The Long March Home

by Zoë S. Roy

  Suddenly, Ming’s voice burst out right next to them. “I am going to take down your shack, you troublemakers!”

  The door crashed, and Ming appeared in front of the two girls before they realized what was happening. He laughed. “Ha! You two rats are hiding here.” His hand levitated over the twigs, and he made a pulling gesture. “I’m going to tear this nest to pieces,” he growled playfully.

  “Please don’t destroy it,” Jian begged. “Please. I’ll lend you my chess book anytime you want.”

  “A done deal!” Ming stretched his head inside and said to Jian, “Your brother told me you were looking for silkworm eggs. If you can beat me in a chess game, I’ll find some for you.”

  Jian promised to play chess with him after finishing her homework, and then asked him to leave them alone until then. As soon as Ming left, she told Yezi she would ask her brother to teach her some tricks in chess so she could win the game.

  Yezi was excited at the thought that her friend might get a few silkworm eggs as a reward. Remembering that dinner was probably almost ready, she told Jian it was time for her to make her way home.

  That evening, Yezi asked her brother to teach her a song in English. “Which one? Why?”

  “The one you learned from our mother,” she said. “That one that goes ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat.’ Jian and I would like to learn to speak English.” She was looking at him intently, her hands placed firmly on her hips.

  “No, I’m not teaching Jian anything. I might be accused of spreading bourgeois ideas. I don’t need that.” He drummed his fingers on the table as though he were solving a difficult mathematic equation in his head. His face softened as he leaned toward her. “But I will teach you some English if you can promise to keep it secret.”

  Yezi nodded emphatically. “I promise. Brother, I promise.”

  “Okay, repeat after me. Row, row, row your boat…” He sang quietly under his breath.

  Yezi happily repeated the words, picturing herself and her mother sitting in a boat that floated along a bubbling brook. The sun was shining, and she and her mother were holding hands while they sang. She continued to sing the song with her brother until she had memorized all the words and it was time for bed.

  The next morning, she met Jian on her way to school. Yezi asked if she had beaten Ming in the chess game. Jian shook her head. “Not yet. But I will beat him some day soon.” Grabbing Yezi’s hand, she said, “Remember, we’re going to our hide-out after school.”

  “Of course,” Yezi smiled. “Of course.”

  They didn’t notice that one of the children in their classroom was following closely behind them and had heard them speaking. “Where are you going?” he asked. “Tell me,” he insisted.

  They both grinned, but did not answer. It was their secret. And he was simply annoying.

  In gym class, Yezi and the other students played ping-pong on the playground. One of the concrete ping-pong tables in the school yard seemed somehow different from the others. The surface of one corner had been mended with cement. Yezi trembled uncontrollably when she saw it. That must have been where the anti-revolutionary slogan had been scribbled.

  After school, when Yezi got home, she plunked herself down at the table beside the door and started to work on her assignments. Moments later, Jian rushed over to her. “We’ve lost our hideout!” she shouted in a desperate voice.

  “What?” Yezi could not believe her ears. She stood up and grabbed her friend’s arm. “How? Why?”

  “It’s gone! No more hide-out!”

  “Who would have done that?” Yezi asked, her lips trembling.

  “Maybe the gardeners took it away along with the other branches.” Jian’s eyes were brimming with tears.

  “This is awful,” Yezi sighed, sitting back on her stool. “What should we do?”

  “I guess we will have to wait until next time they trim the trees,” Jian said, wiping her eyes. “Then we’ll build another one.”

  “Yeah, we’ll do that.” Yezi slung her arm around her friend’s shoulder, trying to comfort her. “Stay here, with me. We can do our homework together.”

  “Why don’t you come with me?” Jian said, sniffling. “The table at my home is bigger…”

  “Go where?” asked Yao, who had just returned from the communal sinks with a pot in her hand.

  “Can I go do my homework at Jian’s home,” Yezi asked. “Please, Popo Yao? Please?”

  “Okay,” said Yao. “Only to do your homework. Be back on time for supper.”

  “Great!” Yezi stood and gathered up her things. Arm in arm, the girls walked away, their heads almost touching. Yezi breathed deeply. The cool evening breeze carried the scent of lilacs as it brushed past them. The fading sunlight danced between the shadows of the locust trees that lined the street. The two friends bounced across the road like butterflies fluttering over a garden. They had forgotten all about their hideout.

  One Saturday afternoon at the end of June—several weeks after the anti-revolutionary slogan had been found on the ping pong table in the school playground, the principal called all the students to assemble in the yard. The Workers’ Propaganda Team leader announced their success in locating the student who had scribbled, “Chairman Mao” on the ping-pong table and then carved three X’s over it. Yezi took a deep breath. A pitiful feeling arose in her for the guilty student, the boy who stood on the stage, his head lowered, his arms dangling at his sides. When the announcer’s voice thundered from the loudspeaker, Yezi could not help but shiver even though she was standing in the steamy sunlight of an early June afternoon. “Now we can prove that ‘a hero raises a revolutionary son, and a reactionary father, an anti-revolutionary bastard.’ Guo Li’s father is anti-revolutionary. That is why he wrote the anti-revolutionary slogan and committed this crime.” The speaker wiped her agitated face with a handkerchief and then barked loudly, “Guo Li has been suspended from school for a year! If he doesn’t improve, the revolution will reform him as it has his father!” Her hand slashed the air as if she were cutting off the head of a criminal.

  The sunlight was hot on Yezi’s face, but a chill surged in her heart. She did not know what the suspended student felt like, but she guessed his legs were weak, and his hands numb. Gloom and dread pressed down upon her. Finally the workers’ leader demanded that each class hold a political meeting to denounce Guo Li’s anti-revolutionary crime. As she banged the loudspeaker on the table, someone shoved the young boy down the steps, pushing him onto his knees on the ground below the platform. Craning her head, Yezi stared at the boy, whose dark hair, licked by the sunlight, looked like a patch of dry grass on fire. When she blinked, several sparkles danced in front of her eyes. She felt as if she were the one being pushed down from the stage. Her legs buckled, and she forced herself to keep standing, willing her legs to hold her steady.

  11.

  THE READING ROOM

  AFTER FINAL EXAMS, THE 1975 summer break started. Like birds freed from cages, Yezi and the other children scampered contentedly around Arts Paradise, playing hide-and-seek. The sun shone. The yard came to life with their play and babbling. As the days passed, the exuberant children expanded their territory, hiding in places outside Arts Paradise and then, even farther out, so that the “cat” would sometimes take hours to catch a “mouse.”

  One such afternoon, while the cat counted to one hundred, Yezi along with two other mice ran toward some remote buildings about ten minutes away. As they passed through a garden, Lan, Ming’s twin sister, decided to hide among the bushes, but Fu, her little brother, who was running with them, kept going. Yezi decided to follow Fu. They finally reached the entrance of a library, a large and imposing building made of dark gray bricks. They climbed up the stairs and headed toward a large window facing the road to the entrance. Fu slouched down on the low windowsill. “I’m going to stay here,” he announced.
“I can see the cat before he gets here.”

  Yezi, standing beside him, was intrigued by the double doors across from the window. She could see they led to a spacious room where several people were sitting at tables reading. People came and went, past the woman doorkeeper who seemed not to pay attention to any one in particular. Curious, Yezi tapped Fu on the shoulder and, pointing toward the room, said, “I’m going inside to take a look. Call me if you see the cat.”

  Nobody stopped her as she entered the reading room. She tiptoed around the shelves, captivated by the rows and rows of books of different sizes and colours. Her eyes fell on several rows of journals and magazines and finally rested on an issue of the People’s Pictorial. She pulled it down and slowly thumbed through its pages, full of photographs, each one with a different story to tell.

  “What are you doing here?” a familiar voice asked, startling her.

  Yezi raised her head and was surprised to face her brother. “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “I’m studying—”

  “Ha! You’re not a university student.”

  “Neither are you.” With a mischievous wink, Sang motioned her to a seat at a nearby table. He rested his hand on a stack of periodicals and papers on the table and said, “I’ve been reading all of these.”

  “You have an English newspaper.” Yezi picked it up and scrunched her nose at the words in large, bold type. “What does it say?” she asked.

  “It’s The Morning Star from London. There are more newspapers over there,” Sang said proudly.

  “Do you understand English?”

  “A little bit,” he said, fingering a thick book. “This dictionary helps me.”

  As she glanced at it, she said, “It’s the same as Jian’s.”

  “Jian has an English dictionary?”

  “Yes. Oh, no, it was her father’s.” Excited, Yezi’s voice became higher-pitched.

  “Shh. We are supposed to be quiet. We can be thrown out for making too much noise.” He waved his hand, fanning her away. “Go look around, quietly.”

  Yezi slunk toward the newspaper rack and flipped through the different English newspapers. She grabbed the first newspaper rod she could reach easily and examined the front page of the newspaper it displayed.

  A young student next to her turned and asked, “Do you read English?”

  “No, but I know it’s English.”

  “What’s this?” asked the student, pointing to a word with a pen in his hand.

  “I don’t know. Can you teach me?”

  “Sure. Times.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s the name of a newspaper published in England.”

  “Times,” she repeated the word. “Thanks. I’m going to read it through,” she said matter-of-factly. Turning around, she carried the paper rod like a flag in her arms.

  The amused student smirked. “Good luck.”

  After reciting the word in a whisper, Yezi carefully laid the newspaper on a table. She inspected the spelling of the word, Times, and searched through the dense text to see if she could recognize the same word somewhere else. Examining the photographs on some of the pages, and running her fingers through lines of text, she finally spotted the word “time” again. Wondering why the word did not have the “s” character at the end and why the first character appeared a little different, she raised her head to question the student that had spoken to her earlier, but could not find him. Instead, she replaced the paper on the rack and returned it to the stacks. She decided to walk around some of the tables so she could see what the university students were reading.

  At an unoccupied seat, she found several issues of an English magazine. Kneeling on a chair, she thumbed through the pages to look at the photographs. The people in other parts of the world looked happy and were dressed in colourful clothes. Delighted, she spotted a photograph of a little girl, her age, with a wide smile and a violin in her hands. Fingering the photograph over and over, she could almost touch that girl and her instrument. She looked at all the other smiling faces in the magazine and felt her throat tighten. I want to smile like all these people, she thought. I want my mama to smile like this too. She couldn’t wait to tell Jian about the English world she had found in the reading room.

  Light-hearted, she left the table and strode past the entrance. She grinned at the doorkeeper, who did not smile but nodded back. She realized then that looking happy was not difficult, and people seemed to like it. Remembering her playmate, she headed toward the windowsill. Fu had fallen asleep. His head, leaning against the window, was bathed in the late afternoon sunlight.

  “Wake up,” Yezi said, gently shaking his shoulder.

  Fu jumped up, a puzzled look on his face. “Why am I here?”

  “We were playing hide-and-seek. Did you see the cat?”

  “The cat?” he asked with a shy smile. “I forgot to look. Maybe he hasn’t gotten here yet.”

  “The game’s over. Let’s go home.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe the cat is still looking for us,” Fu said, following her glumly downstairs.

  Outside, the sun hung westward, making everything on campus golden. The sky was an endless pale blue. Eyes narrowing to a slit in the bright light of the afternoon sun, Yezi said, “Everything looks so fantastic.”

  “What?” Fu perked up and then glanced at her. “You look happy,” he said.

  “Yes, I am,” she answered, thinking about the child violinist in the photograph. “You should be happy, too.” She laughed and looked up into the clear sky, enjoying the feeling of having discovered something wonderful.

  Just as they were nearing their courtyard, the song, “The East Is Red,” blasted through a loudspeaker, a signal on campus for suppertime. Waving goodbye to Fu, Yezi ran the rest of the way home.

  “Where were you this afternoon?” Yao bit her lip when Yezi drew close to the table.

  “I was at the library.”

  “Library? How did you get in? It’s not a place for kids.”

  “But I did. So did Sang,” she said, her eyes glowing.

  “Are kids allowed there?” Yao took a breath.

  “You can ask my brother.” Joining Sang at the table, Yezi said, “I’m hungry now.”

  “You poor starving creature.” Raising her eyebrows, Yao filled a bowl with steaming rice and shredded cabbage.

  “It’s delicious,” Yezi said, smacking her lips.

  Surprised, Yao said, “But you don’t like cabbage. I cooked some tomatoes for you.”

  “From now on, I like everything,” Yezi said, grinning.“Well, now, what has changed you?” Yao asked, staring into Yezi’s smiling face. “Books?” She remembered what she had heard as a child: if people had an education, they had a chance of being hired by the emperor. She was told that reading books could make people officers. Maybe Yezi will be hired by the emperor. She felt suddenly very proud of her young charge.

  After supper, with Yao’s permission, Yezi pranced across the road into the yard, and walked over to the large, four-storey, brown brick building that faced her apartment. She climbed the stairs two at a time until she reached the top floor. She stopped in front of the first door and knocked.

  Jian opened the door with a welcoming smile. She gripped Yezi’s arm and pulled her inside. “What’s up? You look so happy.”

  “Guess what? I discovered some English newspapers.”

  “Where?” Jian asked, as they scrambled onto chairs at the table where Jian’s younger sister, Kang, was playing with a mound of toy blocks.

  Yezi told Jian about what she had found in the reading room of the main library. Jian told her that she had spent the afternoon playing chess. She had won the chess game and would soon be getting some silkworm eggs from Ming.

  “I’d like to see those n
ewspapers. Let’s go tomorrow,” Jian said. “Then we can go for a walk along the lakeshore. There are mulberry bushes there and we can pick some leaves for our silkworms to eat.” Her arm shook in the air as if she had already grabbed a few branches.

  Yezi pictured worms crawling on green leaves.

  “Can I come?” Kang whined, pushing her blocks away.

  “We’re not going anywhere right now,” Jian said to her sister. “Come on. I’ll help you build a house.”

  When Yezi got back home, she was still thinking about her discovery of the newspapers in English. “Do you know Times?” she asked her brother.

  “You mean The Times, the newspaper?” Sang raised his head from his book, looking at her with surprise. “What about it?”

  “Guess what?” she said, grinning. “I found a misspelled word.”

  “How? You don’t even read English.” Sang was dismissive.

  Yezi placed a piece of paper on the table and wrote the words ‘time’ and ‘Times.’ She thrust the paper toward him. “Do you see the difference between the two?” she asked.

  “I sure do. This is its singular form.” Her brother laid his finger at the end of the word ‘time’. “There’s no ‘s’ here.”

  “Well, look here. There’s something else that is different,” Yezi said, pointing to the letter, ‘t.’

  “It’s in the lower case, but the letter in the title is capitalized.”

  “Oh! English is confusing,” Yezi said, puzzled. “Why do they write the same character in different ways?”

  “Look here.” Pointing at a Chinese character he had written, Sang asked, “Read it.”

  “Sun.”

  He added a stroke to it. “Now read this one.”

  “Eye.”

  “One more stroke made a different character. This is the way of written Chinese.”

  “I see.” She laid her finger on the English word. “So that is the way of written English.”

  “Smart girl,” Sang said, clapping his hands. “I’ll teach you the English alphabet if you want.”