One Bright Moon

by Andrew Kwong

  Yiu-hoi and I swung hard and fast with our torches, spinning them in arcs of brightness, terrifying the hapless sparrows huddling high on the beams. Dazzled by the light and noise, they started flying around in all directions, hitting the walls and knocking themselves out as they shrieked in alarm, their wings flapping but going nowhere.

  ‘Ha, ha, ha . . . !’ a stranger’s voice cried out.

  Yiu-hoi dropped his torch.

  ‘Ouch, ouch, ouch . . .’ came the echoes from deep inside the derelict building.

  Ah-dong shrieked. I turned to see what in my frenzied state I thought might be a ghostly face towering over him. He dropped his basket and closed his eyes.

  Yiu-hoi and I screamed. We took off for the front door, dropping our torches and tripping over a pile of bricks. We landed in a heap and squealed our hearts out.

  We managed to get ourselves up and run.

  Splash. Yiu-hoi fell into a ditch. We stopped to drag him out. Slippery mud made the uneven path hard to negotiate. We stumbled and cried but managed to make it home, covered in dirt.

  The next day, we sat on the levee wall and didn’t want to talk about what had happened. A few sparrows flitted overhead, chirping.

  We decided it would be easier to join the rest of our neighbours beating their pots and pans in the evenings. Sparrows took flight and bashed themselves against tree trunks and brick walls in the dark, knocking themselves unconscious. We kids ran around with our fishing baskets and picked them up by the score. My mother spent a whole night killing, plucking and cooking them. She kept the claws for me to take to school for the Kill Sparrows competition.

  This went on for weeks until the song of the sparrows died in Shiqi.

  Ah-dong took many pairs of sparrow claws to school, and he won the Kill Sparrows Prize that autumn. He ate so many sparrows that he was the only one on our street with good colour in his face, and his skinny legs began to fill up. He was chirpier than ever, and cocky.

  CHAPTER 11

  Towards the end of 1959 the greatest piece of news in the gloomiest days of my life arrived: my father was being released on the grounds of his ‘complete re-education and good behaviour’.

  Over three years had passed since his imprisonment. In his regular letters, he’d told us how grateful he was to Chairman Mao for the opportunity to redeem himself along with many of his academic colleagues, fellow intellectuals and other prisoners in Heilongjiang. He was learning more about communism and socialism every day, and felt proud to be part of the revolution and rising PRC. He wanted to serve the nation under the District Head. Now, more than ever, he pledged to devote his life to serving China and working for a better future for our people. I was proud of Baba – although later I overheard him telling Mama that the government hadn’t been able to feed all the prisoners, so some of them just had to be released.

  On the day we received his brief letter announcing his freedom, Mama read and re-read it, her face contorted with indescribable emotions as her tears flowed. We huddled together. No words were necessary; no words were adequate to describe how we felt.

  The next morning, Mama wrote a long message for me to deliver in town. ‘This is very important, my son,’ she said. ‘Take this to the good Mrs Lee to ask for a loan. Baba needs money to fund his journey home. It’s a large sum, so you must be most careful. Come home with it immediately.’ Her face was glowing, and I suddenly noticed how pretty my mama had become again.

  I sprang to my feet and ran into town along Come Happiness Road, then crossed Come Happiness Bridge over the Nine Meanders River onto Come Happiness Street. I turned right into the road where Mrs Lee lived, knocked on her back door and waited. My heart was racing, and the entire town seemed to reverberate with my excitement.

  ‘Oh, that’s a lot,’ Mrs Lee exclaimed on reading the message.

  ‘Baba is on his way home,’ I blurted out. I couldn’t wait to announce the big news, even though Mama had probably told Mrs Lee in the note.

  Her face brightened with a big smile, then, lost for words, she briefly disappeared into the house before returning with the money.

  ‘Be careful, Ah-mun, this is more than two months’ wages for many people,’ she advised.

  I sprinted home with one hand holding the money in my pocket, and proudly gave Mama the sweaty notes. She then took the money to the bank in town and sent it to Baba.

  I was confident that with Baba home we wouldn’t starve. He would have many ways of finding food; we might even go fishing in the South China Sea, as he’d said we would. It was wonderful to be alive, even with a grumbling stomach.

  As Mama, Ying (recently returned home from the swimming squad), Weng and I waited patiently for Baba’s homecoming, we burned an incense stick every day to show our gratitude. It seemed to take months for Baba to make his journey. Mama kept reassuring us with his frequent letters from famous historic sites, including the palaces in Beijing, the Great Wall, the Yangtze River, and many of the places mentioned in the famed literary works that Baba loved. It looked as if he was indulging himself with the money from Mrs Lee and soaking up as much culture as he could while he had the chance.

  We plotted Baba’s journey home like it was a lesson in geography, history and literature. Diligently, we marked his whereabouts on the map, beginning at the Great Northern Wilderness bordering Russian Siberia, continuing down the tortuous east coast, west along the Yangtze River and on to inland places such as the ancient mountains of Huangshan and the Great Wall of Badaling, as well as many other locations that we’d never heard of before. Mama, ever a good teacher, explained the cultural significance of each of these locations. And whenever a letter from Baba arrived, we charted his whereabouts on the vast continent and estimated how many days it would be before he arrived home.

  Mama now often danced around the house, humming and singing. We all talked about the many things we were going to do with Baba. We laughed until our jaws ached. It was the happiest time I’d ever experienced as a child in Shiqi. I slept in most days, and Mama had to wake me up for school. We praised Chairman Mao and burned more incense sticks to show our gratitude to the ancestors, and waited with great patience. We wrote to Ping.

  ‘My Baba will be home soon,’ I hurried to announce to my friends as we sat on the levee wall. Yiu-hoi’s face brightened and he said, ‘That means we’ll catch more fish. My Seventh Uncle knows all the best fishing spots in Shiqi!’ Ah-dong and Earring nodded in agreement and clapped.

  *

  One day, I was about to pack away my homework and attend to the usual chores of feeding the only two chickens we could afford and watering our small vegetable garden when a man, with his bedroll slung over his shoulders, marched into our open house.

  At first glance, he looked like a new tenant. What a tramp, I thought.

  It took a second look before I realised he was my dearly missed baba. He was tanned, healthier-looking and more solid than when I’d last walked with him, over the Wonder River Bridge. He also seemed shorter. His hair was long and flowing from months of neglect, but a broad smile hung on his face, and tears glinted in his eyes.

  He hugged us all in his big arms, and we cried and laughed in a huddle. The large numbers stamped in white on his jacket identified him as a prisoner of New China, but with his newly authorised pass, he could show that he was now a reformed citizen. The odd smell oozing from his uniform didn’t stop us from snuggling close to him. Weng couldn’t stop peeping at the man she barely knew; she smiled at him, flashing her beautiful dimples. There was a lot of catching up to do.

  We were the happiest family in the whole of Shiqi, but the bigger of the two chickens was not so fortunate that day. After offering it to our ancestors for their blessings, we ate it in celebration. Incense smoke filled the happy household in Number 1 Kwong Street.

  Baba brought with him gifts he’d collected on his long way home. The honey melon from some remote place was priceless, according to him, and we kept it for so long that it rotted before we could bear
to cut it up. The apples he brought were going brown, but we enjoyed parts of them; we couldn’t make their seeds germinate, though. The wildflower seeds from the Great Northern Wilderness also failed in our humid climate.

  ‘This is for you, Ah-mun,’ Baba said to me that evening he arrived home, as he handed me a copper-handled pocketknife. ‘My friend in the Northern Wilderness prison made it for me as a gift. He said I might need it on the long hike to the train station.’

  It was a crude little knife with a rather sharp ten-centimetre blade, just perfect for working those tough bamboo skins when kite-making. It was the most memorable gift I’d ever been given.

  The news of Baba’s return reached the District Head, and he paid us a visit the next morning. He asked why it had taken Baba so long to get home, but commended him on his effort to undergo full rehabilitation. ‘Attend the evening meetings from tomorrow. The revolution is continual. Never stop learning communism, and don’t leave the street without my permission.’ With that, he marched off to the beat of ‘The East Is Red’.

  *

  With gusto I again shouted the Great Leap Forward slogans: ‘Do more. Do it faster. Do it better. Do it cheaper!’ until my voice became hoarse and my throat hurt. My schoolteachers were more than pleased with my reinvigorated enthusiasm. I told my friends on the levee wall that I would die for communism if I had to, now that Baba was home.

  ‘But would you die happy if your stomach hurts and rumbles?’ Ah-dong asked.

  ‘If it’s for Chairman Mao’s revolution, I would,’ I said without a second thought. I had already made up my mind as I fixed my gaze on the rising sun that morning from the levee wall before heading off to school. I was used to the gnawing pain in my stomach and didn’t remember what it was like to have it filled with food. I’d probably be sick, I thought.

  Within days of his return, anxious to make a contribution to the Great Leap Forward, Baba threw himself into the rope-making enterprise in our street commune. It was his volunteer job. I was quietly pleased and outwardly proud that he’d been fully reformed, whatever that meant. To me, he was now a progressive man, almost a comrade in the sacred revolution, exactly what I had been secretly wishing for all these years. He joined the commune workers in flaying palm stalks on rows of long sharp nails to extract the fibres for rope-making. Every day he came home with fresh wounds on his hands.

  Baba soon invented a fibre-extracting machine using old bicycle chains, paddles and other odd mechanical parts to turn a large drum spiked with nails. His fellow workers were delighted by this much safer and faster method. Before long, with several machines operating at full capacity, the Kwong Street Rope-Making Brigade had more than tripled its output. Baba was awarded a white T-shirt with ‘Model Worker’ printed on it boldly in red, symbolising the spirit of the sacred Great Leap Forward. The District Head was pleased and even smiled at us sometimes.

  In the dining hall, Baba never once complained. With relish he devoured his allocated bowl of rice with soggy vegetables and a small piece of fish fried in black oil.

  ‘We are lucky here in the commune.’ He spoke loud enough for others to hear. ‘Up north we ate rice only once a month, and on national holidays. It was corn and sweet potatoes at all other times. Together with black mantou buns, that was our staple diet in prison.’

  I couldn’t hold in my curiosity and asked him, ‘But why were they black?’ The mantou, I knew from propaganda posters and books, were white steamed buns served at New Year celebrations or on special occasions in the cold northern provinces. I had always aspired to eat one but had never even seen one.

  ‘The grains were ground with the husks and maybe straw too, plus other unknown additives, to bulk it up,’ explained Baba. ‘We rarely had fish or meat but soon learnt how to trap squirrels and other little animals to supplement our diet.’ He stopped short of saying prisoners had been released early because there were too many mouths to feed.

  Baba told vivid stories, attracting people from streets away. We gathered around him, listening to his retellings of legends and other historical happenings. In private, he told us that when he had visited those historical sites on his long journey home, he’d tried to envisage the thoughts and emotions of the great poets and authors who had created literary masterpieces, thus deepening his interpretations of their work and enriching his experiences. Apart from smoking and going fishing in the waterways, storytelling was Baba’s favourite activity.

  When telling stories to a crowd, Baba was careful to embellish them with appropriate revolutionary colours to ensure he wouldn’t be accused of spreading counter-revolutionary ideas. One of his most popular tales was that of the heroic exploits of Commander Yang and his children, who defended the Song Dynasty against the onslaught of the mighty Mongolian armies. They died martyrs, and became symbols of resistance against foreign invaders. We also loved his yarns from novels like Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, no matter how many times we heard them.

  Baba’s audience had listened to the narratives many times over the years without tiring of them, even before he was sent to prison. The same old stories were now told with fresh passion, emotion and respect. To the adults, they seemed more interesting than the monotonous revolutionary slogans and the compulsory political meetings. Many in the audience were illiterate, so these legends were all they knew and were familiar with. Generations of storytellers had passed them down. To us kids, revolutionary and political items already filled our curriculum; there was no time left at school for the legendary stories we loved.

  The hour between six and seven in the evening was Baba’s storytelling time. It never seemed long enough. After that, he had to attend his political re-education a few houses down the street. There, under the watchful eye of the District Head and his committee members, Baba and his fellow undesirables faced another barrage of self-criticism, thought-cleansing and even denouncement.

  CHAPTER 12

  Ah-dong’s mother frowned. ‘What? Another cut? How are we going to tell the people?’ She was talking to the two women who worked in the kitchen of our commune dining room.

  Inside, there was a huge wok so big that I could have bathed in it. (How I missed our galvanised-iron basin that the District Head’s children now enjoyed.) The wok sat on a specially constructed brick stove with a hand-operated ventilation fan on one side. One of the women was pulling and pushing it, feeding rice shells into the glowing fire. The kitchen had the earthy but comforting smell of cooked rice.

  It was early in 1960, still winter, and the cold gnawed at our empty, rumbling stomachs. Ah-dong and I were there hoping to get a sweet potato to share after school.

  Ah-dong’s mother was in charge of feeding the whole street. She had to divide carefully, month by month, the dwindling rations of rice, oil, meat, fish and vegetables that were delivered to all the dining rooms in our commune, the amounts of each based on the number of residents. I was pleased that she was in charge of ours; she often slipped an extra spoonful of rice into my bowl and pressed hard to hide it when no one was looking.

  ‘Drought in the north and floods in the south have destroyed a lot of crops,’ Ah-dong’s mother said, reiterating what the street-corner loudspeakers had been telling us since before the New Year.

  ‘Someone said too many people are building dams and making steel, and not enough are working in the fields,’ one woman mumbled.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that if I were you,’ said Ah-dong’s mother, as she washed a large basket of vegetables. ‘You could get yourself into trouble.’

  The woman wouldn’t stop. ‘That’s just what I hear some young people are saying. They go to high school. Intellectuals. They should know.’

  ‘Maybe we had it too good last year.’ Ah-dong’s mother seemed confident. ‘We ate too much, but it was a good harvest the year before, they said. Nature isn’t helping us now. Don’t forget, we had the Russian debt to repay, and we have to support our comrades in Africa and Cuba.’

  Ah-dong’s mother s
eemed to know more than others in the street. She worried when people in the dining room complained about the decreasing portions of food. As their main meal of the day, working adult men now got a bowl of boiled rice that Ah-dong’s mother weighed carefully on a scale in front of them, just to show they were getting the right amount, plus a serving of overcooked vegetables and a small piece of fish. Women and children received a smaller bowl of rice with smaller portions of the same accompaniments. The vegetables were boiled in water with salt; there wasn’t a trace of oil or garnish. Once a week we were each allocated a serving of meat as big as two adult fingers put together.

  ‘Remember how the heroes of the Long March overcame their challenges,’ our teacher reminded us every morning at political studies – our first lesson of the day, which was now all about the soldiers of the civil war. ‘Our heroes and martyrs often had nothing to eat, yet they trekked ten thousand li [five thousand kilometres] and overcame the snow, mountains, rivers and desert to dodge the enemy’s pursuit, and reached Yan’an, our holy destination, and final victory.’ She beamed with pride and emotion, but couldn’t hide her thin, jaundiced face. ‘We can do the same with less food.’

  We tried not to complain and kept our spirits high, knowing that we were taking part in Chairman Mao’s sacred revolution. Some adults quietly voiced their concerns, but many merely shook their heads and kept quiet, fearful of punishment for speaking up.

  ‘Even with an empty stomach, man can overcome nature,’ Chairman Mao told us every day through the street loudspeakers. ‘Let’s tighten our belts.’

  *

  Rations were steadily reduced. Every day we felt the hunger pangs. My mother sent us to bed early to save kerosene for our one little lamp, which was often needed for the frequent power disruptions. Each of us wore an extra woollen jumper and a pair of thick socks, and she insisted we put on our sandshoes to go to school in winter, instead of going barefoot as we did in the warmer months.