by Bei Dao
Very late that night during our watch, a girl who lived in building No. 2 came toward me weeping. In the morning, she and the rest of her family would be escorted onto a train, forever forbidden to return to Beijing. Under the authority of the Red Guards, more than one hundred thousand Beijing residents were forcibly relocated back to their rural ancestral homes. Beneath the dim lamplight, the girl sobbed and sobbed, crystallized tears tumbled down her cheeks, flowing on and on, glinting in the night.
A summer of bloody rains and foul winds finally ended.
The Cultural Revolution gave the democratic parties an opportunity to put the practice of democracy into action. The CAPD central committee joined up with a group of twenty high officials and party workers, then separated into two factions according to the democratic rules of the game. Father busied himself writing big-character posters, wielding his brush as a weapon, always happy never tiring. While on a ladder, brushing a slogan, he fell and landed on his left hand; when he tried to check in at Jishuitan Hospital, the doctors and nurses were also busy with factional fighting; his wrist bone, fortunately, was still in one piece though it looked dislocated.
On the theme of “carry the revolution to the very end,” ordinary people’s daily lives provided the variations: souvenir-badge collecting, regular chicken-blood injections, arm-swinging therapy, raising tropical fish. . . . A Mao souvenir-badge market appeared at the Ping’anli T intersection where one could barter and trade. I carried several Mao badges in my chest pocket, and wanted to trade for one as big as the mouth of a bowl, but no one gave me the time of day. Father bravely retreated from the torrent of factional battles and started collecting transistor radios.
In those days, the main source of fuel was the honeycomb-coal briquette. Coal-shop workers originally used to sell them door to door via tricycle cart; then to keep pace with the Cultural Revolution, the workers revolted and no longer served the bourgeoisie capitalists, basket upon basket of honeycomb briquettes would simply be unloaded at the entrance to every building, each family needing to figure out their own method of transport. A basket of honeycomb coal weighed around sixty to seventy catties (more than ninety pounds), blindsiding families short on physical strength who then eagerly sought to take in a son-in-law, first making sure he could pass the trial of the honeycomb-coal basket.
Exploiting the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, an assortment of junk sadly invaded the basketball court on the eastern side of the courtyard, turning the area into a recycling station, though this later proved to be quite visionary: at the end of the 1960s, the great migrations across the country produced unlimited business opportunities. Yifan and I visited the recycling station to intercept clients and sift for old books that were being sold as wastepaper; we even used certain letters of introduction to worm our way in, diving straightaway into the wastepaper heaps to retrieve the treasures.
While the great migrations crisscrossed the country, the citizens of Beijing began to dig out air-raid shelters. Once again, a large-scale construction project took over the courtyard. The first to suffer disaster were those leap-into-the-sky poplars. They were all chopped down and carried away, only a barren landscape remained.
10
The residents of Three Never Old Hutong No. 1 disappeared one by one, buildings emptied — you could net sparrows at the gate. The recycling-station business turned bleak. What was once a deluge of overflowing junk shrank, as if a conjuring trick, into a few wicker baskets.
In the spring of 1969, I was assigned to the Beijing No. 6. Construction Company and sent to Yu County in Hebei Province to blast through a mountain. More than a year later the construction site moved to the East Is Red Oil Refinery in Fangshan, in the southwest reaches of Beijing; once every two weeks I could take a day of rest at home.
This was when our apartment became a central gathering place. Closing the thick, coarse curtains, our small group of friends would read, write, drink, listen to music, and, naturally, pursue romance. Our activities were long being monitored by the compound’s neighborhood committee. And so the night Yifan developing photographs at his place, the red darkroom light glowing, the enlarger lamp flashing on and off, the “little feet investigation squad” quickly informing the West City District Public Security Bureau about the suspicious secret signals, the policemen breaking down his door and storming in, all for a pile of classical Bakelite records.
We invited the tenor Kang Jian to my home. His head as big as the Dipper, face ruddy; like a night sun, he lit up the little room packed full with guests sitting on the floor. His laughter thundered out and shook the windows. By the time his voice rose to Mily Balakriev’s “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” the audience turned pale; we heard that booming warning could be heard over two kilometers away: “Stamp open the world’s uneven road. . . .”
A few years ago, the boys and girls of this building went to live with a production team, to work for the military corps, join the army, reform themselves through labor; these diverse individuals now, one after another, have returned; Ji Nian and I transferred to the May Seventh Cadre School in Hebei’s sand-and-river Shahe town, near Beijing, and so we have also returned home; only Shan Shan hasn’t been able to come back. . . . (From my mother’s interview)
The salon had no choice but to move its base of operations; we forged some monthly trolleybus tickets and met outside the city in a desolate field.
At the start of the 1970s, rising into his early twenties, he was already starting to write poems and novels. He frequently asked for sick leave and stayed home, turning the kitchen into his study, shutting the door, and immersing himself in his work. Sometimes I’d get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and the dull yellow light in the kitchen would still be burning. . . . (From my father’s notebook)
Through my father I was introduced to Uncle Feng Yidai in building No. 1, and through Uncle Feng I was introduced to a bounty of books and interesting individuals. I often dropped by his home for a visit. Uncle Feng, pipe in hand, always smiled brightly. Threads of conversation ascended with the wisps of cigarette smoke as we sat and chatted. Aunt Feng, wearing an apron and sleeve coverings, busied herself between the stove and the dictionary they were working on together. She was almost blind. Answering the door, she would stare at me through her thick lenses in total perplexity; grasping a magnifying glass in her hand, she would help Uncle Feng track down the hidden meanings of words, to finally lock them into place.
One early October evening in 1976, I rushed over to Uncle Feng’s with good news: The Gang of Four had fallen. Uncle Feng was standing in the kitchen wiping his back with a towel. Then he turned around to face me, as if hand in hand with history.
Later that year, some friends and I launched the literary magazine Today. We bound the issues at my place, piles and piles of mimeographed pages rising from the floor past the bed, emanating the pungent odor of printing ink. Our threshold turned busier than a marketplace; I raced around with flailing hands, feet in a flurry. While greeting guests, I imagined that the neighborhood committee and local police must be working overtime, too.
In the autumn of 1980 I got married and moved out of Three Never Old Hutong No. 1.
11
Toward the end of 2001, Yifan drove me back to Sanbulao. This home that has haunted my dreams for so long was now difficult to recognize: a low building, narrow windows, façade recently whitewashed, yet its appearance of decay couldn’t be concealed.
We visited some old neighbors, first stopping by the Pang family in apartment 434. Big Bro Bang Ben opened the door and welcomed us in — his hair white, his stature as tall and stately as before. Bang Xuan currently worked as the managing director of an investment company and dressed like one. Everything pointed in the direction of society’s remarkable material progress. Big Bro had wanted to host a party for the guests and invited all the children in the building. Our family’s apartment was being rented out, an idea that I had sug
gested as a way to avoid stirring up the dark recesses of memory.
Dusk fell as we said good-bye to our neighbors. An apartment building now stood on the former air-raid shelter. Reverse thirty years, those poplars await their felled fate; reverse forty years, those Taihu stones await their heaving onto a truck and their destination at the military museum under construction; reverse six hundred years, Zheng He leans on a balustrade, gazes out over the back garden, lights a lamp in the twilight, birds return to their nests, the ten thousand things return to silence.
My parents’ wedding portrait, Shanghai, 1948
Father at the Temple of Heaven, 1948
Father as a young man
Family portrait, 1963
Beijing, 1969
With classmates at the Temple of Heaven, 1968
Little sister in Beihai Park, 1969
Little sister on the balcony, 1969
Qian Ayi
According to my father, sometime in early 1950, a village girl named Wang Yuzhen, embroiled in a domestic dispute, traveled from Baoding, Hebei Province to Beijing in order to file a lawsuit. From the start, the legal battle became as drawn out as the day is long, and for a time we employed her as a baomu, a live-in nanny plus housekeeper. We were living at Dong Jiao Min Alley, 1 Ministry of Foreign Affairs Street, not a far walk from the courthouse on Ministry of Justice Street. Wang Yuzhen had a strong, robust constitution, her voice sonorous; besides watching the children, she did the laundry, cleaned the apartment, bought groceries, cooked meals, all with an as-if-it-were-nothing lightheartedness. My father said that each day he came home from work, he would find her sitting by the doorway, holding me in one hand and my little brother in the other, taking turns feeding us. Both of my parents worked, and as no one else watched over us, we must have joined Wang Yuzhen during her judicial arbitration whenever her case came to session. Two years later, her lawsuit was finally resolved and she returned to Baoding. By then, my brother and I were already running around.
1
Toward the end of 1957, a new baomu joined our family: Qian Jiazhen, from Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province. Her husband ran a small business, found a new flame; she left for Beijing in a fury, first staying with her stepmother, with whom she eventually had an ugly falling out. Gritting her teeth with determination, and with a single-minded resolve to make it on her own, she found her way to our home through the introduction of one of my parents’ colleagues. Qian Ayi and I became mutual witnesses through the passage of time — from age eight to my grown-up days as a construction worker; from Qian Ayi’s days as a comely young woman, as graceful as an echo of wind, to her wrinkled old age.
Before the reform and opening-up policies, my parents’ salaries hardly increased and together totaled around 239 RMB per month (enough for a family of five to live comfortably); after deducting some for pocket money, they gave the rest to Qian Ayi to keep house.
Qian Ayi was illiterate; as I was considered the most educated one in our family apart from our parents, bookkeeping duties eventually fell on my head. Every night after eating dinner and tidying up, I’d sit face-to-face with Qian Ayi at the dining table, her big eyes staring into my small eyes, as we went over the daily household expenditures. We used a ruled notebook, sixteen lines per page, cover stained with grease spots, corners curled, several vertical lines drawn down each page with a ruler, columns labeled with dates, purchased items, quantities, total costs. Qian Ayi broke her fingers calculating each and every expense, fishing out jiao banknotes and coins from her pocket, as well as little pieces of paper with circled sums. All those circled figures, depending on their size and shape, represented different purchased items, their visual notation calling to mind certain ancient, originary glyphs and signs.
In truth, I came to wholly detest the job, which continued on and on, year after year, three hundred and sixty-five days with hardly an interruption, and if there happened to be an interruption for a day or two, even more time and energy had to be expended to make up for it. I just wanted to have fun, let my mind wander without a care, and prepared for the right moment to sneak away. Qian Ayi would first put on a serious face, then she’d slap the table and glare; each day we parted in discord. My parents, in fact, never checked the accounting books, and Qian Ayi knew it, yet this only demonstrated her lifelong reputation as an upright individual with an honest name.
I was responsible for another impossible task: writing her letters. Concerning Qian Ayi’s personal history, I really didn’t know much. She always prattled on and on about how she was born into a rich and influential family. Essentially, she could be described as a germaphobe, her clothes and bedsheets unsullied by the slightest speck of dirt; when cleaning and chopping vegetables, she tossed out more than she saved. Such faults were caused by her wealthy upbringing.
Qian Ayi had a younger half sister on her father’s side; whenever she received a letter from her sister, who lived in Yangzhou, it was a major event. To ensure an unobstructed path of delivery, Qian Ayi even offered her matchmaking services to the mailman, Little Zhao. Little Zhao maintained a squeaky-clean appearance; he was also exceedingly shy. Each prospect he readied himself for either harkened from a rural village or lacked sense and sensibility. On the scene for every introduction, I could only knead my fingers and sweat anxiously for Little Zhao, for how could I interfere with the conversation? Nothing could be done about Qian Ayi’s limited social circle; back then, the social hierarchy lurked behind a mask of equality. Little Zhao gradually turned into Old Zhao, staying as single as ever.
Finishing her day’s work, Qian Ayi removed her apron and sleeve covers, then pulled out the freshly received letter from beneath her pillow. I carefully unfolded the paper and keke baba stammered through, reading aloud, skipping over any unfamiliar words. Qian Ayi listened intently, face full of doubt, then forced me to read it over again. The composing of the reply followed. In second grade I could write about two or three hundred characters at most; if I got stuck in the letter, adopting Qian Ayi’s notational method, I just drew a circle around the mysterious word. Fortunately, one could follow a pattern in her replies, the opening always running: “Receiving your letter and knowing that everyone’s doing so well eases my heart. . . .”
A long time passed before I finally found out that Qian Ayi’s sister also used a “sharpshooter”: her own daughter. My counterpart happened to be around my age; later, she joined a production team in Jiangxi. For a while we commiserated with each other by inserting our own commentary in the margins of the letters, confounding Qian Ayi to no end.
2
Though illiterate, Qian Ayi, “feet unbound,” didn’t want to be left behind and sought to participate in various social campaigns; keeping up with the fickle times, however, wasn’t easy to do. In the new society, the baomu position had become complicated and uncertain, especially during the Cultural Revolution, to the extent that it carried political risks.
Summer of 1958: Great Leap Forward propaganda posters appeared on the brick wall of the hutong next to us, Aviation Alley, their blazing hues cranking up the summer heat. The changing roles of workers and farmers symbolized the changing times; the wind picked up, the sun blazed down, and bit by bit posters covered the whole wall. To children, those were thrilling, exhilarating days, when almost every day felt special, like a festival.
Autumn arrived and a communal canteen was set up in the neighborhood committee’s one-story building across the street. Qian Ayi answered the party’s call, abandoned the three of us, threw on a white workers’ coat, and twirled into the canteen, puffing out with pride. She metamorphasized into another person, brows raised eyes smiling, riding a spring breeze. There was a time when her thick Yangzhou accent knotted its way through her jumbled Mandarin, creating a feast for the ears. Qian Ayi still lived at our house but ignored us, withholding any sort of affection. Did she have a certain agreem
ent with my parents, or was this a unilateral decision? Her posturing seemed like it could evaporate at any moment. The three of us were totally blindsided; we had no other choice but to join her in the canteen. Almost instantly I could see why Qian Ayi felt so liberated: independence; feelings unfettered and untroubled; the camaraderie in the communal space.
The canteen ran at a heavy loss; no more than a few months passed before it shut down. Qian Ayi took off her white workers’ coat, slipped on her blue sleeve covers, and lit the stove back at home. All day long she walked around with a long, inconsolable face, sinking into a deep silence; from time to time she would stand with her back to the window in a daze, chimney smoke from cooking fires drifting up behind her, soaking up Beijing’s winter sun and sky.
Seven or eight years later, Old Heavenly Grandfather had another joke to play on her. When the Cultural Revolution broke out in the summer of 1966, Qian Ayi initially halted the troops and took no action, watching calmly from the side to see what would happen next. Then one Red August morning she suddenly sprang up, changed into an earth-yellow army uniform (different from the orthodox national-defense green), pinned a Mao badge onto her chest, wrapped a leather belt around her waist, and rushed out like a fire in the wind, peng peng! slamming the door behind her. She went on a kind of semi-strike. Actually, a coordinated semi-strike, as she just no longer served regular meals; after we had filled our empty stomachs ourselves, she would conveniently appear and offer us some food. Qian Ayi turned forty-three that year — maybe she was making her final stand before life slipped away from her; maybe she felt it was her last chance to alter her destiny.