was a returned PLA officer, a thin man with a voice hoarse from constant smoking. In between phlegmy coughs, his eyes glinted with revolutionary spirit. My father said this man had directed the district during many campaigns, from the bloody land reform and ‘mopping up’ programs in the years just after the PRC was founded – during which the landowning class and those resisting the young republic were exterminated – to the subsequent ruthless nationalisation of all industries and businesses, as well as the frequent summary executions of recalcitrant landlords and counter-revolutionaries, and the enforced exile of many others who were sent to re-education camps in remote parts of the country. Everyone was fearful of the District Head.
One day, the District Head and his committee members trooped into our house and marched past us kids as we were playing hide-and-seek in the first lounge room. They went straight to Baba, the only man of the family in the house at the time, and demanded to check out all the living quarters. He wasn’t allowed to accompany them. They stomped into every room, noting down on a scrap of paper how each was occupied. Yiu-hoi, Ah-ki, Yiu-wei, Weng and I stopped playing and went over to the adults. Ying and Ping were away at school at the time. Baba was frowning, and I could see he was upset. Mama stood by him with her head down, not daring to meet the comrades’ gaze.
‘There are five unoccupied living quarters in this house, and you have two large kitchens,’ said the District Head, who was wearing his faded PLA tunic. He had one fist pressed deeply into his waist and the other thrust close to Baba’s face. His voice bounced off the grey brick walls in the third lounge room as he accused Baba of not reporting the vacant rooms to his office.
‘But . . . but they are my brothers’ rooms, and they have their furniture in them,’ Baba replied with his head bowed and his hands held together in front of him.
I clung on to his arm, staring at the District Head’s PLA tunic and feeling baffled.
‘Haven’t you been to street meetings? Haven’t you heard the rules?’ the District Head shouted at my father. ‘It’s rich people like you who don’t care about the proletariat! Who don’t care about communism! People like you need more political studies and reeducation.’
I was trembling, and my sister and cousins were all quiet. Because they were regarded as redundant intellectuals from the past, my parents were already attending evening political studies classes with many of our neighbours, and they were regularly sent to re-education camps, usually for a week at a time, sometimes just a weekend, though Baba had once been away for over a month. I hated the idea of him going away again.
Baba nodded and said softly, ‘I’ll write to my brothers and let you know as soon as they reply.’
‘Not good enough!’ the District Head roared. ‘We need all the empty rooms now.’ He turned and marched out of the house with his committee members. We were all shaking.
Within days, five families had moved in, and our house became as noisy as Come Happiness Road at lunch hour. We children were curious of the strangers in our once-peaceful home, and we didn’t know what to do, so we stopped playing and quietly watched the chaos set in.
Baba explained that many people came to town to look for jobs while others were relocated there on government business. The Korean War soldiers had returned home, and war casualties needed treatment. ‘There are many homeless people out there and we must help,’ he said to us. ‘Now go and play with your cousins.’ At other times my parents said to us, ‘We share the house just like we share food, so that every citizen is catered for.’ We kept our spirits high, singing and dancing to celebrate our revolution. We were so proud of our parents.
Unlike placid Ping, Ying grew unhappy as the house became crowded. She avoided the new residents for weeks. No greetings. No eye contact. She was now a senior in primary school and was looking forward to learning Russian soon. So she felt she deserved a room of her own, but all the unoccupied rooms were taken up by residents assigned by the housing authority in town. She began talking back to my parents and slamming doors.
‘It’s only kind to let people share our large home,’ I overheard Mama say to her one day. ‘Besides, the Housing Control Bureau has the authority to make sure every unoccupied room in town is filled. It’s not our family’s choice.’
One of the people allocated to our house was a young comrade called Choi-lin, who worked in the ration-voucher store in town. She wore smart blouses and pretty floral frocks, which stood out in a sea of green, grey and blue. Ying and Ping took to her and admired her dresses.
Choi-lin immediately showed an interest in our family. Once, when Baba was out doing voluntary labour, Choi-lin asked Ying, ‘Where are the other uncles? What do they do?’
Ying said she didn’t know.
‘What about your baba, what did he do before the revolution? Was he a teacher?’
Ying gave her a blank look.
My mother appeared from the kitchen with her cooking utensils. Choi-lin stopped the conversation and gave each of us a sweet wrapped in colourful transparent paper, at the same time telling Mama what good children we all were. You couldn’t help but like her.
When the authorities allocated a small corner in one of the two kitchens for Mama to cook in, she became unhappy. She discovered that the new residents had used her pots, wok, saucepans and other utensils, and left them dirty or even taken them away. But Baba said it was hard to accuse the new residents of stealing even if we saw them with the items we had ‘lost’. The District Head believed that the haves had to share with the have-nots, and that the proletariat, the chosen people, would never steal from one another. The front door, which Baba had been so particular about locking up every night, was now left unlocked under the instruction of the housing authorities. ‘There are no thieves under communism,’ the District Head assured my parents. ‘Everyone is equal. There is no need to steal.’
Nevertheless, Mama asked us to help her collect all the remaining utensils and store them in our room, together with our bowls and chopsticks. Later, we kept firewood there as well. With the doors to my parents’ room locked, we felt more close-knit than ever. There was a cosy sense of belonging to one another as a family, despite the presence of many strangers in the house.
CHAPTER 2
I enjoyed spending more time with my family, especially Baba. At home I followed him around and helped with the chores: when he swept the floors, I gathered up the rubbish and took it to the bin. We chatted as we worked together.
Around this time, he began showing me how to fish in the waterways. ‘Ah-mun, see the water in the creek? When it’s clear, you won’t catch any fish. If there were fish there, the water would look murky because it would have been churned up by the fish as they play.’ He recommended the best times for fishing: ‘Fish early in the morning or when the sun goes down for a better catch. Sometimes big fish feed in the night and you can hear them in the fishpond or the river. And always remember that patience helps.’
Passing near our house and skirting the whole of Kwong Street was a 1.5-metre-high levee wall, which, Baba explained, was meant to reduce flooding ev
ery summer. Outside the wall was the communal land, where the paddy fields and vegetable gardens were; on the embankment under the wall was our family vegetable patch. We also kept a few rabbits, chickens and ducks in a walled-off side lane of the house. The levee wall became my favourite spot to talk with my father; there were so many interesting things to learn from him.
‘Why can’t we eat the lychees?’ I asked one day. I was thinking of the many lychee trees, laden with green fruits in large bunches, that swayed back and forth in the summer breezes along the banks of the fishponds not far from our house. My mouth began to water.
‘They need nutrients and the sun to grow bigger,’ Baba explained, ‘and then they will turn red to tell you it’s time to pick them.’
‘Why don’t the birds eat them now?’
‘Because they are green like the leaves, making it hard for the birds to see them, and they have tough, bitter skin.’
‘Oh. What about the green bok choy?’
‘You have to cook them before they taste nice.’
‘I like the colour red.’
‘It’s a revolutionary colour, my son.’ Baba was always moved by the many red flags around us. Their colour, he told me, symbolised the blood spilled by the martyrs who had sacrificed themselves for us and our country so that we could have a peaceful life under Chairman Mao.
‘How do you spill blood?’
‘Your skin opens up when you get shot, cut or stabbed, and blood gushes out; if you lose too much blood, you can die.’
Baba scooped me up and held me close to him every time I asked unusual questions like this, and I would put my arms around his neck, savouring the cigarette scent he carried. ‘My dear Ah-mun, you are too young to think of this, about death and dying. Remember, my son, you only have one life, and you must treasure it. Now go and play.’ Baba always kissed me before letting me down.
Late one afternoon in early May 1955, my father and I were sitting on the levee wall in front of our house, catching the breeze from the South China Sea. We looked towards Come Happiness Road, admiring the ripening lychees that hung low near the fishponds next to the sea of jade-green rice that rippled in the gentle wind. The air was thick and humid, and the sun blazing. Baba explained to me how the sun sucked up lots of tiny water droplets and strung them together, forming a veil of moisture that floated in the warm air.
Yet, while the young rice was lush and the lychees were thriving, other vegetation was suffering in the heat. Even the resilient lotus plants in the pond looked limp, their leaves singed at the edges. (How I loved their roots, which Mama cooked, and the seeds she used in soups.) Why, I wondered, were so many plants withering when the air was so damp? It was all very confusing to me. And it seemed to mirror another puzzle: although we were promised that the revolution was bringing us great benefits, my parents had still not been allocated jobs, and their concern had begun to show on their faces. I didn’t want to see them become shrivelled like some of the vegetation around us.
I began to distract myself from the heat by capturing the humidity with both hands, then watching the liquid drip from my fists to the thirsty earth. It was almost like squeezing ripe lychees.
Baba was amused. ‘Ah, water, the life juice of our universe,’ he said. ‘Fortunately, here in the Pearl River Delta, we’re blessed with an abundance of it – usually enough to maintain three good rice harvests a year, plus a vegetable crop or two in between.’
‘But what’s life juice?’ I asked, looking up at Baba as I swung my legs against the brick wall, feeling the coolness between my toes.
‘Well, my son, it’s what’s required for plants and other living creatures to grow properly. I suppose even for plants it’s more than just water: it’s water, good soil and nutrients.’
‘And what do we need to grow?’ I asked.
Baba looked at me, frowned and said, ‘Well, for us it’s a little bit more complicated. A meaningful life needs more than food, nutrients and water. You need to be free, like the sparrows and swallows that fly wherever they want to.’ He gestured to the hazy blue above us and looked at me again, his heavy eyes widening. ‘You also need education, nurturing and an opportunity to thrive. When you grow up, Ah-mun,’ he added, ‘you’ll understand what I mean.’ He then turned to the east, from where the sea breeze came, and frowned again as he looked towards the horizon.
That was the first time in my life that I knew my father was really worried about something – perhaps about his own predicament, the family or our future. With both parents unemployed, the money we received from Hong Kong didn’t last long, even just for essentials like food, and we children often sensed our parents’ anxiety towards the end of each month and the arrival of the next allowance.
*
Coming home from school a few days later, I overheard my parents in a heated discussion. ‘I don’t think they trust us intellectuals,’ Baba said to Mama, who sat on the edge of the bed folding the laundry. ‘Just look around. All our university friends have no jobs. Writers and poets and other artists have no jobs. The accountants and lawyers are all unemployed or in prison. The government is trying to get rid of us . . .’ Baba’s voice dipped to a whisper as he saw me walk into the room. He moved closer to Mama, mumbling, ‘Without the intellectuals and educated people, a nation of illiterate peasants is a lot easier to rule.’
Mama paused in her task, her eyes growing large. ‘Be very careful of what you say, my dear,’ she said. ‘We’ll be in big trouble if the tenants hear this.’
It was then my father pulled me close and said, ‘Son, you didn’t hear what we were talking about, did you?’
I didn’t know what to say. Instead I stared at him and Mama.
‘If you’ve heard anything at all, you must keep it secret. You don’t want Mama and Baba ending up doing more political meetings or more re-education camp time, do you?’ He tried to look straight into my eyes, but I avoided his gaze.
‘No. No, Baba, I didn’t hear what you were talking about.’
My parents had wanted to contribute to the rebuilding of China, but things hadn’t worked out as they’d wished. In the beginning they were proud to be regarded as the so-called ‘high intellectuals’ – those with university qualifications.
‘We are among the very few university graduates left,’ I often heard my parents reminding each other. ‘Our Motherland needs us to educate the next generations.’ They had refused to relocate away from China before 1949, when the border was still open and many of their friends had left. Instead they had waited for a call from the District Head, who was in charge of employment locally. But the call never came. ‘Wai-hung and Beng’e work like peasants in the field when they should be teaching,’ Baba said to Mama, speaking of my aunt and her husband who lived in Shenmingting, Mama’s ancestral home.
‘Like us, they were educated before 1949,’ Mama mumbled.
‘I hate relying on your mother to send us money from Hong Kong,’ Baba said as he lit another cigarette while one still burned between his fingers. He shook his head. ‘The re-education camps are full to the brim with so-called intellectuals. The ones not there have to do long hours of volunteer work.’ He sucked hard on his cigarette before turning to Mama. ‘But “volunteer”? I don’t think so. It’s forced labour . . .’
‘Keep your voice down,’ she said.
I hated seeing her endearing smile disappear from her pleasant face. Her slim body hunched up and the glint in her eyes died. She seemed to grow old faster behind the shut door to our room whenever Baba was in a funny mood.
‘They don’t trust us – just look around,’ Baba said to her on another evening. ‘Denying us job opportunities is like the Qin Emperor burying scholars alive. Didn’t Stalin try to stop intellectuals from working by sending them to Siberia? Now Mao is doing the same to get rid of us.’
Sometimes I heard them complaining between themselves that jobs had gone to Party members, revolutionary heroes, returned soldiers from Korea, the many martyrs’ families, and p
easants and proletariats, all of whom had better classifications than my parents.
But unhappy as they were, I never heard them argue with each other. Baba always apologised later for any surliness, which brought back Mama’s smile. Then I loved my baba again.
*
After overhearing Baba’s grievances and Mama’s quiet acceptance of his complaints, I started to fear that they both weren’t as progressive and communistic as I’d believed them to be. I hoped they would become more like the comrades in charge of us, including the District Head, Comrade Teacher Wong, Choi-lin and some of my classmates’ parents: patriotic, solemn and totally devoted to Chairman Mao. If Baba or Mama had been directly involved in the liberation of China, I now realised, they would have jobs and we’d have received more food vouchers and wouldn’t need to rely on capitalist dollars from Hawaii.
At school, we were told that high intellectuals weren’t needed in the new China and advised to report any members of the community who weren’t pulling their weight. I wanted to be a good communist when I grew up, but how could I ever report my parents to the authorities, even if a few of my schoolmates reported their own parents?
To make myself feel better, I’d make up patriotic stories about Baba as I sat on the levee wall, watching the birds fly freely in the hot sky. I began to fantasise that perhaps his real role was top secret. After all, despite my father’s lowly classification, people in our town seemed to look up to him. Most of them had never been to school, so he helped them fill in application forms for jobs or for permission to stay overnight with relatives outside the district. He wrote letters for people who wanted to ask out fellow workers; he even prepared marriage proposals. He fetched drinking water from the river and washing water from the wells for the elderly in the street. Many of them had watched him grow up to be an educated man, and they were proud of him.