by Anchee Min
“You didn’t tell me anything about your life at Elephant Fields,” she wrote. “I can figure it out for myself. I can feel your pain just like I can feel your joy. I think of you every day . . .”
* * *
I went to work carrying Katherine’s letter. The explosions of dynamite sounded exciting. For the first time I enjoyed the grand scene of millions of tiny stones raining down after the blast. Also for the first time I paid attention to Lao Guener’s monthly progress report, which said that our division had produced the best rocks for building roads. We’d been named the “model labor team” of Elephant Fields.
I went to visit Little Rabbit one evening and told her that her mother had written. She widened her eyes and all of a sudden threw a temper tantrum. She smashed her rice bowl on the floor and said I was lying to her. Her mother had forgotten to pick her up as she had promised.
I held Little Rabbit tightly. I didn’t know what to say.
I wrote to Katherine again and reported Little Rabbit’s disappointment.
“Every morning I wake up thinking to myself, I’ve got to get Little Rabbit out!” she wrote. “No one ever said giving birth was easy. No one is going to keep my child away from me, no one.”
* * *
Another three months passed. Katherine’s latest letter brought great news. She had explained my situation to the president of her school and showed him pictures of my paintings. The school had agreed to admit me to its fine arts program and would offer me a scholarship. “Now it’s time to do your part. You must get permission for you and Little Rabbit to leave. Find out how far the long road of bureaucracy stretches and be prepared for how it may confound you. I’m still working on this on my end. Promise me you won’t give up.”
I hit my head with my fist because I couldn’t believe this was real. I looked around. Covered with dust, all the workers looked like white bears. Was this the end of my misery? I lost sleep in my excitement.
* * *
I wrote to everyone I knew asking how one got permission to go to America as a student. Jim wrote with information on procedure. Big Lee and Little Lee also answered my letter, giving me tips and encouragement. Little Bird checked with one of her relatives in the city foreign affairs office and sent applications for passports for me and Little Rabbit. I drew up a statement of purpose and presented it to the local Party boss as Jim instructed.
I waited for Lao Guener’s response to my letter. Every waking second was spent waiting. A couple of times I lit a stick of dynamite, tossed it, and drifted off in thought until a co-worker would yell at me to run.
Finally, two weeks after I had submitted the letter of intent, Lao Guener called me into his office at lunchtime. I brought along a dirt-colored canvas bag that contained ten cartons of cigarettes I bought with Katherine’s money. I would look for any chance to flatter and corrupt him. My legs were trembling. I tried to calm down, tried to look relaxed, tried not to think what would happen if he rejected my request.
Like an owl, Lao Guener squatted on his heels on a narrow wooden bench next to his tree-stump table. Half the table was piled high with Mao’s books coated with dust. Lao Guener was drinking tea and smoking a pipe. He looked tired and hadn’t bathed for a long time. His facial hair was messy, his Mao jacket greasy. He pointed for me to sit down on another bench.
I bit my lips in nervousness. My mind was boiling. Lao Guener held the same power as Mr. Han had held over my future. Was he in a bad mood this morning? Was he annoyed with me? Did he sleep well last night? Did he reread my dossier? Would he judge me on the basis of the reports Mr. Han had written or would he use his own eyes as he had said? My work at Elephant Fields was invulnerable to criticism—Lao Guener himself had praised me as a good worker—but wouldn’t he be selfish about losing a valuable laborer? Were the tobacco leaves in his pipe dry enough to keep burning and soothing his brain? Or was he going to cough and feel irritated?
I felt like a criminal on an execution platform. My life hung on the tip of Lao Guener’s tongue. One word from his mouth and my head would either dance on my shoulders or roll on the floor.
Lao Guener cleared his throat and spit flew from his mouth. He said something I could not hear. I only saw his tea-leaf-colored teeth moving. I bit down hard on my lip and concentrated on his thick cracked lips. I heard him ask me to explain what my letter was all about.
I began my long prepared speech. I said going to America to study was a way to requite the Party’s kindness. When I came back I would help Communism take a stronger hold in China with the knowledge I’d acquired.
Lao Guener interrupted me impatiently. He asked what America was. I let out a breath. At least I wouldn’t have to explain why I chose to go to such an imperialistic country. I said that America was a nation of people of many different races—and a lot of proletarians. Lao Guener asked where it was located. I replied that it was on the other side of the ocean. He was still unclear.
“Is it near Albania?” he asked.
I thought he must have good feelings about Communist Albania, so my mouth moved. “Not too far from Albania.”
“Do you plan to spread revolution in America?” Lao Guener flipped his pipe over and tapped the ashes out on the table.
“Of course. If I get the chance,” I said.
“No! As a revolutionary, you must look for chances to spread revolution! You must be active about it!” He became strangely excited. “When I was a young Red Army soldier, I spread revolution wherever I went, village to village, port to port. Nothing stopped me, nothing! Why? Because I was active, aggressive, and determined about it.”
I asked if he would release me.
“I don’t see why not. I don’t see anything wrong with spreading revolution in Albania . . .” he answered.
“America,” I reminded him in a small voice.
“Of course, America. It doesn’t matter. What matters is we do our best to put red dots all over the map, right?”
“Right,” I echoed.
“Now tell me, what do you need?” he asked, filling his pipe with new tobacco.
I asked if he would issue me a letter of release and permit me to take a leave of absence from my work because I needed to collect stamps of approval from different government organizations. He nodded and said he knew how bureaucracy ran rampant through the city.
“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I never understood why all the city youth went home and you were sent back.”
I told him about Mr. Han. Lao Guener shook his head and said that he understood my situation completely. Half the workers at Elephant Fields who came from the city had been sent for similar reasons.
“During the fifties people with thinking problems were called ‘rightists’; in the sixties they were ‘counterrevolutionaries’; in the seventies, ‘reactionaries.’ I wonder, what are they called now in the eighties?” Lao Guener sighed and lit his pipe. “There’s just the matter of your educational fee for all you’ve learned here at Elephant Fields . . .”
I knew this was his indirect way of asking for gifts. I opened my bag and slid it across the table.
He asked me to write the letter for him to sign saying I was a good comrade and that he had no problem releasing me.
* * *
Buddha in Heaven, I thank you. Katherine, keep praying for me. At night I lay outside my tent celebrating my first victory. The stars shone clearly, the moon looked so close and the air was chilly. Would I make it through? The wind answered me with its whistle.
The letter proving my good comrade status began to travel along with my application for a passport. It went on to get stamps from the district Party office to the town Party office, to the county Party office, the provincial Party office, and finally the Party’s National Educational Bureau. The letter got stuck twice, once for the stated reason that “certain documents are missing,” and then because “family background needs to be reinvestigated.” I waited patiently and humbly checked every month with the authority. Four months
passed. When I checked again, I was told that “the documents have been misplaced and are in the process of being traced.” I knew the whole thing must have been lost. I filed the application all over again.
There were days when I grew tired of waiting. I felt my hope ebbing. I feared there was a bigger problem than that “the documents have been misplaced.” The Chinese way of punishing a person was never direct.
* * *
On a cold November day I got off work, stepped into the tent, dog-tired, and found a dirty envelope on my blanket. I picked it up. The minute I opened it, my breath stopped. I got down on my knees and took out a little brown book with a plastic cover. My passport.
That night I danced with the envelope outside my tent. My coworkers thought I had a ghost in my body performing witchcraft.
* * *
Contacting the foreign affairs office in Shanghai was my next task. I was switched to seven different telephone operators and finally reached the party I needed. I was in a town several miles from Elephant Fields. I spent two hours on the road just to make this call. I was told that Little Rabbit’s passport was on its way.
I hurried to the nanny’s house to pick up Little Rabbit, and to my horror the child was not there. The nanny told me that people from the orphanage had come for her.
My mind went blank. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I rushed to the bus station but the last bus of the night had left. I walked overnight to the orphanage. I arrived at five o’clock in the morning with my clothes wet from dew.
I was told Little Rabbit was being kept in an isolation room. The headmistress said that she was ordered to take Little Rabbit back because the child had been assigned to a Taiwanese family for adoption. Her new parents were on their way.
“Why?” I gasped.
“Why?” she said viciously. “Ask yourself!”
“I don’t understand.”
She stared straight into my eyes. Pointing her middle finger at the tip of my nose, she said, “You forged the papers, didn’t you?”
I silently admitted my crime.
“One reaps what one plants,” the headmistress said.
“But Little Rabbit was assigned to Katherine,” I insisted.
“How can you say this as if you hadn’t lived through the Cultural Revolution at all,” she said sarcastically.
“Did you report me?”
“No,” she said, bending down to pick up a stack of papers. She threw it on her desk and flipped through the pages. “I was questioned by a secretary from the top. But I covered your ass by saying that I didn’t know how the case had gotten so messy. I said someone from my office must have mixed up Little Rabbit’s case with someone else’s. Anyhow, Little Rabbit has to go, and this time I can’t do anything about it.”
I paced the orphanage’s courtyard back and forth. The headmistress felt sorry for me since she had taken my donations. I asked if she could put the Taiwanese couple on hold for a couple of days, not knowing if there really was a Taiwanese couple or if the whole thing had been made up as a way of thwarting my plans. She said she didn’t have to put the case on hold because a contagious virus called “the disease” was sweeping through the orphanage. The virus caused a high fever that could eventually attack the brain. Most of the children had no immunization shots, and so many of them were knocked down by the fever.
“We can’t show sick children to their future parents. We have to wait until they get better. Our orphanage is no heaven. Whoever is not strong enough dies. Our facility is poor, as you can see. One caretaker has to look after more than twenty infants. And every day we have newborns thrown at our door. All female except for a few deformed males. So many with handicaps or mental illness . . . We just can’t do it all.”
“Is Little Rabbit all right?” I asked.
“We got her yesterday. She seemed to be fine.”
I demanded to see Little Rabbit. The headmistress picked up the keys and then changed her mind. She said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to lose my job.”
* * *
I ran to the train station with the last of my strength. The station looked like an animal pen with straw everywhere. The conductor told me that all the tickets had sold out days ago. I asked about a seat in cargo. Seeing me coated with mud, his eyes showed sympathy. He said he wanted to help, but it was not legal because the car was designed to transport animals, not humans. I stuffed fifty yuan in his hand and he hid me in the pig carriage.
By six o’clock in the morning I was on a moving train with pigs. I was back in Shanghai by noon.
When I got off the train, I went straight to the American consulate. I realized that I must have looked crazy when the guard saw me and immediately put his hand on the gun in his belt. I showed the guard my passport and the useless certificate of adoption. The guard let me in.
One of the assistants to the consul general came out and looked carefully at the certificate as I explained the situation. He asked me to wait and went back into his office. I heard him making phone calls. He came out and asked me to come back the next day.
I couldn’t sleep. I still smelled of pig shit from the train. My parents stayed up with me. They wanted to know when I would be able to leave for America so they could start preparing. I yelled at them and told them to go to sleep and leave me alone. I said I might not be going at all.
My nerves were tight and my thinking circled the same spot: How could I go without Little Rabbit? How could I tell Katherine that Little Rabbit was someone else’s daughter now? I sat by the window waiting for the day to dawn.
At seven-thirty I was the first one in line outside the consulate gate.
* * *
I was taken in to see the consul general, who asked me to explain again how Katherine had adopted Little Rabbit. I told him everything I knew, including how I faked the papers in order to place Little Rabbit with a nanny near Elephant Fields so I could take care of her on Katherine’s behalf. The consul began to make phone calls.
My heart pounded loudly and I felt strange speaking English with an American official. The phone on his desk rang, and the consul asked me if I’d like to speak with Katherine.
I couldn’t move. I sat still in my chair and thought I hadn’t understood him correctly. He repeated the question and passed me the receiver.
I stood up, trembling. I heard a voice on the other end calling, “Hello! Hello!” It was Katherine’s voice.
* * *
I told her what had happened, but I couldn’t explain about the forgery. I couldn’t be sure the phone wasn’t bugged. She told me not to worry, that the consul was going to mail her a copy of the original certificate of adoption, and she would contact the authorities from America.
“Please act fast, Katherine,” I said. “This is China. Any minute things could change . . .”
“I know that very well, Zebra,” she said. “Now go and take care of Little Rabbit. You’ll hear from me soon.”
* * *
I went back to Elephant Fields. I put all my belongings into a plastic bag. I was off again. I hitchhiked a ride on a tractor to the orphanage to be with Little Rabbit.
The headmistress told me that Little Rabbit’s case was “in dispute,” which meant no one was allowed to see Little Rabbit.
I didn’t know what “in dispute” meant: Had my forgery provoked a criminal investigation? Did it signal the involvement of the U.S. consulate? Or was it just the authorities’ way of making Little Rabbit disappear in order to reject Katherine?
During the day, I waited outside the headmistress’s office, begging and threatening her to let me see Little Rabbit, hoping my pleas would exhaust her and make her give in. At night I slept in a villager’s straw cabin. I was running out of Katherine’s money and was preparing myself for hardship.
After two days I bought information from the doorman of the orphanage and learned that Little Rabbit had caught the disease and was running a high fever. She had just been sent to a local hospital emergency room.
I found Little Rabbit stuck with intravenous needles. Her face was colorless. I held up my hand to her mouth and could hardly feel her breath.
A nurse came in at midday carrying two baskets and changed the IV bottles for each child. She hurried off as quickly as she came.
No one visited these children.
Little Rabbit opened her eyes halfway. She recognized me but was not able to talk. Her red eyes made her look like a real rabbit. Her lips cracked like potato chips. She was too weak to move her eyelids. By early evening a doctor came by and told me that Little Rabbit had been drifting in and out of consciousness since she’d arrived.
“We’ll see,” the doctor said.
I guarded Little Rabbit and fed her thin porridge whenever she was able to swallow. The sick, motionless children around me stared straight at the white ceiling. The innocent and helpless look in their eyes made me feel ashamed for not being able to help them. They couldn’t understand why they were made to feel such pain, but when I looked in their eyes, I saw only acceptance.
* * *
Every day I hitchhiked rides on tractors from the hospital to the town post office, waiting for mail from Katherine. One rainy afternoon the driver lost control while making a turn by a narrow bridge. The driver and I were thrown in the river. In midair the only thing I thought about was protecting my passport, which was carefully wrapped in wax paper in my chest pocket.
When I resurfaced and found my passport was safe, I didn’t even notice the pain in my body. I helped the villagers lift the driver out of the water. He’d broken one of his legs. It could very well have been you, Zebra, I thought.
* * *
After a week in the hospital Little Rabbit was getting worse. The hospital had primitive medical equipment, beds were made of bamboo, the towels were mud-colored, and the floors were dirty. Little Rabbit slept most of the time.