by Xiaolu Guo
‘You must pass the politics exam. All you need to do is memorise the textbook. You don’t need to understand the concepts, just learn them by heart!’
‘But how can I learn something by heart when I don’t understand it?’
‘Understanding doesn’t matter!’
I listened to my father’s advice and took the textbook to bed. I thought about the way my grandmother had learned to recite the Heart Sutra. Learn by heart! Yes, I could do that, as long as I could put up with the boredom. But surely a life lived like Lei Feng had no space for boredom? I set about learning every line on every page, for a whole week. I was reciting them during lunch and supper. It was a painful week, but my future relied on a positive outcome. A week later, I managed to pass the exam. I even answered the last question about Marx’s notion of ‘surplus value’ in Das Kapital and wrote every word exactly as it appeared in our textbook:
What is surplus value? Conventionally, it means sales revenue. It should be equal to the sum of gross wage income and gross profit. But in Marx’s theory, he thought that the gigantic increase in wealth and labour population from the 19th century onwards was due to the competitive striving to obtain maximum profit from the employment of labour, resulting in an equally gigantic increase in production and capital resources. Essentially, surplus value is extra profit in an immoral social system.
Just like my grandmother, I didn’t understand a word of what I was saying. Even today, I can still recite those lines, though now I have a little more understanding. This method of education wasn’t entirely without its uses.
The last year of my primary school was so heavily loaded with homework that there seemed to be little room in my mind for anything else. I often felt like a shrimp stuck in the rice paddy, desperately searching for a way to clean flowing water. I was not yet thirteen, but I barely had any time to play. I was reciting textbooks even during the evening meal. I was a walking, talking study-robot whose lips murmured nothing but meaningless syllables.
There were moments in which I felt like I was penetrating the airtight mud of repetition. I remember one of the rare foreign texts we studied was a section from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, including the famous speech in which Portia begs Shylock for mercy.
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes …
We had no idea who Shakespeare was, except that he was the West’s most famous writer. The Chinese translation of the original text was quite obscure, but we were given official guidance before even reading the text.
‘The Merchant of Venice demonstrates the ultimate conflict between money and morality in the early stage of Western capitalism,’ the teacher announced, holding the textbook. ‘Shakespeare obviously witnessed this first-hand in Elizabethan England. The playwright uses his characters to persuade the rich and powerful of the need for mercy. Does anybody here think that a moneylender could possibly show mercy?’
The teacher stared at us, waiting for an answer. But no one said anything, because we had never read the text and we had no idea what the teacher was talking about.
‘Of course not!’ the teacher concluded. ‘Shakespeare was naive in his grasp of the real nature of capitalists. He would have written the play differently if he had read Marx! Still, all things considered, The Merchant of Venice is an anti-capitalist work. It denounces the mercilessness of capitalism!’
We listened on our hard benches and scribbled down what the teacher was telling us in the margins of our textbooks. ‘Anti-capitalist’ and ‘denounces the mercilessness of capitalism’. We knew these were the ‘correct’ answers, whatever the questions were going to be in the exam.
As I look back on my childhood now, I can see that our proletarian upbringing was anti-capitalist, that is true, but it was also quite merciless. My grandfather beat my grandmother mercilessly every day, but he was only a penniless failed fisherman. His ruthlessness seemed to have no motivation. Mercy is not an automatic human quality, not even between mother and child. My relationship with my mother showed that. I was never more than a secondary concern in her male-dominated world – surplus without value.
But this bleak reality did mix with more optimistic emotions. I memorised the government’s simplistic slogans and Four Modernisations, and yet somehow also dared to hope China would make great improvements by the year 2000. This imagined future was largely based on the Western movies and soap operas available in 1980s China. State television dubbed Falcon Crest and broadcast the lives of a rich family in the Californian wine industry to the masses. That was where I got my very first introduction to the concepts of modern agriculture and business, as well as the trappings of wealth such as long evening gowns, wine tasting and snappy dialogue. Falcon Crest was pure glamour and fancy Californian real estate. In 2000 I would be twenty-seven years old. If we succeeded with the Four Modernisations (especially in industry and science), the results would be amazing. How and where would I live? In a brand-new high-rise in Beijing or Shanghai? With a functioning flushing toilet and a microwave oven? Perhaps I would learn to drink Western wine in long-stemmed glasses like the ladies and gentlemen in Falcon Crest, always poised and well groomed and never wrinkled like us peasants.
Had that young girl been able to ride on Time’s Arrow all the way to the turn of the millennium, she would have found that the Chinese had achieved more than just the Four Modernisations. Not only did most of us have flushing toilets and microwaves, we had also built modern railways and high-tech factories. We had sent rockets out into space. And yet, despite all that progress in the fields of agriculture, industry, science and military technology, there was still no space for human rights and political freedom.
As it turned out, by the year 2000 China was no longer interested in the Four Modernisations. She had simply forgotten about them and had moved on. Chinese ambitions had grown exponentially. And so had my own ambitions. I wanted to see the world beyond Wenling. I must.
Sex Education
I don’t remember my father ever beating me. He slapped me a few times, but nothing more serious. My mother, on the other hand, beat me regularly. I imagine that was how her parents treated her when she was young. In China at that time, every parent hit their children – it was normal. My mother used whatever she could get her hands on: broom, stick, belt, shoes. The frustration was clear to see, and the violence was cathartic. I remember her hitting me particularly hard with a broom once. All because of a misunderstanding about a harmless toy.
My parents always kept a couple of drawers in the bedroom locked, and I frequently checked to see if they had been left open by mistake. One day – I was about eleven at the time – I saw a small key hanging from the keyhole of one of the drawers. My parents must have forgotten to take it. My hands were itching with curiosity. I opened it and found two drooping transparent balloons, three volumes of a book called The Plum in the Golden Vase, and a marriage certificate with a photo of my parents smiling towards the camera. I grabbed one of the small balloons and blew it into a big ball. As I was playing with the balloon, I flipped through one of the books, wondering why my parents felt the need to lock away such innocuous items. They didn’t look expensive. As I was leafing through the pages of The Plum in the Golden Vase, I found some strange illustrations alongside the text. In one picture, a naked man was squatting, facing a naked woman lying on her back; in another picture a naked couple were cuddling together; in another, a naked woman sat on top of a man’s belly under some flowering trees. These naked figures were like worms, their bodies were plump and their hairdos like the wealthy characters in a traditional Chinese opera. I tried to read a few lines next to one of the illustrations. But the text was written in old Chinese with lots of added explanations underneath. After struggling with the text for some time, I could roughly make out the following paragraphs:
… the
reupon, he started to undress, sent the maids out of the room, and proposed to go to bed with Yüeh-niang and seek his pleasure with her.
‘If I let you into the kitchen, you’ll only make a pig of yourself,’ said Yüeh-niang. ‘It’s concession enough if I allow you into my bed tonight. If you’ve got anything else in mind, forget it.’
Hsi-men Ch’ing responded by exposing his organ to Yüeh-niang. ‘It’s all your doing,’ he joked. ‘You’ve made him so angry he’s having a dumbstruck fit.’
‘What do you mean “he’s having a dumbstruck fit”?’ demanded Yüeh-niang.
‘If he’s not having a dumbstruck fit,’ said Hsi-men Ch’ing, ‘how come his eye is bulging so wide, but he can’t get a word out?’
‘You must be delirious,’ responded Yüeh-niang. ‘What makes you think I’ve got even half an eye for the likes of you?’
At this point, without permitting any further explanation, he lifted Yüeh-niang’s two fresh white legs onto his shoulders, inserted his organ into her vagina and gave free rein to the oriole’s abandon and the butterfly’s pursuit. Entranced by the clouds and intoxicated by the rain, they are not yet willing to call a halt.
The last few lines confused me. What were an oriole and butterfly doing there? But I had a vague sense that the book was about sex, or marriage. I tried to read a bit more, but was soon bored with having to read all the notes underneath just to understand what was going on.
I threw the book back into the drawer and took out another two balloons. I took them with me to school and blew them up for my friends to see.
‘Where did you get this?’ one of the teachers barked, her eyes bulging, when she saw what I was playing with.
‘From home,’ I said. I didn’t understand why she was angry.
‘Stop waving them around in public,’ she said nervously. ‘They aren’t real balloons!’
I looked at her and then at my two balloons. They were very small, to be sure, but I couldn’t see why they weren’t real. Why shouldn’t I play with them? But still I obeyed her instructions and put them back in my pocket. Later, some of the older kids laughed at me, and told me they were condoms – a sort of medical balloon worn by your parents when they were having sex.
Medical balloons? ‘What do you mean, worn by your parents when they’re having sex?’ I said in a small voice.
‘No, worn by your parents,’ one of the kids giggled, ‘not my parents!’
My face turned red. I felt ashamed and I didn’t want to know any more. The idea of ‘having sex’ sounded so mean and dirty to me. If sex was a good thing, why did people talk about it in such a secret and nervous manner? I certainly wouldn’t do anything like that.
Only a few days later, my parents discovered the missing ‘balloons’. By then, my teacher had already sent a letter home, reporting my ‘indecent behaviour’. Feeling shamed by the teacher’s letter, my mother beat me severely with the spiky broom from our kitchen. I remember the beating lasting the whole afternoon. I screamed and cried and ran out into the compound for help like a rat being pursued by an irate cat. But no one came to help me. Everyone stood and watched me being smacked. Only later in the evening, when my father came home, did it stop, as he dragged my mother away and told me to stop crying. But I had cried for so long that I couldn’t breathe properly. I vomited that night and felt sick for days. I hated my mother so much. The weals on my skin were red at first, then became very itchy and hard, until they turned into big purple-coloured patches. I scratched them constantly until they bled. In my bitterness I imagined killing my mother one day. I would strangle her and watch her die. But I needed to be bigger and stronger first, big enough to fight back.
Some years later I realized that the big volumes locked away in my parents’ drawer were the most famous erotic novel in Chinese literary history. The book had been banned by the Communist Party as pornography during the Cultural Revolution and was still banned until the late 1980s. No wonder my parents had had to lock it away.
Seeing Grandmother Again
Then the beating got worse. I was clearly a ‘useless girl’ and ‘a food bucket’ in my mother’s eyes – my existence in the house only meant dwindling food resources. Feeling timid and fearful in her presence, I seemed incapable of making her happy. At that time the One Child Policy had reached its height and we often heard about baby girls being abandoned at bus stops or by the railway tracks. Often these nameless babies were left in shoeboxes. If found alive, they would be taken to an orphanage. Every little Chinese town had at least one or two big ones. It made me think: would it have been better to have been left at the orphanage instead? My father was my only protection at home, but he was often away for work. Really, I would have preferred to have been left in a shoebox. I would have been able to sleep wherever I wanted, and go wherever I pleased.
My brother followed my mother’s example, and continued to treat me as his enemy. He and the other children teased me, calling me nasty words such as sha zi (little idiot) or ben dan (stupid egg). Every day was a humiliation. What was wrong with me? I turned my back to them, and wandered the hillside behind our house alone. There I often sat and found solace. There was a little pond, but all the fish and shrimp were gone. I stared at that lifeless pond with the dead leaves floating on its surface, and even the keys around my neck seemed to whimper with loneliness. In those moments, desolation came and swallowed me. I hadn’t had many friends in Shitang either, but still I missed it. I missed the fishing village miserably. I missed seeing the newly caught red snapper and eels jumping in their nets as they were dragged up onto the dock. And I missed my grandmother, alone and hunchbacked, praying to her Guanyin statue. I pictured her hobbling on her small bound feet to the beach in order to buy the cheapest leftovers for her supper.
One evening, I told my father that I wanted to see my grandmother and bring her back from Shitang to live with us. I was determined to realise my plan.
‘But where would we put her? We don’t have space for her in the house,’ my father said, looking around the narrow space between the kitchen and the bedroom. Since my brother and I had to share this tiny four-square-metre corridor next to the kitchen, he wasn’t wrong. Not enough space for even a chicken or a dog.
‘But she can sleep with me,’ I suggested, pointing at my narrow bed squashed against the wall.
My father said he would discuss it with my mother, and he was in fact quite keen on the idea of my grandmother coming to live with us. For years, my parents had been sending small amounts of money for her living expenses, but I knew how difficult it was for her, now that she was alone.
Somehow my suggestion was approved, although I had no idea how and why my mother had agreed to it. The plan was that I would go back to Shitang in my school holidays and bring my grandmother to Wenling. I was so happy that I nearly wept; my grandmother’s misery was finally going to come to an end! But before I had packed my things for the journey, I sensed my mother’s growing unease. I knew she had never really got on with my grandmother, although in truth she barely knew her, just as she barely knew Shitang. But I didn’t care about all that. I was eleven years old, and I felt proud that I would travel alone on a long-distance bus to fetch my grandmother.
The trip back was much shorter this time. The mountain tunnels had been finished and the roads were smoother. It only took five hours to get there, but I had thrown up the contents of my stomach within the first hour. The world was spinning around me and my stomach throbbed from the constant vomiting. Some peasants on the bus offered me water to clean my mouth and handed me tissues to wipe my face. I felt awful, but I had more important things to think about. As the familiar salty air entered my nostrils, I knew I was getting closer and closer to my home. I was in an acute state of anticipation about seeing my grandmother. I visualised the old stone house, and how we would greet each other after so long. Had Shitang changed much? How were Da Bo’s four daughters that lived next door doing? Did they go to school like me? I also wanted to see the st
ationmaster, and luckily the bus would stop exactly where he lived and worked. I wanted to tell him everything that had happened to me over the last five years, since leaving for Wenling.
I jumped down from the bus, my face dirty and my shirt wet from vomiting. I first went to look for my stationmaster. There were some buses waiting to be dispatched and some young drivers who I had never met before. The station looked much cleaner than in my memory, no vomit or sugar-cane peelings on the floor. Somehow the place seemed very small to me. There was a new office building by the front gate. I walked straight over to it and stood on my toes to look inside. I saw a man selling tickets and another behind him, supervising. There was no stationmaster inside. Nor his wife. So I found two bricks on the ground, piled them up by the ticket window and stood on them so that the man inside might see me. I leaned forward and asked in my rusty Shitang dialect: ‘Do you know where the stationmaster is?’
The two men looked at me as if I was a small insect. They didn’t pay me any attention. I repeated my question, louder this time.
‘Which stationmaster?’ The man who was doing the supervision glanced at me suspiciously, then added: ‘I am the stationmaster, what’s the matter?’
I was a little confused. ‘No, the stationmaster who worked here a few years ago. He sold tickets, and drove some of the buses too.’
‘Oh, you mean the old stationmaster? He died last year.’
‘He died?’ I couldn’t believe my ears. He wasn’t that old, maybe only about my father’s age.
‘Yes. An accident. The bus crashed into a truck and fell into the sea. You didn’t know?’
I was speechless. He died when the bus fell into the sea? He sank to the bottom of the ocean? Were there lots of passengers on the bus? I couldn’t bring myself to ask. All the things I had planned to tell him about Wenling and about my parents on the way over were now lost without anywhere to go. I wanted so badly to tell him that my father was a painter and that I loved his work, and that my mother played the part of Iron Plum in the revolutionary opera. And I wanted to tell him that I had missed him, missed his soothing words and his funny jokes. This news left me sad and depressed, so soon after my arrival.