Spider Eaters: A Memoir

by R Yang

  Half a month later, I was ready to leave Cold Spring for good. Suddenly I found I was attached to it. I spent hours walking around, trying to remember everything. My friends did not share this sentiment of mine. They hated this place. Old Song was still as determined as before about not having a boyfriend. Liya, on the other hand, fell in love with a Shanghai youth. So she had a boyfriend for a couple of years. After he went to college, they broke up.

  Fang sometimes joined me in my walks. She asked me to advise her if she should marry a peasant in a suburb of Shanghai called Chongming. This was her parents' idea. It was to help her go back. Yet Chongming was not Shanghai itself. And Fang hated to marry a total stranger. So we talked and talked, as I tried to figure out which was the lesser evil: stay here or marry the stranger. Finally I said to Fang that in my opinion she should marry the stranger, since she had declared she'd never love anybody here. And that was what she did.

  After that Fang's hukou was transferred to Chongming where by and by she became a worker in a textile factory. In the eighties, she wrote me letters saying that since she was stuck in such a marriage and such a job, her only hope in this life was that someday her son would be happy and successful. When I read this, I blamed myself for making a wrong decision for my best friend. I had not anticipated that three and a half years later all educated youths would be allowed to return to their native cities. Fang might have been able to find a better job and a husband she could love in Shanghai.

  As for my boyfriend, Zhou, what could he say except that he was glad for me? Maybe he was sincere; maybe not. It didn't matter. The love we had for each other didn't matter either. "Situations are always stronger than people's will." Our situations had decided that our love was no more than what the local people call "a lie flower." Blooming for a while. Then blown away by the wind, struck down by the rain. No fruit would grow out of it.

  In fact the love of most educated youths at Cold Spring turned out that way. In 1979, when the educated youths went back in throngs, lovers said farewell, shed tears, and then went separate ways. Even those who came from the same cities broke up by and by. Some went on to college. Others became workers, shop attendants, or unemployed youths. In the village, we had been equal. In cities, we were not.

  Zhou married Xiang a year after I left Cold Spring. Later when the majority of educated youths returned to the cities, they chose to stay. That finally convinced me that Zhou was sincere when he said taking roots in the countryside was, in his opinion, the right thing for an educated youth to do. By and by I lost touch with him, that is, after he told me that Xiang was not comfortable about our friendship. We stopped writing letters to each other.

  Before I left Cold Spring, I felt uneasy seeing Jiang and Old Sul. They knew so much about what happened between Zhou and me. In the past, they had tried very hard to bring us together. Yet their efforts backfired. Their life was a painful eye-opener. How could I possibly tell them that? Furthermore, the plight of the family distressed me. Old Sui was not cured; yet the hospital released him, for there was little else they could do. When I visited him at home, he seemed resigned to his fate. Yet he worried about the four kids. Once he asked me, "What will happen to them when I die and Jiang remarries?" What could I say to answer that question?

  Huar and her parents, Old Ji and Ji Daniang, gave me a farewell dinner. It had a happy start. But in the end when Huar said good-bye, tears welled up from her eyes. She cried for a long time, venting her anger and frustration. I had no words to comfort her. Any words from me would be hypocritical. I was leaving. She had to stay. Her talent was wasted. Her dream was shattered. In the past I had helped put that dream into her head. It was my dream too. I wanted to cry with her, but I did not dare, for fear that my tears would be crocodile tears.

  In China, things were so unfair. (And they still are.) City people exploited the rural population, deprived them of almost all opportunities, and these people were not even grateful to the peasants! They took their privileged positions for granted; the positions were guaranteed by the hukou system. They truly believed they were superior to the peasants by birth. My generation was probably the only one that might know better because we had been peasants ourselves. Yet in recent years I have seen my peers forget what they had learned, when they blame the crimes and the lack of space in the cities on the peasants. I hope I will never forget what I was at Cold Spring and how I felt back then.

  24

  Epilogue

  A week later, I was back home. My parents welcomed me as if I were a victorious Napoleon. Mother was so proud of me that she made me promise: in the future I would help my brothers out the same way. I agreed. Then we moved to Shijiazhuang, where I resumed my studies.

  In December, my parents went back to Beijing to celebrate New Year with Lian, Yue, and Aunty. I stayed behind "to look after the house." By that time, of course, nothing in our house was worth a burglar's trouble. I said that because I wanted to save my parents the train fare. Meanwhile I would use the time to study on my own. The years I spent in the countryside made me believe that heaven would reward only those who behaved themselves. So I tried to behave myself and hoped that by so doing my parents would soon have good news for me. For Mother had said before she left that on this trip she would explore possibilities for all of us to go back to Beijing.

  Ten days later, I received a telegram from Father. As before, it was very brief. It said, "Mother Died. Return Quickly." I was sure that Mother had discovered something and now she needed my help: a connection, a back door, some kind of opportunity ... She is amazing! She is a genius! All right, Mother. I'm coming. Let's work on it!

  I rushed back to Beijing, ready for action. But Mother was not there. Father told me that Mother had had a heart attack. She had died on the way to a hospital the day before. It was January 7, 1976. For a while, I could not believe the news. But Aunty and Father were both crying. Lian and Yue were crying too. Confused as I was, I had to believe his words.

  Before long, I saw Mother in the hospital mortuary. I touched her face and her hand. She was cold and hard, like a rock. Her face was no longer swollen, but her eyes were closed forever. She would never see or hear us. I started to cry too.

  The next several days, we wore black armbands to mourn for her. People in the streets looked at us and thought we were wearing them for Premier Zhou Enlai, who had died the day after my mother. That week, numerous people in Beijing shed tears for the premier. When we cried, people took it for granted that we were crying for him too. Poor Mother! While she was alive, her life was disrupted, her health destroyed, and her career went down the drain because of a so-called great revolution. When she died, even her death was overshadowed by that of a "beloved premier."

  But that was not the worst. Half a month later Father began to talk about an old friend of his, a woman he got to know in 1948 after he and Lilac parted. She had been divorced a number of years ago. One month later, he married her. This shocked everybody but me. Knowing Father's frustration over the years and the fact that he could not love Mother, I could not blame him. Yet I did. The fact that he remarried only a month and a half after Mother died hurt me deeply.

  How could he be so heartless? Are all men as heartless as this? After all, Mother loved him for twenty-seven years. She gave him three children and made all the sacrifices she could for him. In the end, what did she get in return? Nothing!

  Suddenly I felt so sorry for Mother that I cried, alone, there in Shijiazhuang in our new home, which had been full of hope only a short while before. After Mother died and Father remarried, he moved to Tianjin. The house became empty and desolate, especially when the power went out. Sitting in front of a lone candle that was shedding waxen tears, I could not concentrate on my studies. My thoughts went back to Ji county, the Great Northern Wilderness, and my childhood in Beijing.

  Father did not understand the letter I sent back asking for help and Mother did. That tells me who truly cared about me and who did not! Then there were the telegrams.
Mother was the one who made them up. The peasants at Cold Spring would never do such a thing. They believed in the power of curses. The messages, they would say, were ominous-and they caused Mother to die.

  What about Mother herself? Might she in any way credit such timehonored beliefs? Maybe not, since she was well educated and she said she was a materialist. Yet she was also a Chinese. In the past when I said that Lian would die before he reached the age of five, she trembled and her face turned white. I remember this vividly, because I was frightened by the sudden change in her. That shows perhaps she did believe in such things, even though she'd never admit it. Yet she sent out the telegrams to rescue me from the Great Northern Wilderness, while she was in such poor health. All because she was my mother and she loved me!

  I want to tell her I love her too. But it's too late! In the past when she was alive, I did not even know I loved her. Nor did I ever try to talk to her so she and I might become friends as Father and I did. Mother was very lonely too. I knew it. Now come to think of it, didn't I secretly take pleasure in the fact that she and Father were estranged? When I came back to live with them, maybe I had made things even more difficult for her and that was why she quarreled with me constantly?

  Now I want to tell her I am sorry. But she is gone. If I go to the ends of the world, I can't bring her back! In the past, I never held her hands, much less hugged or kissed her. Yet I took her for granted, assuming she'd always be there to help me out. When I first heard she was dead, wasn't I angry at her? As if I felt she had let me down. I can't believe I was so selfish! I was as heartless as Father, while Mother endured all the pain and never complained. She struggled for the survival of our family, until she literally dropped dead ...

  Mother's death hit Aunty even harder, a fact I had not anticipated. Their relationship in the past was ambivalent. On Aunty's side, there was the old grudge against my maternal grandparents who had tried to replace her with a Shanghai nurse. Later this grudge became a prejudice against almost everybody from Shanghai. As for Mother, she had been jealous of Aunty because of the love Lian, Yue, and I had for her, which we did not hesitate to display. So the two had been rivals for many years. Yet throughout the years they had also fought side by side to hold our family together. When Mother was alive, Aunty thrived on the secret rivalry. When Mother died, she began to crumble from the inside.

  I could feel the change in her from one month to the next because of the mysterious tie between the two of us. Somehow the fighting spirit and confidence that had propped her up in the past several decades had dissipated. Without them, Aunty was weak and vulnerable. She needed support. I was the only one she could lean on. Lian and Yue were both too young. Father was in a different world, enjoying his belated and prolonged honeymoon. I had to get back to Beijing as quickly as possible. If I got there on time, I might be able to catch her in her fall and tide her over. I must save her! I could not afford to lose her as I did Mother! This time I knew danger was imminent. I was desperate. Day and night my heart was burning like a joss stick.

  By then I had started working at a pharmaceutical factory in Shijiazhuang. I could no longer let Father support me, after he remarried. The factory I worked in was relatively modern, designed by the Soviet experts in the fifties. In 1976, although it employed seven thousand workers, it was still making good profit. The workers here wore white robes and sat in front of control panels. The workshops were sunny, with large windows and high ceilings. Thus in many ways, this factory was every Chinese worker's dream. Once I got in (through a back door, otherwise the factory would reject me because I was a woman), I lost no time negotiating a deal with a veteran who worked in Beijing.

  This veteran's wife and children were peasants in Hebei province. For several years he had tried in vain to move their hukou into the capital. Failing that, he finally agreed to exchange positions with me. But before I could take over his Beijing hukou, of course I had to meet his numerous conditions. It took me two years to work the whole thing out.

  In June 1978 I finally went through all the formalities and came back to Beijing as a legal, permanent resident. I moved into Aunty's house. But she was not there to welcome me. I was too late. Aunty had died earlier that year.

  At first what she got was just a cold. A fortnight later it became pneumonia. She was hospitalized. I rushed back to Beijing to take care of her, for the situation in the hospital was chaotic. Patients who had no connections were neglected by doctors. Nurses declared they were too busy to take care of the critically ill so their family members had to live there and do part of the job, which turned out to be everything except giving injections.

  Thus for a month, Lian and I took turns to look after Aunty in the hospital. Twelve hours at a stretch. One worked by day and the other at night. Yue was too small. Father was not available. There was no one else to relieve us. So Lian and I kept it up. The night shift was especially hard; we had to sleep on a concrete floor next to Aunty's bed, sharing a ward twenty feet by nine feet with two other patients and their family members. By day, despite our exhaustion and worries, we had to put on smiling faces to make friends among doctors and nurses.

  This experience, trying as it was, finally brought Lian and me together. Around Aunty's sickbed, for the first time in my life, I felt I could love and trust Lian. In this huge world, among billions of people, I realized, there were things only the two of us could share, such as our love for Aunty and our memory of Mother. Our relationship was special. We were "from the same womb."

  Besides, in those days we were like two soldiers fighting back to back, trying to fend off death, which had already cast dark shadows around our dear old Aunty. If one of us should collapse, the battle was lost. It was a matter of life and death! So much was at stake! This awareness finally put an end to the feud we had kept up for more than two decades.

  When Aunty's condition was somewhat stabilized, she would not let me stay. The reason was the upcoming entrance examination for college, which had been suspended since 1966. Now the Cultural Revolution was over, anyone who wanted to take it could do so and the competition was expected to be fair. But in my case, I had to take this examination in Shijiazhuang where my hukou belonged. Staying in Beijing with Aunty, I would miss the opportunity.

  "Rae! Go! Go! Don't you worry about me! I won't die. I have not brought up your children for you yet. I can't die before that! But now I want you to go and take that exam. Come back to Beijing as a college student! You hear me?"

  She fixed her large, sunken eyes on me. In those eyes the love was unfathomable and the hope was feverish. I could not resist them. I did not want to put anxiety and disappointment in them. So I left. I left one day before the examination began.

  On that day, snow was falling heavily all the way from Beijing to Shijiazhuang. Everywhere I looked, it was white. The sky, the fields, the villages, the roads ... It was a bad omen, as if the whole world was in mourning. I had a very sick feeling in my heart. I should have trusted my instinct and turned back, because it did not cheat me. After I left, Aunty's illness took a sharp turn for the worse. A few days later, she died.

  Then it turned out that I did well in the entrance examination. But I decided that I would not go to college. Father was very upset when he heard about this. He took an overnight train to Shijiazhuang to "bring me to reason."

  "You know if you go to college, you will become a cadre after you graduate. Your future is guaranteed! The government will assign you a job, which is going to be much better than the one you have now. In the past, I thought you really wanted to go to college. You were deprived of the opportunity because of the Cultural Revolution. Now I hear from Li, my old friend, who was in charge of college enrollment in this province, that according to your score, you can go to any university in Hebei, even some in Beijing. But you say you are not interested in going to any. Why? Do you know there are many young people who'd do anything to be in your shoes?"

  Of course, I knew that. Many of my fellow workers took the same examin
ation and failed. So at first they envied me. Then some of them told me I was a fool. These were my friends who thought I was making a big mistake. Behind my back others said I was weird. They did not like me and I knew it. But I did not care.

  After Aunty and Mother died, many things that would have mattered in the past did not matter to me anymore, including success or failure in the eyes of others. The world was a desert. I was a grain of sand, drifting along. The ones who would be proud or ashamed of me were all gone. So why should I bother to go to a university and study what I had already learned? Four more years of my life wasted, in exchange for a college diploma-for a piece of paper. It did not make sense to me.

  So I did not go to college. Instead I returned to Beijing and lived in Aunty's house. I lived there alone. Lian and Yue had both moved out after Aunty died. Yet I was not alone. The house was filled with Aunty's memory. Her spirit was with me all the time.

  On the wall hung an old coat. Aunty bought it after she came back from Switzerland. She had been wearing it every winter since then. Twenty-two years. The blue cotton cloth on the outside was almost black; grease shone on the sleeves; the fur on the inside was worn off along the edges. I hugged it to me, and the familiar smell of Aunty brought tears into my eyes. Once upon a time, I had stolen money from these pockets and expected she would say I was a bad girl, as my parents had done. But she continued to love me and trust me. By so doing, she saved me and I would be indebted to her ever after.