The Long March Home

by Zoë S. Roy

  By the time she reached the end of the row, Meihua had filled the sack. With one hand supporting her waist, she straightened her back as she trudged toward a large, round container made of bamboo sheets. She poured the tea leaves she had gathered into it, and she asked for a slip from the armed guard as proof that she had filled a sack. Nine of the yellow slips would represent her daily workload.

  She continued filling the second sack as a warm sunbeam sparkled numerous shiny threads in front of her. She looked back to the time when she was in grade ten, and known by her American name, Mayflora. That was twenty-five years ago, in 1943, when she had lived in Boston with her mother and stepfather and her half sister.

  Mayflora and her friend Susan had found a summer job picking strawberries on a farm in Cambridge, outside Boston. The war was underway. Thrilled with the job they had found, the two girls commuted daily between their homes and the farm by train. Their goal was to save enough money to go to a university, even though wartime made such a dream uncertain.

  They arrived before the first sunrays had cast a bright veil over the endless rows of strawberry bushes. The tender fruit, juicy and red, hid under the green or brown foliage.

  “Let’s see who can pick more,” said Susan, bending over with a wooden basket.

  “Sure, why not?” Mayflora squatted to unfold the leaves as she culled ripe berries off the stems. Soon her basket was full. When she raised her head, she saw Susan, sitting at the end of a row, beckoning to her. Mayflora waved her hand back. Then she lifted her bin and raced over to a gigantic crate. After she exchanged it for another empty basket, she resumed picking in a new row.

  “I’m tired,” said Susan, after gathering up five basketfuls.

  “Me, too,” said Mayflora, walking toward her friend. They plucked some more of the fresh strawberries from the bushes and these they munched on contentedly.

  At noon, Mayflora and Susan devoured their sandwiches and then sauntered around the field. Hearing the faint peep of newly-hatched birds, Mayflora peered into the nearby shrubs and spotted a nest. On her tiptoes, she pushed a few of the branches away and peeked at the nest. “Wow! There are five really tiny baby birds here,” she said.

  Susan craned her head toward the branches. “Ah, they look so funny, their tiny bodies covered with only the faintest bit of down.”

  “They can’t open their eyes. And look! They have such long beaks.”

  “Yeah, and their beaks are wide open. They must be starving,” sighed Susan. “I wonder where their mother is.”

  “I have some breadcrumbs,” Mayflora said, pinching some small crumbs from her sandwich bag.

  They slipped the breadcrumbs into the exposed beaks of the hatchlings. Bit by bit, the chicks swallowed the crumbs and then tucked their heads under their wings to sleep.

  For nearly two weeks, the two girls fed the baby birds with breadcrumbs. As the birds got older, most of their plumes gradually turned green, but the feathers on the lower part of their neck turned red. Mayflora recognized that they were hummingbirds. Each time she saw the tiny birds flap their wings, warmth flooded her heart. They even began to spring out of their nest, fluttering toward Mayflora and Susan whenever they drew near.

  The strawberry season ended; so did their work. On the last day, Mayflora went to see the hummingbirds but the nest was empty, the bush silent. Gripping a branch, she gaped at empty nest, agonizing over whether they had been able to fly away, or if they had been killed by a predator.

  Years later, Mayflora and Susan’s dreams of going to university were fulfilled. After the Second World War, Susan went to the University of Washington in Washington, D.C., and Mayflora, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Meihua saw hummingbirds again in the Lancaster area during her visit to the Amish county in the summer. Accompanied by her fellow students, she hiked along a path in a sunflower field and heard a horse-drawn buggy creak down a gravel road paralleled to the path. A couple of hummingbirds swooshed past them several times, their wings glittering in the warm sunlight. She felt as if she were one of these newly fledged birds flying across that expansive, wild blue sky.

  Meihua had stuffed her fifth sack with leaves. A flock of wild geese flapping over the tea bushes drew her eyes upward. The edge of the vault of heaven looked ambivalent and obscure. She hadn’t heard from her mother since she wrote to her two years ago after Yezi’s birth. The Cultural Revolution had amplified China’s political break with the United States, a symbol of capitalism and bourgeois democracy. As Meihua thought of her mother in Boston, her children with Yao, and her lost freedom, her eyes filled with tears.

  When will I be free like these geese overhead? she wondered. Willing herself to forget the past, she shuffled to the gigantic barrel and unloaded her bag. Maybe, she thought, this toil was really helping to reform her thoughts and maybe soon she would be able to prove that she had indeed improved. Imagining her children’s happy faces, Meihua rubbed her numb fingers and continued plucking tea leaves.

  5.

  DISCARDED NAPA LEAVES

  IN 1970, THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION continued to purge the country of suspected counterrevolutionary activity. Four-year-old Yezi only saw her mother, Meihua, once a year in a distant location that Yao called a “reform-through-labour” camp. Yezi knew very little about her mother. Without the aid of some old photographs, she couldn’t even remember her mother’s face. The word “Mama” sounded intimate and sweet, but it was a mystery to her. When she heard her brother and Yao talking about her mother, she could not help but ask, “Why Mama not home?”

  “She lives far away,” groaned Yao.

  Yezi could not understand why her mother had never been home. Her father also lived in a far-off place, but at least, he came home to visit several times a year. Yezi was happy her father was visiting today.

  Yao was cooking their supper on the log-shaped stove made of clay that she had placed near the wall outside of their living quarters—their previous kitchenette. The family was forced to move out from their apartment after Meihua was arrested. Now their “kitchen” was in the open air. As the family members of an anti-revolutionary, they did not have the right to live in their free, furnished apartment as before, like the other university staff members did. Since Meihua had been imprisoned, they had lived in this tiny, shabby home, which was half indoors and half outdoors. Sang was in school. Yezi sat with her father at a table laid in the shade near the door. The aroma from the pot drifted enticingly around them. Yezi was reading a story from a used picture book with her father’s help. Her finger pointed to the picture of a woman in the book. Yezi asked, “Do you see Mama?”

  “Once a year,” her father answered.

  “Why are other kids with their mamas and babas?”

  “You’re a special and good girl,” answered Lon, closing the book on the table. He hugged his daughter close. “Baby, do you like your Popo Yao?”

  “Yeah, a lot.”

  “Well, right now, she’s your Mama and your Baba.”

  Yezi saw the tears in her father’s eyes. She was making him sad. Afraid to ask any more questions, she remained quiet, wrapping her arms tightly around her father’s neck.

  On June 1, 1971, Yao woke in the early morning. The two children were still sleeping soundly. The stars faded into the gray sky, but the night’s veil still enveloped the yard. Soon the first rays of light would expel the darkness.

  Yao’s bed was actually a chair with short legs. During the day, the chair kept Yezi company. She would sit on it for meals or ride it as a play-horse. Sometimes she would stand on the chair inside their only room to look out the window at groups of Red Guards or revolutionary teams passing by. Their arms pumping up and down, they would play drums and beat bronze gongs or cymbals. Under the waving red flags, they would march and trill songs along the road to celebrate Mao’s newly announced directives. Infected by t
heir excitement, Yezi would tap on the window, or wave her hands left and right at the marching students, even though the crowds were oblivious to her existence.

  At night, Yao slouched in her short-legged chair set beside the bed. Leaning her sore back against the back of the chair, she would rest her legs over a tipped stool in front of her. After napping a while that way, she would lower her head onto her folded arms on the edge of the only bed in the room. Yezi always slept sideways at one end, her brother at the other. Yao would rest her head on her own arms as a pillow, her eyes half open, in the space near Yezi’s head. She had slept like this for years, ever since they had moved into this tiny home that had no room for another bed.

  Since Meihua’s imprisonment, the family had also been deprived of its main source of income. Yao could barely manage to feed the children with Lon’s meagre salary, let alone get paid for her own work caring for the children and their home.

  Curious people asked Yao why she continued to work for the family. Yao would explain that Meihua had kept her from becoming homeless some nineteen years earlier so she had made the decision to stay with the family for better or worse. “Buddha wants me to repay a debt of gratitude. These two children are under my wing. I’m going to wait for their mama to complete her ‘ideological reform,’” she would answer, slapping her apron. These words were ones she had heard from Meihua during her visit to the gulag, although she was not quite sure why Meihua would need any kind of ‘reform’ at all. She never spoke the words aloud, but she knew Meihua was being punished for having been born in America.

  Rising from her chair-bed, Yao gripped the curtain hanging from the doorframe with one hand, and rubbed around her eyes with the other. In all seasons except winter, Yao always kept the door open for her and the children to come in and go out more easily. She used the curtain to give them a measure of privacy. She reached out of the room for a short and smooth log that she had obtained from the carpenters’ workshop on campus. Slumping down on it, she struck her legs and back repeatedly with her fists to relax her muscles. Her back and limbs were always stiff and sore. Her mouth half open, she breathed deeply and heavily—the outside air was better than the air inside their stuffy and cramped quarters. Finally, she felt somehow released from the night’s discomfort.

  She reached into a huge basket beneath the extended roof fixed by a sympathetic worker. She pulled out an apron from the stack and wrapped it around her waist. From its pocket, she drew out a broken wooden comb she had used for years. She could not afford to buy another one.

  Two long braids hung on the front of her chest. First she raked the ends of her gray hair and then removed the elastic bands from the braids. As she held the comb in her teeth, she separated the plaits with her gnarled fingers. Struggling to untangle her hair, she drew the short piece of comb through the thick strands until her scalp tingled. She relished the twinges that reduced the itch at the moment. It’s time to wash my hair, she thought.

  Her long gray hair loose around her, Yao began her daily routine of gathering tinder. Some went into the stove. Several short twigs were added on top. From a pile of paper covered with a patched plastic raincoat stacked against the wall, she drew out some old newspapers. A flame started with the lit paper in a small rectangular opening at the bottom of the stove. As the wind blew in, the fire crackled through the twigs. Then she added several lumps of coal over the twigs. When the thick smoke erupted and spread over, she began to cough, her hand over her mouth. Then she laid a full kettle on the fiery stove. A tin bucket in one hand and a pot in the other, she trudged toward the communal sinks.

  The sky became lighter, the sun’s pale light washing over the yard. The door of one of the apartments across the yard opened, and thirteen-year-old Liang stepped into the yard. She needed to relieve herself. The screeches of a cat piercing the morning air sounded like a bawling infant, and it startled her.

  Liang’s heart pounded at the sight of a rotund figure, a head full of gray hair, moving around the sinks in the centre of the yard. Immediately, she jumped back inside and quickly shut the door. There are no such things as ghosts, she told herself. Is this a class enemy doing something bad out there? she wondered. What she had been told in school played out in her head.

  Shaking her head, she reopened the door to peek outside and look again at what was going on. As she listened to the running water in the sinks, she glimpsed a flickering flame from the stove outside of that outcast family, and saw the smoke climb above the roof extension. Liang soon recognized the gray-haired and hefty figure, Yao, who was busily laundering and hanging washed clothes on the clotheslines across the yard. Relieved, Liang stepped out of the door and raced toward the communal latrine.

  Yao poured heated water from the kettle into the pot. Then she placed the pot on the stove and began cooking rice congee for breakfast. Then she drenched her hair in the lukewarm water of a worn-out enamel basin on the table and washed it.

  At 7:00 a.m. she was back in their small apartment and had pushed aside the curtain that hung in front the children’s bed. She pushed Sang’s arm and called out, “Rise and shine! The sun is on your butt!”

  “Please don’t shout. I’m getting up,” the boy mumbled, kicking off the blanket. He slid out of the bed, picked up his shirt, and slipped his arms into the sleeves.

  “Careful! Don’t pull apart your shirt!” Yao grumbled.

  “Don’t yap….”

  “Stop griping. Let your little sister sleep a bit longer,” said Yao. Taking a bundle of meal coupons held in an elastic band from her pocket, she picked out two dark red ones and handed them to Sang. “Run and get two steamed buns at the canteen.”

  She went out and removed the pot of congee from the stove, replacing it with the kettle. After lifting the lid off the pot to let the congee cool, she took a worn bamboo basket that hung on the outside wall and repaired it by binding its loose edges with some old rope she’d collected from a nearby garbage dumpsite.

  Sang pocketed the coupons. Behind the door curtain, he peeked out at the sinks. Good. Only a few people out there, he thought. A mug, a toothbrush and toothpaste in his hand, he pulled a facecloth off a hook on the wall and went out. In the yard, Sang strode under Yao’s laundry on the clotheslines; the laundry swung like various flags in the morning breeze. On the platform of the sinks, a ribbed washboard lay on the edge; an ample, cream-coloured enamel tub held the rest of Yao’s laundry.

  After brushing his teeth, Sang grabbed a pot with a lid and hurried to the canteen. Back with the steamed buns twenty minutes later, he joined his sister and Yao around the table for breakfast. By that time, several students had already left their homes in the yard for school.

  A teenage boy named Jun walked toward them. “You dummy, aren’t you done yet?” Guffawing at Sang, Jun patted him amiably on the shoulder.

  “You short-lived creature! You won’t see heaven if you make trouble!” Yao yelled before Sang could respond. Turning toward Sang, she added gruffly, “Eat up your food. You must get going if you want to have a chance in your next life!”

  Confused by Yao’s words, both Sang and Jun remained silent. They had never thought about a next life.

  In the distance, Yao spotted Liang. “Sweetie,” she called out, “Could you come and braid Yezi’s hair later today?” she asked. Her voice was coarse, but joyful.

  “Why are you fussy about her hair?” asked Liang, turning to size up Yezi.

  “My little girl turns five today.”

  “Okay, when I’m back from school this afternoon,” answered Liang. Her birthday! What a lucky girl! Today is also International Children’s Day, she thought, waving her hand. “Be quick, Sang, if you don’t want to be late.”

  “Let’s get going,” Sang said to Jun. He grabbed his book bag, and the two boys raced over to catch up with Liang.

  “Goodbye,” Yezi called out after them. Her eyes stayed on he
r brother and the others until they were out of her sight. She plucked at Yao’s apron. “I want to go to school, too.”

  “Not until the year after next.”

  “I want a book bag. And a real pencil.”

  “You want new stuff just like you want my life!”

  “I—I don’t…” said Yezi, pulling on Yao’s hand.

  “Let’s go to the store,” said Yao, one hand gripping the handle of the fixed bamboo basket, the other holding on tightly to Yezi’s hand.

  When they reached the vegetable store next to the large, five-storey staff dormitory, the busy hour had ended; most of the customers had gone to work. Only a few elderly people and housewives were still lining up. Occasionally a passer-by would stop to look over the prices listed on the board outside the counter, and then hurry away.

  Neither checking the board nor joining the line, Yao strode toward a heap of discarded Chinese napa leaves. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said to Yezi as she let go of her hand. “Watch out for kidnappers!” She raised her voice as she bent down to pick through napa leaves. After tearing off yellow or rotting parts, she placed the rest into her basket. Hopefully, she thought, I’ll be able to get enough vegetables from what’s been discarded. She might even be able to hoard some for another day. An elderly woman came to Yao and picked one of the cucumbers she’d just bought from her basket and gave it to her.

  “Thanks, Granny Yu,” Yao put it into her basket and continued her work.

  “That was nice of you, Granny Yu,” piped a middle-aged woman walking by.

  Granny Yu sighed and turned toward the woman. “I don’t understand why Yao’s staying with that family. Skirt Wei should confess her crime. Otherwise, she’ll never get out of there.”