The Good Women Of China

by Xinran

  I wondered to myself if this could have been the couple I had overheard in the hospital. I was shocked by this unknown woman’s decision, but on some deep level I understood her desire to have this unique experience. Her bereaved husband could not and did not. He asked me if I could tell him how he could understand women.

  I do not know if his baby boy took the name Tianshi, but as I left the funeral dinner I hoped he would be a heaven-sent key to unlock the door to women’s minds for his father.

  I only truly understood what it means to be a mother, however, when, in 1992, I visited the industrial city of Tangshan, which had been rebuilt after its complete destruction in the terrifying earthquake of 28 July 1976 when 300,000 people lost their lives.

  As the broadcasting station in Nanjing was an important one in China, I often had to travel the country to attend regional conferences on the development of radio and television programming. The sole purpose of these conferences was to parrot Party policy rather than engage in any genuine debate. To make up for the lack of intellectual stimulation, the organisers frequently arranged for the participants to travel the surrounding countryside during the conferences. This gave me many opportunities to interview women in different areas of China.

  During one such conference in Tianjin, I took the opportunity to visit nearby Tangshan. The Tangshan earthquake of 1976 was notorious for exemplifying the complete breakdown in communication in China at that time. In 1976, the Chinese government was coping with the deaths of three crucial figures: Mao Zedong, Prime Minister Zhouenglai and the military leader Zhu De. Their preoccupation with this crisis, together with the inadequacy of Chinese technology, meant that they were completely unaware that the earthquake had happened. It wasn’t until a man from Tangshan went all the way to Beijing that the news filtered through. Even then, people thought he was a lunatic. The Xinhua local news agency, which covered Tangshan, found out about the earthquake, not from government central office, but from the foreign press, who had received reports from the more sophisticated earthquake monitoring centres of other countries.

  While I was in Tangshan I heard about an unusual orphanage founded and run by mothers who had lost their children during the earthquake. I was told they financed it out of the compensation money they had received. I telephoned to arrange a visit. The orphanage had been built with the help of the local army garrison, and was situated in a suburb, next to an army sanatorium. I heard children’s voices as I approached the low wooden fence and shrubs that surrounded it. This was an orphanage without officials; some called it a family without men. A few mothers and several dozen children lived there.

  I found the children exercising in the courtyard, and the mothers making dumplings in the kitchen. The women greeted me with floury hands, telling me how much they liked my programme. Still in their aprons, they took me on a tour of the orphanage.

  Each mother lived with five or six children in one large room, simply furnished, but homely. Dwellings of this kind are common in northern China: half the room is occupied by a kang, a bed-cum-stove made out of bricks or earth. In the winter, a fire can be lit under the kang to keep it warm and at night everyone in the family sleeps on it. Individual quilts demarcate sleeping areas. In the daytime, the quilts are rolled up on one side and a small table is set up on the kang to form a living and dining area for the family. The other half of the room is filled with wardrobes, a settee and chairs for receiving guests.

  Unlike normal homes, the rooms in the orphanage had been decorated in a riot of colour, according to the children’s interests. Every room had its own style of decoration, but three things were present in all the rooms. The first was a frame containing pictures of all the children who had lived at the orphanage. The second was a crude painting of an eye brimming over with tears, with two words written on the pupil – ‘the future’. The third was a book in which each child’s history was recorded.

  The women were very proud of the children, and regaled me with tales about their exploits, but it was the stories of the women that I was keenest to hear.

  On my first visit, I managed to interview only one mother, Mrs Chen. She had been an army dependant, and had had three children. I talked to her as I helped her boil dumplings for the children, addressing her as ‘auntie’ as she was of my parents’ generation.

  ‘Auntie Chen, can I ask you about what happened the day of the earthquake? I’m sorry, I know the memories must be very painful . . .’

  ‘That’s all right – not a day goes by when I don’t think of that day. I don’t think anyone who survived it can ever forget. Everything was so unreal . . . That morning, before it was light, a strange sound woke me, a rumbling and hooting, like a train was being driven into our house. I thought I was dreaming – dreams are so strange – but just as I was about to cry out, half the bedroom caved in, along with my husband in his bed. The children’s bedroom on the other side of the house suddenly appeared before me, like a stage set. My elder son was staring, mouth open; my daughter was crying and calling out, stretching her arms towards me; and my little son was still sleeping sweetly.

  ‘Everything happened so quickly . . . the scene before me suddenly dropped away like a curtain falling. I was terrified, but I thought I was having a nightmare. I pinched myself hard, but didn’t wake up. In desperation, I stabbed my leg with a pair of scissors. Feeling the pain and seeing the blood, I realised this was no dream. My husband and children had fallen into an abyss.

  ‘I shouted like a madwoman, but no one heard me. The sound of walls collapsing and furniture smashing filled the air. I stood, trailing my bleeding leg, facing the yawning pit that had been the other half of my house. My husband and my beautiful children had vanished before my eyes. I wanted to cry, but there were no tears. I simply did not want to go on living.’

  Her eyes were filled with tears.

  ‘I’m sorry, Auntie Chen . . .’ I stammered, overcome.

  She shook her head. ‘It’s been nearly twenty years, but nearly every day at dawn, I hear a train rumbling and hooting, along with the cries of my children. Sometimes I’m so frightened of those sounds, I go to bed very early with the children and put an alarm clock under my pillow to wake me before three. When it rings, I sit up until it gets light, sometimes I go back to sleep after four. But after a few days of this, I crave those nightmarish sounds again, because my children’s voices are in there too.’

  ‘Does it make you feel better to have so many children around you now?’

  ‘Much better, especially at night. I watch them sleeping and feel comforted in a way I can’t explain. I hold their hands to my face as I sit by them. I kiss them and thank them for keeping me alive.’

  ‘The children will thank you when they grow up – it’s a cycle of love.’

  ‘That’s right, from old to young and back. All right, the dumplings are done, I must call the children in. Will you have a little too?’

  I excused myself, saying I would be back tomorrow. My heart was too full to speak to anyone else. I left feeling emotionally and physically drained.

  That night, I heard in my dreams the rumbling noise and children’s cries that Auntie Chen had described, and woke drenched in cold sweat. Sunlight was streaming through the net curtains, and the sound of children on their way to school filtered through. Relief washed over me.

  That day’s meeting finished early. I politely refused an invitation to dinner from some friends in Tianjin and hurried to catch the train to Tangshan. At the orphanage, I spoke to a woman called Mrs Yang, who was in charge of the children’s meals. She was supervising the children’s dinner when I arrived.

  ‘Look how the children are enjoying their food,’ she said.

  ‘That must be because you’re a good cook.’

  ‘Not necessarily. Children enjoy certain things, like food in special shapes. It may just be steamed bread shaped like a bunny or a puppy, but they’ll eat more of it that way. They also like sweet things, so they enjoy sweet-and-sour dishes or Cantones
e roast pork. They like food that is easy to chew, like meatballs or vegetable balls. Children always think what their friends have is nicer, so I let them choose their food and swap it as they wish. It stimulates their interest in food. My daughter was exactly the same; if you gave her one portion of the same thing on several different plates, she got so excited.’ She shook her head fondly.

  I spoke hesitantly, ‘I heard that your daughter . . .’

  ‘I will tell you my daughter’s story, if you like, but I won’t do it here. I don’t want the children to see me cry. It’s such a comfort to see them eating and laughing so happily, they really make me . . .’ She stopped, her voice suddenly thick with tears.

  I prompted her gently. ‘Auntie Yang?’

  ‘Not here, let’s go to my room.’

  ‘Your room?’

  ‘Yes, I’m the only one to have a room of my own, because my other job is taking care of the children’s health records and personal belongings. We can’t let the children near those things.’

  Mrs Yang’s room was very small; one wall was almost completely covered with a photograph that had been so overenlarged that it looked like a painting in pixels of colour. It showed a young girl with lively eyes, lips parted as if about to speak.

  Gazing at the picture, Mrs Yang said, ‘This is my daughter. The photo was taken when she graduated from primary school. It’s the only picture I have of her.’

  ‘She’s very pretty.’

  ‘Yes. Even in nursery school, she was always acting and making speeches.’

  ‘She must have been very clever.’

  ‘I think so – she was never top of the class, but she never gave me any cause for worry.’ Mrs Yang stroked the photograph as she spoke. ‘It’s been nearly twenty years since she left me. I know she didn’t want to go. She was fourteen. She knew about life and death: she didn’t want to die.’

  ‘I heard that she survived the earthquake?’

  ‘Yes, but it would have been better for her to have been crushed to death at once. She waited fourteen days – fourteen days and two hours, knowing death was approaching. And she was only fourteen . . .’ Mrs Yang broke down.

  Unable to keep my own tears back, I said, ‘Auntie Yang, I’m sorry,’ and put my hand on her shoulder.

  She sobbed for a few minutes. ‘I’m . . . I’m all right. Xinran, you can’t imagine what a wretched scene that was. I will never forget the expression on her face.’ She gazed at the photograph again with loving eyes. ‘Her mouth was slightly open, just like this . . .’

  Distressed by her tears, I asked, ‘Auntie Yang, you’ve been busy all day, you’re tired, let’s talk next time, all right?’

  Mrs Yang composed herself. ‘No, I’ve heard you’re very busy. You’ve come all this way just to hear our stories; I can’t let you leave with nothing.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, I have time,’ I reassured her.

  She was resolute. ‘No, no. I’ll tell you now.’ She took a deep breath. ‘My husband had died a year before, and my daughter and I lived in a fifth-floor flat allocated by the work unit. We had only one room, and shared a common kitchen and bathroom. It wasn’t a big room, but we didn’t find it cramped. Because I hate extremes of heat and cold, my half of the room was by the inner wall, and my daughter’s was by the outer wall. That morning, I was woken suddenly by rumbling, banging and a violent shaking. My daughter called out, and tried to get out of bed to come over to me. I tried to stand, but couldn’t stay upright. Everything was tilting, the wall was leaning towards me. Suddenly, the wall by my daughter disappeared, and we were exposed on the edge of the fifth floor. It was very warm, so we were only in our underclothes. My daughter screamed and wrapped her arms around her chest, but before she could react more fully, she was thrown over the edge by another falling wall.

  ‘I screamed her name as I held on to some clothes hooks on the wall. It was only after the swaying had stopped and I could stand still on the sloping floor that I realised this was an earthquake. I looked frantically for a way to get downstairs, and staggered off, shouting my daughter’s name.

  ‘I hadn’t realised that I wasn’t dressed. All the other survivors were wearing very little too. Some were even naked, but nobody thought about these things. We were all running around wildly in the half-light, weeping and shouting for our relatives.

  ‘In the cacophony, I screamed myself hoarse asking everyone in sight about my daughter. Some of the people I approached asked me if I had seen their relatives. Everyone was wild-eyed and yelling, nobody took anything in. As people gradually realised the full horror of the situation, a grieving silence fell. You could have heard a pin drop. I was afraid to move, in case I made the earth start shaking again. We stood surveying the scene before us: collapsed buildings, broken water pipes, yawning holes in the ground, corpses everywhere, lying on the ground, hanging over roof beams and out of houses. A pall of dust and smoke was rising. There was no sun or moon, nobody knew what time it was. We wondered if we were still in the land of the living.’

  I encouraged Mrs Yang to have a drink of water.

  ‘Water? Ah, yes . . . I’m not sure how long it took, but I began to feel thirsty because I had shouted my throat raw. Someone echoed my thoughts in a weak voice, “Water . . .” reminding everyone to turn to the immediate matter of survival. A middle-aged man stepped out of the crowd, and said, “If we want to live, we must help each other and get organised.” We murmured in agreement.

  ‘It was starting to get light, and everything before us became more distinct, and more horrible. Suddenly someone shouted, “Look over there, someone’s alive!” In the wan light, we saw a girl wedged in mid-air between the ruined walls of two buildings. Although her hair hung over her face, and her lower body was trapped and hidden from view, I knew from the colour and style of her bra, and from the struggling movement of her torso that she was my daughter. “Xiao Ping!” I shouted. I called her name over and over again, wild with joy and grief. She continued writhing desperately, and I realised that she could not hear or see me. I pushed my way forward through the crowd, gesturing towards her and sobbing hoarsely that she was my daughter. Rubble blocked my path. People started to help, trying to scale the wall my daughter was trapped in, but it was at least two storeys high, and they had no tools. I shouted Xiao Ping’s name over and over again. She still had not heard me.

  ‘A few women, then some men joined in shouting to help me. Soon, almost everyone was calling, “Xiao Ping! Xiao Ping!”

  ‘Xiao Ping finally heard us. She raised her head, and used her free hand – her left – to push her hair off her face. I knew she was looking for me. She looked confused; she couldn’t find me in the crowd of naked or near-naked bodies. A man next to me started pushing everyone around me aside. None of us understood what he was doing at first, but soon it became clear that he was trying to clear a big space around me so Xiao Ping could see me. It worked; Xiao Ping shouted “Mama!” and waved to me with her free hand.

  ‘I shouted back, but my voice was hoarse and faint. I raised my arms and waved to her instead. I don’t know how long we spent calling and waving. Finally, somebody made me sit down. A big empty space was still left around me, so Xiao Ping could see me. She was tired too, her head was lolling and she was gasping for breath. In retrospect, I wonder why she never screamed for me to save her. She never said anything like “Mama, save me”, not a word.’

  ‘When did you start counting the fourteen days and two hours you spoke of?’

  ‘Someone shouted to Xiao Ping, “It’s 5.30 in the morning, there’ll be someone coming to rescue you soon!” He wanted to comfort her, to help her hold on. But seconds, minutes and hours passed, and nobody had come to the rescue.’

  ‘That was because it took time for people to find out what had happened,’ I said, remembering how long it had taken for a news report to appear.

  Mrs Yang nodded. ‘What kind of a country was this in 1976? A big city lay in ruins and three hundred thousand people had died, ye
t no one knew. How backward China was! I think that if we had been more advanced, many people might not have died. Xiao Ping might have survived.’

  ‘When did the rescuers arrive?’

  ‘I can’t say for sure. I can only remember that the army came first. The soldiers were all sweaty from running, but not one paused for breath before they split up and went to the rescue. Equipped with ropes and pitons, two soldiers started to climb up the wall in which Xiao Ping was trapped. It looked like it might collapse at any moment and crush them all. I could hardly breathe as I saw them edge closer and closer to her . . .’ She fell silent for a few minutes.

  ‘When Xiao Ping saw that someone was coming to rescue her, she burst into tears. The first soldier to reach her took off his uniform jacket to cover her. She only had one arm free, so he had to wrap half the jacket around her like a Tibetan robe. The other soldier held a water bottle to her mouth. The two soldiers started pulling away the bricks and stones around Xiao Ping, and soon freed her right arm, which was bruised and bloody. For some reason, they suddenly stopped digging. I shouted to them, asking what the matter was, but they couldn’t have heard me. After a while, they climbed down and walked over to me. Gesturing with bloodied hands, they told me that the lower half of Xiao Ping’s body was wedged between the reinforced concrete slabs of the wall, which they couldn’t dig away by hand. I asked them why their hands were all bloody. They put their hands behind their backs and said that they were not allowed to use tools to dig people free, for fear of hurting them.

  ‘After it was all over, I found out that some soldiers’ fingernails and fingertips had been worn away by digging, but they had bound their hands in cloth and carried on. Some soldiers shouted madly as they dug, because they could hear moans and cries for help deep within the rubble. How much could they do by hand? The heavy rescue equipment couldn’t get to the city because the roads were destroyed. How many people died waiting for rescue?’ She sighed, and wiped the tears from her eyes.