Spider Eaters: A Memoir

by R Yang

  So what if he already knew of all my terrible thoughts? Maybe he is merely testing me to see if I am honest or not? I will fail the test. And henceforth everybody will know that I am a coward, a liar, and a person with very dangerous thoughts!

  The prospect scared me. Yet I was unwilling to betray myself. Toward the end of the week, one night, I was awake for a long time. When I finally fell asleep, I had a dream.

  It seemed that I was back in my childhood. Instead of being fourteen, I was only nine or ten. It was a sunny day. I was in a beautiful park. I had never been to this place before. Everything was unfamiliar. Why am I here? Is this a spring outing? Where are the teachers and other students? Suddenly it occurred to me that we were playing hide-andseek. My classmates had all disappeared. Where should I hide myself? I became very anxious.

  With frenzied eyes, I looked around me: the flower bushes were very low. The young trees were too slender. In some distance I spotted a pavilion. But when I rushed into it, I found it was made of bamboo. The delicate banisters could not hide anyone. Besides, it was on top of a naked hill. Anyone in the park could see me, from any direction. Their eyes. Sharp long nails! They'll pierce me, punch holes through my body. But I mustn't give up. There's still time. I have to find another hiding place. Hurry up! Time's running out! The seeker might be here at any moment!

  In despair, I looked around me once again. This time to my great joy I discovered a small shack at the foot of the hill-somehow, it had escaped my attention. I ran toward it. In no time I was inside. In the shack, it was dark. Just as I heaved a sigh of relief and thought that I was safe at last, I lowered my eyes and saw that my feet were stuck in a big pile of dung!

  I woke up with a start, utterly disgusted. Unable to go back to sleep, I thought about this dream. It was a bad omen. No doubt about it. In the past I had heard people say that dreams would foretell a person's luck. If one dreamed of water, for instance, it meant that one was going to have money. If one dreamed of fire, it meant success. There were bad dreams too. Shoes, for instance, were bad luck. Teeth falling out of one's mouth meant that someone in the family was going to die. But excrement was worst of all. It was a sure sign that the person would run into some very big troubles. The cursed dream made me even more nervous than before.

  Yet in the midst of all my troubles, somehow I never thought of discussing it with my parents. I knew they would laugh at me if I started talking about dreams. And if I told them that I was serious, they would be ashamed of me. Besides, at the age of fourteen, although the crisis between my parents and me had been over for some years, I was still afraid that if I told them about my dangerous thoughts, I would give them new evidences of my wickedness. So I kept my problem to myself. The third layer of thoughts, Qian was right, one would not tell anybody.

  On the last evening I sat down with a pen and a piece of paper. For a long time I wrote nothing. When the clock struck twelve, my hand jotted down a few insignificant things. The next day, without reading it a second time, I handed the thought report in. After that I waited for the political teacher to send for me. A talk in his office. A guilty verdict ... For several days my right eyelid kept jumping. Another sign of some forthcoming disasters, for didn't the Chinese say, "The left eye jumps for wealth; the right eye jumps for disaster"?

  But as time went by the political teacher did not send for me and after a while my eyelid calmed down. My heart, which had been hanging at the top of my throat, gradually returned to its normal place. I was relieved. I even grew a little complacent. After all, the political teacher was not a god! So I had deceived him and got away with no loss of face! At that instant, however, I remembered what he said about cancer and my heart sank again. Perhaps by concealing my third layer of thoughts, I had already created a favorable environment for the cancer to grow inside me. Someday I would be eaten up, the result of my cowardice and dishonesty. I could not blame others for not trying to save me. It was me who let them down.

  Even today I am not sure where this Exposing Third Layer of Thoughts campaign came from. I checked with others who were in middle schools in Beijing and elsewhere at the time; they had not heard of such a thing. So I suspect that our political teacher took the initiative to create such a campaign. Thanks to him, at the age of fourteen I had a nightmare that I would never forget. The teachers at ioi worked conscientiously indeed. What wonderful teachers we had! When the Cultural Revolution broke out, I would have my revenge.

  I2

  The Hero in My Dreams

  The political campaigns made me increasingly uncomfortable, and I began to regret that I went to a school with such a glorious revolutionary history. As an option, I thought of the nearby middle school attached to Qinghua. Perhaps they would not emphasize physical labor and thought reform as much? I secretly decided that when the next entrance examination came round I would apply to that school. From there I would go on to Qinghua University and eventually become a woman scientist.

  For ioi did not make me feel good about myself. Nor did it make me feel good about my parents. In the past I had been very proud of Father because he was an old revolutionary. Now I did not know what to think of him. In the early sixties, he decided that he did not want to be an official anymore. He wanted to be a college teacher instead. It was a strange request, from an old comrade like him. The leaders of the ministry were not pleased. It was not hard to imagine what they thought of him. "This old comrade's revolutionary will has waned." "Well, he was from a capitalist family, and when he was in college, he was influenced by Western ideas." So after a while, they let him go.

  He was transferred to International Relations College, which was attached to the ministry anyway. At the college, Father was asked to be the dean. He refused, saying that he just wanted to be an ordinary teacher. So in the end he got what he wanted. He became an ordinary teacher.

  As for Mother, in old China there was a saying: "Married to a rooster, follow a rooster; married to a dog, follow a dog." In new China somehow this was still true. Soon she followed my father into the same college where she too became an English teacher. Meanwhile, we moved out of the big yard. That made me rather sad. I missed our comfortable apartment there and my friends. Without the special pass, I could no longer go to the auditoriums to see operas and movies on Saturday nights. But I said nothing. Between my parents and me, there were things we did not talk about. This was one of them.

  Officially, of course, I was still a revolutionary cadre's child. Father's source of income before 1949 decided that once and for all. Yet after my parents became teachers, each time I said I was from a revolutionary cadre's family, my voice was a little thin. Nobody noticed this, of course. I did not bother to tell my classmates that my parents had changed jobs. Yet somehow I began to feel lonely at school. Among those blue-blooded, high-ranking revolutionary cadre's children, I felt that I was "a fish eye mixed in a pile of genuine pearls." Secretly I was ashamed of my parents; I was ashamed of myself. Thus I tried to stay away from ioi as much as possible.

  Some of my classmates soon noticed this. Jokingly they said that I had become the teacher's forerunner. In the morning I always entered the classroom just one minute or two before the second bell rang. In the afternoon as soon as the class was over, I jumped onto my bike heading home. Neither the violent spring wind nor the thunderstorms in summer could stop me. In winter I slipped and fell on ice and snow, but I had no complaints. In fact, I thought I was really lucky that I could go home every day. How miserable I'd be if I were a boarder-sharing a room with five other students, I'd have to live under the teachers' noses twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. At home, at least I could relax behind closed doors and indulge in the two things I loved most: the books I read and the dreams about my hero.

  I began to read novels when I was about ten, skipping difficult words and lengthy descriptions of the landscape: I read for the stories. At home my parents had a sizable collection of Chinese and foreign books. I started with Chinese novels: Song of Youth, Genealog
y of a Red Flag, Red Sun, Seeds of Fire, Railroad Guerrillas, Wind and Rain of Tong River, Spring and Autumn of a Small Town, Reports of Guns on the Plain, Red Rock, Wild Fire and Spring Wind, Fight Over an Ancient City ... These were all revolutionary novels popular in China in the sixties, as their names show. Such books were the spiritual diet on which people of my generation fed. They shaped our imagination.

  While reading novels, I also dug into my parents' nonfiction books: memoirs of old revolutionaries who had been Red Army men or underground workers, biographies of famous revolutionary leaders and martyrs, foreign as well as Chinese. After I finished these, I turned to translations of foreign masterpieces. Some of the books I borrowed from the library of tor. Others Mother borrowed for me from her college. (My parents' foreign books were no good, because at the time I could not read English or French. In fact I never read them; in 1966 after the Cultural Revolution broke out Mother sold the books by the pound, several hundred copies, to a waste recovery station.)

  Of the foreign books I read in translation, my favorite ones were La Dame aux camelias, Les Miserables, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, A Tale of Two Cities, War and Peace, The Captain's Daughter, The Gadfly, How Steel Was Made, The Scarlet Letter, Life on the Mississippi, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and all the rest of Jules Verne's science fiction, plus the detective stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Thousand and One Nights, the Greek myths, and Shakespeare's tragedies. This list not only reflected my taste, it also showed what was available to me at the time.

  When I was in middle school, no libraries in Beijing would allow students to enter the stacks to look for books. Instead, I had to write down the call number of books I wanted to borrow, but only one at a time, hand the slip in to a librarian through a hole in a thick wooden door, and wait for my name to be called. If the book was not there (which happened often when the book was popular), I might try again a week or two later. The library would not recall books for students. Thus some books I would have loved to read I never got hold of.

  Buying books was not easy either. First of all, I did not have the money. Second, many good books were either sold out or out of print. Because of such difficulties, each time I got hold of a good book, I spent hours copying parts of it down into a notebook. The book itself I had to return to the library within a fortnight or else pay a fine.

  As time went by, my notebook filled with excerpts from my favorite books. I became very attached to it. By day I kept it at home in a drawer, knowing that Aunty would guard it for me like a dragon. At night, I let it stay next to my pillow so that I could read parts of it before I went to sleep. I rehearsed the tragic love and noble deaths of the heroes in my head. After I crossed the threshold to the "dark, sweet homeland," the boundaries of the stories melted away. A hero, like a bright star, came into being in my dreams.

  Looking back on it, I think it is strange that the hero I dreamed about was so different from myself. Actually he was the opposite of me in almost every aspect. For example, while I was plain, he was very handsome. I can still see him now.

  Tall, slender and vigorous, he is like a Greek warrior. His every movement is nimble and graceful. His voice is sweet and mellow, like music from heaven. His hair is pitch-black. His eyes are the brightest stars in the sky of a clear autumn night. His lips are warm and rosy, as intoxicating as the finest red wine.

  Unlike me, he has a great deal of charisma. I always shun crowds, but in the largest gatherings he is in his element. Everywhere he goes, he is a magnet, he is the sunshine. He gains people's hearts by his kindness and generosity, risking his life many times to rescue others. Where I am cowardly, he is brave and resolute. If the situation demands that he cut off his left arm, he will clench his teeth, pick up a knife, and do it himself. He will not faint or even utter a groan.

  He is, of course, a revolutionary hero. He joins the Chinese Communist Party when the fire of revolution is yet as tiny as sparkling stars, and the counterrevolutionary forces are raising storms of blood in their attempt to put it out. Their slogan is "Better to kill a thousand by mistake than let one Communist escape." White terror shrouds the whole country. Thousands of intellectuals and workers are put in prison and executed. Others bury their heads in books or go abroad. At this juncture my hero, saddened by the backwardness of his country and enraged by the slaughter of innocent people, commits himself to the revolutionary cause.

  Henceforth he fights for the people's liberation. He climbs down the deepest shafts, lighting torches within the hearts of coal miners who are buried alive in poverty and oppression. He organizes strikes among railroad and factory workers. Red band around his left arm, he stands in front of them in the picket line. Tear gas, fire hoses, mounted troops, sabers, nothing will force him back. His blood is mixed with that of the workers, who respect him as a teacher and love him as a brother.

  He also goes up into the green mountains to fight guerrilla wars. He is a brilliant military strategist. Amid the enemy's ruthless attacks, his army not only survives but grows. When spring comes, he rides a black steed on the mountain slope and shoots at copper coins thrown up by his bodyguards by the handfuls from a hundred paces away. The coins glitter in the sun, falling like sparking rain through willow twigs that sway in the wind. With a pistol in each hand, he fires twenty shots in one breath. Not a single shot misses the mark.

  As time goes by, his fame spreads. The Robin Hoods of the mountains and marshes, proud and tough men they are, hear of it. They come to challenge him. First he wins the contest on their terms and gains their respect. Later he talks to them heart to heart and opens their eyes to the revolutionary truth. In the end they all join him. Men, horses, and guns.

  His strength, however, comes mainly from the ordinary peasants who have been driven by famines and the bullying of local tyrants to desperation. For them, he is the only hope. If he wins, every family will have a piece of land to farm and all will have enough to eat. The old men will not lose their dignity begging in the streets. The young girls will not be kept home by shame because they have no decent clothes to cover their bodies. The children will laugh instead of cry. There will be peace and justice in China for ten thousand years to come. For such a dream, the peasants give him all they have: their sons, grain, protection, and information.

  My hero, though he is devoted to the liberation of workers and peasants, is not from a poor family. His family is rich and powerful. He is well educated. He has studied in London and Paris, where beautiful and wealthy young ladies fell in love with him. Old men in the reactionary government recognized his genius. They promised him a "great future"-in politics or in the military-if only he would join them. But my hero does not want to live for himself. He was born for the salvation of millions who are living in deep water, hot fire.

  Under the hero's leadership, people are winning the war. Each day young peasants join his army by tens of thousands, while workers and students hold demonstrations in big cities. Even those who work in the enemy camp come over to his side secretly and help him with intelligence. The old world is crumbling. The reactionaries are desperate.

  Among those who hate my hero, none is more shrewd or cruel than his own father. In that old man's heart, there is no love, only hatred and an insatiable desire for power. Seeing that his only son is tearing down what he and his ancestors have built up over centuries, he wants to destroy him: strangle him slowly with his own hands. Cut his flesh with a razor blade and see blood gush out from the wounds. Stamp on his chest and break his ribs. Slash open his abdomen and see him struggle in his death throes.

  To satisfy these desires, the old man lays a snare for my hero. Knowing how much his wife, who is in poor 'health, misses her son and vice versa, he sets himself to convince her that he can arrange for them to meet at a secret place. No one will find out. Their son can come in dis guise and return safely. The only thing she needs to do is to write him a letter, saying that she wishes to see him for the last time. The old woman is taken in. She does exactly what her husban
d tells her to do. As a result, the hero falls into an ambush. In crossfire, he is wounded in the chest. He loses consciousness and is seized by the enemy.

  The hero's fiancee, who comes with him to see her future motherin-law, is also captured by the enemy. Many people know their love story. She is the only daughter of an excellent scholar, a true intellectual who was the hero's beloved teacher. She and the young man studied together. In their quest for knowledge and pursuit of truth, they fell in love. Since then, neither time and distance nor human beings are able to separate their hearts.

  But now they fall into the hands of their enemies, their love is doomed. The young man regains consciousness and sees the enemies begin to torture his fiancee in front of him. They hang her up and whip her until blood drips from all over her body and she passes out. They tie her to a bench and pour red pepper juice down her nose and throat. When she coughs it up, it is mixed with her blood ... The torturers tell the young man that his fiancee's life is in his hands. He can make them stop at any moment, if he will denounce the Party and reveal the names of the underground workers. Of course he cannot do this. So he has to watch her suffer, raped by those beastly torturers, attacked by ferocious wolfhounds, drowned in a glass water tank ... The only thing he can do is pretend that he does not care.

  "In China's history what is a woman to a man? She is a garment. Nothing more. If you tear her to pieces today, tomorrow I'll have another one, who is younger and even more beautiful. A man can have as many women as he likes, while a woman can have only one man.