From Darkness to Sight

by Ming Wang

  I had suffered greatly during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and I had gone through so much in my life that I wondered how I had been able to pull myself through all those difficulties. During the darkest days of my teenage years, while many others got crushed and even perished, I had fortunately survived. Why had God allowed so much hardship to take place, hardships that had at several points in my life nearly destroyed me? Did He have a purpose for me, and if so, what was it?

  Sterile surgical gloves stretched over my hands. The tips of my fingers were still scarred from frostbite I had endured while playing the Chinese erhu violin during that bleakest winter of my life, nearly four decades earlier. I was reminded of the long and arduous journey thirty-four years ago that had brought me thousands of miles around the globe to America, from my hometown, Hangzhou, China.

  Part Two

  Growing Up in China

  Chapter 2

  Hangzhou

  “What is my child doing out here on the street all by himself?” my mother asked in panic. My caretakers rushed outside, apologizing profusely. I beamed up at them from my high chair, oblivious to the adults’ concern.

  Since both of my parents had active professional lives, a local family looked after me while my parents were at work. This family had several kids of their own, so they just left me alone in a traditional Chinese high chair, a heavy mahogany cylinder that stood a few feet off the ground, with a wooden board midway inside that allowed a one-year-old to stand up and grab its rim without falling out.

  Even at that young age, I wasn’t content to be left in a dark corner of the house. I wanted to explore, to see the world around me. Although I was just a baby, I figured out a way to actually move the high chair forward by pushing my little body back and forth in circular motions, which caused the cylinder to make small forward movements. I worked at this all day until I moved the cylinder, inch by inch, across the entire floor of my caretakers’ home, and eventually onto the street outside where my mother was shocked to find me. It must have been an amusing sight to behold—a little baby ferociously rocking a high chair back and forth and maneuvering it on the street through fast-traveling cars and bicycles. Needless to say, that family kept a much better eye on me from then on.

  I was too young at the time to actually remember this incident, but growing up, my mom often told me the story.

  “You were very different than other kids from the very start,” she said. “You were always curious about things and determined to do your very best at whatever you set your mind to.”

  Many years later, that same kind of singular focus, innate tenacity, and relentless determination would help me wrestle myself out of much rougher spots than the dark corner of my caretakers’ house.

  My parents were both doctors, and my father came from a long line of physicians. My dad, Zhen-sheng Wang, grew up in Anhai, an ancient town in the Fujian Province on the southeast coast of China. My grandfather, Ding-pei Wang, was a famous doctor in Anhai and was renowned for his generosity. The mayor of Anhai named him a “Doctor with a Heart to Help,” an official proclamation honoring his tireless dedication to the community throughout his career. When I was a boy, I often asked my grandfather to tell me stories of how he had valiantly treated wounded soldiers, displaced refugees, and countless peasants during the turmoil of the Second World War. As I listened, I often ran my finger along the wood grain of the plaques from grateful patients that hung on his walls.

  All nine members of my grandfather’s family were physicians. Growing up among healers, my father was a doctor at heart himself from a young age. He told me that when he was still in elementary school, he created a small clinic at home where he treated his young friends’ minor injuries.

  My dad met my mom, A-lian Xu, at Zhejiang Medical University in Hangzhou during the summer of 1953, when they were both first-year medical students. My mother didn’t come from a family of doctors as my father did. Her inspiration to pursue medicine came from witnessing how severe illnesses ravaged villagers throughout the countryside near her hometown Zhangzhou in the Fujian Province. In medical-school, she chose to specialize in infectious diseases like polio, smallpox, and schistosomiasis, a disease caused by parasitic worms. She felt it was her duty—as did my father, my grandfather and my grandfather’s family—to be part of the solution to such terrible afflictions that predominantly hurt the poor.

  My parents graduated from Zhejiang Medical University in 1958. Both outstanding students, they were employed at the school and its teaching hospital immediately following graduation. They married later that same year.

  I was born early on the sunny morning of October 24, 1960. At first, my mother wasn’t sure what to name me. But as she lay in bed after delivering me, she saw the sun rising over the horizon, setting the town ablaze in hues of gold and pink, so she decided my name would be Ming-xu, meaning “bright sun rising in the east.”

  Despite the sunny morning on which I was born, I came into the world during one of the bleakest periods of modern Chinese history. In 1958, two years before I was born, Mao Zedong, the founder of modern China and the beloved leader of the Communist Party, had launched the Great Leap Forward. All of China’s citizens were called upon to contribute to this aggressive attempt to catapult China into the modern Industrial Age. Farms were abandoned and peasants were put to work producing steel in backyard furnaces. The result was disastrous. By the time I was born in 1960, China was in the throes of the worst famine in human history. Within only three years, an estimated thirty-six million people perished.

  While the famine was worse in rural areas, food was scarce everywhere, and poverty persisted for years after the devastating Great Leap Forward was halted. Around the time I was born, my parents’ combined monthly salary was only one hundred and six yuan, or thirteen dollars. I remember that, in my earliest years, our family subsisted on mostly rice and a few vegetables, since we couldn’t afford meat. On one weekend, my parents used some of their savings to buy just one cookie. So rare and precious was this treat that they split the cookie in half, and gave me one half, and split the other half between themselves. My parents were always very loving and dedicated to my well-being, so although we had very little, they made the most of it. Additionally, it’s hard to feel poor or unhappy when you grow up in Hangzhou, one of China’s oldest and most beautiful cities.

  Hangzhou, the capital city of the Zhejiang Province on the east coast, is located just south of Shanghai. My family lived on the north side of the city, at the base of a mountain near the remnants of an ancient city wall. My dad often took me on walks up that mountain after supper, when the town was quiet and crickets were singing. We walked among the dense trees, our path lit by moonlight. Dad walked slowly and patiently as I took tiny steps, jumping into shadows as if they were puddles that might splash into the light.

  My father told me that our planet was a round ball orbiting in space around the sun. He pointed toward the night sky and explained that the moon traveled in circles around the earth.

  “Daddy, why then doesn’t the moon fall down?” I asked. I was just a toddler at the time, brimming with curiosity.

  He thought for a moment. “The law of gravity keeps it there. When you’re older, you’ll understand.” My father was a doctor, not a physicist, but he loved science.

  “How come the moon is so bright?”

  “The moon is like a mirror, reflecting light from the fiery sun,” he said.

  I imagined us walking atop this big ball of dirt, alongside a ball of fire and a shiny mirror suspended in space. My curiosity was insatiable, and for every question I posed, my dad offered a rational and scientific answer. There was never a mention of anything mystical, nor of a higher power or a creator. During these years, China had no God and virtually no religion, besides the doctrine of communism. My childlike questions about life and the world were always met with simple logic and science. My parents nutured my curiosity and encouraged me to ask as many questions as I could come up with. />
  One day while walking through the city streets with my mom, I watched with fascination as construction workers dug into the ground, into this giant dirt ball that Dad called Earth. I wondered what would happen if they just kept digging and digging straight down, and where they would end up if they reached the other side of the earth. Would people there walk upside down? What did they look like? I never imagined back then that one day I would actually live there, America, which was on the other side of the planet.

  When I was four, my family moved to a three-story dormitory building about a mile from West Lake, the heart and soul of Hangzhou. Over the years, my parents and I spent many Sunday afternoons walking along the lake’s tranquil shores. I ran ahead of them along the trails, running my arm through the long, wispy willow branches that drooped down to lotus pools and lily ponds on the water’s surface. My dad told me that West Lake’s stunning scenery had been a refuge and source of inspiration for poets and painters for thousands of years. He recounted the legends and histories of the ancient bridges, pavilions, and pagodas. The lake stretched far across the horizon, where misty hills and peaks rose up in the distance. Every spring, bright green camphor trees enlivened the hills, and in late summer, I would deeply inhale the rich scent of osmanthus flowers that bloomed in bursts of yellow.

  Compared to the idyllic beauty around West Lake, our living arrangements were much less inspiring. We lived in a drab, concrete dormitory close to the medical-school where my parents worked. In those days, it was dangerous to express anything that resembled a bourgeois aesthetic. The clothes we wore were all simple, utilitarian “Mao Suits,” usually blue or gray. Buildings were uniformly boxy and gray. Despite the natural paradise nearby, no such beauty or elegant decor was allowed inside anyone’s home. Instead, most homes had only reverent portraits of Chairman Mao, photos of workers laboring in the fields, and maybe a few black-and-white family photos. Everything had to be clean, bare, orderly, and strictly working-class.

  Our young family shared a one-room apartment that was about a hundred and thirty square feet on the second floor of the building, alongside fifteen other families on our floor, with whom we all shared one single bathroom down the hall. The bathroom was a big room with three sinks on one end and three stalls on the other. The toilets had to be manually rinsed out a few times a day. There were no showers or baths. In warm weather, I simply washed off with a hose out on the street. When it was cold, we bathed at communal bathhouses or at home by filling up a large basin with buckets of cold water drawn from the communal bathroom down the hall, and then warmed on the stove outside our door.

  Half the time our communal bathroom had no running water at all. In the winter, the pipes often froze, and in the summer, given the limited water supply and the large number of families consuming it, the water pressure was so low that the water flow often couldn’t reach the second and third floors of the building. When that happened, all forty-five families in the three-story building would all descend and converge on the first floor’s single communal bathroom. People held buckets and waited patiently for hours in long lines to get water. We also had no air conditioning or heat in our building, so the inside temperature was always the same as it was on the outside. In the summer, my father and I walked around our apartment and in the communal hallway bare-chested, and in the winter, I had to wear my thick quilted coat outside and inside, even in bed!

  The window from our apartment looked onto a field full of lower-lying houses. I would often drag a little stool close to the wall and climb up so that I could look out. Since we had no television, I would cross my arms on the windowsill, rest my chin on my hands, and enjoy the “scenes” of the everyday life that I watched through the window. They were my TV shows as a child. What I saw was an area very crowded with buildings and people. I saw neighbors coming out of the back doors of their homes to beat the dust from clothes with wooden poles. No one owned washers or dryers, so clothes were cleaned by hand using soap and a washboard, and then they were rinsed and hung to dry. For our laundry, my father crafted a rectangular frame using wire and bamboo sticks that extended way out our window, before angling sharply back to the top of the window frame. We weren’t the only family making such creative use of our window. All our neighbors had similar drying contraptions sticking out of their windows as well. On any given day, the dormitory’s outer wall was full of makeshift flags of all colors and shapes, all waving patient allegiance to the rudimentary conditions in which we lived inside that building.

  Being packed together so tightly, however, did allow us to know our neighbors very well. The building was filled with kids of all ages. There were no video games, electronics, or TV, and none of us owned any toys, but that didn’t matter. In those barren times, my imagination came alive. When it was warm, I led groups of kids in games of soccer and hide-and-seek outside. When it was too cold to play outdoors, I told stories and staged shows inside our one-room apartment to entertain my friends. I used scissors to create a miniature kingdom—including city walls, houses, and a castle—out of cardboard and paper. I made hand puppets from fabric scraps and clay heads that fit over my little fingers. My parents’ bed served as a stage, and mosquito net that hung from the bedposts became the theater curtain. I tied a string across the front of the bed, on which I hung the bedsheet. I jumped onto the stage (the bed) and hid myself behind the bedsheet. Neighborhood kids gathered in front of the bed and sat on stools, watching the shows with fascination, as puppets dancing on my fingers acted out legendary Chinese tales. I particularly loved the Monkey King character, a fabled animal who was creative, tenacious, and overcame obstacles during his many adventures to the West. My mother often came home from work to find us huddled around her bed. She would wait patiently in the dark room until I had finished the show, clapping wholeheartedly when the makeshift theater curtain closed, the lights came back on, and my hand puppets took their bows.

  My younger brother, Ming-yu, was born in the summer of 1968. One day I came home to see a bunch of grownups huddled around my parents’ bed. I wriggled my way through the group, pushing my shoulders against their legs until I was right next to the bed. My new baby brother was bundled up in the middle of the mattress. He was born three weeks premature, so his face was full of wrinkles, and I couldn’t understand why a newborn baby would have them, so I called him “little old man.” But I also gave him his real name. My name, Ming-xu, meant “bright sun,” so I suggested that my parents name him Ming-yu, meaning “bright universe.” I was the sun, but I wanted him to be something even bigger.

  Since I was eight years older, I often took care of my little brother, picking him up from daycare the way my mother used to come for me when I was a toddler. I had a key tied to a string that hung around my neck to let us into our apartment when my parents were still at work. My first task after coming home from school was to prepare the rice for dinner. We didn’t have any kitchens in the building, but there was a small coal-burning stove in the hallway outside the door of each apartment. While little Ming-yu played, I washed the rice in a bowl of water, lit the stove, and placed the bowl on the flame to cook. At times I would leave the bowl on the flame longer and the water would boil over. The neighbor’s grandmother across the hall would then call me, and I would return and lift the lid just in time to avoid burning the rice or overflowing the water that could extinguish the stove’s flame.

  In the evenings, my family ate dinner together, sitting on small stools around a square wooden table. After dinner, my parents pored over the mounds of books that were crowded among the sparse furniture in our apartment. There were only two kinds of books, though: my parents’ medical textbooks and communist books like The Quotations of Mao Zedong—also known as his “Little Red Book”—and other selected works by Mao. No other books were allowed—no literature, no poetry, no art—nothing that failed to promote the prevailing Marxist ideology.

  But my dad and I shared a little secret. We had one other little book in our house hidden behind the re
d books on the shelves, a book of poetry featuring the four famous poets of China’s Tang Dynasty. Dad wanted me to learn and relish the ancient verses of our culture. One of the four poets was Li Bai, who lived in the eighth century and often wrote of finding companionship with the moon, that celestial body that had so captured my young imagination. I read those poems so often that I can still recite them today, fifty years later.

  One of Li Bai’s verses says, “If one wants to enjoy life, one has to make the best of it.” My spirit of making the best of any circumstance was embedded in me in childhood and would carry me through the many years that laid ahead. We were materially poor, yet we were rich in love and affection for each other. My parents nurtured an environment where I was not reprimanded or restrained for being different from other kids, and where I was allowed to explore and ask questions freely. It gave me the emotional security to dream about the future. I imagined myself one day wearing the same white coat my father wore in the hospital where he worked. I put together a little medical kit that I carried with me everywhere. My parents brought me old instruments, medicine bottles, and other supplies, and I also filled my tin box with tweezers, iodine, cotton swabs, cloth bandages, and herbal ointment. I treated my young compatriots’ injuries the way my father had done when he was a boy. Growing up to be a doctor was my constant childhood dream. During those years, I often thought what an honor it would be to continue my family’s medical tradition.

  Though I harbored these young hopes, what I didn’t know at the time was that another impending disaster would soon follow the treacherous famine that had claimed so many lives across China. By the time I started elementary school, a fierce political storm was brewing. Its calamitous force would grow more powerful and widespread in just a few years, leaving a lasting devastation across the country. No family would be left unharmed—including ours.