by Ting-Xing Ye
Six months later, the cancer returned. This time Mother was sent home from the hospital with a gloomy prognosis and a large dose of painkillers. On December 31, 1965, after enduring months of awful pain and misery, Mother too died, three years after Father had left us.
In the days after Mother’s funeral, I refused to go to school. In fact, I felt I wouldn’t mind if I never saw my classroom again. The sight of my parents’ silent bedroom and empty bed frightened me. I was scared to stay home yet scared to go out.
The spring passed slowly as the five of us tried to face our parentless life. In March, Great-Aunt turned 55 and was retired from the factory. She was home all day. Yet her care and devotion to us made me miss my mother more than ever.
(Left) My mother, Li Xiu-feng, Shanghai, 1948, just before Mao Ze-dong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
(Right) My father, Ye Rong-ting, Shanghai, 1948.
One warm April morning, two months before my fourteenth birthday, I was busily working at my desk during a break between classes. Most of us at Ai Guo Middle School used the recess time to make a start on our homework so we would have less to do after school. As I got out of my seat to head for the bathroom I felt something warm and sticky running down the inside of my leg. One of the girls sitting behind me cried out, pointing to the floor, “Look! Blood!” The other girls craned their necks and whispered. There were red spots on the floor and a pool of blood on my seat.
Remembering Great-Aunt’s gruesome tale of her cousin bleeding to death from a gastric ulcer, I was suddenly sick with terror. I have to get home, I thought frantically, snatching up my belongings and stuffing them into my bag. I adjusted the strap so the bag would cover my bottom and raced out of the school.
I ran all the way. First Father, then Mother. Now it was my turn to die, bleeding to death! I burst into our apartment and found Great-Aunt darning Number 2’s cotton socks. She looked up, startled, as I squeezed past her, ducked behind the curtain and plunked myself down on the chamber pot.
“Great-Aunt,” I cried, “I am bleeding to death, just like your cousin!”
“What are you talking about, Ah Si?” Through a gap in the curtain I noted that she hadn’t even looked up from her mending.
“I have blood all over my pants and it’s still coming!” I yelled. What’s wrong with her? I thought. Can’t she see I’m sick?
Finally she put down the sock and needle and slowly rose to her feet, mumbling.
“What did you say?” I shouted, exasperated by her apparent calm.
“I really don’t know what to tell you,” she said, opening a dresser drawer. “It should be a mother’s job to explain this.”
I hated it when she talked like that. Whenever I got on her nerves, she wouldn’t criticize me. Instead, she would blame Mother for spoiling me. If I complained about the ugliness of my clothes, she would say I had Mother’s vanity in my blood. I had given up arguing years ago; she always got the last word.
Now here we go again, I thought. I’m dying and she makes remarks about my poor dead mother.
“Why can’t you leave Mother alone? At least you’re still alive.”
I yanked the curtain closed, expecting her to criticize me for my outburst. But she brought me a small paper parcel and a square brown package with “Sanitary Paper” written on all four sides. Her lack of concern calmed me somewhat and I examined the parcel. I had seen ones like it in store windows and had often wondered why there were two kinds of toilet paper, one called straw paper—an accurate description, since smashed straw pieces made a wrongful appearance here and there—and the other sanitary paper, which was sold in glued packages rather than stacks. Now that I thought of it, I had also seen it from time to time in our toilet paper basket at home.
But why was Great-Aunt handing me this stuff when I was in such danger? My very life was flowing down my legs. I recalled what the doctor had told us when he had diagnosed Mother’s terminal cancer: “Let her eat what she likes.” Was that why Great-Aunt was giving me such fancy toilet paper?
I turned the second packet over in my hand. “Sanitary Belt,” it read. I thought, double sanitation. Inside was a pink belt-like contraption, shaped like the letter T, made of soft rubber with white cotton bands.
“What’s this?” I called out to Great-Aunt, who had returned to her work. “Why are you giving me these instead of pills?”
“Are you really as stupid as you sound? Can’t you read?”
“Of course I can, but there’s nothing here to tell me what they’re for!”
“Don’t try to fool me. I may not know how to read, but I can see there are words all over the packages,” she insisted.
Knowing I had already gone too far, I softened a bit. Besides, I knew I could be left in this position all day if I opened my mouth again. In a moment Great-Aunt came back and showed me how to fit the paper inside the belt.
“Believe me, you are not going to die. Your parents wouldn’t let that happen to you.”
I put the strange contraption on and waited for Number 3 to come home for lunch. She went to a different school because of her entrance exam results. Maybe I could get some answers as well as sympathy from my elder sister.
“Number 3! I thought I was going to die this mor—”
“Cut your voice down, Ah Si,” Great-Aunt interrupted.
“What happened?” Number 3 asked.
I dragged her into the front room. “I have gastric bleeding, just like Great-Aunt’s cousin. You can’t imagine what a mess I made in the classroom.”
Before I could go on, my sister pushed me away. “It’s a pity you only look smart,” she sneered. “Didn’t you read your health textbook?” She walked out of the room, muttering, “Dying! As if there isn’t enough death in this family already.”
Physiological Hygiene was a non-credit course at my school. We had one lecture a week and were supposed to study the textbook ourselves. But the lectures were often cancelled to make time for political study sessions, and I had avoided the book ever since a girl in my class had been accused of having dirty thoughts when she was spotted looking at the pictures of a naked man and woman.
That afternoon I hunted up the book. By the time I had finished reading it, I was weeping, for the relevant section emphasized that students should read it “under parental guidance.”
I felt Great-Aunt’s hand on my shoulder. “Don’t be sad, Ah Si. Every girl has to go through this, and believe it or not, some parents are happy for their daughters when it happens.”
“The book says it’s a mother’s job to tell things like this to their daughters,” I said without looking at her. “But Mother is gone. Who is going to tell me all the rest of the things I don’t know?”
“Ah Si, I’ll try, if you let me. I’ll do my best to raise you, even though I’m not sure how.”
I now felt sorry for the words I had thrown at her earlier. Probably nobody had ever told Great-Aunt herself about menstruation. And I was sure there had been no book available for her, even if she had been able to read. Considering her own life, how could she say that for a young girl to become a woman was a joy?
The harmony we had reached was short-lived, though. Before supper time I asked her for another package of sanitary paper.
“Are you saying you used it all in less than half a day?” She sounded more shocked than angry.
“Well, I didn’t eat it! It’s paper, you know, not candy.”
“Each package costs thirty cents,” she rebuked me as she showed me how to extend the life of the paper by refolding it for a second use. “That was half a day’s pay for your brother when he was an apprentice.”
How nice it would be if there was just one thing in life that didn’t involve money. Only a few days before, she had been complaining loudly about the rise in food prices. How could she save money for our winter clothes? I pictured our money flying away with all the sanitary paper for Number 3, Great-Aunt and me. One day Number 5 would need it too.
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I sighed. “Great-Aunt, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were all boys?”
One dusty and windy afternoon toward the end of May, fifty classmates and I rode the bus for an hour and a half into Songjiang County to the Eastern Town Brigade. Although my visits to Grandfather’s rural town had made me familiar with country living, I was nervous and confused. We had been sent there to help with the Three Summer Jobs, a policy that had more to do with politics than logic, and I had no idea how we city girls could help the peasants. In the space of two weeks we were supposed to learn planting, harvesting and field management, and to grow physically and mentally fit from hard labour. We were housed in a large building with a swept dirt floor. Along the walls, rice straw had been strewn over planks for our beds. I dropped my bedroll onto the boards and started to unpack.
It turned out that there was not as much “real work” as we had been led to expect. First, we picked up loose ears of wheat in the fields and along the roads, an easy but tremendously tedious job. A few days later, we carried bundles of rapeseed stalks, which had been harvested and tied loosely with straw. Since the seed pods were crisp and fell off easily, great care was needed when transporting them to the threshing ground. The farmers instructed us to carry one bundle at a time, but we all burst out laughing after lifting them up: the large, awkward bundles seemed weightless. Ignoring the expert advice, we left with one bundle in each hand, struggling over the ridges in the plowed fields. A strong wind buffeted the bundles like kites, pulling me this way and that until I lost balance and fell to the dirt. Rapeseed scattered and rolled all around me. By the end of the day at least five of us had sprained our ankles.
Some villagers didn’t hide their feelings about the whole business of having incompetent city kids around, calling our mission “lighting a candle for a blind person,” and all of us eagerly awaited the day when we could go home. When we stepped down from the bus into our schoolyard two weeks later I felt we had not gained much except our bundles of dirty laundry. Principal Lin welcomed us back with a long boring speech, during which he constantly consulted his notebook as we stood baking in the sun.
“The physical achievement of your hard work is not nearly as important as your mental accomplishment through living with the peasants, the best teachers in life,” he began.
As he droned on, he kept glancing nervously at the school’s Communist Party Secretary Fang, who stood to the side in the shadows. Something is up, I thought. Principal Lin went on to say that, contrary to custom, we would not have the next day off to rest. We must return to school. That was when Secretary Fang cut in.5
He announced that all our regular classes would be suspended until further notice. We had a lot of catching up to do in our political education, he said. We would be studying documents from the Central Committee of the Communist Party—the “May 7th Directive,” the “16th Circular” and editorials from the People’s Daily newspaper, the main mouthpiece of the Party. Drooping in the heat, I paid little attention when he declared that a new movement was about to start.
When I finally got home, Number 3 told me that her classes had been suspended as well. Number 5, who had been cramming and beavering through exercises in preparation for her middle-school entrance exams, had been thrown into endless meetings and discussions, too. She was delighted. After watching her four siblings killing themselves with study on previous occasions, she wanted none of it.
“I feel great!” she crowed. “No more burning the midnight oil, no more nightmares. I’m liberated!”
Number 3 didn’t look so relieved. She had been sent home to write a biao tai—a statement of belief, repeating the government’s policies—to make her position known in the new movement. I watched over her shoulder as she crossed out and revised her statement.
“I’d love to help, Ah Sei, but I have no idea what to suggest.” I guess I didn’t sound too sympathetic.
“Wait till it’s your turn,” she retorted.
Great-Aunt, too, was parroting new political terms, such as “a revolution that touches everyone’s innermost being and purifies people’s thinking.” I laughed at her, for she clearly did not understand what she was saying.
We did not know it, but the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had begun.
1. Although we called her Great-Aunt, she was not a blood relation. She had been taken into my grandfather Ye’s household as an unpaid live-in maid when in her twenties, after being twice widowed. When my father set up his home in Shanghai, Great-Aunt was sent along to keep house for him.
2. In 1956 the government began its nationalization program: the forced confiscation of all private businesses.
3. The neighbourhood committee is the lowest level of government organization. It puts government regulations into effect at “street level,” for example, distribution of food and coal coupons, or administration of welfare payments.
4. In China, middle school is divided into junior (grades 7–9) and senior (grades 10–12).
5. Every organization or work unit (called a dan wei) in China—school, factory, the government itself—had an administrative head and a Party Secretary. All policies and decisions required the Secretary’s approval. He or she was responsible for applying the Party’s programs.
CHAPTER TWO
“Suspend classes to make revolution!” was the first da-zi-bao—big character poster—I saw as soon as I walked through the front gate of my school the next morning.6 I had left my school bag and lunch at home because there would be no classes and the steam room where our rice was cooked for us would not be operating. A second poster read, “Long Live the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!” Each black character on the blood-red paper was as tall as me.
Day after boring day our teachers read aloud to us government documents and newspaper editorials, which local and national papers were churning out with tedious regularity. This was the Party’s method of spreading information about new policies and condemning or praising political figures, most of whom I had never heard of. Sometimes the teacher had us stand and read one paragraph each—a good method of keeping us awake. Soon we all sounded like Great-Aunt, spouting slogans and terms we didn’t understand.
Like the other girls, I just went through the motions. This was not the first “movement” we had been forced to participate in: a few days short of fourteen years old, I was already a veteran. China—and our personal lives—fell under the control of the Communist Party. There was only one political party anyway, and Chairman Mao was the leader and ruled with an iron fist. Government officials were not elected by the people. Policies were forced on us through “campaigns.” We all assumed that this latest campaign was directed mainly at people working in the Arts—those who, in Great-Aunt’s words, “drink ink and play with pens.” We thought it would be over in a few months; instead, it was to rage for ten years.
One morning I heard the school’s loudspeakers blasting long before I entered the gate. “Fellow comrades, wield your pens as swords and spears and aim your words like bullets against the reactionaries.” A reactionary was anyone who opposed the Party and government. “Go to collect your weapons at the main office.”
The office had been turned into a storehouse stacked with giant sheets of coloured paper, boxes of bottled ink and writing brushes of all sizes. In one corner, Old Uncle Zhang, the gatekeeper, was making glue in a wooden barrel to paste up the posters. His forehead shone with sweat and his shirt clung to his back. A chattering human stream flowed through the room, picking up supplies for the writing of da-zi-bao and xiao-zi-bao—the second being small character posters written with pen rather than brush.
I left with a bottle of ink, two brushes and a sheaf of red paper under my arm. At the foot of the stairs leading to my classroom, two freshly hung posters, the ink still running, caught my eye. “Rebellion is justified!” screamed the first. The second filled me with confusion and dread: “If Lin Guang-min does not surrender, we will destroy him!” The three characters of our principal�
��s name had been crossed over with Xs. Years before I had seen many caricatures of John F. Kennedy—whose name was transcribed into Chinese as ken-ni-di—chew the dirt floor. On those posters, each character in Kennedy’s name had been over-written with an X to show he was an enemy.
I stood transfixed. Principal Lin, in his late fifties, was well respected by the teachers and students, a man who would “check the ground before taking a step, for fear of crushing an ant,” as my geography teacher put it. What had he done to justify such extreme disrespect?
Shaken and confused, I spent the rest of the day filling my large red sheet with pointless slogans. While I was gluing my poster up on a brick wall I noticed that some of those already hung accused Principal Lin of “using ancient things to make fun of the present” in his history classes. Most of them were signed by “Revolutionary Soldiers,” even though pupils had written them.
The next day I found my previous day’s labour plastered over with new and more aggressive posters. I had never seen the students in such high spirits: no classes, no school, no homework and, most of all, free to criticize teachers, an unprecedented event since the time of Confucius, who had emphasized that teachers should always be treated with honour and respect.
The colourful posters attacked teachers for giving low marks or for writing critical remarks on report cards, and some exposed their private lives through gossip and rumour. One related that a pretty young math teacher, Yao, had shared a boiled egg with a bachelor teacher, Meng. Yao ate only the yolk and Meng finished the rest. They were openly addressed as “Teacher Yolk” and “Teacher Egg-white” by the students. Another poster disclosed that the only son of Teacher Zhu, my first-year English instructor, was adopted. The cruelty and meanness of this gossip was enormous. Adopting someone in your extended family was not uncommon in China, but adoption from outside was widely considered “fetching water with a bamboo-woven basket”—a futile effort—owing to traditional attitudes toward blood lineage. As a result, adoptive parents never revealed the truth to the child and would often move to another neighbourhood, even change jobs if possible, to keep the secret.