Bend, Not Break

by Ping Fu

  “No, no, no! That’s not true,” I said. “She is my mama, she is my mama!” I kicked my feet and squirmed in the girl’s grip until she handed me back to the boy who had spotted me first.

  I lifted my head to look at him. He was quite handsome in his uniform, as tall as my oldest brother. The red star on his cap was slightly bent and scratched. I immediately thought of him as “Bent Star.”

  Bent Star tapped the ashes off his cigarette and stuck it into the right side of his mouth. Then he lifted me up with one hand, roughly grabbing the back of my T-shirt by the neck the way butchers handle slaughtered chickens. I reached my hands out to Mama. But the other three boys pushed her even farther away.

  “Let me go,” I said as I struggled. “Mama, save me, save me!” I called out to her, my arms waving.

  Bent Star dropped me onto the wooden floor and took another drag from his cigarette. Ashes fell from the air, a spark singeing my ankle before dying out. He then grabbed my hand and pulled me through the library door to the top of the stairs. His strides were long, like a giraffe’s, so I had to scramble to keep up with him in order to avoid being dragged across the floor.

  “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “You are lucky that we’re taking you to your real mother.”

  “But she is my real mother,” I replied, pointing back to where Mama stood at the library door, hands over her mouth to muffle her cries. “Please, let me go, let me go! You’re hurting me!”

  “Shut up or I’ll hit you,” he hissed, his big palm rising in the air. I could see, though, that he was like a barking dog that is not really going to bite. He was only trying to appear tough in front of the others. My brothers behaved the same way. I wished that they were home. They would not have allowed anyone to hurt me.

  “Ping-Ping, stop fighting,” my mama said, raising her voice to stop my protests. “He is right—I did not give birth to you. Nanjing Mother is your real mother.”

  “No, no, no! You are my mother. You told me so many times. I’ll be good. Don’t let them take me away—please!” Tears gushed down my face and blinded my eyes. How could my mama say such a thing? Only a few weeks ago, I was playing in the kitchen while she cooked dinner and she had told me that I was her favorite child. My mama only uttered a small cry. Her hands shook furiously, and her almond-shaped eyes filled with tears.

  “She’s lying!” I screamed.

  The girl guard walked over and slapped me twice on the face, hard.

  “What are you doing that for, Lin?” Bent Star asked, placing his arm in front of my face to shield it from any further blows. Lin threw her head back in disgust. Bent Star tossed aside his cigarette butt, picked me up with both arms, and carried me downstairs. The others cheered as they marched down the stairs behind us.

  “Mama, please take me back. I’ll be good—I promise. Please!” I wailed, as the guards carried me out the villa’s front door.

  The last glimpse I had was Shanghai Mama standing behind the iron gate, waving, her hands stretched toward me while she spilled out a few halting words. “Ping-Ping, be . . . be good. Ping-Ping . . . be a . . . a brave girl . . .”

  Bent Star pushed me quickly away from the house, while Lin gave me another slap. “Keep quiet,” she hissed. They loaded me into an empty black military van. Ten minutes later, we arrived at our destination.

  Shanghai Train Station West was jammed to the breaking point with people carrying babies, baskets, and suitcases. I had never seen it so busy before. Bent Star grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the van. His eyes wandered around as if he were confused.

  “Over there!” Lin said, pointing to an approaching train. I watched the hot steel creature grunt and lurch into the station. Sparks of burning coal swirled out of the engine pipe until they faded into the damp gray air.

  As we walked closer to the train, the scene grew even more chaotic. The cars were already packed full when the train pulled in, yet more people struggled to get on board anyway, pushing their way through doors and climbing in windows. Arms, legs, and bottoms stuck out from every possible opening. I noticed several other groups of Red Guards on the platform as well. Some were boarding the train themselves; others were pushing unwilling passengers with tear-streaked faces.

  Bent Star watched the scene for a few moments as he tried to figure out how to load me onto the train. I noticed that we stood in front of car number five. Copying the other Red Guards, the gangly teenager picked me up and heaved me through the nearest window like a sack of rice. I was struggling to find my footing in the crowded compartment when I heard him call out my name.

  “Ping, catch!” Bent Star said, throwing his own wool sweater in after me. “Put it on before you get sick,” he ordered. Then he turned and disappeared into the sea of people.

  I found myself crammed into a tiny space on the floor surrounded by strong odors of cigarette smoke, urine, and sweat, fighting for breathing room with strangers far larger than I. Family members screamed for each other and babies cried, creating a symphony of suffering. I began to weep.

  An old man noticed me and asked if I was traveling alone. When I nodded, he offered me a wedge of seat between himself and the window. I felt a breeze as the train began to move. The fresh air, the view of the deep green rice fields, and the swaying motion of the train offered me some small comfort.

  —

  Smashed into my seat corner, I sorted through the puzzling events that had just taken place. I tried to tell myself that Mama had said those hurtful things about not being my real mother only because the Red Guards had been threatening me and she had been afraid that they would hurt me if she didn’t lie. But the truth of the matter was, there had been hints before that I’d been adopted. I remembered a time when my older sister had complained that my brothers were giving me a longer sedan chair ride in their arms than they were giving their “real” sister. I had run inside the house crying. Mama had assured me that she was my real mother.

  “Ping-Ping,” she had said, stroking my hair, “you’re so special that you needed two mothers to give birth to you.”

  Nanjing Mother, Shanghai Mama’s sister, had been a part of my life for as long as I could remember. I had often wondered why Shanghai Mama had worked so hard to encourage me to form a bond with Nanjing Mother and write letters to her. My nanny had even taken me on this very train to visit Nanjing a few times, though it had been a while since our last trip. I had also found it strange that Shanghai Mama had always asked me to call her sister “Nanjing Mother,” as opposed to “Auntie.” Still, it had never occurred to me that Nanjing Mother might be my real mother. Now I finally faced the undeniable truth: Nanjing Mother must be my birth mother.

  I remembered Nanjing Mother as a serious person. She had an efficient, close-cropped hairdo that she kept perfectly blow-dried. Short and thin with a round face and sloping shoulders that made her face seem even rounder, she nonetheless stood very erect. During my visits, she always hurried off to work early in the morning and arrived home late. She carried with her at all times a dark wooden abacus, each bead shining from use. At night, I would fall asleep to the sound of the abacus clicking in a pleasant consistent rhythm. Once she told me proudly that she had won the Nanjing city abacus championship.

  Nanjing Mother often asked me questions to test my knowledge of basic math, such as, “Two plus two equals?” If I knew the answer, another question would follow. “Two times three equals?” This would go on for a while until I didn’t know an answer. “You’ll know next time,” she’d say.

  In Shanghai, we always had a table full of fragrant homemade dishes for dinner. Mama was a wonderful chef. Papa would share his stories of the day, while my brothers interjected their jokes, making me laugh so hard that my tummy ached. Nanjing Mother, on the other hand, didn’t like to cook. She often went out to get dinner. I accompanied her a couple of times. We waited in a long line until we reached the window of a large cafeteria.
Servers scooped the food out from vast metal containers. It didn’t look or smell appealing, and it often contained big chunks of pig fat that I couldn’t swallow. When I spit them out, it would infuriate Nanjing Mother. “You are wasting food,” she’d complain. We never talked or laughed at the dinner table. Nanjing Mother didn’t seem to enjoy the food or her time with me.

  Nanjing Mother’s husband, whom I now realized was probably my birth father, was even shorter than she was, but I couldn’t picture his face. I just remembered Nanjing Father getting up early each morning to fetch fresh food from the market and make me sesame pancakes with soymilk for breakfast.

  “Don’t say you like it,” Nanjing Mother warned. “You will get the same breakfast every day if you do.”

  They had a two-bedroom flat on the second floor of an apartment building with an old-fashioned Chinese roof and patchy, discolored brick walls. The building housed members of the faculty of the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, or NUAA, where Nanjing Father taught engineering. They had a cute little daughter named Hong, four years younger than I was. The last time I’d seen her, she was learning how to use the potty by herself.

  I didn’t dislike my Nanjing parents; I just didn’t know them. They hadn’t raised me, and I couldn’t think of them as my real parents. But I took comfort in knowing that at least I wouldn’t be alone when I got to Nanjing. I was going to live with them and visit my Shanghai Mama and Papa, instead of the other way around.

  In the seat opposite me, a woman nursed her baby girl. Faces filled with love, they seemed oblivious to the cacophony surrounding them. It made me miss Shanghai Mama even more.

  —

  Four hours later, the train came to a squeaking halt at Nanjing Station, where the scene was almost identical to the one I’d witnessed in Shanghai. People fought their way off the train and onto the packed platform, sending their sacks flying through the windows. Fights broke out. Women, their clothes and children wrapped tightly in bundles under their arms, dashed out of sight.

  I felt beads of sweat form on my forehead and the palms of my hands. I wondered if everyone except for me knew where to go and what to do. The kind old man who had shared his seat with me had already left; I was alone.

  I sat motionless on my seat, trying to make myself invisible. Streetcar Number 24, which stopped in front of our Shanghai house, traveled in a loop. Shanghai Mama always told me that if I ever got lost, I only needed to stay on the same streetcar until it brought me back home. It occurred to me that the train probably worked the same way. If no one found me here, I could simply stay put, and this train would take me back to Shanghai, where I would be reunited with my mama.

  “Ping Fu! Ping Fu!” The sound of my name being called by two voices—one male and one female—jolted me to attention.

  “I’m here! I’m here!” I answered instinctively, thinking this must be my Nanjing parents coming to fetch me. I poked my head out the train window and waved my hand furiously. But the afternoon sun blinded me so that all I could make out rushing across the platform toward me were two silhouettes.

  As the figures came stomping onto the train, I was horrified to discover that these were not my Nanjing parents after all, but two new Red Guards. How had they known where to find me? Bent Star must have notified them that I was in car number five. I glanced around for an escape route, but it was too late. The girl already had her hand on my shoulder and was shaking me.

  “Why the hell did you stay on the train, you idiot? Get off this minute,” she commanded in a high-pitched voice. I decided to call her “Squeaky.”

  “She wanted a free round-trip,” the boy guard joked, not realizing just how close he was to the truth. It looked as if he had broken or dislocated his nose at some point, so I labeled him “Crank Nose.”

  Crank Nose and Squeaky led me to a car and drove me through the city. I had learned just about everything I knew of Nanjing from my Shanghai Papa. He had told me that the city was known for its prime location on the Yangtze River and for attracting intellectuals as well as artists. Nanjing means “Southern Capital.” The city had earned this name because it served as the capital of ten dynasties in ancient China. Papa’s tales of its rich history, plus the presence of Nanjing Mother and Father, made the city mystical in my childhood mind.

  A dark period in Nanjing’s recent history had lent the city a newfound and unwelcome notoriety. In December 1937, the Japanese army occupied Nanjing for six weeks. The city erupted in violence, becoming the scene of one of the biggest massacres in modern history. An estimated three hundred thousand Chinese civilians were slaughtered, with mass beheadings, live burials, burnings, and other forms of torture. More than twenty thousand women were raped and many were then killed. A third of the city’s buildings were damaged by fire, and countless shops, stores, and residences were looted and sacked. Blood ran through the boulevards; corpses floated on rivers and littered the streets and alleys. Children, the elderly, even nuns—no one could escape the savagery of the Japanese army. When I was nine or ten, I learned that the Rape of Nanjing Memorial Day falls on May 30, my birthday. The coincidence unsettles me to this day, making my birthday both a cause for celebration and an opportunity for grave reflection on humankind’s potential for cruelty.

  Nanjing had recovered somewhat in the decades that followed the Japanese occupation, but I recalled from my previous visits that it was still nowhere near the glamorous, cosmopolitan city that Shanghai was. As we drove through the streets that day, I saw that it was not even as pleasant as I had remembered; it seemed more like a war zone. Military tanks rolled down the tree-lined roads. Gunshots rang out like bad omens. Bloodstains dotted the sidewalks, serving as warning signs. The streets were almost empty of citizens except for a few people dressed in blue-and-gray Mao-style jackets riding bicycles silently with their heads down. But everywhere, I saw Red Guards with their matching military uniforms, caps, and red armbands. It was clear that these young people were running the show.

  Without a word, Crank Nose and Squeaky dropped me off at the front gate of the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. I was relieved to recognize the place from previous visits: this was where Nanjing Father was a professor. I got out of the car excitedly, hoping to catch site of my birth parents. My two Red Guard escorts darted away in their vehicle, leaving me behind with nothing more than the stink of their black exhaust.

  Once I took in the scene, the situation seemed hopeless. Armed military personnel unloaded from tanks and trucks lining the road in front of the main entrance to the university. Behind the military line they had formed, a crowd of thousands pushed at one another and yelled at the Red Guards. Trucks jammed with more people passed by. Chaos filled the air, and confusion shone forth from the face of every citizen. Still eager to find Nanjing Mother and Father, I squeezed between people’s legs and made my way to the front of the crowd, right up against the university gates.

  Suddenly, I heard my nickname being called by a thin and familiar voice. Standing on my tiptoes and stretching my neck long to make myself taller, I struggled to determine where the sound was coming from.

  “Ping-Ping!” the voice called again, enabling me to home in on one of the trucks where Red Guards were loading up citizens. Standing there in the truck bed were my Nanjing parents. They furiously nudged their bodies through the crowd to get closer to the edge of the truck bed so that they could wave to me. Their faces were flushed red and drawn tight.

  I kept pushing my way toward them through the crowd, but their truck pulled away too quickly. All I caught were a few glimpses of Nanjing Mother, with Nanjing Father’s head popping up over her shoulder.

  “Ping-Ping, take care of your sister,” I heard Nanjing Mother shout as the truck drove off in a cloud of dust.

  At their disappearance, I felt numb. My shoulders shook as I doubled over on myself, scared and confused.

  That was the first time
I felt the falling sensation that was to become so familiar to me over the years. I was falling, falling, and there was no one to catch me. There was no one left here who knew me, and no one to care for me. I got sick to my stomach, nearly vomiting onto the shoes of the people surrounding me.

  If only my eighth birthday wish had come true, I thought. If only I could fly. I’d soar like a bird up into the heavens, out of this nightmare, and back home to Shanghai, to my loving mama and siblings and our peaceful home.

  —

  The next thing I knew, Red Guards grabbed me and pushed me into a line with other disheveled kids. We walked across the street to the student dormitory area, where a pair of two-story gray concrete buildings stood parallel; not far from them were a scum-filled water canal and a long brick wall. A trail of garbage brought my attention to a soccer field on the west side. This would be my home and neighborhood for the next ten years.

  In the early 1960s, the government provided Chinese students and faculty with standard housing on campus. But everything changed with the Cultural Revolution. Receiving an education suddenly was considered an activity of the bourgeois elite, and teachers were declared enemies of the state. Most people with an intellectual background—merchants, doctors, lawyers, bureaucrats, professors, and students—were killed or carted off to the countryside for reeducation. I later found out that, before my arrival in Nanjing, my parents’ two-bedroom faculty flat had been confiscated along with everything in it.

  Now that Mao had decided to require everyone in China to return to the city of their birth—even children unaccompanied by their parents—the university student dormitories were being converted into housing for families or individuals who had been relocated, like me. Several Red Guards sat at a table calling out names and assigning room numbers. I waited until they called “Ping Fu,” and I approached the table.