by Li Cunxin
“Did they bury her?” I asked.
“No! It’s illegal to bury a live person,” he replied.
I could tell the best part of the story was still to come.
“The old lady’s only treasure was a pearl necklace her husband had given her, and she wrapped it around his neck. She begged his soul to find a peaceful resting place and then come back to get her. The old man’s son didn’t wait for the three-day period. He buried his father on the first night after his death. The word spread wide about the buried treasure around the old man’s neck. At midnight, a robber dug up the grave and opened the coffin. He could see the pearls reflected in the moonlight. The robber made sure the old man was truly dead before he took the necklace by punching hard on the old man’s chest three times. Just as he reached for the necklace ...” Cunmao stopped. “Guess what happened?”
“The old man’s son showed up?” I guessed.
“Ha-ha!” Cunmao laughed heartily. “Are you sure you won’t be scared?”
“I already promised you, hurry up!” I urged him.
“The old man suddenly opened his eyes wide and said in a loud voice, ‘What do you think you’re doing, young man?’ The robber, as if he had seen a ghost, jumped out of the grave and bolted away witless.”
I sat there petrified to the spot. This was the last outcome I’d expected. Cunmao opened his eyes big and wide, just like the old man’s.
“Why did he become alive again?” I asked, terrified, gasping for air.
“I knew you wouldn’t get it!” Cunmao scoffed. “The egg got stuck in the old man’s throat and when the robber punched him, the egg was knocked loose so he got his breath back. And that’s why we have to leave Na-na’s body here for three days in case she comes alive again too.”
“Then why didn’t anyone punch our na-na three times?”
“Do you think our elders would do it in front of us? Okay, go and play now.”
I still had a lot of questions I wanted to ask, but I could see Cunmao had had enough of me. When I asked my second brother, Cunyuan, about the reason for our na-na’s three-day staying, he told me it was just to allow relatives who lived far away to see her before she was buried. But I thought Cunmao’s story was much more satisfying.
I was stricken with grief at Na-na’s death. At the beginning I didn’t mind seeing her pale, motionless face in the coffin, but as time wore on, her face turned strange and very scary. I had nightmares for several nights.
Na-na didn’t want to be buried near my grandfather because his first wife was also buried there and she didn’t want any fights. She said the first wife always had priority. But she did say to my parents, a few days before her death, “If there is one thing I want you to do for me when I’m dead, it is to bury me properly.” She firmly believed that her spirit would live on in a different world. So my dia and uncles asked a good carpenter to make a special coffin, carved with birds, flowers, trees and water. Our youngest aunt’s husband painted it, the one who was the furniture painter and had lots of photographs.
It wasn’t easy to obtain permission for Na-na’s traditional burial, however, since this was now considered an old, unhealthy tradition. The government had just started forcing people to cremate the dead. Our elders had to do a lot of lobbying, at different levels of the commune leadership, but none of the leaders wanted to take responsibility. Nobody officially gave us permission to bury our na-na. But nobody said we couldn’t either, so she was buried as she had wished. “This shows how important it is to be honest and kind,” my dia said to us. “If it wasn’t for the Li family’s reputation, we couldn’t do this.” Na-na’s burial was to be the last one allowed in our village.
The village leaders let us select the edge of a ditch for Na-na’s burial site. It was a water escape channel from the fields. Any place with water was a lucky place. It lay north of our house, halfway up the Northern Hill.
Before she died, Na-na had personally chosen her funeral clothes, shoes and other essential burial items. She’d made her own clothes and shoes so she’d feel comfortable in the other world. After she died, she was washed with a warm cloth to represent “cleansing her of the filth of this world” so she’d have a clean start in the new world. Na-na’s own daughters then dressed her in her burial clothes, a dark greenish-blue cotton jacket, and black shoes with flowers stitched on the soles. The man with the best writing in the village was fetched to write Na-na’s name on a large piece of white paper, the same shape as the stone nameplate on the graves. Once a person died, his or her spirit would linger, looking for the place where they belonged. This temporary nameplate would show her that this was her place. If we didn’t have Na-na’s nameplate put up quickly, her soul might wander away and become lost forever. The man with the good writing also wrote Nana’s name and her date of birth and death on a piece of white silk, large enough to drape over the coffin. At least one person would stay by the coffin at all times during those three days, to “keep the beloved company.” Any person related to Na-na or our family had to cry loudly as soon as they walked into the room, regardless of their age. The person who was “keeping the beloved company” had to cry as well and as they cried they would call out the visitor’s name so Na-na would know who was paying her their respects.
On the first night after Na-na’s death, we used sorghum stems and blue rice paper to make some figures of a cow and a horse, and several child-size figures. A painter would then paint some faces onto these, not human faces, but half-human faces. The models represented food and servants for Na-na to use in her new world. Na-na was so poor in our world, I thought to myself, and yet she is meant to die so rich. In reality, when she died, her only possession was a chest of drawers.
As soon as the sun went down on the first day after her death, the entire family formed a procession. Everyone cried loudly all the way to a temporary miniature temple, about ten minutes away from our house. The Red Guards had destroyed all the real temples, so my dia and uncles had to make this one themselves. It was only about a yard or so high—it looked like a toy temple to me, but here the local god would determine if our na-na was worthy of a happy life. If there were a god and he were fair, he would definitely look after my na-na. She was the best na-na in the world. I couldn’t imagine anyone kinder.
This procession was repeated again on the second night after sunset, and very early on the third day, the funeral day, just before sunrise. Skilled diggers then went to the burial site to prepare for the coffin.
The funeral itself was expensive. Some families would spend up to a third of their savings on it. Our family hired many people, even though it cost us dearly: coffin carriers, dancers on stilts, musicians, blanket-and-quilt carriers, even people to carry mirrors, combs, cups, food, drinks and, most important, a lot of fake paper money.
On the day of the funeral, the procession began from Na-na’s house, with my eldest uncle carrying a big clay pot on his head. At one point he had to drop the pot on the ground. The pot broke into pieces, the signal for everyone to begin crying, one of the only occasions when crying in public was acceptable. Only men were permitted to go to the burial site. The women were left to cry in the house and cook the feast.
The Li funeral entourage was very impressive. Many distant relatives appeared, some we didn’t even know existed! The procession moved very slowly behind the coffin, all the way to the grave site. It seemed to take forever. I had never heard or seen my dia cry before, and haven’t since, but there was more crying to come at the grave site. We had to kneel in front of Na-na’s coffin and kowtow three times before she was lowered into her grave. I remember seeing the little windowlike holes in the grave to hold her mirror, her cups and other possessions.
The closing of the grave was the worst moment, though. My heart throbbed. I tried so hard to drive away that last frightening image of her dead face lying in the coffin. My fourth brother was the worst affected. Cunsang cried for days. He slept on Na-na’s old bed for many months afterwards.
; We had to wear something white for a whole year after Na-na’s death. Our parents wore white shirts, but for us children the only things our niang could afford were white strips of cloth, which were sewn onto our shoes. We often went to visit Na-na’s graveyard with our dia and fourth uncle, so she wouldn’t be lonely in her new world. Each time, we brought her lots of symbolic money, gold and food. I loved going back to her grave to wish her a happy life, but it always saddened me too.
Within a month of Na-na’s death my niang suddenly fell ill with vomiting and a high fever. Despite seeing a few local healers, her sickness persisted and on the second night she had a strange dream: Na-na accused her and my dia of not looking after her. She complained that her house was shabby and that the roof leaked. My niang tried to reason with her. “We looked after you to our best ability while you were alive and gave you a lot of money for your new world. What else can we do?”
“Who told you I’m dead?” my na-na snapped, and turned her back on my niang.
The next morning my niang told one of her sewing friends about her strange dream. “Maybe she needs help,” her friend whispered in her ear. “Why don’t you do a test to see if I am right?”
“I’ll do a test, but why do you have to whisper?”
“There are too many loose spirits! If they overhear our conversation they might play tricks on you!”
After her friend left, my niang took out a pair of chopsticks and a raw egg and placed the chopsticks pointing north on her kang. She lit two sticks of incense, closed her eyes and called out, “Niang, mother of Li Tingfang, if it was you who showed your spirit last night and if you are in need, please show your spirit again now.” Then she placed the egg between the chopsticks with the pointed end down. The superstition held that if it was Na-na’s spirit calling for help, the egg should stand up on the pointed end all by itself.
My niang opened her eyes and was stunned. The egg was still standing up! Even for a deeply superstitious person like my niang, it seemed a little scary.
For a few moments she didn’t know what to do, until the egg fell and started to roll toward her. She grabbed it in her hand, as though it were Na-na’s spirit, and immediately kowtowed three times in the direction of Na-na’s burial place. “Niang! We will come to see you soon and bring you food and money! Please forgive us for our sins!” she murmured.
When my second brother arrived home from school that day she asked him to take two of his younger brothers to check on Na-na’s grave straightaway. Three of us raced each other to the burial site and found a large round hole there, dug by an animal. We were not aware of our niang’s dream then, so we simply filled the hole with the loose dirt and told Niang what we’d found. As soon as our dia came home from work, she said to him urgently, “Go to our niang’s grave with some food and money, and make sure the hole is properly secured and patched up.”
My dia was about to ask what this was all about, but my niang stopped him. “Just go now and I will explain later!”
At first my dia was reluctant to go because all of us were waiting for dinner, but after he saw how serious and determined she was, he went back to the grave, carrying a lantern, a shovel, a bottle of water and some incense and paper money.
Later that night our niang finally told us of her dream and her experiment with the egg. All of us children laughed and thought she was just being superstitious, but our dia was more thoughtful. “One cannot fully believe it and yet one shouldn’t disbelieve it.” That’s what Confucius would have said, I thought. But even so, our niang’s fever receded the very next day.
My parents discussed this incident often. So did our niang’s group of friends, whose superstitious beliefs gave them hope beyond the harsh reality of daily life.
But one question that bothered my parents for many days after this incident was why Na-na didn’t send her message about her leaking grave to my dia instead. Perhaps, my parents considered, Na-na wouldn’t have thought he would take this dream too seriously, or perhaps she thought he would have been too tired to even dream. But most important, they believed that Na-na wouldn’t have had the heart to strike down the main breadwinner of our family with sickness, her youngest and most favorite son.
The death of Na-na was the first time in my life that I had lost someone I loved dearly. Every time I entered or passed her house, tears would stream down my face. I kept hearing her sweet voice. I dreamed about her often. I missed her for many, many years.
6
CHAIRMAN MAO’S CLASSROOM
The year my na-na died was the year I was supposed to start school. The compulsory age was eight, but there was no room for my group that year, so I didn’t start until later.
It was February 1970. I had just turned nine. For my first day at school, my niang dressed me up in my best clothes, a new black cotton, quilted winter jacket and hand-me-down cotton pants with patches on the knees and the bottom, and a hat for winter of cotton and synthetic fur. She also made me a simple schoolbag from dark blue cloth. My dia bought me two notebooks, one with pages full of squares for practicing Chinese characters, and another one for math. He made me a wooden pencil box containing one pencil, a small knife and a round rubber eraser. Of course, one of the most important requirements was Mao’s Little Red Book.
“This is a special day for the Li family!” my niang jokingly declared at breakfast.
“Why?” our dia asked.
“The Li family has one more scholar today.” She tilted her chin at me. “I hope you’ll study hard. We’re not sending you to school to play. I hope you’ll learn more than your dia and your brothers have learned from school.”
“Mmm,” our dia said. “It wouldn’t be too hard to do better than your dia.”
“Listen to your teachers, follow their instructions, be a good student. Don’t lose face for the Li family. Make us proud,” said my niang.
I felt apprehensive throughout breakfast. School meant the end of my carefree days. It meant that I had to wear clothes and shoes and conform to rules. School would teach me how to read and write, but deep down, like my dia and my brothers, I wondered what use an education would be to a peasant boy who was destined to work in the fields. How would school help my family’s food shortages? I didn’t need an education to be a good peasant.
The school we were supposed to go to was about a mile from our village, but there wasn’t a spare classroom there at first, so our village donated an abandoned, run-down house as a temporary classroom. I knew this house. It was always vacant. I was told that a childless couple had lived there, and had mysteriously disappeared when they went to another province to visit their relatives. Our commune officials made repeated inquiries to the police but all investigations had failed. Rumors spread that the couple were spies and had secretly escaped to Taiwan. We used to throw stones at the house, and the older boys told us it was haunted. I always wanted to peek through the window and see what was inside, but I chickened out each time. And now this mysterious house was going to be our temporary school.
So, on this first day, a small group of us, around twelve neighborhood friends, walked to our school, excitedly chatting about the house and guessing what would be inside. Halfway there, we met some older students. “Here come the new scholars!” one teased. “Aren’t they in for a treat?” another remarked, and they all laughed at us.
Forty-five new kids from four villages were enrolled that year. When we arrived at our school, all forty-five of us gathered outside. One teacher introduced the man beside her as our sports teacher and introduced herself as our Chinese and math teacher. Her name was Song Ciayang.
“Students, this is an important day for you all, a new beginning in your lives! I hope you will treasure this opportunity Chairman Mao gives you. I hope you will study hard, and not let our great leader down. But before we can start our lessons we must clean this place and set up your workbenches.” To my disappointment, the contents of the old house had already been cleared out, so we never did discover what had been inside.<
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Nearly the entire house was made of mud bricks, with German-style roof tiles. There were two small wood-framed windows, but the thin rice paper pasted onto them had long ago been broken by our stone throwing. The ceiling was low and the room was depressingly dark and damp. It smelled of ancient dust, mildew and animal shit. It was revolting. We spent that entire first morning cleaning the floor, scrubbing the walls, and pasting new rice papers onto the window frames. Teacher Song brought pictures of Chairman Mao and Vice Chairman Lin Biao, and we pasted them onto the middle of the front wall. Under these we hung a makeshift blackboard. There were no chairs or desks so we were asked to bring our own foldable stools, which our fathers had made for us. We also had to make workbenches from used wooden boards which were full of splinters.
We didn’t learn anything that first morning. We were divided into several small groups, and Teacher Song selected two captains. The girl captain was taller than nearly all of us who lived in our area. The boy captain, Yang Ping, lived in the east part of our village. He was considered privileged because his grandfather had been in Mao’s Red Army and had died in the civil war. I never played with him because of the strong territorial pride within our village. And besides, my eldest brother had once been kicked by Yang Ping’s father from behind during a fight, and even though Yang Ping’s grandmother had apologized profusely and had shown kindness toward my brother, I was determined not to make friends with Yang Ping. And anyway, by the time we had selected our own spot and placed our stools next to whom-ever we wanted to sit with, our first day of school was over.
Next morning we started at eight o’clock. Teacher Song called out our names one by one from her roll book and we all obediently answered, “Ze!” Then she picked out the boys and mixed us in with the girls, which I thought was cruel, because I had chosen a spot at the back with two of my best friends. Now I was sandwiched between two girls I didn’t even know.