by Li Cunxin
I put on my best innocent face. “Niang, I saw our little goat sneeze out a worm the other day.”
She looked alarmed, and asked me excitedly, “What does the worm look like?”
“A whitish caterpillar about the size of my finger.” I stuck out my second finger.
“What happened to the worm?” she asked eagerly.
“The goat ate it very quickly,” I replied casually.
“Next time when she sneezes out the worm you must pull the goat away from it and try to capture it. This kind of worm is worth a lot of money!” She became happier then, and seemed to dream. “Maybe this is our savior goat,” she murmured to herself, and she would forget about her despair for a while.
But one day I told the same story once too often and she realized I had been making it up all along. “Get lost! Don’t think you can fool me again!”
What a shame, I thought. Now I would have to think of a cleverer tale to cheer her up.
And the goat? She eventually died, from starvation, the following winter.
My niang was also recognized as one of the best seamstresses in the village. Sewing was one of the most important pastimes for the ladies. My parents simply had no money to buy ready-made clothes, and my niang didn’t have a sewing machine. So the older ladies would teach the younger ones, and they often gathered together as a sewing group in our small, crowded house, even though they knew we were very poor, to share their secrets, drink tea and gossip. The women of the village loved to come and share their happiness or their problems with my niang, and her sewing skill was admired by many. Her stitches looked as if they were made by a sewing machine—small and perfect. Once she was asked by a friend to redo some machine-sewn zippers because he preferred my niang’s delicate stitchwork.
My niang’s warm personality was well liked and respected by people of all ages in the surrounding villages. Like my dia, she always tried hard to help others. Besides that “lucky woman with seven sons,” she was also known as “the live treasure.” Men occasionally stopped by our gate to have a chat with her: most women would have been intimidated and embarrassed, talking to men other than their own husbands, but not our niang. For this, Na-na often fondly called her “that wild girl.”
But my niang was also an open-minded person, receptive to new ideas. Mao’s Cultural Revolution boasted that one of the great achievements of the Red Guards had been the establishment of evening schools. These were especially aimed at teaching the uneducated peasants Mao’s communist ideas. We were all given copies of Mao’s Red Book. I was six years old then, and I remember two enthusiastic young Red Guards coming to teach my niang to read. She never learned to recognize individual words, but she could memorize entire paragraphs of Chairman Mao’s sayings. She would practice while she was washing, cleaning, sewing and cooking: I often saw her lips moving as she silently recited passages from her book. She was considered a model student.
One day, while my niang was trying to make a fire to cook dinner, two young Red Guard girls came into our house to check on her reading progress. She was having a terrible day and couldn’t get the half-burned coal to light. Smoke filled the whole room. My niang was a sensible, fair woman: she was polite and explained that she didn’t have time to talk just then and asked them to come back another time. So the girls left and she pulled all the unlit half-burned coals out and tried again. She asked me to push the wind box for her. But just as she was going to start cooking, the two girls came back. They kept insisting on testing my niang on her understanding of Mao’s Red Book. They had to report back to their group leader that evening they said.
I could see my niang’s anger growing. Eventually, she told me to get up off the floor and asked one of the girls to push the wind box. She handed the second girl her wok flipper and asked her to take over the cooking. The two girls just stood there and looked at each other, very confused. By now my niang was frustrated and at the end of her patience. She roared at them. “I could learn Chairman Mao’s sayings every day, all day long, until I die, but who is going to do my cleaning, washing and cooking? Who will bathe my sons, sew their clothes, provide my entire family with three meals a day, every day of the year? Who will cook things out of thin air? Do you think Chairman Mao’s words will fill our stomachs? If you can come back every day to help me do all of these things, I will learn whatever you want me to learn—and more!”
The two girls left, red faced. That night my niang told my dia what she’d said to the two girls. He just smiled. That was the end of my niang’s educational adventure, and the two girls never returned to our house again.
By the time I was eight, the hard work and poverty had begun to wear down even my niang, strong as she was. She woke up one morning complaining of dizziness and a headache, and she didn’t eat any breakfast. My youngest brother, Jing Tring, and I were home with her. She had planned to do a lot of washing that day but found the water in our storage pot frozen hard. So she packed up a heavy clay washing basin full of clothes and, carrying a wooden washing board under the other arm, she headed to the man-made dam on the steep Northern Hill.
I knew she didn’t feel well. I begged her not to go. “I’ll fetch you some water so you can do your washing at home.”
“It will be slippery at the well with all the ice around it! Do you want to die in the well?” she replied impatiently. “I have to finish these clothes, or your brothers will have to wear filthy clothes to school tomorrow.” She walked out the door. “If I don’t get back before your dia gets home, tell him to come and help me carry the clothes back.”
A couple of my friends came over to our house to play that morning. Then, around noon, a neighbor rushed to our house, shouting, “Hurry! Your niang has fainted halfway between the dam and your house!”
My dia was not yet home from work and often he had to finish his quota of lifting heavy materials for the morning before he was allowed to take his lunch hour. Most of the time he wouldn’t come home for lunch, but that morning he’d said he would try to get back because he knew our niang wasn’t well.
I asked my friends to look after Jing Tring, then rushed to my fourth uncle’s house to see if he was home. The door was locked. In a panic I rushed to another neighbor’s house, but realized immediately that she would not be able to help: she had tiny bound feet. It would take her all day to walk up the Northern Hill on the rough dirt road.
I ran to a couple more houses and found no one to help. Then I ran as fast as I could toward the dam. Tears streamed down my face. I was afraid that I would be too small to be of any help.
I found my niang lying on the side of the road, her clay washing basin broken in pieces, the pile of washed clothes scattered around in the dirt. She looked so pale. I threw my body on top of hers and shook her violently. “Niang! Niang, wake up!” I shouted, panicking, fearing she was dead. When my face touched hers, I felt it burning and she lay in my arms, motionless.
A few minutes later she slowly opened her eyes and asked me, in a weak whisper, “Where is your dia?”
“He is not home yet!” I replied, frightened, but relieved she was still alive.
She sighed. “Where are your elder brothers?”
“They are not home from school yet.”
She sighed again. It seemed hopeless. “Help me up,” she said.
My earlier fears were correct: I was too small to be of much help. I held one of her hands to support her but it was not enough and after a few slow wobbling steps, she crashed to the ground again. I felt useless. I wished that I was big and strong enough to carry her on my back. I wept in desperation.
“I’m going to have a little rest here,” she said. “Go home and see if your dia and any of your brothers are back.”
I flew home. No one was there. I rushed out of our house in all directions trying to find help. Eventually I saw a middle-aged man riding his bike home. “Da . . . Ye! Are you in a hurry?” I stuttered, the words like bullets out of a machine gun.
“Not particularly. Why?�
� he replied, puzzled.
“My niang fainted on the Northern Hill and can’t get home. Please help her. She is dying! Please! I beg you!” I spoke so fast and stuttered so much that he had to ask me to repeat myself, but when I tried my stutter just got worse. I wanted to show him my urgent heart inside my chest. Finally, out of desperation, I began to stamp my feet. That helped the rhythm of my speech and he eventually understood.
“Where is she?” he asked.
I pointed toward the hill.
“Don’t worry, leave it to me.” He hopped onto his bike and pedaled off as fast as he could, with me running behind. He reached my niang before me and was already on the way down with her, motionless, propped on the back of his bike. I quickly went back to gather all the clothes but found nothing to carry them with. What to do? I wrapped all the long pieces of clothes around my neck, waist and arms, and carried the small pieces against my chest on the wooden washing-board. The muddy clothes were extremely heavy, and made me twice as big, but I was going downhill, and I managed to get everything home.
By the time I arrived, my fourth aunt and some other women had already begun to put cold wet towels over my niang’s forehead. One of the ladies told me to get some boiled water to make a ginger drink, to help with her high fever. I took two thermal bottles and a coupon and headed for the hot-water depot. The village shared one hot-water boiler. I paid one fen for every water bottle filled, and the old shopkeeper stamped two little red squares on our coupon.
That was the first time I ever saw my niang ill. She couldn’t get out of bed for nearly a week. The “barefoot doctor” in our village gave her a dozen different kinds of medicine, and she had to take a handful three times a day with warm water. We were always told to take medicine with warm water. The barefoot doctor was one of Mao’s inventions, a product of the Cultural Revolution. They were supposed to live among the peasants, live like peasants. Their precious shoes wouldn’t be useful in the muddy fields, so they were known as barefoot doctors. By the early 1970s, facing a severe shortage of doctors and nurses in the countryside, Mao ordered clinics and hospitals to train as many people as possible and send them to the countryside. He criticized the medical profession for avoiding the communes and refusing to share the experience of the peasants’ lives. Many people were rushed through a short training course. They read The Barefoot Doctor’s Manual and were declared qualified doctors.
But despite the barefoot doctor’s medicine, my niang’s fever wouldn’t recede, and she kept having dizzy spells. Her lips became covered with white blisters, she lost weight and her eyes sank deep under her brows. I often placed my hands onto the frosted window and then onto my niang’s burning forehead to help cool her down.
That week, my dia had to cook, wash, clean and get my brothers ready for school. He didn’t have a minute to himself. He rose very early to cook us breakfast and rushed home to see my niang and cook us lunch. Dinner was always late since he had to finish his day’s quota before he could come home. My dia’s cooking was basic and often flavorless, but nobody complained. We knew how serious my niang’s illness was and how hard it was for my dia. I was so frightened that my niang might die. “Look after your dia if I don’t make it,” she said. “Maybe I will die young, just like my mother.”
Everyone in the family, all the way down to five-year-old Jing Tring, was expected to pull his weight. My niang was so worried that my dia might get sick from overworking: we would not survive if he got sick. He was the breadwinner, the rock and spine of our family. But he never showed any signs of frustration or fatigue. He spoke even fewer words than usual that week. He just worked and worked and worked.
We had no money to take my niang to the hospital, and the medicine from the barefoot doctor was cheap and ineffective. So my dia chopped huge amounts of ginger and garlic into tiny pieces, boiled them in the wok with some sugar borrowed from my fourth aunt, and gave it to my niang. She drank massive amounts of this steaming-hot mixture and immediately covered herself from head to toe with layer upon layer of thick cotton quilts to make herself sweat. Then Cunfar and I were sent to the big grain grinder about five minutes away in the eastern section of our village to grind some wheat to make her some noodle soup as a treat. The grain grinder was a round platform pieced together from several thick granite stones. On top was a huge heavy stone ball with a hole in the middle and a strong bamboo stick through it. A person on each side would push the stone ball around to crush the wheat. My brother and I pushed the ball in a circle until the wheat was finely crushed, and when we returned with the bowl of cracked wheat, my dia used a fine wire sieve, which he’d made himself, to separate the flour from the cracked wheat shells. He mixed the flour with some water and rolled it into a thin pancake, then patiently folded it into many layers. Then he cut the pancake into noodles with a big cleaver. He even used a few drops of my niang’s precious oil—and two eggs! But my niang noticed immediately that the color of the soup was rather strange and after the first taste she asked my dia, “Have we run out of salt and soy sauce?” At first my dia didn’t understand, then all of a sudden he realized he’d forgotten the most important ingredients. They burst into laughter. Even in sickness my niang had a sharp sense of humor, and a brilliant, contagious laugh.
It was wonderful to hear my parents laugh again. Niang called Jing Tring and me over. “Help me eat some of these noodles. Your dia has made too much.” We all knew that she’d hardly eaten anything the entire week. We all knew she could have eaten twice as much as our dia had made. “Get out of here!” our dia said. “Your niang will never eat her noodles in peace while you’re here.” Our niang protested, but our dia gently pushed us out of the room and forced her to finish her soup.
Over the next few weeks, my niang gradually recovered, but we never found out what she’d had, though exhaustion and starvation were the likely causes. Her health was never quite the same, and she suffered from dizzy spells ever after. My dia wanted my niang to stop working in the fields, but in her usual strong way she argued back. “We can’t afford for me to stay home! Your wage is not enough for all of us to survive.”
“If we only have water to drink,” he said to her, “it would still be better than you working yourself to death. Our family could never survive without you, either.”
But the reality was that our family couldn’t live on my dia’s wage alone. He eventually agreed to my niang working in the fields only part-time, to ensure our survival.
Every day except Sundays, my dia would ride his old bike to work in the town of Laoshan. It was a good half hour away. He paid someone in the flea market ten yuan for that beloved secondhand bike. It needed a lot of fixing before he could ride it, but he was a resourceful handyman and could fix anything. It was so precious to him that we were never allowed even to touch it. He had to carry all kinds of heavy materials—huge grain sacks, big pieces of stone—as part of his job. He was the tallest and strongest among the crew of five, so he was called upon to carry the heaviest materials. He was also the driver’s right-hand man: when the truck had to reverse he would guide the driver, sitting alongside. I was very proud of him. A truck was impressive—most transport was still done by horse and cart in the communes. His job was also considered one of the better-paid jobs in the county and many people were envious of him. He was paid thirty-five yuan per month, almost U.S. $4.20 then! I wished that I could be a truck driver one day, but I knew at the bottom of my heart that my destiny lay in the fields as a laborer, like hundreds of millions of others.
It was often well after seven in the evening before our dia came home in those days. He would be worn out, and my niang often had to massage him at night to prepare him for the next day. As long as I could remember, he never missed one single day’s work, even when he didn’t feel well.
Apart from my dia’s few brief days with a teacher, my parents never went to school when they were children, so they could not read to us. But nighttime was still story time, and our dia would tell us his stories and fabl
es, always simple and basic, but we constantly begged him for them and we always listened eagerly.
My brothers also played their own version of I-spy. One of them would select a word from the newspapers glued all over the walls and ceiling, and whoever spotted this word first would have a turn to select the next. Sometimes we would not find the word for days. Later, once I’d learned to read a little, one of my words held the record for the longest time it took to find. We always thought it was sad that our parents couldn’t join in because they couldn’t read.
One year, a friend of our dia’s who worked in a Qingdao printing factory gave us some Deer cigarette labels. They were green, and we used them as wallpaper for the ceiling. Our dia could not afford cigarettes. Instead he smoked a wooden pipe and cheap tobacco, but he often joked to his friends that he had the luxury of enjoying Deer cigarettes every day because of the labels on our ceiling.
My dia was always patient and emotionally controlled, sometimes stubborn, and always good-tempered. The only time I remember him losing his temper with us was when my fourth brother’s teacher came to report to our parents about his bad school marks that year. Cunsang knew his teacher’s report wouldn’t be good. He gathered together my fifth brother, Cunfar, my youngest brother, Jing Tring, and me and said to us, “Let’s make chaos! I hate her, and she doesn’t like me either!” We thought the teacher was a disruption to our nightly playtime anyway, so we needed little encouragement. The teacher sat on one end of the kang and my niang on the other. Our dia poured them a cup of tea each. As soon as the teacher started to tell my parents of my brother’s poor school progress, my fourth brother gave us the signal, and we began running from side to side on the kang and yelling at the tops of our voices.
Our dia gave us a dark look. “Be quiet,” he said.
“I’m sorry about our misbehaving children,” our niang apologized. “They are tired tonight.”