One Bright Moon

by Andrew Kwong

  Both guards now turned to face the crowd, and one shouted, ‘They’re to be punished!’

  The people were jostling as others joined in, gathering around us. Come Happiness Road was blocked. What had started as a timid protest grew as people spoke louder and louder over each other, soon shouting, arguing against the injustice of the dire situation they were in, their own lot in life. The guards struggled to quell their anger.

  I felt a tug on my arm. ‘Go, now,’ whispered the woman who’d first spoken up.

  I ran off. Yiu-hoi followed, with Ah-dong staggering behind. We got Ah-dong home to his mother in time for some sweets she kept locked away for his funny turns.

  After that incident, when we sat on the levee wall we’d often talk about our close encounter with the People’s Militia. Ah-dong couldn’t stop laughing, his eyes gleaming and face beaming; his head seemed to get even bigger as he retold the story without his stutter. We would then plan our next move to find food for another day.

  *

  As we grew older, we were becoming more aware of the reality of our situation. We grumbled about the fact we couldn’t afford to buy food in the black market to help our hungry families, and we dreamed about getting rich. It saddened me to hear Ah-dong say how he was still waiting for someone to offer him a hundred yuan to die so his family could afford to buy extra food; he said he didn’t care anymore if he was eaten. Yiu-hoi echoed me, insisting that he wouldn’t do it for less than a thousand yuan. I began to consider selling myself again, even though my father had come home and things were looking better. Thinking back now, I don’t believe we really wanted to sell ourselves, but at the time we felt prepared to do anything to save our families.

  One day we sat on the levee wall jealously watching the commune ducks pick up the leftover grain in the paddies. After this, the birds would be force-fed balls of cooked greens and rice husks to speed up their growth – while we didn’t even have rice husks.

  Without a word to each other, we knew exactly what we were going to do.

  Quacking merrily, the ducks poked their heads into the shallow water to gobble up the loose grains. I stood on the wall holding a piece of broken brick behind my back. Ah-dong watched as my eyes focused on the fattest duck closest to the wall.

  ‘Go Big Brother,’ said Yiu-hoi, as soon as the duck keepers weren’t looking our way and no one was watching from Kwong Street.

  I hit my target. The other ducks dashed for cover while their mate struggled, but within seconds they were all back, eagerly feeding as if nothing had happened. We were frozen on the wall. My heart skipped out and took off. My hands and lips went cold. Then I began to tremble.

  The dying bird also trembled and couldn’t raise its head above water. Soon the flapping stopped. Silence hit as we watched the duck stretch its legs for the last time. The other ducks kept looking for food around its floating body.

  ‘You look awful,’ Ah-dong said to me. ‘The colour of death is on your face.’

  I didn’t like hearing that, though I usually appreciated his honesty.

  ‘Shut up, Ah-dong,’ said Yiu-hoi, ever so loyal to his older cousin.

  Before long, the ducks were moved on to another field. Yiu-hoi jumped off the wall and weighed down the dead bird with a large ball of mud, hiding it beneath the surface.

  ‘You look a bit better now, Ah-mun,’ said Ah-dong, patting me on my shoulder. ‘The colour of death has gone. You’ll live a long, long life, but I bet you’ll never forget this.’

  I’d never thought about what a long life meant, or what it would be like. Life in those days was too much like living with death wrapped around your throat, tightening at its will and suffocating you at its pleasure. Death meant little, so little that at that point I didn’t care if I was to die, but I did hope for at least a thousand yuan for the family. I could only free myself from these ill thoughts when I was doing things with my friends, or when Mama and Baba hugged me close, or when Ping and Grandmother Young brought food home.

  ‘Let’s fly our new Red Star tomorrow,’ I said to Ah-dong and Yiu-hoi. ‘I’m not sure if it’ll last the season.’

  The boys agreed, and we started to talk about other things, trying not to regret what we had done.

  When evening came, I retrieved the duck and took it home. Mama boiled water and soaked the bird for nearly half an hour, then plucked it. She cooked it in our room without any herbs or spices, for fear of the tenants smelling it. She then woke the family in the small hours, and we sat around and ate the duck after saving the drumsticks for Ah-dong and Yiu-hoi. I slept a lot better after that.

  Before dawn, I got up to bury the duck’s feathers and bones in the family’s small vegetable patch. Just that extra bit of food seemed to restore me, or at least strengthen me enough to plot another day’s survival.

  *

  Food rations were cut even further, and rice for unemployed adults went down to twelve kilos a month. Essentially, that meant you had about four cups of cooked rice for every three meals, with very little other food such as meat, fish or vegetables. Sugar and black oil were also in short supply. Yet loudspeakers in the street kept urging us to tighten our belts to repay the Russian debts.

  I was pleased that Baba had finally recovered from his injuries, but he smoked more in his dark corner and seldom talked. We knew he was planning how to persuade the District Head to allocate him a job so that he could help feed his starving family.

  Ping and Grandmother still visited every month, and the District Head continued to collect his share. One day he shook Baba’s hand to express his gratitude for the extra goods. Baba seized the moment. ‘I need a job, comrade. Any job.’

  The District Head took a long sniff at the small handful of Camel cigarettes Baba had given him. He kept his head down and avoided looking at Baba.

  Then he nodded.

  ‘The weight of the world is on his shoulders,’ said Baba, after the man in charge of us had left.

  ‘Times are hard.’ Mama’s voice was subdued, tender and soft.

  I remember clearly Baba’s excitement when he got his first paid job, after being unemployed for so long. Finally, after all these years of re-education and imprisonment, he was qualified to work as an apprentice to a pot and kettle repairer. I suspect he’d finally ceased to regard himself as an academic, an intellectual, knowing his education was useless.

  ‘Look what I’ve earned today!’ he called out as he bounced into the house after his first day at work, waving five ten-fen notes in the air. Cuts glistened on his hands in the evening light, but he didn’t seem to care.

  Mama cried. She rushed to make bandages from an old sheet and fetch clean water to tend the wounds. Baba’s face was beaming, red as the bright blood stains on the notes flapping in front of us. My sisters and I danced around him, singing our favourite song:

  I am not a parasite, and I work hard to rebuild China

  Soon we’ll rise, and soon we’ll be a great, great nation

  Under our dear Chairman’s guiding light

  La, la, la, la, la, la, la . . .

  Baba gave each of us kids a two-fen aluminium coin – a small fortune for us in those days. We were very happy, and Mama was smiling again, so prettily.

  Baba was also pleased that he now knew how to replace a pot’s burnt-out bottom with another piece of tin. He even brought one home to show us how it was done. However, he cautioned us against limiting our learning to simple tasks and didn’t stop stressing the importance of a good education. ‘Always utilise your brainpower,’ he reminded us as he often did, pointing to his head. ‘It is unlimited.’

  I heard him mumble to himself one day while sitting in his favourite cane chair smoking his cigarette, ‘While I ride on a buffalo, I am looking out for a horse.’

  *

  In late winter 1961, strangers with sunken, wrinkled faces, like dried melons, drifted into town, begging for food in peculiar dialects I had never heard before. They horrified us with their dark yellow skin and lifeles
s eyes. Their bulging bellies were nearly too heavy for them to carry. They panted as they dragged their exhausted bodies along, fluids oozing from their swollen legs, soaking their makeshift bandages. Flies swarmed around them, but they had no strength to drive them away. Even from a distance the stench was awful.

  Baba said these people were from the poorer inland provinces where the famine had hit the hardest. They were not far from dying of starvation and the smell of death clung to them.

  Although awareness of the famine had spread, there was no mention of it in the official newspapers, radio broadcasts or over the loudspeakers, which continued to praise Chairman Mao and the Party as our saviours, and remind us of the success of the Great Leap Forward. As well, there were new slogans, along with accusations against the Russians, who it was said were causing all our troubles. We began to hate the Russians even more.

  ‘Hold hands on the way to school,’ Mama reminded us every morning. ‘Never let Weng walk home by herself.’

  Most days Mama walked halfway into town with us and met us near the school when it finished, just to be sure we were safe. For the first time in years my family locked our front door and bedroom door every night, and we kids wouldn’t sleep unless our parents were in the room with us.

  ‘Have you eaten today?’ friends and relatives grimly asked when they greeted each other with concern, but that was as far as it went. Nobody could spare any food.

  We used the manure from our chickens to fertilise our vegetable patch, and we saved a few eggs for hatching. Baba taught me how to identify the fertile eggs under our kerosene lamp: they have a dot in the middle of the yolk. Nothing was more exciting than watching the tiny chicks peck their way out into the world. The balls of squirming slime soon dried and turned into fluffy, golden, chirpy creatures. We fed them grass seeds. When they grew up, we exchanged some of them for other necessities. It was never a happy time when we had to eat the biggest of the flock.

  One morning in winter, my pet rooster refused to feed. It was on my mind all day at school, a bleak midwinter’s day with clouds hanging low and the north wind howling. As soon as class finished, I rushed home; I couldn’t wait around for Ah-dong to come out of detention class. While the chickens went about the yard looking for insects and worms, my little rooster was left behind. He tottered out of the pen and settled a short distance away where he dozed, his heavy eyelids slowly opening and shutting. Baba shook his head, expecting the worst – a nodding chicken was a bad sign, and chicken flu hit without warning every few winters.

  I gently held my little rooster in my hands, no longer the bold and handsome bird he used to be. His shiny bronze and red feathers had lost their lustre. He could no longer hold his head high and march around the yard, asserting his authority. His body felt like a hot water bottle and he couldn’t stop trembling. His eyes were half-shut, but I was sure he knew I was there.

  Then he began to shake violently. Minutes later he stretched out his long legs, threw back his head and died in my palms.

  For days I was very upset. Worse still, we had to eat him.

  The following week, the rest of our small flock of chickens died, one after the other, and so did others in the neighbourhood. We had chicken for dinner every night of the week because there was no refrigerator.

  After the chickens had died and fish became harder to find in the rivers and waterways around the town, we saw much more worry on our parents’ faces. Baba’s eyebrows now knotted in the middle as he sat in his corner, deep in his thoughts, drawing hard on his cigarettes.

  ‘The bright moon will shine again one day when the clouds disperse,’ Mama said softly to us when we sat with Baba. There was no anger in her voice, just fatigue. We believed everything she told us and went to bed hungry, hoping to see a clear sky in the morning.

  *

  Mr Lee continued to visit Baba at our house. He didn’t smoke, though, for he took good care in maintaining his legendary lung capacity. We called him Comrade Instructor, but Baba always called him by his given name, Ding-yan. A quiet rumour around town was that his father had been taken up to Pig Head Hill as an enemy of the revolution as soon as the PRC was proclaimed.

  One day after school, I walked into our room to find Baba carefully cleaning a piece of bloodstained meat Mr Lee had given him, the size and shape of a small cauliflower. Baba, who seemed very excited by the gift, cooked it with some herbs and half a bowl of cheap rice wine. The smell of the concoction wafted through the whole house while it simmered for hours. He delegated us kids to keep the fire going and to guard the gift. Later that evening we each had a small bowl of broth with cut-up pieces of meat.

  This happened a few more times. We kids were most surprised to receive such a big piece of meat without needing ration vouchers. It was unbelievable.

  ‘It’s human placenta,’ Baba eventually confessed. Mama nodded, and explained to us what that was. ‘It’s all right to eat it. They use it in medicine. Many animals eat their own afterbirths.’ She told us it was rich in protein, what we needed the most to stay alive.

  Ying felt sick and said she wanted to vomit, but Weng and I appreciated the extra food and didn’t care where it came from.

  ‘When you are starving, you will eat anything to stay alive,’ Baba said. He told us how desperate people up north would eat white clay, called Goddess of Mercy’s clay, to relieve their hunger. It was usually their last meal, as the clay clogged up their fragile bowels.

  Suddenly the supply of placentas ended. I found out later that senior members of the maternity hospital took priority over others like Mr Lee’s sister, who was a midwife, in securing them for consumption.

  I impressed my friends by saying I had eaten human placentas. But we only wanted a biscuit or two, or a sweet of some sort. We didn’t want to steal food from the commune. We really didn’t want to eat human afterbirths, and definitely not human flesh. So we continued to sit on the levee wall, dreaming of food.

  CHAPTER 16

  One unusually warm day at the peak of the famine in late 1961, I returned from school and smelled food in our street, something tantalising – an unforgettable moment. It wasn’t a scent from our daily fantasies on the levee wall. It wasn’t the fragrance of ripening rice that always made me drunk with delight, and it wasn’t the bland smell from huge woks in the commune kitchen. It was the delicate whiff of sugar, milk and flour all mingled together – an aroma treasured in my hungry mind, and associated with the yummy oval ‘Gold Mountain’ arrowroot biscuits my grandmother sometimes brought from Hong Kong.

  At first I thought the smell could have been my wishful imagination, even a hallucination. But then I remembered it was related to something we’d been talking about and expecting for days.

  ‘A man from the New Gold Mountain is looking for a wife,’ Ah-dong had said to us on the levee wall the week before. Like his mother, he always seemed to know what was going on in the street.

  ‘How do you know?’ Yiu-hoi asked, eyes widening.

  ‘I always know these things,’ said Ah-dong, ‘because my baba told my mama.’

  My parents had long told us stories of sojourners who’d spent decades abroad toiling for families they’d left behind. After squirrelling away some wealth, many returned to find a wife and start a family, but by that time, they were often elderly.

  A few of my cousins, like Third Aunt’s daughter, had married sojourners, and their families lived more comfortably than others; having girls in the family could be a blessing in this time of starvation. But my older sisters swore that they would never marry old men, even if they were from the goldfields. The slightest mention of it made Ying slam doors even harder.

  Baba had told us that in the early days of the PRC many sojourners were fearful of returning home because of the sanctions against China and the risk of losing their residential rights in foreign countries; they were also afraid of being detained under the PRC. So they had usually looked for wives in Hong Kong or Macau instead. But since the sojourners had been re
classified as patriotic because they helped increase foreign currencies for China’s rebuilding program, a few more had started to return to seek a wife.

  This one would be negotiating with a family in Kwong Street. The thought of witnessing such an unusual event had us buzzing with excitement for days before his arrival. The go-between, who had recently returned from a re-education camp, had received approval from the street committee and the District Head to help with the negotiations.

  The young woman was still unmarried at the age of twenty, a great concern to her parents, and the street committee wasn’t happy with the family because she hadn’t answered the government’s call to get married at the age of eighteen and have babies to rebuild China.

  Mama had often said that the young woman’s mother worried a lot about her daughter’s future and those of her other four children. Like my parents, she was unemployed because her parents were from a now-disparaged class, in their case the landlords. Luckily, the daughter had somehow obtained an indoor job in a lightbulb factory. She was once friendly with a young man, a son of a Party member, in her production unit. But the comrade in charge of the factory promptly put a stop to the acquaintance, telling her she was unworthy of the young man.

  At least having an indoor job had benefited the young woman’s marriage prospects: she’d retained a fair complexion, which the go-between emphasised during the negotiations.

  ‘Sojourners like fair-skinned women to be their wives,’ Baba explained to me. ‘And there aren’t many fair-skinned women left in Shiqi. They have to work in the fields, or build roads and dams.’

  Whether such negotiations were successful or not, they always involved the distribution of special treats for us children. The thought of foreign sweets and biscuits had us drooling for days. Indeed, in the lead-up to the sojourner’s arrival everyone was wondering what gifts he would bring, what clothes he’d be wearing and even how he would smell – the event evoked visions of foreign countries and their bountiful opportunities. I sat with my friends, inventing tales of what it would have been like for us if we’d gone to live in a foreign land. How would our families cope? How old would we be when we returned? Would people in the street recognise us? Would we ever make it home again? These thoughts lifted our spirits.