Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  My stomach churned when I heard this. After a few seconds of silence, I asked again: ‘Was that really the first time you met Father?’

  ‘Yes, how else do you think we could have met?’ my mother answered dismissively. ‘People like him didn’t live with the rest of us. He was either out in the fields or locked up in the labour camp.’

  ‘But, I mean, did he look right at you while you spat on him and kicked him?’

  ‘I don’t remember. We were a group of Red Guards, we got carried away in the moment. We didn’t really mean it.’ My mother’s tone was dry, so shockingly matter-of-fact.

  ‘But you ended up getting married?’

  ‘We went to the re-education camps to monitor the capitalist dogs and stinking intellectuals. I saw how your father lived in a pig shed and worked day and night. He was so skinny and he could barely see. He struggled with the work. I took pity on him, and brought him clean water and some vegetable buns. He looked like he might faint at any second.’

  ‘You took pity on him?’

  ‘Yes. I also thought, why would such an honest-looking man be a capitalist dog? Maybe the party had misunderstood, not that I dared say that out loud. We ended up like comrades really, until the year he was set free and returned to Wenling.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘We decided to get married.’

  ‘And Father was happy with that?’ I asked.

  ‘Are you being deliberately stupid? He felt grateful to me. Which other woman at that time would have dared marry such an outcast? He was a public enemy! Without me, he would probably still be living in a pig shed and eating from a trough.’

  I heard different versions later from our neighbours. Apparently it had been a very dramatic decision for my mother. People shunned my father, to protect themselves from his bad reputation as a class enemy, in case there was a further political purge, my mother’s family included. My grandmother was especially adamant that her daughter not marry him. My mother’s brother beat her and threatened her, saying that she would never be allowed to return home if she went to see my father again. She was locked up in a room and all her clothes and shoes were taken away, so that she couldn’t escape. My grandmother said she would rather her daughter die than marry an anti-revolutionary Stinking Number Nine. Despite all this, my mother was not to be dissuaded. One night, she managed to escape through the window. She ran half naked through the street, straight to my father. He dressed her in his clothes. With no shoes on her feet, they went the next morning and registered their marriage.

  ‘Your mother was so brave and romantic. At that time no one even dared to talk to your father. They avoided him like the plague. But your mother didn’t care about any of that,’ one of our neighbours in the compound told me.

  ‘Their story is just like The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd. The Weaver Girl’s mother created the Milky Way to keep them apart, but just like the girl from the story, that wasn’t a big enough obstacle for your mother!’ another old woman in the compound told me, her eyes glistening. The Weaver Girl was the seventh daughter of Mother Heaven, and her job was to weave white clouds for the sky. Bored and lonely up in the sky, the Weaver Girl decides to visit Earth, where she meets a simple cowherd. Of course, they fall in love and she stays. Mother Heaven is so furious that she takes out her giant hairpin and scratches a river in the sky to separate the two lovers. This was how the Milky Way was formed. I thought to myself: The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd is a sad story, but my mother and father’s had a happy ending. Well, so far, it seemed.

  My mother’s family lived on the outskirts of Wenling, but from what I’d heard, I imagined my maternal grandmother to be an awful and cruel old lady, who tried to stop my parents’ love. I bet she also had a giant hairpin, like most old women.

  So my mother saved my father’s life? Even though she spat on him and kicked him on their first encounter? It was hard to believe. There must have been some love between them, but no one ever used that word. In fact, I don’t think I ever heard it in our family; there were never fancy words like ‘love’ in a family’s life in China then.

  I always felt that my mother kept a lot of things from me, lied even. She never told me that she had rebelled against her family to marry my father. Perhaps she worried that I would be inspired by her example. She also never told me whether she had joined the Red Guard house raids, where they targeted the houses of the suspected ‘anti-revolutionaries’ and smashed everything up, sometimes even torturing people in the process. She had barely participated in any ‘real’ revolutionary acts – that work was reserved for young men, she told me. She only chanted and danced in the Taizhou Region Red Guard 8th Rebel Group Dance Troupe. I would never know exactly what she did in those years. It had already become a kind of myth to my generation.

  After marrying my father, she quickly fell pregnant with my brother. She left the Red Guards and started working in the large silk factory. Zhejiang was the centre of the silk industry, and at least three thousand women worked every day in my mother’s factory alone. I remember how I used to enter the factory and look for my mother. I walked past rows of noisy silk-binding machines which were extracting silk from the silkworms. Each machine whirled softly and was in perpetual motion; collectively it was overwhelming. The air was stiflingly hot, and an intense odour of mulberry leaves hung thick around me. It felt like some layer of Chinese Hell for worm corpses, manned by women in white robes. My mother appeared out of the gloom, standing among the lines of workers, her hands soaked in warm water and her fingers busily sorting the wet silkworms with a small brush. She skewered the silkworms and roasted them on top of the hot machines. She used to give them to me as an after-school snack, and I would sit eating them in a corner of the throbbing factory. They tasted of mulberry leaf and burnt meat. I probably ate at least a thousand of those hot little bugs over the years, a token amount of protein to make up for all the years I spent living with my grandparents and eating mainly rice porridge and kelp.

  Shaolin Kung Fu

  I had been living in Wenling for some years, but still my brother and I seemed to lead, largely, parallel lives. I had thought we might play together or that he would protect me. But none of that had happened. He was the centre of the Guo family. I was the afterthought. We kept our distance. My overwhelming memory of my brother as a young boy was his love of Shaolin kung fu.

  In 1982 a truly astonishing film called Shaolin Temple came out starring a nineteen-year-old Jet Li, who had swapped a life of professional martial arts for that of an actor. He replaced Bruce Lee as the ultimate Chinese hero in the minds of all young boys, my brother included. We lived right next to Wenling People’s Cinema and it was possible to slip through the back door from our compound without buying a ticket. So we children used to sneak into screenings all the time. We were blown away by Shaolin Temple. It was one of the very first Chinese martial arts films not to focus on fighting, but to emphasise love, the beauty of nature and the poetic spirit of the monastic life. None of us had ever been to the real Shaolin Temple, which was far away in Henan Province in central China. But we all knew about it, this mysterious temple with 1,500 years of history in teaching young monks how to fight. For us, it was a sort of children’s version of the basic ideas of Buddhism and even Taoism, those deep philosophical things only old people understood. I was absolutely taken by the picturesque mountain landscapes and mesmerised by the pretty actress Ding Lan who sang while herding rams in the wild forests that surrounded the temple. But I soon realised the reason for my brother’s adoration of the film was very different to mine. He was fascinated by the magical power of Shaolin kung fu, especially its techniques and philosophy. He murmured the names of the martial art forms and walked around kicking non-stop. The film was a massive commercial success in China and was shown in cinemas for months. My brother could never be found after school and neglected his homework, because he was watching the film again and again. He wanted to learn every combat move that Jet Li and the Shaolin monks mad
e. He even practised silently in the dark of the cinema, while the other audience members were enjoying the forbidden love story between the apprentice Jet Li and the singing cowherd girl.

  The monks in the film were performing a kind of qigong martial arts, and I could see that all of the boys were attempting moves like ‘the 18 Hands of Luohan’. It was said that this particular form had been created by an Indian Buddhist monk called Bodhidharma. When Bodhidharma visited the Shaolin Temple, he taught the monks a series of exercises which imitated the gestures of arhat statues (in Chinese we call them luohan). The method focused mainly on palms, fists and hooked hands, as well as twists and flicks of the wrist.

  I was never a fan of all this kicking and fist throwing. I kept at least a ten-metre distance from my brother when he was in kung fu mode, but still I was destined to be on the receiving end, by virtue of being the youngest girl in the compound. Every time they hit me, I recall the words of the master monk to his disciples: ‘Martial arts are for defence, not for killing or hurting people.’ It looked like none of the boys had remembered this line, even though they had seen the film so many times. When my eleven-year-old brother demanded to be allowed to join the temple, my father asked him if he was prepared to get up every morning at five and train for a whole day, without ever being allowed to eat meat for the rest of his life. ‘No meat?’ My brother thought about this for a few days and then never mentioned the idea again.

  Even though Shaolin kung fu became a national obsession for Chinese boys throughout the 1980s, most of them grew out of it eventually and moved on to ‘real life’. Strange when you think about it, that these teenagers, who once punched and kicked each other, settled so easily into their obedient roles. Perhaps it was also to do with the incredible number of martial arts films produced, leading to very poor production, and indeed, overproduction. Audiences lost any appetite for it and young people discovered other sources of zeal. I don’t remember when exactly my brother stopped watching kung fu films. But I remember he spent more and more time in my father’s studio learning ink painting, which my father encouraged of course. He also became more and more introverted, as if those blots of ink absorbed his youthful energy. He began to smoke too, and by the age of fifteen, he would sit on my father’s chair, enjoying a cigarette, while my father was out at meetings. His legs dangled beneath the ink-soaked table, his unfinished mountain and river painting laid out before him. I didn’t say much about his work; whenever I tried, he only looked back at me with those weary kung fu eyes.

  ‘You know nothing about art,’ he hissed like a snake, ‘so just shut up.’

  My brother and I are just as distant today. The idea that he was the official child of the family and that I was nothing but an unwanted girl dominated everything about the way we behaved at home and outside. This distance gradually turned into a sort of mutual respect for each other’s lives. At sixteen he left us to study fine arts in Hangzhou.

  Life in a Communist Compound

  Life was centred entirely around our compound. We lived in a typical Communist worker compound, built in the 1960s. Forty families lived together in a mix of dwellings that were fused at some point around a large, central courtyard. We had one public shower room and one toilet block with five holes to squat over. Each family was given two rooms: one for cooking the other for sleeping. We cooked downstairs and slept upstairs. No one had any secrets. Everyone left their front doors open. Mothers and children rushed in and out of all the homes as if they were their own. I remember two donkeys and a mule lived in the compound, too, belonging to one of the families who used to be farmers. Now factory workers, the donkeys were retired and spent their days wandering around the yard or periodically roaming into the distant fields for fresh grass. The sight of them reminded me of the poor donkey my grandmother’s family had received in exchange for their elder daughter’s ghost marriage. Here in Wenling animals seemed redundant. No one worked on the farms, and everyone was busy learning how to operate machines. Every few days a crowd would gather in front of our kitchen, staring at a brand-new electricity generator or a mechanical rotisserie and trying to get it to work. Machines seemed to be taking over our lives.

  Of the animal kingdom, only chickens had retained some purpose in this new world. We owned a multitude. They were everywhere: in the back and front yards, under the beds and chairs, sometimes flapping onto the dining table while you were eating. As a result their excrement covered our floor, but no one seemed to mind. The adults were too busy to care about hygiene. Every few days we would check if the hens had laid eggs. Eggs were our main source of protein. But frequently they would hatch before we could harvest them. My favourite thing was to watch the small chicks crack through the shells and pop out, all wet and soft. They were my pets, my little friends.

  But the yard had been stripped of any grass. So to feed the chickens we kids were sent out to collect grass and grain from the fields outside the compound. Somehow, the number of chickens reduced steadily each year. I remember one morning walking to the public toilet where I found a whole bunch of dead chicks floating in the cesspit. Our toilet was actually nothing more than a huge hole in the ground. Someone had left the door open, and the chicks had stumbled into it. It was a very sad sight, seeing their little beaks popping up through the sludge, along with their dull blind eyes. The adults said the poor animals must have been thirsty or hungry and gone searching for water in the night. This started happening repeatedly, as we never fenced in the chickens. I found it horrifying and would often avoid going to the toilet, until one day there were no more chickens left in the yard.

  One afternoon, I noticed that the adults were cleaning up the small hall of our communal building where furniture was usually stored. They were converting it into an auditorium. Then they brought in a box-shaped object with a smooth, shiny front, like an insect’s shell. Someone said it was a ‘television’. It would educate us. It was eight inches across and only showed black and white. Its long aerial was two antennae like a beetle. We kids were extremely curious to see what would come out from this compact and mysterious box. We waited impatiently for the adults to adjust the channels, although there were only two or three on offer in China at that time.

  From that day on, everybody would bring their benches and eat their supper in front of the television’s glowing light. It was a revolution in our evening lives. After the news at seven o’clock, where we could see our country’s leaders shaking hands with important people, films and drama series would follow. Subject matter ranged from the Communist defeat of the Nationalists to stories about the anti-Japanese war of the 1930s. I loved these programmes. They had stirring, patriotic soundtracks, often sung by young women, whose soaring voices would pierce my ears and my heart. It was unashamedly propaganda, but beautiful all the same. The television allowed me to access a vastly larger world than the one I had known in Shitang. In Shitang there had been very few man-made images, apart from the fading prints that hung on old flaky walls. Colour came in the form of gaudy sweets packaging, or the old, eerie Buddhist statues. Television was an explosion of image, and my imagination swam in this new, artificial world.

  The Trial of Madame Mao

  After the arrival of the television, we compound families were bound even closer together. One day we received an official notice: all adults were told to gather for the seven o’clock national news to watch the trial of Madame Mao. Of course the children followed the command as well. It was November 1980, four years after Chairman Mao’s death. The show trials of the Gang of Four had just begun. We children used to shudder in fear at just the name, the Gang of Four, as if they were a monstrous cannibalistic horde that might appear at any moment in our courtyard. Despite our youth, we were told that the Gang of Four was a political faction composed of four Communist officials including Mao’s last wife Jiang Qing, and that they were evil criminals who had plotted against Mao. I was eight and a half years old and fascinated. Mao’s wife plotting against her own husband? Why would she w
ant to do that? It would surely make her public enemy number one.

  The trials were televised nationwide for several weeks. They made a very strong impression on me. Now, as I look back, the event seems like a symbolic moment in our recent history: before the Gang of Four no Communist high officials had ever been put on trial. I think by showing the Gang of Four in the dock, our then leader, Deng Xiaoping, wanted the people to realise that a new era had begun. This was his time and he was showing that he disproved of the manic political purges of Mao’s time.

  My father was always the first in our compound to take up his position before the television to watch the trials. All the neighbours would sit beside or behind him. We guessed that he was especially concerned about the fate of these officials, having been punished during the Cultural Revolution himself. Even though his name had now been cleared and he had been promoted to work in Wenling’s Cultural Bureau, he still felt insecure. One evening, just before the trial broadcast was about to begin, he tried to explain the background to me and my brother. During Mao’s violent class struggle in the 1960s against so-called ‘revisionists’ and the ‘bourgeoisie’, nearly a million Chinese had been sent to labour camps. And by the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, at least 35,000 intellectuals had died, either by committing suicide or being tortured to death. The Gang of Four was responsible for these purges. But still, when Madame Mao appeared in front of the court, I just couldn’t connect the image I saw with what I had been told about her. I asked my father: ‘Is she really the Chairman’s wife?’