by Lisa See
No political rally is scheduled, but we do as we’re told. As we near the area where the canteen, nursery, and leadership hall are located, we see this will be a communewide meeting. It’s rare that we’re all together at one time, but here we are—nearly four thousand of us. Maybe we’re going to “launch a Sputnik”—a twenty-four-hour project inspired by Old Big Brother that will require the participation of the entire commune. Earlier this year, the whole country launched a Sputnik, spending twenty-four hours making more iron than the United States does in a month—or so we were told—but not only was the result worthless but it left communes like ours without many scythes, hammers, or buckets. But no, we haven’t been called here to launch a Sputnik.
Brigade Leader Lai stands on a raised platform with his hands clasped behind his back, rocking on his heels, a fierce look on his face. My stomach tightens when I see Yong on her knees next to him, her bound feet hidden under her. A white ribbon has been pinned to her tunic, showing that she’s been denounced. Kumei and Ta-ming stand on the edge of the platform. Kumei can smile in any situation, but not now. Her face is pale and her scars have turned lavender with what I take to be fear. What could Yong and Kumei have done to so upset the man who’s been living with them in the villa these past months? Party Secretary Feng Jin and Sung-ling also have spots on the platform. They look invigorated and alive with excitement. This isn’t a small performance for just Green Dragon Village. This time thousands of faces stare back at them in anticipation.
Brigade Leader Lai raises a bullhorn to his mouth. “Chairman Mao has said there will be no parasites in the New Society,” he recites. “Everybody works so everybody eats.”
We’ve heard these things before, but what he says next sounds ominous.
“These three are black elements. Two shared a bed with the landlord. One is the landlord’s black spawn. Once this label is affixed, it is passed from generation to generation. They and their descendants will never escape their black labels.”
A shudder ripples through me.
He motions to Kumei and Ta-ming. “These two do their best.” Then he nudges Yong with his shoe. “But this one is a daily reminder of all that was bad in the old society. Years ago, Chairman Mao ordered all women to unbind their feet. Did the landowner’s fourth wife obey?”
Shouts of no come from the crowd. Yong doesn’t react. She keeps her eyes cast down.
“We all work in the fields, but what about this one?” the brigade leader asks.
Disgruntled mumbles ripple around me. Everyone seems to have forgotten that Yong came out of the villa to work in the Overtake Britain Battalion with my mother, mother-in-law, and some of the other older women in Green Dragon.
“It’s time you remove your bindings and join us. Do it now!” Brigade Leader Lai orders.
Without a word of resistance, Yong shifts to a sitting position, accepting insult and humility in a way that everyone here understands, for in the past only slaves, condemned criminals, those captured in battle, and servants sat on the ground. The crowd falls silent, and people strain their necks as the long bindings come off in loop after loop. The commune’s members may have been too poor to have bound-footed women in their families, but everyone knows that a woman’s bound feet are her most private parts. “Even more private than that place low down,” my mother once said to me when she was telling me about my grandmother’s bound feet.
“Now get up!” Brigade Leader Lai yells at Yong.
How can she when her feet have been broken and crushed, held together in their tiny shape for more than forty years? But an order is an order, and the crowd is raw with hatred. Yong wobbles to her feet. Her face remains stoic, but her body sways uncertainly. Ta-ming moves to help her, but Kumei wisely holds him back. As the brigade leader said, the boy is and will always be a black element. How he acts now will save him from harassment in the future.
“Walk!” Brigade Leader Lai shouts. When Yong doesn’t move, he yells even louder. “Walk!”
I’m horrified, terrified, and thrust to that place I never want to visit—what happened to my father and my part in his death. The nausea I’ve been feeling the last few days comes up and burns the back of my throat. I feel sure I’m going to faint.
“Walk!” Red fury infuses the brigade leader’s face. “And tomorrow you will join the other comrades in the fields. It’s planting time, and we need all hands … and feet.”
Is he joking? Yong can’t possibly work in the fields. She wouldn’t last an hour, let alone a day.
“Walk!” he bellows. “Walk all the way back to your villa!”
The crowd takes up the chant. “Walk, walk, walk.”
This is much worse than when Comrade Ping-li’s husband was struggled against because his wife killed herself by throwing herself in front of the hay cutter. I willingly joined in when the mob attacked him, but Yong, Kumei, and Ta-ming are my friends. They didn’t do anything wrong. And maybe, I’m shocked to think now, Ping-li’s husband didn’t either.
Kumei and Ta-ming are permitted to help Yong down the platform’s steps, then they move aside so she can proceed on her own. The crowd parts to let her pass. Tears roll down her cheeks, but she refuses to cry out. I look everywhere, trying to find Tao, but I’ve gotten separated from him and his family. I need him. Where is he? I try to calculate how far it is to the villa. Yong will have to walk on the footpath next to the stream, past the turnoff to the Charity Pavilion, and then continue to the villa. I can make that trip in about ten minutes, but I don’t see how Yong will be able to do it at all.
The people from the other villages that make up the commune begin to disperse to spend the rest of their Sunday in peace with their own families, but the villagers from Green Dragon stay close to Yong, taunting her, spitting on her. I see Tao and grab his arm. He shakes me off as he turns to me. His face is filled with rage and hate. How could I have married him?
I push past a few more people. Up ahead, Yong staggers. When I reach Brigade Leader Lai, Party Secretary Feng Jin, and Sung-ling, I plead with them to end this, but they continue their chants. “Walk! Walk! Walk!” Their faces are as twisted and frenzied as my husband’s. An image of my mother comes to my mind. It was on the day the FBI and INS agents accused my father of so many terrible things. My mother showed no fear. She was Dragon strong. The realization that truth, forgiveness, and goodness are more important than revenge, condemnation, and cruelty gives me courage and certainty. I’m dizzy and sick to my stomach, but I straighten my back, walk forward, and take Yong’s arm. Seeing what I’ve done, Kumei takes Yong’s other arm. Epithets are hurled our way. I recognize the voices of my husband, his mother and father, his brothers and sisters. Finally, I give in fully to what I’ve known for months now. I don’t belong here. As soon as this is over, I’ll go home, tear up the letter I wrote to my mother earlier today, and write a new one, asking her to come and get me. I want to go home to Los Angeles. If I can’t go all the way home, then at least I can be with her in Shanghai.
Kumei and I help Yong over the villa’s raised stone threshold and into the first courtyard. I fear the villagers will follow us, but they don’t. They stay outside, still chanting. We pull Yong through the courtyards and corridors to the kitchen, where she collapses on the ground. I’m going to be sick and I look around frantically, trying to find a bowl or pot, but all those have been given either to the canteen or to the blast furnace. Usually there’s a washbasin on the floor, but it isn’t here today. In desperation, I run to the low wall that divides the kitchen and the stall where this family once kept their pigs. I lean my head over it and throw up. Once my stomach is empty, I sink to the floor, turn, and look at the others. Yong is white with pain, Kumei looks terrified, and Ta-ming shivers from shock.
“Why?” I manage to ask.
“Food,” Kumei answers weakly, leaving me even more confused. “We needed food. We’re black elements, so I knew we’d receive less food when rationing began. We live in the villa with the brigade leader. He
brought home extra food, but there’s been a price.”
“You’ve been …” I glance at Ta-ming, not sure how blunt I can be.
“It’s a price I’ve paid before,” Kumei says. “It’s not as bad as you think, but last night the brigade leader and I had a disagreement. I needed to take care of Ta-ming, but the brigade leader wanted me to take care of him.”
I close my eyes. Of course, this had to be true. The brigade leader didn’t need to live in the villa when he already had the leadership hall—the most secure and comfortable building in the commune. I lived in the villa with Brigade Leader Lai only a few days after I returned to Green Dragon and before I married Tao, but I remember my mother complaining a couple of times about how she kept getting woken up at night by the sound of someone creeping around. That must have been the brigade leader going to and from Kumei’s room, or vice versa. There are no secrets in China, not even in a house this large, but why hadn’t I understood what was going on before? Because I’m an idiot.
“Have you eaten?” Yong says, her voice barely a whisper. “Do you drink tea?”
These are the two most common questions asked when a guest enters your home. Even in her agony, Yong is a woman far above the barbarians outside the villa’s walls.
Kumei, remembering she is also a hostess, gets to her feet and puts water on for tea.
LATER, AFTER THE peasants leave, I fetch water from the stream. The cold water will help sooth Yong’s feet, which are about the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen. Her toes and midfeet have been broken and rolled over until the toes meet the heels. They’ve been wrapped in that position for decades. Now they’ve uncoiled, but only so far. They look like camelback bridges—just the toes and backs of the heels touch the ground. The cadres made her walk barefoot, so her flesh, which looks baby soft from being hidden from the world all these years, is ripped and torn. The color? It does not belong on a living creature. I’m trying to be brave and helpful, but my stomach churns. I wish whatever it was I ate or drank would hurry up and pass through me, just as it did when I first arrived here with Z.G.
I’ve had questions about Yong and Kumei for a long time. In the past, I made up romantic stories, for Kumei especially. Now that I’ve helped them in front of everyone, I suppose I’ll have a black mark against me too. Since that’s the case, I need to know what they did to earn such antipathy from everyone in the commune.
“Why do they hate you so?” I ask.
That’s about as direct and American as I can make it. I expect them to shrink from my rudeness, but instead they look at me as if I’m stupid.
“My master was the landowner,” Yong answers, fingering the white ribbon she’ll wear as a stigma for the rest of her life. “Didn’t you know that?”
“I did, but I still don’t understand what they have against you.”
“Because we’re all that’s left of his household,” Kumei says. “The people think we lived privileged lives, but he was a bad man and we had to endure a lot—”
“I know you feel that way,” Yong interrupts. “But I thought he was a good man. He cared for the people here. When the Eighth Route Army came and the soldiers asked him to redistribute his land, he did so without argument.”
“I never even heard the word landowner before the army came,” Kumei says.
“That’s because the word didn’t exist,” Yong explains, her voice warped by pain. “Everyone always called the master en ren, which means benefactor. But the soldiers gave him a new title—dichu—landowner. When the soldiers left, we thought everything would be fine. Instead, the villagers’ hidden anger and resentments surfaced.”
Kumei holds one of Yong’s feet in her hand and with her other hand dribbles cold water over the purple and green skin. Washing bound feet is something that should always be done in complete privacy. Yong should be mortally embarrassed, but she’s already been so humiliated in front of the commune that having me here for this most intimate moment is nothing.
“All wars are brutal, especially for women,” Yong continues haltingly. “But our lives were not so wonderful even before the War of Liberation and land reform. We entered this house as wives, playthings, entertainment, and servants—”
“My parents were poor,” Kumei cuts in. “Poorer than your husband’s family.” She doesn’t wait for me to comment on that. “We had a bad famine when I was little. You think this winter was difficult? It wasn’t nearly as terrible as when I was five. When my brother died, I was told I was being given to the master to help pay the death tax. They said I was ‘going to the benefactor,’ but I didn’t know what they meant or what was required. I was brought into the second courtyard and told to put my forehead on his feet and those of the bound-footed women in the household. He was fifty.”
I put a hand over my mouth to cover my surprise as I realize why Sung-ling chose Kumei to play the maiden in our propaganda play and why the cadre was so tolerant of my friend for ignoring the set script. Comrade Ping-li’s husband wasn’t the only one being struggled against that night. Kumei was also being made to tell her story. How many times has she been forced to do that in one form or another since Liberation? Other moments come to mind too: when we first arrived and I asked Kumei why more people didn’t live in the villa and she was so evasive, and the night my mother came to Z.G.’s house and he said that we’d been housed in the villa as punishment. Even when people were telling me things, I wasn’t hearing them.
I tune back in to Kumei’s tale as she says, “I waited on the wives and concubines and took care of their bound feet. Yong was the youngest and prettiest wife—”
“I was also the meanest,” Yong confesses. “I was from Shanghai and spoke Shanghainese. The villa was beautiful, but Green Dragon wasn’t Shanghai. Our master was never satisfied either. He had many wives and concubines. He had plenty of children. Sons, even. But he wanted to prove his strength to the village. He was the headman, see?”
I don’t see, but Kumei goes on to explain it to me. “He had control over us, but as the headman he also needed to prove his strength to everyone in Green Dragon. What better way to do that than to have me in his bed and show that he could give me a son. By then, I was eleven. After the first night, I ran to my uncle and aunt’s house in Black Bridge Village. I begged them to let me live with them, but they turned away from me, stepped back into their house, and shut the door. I walked back to Green Dragon, to the house where I’d been born. I sat outside and cried. I rubbed dirt over my face and arms, into my clothes, and into my mouth. And then I stood up and walked back to the villa.”
“Why didn’t your parents help you?” I ask.
“They starved to death the winter they gave me away,” she answers. Then, after a moment, she continues. “I didn’t understand the things that went on in the villa. I was a servant, but I was also a concubine.”
“You were a little girl!”
Yong has been saying that the landowner was a good man, but how could he have been?
“We treated Kumei worse than the lowest servant, because she was the master’s favorite in the bedchamber,” Yong admits. Then she addresses Kumei directly. “You had no proper status in the household, and you could never enjoy the luxury that the other wives and concubines did. I remember Third Wife used to poke you with the sharp end of her brooch. She insisted that the kitchen servants feed you only melon rinds and rotten vegetable leaves.”
“At least I got something to eat—”
Are they teasing each other?
“And what about that concubine from Hangchow?” Yong rolls right over Kumei, laughing. Despite her pain and humiliation, Yong is managing to find humor in what I think is a ghastly story. “She thought she was so special—one of the great beauties! If her tea was too cold, she threw it on the floor and made you mop it with your clothes.”
“If it was too hot, she threw it in my face!” Kumei giggles at the memory. This must be how she got her scars, but before I can ask this, she exclaims, “Oh, I would have
gladly traded places with any of you! The things he did! The things he made me do! I don’t know how real husbands and wives do this thing, and I will never find out.”
Now Yong and I exchange glances. Was what Kumei did then any different than what she’s been doing with the brigade leader? Kumei, as far as I can tell, has had sex only out of duty or necessity. Wouldn’t that color the experience, especially if she wasn’t in love the way I once loved Tao?
“I did many chores,” she goes on. “I washed the feet of the wives and concubines. I listened to their bickering. I watched them put on face powder, silks, and jade jewelry. The more I endured, the more beautiful the master said I was. I got pregnant when I was thirteen. I didn’t understand what was happening. I was sleepy and sick.”
“We thought you were lazy,” Yong says. “But now I can say you led an animal’s existence in those days.”
“Finally, a kitchen slave told me what was wrong.” Kumei’s face pales with her memories. “Pretty soon I felt this thing growing inside me, moving, like I was invaded by a demon. I wanted to disappear into the black depths of death. I would kill myself by swallowing the gold ring the master had given me or by eating food that had turned bad, but these methods didn’t promise a sure result. Then I realized the best way to do it. I would drink lye. But my master slapped it away from my lips, which is how I ended up looking like this.” Her fingers trail over the scars that run down her neck and under her clothes.
“She has as many scars in her heart as she has on her body,” Yong says. “Her life has been dark without a glimmer of light.”
“But your life couldn’t have been easy either,” I say to Yong.
“I was supposed to have a happy life,” she concedes. “My mother told me that if I had my feet bound, my swaying walk would look like the drifting mist and I would marry into a good family with at least five other women with bound feet. She promised that, when I married, I would wear a headdress weighing more than a dozen pounds. She said I would never have to leave my home, but if I wanted to for some reason, I’d be carried in a palanquin so no one would see me. She said I would always have four maids to help me, and for a while I had even more than that. She said I would never have to work in the fields—”