by Andrew Kwong
After the simple ceremony Mama rushed off, heading towards the west side of Shiqi where the Wonder River Bridge connected town to country. It began as the same road that linked Shiqi to Shenmingting, then after crossing the river it branched sharply north towards Guangzhou.
I went outside to sit on the levee wall, trying to recapture the times Baba and I had spent there together. The north wind stung my face and hands, so I pulled up the collar of my padded jacket and lowered the earflaps of my PLA-style cap. The solidity of the surrounding darkness unnerved me. The bitter wind whipped at me without mercy. I cried as I thought of the fifteen years that would have to pass before I would see Baba again. It was a long time, almost twice my lifetime. How would he be when he came home? What would I be then, as a man in my early twenties? Could we still have fun together? Would we go fishing in the lotus pond or the rivers, or even the sea that we had never managed to visit? Would he recognise me and put his strong arms around me, holding me close so I could smell his cigarettes? These questions and many others washed over me with my tears.
The first light had not yet arrived, and the frost cut into my hands as I got down from the levee wall. Despite the ban, I was determined to see Baba one last time. And perhaps he’d see me.
I caught up with Mama and followed her in the predawn darkness, keeping a good distance between us so she wouldn’t know that I was disobeying the District Head’s order.
The cold wind blew across town, slicing through the narrow streets and alleyways. It pierced my padded jacket and nipped at my skin. The dim light from the miserable street lights trembled. The People’s Militia guards were still on duty, cowering inside their padded PLA jackets, ever ready to defend Shiqi from would-be invaders. Dogs barked as we made our way towards the Wonder River Bridge.
Exposed debris made the river look gloomy. The water seemed frozen as it receded towards the east to join other rivers on their way to the South China Sea. A small crowd of adults had gathered along the east bank. I noticed a few older children among them, and I shared the feeble defiance in their eyes. No one was talking, but there were quiet sobs and the blowing of noses accompanied by familiar phlegmy coughs. People lowered their heads in humility to acknowledge the prisoners’ wretched fates. Mama was in the crowd, unaware I was on the other side of the bridge.
Approaching footsteps thumped on the gloomy street.
We turned our heads towards the sound.
The prisoners soon appeared, walking two abreast. They wore new padded khaki jackets with large bold numbers painted on the front and back. They walked with their heads down, but from time to time their eyes searched the anxious faces of the waiting crowd for their loved ones.
As the column slowed at the Wonder River Bridge, people began to walk alongside the prisoners. And now, I noticed, Mama was by Baba’s side. The backs of their hands touched as they moved in unison, tied by an invisible knot.
Much to everyone’s surprise, the guards’ stony faces softened. They even averted their gaze, allowing the prisoners to relish their last sensations of home: the silhouette of the Pagoda Hill in the first light, the muddy-fishy smell of the river, and the warmth of their loved ones.
Most of the prisoners were crossing the Wonder River for the last time. Heilongjiang, better known as the Great Northern Wilderness to us southerners, was a long way from home. Few would survive its severe cold to see Shiqi again.
I edged closer, trying to hear what my parents were saying to each other. Then I saw Baba take hold of Mama’s free hand, while her other hand tried to wipe away those endless tears. Her small frame trembled in her worker’s jacket.
I pushed through the crowd to reach Baba. I held on to him and couldn’t stop crying. He bent down and picked me up. He held me close, pressing my face against his. Our tears joined together as they trickled down to my neck and onto my chest. I tasted the saltiness and locked it in my heart permanently. I felt hot and started to sweat, but I didn’t care.
We walked on. Mama clung to both of us, and couldn’t stop crying. The small bridge seemed to stretch out forever, exactly as I had wished for. We didn’t speak, but I am sure that our hearts beat loudly as one into the silence of that morning.
It was there that I experienced the most powerful feeling of love and belonging, a moment of inexplicable magic and pain. I knew then this would remain with me all my life. At the same time, it was a moment of utter vulnerability, dejection and despondency. But there was no time to scream for justice – our remaining time together was too precious to be squandered in righteous indignation. We just kept walking in a huddle, feeling the warmth and strength of each other, so fierce that even the piercing north wind couldn’t disrupt our sense of unity.
As we finished crossing the bridge, Baba promised to come home to us, and Mama pledged to stick to the plan they had hatched for the family. One day, somewhere, we would be reunited.
A light mist rose in the icy air with a fragile eeriness while the river flowed on. I saw eternity in the eddying tide under the bridge. How I wanted it to take away my family’s sorrow and misfortune, but at the same time maintain our hope of a peaceful life together in a place we could call home, no matter how far away.
*
More than a month later, Baba’s first letter arrived. It was brief. He sent his love to each of us and asked about our progress at school, urging us to study hard and become good citizens of New China. He spent the larger part praising Chairman Mao for giving him the opportunity for re-education and making him realise how important it was to continue the People’s Revolution. He also praised the Chinese Communist Party for its leadership. He mentioned very little about the prison camp, except that the winter snow piled high everywhere.
‘The letter’s been opened and resealed,’ Ying said. She pressed the envelope to her cheek, savouring it as though it was Baba’s touch.
‘The camp authority must have inspected it,’ Mama said. ‘So did our local authority.’ But she didn’t seem to care how many times the short letter had been opened and resealed. She read it a few more times, and a faint smile rose on her face. How I wished that smile would stay there.
My sisters and I snuggled close to her and wept. We were all relieved that Baba had arrived safely at the prison, but we were worried about the extreme cold.
After that we wrote often to Baba, being careful what we said. We soon learnt to censor our expressions of affection, and to ensure that everything was politically correct. With some luck, we believed, this might count towards his re-education merit points.
*
‘No, not that grinning face again,’ Ying said as she noticed the District Head appear at the front of our house. She went straight to her room and slammed the door.
I overheard him telling my mother to resume evening meetings for prisoners’ spouses. Three times a week, Mama would need to leave us at home while she attended these meetings under the watchful eyes of the District Head and his committee members.
‘He’s here to bolster our revolutionary spirits,’ Mama said later to us kids. ‘Just to make sure we continue to be progressive and patriotic, and don’t yield to anger.’
‘Hate him,’ Ying said.
At school she was regularly made to stand up in class and denounce Baba. Humiliated and shamed by the teachers and classmates for being the daughter of a counter-revolutionary, she’d cry all the way home.
The street seemed to be subdued. Some neighbours talked quietly as we passed by; others looked the other way.
Mama, meanwhile, was eating little and sighing a lot. She moved about with her head down. Other times she sat alone in the dark, grasping my father’s letters in her hands. She rarely spoke and didn’t want to go to bed. She started a habit of smoking in Baba’s favourite corner. Each time she turned to look at us, she burst into tears. We kept reminding her that Baba had done nothing wrong and that they would release him soon, even though the fifteen-year sentence seemed interminably long.
In the small hours
of the morning I often went to sit on the levee wall and wait for light to arrive from the east to mark off another day of Baba’s imprisonment. One time, a strange calm came over me that I found impossible to define. Maybe it was a sense of acceptance. I jumped off the wall and ran to my mother. ‘Everything will be good again, Mama. Please don’t be sad today.’
She looked at me and murmured, ‘Yes, it’ll be good one day.’
I did the same the next day, then every day after that. I felt better afterwards and reassured myself that Baba would eventually be free, and that we would live happily together as one family again.
But Mama’s misery continued, especially when a letter from my father was due but didn’t arrive. On those mornings she sat waiting for the postman on her little bamboo stool at the entrance to our street. She stared into the distance, an unsmoked cigarette burning between her fingers.
For her, it seemed life wasn’t worth living, except for the sake of the children. A panic came over me each time I saw her stare in the direction of the old lychee tree. I put my arms around her, hoping to fend off her desperate thoughts. She stroked my hair, drenching it with tears as we hugged in silence.
*
Towards the end of 1957, Ying had been selected to train with the Guangdong Provincial Swimming Squad at the Guangzhou Sports Institute. To be included in any sporting squad meant you were among the best in the state, and the institute’s intensive training was designed to improve performances further. In 1958 she represented Guangdong in the national swimming competition in Beijing, an important event held partly to commemorate our Chairman’s Yangtze conquest. It was a great honour for us, and, I suspected, for the whole town of Shiqi as well, not least the District Head. Since Ying specialised in butterfly stroke and was the youngest member of the squad, they called her the Little Butterfly.
Basking in the glory of having discovered a talented swimmer, the District Head continued to pay Mama a visit from time to time. He boasted, ‘Ying’s fiery temper is good for sport – I spotted it and put it to good use.’
With her head lowered as usual, Mama thanked him. She never looked him in the eye, and I saw this as her way of expressing defiance, anger and sadness, rather than surrender. But she still had to be careful to defer to him.
The District Head looked smug. ‘See what revolution can do for sport!’ He hummed his favourite song as he left.
Now that Ying was the Little Butterfly, the small spark of hope that I’d discovered on the levee wall rekindled in my heart and grew. I kept reminding myself that life would be good again when Baba came home, one day, after serving his sentence.
CHAPTER 9
‘Down with the rightists!’
‘Long live Chairman Mao!’
‘Down with the Americans!’
‘Down with the capitalists and their running dogs!’
‘Down with the Russian revisionists!’
‘We’ll die to protect China!’
Increasingly, we were encouraged to denounce the rightists, a new group who needed to be cleansed, as well as the usual Americans and their running dogs, whoever they were, and also now the Russian revisionists, whatever that meant. It was a confusing time for all of us in Shiqi.
Back in May 1956, a campaign from Beijing, ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom; Let a Hundred Thoughts Contend’, had encouraged the whole country – even comrades, administrators, workers in all production units – to speak their minds about the government and the Party. Discontented citizens soon exposed their true faces. They were quickly classified as bad elements called rightists, and over the next couple of years the new Anti-Rightist Campaign began to purge them from the Party. Our town again became frantic with denunciation meetings, while Pig Head Hill was busy with more executions. Baba had deliberately steered clear of both campaigns.
With so many enemies to condemn in slogans bellowed all day long at school and often after school too, everyone had hoarse voices like our District Head.
‘How do the Russians and Americans know we hate them?’ Ah-dong asked me privately one day in his croaky voice.
‘Not sure.’ My own voice was hardly recognisable.
In spite of Ah-dong being my good friend, I was careful not to show my own true feelings to him. I wasn’t prepared to risk being branded a rightist at school, as some teachers and senior students were already being tarred with this brush. It would have been a lot worse than the jeers over my failed crossing of the Wonder River.
Around this time, Aunt Wai-hung visited us with her boys, Young-young, Young-chit and Young-syn. I remember one afternoon, when I was carrying firewood from our room to the kitchen, I overheard her talking with Mama.
‘Be careful, Wai-syn. Don’t say anything about the Party to anyone. The Hundred Flowers Campaign is aiming at doubters. Beng’e suspects there could be a more serious campaign ahead.’
Mama attended to her cooking and didn’t respond. Instead she asked me, ‘How was school today?’
‘Same as yesterday,’ I said in my husky voice. I didn’t want to say more – my throat was sore from shouting.
For a long time after that, I worried that Mama might say the wrong thing to the wrong person.
*
After Baba’s appearance in the People’s Court, the District Head had allocated Mama a relief job in a nursery. New mothers had to return to their production units one month after giving birth, leaving their babies in care, so there were a lot of infants to look after.
The job seemed to alleviate Mama’s depression a little, though it was underpaid. Adults in town earned twenty-four yuan a month. Technical or skilled workers made thirty-two, while Party members were rewarded with forty-eight yuan because of their contribution to the revolution. Mama was paid fifteen yuan a month, the wage of an apprentice.
These meagre payments nevertheless provided Baba with some support, and also Ying, who was still in the Guangzhou Swimming Squad. But Mama often ran out of money if the payments from Hong Kong were delayed. She’d wait for the postman at the entrance to our street, the same way she’d wait for Baba’s mail, at these times staring blankly in the direction of Hong Kong. Often I sat with her and we waited together. We didn’t talk much but appreciated each other’s company.
Mama couldn’t sleep or eat when she got to her last ten-fen note, only enough for a bunch of bok choy. With reluctance, she’d write a message requesting a credit of two yuan to help us out and ask me to take it into town to Mrs Lee, my old friend Flea’s aunt.
The word around town was that Mrs Lee’s husband was a successful businessman in Hong Kong. Theirs was one of very few well-off families in Shiqi. For some reason, the authorities didn’t seem to be too hard on them. Gossips said that her husband was sending her regular generous living allowances that also contributed to China’s foreign funds, just as Grandfather Young’s American money did.
With Mama’s note in my pocket I’d run to Mrs Lee’s house, dodging pedestrians and bicycles. Not far from Come Happiness Bridge I’d turn right into her street. Then I’d knock on the back door of the handsome two-storey house and wait patiently for someone to answer the door.
From the landing above the street, I’d see people moving about with their heads down. Their frowns were as contagious as the one Mama carried all day long. They shifted quietly along like ghostly shadows drifting in the dark, indifferent to everything around them; even the pleasant chirps of sparrows and the ringing of bicycle bells didn’t make any difference.
Mrs Lee usually invited me into her house. She’d take Mama’s note and return carrying two red one-yuan bills printed with Chairman Mao’s face. She was always smartly dressed in unpatched, handsome clothes. Her fair skin was unusual in Shiqi – unlike many of the townspeople, she didn’t need to volunteer to work in the open. She had four children, and the two older ones had left before 1949 and lived in Hong Kong with her husband. Through the door I could often see and envy the many beautiful toys her younger children owned, but I would never stop to play.<
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I’d grip the money in my pocket all the way home, for fear of losing it, my hunger pangs quickening my pace, then I’d hand the moist bills to Mama and feel proud of myself for helping the family. As soon as our allowance from Grandmother arrived, Mama would dispatch me to repay our debt to the good Mrs Lee.
*
By early spring of 1958, Baba had settled into the prison in Heilongjiang and more slogans had burst into our classroom, directly from Beijing as usual. The Anti-Rightists Campaign had been a success, the adults said.
‘Follow the Three Red Flags!’
‘Beat the British in steel production in fifteen years!’
‘Do more, do it faster, do it better and do it cheaper.’
These war cries were different: for the first time, there were no enemies to fight. This surprised us, including all the teachers at school and the adults in town. The grown-ups began to breathe a sigh of relief.
Next we plunged into the Three Red Flags Movement, aimed at rapidly industrialising China. Our District Head and his committee members eagerly advanced the new campaign, reinforcing the message of collectivism, unity and patriotism. Loudspeakers blared around town, and walls thickened with posters. A revolutionary storyteller took over the banyan tree near the school, and he told us the story of the king, his sons and their arrows – how one arrow alone was easily snapped, but not a handful of arrows bound together.
In our classroom our teacher pushed back her PLA cap, her eyes shining. ‘The Three Red Flags Movement,’ she explained with high spirits, ‘are three directives in the implementation of the Second Five-Year Plan: first, to massively increase steel production; second, the rapid industrialisation of agriculture, our Great Leap Forward; and third, the setting up of communes all over the country. We are going to make history!’