by Bei Dao
The Great Famine awakened my growing body during a time of daily desperation and fear. Everyone talked about how to get enough to eat, how to survive. Chairman Mao issued his own directives: “Ration according to the people, so when busy eat more, when idle eat less, when busy eat dried foods, when idle eat lean foods, when neither busy nor idle, half dried half lean, mix yams and greens and radishes and cluster beans and taro root and so on.” School hours were reduced; physical education class suspended; teachers urged everyone to save their energy, move less, recline more, go straight to sleep after dinner. Visiting friends and relatives brought their own ration coupons, accounts settled after the meal. Inventive means were born into their fated purpose: We used various containers to store rice-rinsing water and grow chlorella, each month harvesting two to three catties of precipitate — rather than calling it “rice flour,” it’d be more accurate to call it a soybean equipartition system according to their own computations. Little Jing and his older brother divided up fifteen hundred soybeans, which the two brothers gambled away playing marbles. We circled around to watch a match, this fight for survival rattling each and every one of us to our very soul. . . .
An outdoor farmers’ market in Guanyuan Park turned into the black market. The prices there truly frightening: one white cabbage for five kuai, one fish for twenty, one chicken for thirty, but our whole family still went every weekend. Father would occasionally buy a pestilent chicken at a discount; back home he’d quickly hone his knife and the chicken would flap madly around the room, trying to flee death’s pursuit, covering the floor with feathers. Eventually the chicken would make it into the pot, where it’d braise in soy sauce, its ribs ultimately gnawed with the most exquisite care, as if carving jade.
One winter afternoon, Father brought my brother and I to the Guanyuan Park market. As we strolled up and down the rows of stalls, my eyes caught sight of a fluffy mass of small rabbits, huddling together for warmth, mouths opening and closing, red eyes shining — it was, as the saying goes, a love once clutched no way to let go. We both pleaded and begged Father with piteous persuasiveness. He wavered, smoked a cigarette with the rabbit seller who puffed a pipe, casually haggled, the price bouncing back and forth between them, until they finally agreed upon twenty kuai for a male and a female.
At home, the rabbits were released from the satchel: a sniff sniff east and a sniff sniff west. We hopped alongside them, much happier than they seemed to be.
Father found an old wooden trunk and some planks, and with a little sawing and hammering, he renovated the trunk into a modern rabbit hutch: two levels divided by planks and connected by a small ladder with wire mesh covering the passageway, plus a sloping roof and a small door in the right corner secured with a metal hook. The rabbits played, ate, and made waste downstairs; upstairs, they slept peacefully. We kept the hutch on our apartment balcony.
The rabbits ate and ate, as if they could never be satiated, and no matter what went in it always came out as the same, black, bean-size pellets. My brother and I carried bags in our pockets to hunt food for them outdoors, first in the courtyard and then farther away, from Houhai Lake to Purple Bamboo Park. While putting nature into practice in an open field, we discovered among the weeds a bounty of wild herbs perfectly edible for human consumption, some even tasted good. It seemed that humans and rabbits were more or less equals, positioned at the starting line of subsistence.
One afternoon, me and Pang Bangdian, a boy one or two years younger than me who lived downstairs, decided to focus our attentions into changing the living situation of our family’s rabbits and his family’s hens. We used some iron wire to make a hook ’n’ hoe and set to work on building No. 1’s dumpster, continuing our search all the way to building No. 8’s dumpster. The sun trailed our bottoms, crossed over our heads, then plummeted behind the buildings. We collected 146 white-cabbage “heads” from the eight dumpsters — a brilliant victory on the battlefield. The first thing Beijing locals do with this vegetable is chop off the “head,” or root section, of the cabbage; we planned to feed these discards to our respective pets.
Under the dim lights at the gate of building No. 8, we divided up the white-cabbage heads, each bundle of seventy-three filling up two empty cement bags — we were thrilled beyond belief; our faces as red as a hen’s, our steps as nimble as a rabbit.
I returned home around nine and went straight into the kitchen to soak the cabbage heads in the sink, scrubbing each of them while recounting everything to my parents. With a strange look, they both stared at me. They told me that on this planet called Earth, there exists a hierarchy in the food chain. Without further explanation, they proceeded to take over my labors, wash the roots clean, pile them into a pot with water, boil them to softness, cut each in half, dip one in soy sauce, chew its tender heart, zaba zaba sucking and lip-smacking and praising its savory tastiness. I had been famished for a while, and so I, too, joined the white-cabbage head feast. The rabbit hutch on the balcony dongdong dongdong thumped and thumped.
3
Hunger gradually devoured our lives. Dropsy became commonplace. Everyone’s usual greeting to each other changed from “Have you eaten yet” to “Have you gotten dropsy yet,” then the pant legs were pulled up and each used their fingers to test the other’s degree of illness. One could press a coin into Mother’s calf and it wouldn’t fall out; this was considered stage three dropsy, a very serious diagnosis. People clicked their tongues in amazement, as if it were a great honor.
The female rabbit got pregnant. The reproduction process still remained a riddle for me. She grew clumsier as the days passed; besides meals, she mostly reclined upstairs, pulling off tufts of her own fur to make a nest.
One evening, I noticed some strange happenings in the rabbit hutch; wielding a flashlight, I discovered five baby rabbits burrowing around their mother. Eyes tightly shut, bodies hairless, they looked like tiny, tailless mice. With my little brother and sister, I opened the cage door and gently picked up the kits; we cradled them in the palm of our hand and softly petted them. Who knew this would lead to catastrophe? After putting the kits back into the hutch, the mother rabbit began to push them away with aggressive nips. We soon realized that the mother rabbit recognized her offspring through her sense of smell, and once their scent changed, they changed into five strange kits she didn’t know.
Emergency measures were quickly adopted: We transferred the baby rabbits to a shoe box lined with cotton batting and fed them through a straw. Besides rice water, we also found a bit of powdered milk, a scarce item as precious as gold. The kits greedily sucked down the rice water and milk, a heavy weight lifting from us.
Then one night I slept in fits and starts; the next morning, I opened the lid of the shoe box to find all five baby rabbits dead, their bodies rigid, four limbs curled. We wept, blaming ourselves. The mother rabbit acted as if nothing had happened, eating and drinking as usual. Who can comprehend the emotions of a rabbit?
The appetites of the parents continued to grow and grow while the grassy spaces around us shrank and shrank. My little brother and I trekked farther and farther out, exiting the city gate, heading deep into the wild fields where we were often chased away by village children. In the name of the rabbits, we exhausted our already quite limited energy reserves given our rationed existence. At the same starting line of subsistence, it wasn’t who ran fastest, the rabbits or us, but who ran farthest.
And then came the critical juncture: My older cousin visited our family. She was a second-year physics student at Beijing Normal University; her family lived in Guangzhou and so she stayed in the dorms. After hearing my parents’ complaints, she suggested that she take care of the rabbits — in front of her residence, a wide expanse of grass opened out, take what you want, eat what you can; plus, a stairwell on the ground floor usually saw little foot traffic and the rabbits could graze there during her breaks between classes.
The rabbits had found their celesti
al paradise.
That was around the time my little brother and I were learning how to swim. We’d blindly flop around the Beijing Normal University pool then pay a call to the rabbits, our trunks half wet atop our head. The rabbits hopped with vigor and gamboled with joy; they nipped our sandals with affection. Tending rabbits seemed akin to the ideals of tending sheep, the orderly cycle of the natural world freeing our hearts and easing our spirits. Sometimes they’d move as stealthily as the wind and sneak into the depths of the tall grass; other times they’d stand at alert, forelegs tucked in, taking in the sights and sounds around them.
But a good thing never lasts; someone complained and the school authorities stepped in, declaring the raising of rabbits in the dorms a disturbance of public space. After freely enjoying a bounty of food and warmth for three or four months, the rabbits moved back into the hutch at home.
4
Rumors together with famine spread neither here nor there but everywhere. Students circled around the classroom stove to roast corn-cone buns and talked feverishly about the international situation. One popular theory making the rounds was that our Big Brother, the Soviet Union, demanded the repayment of a debt, a debt owed from the Korean War when they had sold China weapons on loan, so that everything from chicken and duck, to fish and pork, to fruit and grains secretly made its way across the border, including each and every apple, one by one. I worried about our rabbits — a film I had seen showed Russians wearing rabbit-fur hats. I imagined a somber, stirring scene of a cargo train full of rabbits crossing the Siberian desert.
The mother rabbit’s stomach swelled once again. We spread dried grass and old cotton batting onto the second floor of the hutch, then waited patiently for the moment of truth. At long last the birth took place, six babies total; this time, of course, we were sure not to touch them, focusing our efforts on finding food for the mother. Spring had just begun; the grass and wild plants had barely broken through the ground. While my parents weren’t looking, I tore off the wilting leaves from the last of our stored winter-white cabbage and minced them up, adding a little lotus root powder, which we usually mixed into water to make a nutritious drink.
The hutch was too small for a family of eight. My brother and I found some bricks to line the bottom of the balcony railing, forming an enclosed pen that gave the animals a much larger space to roam. The kits curled around their mother, sucking her milk, while the father rabbit patrolled the area — eagles, fortunately, an uncommon sight in Beijing.
The following morning our faces turned white with fright: Three of the kits had disappeared! To our horror we discovered a gap in our “brick wall.” The babies had plummeted off the balcony, their corpses we recovered in the Gongs’ small vegetable garden. With heavy hearts we reinforced our “brick wall.” But on the morning of the second day, another one was missing; it had dropped into the flower pot on the Gongs’ windowsill. We became crazed: Their blindly suicidal behavior totally unfathomable; their eyes hadn’t even opened yet to see the wide world. We had no choice but to shut the survivors in the hutch again.
As spring passed into autumn and the babies grew up, it became increasingly difficult to provide for this family of four. Our legs turned to noodles looking for grass to feed them — my little brother and I walked the whole “four-nine city”: Beijing’s walls in the four directions and its nine city gates, then walked the wild fields outside the city, a whole summer vacation spent serving the rabbits’ struggle for survival. This, though, would be the final struggle. With winter around the corner, what could be done? Even if every white cabbage in our stores could be fed to them, it wouldn’t be enough. And then there were those Russians seeking a settling of debts, waiting for their rabbit-fur hats.
My father, our family’s commander in chief, issued forth a decision: Kill the rabbits and eat our fill, solving all our problems with one stroke. I imagined he had plotted this end from the moment of purchase — from wild rabbit to house rabbit, truly this pattern of excess has passed down to us from our hunter ancestors.
My brother and I put up a fierce fight, wailed and wailed kuhu! kuhu!, and even declared a hunger strike. But the words of the lowly carry little weight — the dictatorial decree of the food-chain hierarchy could not be overturned.
It happened on a Sunday. My brother and I set out early in the morning, one fleeing east, the other west, unable to step onto the balcony to bid the rabbits one final farewell. I found myself along the shore of Houhai Lake, crossed the Silver Ingot Bridge, passed Slanted Tobacco Pipe Street and the Bell and Drum Tower, lost myself in the crisscrossing alleys of the hutong weave. The posture of a rabbit standing on its hind legs, surveying the scene, is, in fact, nearly equivalent to a person’s posture. I fell into a trance, the streets seemed to be packed with standing rabbits.
The day darkened; my brother and I arrived back home around the same time. Everything was very quiet and still; it felt like the massacre had ended a long, long time ago. The commander in chief lay in bed, reading a book. Mother spoke to us softly, mentioning there was some food left in the pot. She didn’t say anything about the rabbits; we understood without a word. Our empty stomachs rumbled with hunger, but we firmly refused to enter the kitchen.
I climbed into bed, covered my head with my comforter, and cried.
Three Never Old Hutong Alley No. 1
1
One winter morning in 1957, my mother guided me along the hutong alleys, thick with mud after a snowmelt, to a newly built red-brick building. The muddy lane was about one zhang (3.3 meters) wide, full of potholes; a small hut stood in the middle of the lane, thick smoke pouring out of it, the charred scent of roasting yams wafting in the air. While we walked, my mother the doctor kept reminding me: “It’s dirty — walk on this side.”
As if I were a hound, that charred scent of roasting yams was forever ingrained in my brain with the memory of our new home: Three Never Old Hutong Alley No. 1. Setting out from here, I’ve walked for many years. . . .
That winter morning, I raised my head to look up, followed the drainpipe, windows, balcony, all the way up until I reached the Beijing sky behind the eaves. The famous explorer Zheng He had once lived here — where were the carved balustrades and jade steps of yesteryear? Only a rock garden remained, as if today’s blind witness.
Zheng He’s family name was Ma (“horse”), his nickname San Bao (“triratna” or “three jewels”); the third emperor of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Di, later bestowed on him the name Zheng; this is how San Bao Lao Die (“Triratna’s Old Man”) Hutong got its name, until the late Qing when the Beijing dialect must have swallowed a jujube red date whole while the choking northwest winds further garbled the homophones to form San Bu Lao (“Three Never Old”) Hutong Alley — a most auspicious name. As for Zheng He’s travels around the globe, the riddle remains — if he was neither flaunting military strength nor involved in commercial trade, what drove him exactly?
Before transferring to the People’s Progress of Min Jin, my father worked for the People’s Insurance Company of China, and we lived in the company’s Fuwai apartment complex, which stood in what is now the city’s second ring road, the area still mostly wild fields. At Fuwai Elementary School, I recited the Winter Solstice “Nine Nines Song,” counting down the nine nine-day weeks until spring: “First nine second nine keep your hands inside / Third nine fourth nine walk the ice outside . . .”; after we moved, I transferred to Hong Shan Si (“Temple of Great Benevolence”) Elementary School, and continued to recite in perfect sync with the times: “Fifth nine sixth nine see willows riverside / Seventh nine river runs, eighth nine swallows come . . .”; then settling into our new home, spring arrived: “Ninth nine add a nine, oxen roaming far and wide.”
To an eight-year-old, the excitement of moving surpasses any feelings of nostalgia. We had been living in the same unit of the insurance company housing as Uncle Yu Biaowen’s family, sharing a common kitchen and bathroom; but our
new place was a fourth-floor walk-up, single-family apartment. Faint whiffs of fresh paint, natural light reflecting off glass, a view of the rock garden from the balcony, and farther out, as if waves rolling away, layer upon layer of tiered clay-gray roof tiles of the siheyuan four-walled courtyards, pushing forth northward to the capital’s low skyline, as flocks of pigeons flicker by, whistles echoing against the lonely sky, jujube trees withstand the wind from eight sides, green drupes deepen to red, enticing children who pass by to reach up on tiptoe, unable to resist a try.
I met Cao Yifan — his family lived on the third floor right below us. Yifan was only a month older than me, yet precocious far beyond our years: While I lingered among children’s books, that prodigy hid under the bedsheets with a flashlight to read Dream of the Red Chamber. His physical development also shot off the charts — by junior high he was already half a head taller than me, and by high school he could pretend to be another student’s uncle. We attended different elementary schools, then merged into the same secondary school, different classes, until finally we both tested into Beijing Middle No. 4 and placed in the same homeroom. If not for the Cultural Revolution engulfing everything, Yifan certainly would’ve been my sponsor to join the Communist Youth League.
2
The insurance company didn’t insure anything at all. Uncle Yu Biaowen leaped from the company’s residential building and killed himself. When I heard about it later the same morning, bewilderment flooded over me — it surpassed my capacity for comprehension. He made a widow of his wife and left behind two boys — the eldest, Yu Meisun, three or four years my junior, trailed after me all day, and the youngest still a baby. The inconsolable widow spent half the night sobbing alone next door, her weeping swallowed by the abyss of history. Besides myself listening through the wall we shared, who else could have heard her lamentations?