My Name is Number 4

by Ting-Xing Ye

  But I was worried that I could not endure a night-long parade. My period had started the day before. What would I do if the Guards did not let me leave the parade to visit a washroom?

  To make matters worse, the hot, humid August weather was producing powerful winds and thunder, declaring the arrival of a typhoon. But the word came down: even if it rained knives, the parade would go on. The demonstration would show “our true revolutionary spirit as well as our determination to carry on the Cultural Revolution to the end.”

  As evening came on under threatening skies, Great-Aunt helped me prepare. She filled my school bag with sanitary paper, adding two extra pairs of underpants in case I needed them. By the time I fought my way through the wind and driving rain to the school, my umbrella had been pulled inside out and I was drenched. I was assigned to the tail end of our parade along with my “brick inspector” sisters, a name we had given ourselves after spending so many hours under the scalding sun, staring at the wall.

  We began the slow march along dark streets in pounding rain. It took half an hour to get to the main road, where the congestion of thousands of converging marchers forced us to halt. By now the rain had stopped but the wind had ripped our flimsy paper flags away and we were left holding naked bamboo sticks. Larger red flags rippled and snapped; the black ink characters on the red cotton banners dissolved into meaningless blotches.

  Still sodden, we stood buffeted by the gale for more than an hour. I was becoming desperate for a washroom so I could change my sanitary pad. I finally got the attention of a Red Guard and received her permission to leave the parade and go home with a girl who lived nearby. You-mei—Young Plum Blossom—took me to her family’s apartment, which had a huge carved steel door at the lane entrance. Her elderly parents were sitting in the living room, reading, oblivious to the political and atmospheric storms outside. You-mei showed me to a luxurious bathroom with a flush toilet, bathtub and sink. Embarrassed by the visit, I thanked them on my way out, turning my face away quickly so they would not recognize me if I met them again.

  When we rejoined the still noisy parade it hadn’t advanced an inch. The downpour began again. I wished I had a raincoat like most of the others, for it was hard to keep my bedraggled umbrella over my head in the wind. Time dragged. Still we remained rooted in the middle of the dark street. I began to think my daily sweating confinement at school was preferable to this cold and hungry vigil.

  After midnight cramps gripped my abdomen again, but all the sanitary packages labouriously prepared by Great-Aunt were soaked. You-mei had disappeared and I could find no one else to take me to their home. Luckily it was dark and the stains on my soaking wet trousers would not show.

  By now the crowd’s enthusiasm had diminished. The flags had been rolled up and the banners put away. The chanting of slogans and shaking of fists and bamboo clubs had died down. Finally the word was passed down the stationary parade that our destination was People’s Square downtown, where we would be reviewed by the mayor and other municipal officials. The news caused an enthusiastic stir, since being received by high officials was like being blessed by the Emperor in the old days.

  But to me nothing would have been more exciting than finding a toilet. I began to understand the meaning of the word pilgrimage, which I had learned from reading the classic novel, Journey to the West. The night crept on; the rain beat down; the wind howled. My blood flow was heavy and I was growing weak. My teeth began to chatter and tremors shook my body.

  At last, the parade began to move. We inched forward through the city streets until pale light showed in the sky.

  As dawn arrived we entered People’s Square. In the distance, so small I could hardly see them, three or four figures waved at us from a raised—and roofed—reviewing stand. No standing in the wind and rain for them. Moments later, the Red Guards ran up and down the ranks, telling us that the parade was over and we could go home.

  The grateful crowd rapidly dispersed in all directions to bus and streetcar stops, but the transportation system had shut down for the parade. The hordes of marchers, like deflated rubber balls filling the streets, reminded me of the words Father had added to my composition six years before: “The crowd surged like a wave moving through water.” Only now the water was a violent and bitter sea.

  Exhausted by kilometres of marching and standing all through the rainy windy night, I began the three-kilometre walk home, chilled to the bone, drained by fatigue and loss of blood. When I woke up it was late afternoon and I found myself lying half on, half off Great-Aunt’s bed in a pool of blood, my clothes still drenched with rain and blood from the night before. I dragged myself from the bed in a panic. It was no use: the blood had long since seeped through the straw mat and stained the bedding.

  “Never mind, Ah Si,” Great-Aunt waved off my apologies. “You have a hot bath and I’ll take care of this.”

  Number 1 carried the water from downstairs and Number 3 brought me dry clothes. The hot bath was heavenly. After I had finished soaking, Great-Aunt prepared a cup of boiled ginger soup with brown sugar. I didn’t tell her that I’d had to throw away the soaked and useless sanitary paper.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When I returned to school in the first week of September, the Red Guards from Beijing had vanished. Nevertheless, the schoolyard looked uninviting, for the typhoon had swept almost all the posters to the ground, blocking the sewers with them, leaving puddles here and there dyed black with ink. This institution that should have been filled with happy schoolgirls at the beginning of a new school year had, in the past few months, been turned into a hateful vindictive place. And now it resembled a ghost town.

  I turned and went home. Now, all of us except Number 2 had become idlers, and our lane was full of school kids just hanging around with nothing to do. I was glad to stay at home. But good things never last long. Late one afternoon when most families were preparing supper, we were once again drawn from our kitchens by the clamour of gongs and the racket of drums.

  Some Beijing Red Guards led a group of a dozen local youths into our lane, marching slowly, beating their drums and gongs, shouting slogans against capitalists and counterrevolutionaries, checking the building numbers. Many of the onlookers—among them Boss Luo’s wife from the building next to us, and my friend Ying-ying’s mother—slunk away, no doubt hoping the raid would not be aimed at them.

  To my relief, the noisy procession passed our door and stopped in front of Building Number 45. “Yao family! Show yourselves!” the leader shouted. Some Guards began to paste da-zi-bao on the laneway walls; others pushed into the Yaos’ apartment, amid shouts of anger and terror.

  The raids on our lane had been launched. In the days that followed, the neighbourhood was thronged with Red Guards. Old Yang, a worker at home with an injury, served as our information source, continuously updating his statistics. “So far, eighteen families have been searched. In Building 75 the Red Guards have taken the roof-drains apart to see if gold bars were hidden there. Now they are going through the roof tiles, looking for guns.”

  Our neighbours—and we—were terrified. Even a toy drum beating could halt a conversation. The raids spread to the houses near us, then right next door. I watched the attack through Great-Aunt’s bedroom window as she sat on the bed mending socks. The Guards poured ink into dresser drawers and over chesterfields, enraged because they hadn’t found the gold they thought would be there. They built a bonfire in the sky-well and burned books and paintings, old and new, hurling them into the flames from the upper windows. The senseless destruction horrified me. I wondered whether Great-Aunt still believed that if a person had done nothing wrong she had nothing to fear.

  “Ah Si! Ah Si!” Number 1 shouted, bursting into the bedroom and slamming the windows shut before my eyes. “Come with me, now!”

  My two sisters stood grim and silent in the front room. My parents’ pride and joy had been our five antique Ming dynasty paintings, each more than two metres long and half a metre wide, done in tradi
tional style. They were watercolours, mounted on silk, with rosewood scrolls at top and bottom. Four were landscapes depicting spring, summer, autumn and winter. The fifth, the centrepiece, portrayed three tigers so fierce and realistic they looked as though they might climb down from the wall and prowl the room. For my entire life they had hung on our walls. No one had ever thought about selling them to bring in much-needed cash.

  Now the paintings were spread out on the floor. I looked questioningly at my brother. He was twenty years old now, the head of the family.

  “These are the only things the Red Guards could punish us for,” Number 1 said, his face bleak, his voice flat and determined.

  We looked at each other.

  “What would the Red Guards come here for? To look for gold?” I scoffed.

  “If they do look for gold and jewels in the home of a welfare family it will show their stupidity,” he responded, “but these paintings are antiques. They belong to the Four Olds. We have to show them a clean house because if they get angry at us there is no telling what might happen. People have been beaten to death for less.”

  Suddenly, I knew what we were going to do. Nobody wanted to say the first word, nor make the first move.

  Great-Aunt broke the tense silence. “I will dump the pieces into the garbage bin after dark.” She did not say what we all knew: as a lifelong worker, technically independent and separate from us children of capitalists, she was safe from attack. “Be careful,” she added. “The Red Guards will not let you off easily. Do what you must and let me know when you’re finished.” She returned to her room and waited there.

  “All right,” Number 1 said, “one painting for each. Number 2 will be home soon to help.”

  I had little sense of what an antique was, but I loved the paintings, their beauty, power and poetic calligraphy. Now here we were ready to cut them into strips with scissors, as if we were doing some sort of craft work. I chose “Winter,” thinking that my dislike of the cold damp season would make my task easier. But I was wrong. Soon tears fell onto the painting as I worked. I looked over at my baby sister, struggling with a pair of oversize scissors, scraping holes here and there in “Summer,” and my tears came faster.

  “Stop, you’re ruining it!” I yelled, immediately realizing the stupidity of my words. I took her into my arms as she wept. The last time we had all cried like this was when Mother died, eight months earlier.

  “Go on,” Number 1 urged. “Hurry!” Once more we set about our horrible task.

  Seeing Great-Aunt leave, her sewing bag full, while my two brothers swept the wall with dirty brooms to hide the marks left by the pictures, my fear intensified. Any indication of a new paint job would lead to accusations of trying to hide evidence.

  Our building was one of the few in the lane that had not yet been searched. Granny Ningbo was utterly terrified, jumping at every footstep. The Guards had hacked off Granny Yao’s hair in Building 45, making her look like a crazy woman, and she was under close watch by her three grandchildren, for she had already tried to kill herself. Mrs. Qiao was in even worse shape after having talked back to the Red Guards when one of them insulted her children: the Guards had shaved half her hair off, creating what they mockingly called a yin-yang style. In the Ye family apartment, we waited for the inevitable.

  At last, one hot night soon after, we heard footsteps on our stairs, followed by a knocking on our door. There were no gongs or drums, no yelling of slogans or insults. Tentatively, Number 1 pulled the door open. It was Uncle Yu, a worker from Father’s factory, whom Father had employed as a cook years before because he was from Wuxi and could prepare the kind of food Father liked. Uncle Yu pressed his index finger to his lips and quickly shut the door. He was a short, plump man, with a chubby, youthful face, though he was over fifty.

  “Ah Du,” he whispered to Number 1, “I came to warn you children. I overheard the Red Guards talking at the factory. They plan to raid your house tomorrow.”

  He went on to explain that all across the city, workers had split into two factions: the Loyalists, who still supported the city government, and the Shanghai Workers Revolutionary Rebels, who wanted to overthrow it. In his workplace, Number 2 had joined the Loyalists, for no one was allowed to stay neutral. Uncle Yu went on to tell us in hushed, apologetic tones that there were a number of da-zi-bao in Father’s factory calling him insulting names and saying that his ghost refused to leave the place.

  “The Communists claim there’s no such thing as a ghost,” I said, “so what are they doing, putting up such stupid posters?”

  “Why are they coming here, Uncle Yu?” Number 3 cut in.

  The old man looked as troubled as we felt. “I have no idea. But don’t give anyone an excuse to hurt you.” He pulled open the door, glanced out into the hall, and slipped away.

  All of us were touched by Uncle Yu’s courage. Out of loyalty to Father, he had put himself at great risk to warn us. That was the last time we saw this kind old man. After vindictive Red Guards revealed that his daughter had been adopted, she left Shanghai, taking Uncle Yu’s grandchildren with her. He killed himself a few months later.

  That night I could not sleep. Neither could Great-Aunt, who tossed and sighed beside me in the heat. She had said nothing after Uncle Yu left. When I thought about it, I realized she had been uncharacteristically silent since the raids had begun.

  All her life Great-Aunt had made a living by her own hands. She had envied Mother and others like her who were also country girls but had lived a better life through a good marriage. While she herself had been cursed with bad luck, Great-Aunt had watched Mother start a new life, surrounded by children. Now, ironically, her bad luck had made her safe from attack.

  We waited all the next day, all six of us huddled in our three-room apartment, and when dusk fell our building was hit a double score. Granny Ningbo’s place was raided first. Then, after half an hour of shouting and crashing, it was our turn.

  The insistent banging on our door was accompanied by bawled orders to open up. Seven people burst into the room—six Red Guards, two female and four male, all in their late teens or early twenties, all sporting the sinister red armbands. With them was a young guy from Father’s factory. The leader, who was from Beijing, ordered us into my parents’ bedroom.

  “Form a line!” he shouted. We stood with heads bowed as he read us several quotations from Mao’s treasure book.

  “Whoever lives in this society is branded by the class he or she was born into!” one of the women Guards exclaimed when he had finished.

  The Beijinger and the worker sat at Father’s desk and examined our hu-kou—registration book—checking against a list in his hand and ordering us to stand still, face forward, and answer as our names were called. The Beijinger, about the same age as Number 1, had puffy red cheeks. His interrogation was continually interrupted by shouts from the other Guards, who had fanned out and begun a systematic search of our two rooms. Great-Aunt’s room was left alone once the worker pointed out that she was a retired working-class woman. She remained inside with the door closed.

  One of the women searching a dresser waved a pair of cotton socks with frequently mended soles and jeered, “Are these socks or shoes? It seems this family has iron soles!”

  The Guards scouring the bedroom burst into laughter, but our interrogator kept his attention on his list. I stood silently, thinking of one of Mao’s quotations: “The poorer people are, the better revolutionaries they will be.” Another of his famous lines said that poverty was like a piece of new white paper on which one could write the finest calligraphy and draw the most beautiful pictures. Yet at the same time we were humiliated, first because we were the offspring of a capitalist, second because we were so poor we walked in mended socks.

  A sudden movement interrupted my thoughts as the Beijinger pounded his fist on the desk.

  “I knew it! I knew it!” he crowed. “Reactionaries are never straightforward in their evil ways. Look, everyone!” he shouted, bringin
g the ransacking of our meagre belongings to a temporary halt. “See what I have found.”

  He stood and strutted around the desk, pushing his finger into Number 2’s face. “Tell me your name again.”

  “Ye Zhong-xing,” answered my brother, his voice shaking.

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “And you?” He pointed to Number 1.

  “Ye Zheng-xing. Twenty.”

  “You see!” he looked around at his comrades and then suddenly punched Number 2 on the shoulder as he hissed, “Now you can tell me how your dead father was a supporter of the Guomindang reactionaries!”

  I was dumbfounded. Beside me, Number 3 caught her breath. The guard was referring to the old government led by Chiang Kai-shek. Father had never supported him.

  “We all know that Chiang Kai-shek’s other name, given by his mother, is Chiang Zhong-zheng, the one he prefers but doesn’t deserve!”

  Number 1’s name, Zheng—Upright—is a good name for a boy, though uncommon. Number 2’s, Zhong, means Steadfast. These were names a scholar like my father would think appropriate for his male children.

  But there was something wrong with the Red Guard’s theory. “That can’t be true,” I spoke up, earning a warning glance from my eldest brother. “As you said, Chiang’s name is Zhong-zheng. If Father had been a Nationalist sympathizer he would have named Number 1 Zhong instead of Number 2. The word order is wrong!”

  “Shut up!” screamed the Guard, spit flying from his mouth. “That just shows your ghost-father’s cunning! He reversed the order to fool people. But our Red Guards’ eyes are much sharper, thanks to Mao Ze-dong Thought!”