by Ting-Xing Ye
Nowadays, money means everything, much more than “correct thought;” even my old mama understands that. One of her favoured expressions is that the most capable wife can’t make meals without a grain of rice. That’s my mama, all right. She’s an old-fashioned woman. I don’t bother to tell her that not everyone in the world eats rice. Rich foreigners, I have learned, eat bread and meat instead. Mama would never believe me, particularly the daily meat part. She loves to reason things out by citing old sayings, which are plentiful in our region.
One of the first I came to know when I was a little kid at village school stated that if you had enough money, you could hire a ghost to do your work for you. At the time, our teacher, an old fragile man who didn’t have any front teeth left, warned us that the adage was a “stinking bourgeois habit of thought.” He had to write the saying on the blackboard because most of us couldn’t understand what he tried to say, so confusing were the hisses and slurs mixed in with his words as he spoke through the wide space where his teeth had been. At home, my father told me sternly that there was no such thing as ghosts. Superstition and nonsense, he declared. I never repeated the saying again, but it stuck in my head.
Ever since the death of Chairman Mao, we have entered an era in which what was once right has become wrong, and previous error has turned to truth. The old adage began to make sense to me. Over a year ago our new leader, Deng Xiao-ping, declared to the whole nation that to be rich is glorious and so is making money on your own, the more, the faster, the better.
Since then I have often dreamed of getting rich. But I don’t know how. One of my old man’s mottoes is that being poor will make a person a better revolutionary. That particular gem, plus his madness over Old Man Yu, was the cause of his nickname, Old Revolutionary Chen. At sixty-five, he ought to enjoy what’s left of his life, which anyone who has eyes can see is a lot better. But he had to involve himself in things that are no longer his concern. My wife, Chun-mei, claims that my father has too much time on his hands, that he is inventing his own way to kill it: first, to wind himself up tight over some issue, then unwind slowly. Mama says that the old man is looking for trouble with a lit lantern. She doesn’t spell out what kind of trouble.
Lately, my father has become quiet, which is totally unlike him. He sits alone, his head hanging, his shoulders stooped, in the front room, our family’s sitting and eating place. One long sigh is followed by a couple of short ones after he squeezes the lit end off his cigarette. His sudden mood change came after I told him that Chun-mei is pregnant, or as the locals would say, “bearing happiness.”
How can I not know the reason behind his odd behaviour, being the only boy in the family? My father doesn’t have wealth or property to pass on to me as foreigners do. He’s never had a bank account. The purpose of his life, the struggles he has gone through, have been for one thing and one thing only: to have his name continue. He did his part, but because of the new government law allowing only one child per family, he is worried on my behalf. Yet he doesn’t want to tell me what’s troubling him, as if admitting his concern will cause Chun-mei to have a girl for sure.
Since Deng Xiao-ping’s economic reforms began—I have adored Deng the way my father worshipped Chairman Mao—Father and I have been like opposite electric charges: when one touches the other, an explosion is the result. We argue over everything, like rebuilding our house and adding a second floor as most village families have done, after I was able to borrow money from the commune’s credit union. All in all, he has been against almost everything I want to do.
“This same building has housed four children and two adults,” he shouted when I first mentioned the renovation. “Your sisters left home with no missing legs or arms. How can you say now we need more space?”
We started construction anyway because my father is retired and the responsibility for the house and loan is mine, though the land where the house stands remains the property of the government. My father nearly choked when I told him that all three rooms on the second level were for the use of my new family. We would have a bedroom, a sitting room, and a nursery.
“Even you can’t be in two places at the same time, can you?” he railed, following me from room to room. “When you sit in your living room you can’t be lying in your bedroom. So, educate me. What’s the need of three rooms? If this isn’t wasteful, what is?”
He calmed down a bit only when my mother dragged him into the nursery where I had painted the walls sky blue instead of pink, like the other rooms. He seemed pleased by that, declaring an end to that round.
My original plan was that my parents would live downstairs. I heard that’s what foreigners and city people preferred. But my father insisted that he and Mama needed only one room, and that his decision was absolutely final. So their living room became a warehouse and storage area for tools, and the third room at the front turned into an eating and gathering place, with an eight-person square table in the centre, four wooden benches around it. To fill up the empty spaces, I added more benches against the walls. It reminded me of our village’s meeting place, where the government documents are read to us and its policies are passed on. There is only one kitchen in our house, at the back, on the ground level. Among all my upgrades, the kitchen has scored poorest. I won’t dare to compare it with the photo I saw in a magazine when I was buying paint in the town market. I know quality when I see it. Everything in the picture was smooth, shiny, and stylish. I would be laughing in my dreams if we could afford the city folks’ gas burners and running water all in one room.
Half our kitchen is taken up by a brick stove, waist-high, with a back wall that rises to the ceiling. Behind the wall is a small chamber, big enough for one person to sit on a low stool and feed knotted rice or wheat straw into the fuel channels in the back of the stove. There is no shining cookware in sight. The smoke changes everything to the colour of ash. We use pig-iron woks for every task: cooking rice, stir-frying vegetables, making soup, boiling water.
In the past, to devote space to a bath hut would have been an outrageous extravagance. A chamber pot was all we had. We bathed in a wooden tub placed in the room where we ate and slept. When I was a kid, the Liu River was my bathtub as soon as summer arrived, but in winter, even thinking about washing in the river gave me goosebumps. I would stop having baths altogether. Only those who had money to burn, as my old man would say, could afford to have a soak in the public bath pool six miles away. I myself have never set foot in the place.
Our bath hut, built in the corner of the backyard beside the well, is my own design. There is no flush toilet so far; I haven’t laid eyes on one around here. The hut is about six by ten feet, divided into two sections. Our tub, a giant pig-iron wok, is set into a raised platform, and under it is a fuel channel, connected to the other room, which is big enough for one person to sit and feed straw into the fire.
The bath-house plan was one of the longest battles I fought with my father. His surrender finally came after my mother took my side. She added her voice to my threat that in the marriage market nowadays, with no fancy furniture or facilities, it would be difficult to find a good match for me. No sooner was this settled than a new clash broke out after I had my first bath. My father refused to let me dump the soapy water. He insisted that he and my mother would use the same water. “Such wastefulness of fuel and water will be punished by the God of Earth,” he bawled, forgetting his hatred of superstition and blocking the entrance with his long arms. Like a warrior guarding a king’s castle, he claimed the prize that time.
Among all our disputes, my campaign to start a business for my own profit was the most drawn-out and bitter. I would hate to admit that it was this battle that “broke my horns” as Chun-mei later put it. I didn’t agree, but in reality I seldom fought with my old man after that.
The war broke out shortly after I was matched with Chun-mei. I received a second loan from the credit union, on top of what I owed for rebuilding the house. My father became apoplectic when I told h
im my idea.
“You’re going to spend it on rabbits?”
“Yes. I have a plan. Put your heart at rest. The plan is foolproof and easy.”
“How many did you buy?”
“Three pairs of white, one of black, and one of chocolate brown.”
He became hysterical “Are you out of your mind? Are the damn things made of gold?”
That was exactly what I had demanded of the breeder after he told me the price. He reminded me airily that what I was looking at were no ordinary rabbits. “They are English angora rabbits, you idiot! If you can’t afford them, there are plenty of people I can sell to.”
Although to him I was a Tu-bao-zi—a dirt head—I knew the weight of the word English. Commodities that have English letters printed on them are at a premium, no matter what the letters say. Most of us can’t read them, anyway. It costs more if undershirts are labelled as T-shirts. In the town market, I have seen people wearing sunglasses with labels full of tiny letters still glued to the lenses. They look like fools, but they’re in style.
The rabbits might not be pure gold, but their hair was, I told my father. I also flashed him the new information I had learned hours earlier, that in the world market, where China provided ninety-five percent of the mohair, one ounce of angora-rabbit hair sold for six U.S. dollars! Although I had never seen what a U.S. dollar looked like, I knew its value. It was not just that American money was worth much more than our yuan; there was no way we could get hold of it. After labouring in the fields all year round, with my face towards the earth and my back to the sky, I felt like dancing when I was handed more than a hundred yuan at the end of the year, and that was after deductions for my share of grain, fuel, fertilizer, and farm tools. Six U.S. dollars is what a city worker earns in a month if he’s lucky, and equivalent to twice what I make in three. As I stared down at the skinny rat-like baby rabbits resting in my palms, I visualized balls of fluffy hair rolled into stacks of ten-yuan bills.
“One ounce of its hair is worth fifty yuan,” I announced, raising my whole hand, all my fingers open wide. “And each rabbit can be harvested five or six times a year. All we have to do is to feed them when they are hungry, let them rest when they are tired. All they are required to do is to grow hair, tons of it. Then we just laugh and sing all the way to the credit union. It won’t be long before we will join the ranks of Ten-thousand-yuan Family.”
The ten-thousand-yuan family was one of Deng Xiao-ping’s new inventions in rural areas. Even the thought of seeing such a large amount of money made my head spin. I had no idea how anyone could be worth that much. The largest note in China was a ten, which was about one month’s spending money for an ordinary family. I had to use pen and paper to work out how many ten-yuan bills these families had altogether. But nothing was more shocking than what I found out later: not only were ten-thousand-yuan families rich, they were treated as celebrities in our country, publicly praised by the government. I read about them in newspapers and heard about them through radio broadcasts. They were getting the same kind of attention and glory that used to be given to the poor when Chairman Mao was in charge.
Besides working in the fields, I had raised pigs, goats, and cows, and was rather good at it. Older and more mature, I just couldn’t see myself unable to look after ten rabbits. They only ate grass. Raising them, or rather their hair, would be as easy as eating a bowl of rice.
After they spent the first night in a wooden cage in our backyard, I had to bring all the rabbits into the house the next day because, during the night, one of them was bitten to death by a yellow weasel. I set them up royally on the second floor, in the new bedroom-to-be. I further learned that if I wanted to have high-quality hair, the rabbits must be kept in a dust-free and noise-free environment. So the “emperor’s relatives” as my father called them ended up sleeping on the new bed before Chun-mei and I had a chance to use it, protected by a mosquito net, while I made do with a mat on the cement floor. I checked them before I went to bed and looked them over first thing after I got up. With a bamboo ruler in hand, I measured the length of their hair, day after day, week after week. Everything about them grew, their bodies, their heads, their legs, but not their hair.
When summer arrived with some days over 33 degrees Celsius, I found myself riding my bike for over a mile to get blocks of ice to cool the cages and prevent the rabbits from expiring from heat. No one in my family nor anyone in the village had ever received such royal treatment. In those days I tried to avoid my parents, my father in particular. I was tired of seeing him shake his head and roll his eyes. For the first time in my memory, he was speechless, which I would have called a miracle under different circumstances. I kept telling myself that I couldn’t risk my “investment,” a new word I heard often. If I could not make a profit, at least I was going to break even. I had to. I needed the money. That was the bottom line.
Of the nine rabbits that escaped the weasel’s teeth, not all of them died at once. Four succumbed to the heat—a rotten irony, since they still had short hair. But the final five gave me great joy when, at the morning measuring, I noted their hair was lengthening. Although the advance was small, my hope soared and once again I saw myself surrounded by piles of money. With each passing day their hair grew.
In my former life I must have been a fox or a weasel, the enemy of angora rabbits. One evening as I arranged the mosquito net over my little money-makers I noticed their hair was patchy and rough. Two days later they were all dead. The vet told me they died from massive blockage of their intestines. The rabbits had been chewing and eating their own hair! They preferred to die from swallowing their coats rather than give me a chance to be rich. I was too upset to harvest the remaining hair from the deceased rabbits; I buried them with their precious coats still on.
My father would have killed me if I were not his only son. I was certain of it. I heard such an earful of I-told-you-so’s, I swore I would never utter those words as long as I lived.
The truth was, although I was sick and tired of being poor, lately I found it harder to live an improved life while some farmers, our neighbours, who had been as poor as the rest of us, became richer. They were building fancy houses, twice as big as ours, with clay roof tiles, large windows with metal frames, and wooden floors in each room. Some could afford meat every day; some even had savings accounts in the credit union. How could I not want to be a part of it? I wanted to have money so that I could have a wedding like the one held for the son of the rabbit breeder, giving banquets, lighting off fireworks while the bride and groom paraded through the village in a motorcar. When they married, all my sisters had was a trip in a donkey cart to the registration office in the commune where the bride and groom were issued two pieces of paper, declaring them husband and wife. I wanted more for my wedding, but my dreams died with the rabbits.
My father wants a grandson more than I want to have a son of my own. That’s pretty much all he has hoped and lived for, even though he’s never said as much. I was too young to remember the details of my two sisters who died from hunger at the age of eight and nine during the famine years. When I was older, I had to try very hard not to think about what had become obvious to me: that my survival, as a skinny, weak five-year-old, was associated with their agonizing death from starvation.
I had been a weak baby, said my mother, and I was called a sick duck by the villagers behind my parents’ back. Out of old-fashioned superstition I was raised as a girl until I was eight. The belief was that a boy child attracted devils, and a sickly boy made the allure much stronger. Accordingly, throughout my childhood I was dressed in a girl’s outfit, wearing clothes of printed fabric; my hair was let grow long and braided in two pigtails. All this was to pull the wool over devils’ eyes, although I wondered many times even then how the devils could be so stupid, unable to see what ordinary farmers could. But in the eyes of my parents the plan worked because I lived and the devils took the lives of my two sisters instead. I had long stopped thinking that my survi
val and my sisters’ death was a deadly see-saw game. As I got older I came to understand that sometimes in life sacrifice is necessary. My parents did their part so our family tree wouldn’t cease to grow, and I was their hope, the seed. Now my wife is pregnant, and I, for the first time in a long, long while, find myself thinking once again about my two dead sisters. I can’t bear to let their death mean nothing, and I won’t.
CHUN-MEI
(1980)
If Chairman Mao were still alive, I could never have become the daughter-in-law of a Party official like Old Revolutionary Chen. In Mao’s time our two families were as different as water and fire. Even if we had both been water we would have come from separate sources, as my mother would say. Loyal’s family would be well water, sweet and pure, while mine would be muddy, black ditch water. Black was the colour that stained us. In the years of absurdity—my term for the Cultural Revolution—our doors and window frames were painted black by the Red Guards, in contrast to those of the pure “red” families like Loyal’s.
The government included my family in the hated landlord class five years before I was born. The Land Reform movement in 1950 confiscated all private land, including ours, the Ma family’s, and redistributed it among the farmers in our village.
My father should never have accepted his inheritance when his father died. He had said it so often that, as a child, I wished Grandfather, who died one year before the Communists took power in 1949, would come out of his grave and take the land back with him. At other times, my father murmured that if only the family’s land had been one-third of an acre less, we would have fallen into the rich peasant class, which was less contemptible. His regret was contagious. More than once, I desired with all my heart that somehow the government had made a mistake in measuring our land, and because of the error, before the entire village, the official would declare that we Mas were no longer members of the landlord class. When my wish didn’t come true, I, too, stopped hoping and dreaming altogether.