by Andrew Kwong
Our teacher said this latest campaign was to reap the benefits from the ‘economy of scale’. We didn’t understand what that meant, but it felt important to keep chanting, ‘Go all out, aim high, and build China greater, cheaper, faster, better and sooner.’ So we began our industrialisation endeavour. And schoolwork could wait.
Although the slogans made our voices hoarse, they boosted our sinking spirits. When we shouted slogans with our class and then the whole school together, again with neighbours in the street, and finally with the entire town, it made us all feel we were part of the revolution. And the benefits of having more food and steel, and all our industries thriving, seemed obvious.
Suburbs in town became local communes, as did smaller towns and villages, each with their own governance and quotas to fulfil to contribute to the modernisation of the whole country. Our Wonder River District, indeed, was the first commune in Shiqi.
It had taken little time for me to feel part of the revolution once more – what I’d always wanted but lost with my father’s arrest. My blood was now boiling, revving up for me to dive into this gutsy movement that would make China great by sharing the work, increasing production and hence income in the local area, for the benefit of all.
At times, I even forgot about Baba being in prison, and Mama and her misery, as I wholeheartedly embraced Chairman Mao’s directives. My eyes glowed like those of the other students. Our teacher was proud of us, saying how we had truly stirred up our revolutionary spirits. ‘Nothing can stop us now, even though you are only eight years old,’ she often said.
How greatly we appreciated the power of comradeship under the Party. We felt invincible. The Americans and Russians were merely paper tigers, so we left them alone for the time being to concentrate on the exciting industrialisation campaign.
Before long, I put behind me the violent denouncements of the townspeople and the nightmares about Pig Head Hill. In my mind, even Baba’s imprisonment had become part of the revolution. It seemed like a sacrifice my family had to make for the sake of a glorious future. I even forgave the District Head for sending Baba away to prison. I saw the radiance and pride in people rise around me, and felt closer to Chairman Mao than ever. Mama also saw a better life not far ahead for all of us, and came to believe that Baba would probably be released soon.
People went around town declaring that they weren’t afraid of hard work, in the hope of receiving larger food rations and other goods, and possibly even a monthly income. Based on the collective model, the bigger the commune’s production, the bigger the rewards would be for all its members. ‘It’s not the fifty thousand people of Shiqi alone,’ I heard them saying to each other, ‘but five hundred million in China all working hard together. Just imagine!’
Aha, I got it: the economy of scale.
‘It’ll be worth it,’ I heard adults saying to each other, sounding ever so positive.
Prosperity was now within reach, more real than I had ever known.
We eagerly bellowed out our morning slogans in front of the solemn portrait of our Chairman before school began, making sure it was loud enough to reach his ears in Beijing.
Mama continued to work in the nursery, and Grandmother Young’s American dollars from Hong Kong flowed in more steadily, supplementing her wage. We heard that my sister Ping had got into a good school there. I often wondered if Hong Kong had changed much since my brief stay a few years earlier. In the photos she sent, Ping had grown a lot taller and was now a pretty teenager. Like the mail from Baba, the letters from Ping had been opened and resealed. But we didn’t care.
In Guangzhou, Ying had made good progress with her swimming. We were immensely proud of her, including Baba in Heilongjiang. The District Head shared in Ying’s glory by telling people how he’d been the first one to recognise her talent when he selected her for the local swimming squad.
Even while buoyed by rejuvenated revolutionary spirits and the improved fortunes of my family, I still missed Baba. So did Mama and Weng and my sisters who lived away from home. When evening came and the noises of slogan-shouting and loudspeakers died down in the streets, we missed him even more. He was only into the second year of his fifteen-year sentence. I counted the days until he would be fully rehabilitated and allowed to serve communism again, while Mama never forgot to burn an incense stick every morning and pray to the ancestors for their blessings. To lessen her sadness, Weng and I tried to be good children and kind to each other. Aunt Wai-hung’s visits also helped.
We found comfort in Baba’s regular letters. He told us that he didn’t have to work outdoors in the frozen wilderness; he had an easier job as a nurse at the prison hospital.
*
Each street within our commune was ordered to set up a communal dining room for its residents. I was excited at the thought of having my meals with my cousins and friends like Ah-dong and Earring (Big Eye belonged to a neighbouring commune, so he couldn’t eat with us). The idea appealed to Mama as well: with every meal catered for, she no longer needed to wait in long queues for food every day (we had to shop daily, as nobody had a refrigerator to keep food fresh longer than a day). She also thought that she no longer needed to worry about tightening food rations, because the commune had pledged to feed all of us well, exactly as Chairman Mao had promised. She even helped promote the idea to a few sceptical neighbours.
‘No such thing as a plump frog hopping into the open for you to catch,’ one of the older neighbours said to her.
‘Nothing comes from nothing,’ was another comment.
Patiently Mama explained to them the collective possibilities for China under the Great Chairman. Her university education and her seemingly logical analysis convinced them in the end.
In order to massively increase grain production, our nation first had to contain Mother Nature’s seasonal floods along the three biggest rivers in China. The Pearl was one of them, the others being the Yellow and the Yangtze. Natural disasters had long been entrenched in China’s civilisation. This was all explained at my school by our teachers, who seemed to know about everything from communism to geography to history to science. We vowed to answer the call from Chairman Mao to defeat these threats and ensure strong agricultural production. ‘Man can conquer nature!’ I shouted with my classmates.
Ah-dong was particularly excited that we’d be spending more time away from the classroom, collecting broken tiles and bricks to build bigger roads and dams – and that there would be no more homework. His stammer was miraculously cured and he was back to his usual self, laughing and giggling, swaying his big round head from side to side, his belly jerking with each chuckle. It seemed the spell of Pig Head Hill had been finally broken.
Like my classmates, I filled my schoolbag with pieces of broken tiles and bricks I collected on the way to school. Soon there were no more classes to attend: instead, we sat around the school grounds smashing our hoard into smaller pieces. Competitions broke out between the classes to see which could produce the biggest pile of gravel, which was in great demand for building roads and dams. As we hammered, we sang revolutionary songs and chatted.
My fingers got in the way sometimes, and bruises, cuts and pain became part of the job. But I was very proud of suffering those revolutionary injuries, and most of the time they didn’t seem to hurt. I was keen to compare my patriotic ‘decorations’ with those of my friends.
But I still felt sad sometimes when I thought of Baba. ‘You must struggle against those backward thoughts and leap forward,’ my teacher said to me whenever I appeared to be unsociable. ‘Always put our Great Chairman ahead of all,’ she advised. ‘Then you’ll be happy forever.’
‘Stop being moody, Ah-mun,’ Ah-dong said to me one day when we were smashing rocks in the school playground. ‘Let’s work hard now for our Red Scarf, so we’ll be the first to get one next year.’
We were so eager to collect rocks, broken tiles and bricks that when we couldn’t find any lying around, we simply dug up the roads. Potholes appeared on
Come Happiness Road all the way to Come Happiness Bridge, upsetting many cyclists. When it was warm enough, my little gang and I dived into the rivers and waterways to search for debris from our rock-throwing contests in previous summers. We were proud as we watched the carts and bicycles with baskets arriving at the school to take away the gravel we’d collected.
I’m not sure how many months we spent smashing rocks and breaking bricks as we embraced the Great Leap Forward. Whenever I woke in the night because of pain from the bruises on my callused palms and cracked fingers, I would think of the boy in my class who’d lost his sight in one eye after it was pierced by a piece of tile. The school awarded him a white cotton T-shirt printed with ‘Model Student’ in bold red letters. He wore it all the time, even in winter. I was envious when he became the first in the class to be awarded the Red Scarf, before getting to Fourth Class, and I hoped they might also award me a Model Student T-shirt one day – even if I had to suffer worse injuries, like losing a finger or two. I didn’t want to lose an eye, though, because when I closed one to see what it was like, I discovered that the world shrank, and everything appeared incomplete and less real. After that, I became jealous of Big Eye with his large round eyes, for I believed he must be able to see better and much more than the rest of us.
Mama warned us every morning not to try to be heroes, and that we must take good care of ourselves. ‘Being cautious,’ she said, ‘and keeping your eyes open will help you sail safely through many storms.’
On the weekends, like all other adults, Mama and her workmates from the nursery volunteered to help construct Tiger Mouth Pond at the foot of Pagoda Hill in town. She didn’t come home until dark, so I took care of Weng. The commune’s kitchen, where we ate our meals, was only a few doors away. We each had a bowl of boiled rice with a serving of well-cooked vegetables and a small piece of fish. I always looked forward to the twice-weekly piece of pork, and on May Day and other national holidays we had extra meat, usually double the normal amount and sometimes a piece as big as my palm. We would praise Chairman Mao for the extras, and wish that he could live forever so that we would always have plenty to eat.
*
As well as building roads and dams, the whole population had to participate in the rapid expansion of steel production.
Our teacher taught us another slogan to shout: ‘Beat the British in steel production and catch up with the Americans! If we pull together,’ she danced around the classroom, beaming, ‘we can do it.’
‘Yes we can!’ we yelled, before joining the senior students already hard at work in the school grounds.
No steelmakers lived in Shiqi, but instructions on how to build and operate furnaces soon arrived. A small furnace was set up in a corner of our school playground and junior students were assigned the important job of finding fuel to keep the furnace burning. We were also ordered to collect anything metallic that could be melted down to make steel.
Soon my schoolbag was bulging with dried leaves and fallen twigs, and the red star on its flap was stretched and grew bigger. Fired up with enthusiasm, I sometimes dragged tree branches all the way to school and delivered them to the furnace. I watched the smoke wend its way into the sky and felt the heat radiating from the big mudbrick stove. How I wished that I were in Fourth Class so I could do the night shift guarding the furnace.
Each day moved us closer to when we would beat the British in steelmaking – and moved me closer to getting a Red Scarf. The smoke from our furnace merged with smoke from all the other furnaces in town, forming a cloud that hovered over Shiqi like a huge shawl, heavy and suffocating. It concealed the crisp autumn sky from us, but this didn’t matter to me. As I observed that amazing sight, my faith in Chairman Mao leapt even higher.
When waste metal became hard to find, I began scouring landfills and garbage tips with my friends. Our teachers suggested bringing items from home: bars from windows (after all, there were no more thieves under communism), old tin buckets, gutters, doorhandles, hinges, brackets. Unfortunately, the tenants at our ancestral home had already taken these items to the furnaces; they had also stripped the wooden panels that had partitioned the large house and taken them to the furnaces too. Now our home was bare and wide open. Mama and Sixth Aunt weren’t pleased, but they dared not say anything to the tenants for fear of being branded counter-revolutionaries.
One day I went home and packed together Baba’s few tools, tea tins, mugs and old cookware, as well as the knives and forks with ivory handles that Grandfather Young had brought home from Hawaii before I was born. Mama wasn’t happy with my patriotic action, while I was disappointed that she wouldn’t let me take the large pair of tailor’s scissors that her father had given her on his first trip home in 1934. ‘They remind me of the father I hardly knew, so you can’t melt them,’ she protested half-pleading and clutching the heavy scissors close to her chest. ‘Besides, I need them to make or alter clothes for the family and maybe for other uses as well.’ Tears welled up in her eyes. So I didn’t take her scissors.
My search continued, however. One wintry Sunday in early 1959, Yiu-hoi, as he often did, had an idea: there was a half-submerged riverboat wreck by the large lotus pond not far from home, and it would have tons of big nails and other metal items. Ah-dong, Yiu-hoi, Weng and I ran off towards the wreck with our hammers and pliers, as four-year-old Ah-ki followed at his slower pace.
The riverboat had been there for months, and looked bleak in the icy water. There was little to find, because others had already been through the wreck. Balancing with difficulty on the tilted hulk, we searched everywhere in and out of the small cabin like ants exposing the skeleton of a dead fish. Ah-dong and Yiu-hoi worked hard trying to remove a large rusted nail, and Ah-ki scurried around trying to help. Weng stood by, looking into the deserted pond and daydreaming, as she often did.
It was freezing. I thought of Baba in the deep north enduring snow and ice for eight or more months a year. He would have been the right person to help us remove that big nail.
‘Big brother, I’ve found a—’
Ah-ki’s voice woke me from daydreaming – just in time to see him slip and tumble into the water.
Yiu-hoi and Ah-dong popped their heads up to check what was happening. Little Ah-ki was struggling like a kitten under the surface of the pond. The world seemed to go into slow motion as we watched him drowning. The silence was eerie.
Weng screamed.
Without thinking, I dived in to reach Ah-ki. I held his face above the surface with one hand and gripped the rough edge of the wreck with the other. The icy water cut like a million shards of glass. It was hard to breathe. But with Yiu-hoi and Ah-dong’s help, we pulled Ah-ki out of the arctic pool. Weng was still screaming and frightened.
The five of us ran all the way home, arriving just before we turned into blocks of ice. Ah-ki’s maternal grandmother, who was staying with us while Ah-ki’s parents were away teaching in different towns, was shocked, mumbling her prayers as she rubbed colour back into him while waiting for the kettle to heat up so that she could give him a warm wash. ‘Four-year-olds should never leave the house in winter,’ she said to us, before giving thanks to God again for our return. We called her the God-believer; we, on the other hand, were believers in Chairman Mao.
Throughout this ordeal Ah-ki had managed to hold on to his find. Now he could proudly contribute a rusty bracket to the commune’s steelmaking.
After I saved Ah-ki, he felt he owed me an immense debt, perhaps for the rest of his life. His God-believing grandmother wouldn’t let him out of her sight until I was around. He followed me like my little shadow and did everything I wanted him to do; he even waited patiently for me to finish my homework. Together we attended to my chores in our vegetable patch. Then we were free to play, though we kept away from the lotus pond and the wreck, fearing the demons and spirits that had tried to take little Ah-ki.
*
For weeks we waited patiently to see the steel we’d been working so hard to make. Finall
y, in the spring of 1959 the day came. We took Ah-ki to school to join in the celebration. We sang and danced to revolutionary songs. Drums boomed. Trumpets blasted. There were more rounds of singing and slogan-shouting to congratulate the school on its success. Big red banners and flags fluttered in the tepid breeze. The continuous clapping hurt our hands but also kept us warm; many of our voices had already broken earlier than usual as a result of all our singing and shouting throughout the year.
The sacred moment finally arrived, but only after many speeches. By then our thin legs were buckling from hours of standing, not to mention hunger. With immense pride, the school’s Party Secretary shouted, ‘Long live Chairman Mao! Long live! Long live! Long live the Chinese Communist Party! Beat the British and catch up with the Americans in steel production!’ His enthusiasm and revolutionary ardour reinvigorated us, and we grew even more excited as the teachers removed the safety barriers then opened the door of the furnace.
Our eyes bulged wide and we forgot to blink. There it was: the glowing liquid flowed forward like a grand character entering centre stage at the climax of an opera, unhurried and stately, and filled a rectangular mould set in a hole in the ground. We held our breaths and praised Chairman Mao for his wisdom. We had made steel. We had made history.
‘Long live Chairman Mao!’ we shouted with gusto. The adults told us not to touch the molten block outside the furnace, and refrain from walking or dancing on it. The holy slab, half the size of a ping-pong table, took several days to cool down before the teachers declared it safe for us to handle. We lined up. When it was my turn, the metallic block was already wet with tears, saliva from kisses, and sweat from the fondling of many excited hands. Red ribbons adorned it, turning it into a shrine we had helped create.