Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  When we finally arrived at my grandmother’s house, many of our neighbours were standing around. Da Bo and his wife had been looking after her, and I watched as his daughters ran in and out with soup. My grandmother was lying on the bed, her face the colour of the ocean and her eyes closed. She was barely conscious. My father tried to wake her up.

  ‘Mother, we’re here to see you! Mother!’

  There was no response. Then my father asked me to try.

  I restrained my tears, leaned over the bed and let my words fall upon her grey-white face. ‘Grandmother! It’s me, Xiaolu! Grandmother, can you hear me?’

  My grandmother’s eyes fluttered slightly. We stared at her and listened to her faint breathing. Then she opened her eyes and turned to my father with a confused look. Her throat made a noise no one understood. Was it speech? Then she groaned again, this time we discerned the meaning.

  ‘Is that Third Cousin?’

  Third Cousin was from her maternal family and he used to visit her in the past, but he had died a while back. My grandmother didn’t seem to recognise my father. He leaned in closer: ‘Mother, I’m not Third Cousin, I’m your son, Xiuling.’

  She rolled her eyes blankly.

  My mother tugged on my arm, hinting at me to speak again. Then my grandmother noticed me, and said: ‘Is that Jinglin selling crabs in the market?’ No one knew who Jinglin was and why she was selling crabs in the market. My grandmother was thoroughly confused, and as if exhausted by our visit, she closed her eyes again. Now my brother was a bit scared. He left and wandered the streets outside. We waited by her bedside for an hour or two but she didn’t open her eyes again. Then Da Bo and his wife said maybe we should come to their house to have some noodles and tea if we were not too worried. My father said he would wait with my grandmother. My mother and I returned half an hour later with a bowl of noodle soup for my father, but my grandmother had stopped breathing. My grandmother never realised that her son had been with her when she died.

  It turned out that my grandmother had been saving money for years to buy herself a coffin. Da Bo and his wife knew exactly where it was stored, in the backyard of the village coffin maker’s workshop. That was behind the village market, as far as I could remember. So my father and Da Bo went to fetch the coffin. Later, I heard that the coffin maker had been complaining for years about not having enough space and that he hoped my grandmother would die soon so he could be rid of it.

  Before we laid my grandmother in the coffin, we had to change her clothes. We had a special outfit prepared for her. My parents undressed her and wiped her skin with wet towels. Only then did we see how thin and spindly she had become. She was a skeleton. I was not unfamiliar with my grandmother’s naked body, but it was a horrid sight. Being old seemed the most undignified state in the whole world. She looked so ghastly that my parents ordered my brother and me to leave the room.

  As I walked around outside, I saw the neighbours gathering and gossiping. Someone thought my grandmother might have starved to death. ‘Either she had no money for food, or she couldn’t get up to feed herself,’ one of the mean-looking women said.

  According to tradition, we, her closest family, had to keep my grandmother’s body beside us for three nights. ‘Hold three days’ wake for the soul of the dead,’ the villagers said. But my parents had always disliked superstition and feudal customs like these, and they decided to stay awake for one night only. We prepared the candles, and borrowed a sheet from next door to lay upon the coffin. My parents didn’t go to sleep, but we children fell into a strange and horrid slumber on the floor, smeared with confusion between the living and the dead. I dreamt my grandmother was talking to me in her usual breathless tone. She’d been running after me. ‘Xiaolu, I bought you a sugared ice. Take it!’ I reached out and took the wet, dirty handkerchief. The ice was melting and it broke apart. We both looked at it melting in my hand with sadness.

  Stop Crying! Every Girl has to Go Through This

  My grandmother’s death stayed with me for a long time, a grey haze hanging over me. I often dreamt that my body had suddenly aged like hers, skeletal, withered skin like worn white leather, laid out in a coffin, utterly abandoned by the spirit that had once animated it.

  Nevertheless, outside of my nightmares, my body was obviously growing larger and stronger. My hair was becoming very long. My body had reached a stage where I was somewhere between childhood and adolescence. Then this interim period was brought to an abrupt end, and all the things a girl was destined to encounter came crashing into me. One after another.

  I find it very difficult to reflect on my early sexual experiences; they were frightening and ugly, and I preferred at the time to move on. But pretending they didn’t happen has not been useful; and I know how powerful the consequences of trying to escape my past have been on me as a grown woman.

  My psychological and physical responses to sex have their roots in those years; they shaped all subsequent relationships with men and with the world. For a young girl in 1980s China, sex was an ordeal endured at first with terror, then with mute disgust and finally numbness. I was twelve when I was first sexually assaulted by a man. It didn’t just happen once. The abuse lasted for about two years. When I left primary school to attend middle school, which was located in another part of town, it stopped, for whatever reason. And since then I have never tried to remember or to forget those sexual acts. ‘Remembering’ is the wrong word to use here, because those moments are embedded in my brain, on my retina, under my skin, in my loins. They don’t need to be remembered. I can instantly see and feel them if I want to. Forgetting them would be like forgetting I have two hands or a mouth.

  I have never mentioned his name to anyone or in any of my previous writings, but here on these pages I want to say it out loud, exactly as it is spelled, for the simple reason that he was never punished for what he did to me. Hu Wenren. Maybe he did it to many other girls, and we were all too scared to fight back. The son of a communal farming officer in a neighbouring town, Hu Wenren worked as the secretary in my father’s office. No one knew why he, a young man without a college degree, was given that position. Perhaps his father had connections. Perhaps it was his skills in calligraphy – he wrote well, which was an important asset in a provincial cultural bureau. His handwriting had a distinctive style, his characters were hard with long, thin strokes.

  Hu Wenren knew the route I took from school back home, and to my father’s office. He would wait for me. At first I noticed him following me. Then he took me somewhere quiet, and so began the terrible normality of the situation. As my body trembled, he pulled down my pants and played with my clitoris, then he inserted his fingers into me while threatening to beat me if I made any noise. I was shaking all over. I remember looking around and noticing the rubbish and rotting food dumped on the corner. Beneath my feet, patches of chicken shit. A metaphor for my situation, no power, no dignity, no hope. Years later, as I reflected on that beginning (I never liked to think of it), I realised this was where my emotional pattern was formed: fright and shame in the face of physical invasion. The enormous fear and shame effectively silenced me.

  Sometimes Hu would force me into the men’s toilets, or corner me behind a large truck in some car park, or an unused office room to which he had the key. I remember seeing urine trickling down my legs as he fingered me. Immobilised by distress and horror, I was unable to react in any other way. After a few weeks, he began to have sex with me, threatening me with some horrible consequences if I told anyone about it. I hated him with a burning fury, but I never dared tell anyone. I never showed any signs of the abuse when I got home. I washed my underwear secretly. I hid my gloom. I never talked about what I had done at school, nor did my parents ever ask. I was thus abused, pathetically and hopelessly, like many young girls at that time. I even found myself repeating quietly the words Hu Wenren said to me as he stuffed his penis inside me: ‘Stop crying! Every girl has to go through this!’

  Every girl had to go through t
his. Sometimes I thought about my grandmother, who had lived such a sad life and cried so many times in front of me. She never really explained the source of those tears, what exactly had happened to her. She must have gone through worse, I thought, given that she had been a child bride and was sold to my grandfather! And probably had many shocking stories about her treatment by the men in her life, yet I would never have a chance to ask her now. She took all those secrets to her grave and we buried them with her. No wonder Chinese ghost stories know only weeping women looking for justice in the afterlife.

  And what about my mother? Probably the same. She had never mentioned sex to me, never told me how babies were made. The teachers at school didn’t fill us in on that either. The only time she spoke to me about the female body was when I got my first period. I remember seeing blood in my pants one morning during physical education when we were taught to jump from one wooden block to another. By the afternoon, they were soaked in blood. Since no one had ever told me about menstruation, I automatically assumed I must have hurt myself from jumping. But the bleeding continued the next day and I was in pain. My mother saw it. She simply folded some soft cloth into a rectangle and put it in my underwear, then told me to change and wash the cloth regularly until the blood disappeared. ‘You will have this once a month, because you are a woman now,’ she said simply and nothing more. I was puzzled by this physical change. What did it mean that I would have this once a month from now on? Because I am a woman now? How? The prudish Chinese education system taught us nothing of the essential facts of human biology, nor did my parents give me a clear explanation of this change. It’s so unfair that women have to bleed once a month and men don’t, I thought to myself unhappily. A few years later I discovered that menstruation was connected to a woman’s fertility. I was horrified when I read lines like ‘The period blood contains dead eggs from the womb’ in one of our biology textbooks. Us women, we walked around carrying dead and alive eggs in our bodies. Women are like chickens, we are the hens, I thought. Egg-producing animals. No wonder we were treated so badly – humans give no respect to chickens. The only way to end a chicken’s misery is to let it die. Better still, to never be hatched in the first place.

  All the Aunts

  I met my mother’s family for the first time when I was fourteen. I knew that she was one of many siblings, but I didn’t know they were estranged because she had married my father, a Stinking Number Nine, recently released from a re-education labour camp.

  For all these years, my mother didn’t visit her family, and her family didn’t invite her to any gatherings or celebrations, not even for the most important festival, Chinese New Year. But around 1986 (ten years after the Cultural Revolution had ended), just before the end of the lunar year, my maternal grandmother sent some friendly signals and asked to meet us children. At first, my mother didn’t respond, so my grandmother tried again. She even sent us some dragon eye fruit and lychees to soften my mother up. I ate all the dragon eyes at once, and my brother finished the lychees. I was curious to meet the cruel old woman, our own Mother Heaven from The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd, who forcefully separated her daughter from her beloved cowherd.

  In China, because women marry ‘out’ of their families and into that of their husband, the maternal grandmother is called waipo, literally meaning, ‘outer grandmother’. It wasn’t strange to have so little connection with your ‘outer’ family. But this year we were going to our waipo for the Chinese New Year banquet.

  The morning of the first day of the new year, as fireworks exploded in the sky above us, my brother and I were all dressed up in our new clothes. My mother prepared some ginseng packages to take with us. My father felt awkward about coming, since he had been held to blame by my mother’s family for all these years. But he was persuaded, and we took a bicycle rickshaw to the outskirts of the city. The urban landscape gave way to rice fields, buffaloes and horses. As we drew up to my waipo’s house, we saw a number of kids screaming and playing out front. My brother and I didn’t know who they were, but we soon discovered that they were our cousins. We entered the house, and I was greeted by a room full of women of different ages. There wasn’t a single man to be seen. We were introduced to five aunts in total, one after another, which surprised me. I didn’t know that my mother had five sisters! They looked much older than my mother, although she was one of the middle sisters. They looked as if their legs had been soaking in the paddy fields since dawn, and they had only just changed into their new city clothes. Their manners and accents were those of simple, rough peasants. They spat directly on the kitchen floor, leaving the white saliva pooling in the dirt.

  Then we were led to an old woman. She was in her seventies, but looked very healthy and strong. This, apparently, was our waipo. I was a bit scared of her in the beginning, having expected to be scrutinised by a brutal woman with piercing eyes. But she was very charming, kind even. I paid extra attention to her hair. To my disappointment, she didn’t have a giant hairpin in the back of her head like Mother Heaven in The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd, only short hair neatly trimmed just below the ears. Her clothing was good quality: grey cashmere and dark trousers. She didn’t have bound feet, and her feet looked to be a normal size. In any case, she appeared much more modern than my hunchbacked paternal grandmother.

  After my brother and I had said the customary pleasantries, we children were immediately given hong bao – red envelopes with money. We were in ecstasy. I didn’t know about my brother, but this was the first time in my life I had been given money, even if it was mostly small change. Then the five aunts also gave us some smaller hong bao. It was an incredible feeling: the first time I came to realise that it was profitable to have a large family. But we could have had this a long time ago! I could have had a very different life if I had been included in this side of the family from the day I was born! Who was to blame?

  We were so happy. Instantly my brother went to light fireworks with the other kids, while I stayed and guzzled food from the table. I noticed a pot of shark-fin soup, a symbol of luxury and prosperity. As I drank the gluey soup, I thought about my dead grandmother – my heart’s real grandmother. She had never experienced a day like this. The singers on the television regularly performed a song called ‘Socialism is Great’, but my paternal grandmother didn’t live long enough to see how great socialism could actually be.

  Gradually, I got to learn the stories of my waipo’s family. Waipo was born in the 1920s, when the Chinese Communist Party was starting to gain a strong foothold in the south with their anti-feudal ideology. So she had never had her feet bound. My maternal grandfather, waigong, was a hard-working farmer, but had died when their children were very young, leaving his wife to raise the children by herself on a little patch of farmland. Like her mother, my oldest aunt was also illiterate. She had stopped farming life in the seventies to help waipo sell groceries. Her husband, too, had passed away, from liver cancer. They had two girls. My second aunt served in the army and had married a soldier who was sent to North Korea in 1950 to fight the Americans. He had died in battle, making widow number three. My third aunt had been selling vegetables in the market for the last ten years. Her husband wasn’t dead, but he was absent from the banquet.

  The two younger aunts seemed to have a lighter spirit. They worked in the newly built state department store. ‘The best job you can have for women,’ they exclaimed proudly during the meal. ‘Socialism is truly great,’ the youngest aunt said during the meal, and she meant it.

  These women were loud and drank a lot. They paid special attention to my father, adding pork and fillets of fish to his bowl. I thought that was partly because he was the only adult man in the house, but also because they had excluded him from the family during the Cultural Revolution and now they felt they had to redeem themselves by showing him particular respect.

  It was during that banquet that I learned that my mother and her sisters had ‘only one decent man’ in their family: their elder brother. But he too had
died. He was the only educated one in the whole family. Apparently my aunts as well as my mother had had to give up any thoughts of school so that the family could afford to give my uncle an education. And receive an education he did, earning a college degree in law in the 1970s. He became a lawyer – one of the first in our province. He specialised in women’s rights and domestic violence. The choice was apt given that he had come from such a female-orientated family! But their brother didn’t get the chance to pay his sisters back for their sacrifice. He had died in his early thirties, of lung cancer.

  It didn’t make sense to me, that so many women should sacrifice themselves for their only brother. In reality, they had been the ones to support the family after their men died one by one. My mother’s chance at an education had been taken away from her. Without that uncle, my mother probably would have gone at least up to middle school. She would have understood why I wanted to write and why I wanted to be an artist! But then, if she had gone to middle school, she probably wouldn’t have been my mother at all. And who would I have been? Would I have existed? At that point my mind was swept into a dizzying whirlpool. I gathered up my presents, and ran outside to play in the afternoon sun.

  A Poet from America

  As a provincial child raised in the Communist education system, I had no concept of America except for the slogans we were taught at school like ‘Down with American imperialism’. I didn’t know there were ‘normal’ people living in the USA and that some of them were even Chinese! But one day we received a letter with an American stamp, and it was to be the start of a new fascination for me.