by R Yang
In a drawer, among rusty needles and tangled threads, I found a silver thimble that had been part of Aunty's dowry. It was shaped like a big ring, and she wore it around her middle finger when she sewed. More than fifty years. Millions of stitches. The needles had poked some of the holes into horizontal slots. It was a witness, telling me how in widowhood she had struggled to support herself and bring up her two children. After she lost both of them, she gave her love to us, especially to me. But in 1968, 1 went away too.
After that, for nearly ten years Aunty had waited for me to return to this house. When I thought of how happy we would have been to live once again under the same roof, tears streamed down my face. Aunty was weeping with me. I could hear her cry in the wind. Lured by such a dream, I left her in the hospital and went to Shijiazhuang to take the exam. Henceforth endless remorse would gnaw my heart, as it did Aunty's in the olden days.
In the fifties, Aunty's desire to help her son took her, an illiterate old woman who had never left Beijing, to Switzerland. In five years she made the money, but her son had died. When she was back in this house, she must have felt the same emptiness I did. Why were the efforts we made always futile? As a matter of fact, they were worse than futile. In her case, they deprived her of the chance to be with her son in his last years and in mine the opportunity to pull Aunty through or at least to be with her when she left the world.
Fate! That was her fate; this was mine! Fate was cruel. It played vicious jokes on us. Sweet dreams. Bitter ironies. The harder we struggled, the more remorse we reaped. Yet throughout Aunty's life, she had never given up hope. Nor did she ever stop loving and caring about people.
"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! ... "
Even when she was dying, she was still hoping, for me, for herself, and for the children she was destined not to see.
Thinking of Aunty, I knew somehow I had to go on. She brought me up. I was her own daughter. I would continue to hope and strive, even though now I knew that hopes often led to broken hearts. By and by, I began to think about going to graduate school. The next year I took the entrance examination. I was accepted by the graduate school of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. This time, I did not need to use any guanxi or go through a back door. The competition was fair indeed.
In the next two years, I majored in journalism. Our department was situated in the big yard of the People's Daily, number-one official newspaper in China. Our teachers, however, were Americans and Canadians, something unthinkable only a couple of years before. Through them, information about the outside world trickled in. I became very curious. Yet I would not have left China in 1981, had Deng Xiaoping not shut down Democracy Wall in Beijing, arrested Wei Jingsheng and other political dissidents, and banned private publications, including a magazine named Today where Lian and his friends published their poems. (Lian continued to write poetry and has been a poet ever since.)
Earlier, I had hoped to become an investigative reporter and poke through some lies, especially those told by the Party and government, which in the past had drowned out different voices and led us to make terrible mistakes. When the political climate changed for the worse in 1980, however, it dawned on me that as a reporter in the future I would not,be able to remain silent as others might. My choice would be either to lie for the Party or to tell the truth and pay a high price for it.
To tell the truth and pay a high price? Humph! Zhang Zhixin, whose story became known in 1979, did that and so she was imprisoned, divorced, raped, and had her vocal cords cut before she was executed in public. Yet who would have heard her challenge of the Cultural Revolution if some leaders had not decided to publicize her story? I do not want to pay such a high price. Nor do I want to wait any longer. The Cultural Revolution has cost me twelve years. I am not young anymore. Who knows how many more years I'll have to wait until there is freedom of press in China. I'd better get on with my own life.
I still loved China. Yet I had long since stopped dreaming that I was a hero who could lead the Chinese people to freedom and liberation. I knew that I had neither great vision nor extraordinary courage. I was just an ordinary woman. I liked to read good books. I wanted to see the world with my own eyes. "Read ten thousand books. Travel ten thousand miles." In the spring of 1981, suddenly this seemed possible, for the lucky ones among us, at least. A friend of mine had just departed for England. My classmates were talking about graduate schools in the United States. A few had sent out applications.
I did not think I deserved such good luck. Yet each night when I woke up at three o'clock and lay in the dark, I saw the idea hanging on the horizon like a dream, beyond an ever so slightly lifted bamboo curtain. Contemplating it, I became wide awake. I felt my energy surge up and my heartbeat quicken.
The opportunity, vague as it is now, might dissipate like the morning mist and before you realize it, the gate of the country is closed once again. I have to do something before it is too late! Just give it a try. If heaven says my fate is to stay, I will not be heartbroken. "The planning lies with people, and heaven will decide the outcome." In the past, Father used to quote this saying to cool Mother down, while the latter was going all out to help me. I didn't like to hear it then. Now it makes sense to me.
Thus thinking, I biked to Beijing Library where I found a few brochures. I selected three universities, for three was a lucky number: University of Massachusetts on the East Coast for comparative literature, University of California at Los Angeles on the West Coast for English literature, and a university in Kansas for sociology. Despite the fact that I knew next to nothing about these universities, I sent out my applications. In the meantime, I was not entertaining much hope, since I had neither money nor connections outside of China.
Then just as I had anticipated, I received a letter from Kansas a few weeks later, saying they could not give me any financial support. Too bad. That shipwrecked my dream of becoming a sociologist in the middle of the United States. Later that month in the reading room of our journalist department, which had dozens of Chinese and foreign magazines, I ran across an article in Newsweek or Time. The article reported that a serial killer was at large in Los Angeles and his victims were all women of my age. That was a shocker. The news reminded me of what the Chinese media had been telling us over the years: America was a place filled with violence, crimes, lunatics, and moral degradation. I wondered if some of this propaganda might be true after all. "Better keep out of harm's way. For don't people say that one can't buy remedy for regret?" I decided that I was not going to California either.
This decision left me without an option. To make things worse, soon some leaders began to worry about a brain drain in China and that caused the policy on Chinese students studying abroad to change almost overnight. As a result, the graduate school I attended refused to give me transcripts or anything to help my application. Without these and the scores of graduate entrance exams such as the TOEFL and GRE, for such tests were not yet available in China, all I had in the end were two recommendation letters from my teachers and a paper I wrote on Jane Eyre.
Of course no graduate school in America or anywhere in the world would accept me with such an application, even less give me financial support. Yet since I had gone this far and dreamed so much about the idea, I was not going to quit without a last-ditch struggle. So I sat down and wrote a long letter to the school in Massachusetts, recounting my experiences in the Cultural Revolution and hoping my words would explain why I had longed so much for an opportunity to study abroad.
Heaven was merciful after all. The letter fell into the hands of a few very warmhearted professors, who in their turn brought it to the attention of an extremely supportive dean. Before long I heard the good news: I was accepted by the University of Massachusetts as a graduate student in comparative literature, and the dean had created a teaching assi
stantship in the East Asian Studies department so that I could work to support myself.
This was like a dream come true. When I heard of what happened at UMass, I was moved. But the dream was still a mountain away from being materialized. I knew if in two months I could not get permission from various officials and obtain a passport, my dream of studying in America would vanish like so many soap bubbles. Moreover, I was aware that under the present circumstances, it would be extremely difficult to get approval from the officials. In order to do so, I definitely had to use guanxi, knock on back doors, put on a smiling face, beg people to intercede for me up and down and all around ... I loathed such acts! Yet in the summer of 1981, these acts filled my life. Day and night I biked all over Beijing like an ant in a hot wok. Two male students in my department were doing the same. We traded information and felt some sort of comradeship growing among us.
By early September I finally got what I wanted. The applications of the other two, however, fell through. Then, of course, they were very angry at the officials. They were angry at me too. They accused me of backdoor dealings. What could I say to defend myself? I was indeed guilty of such a charge. Nevertheless, the hint that perhaps I liked backdoor dealings made me feel funny. In my case, I thought, if the situation were normal and the policy reasonable, I would not need to degrade myself by going through back doors. My request (like theirs) was entirely legitimate. The trouble was, after the Cultural Revolution although some front doors opened, more often than not, without guanxi, legitimate requests ran up against stone walls.
Thus I knew that as long as I was in China, I could not quit backdoor dealings. In each case, somehow I had to do it. For instance, when Second Uncle came back from the salt farm, he had no work unit. He asked me if I could help him get into a research institute that wanted him. There was a problem: its quota of new employees for the year had been filled. I could help him. I knew it. And I felt that he deserved a de cent work unit, after what he had gone through in the past twenty-two years. He was my uncle after all. Nainai had said I would help him. She was right and I did so. Yet my conscience bothered me.
Does the end really justify the means? I wonder if such questions troubled Mother in the past when she tried to help me. Throughout her life, she believed in the Party and its doctrines. At the same time, she loved her daughter. She knew if she did not help me out, nobody would. I would be stuck in the Great Northern Wilderness. Something might happen to me ... Yet perhaps she was uncomfortable about what she did. So in those days she only talked to me about strategies and tactics. She never let me know if she had a moral dilemma.
Now as I was leaving the country, I could quit backdoor dealings at last. I was relieved, for I feared if I went on like this, someday I would get addicted to the practice and lose my sense of right and wrong all together. I was glad that henceforth I would be competing with others fair and square. If I won, I would feel happy rather than guilty. If I lost, I would double my effort. No complaints. I knew that in the United States competitions were very tough and there was no iron rice bowl. Moreover this time I would be alone, and not as I had been thirty years ago when I left China in Aunty's arms with Father by my side.
When I boarded the airplane that would take me across the ocean to the new world, I had only fifty dollars in my pocket (and even that was borrowed money). Yet I knew I was not poor. For I had a heritage. I was carrying it with me. It consisted of Aunty's zhigi, Nainai's wisdom eye, Mother's energy and ingenuity, Father's broad-mindedness, the education I received from the peasants ... These were the materials that over the years made up the core of me. In the future they would endure while other aspects of me changed with the outside world. Through wind and rain, from graduate studies to college teaching, no matter where I went and what I did, as long as I was in touch with this core, I knew who I was and what I wanted. I might be lonely. Or feel frustrated. But I was not lost.
As for the memory of the Cultural Revolution, the dreams and nightmares, I carry them too. I don't think I will ever forget them as long as I live. I don't think I should forget them either, despite the pain and shame they constantly cause me. Using Lu Xun's metaphor, I and my peers are the ones who ate spiders. Long before we did, my parents and their peers had eaten spiders too. The spiders tasted bad. They were poisonous. Nevertheless, in my case, they became a bitter medicine. The Chinese say, "Bitter medicine cures illnesses." The spiders I ate made my head cooler and my eyes brighter. Because of them, I cherish freedom and value human dignity. I have become more tolerant of different opinions. Lies, big and small, cannot easily hypnotize me. And I believe as a human being, Chinese or American, I have responsibilities beyond ones to make a living for my son and myself. Part of these is to make the lessons we learned with such tremendous sacrifice known and remembered by people in the world, including the younger generations in China.
'Chou is the personal name of Chuang Tzu, which means "Master Chuang."
Table of Contents
Epilogue
Author's Note
i. A Strange Gift from the Pig Farm
z. Old Monkey Monster
3. Nainai's Story Turned into a Nightmare
4. Nainai Failed Her Ancestors
5. Why Did Father Join the Revolution?
6. Second Uncle Was a Paper Tiger
7. The Chinese CIA
8. When Famine Hit
9. A Vicious Girl
i o. Aunty's Name Was Chastity
Is. Beijing ioi Middle School
I z. The Hero in My Dreams
13. At the Center of the Storm
14. Red Guards Had No Sex
15. Semi-transparent Nights
16. "The Hero, Once Departed, Will Never Come Back"
17. In a Village, Think, Feel, and Be a Peasant
18. "The Tree May Wish to Stand Still, but the Wind Will Not Subside"
19. Death of a Hero: Nainai's Last Story zoo
zo. Remorse
zt. Friends and Others z33
zz. My First Love, a Big Mistake? z45
z3. What Have I Lost? What Have I Gained? z6,
24. Epilogue 2-74
Illustrations follow page
Speaking of dreams, I recall a famous Chinese dream in which Chuang Tzu, an ancient philosopher, bec