Red Scarf Girl

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Red Scarf Girl Page 10

by Ji-Li Jiang


  She kept her eyes on her work and moved the big broom back and forth laboriously. A gust of wind threatened to scatter the pile of trash she had collected, and she scurried to cover it with her broom to keep it from being blown away. Somehow she tripped over the broom and fell.

  It looked like a serious fall. She moved her hand and struggled to get up, but she couldn’t seem to stand. I was about to go to help her when I saw her youngest son, my cousin Shan-shan, walking toward us. Shan-shan would help her, and I didn’t want to embarrass her by making her realize that I had seen her sweeping the alley. I drew back and walked around them quietly.

  After a few steps I turned around to see if they were all right. I could hardly believe my eyes. Shan-shan had walked right past his mother! She was lying there, injured, and he had not stopped to help her. He couldn’t possibly have missed her. He must not have wanted to expose himself to criticism by helping someone from a black category.

  What a son! I took a step toward Aunt Xi-wen and stopped. Maybe I shouldn’t help her either. People would probably say something if they saw me, especially since I was from a black family too… .

  Before I could decide, Old Mrs. Wang passed by and saw Aunt Xi-wen on the ground. Mrs. Wang hurried over and helped Aunt Xi-wen up. Then Mrs. Wang picked up the broom and dustpan and helped Aunt Xi-wen walk home.

  Now I remembered that Shan-shan had written a da-zi-bao after their house had been searched, formally breaking relations with his mother. I had admired him for his courage and firmness then.

  It was not easy to break with your mother. I could not imagine actually doing it. They had to live in the same room. Would he eat the food she had cooked? Would he speak to her at all?

  And what could it be like for Aunt Xi-wen?

  One December afternoon when An Yi and I came home from a walk, we saw a big crowd gathered in the middle of our alley. An Yi turned pale and ran to the crowd, dragging me with her.

  People, mostly neighbors from the alley, were standing in neat circles, almost as if they had formed ranks intentionally. An oddly familiar voice was shouting, “Down with the oppressor Sang Hong-zhen! Down with the black executioner!” Sang Hong-zhen? Du Hai’s mother? The Neighborhood Party Committee Secretary? I looked at An Yi in amazement.

  An Yi’s whole body relaxed, and she even smiled. “Oh, I was so scared! I thought they were from my mother’s school.” We squirmed into the crowd.

  Du Hai’s mother was standing on a stool, her head lowered to her chest. Two torn shoes, the symbol of immorality, were hung around her neck, along with a sign that read, SANG HONG-ZHEN, OPPRESSOR OF THE YOUNG, DESERVES TEN THOUSAND DEATHS. Her disheveled hair dangled around her shocked, gray face. I hardly recognized the once-powerful Neighborhood Party Committee Secretary.

  A short man was standing in front of her, shouting so angrily that saliva foamed over his lips. “This damned executioner conned me into going to Xinjiang!” He turned his face toward us. It was a coarse face, and I recognized it at once. He was Xu A-san, who used to live next to Six-Fingers and moved far away to Xinjiang a few years ago. No wonder the voice was familiar.

  “She lied to me! She told me Xinjiang was like a flower garden. She said we would live comfortably and eat well. And then what did we find when we got there? Nothing! Not a damned thing! Not even a building to live in. Not even lumber or bricks. We had to build a lousy hut out of dirt. I fell off the roof when we were building it, and now I’m a cripple.”

  Xu A-san slapped his leg heavily and continued. “When I wrote to her to ask if she could help me come back, she sent my letter to my boss in Xinjiang. They stopped my salary for six months and forced me to write a self-criticism to admit that I was wrong.

  “She fooled us into going to Xinjiang and then didn’t care whether we lived or died. Is that any way to treat a sixteen-year-old boy? While I was sick and begging for my food in Xinjiang, what was she doing here? She was running around with men and having a good time.” The blue veins on his neck stood out, and his pointing finger almost touched her nose. “Thank heaven for the Cultural Revolution. Now I’ve come back to expose this damned woman and bring the revolution here to our own neighborhood!”

  Many of the crowd were moved to tears by Xu A-san’s story. I had never liked him or trusted him, but if what he said was true, she was really wicked. Besides, she was Du Hai’s mother. What did I care about her problems? Xu A-san was still shouting slogans, but An Yi and I pushed our way out of the struggle meeting.

  “I wish I could see Du Hai’s face now,” I couldn’t help gloating.

  “Well, you know the old saying. ‘The wheel of fate makes a full turn every sixty years,’” An Yi said. “It’s their turn to suffer now.”

  “Does that mean soon it will be our turn to be on top?” I asked thoughtfully.

  We walked on in silence. I watched our feet on the pavement. They were perfectly in step.

  “Maybe it’s really true.” It seemed clear to me all of a sudden. “It’s just because of fate that we’re being hurt. It’s just fate that made us be born into black families. And now the wheel of fate is turning. Maybe our families will be free of trouble soon.”

  When I looked around me, fate seemed to be the only explanation for what was happening.

  A few days later Ji-yun was already home from school when I got back from shopping. I tiptoed up behind her and suddenly put my hand in front of her eyes, holding the colored handkerchief I had just bought for her. “Ta-dah!”

  To my surprise she did not jump up or cry out with joy.

  “Don’t you like it? Look at these kittens. Aren’t they cute? It’s for you.” Collecting colored handkerchiefs was her favorite hobby.

  She still did not move.

  I went in front of her and was about to tickle her when I saw her face. She had been crying. Her eyes were red and swollen, and she had a balled-up handkerchief in her hand.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She did not say a word.

  “Why were you crying?”

  There was still no answer.

  She must be having one of her fits of temper. Ever since she was little she would cry and refuse to say why. 1 knew how to deal with that.

  “I’m going to go ask your teacher.” I turned around as if to go.

  “No! Don’t.” She pulled at my clothes.

  “Well then, what’s wrong?”

  “I… My… schoolbag is gone.”

  “You lost your schoolbag? What happened?”

  She began crying again.

  “For goodness’ sake, stop crying and tell me what happened.” She kept crying, and I got angry. “You’re really a big girl now, aren’t you? You can’t even take care of your schoolbag, and then you just cry about it.”

  She started wailing, her chest heaving. Grandma rushed in and asked me what was wrong.

  “I don’t know. She just told me that she lost her schoolbag and then she started crying,” I said as I threw the handkerchief angrily onto the table.

  “I didn’t lose it… . It’s in the school yard right under the classroom window,” Ji-yun said through her sobs.

  “What?” Grandma and I asked together. “Why didn’t you pick it up?”

  “No. I’m not going to pick it up. Some boys in my class threw it out the window. They called me a black whelp. They stood on my desk and said if I stared at them, they would dig my eyes out. They threw it out the window and told me to go pick it up. I won’t go.”

  I did not know what to say. I wished I had not scolded her.

  “Why didn’t you tell your teacher? She’d make them bring it back,” Grandma said.

  “That would only make it worse. Last week they were pushing Wei-wei and me around and she told her mother, and she told the teacher, and they were punished. But then they just bullied her even more, and now she has to stay home.” Ji-yun’s voice was calmer. She had almost stopped crying.

  “You should have told Mom and Dad,” I said at last. “They would ha
ve done something about this.”

  “No! They’d just make it worse.”

  I looked at her with a bad feeling growing inside me. I noticed her lumpy and clumsy braids and felt guilty. She had done them herself. I suddenly felt that I had been too hard on her. I was more like a da-dui-zhang than a sister. When I took her to her piano lesson, I scolded her if she did not play well. If she was playing at a friend’s house after school, I made her come home and do her homework. In spite of this she trusted me and relied on me for everything. She would ask my advice on what to do or what to wear. If she went to a movie, she wanted me to go with her.

  Now she had to learn to take care of herself. It didn’t seem fair. She was only ten years old, and too small to protect herself.

  I took out the new schoolbag and pencil box I had bought for junior high school. “Here.” I put them into her hand. “Let me braid your hair first, and then we’ll figure out what else you need and go shopping.”

  I pondered Ji-yun’s fate. She was so little. Why did she have to suffer? And now that the wheel of fate was turning, why hadn’t her fate improved?

  It had to change soon.

  A subdued Chinese New Year had passed. So had my thirteenth birthday, which came and went without any celebration. There was a chill to the air that cut into the skin and numbed the body.

  I could see Ji-yong and Xiao-cheng standing at the entrance to the alley. They did not seem to feel the cold. Xiao-cheng leaned against a green mailbox, gesturing to Ji-yong. Even at this distance I could feel the confidence in his movements.

  Ji-yong had told us that Xiao-cheng’s father was having a very difficult time now. Almost every day he was criticized in struggle meetings. In addition, as the highest official of our district before the Cultural Revolution, he was often taken as a companion target to struggle meetings against his junior officers. It could not have been easy for Xiao-cheng to appear so calm.

  As I approached them, a row of big trucks came slowly down the street and stopped in front of us.

  We were all shocked. Xiao-cheng’s father was standing in the first truck.

  He was wearing a tall dunce cap covered with red X’s, the sign for a criminal. His wrists were tied together behind his back, and his arms were lifted high behind him. His head had been forced down so that we could not see his face. Around his neck was a heavy wooden sign: CAPITALIST EXECUTIONER SHAN YI-DAN. The name had been written in black ink and crossed out in red paint.

  We stood there, speechless. The people on the truck shouted slogans, and the trucks moved on. I didn’t dare to turn my head and look at Xiao-cheng. I knew that he was very close to his father. I searched for something to say to comfort him, but he spoke first.

  “Well, I guess the old man came out to greet his public again.”

  I stared at him in astonishment. Xiao-cheng’s eyes were still following the departing trucks. His lips were set in a mocking smile. I turned and went home without a word.

  Was he really used to seeing his father treated like this? Surely he was just hiding his real feelings? I leaned against the balcony railing, trying to clear my head in the chilly air. I didn’t notice Ji-yong until he leaned on the railing next to me. His face looked very strained.

  “Ming-ming’s father is dead,” he said weakly.

  “What?” I shivered.

  “The Institute called his mother early this morning. They said that he hanged himself.”

  “Hanged himself?”

  Ji-yong nodded. “The Institute didn’t even let her see the body except through a window. Then they had the body cremated. Xiao-cheng was saying that they probably beat him to death before he ‘hanged himself.’… There’s Ming-ming. I’ve got to go.”

  Ming-ming and Xiao-cheng were waiting down in the alley. When Ji-yong got there, the three of them walked off together.

  I went inside, but I still felt very cold.

  An Yi opened the door. Before I could mention Mingming’s father, I noticed her eyes. They were red and swollen.

  “What happened?”

  She went back inside their apartment without answering, leaving the door open for me.

  I had not been inside their apartment for a long time. Since Grandma had died, her ninety-year-old sister sat blankly in front of the window all day and never left the room. The mahogany furniture that had filled the place was gone, confiscated. The room seemed larger, and our steps echoed. An Yi and I sat by the window on the old stools that were now their only seats.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked again.

  “My mom…” She dropped her eyes.

  “Beaten again?”

  “Worse than that. Yesterday the teachers who were under investigation had to climb the factory chimney.” She choked and could not continue.

  “Climb the chimney?” I was aghast. “What kind of remolding is that? Did she… did she do it?”

  “She didn’t dare not to. That would be resisting the revolution—she would have been beaten to…” An Yi choked again. “Luckily the factory was off yesterday. You know how hot… the chimney gets… . She couldn’t have…”

  I couldn’t say a word.

  “I’m really afraid, Ji-li.” An Yi looked straight into my eyes. “If Mom is a little late coming back from school, we’re so worried. Dad paces up and down, and I just can’t do anything. Sometimes Dad can’t stand it anymore, and he goes to school to meet her. I’m so scared. I don’t know what’ll happen next. Ji-li, sometimes I’m really afraid to go home.” The expression in her eyes made me want to cry.

  I saw her mother clinging to the high chimney. I shivered. I saw her grandma standing by the window in her black clothes; Old Qian, collapsed at the foot of the propaganda wall; Xiao-cheng’s father, arms wrenched behind his back; Ming-ming’s father, dangling in the air, his tongue dangling out of his bruised, purple face.

  Fate.

  An Yi dried her tears. We sat in silence for a long time before I asked, “Did… do you ever blame your mother for all this?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I think she’s just too pushy, like when she dismissed her students’ Lei Feng Study Group. That’s what first made them call her a reactionary. It made trouble for all of us. But she really did do it for her students’ own good. That Lei Feng Study Group was a joke. They didn’t study his good deeds. They just fooled around every day, and their grades got worse and worse. She wasn’t reactionary at all.”

  “I hate my grandfather!” I said suddenly. “If he hadn’t been a landlord, none of this would have happened to me… . But I guess the only thing I can do is stop thinking about it. It’s just my fate that I was born in these times.”

  “That’s it,” An Yi agreed. “But why doesn’t our fate change?”

  I had an idea. “Listen, let’s predict the future. My cousin told me how to do it. We write different things on different pieces of paper and put them on the windowsill. The first one to blow off will come true.”

  Predicting the future was fourolds, but we could not help doing it anyway. We prepared three pieces of paper: EVERYTHING WILL GET BETTER, BAD LUCK WILL CONTINUE, AND SOME GOOD AND SOME BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN. We folded them, put a little water on each one, and then stuck them on the sill.

  We waited for the wind to blow from heaven while I prayed silently, “May Allah bless us. May Allah bless us. May Allah bless us.” A breeze rustled the folded papers, but none blew off. Another breeze came. One of the papers blew off the sill. An Yi caught it before it hit the floor.

  “Which one?” I asked. “Which one?”

  She unfolded the paper. “Some good and some bad.”

  We looked at each other, and neither of us said anything.

  JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL AT LAST

  After more than a year the great day had finally arrived: my first day of junior high school!

  It was a warm September morning. Four hundred brand-new students made the auditorium of Xin-zha Junior High School even stuffier. Some of us had not seen each other for more than a ye
ar, and everyone was excitedly picking old classmates out of the sea of new faces. The new school chairman, who had replaced the old principal, was giving us a welcome speech, but we had too much to catch up with among ourselves to pay him much attention.

  An Yi and I leaned forward to hear the boy with protruding ears in the row in front of us. “… In my brother’s factory the fighting was really serious. Two factions were fighting to lead the revolution in the factory. They both got guns from the army. People were killed with machine guns. My brother saw it with his own eyes…” Someone pulled my braid, and I turned around. Deng Yi-yi, no longer dressed like a pauper, was smiling at us.

  “What a beautiful sweater,” I said. “Did you make it yourself?”

  “My older sister made it for me. It’s a new pattern called ‘double pearls.’” She proudly stretched her arm out to give us a closer look.

  An Yi grabbed her arm and patted it three times, “New clothes, new clothes, one, two, three,” she chanted, just as we had when we were little. We all giggled.

  “Are you two inseparables in the same class?” Deng Yi-yi teased.

  “No,” I said sadly. “I’m in class four and she’s in class six. What about you?”

  “I’m in class nine.”

  “Do you happen to know what class Yang Fan is in?” An Yi glanced nervously at Yang Fan, sitting off to our right.

  “I think she’s in class two.”

  “What about Du Hai?” I asked, trying to control my anxiety.

  “I don’t know about the boys.”

  “What about Yin Lan-lan, then?” I asked. “You know about her, don’t you?”

  “She’s in my class,” Chen Yi-yi said.

  My eyes met An Yi’s. Ever since we had received our admission letters, we had worried about being in the same class as those three. Now we did not have to worry about two of them. If only Du Hai could be kept far away from us too… .

  The chairman finished his speech.

  We all crowded out of the auditorium and rushed, laughing and shouting, toward the new classroom building.

 

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