by Karoline Kan
“None of us have done anything wrong,” Laoye said. “It’s just a form of exercise.” He tried to smile to ease the tension, but the officers did not smile back.
One of the officers took off his hat and revealed a glossy sheen of sweat on his forehead. “We’re just following orders.”
“Hand over the books and DVDs, Lishui,” Officer Zhang urged my uncle. He had to play tough in front of the policemen even though he and my uncle were friends.
Uncle retreated to his bedroom to fetch the materials. He took out a bag of books and DVDs and a red lotus-shaped cushion. He handed over the articles to the officers.
The policemen walked around the house to complete their routine check of every corner. When they were done, the sweaty officer said to my grandfather, “I hear you’re a Communist Party member. Falun Gong definitely conflicts with that. Be careful.”
“Yes,” his colleague said, looking around the room at us, “you are smart people. You know everything will be fine if you stand in line with the government. But if you stand against us, you will mess up your life and your children’s. Be a good example for the rest of the lăobăixìng, eh.” They proceeded to walk out.
I saw them throw the books and DVDs into the trunk.
“Were they warning me?” Laoye cried after they left. “When I was on the battlefield, their fathers were just crying babies! Who the hell are they to tell me what to do?”
Uncle Lishui led him to a chair to calm down. “Just give them what they want. If people ask, just say you don’t practice it anymore. Easy…”
“Why did you hand the books over?” Laoye yelled. “Didn’t you spend money on those books?”
“Father, please. We could have been arrested.”
“What law have we broken?”
“The Communist Party is the law. If they say it’s black, then it will never be white.”
Laoye sat back in his chair, annoyed. They never found the books hidden under his quilts.
* * *
Tens of thousands of Falun Gong members were arrested and tortured. Some members were arrested and sentenced to jail without trial, or sent to “re-education” camps where they had to work for as long as fifteen hours a day without rest, and could be beaten for not finishing, or for no reason at all.
They were treated like slaves and fed bread, gruel, and watery soup. When questioned by international media and human rights organizations, the Chinese government said the crackdown was China’s internal affair, and other nations had no right to intervene. In other words, they should mind their business.
Laoye still practiced secretly in his room but people like Kuoxiang never hid. She and other members would protest at the Tianjin municipal government building and planned to take trips to Beijing. Before they could get there the first time, they were stopped by police and locked in a local prison, without trial, for three years.
Chapter Seven
The Girl with
Big Feet
Before Yunxiang could take the gaokao, the college entrance exam, local police came to our home for an investigation. They wanted to make sure our family was not involved with any political movements that threatened the Communist Party. If so, Yunxiang would not be able to attend college. Laoye and Uncle Lishui had to have their fingerprints taken and sign a letter stating that they were no longer members of Falun Gong. With that, Yunxiang passed the investigation.
Yunxiang was accepted to the same military university as our cousin Zheng. Baba was so proud that he posted the admission letter on the wall in our kitchen.
Congratulations on joining the
People’s Liberation Army College
To fulfill the responsibility to protect the motherland, Comrade Yunxiang from Lutai Town, the Ninghe District of Tianjin municipal city, voluntarily applied to attend PLA College. He has passed the test hosted by the Tianjin student recruitment committee, and has been accepted. Yunxiang will attend our university on September 1, 2002.
My mother suggested we spend a few weeks of vacation in Chaoyang that summer. I teased her, saying that she just wanted the villagers to fawn over Yunxiang’s good news, but I understood. It had been seven years since we left Chaoyang after her fight with Grandfather Wengui, and Mom wanted to give the villagers a renewed sense of our family. Now that Yunxiang was going to a prestigious university, all the heartache she endured had been worth it.
I was happy for Yunxiang too. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is well respected by the Chinese. After the Communist Party won the civil war in 1949, the government and military formed an unshakable union—as bonded as fish to water. Although rich people were admired, the army ranked even higher in China. The PLA takes marching orders only from the Communist Party.
Both Yunxiang and our cousin Zheng were accepted through the help of my mother’s younger brother, Siyong, who was a member of the military. Of course, Yunxiang and Zheng got high scores on the gaokao, but without that connection, there would have been no way to be admitted into a top military university, which was free and guaranteed jobs postgraduation.
When I was young, my happiest times were when Uncle Siyong visited. His unit was based in Beijing and he always wore his uniform when he visited us in Caiyuan. His appearance would attract a crowd, and a flock of cheering people would escort him all the way to his parents’ door. I’d walk by Uncle Siyong’s side to show off. He was our hero. I was happy that Yunxiang was officially going to bring back honor to my mother’s name, and to her place in the village.
More importantly, Yunxiang’s success in the gaokao gave me some hope. If I worked hard, I could also go to a university one day, maybe a better one. My entire life was a secret competition with my brother—as if as a girl, the second child that cost my mom so much, I had to prove to her that I could bring as much or even more honor to her.
After Yunxiang left for school, my grandparents moved in with us. Laolao accepted the situation and moved into Yunxiang’s room, but Laoye had a harder time adjusting to town life and went back to the village.
I went to middle school that autumn and grew even more dissatisfied with my education, which mainly consisted of grand histories of influential men.
To entertain myself, I’d spend hours in the library reading folktales and researching oral histories. I wanted to learn the history of regular people like me and my family, not the martyrs China had invented. I was fed up with the same patriotic tales. I started to doubt whether those stories were true at all, or to what degree. I often saw a different, sometimes even contradictory, point of view between the history books and history told through the lives of ordinary people I knew.
One day I was reading in bed next to Laolao while she ate sunflower seeds. My history teacher wanted me to submit an essay for a competition. I decided to write about someone I knew, someone who was not talked about in history books but who had experienced it firsthand.
I was in the middle of deep thought about who when Laolao suddenly said, “Your feet are big.” She touched my toes. Laolao was in good spirits these days, although she’d cough and still had to put a blanket over herself even with the slightest breeze. “Today you girls have big feet, like you’re showing off your freedom,” she joked. “Is it revenge on us old women?”
I laughed. I knew Laolao liked my big feet. “Big feet are a good sign. It means that you will grow tall into your future,” she’d often say.
Laolao had big feet, too, and so did my mom. Laolao said her own would have been a blessing if she had been a working woman, but she had never been able due to a lifetime of ill health. She said Mom’s big feet made her a better farmer. Small feet were for rich women; they were the only ones who needed to be beautiful. Big feet were more practical, allowing us to walk faster and more easily on country roads. She explained that, in the past, women’s feet were bound to be made smaller. If you were a girl of four or five years old from a well-off family, your parents would bind your feet. They’d take the feet, bend the bones, tightly wrap them with
cloth, and put them under a stone for days and nights to ensure they would never grow. The “three-inch golden lotuses” were considered attractive, though they were extremely painful, and limited movement. To walk, these women had to have good balance and avoid getting trapped in the mud. Therefore, these women stayed home most of the time, which was considered a female virtue and a sign of privilege.
I had never talked to Laolao about it or met my great-grandmother, but I knew she’d had bound feet. Mom told me she complained about them often. At night, she would remove the cloth binding and soak them in warm water. This reminded me of Laolao’s saying: “I am weak as a lady, but humble as a maid.” In traditional Chinese culture, women who looked pale and weak were considered beautiful. If Laolao had been born to a rich family, her fair skin and frail, slender figure would match her status. However, she was a farmer’s daughter. On the farms, to be rough and stout was more fitting, if not beautiful.
Although foot binding had been banned long ago, people hadn’t changed their views so much on beauty. Growing up, words like pretty or keai were never used to describe me. I had small eyes, whereas big eyes were considered nice-looking. I had freckles. My nose was too flat, and I was short. My relatives always joked that I was adopted, because I didn’t inherit my mom’s beauty. At times, I’d stand in front of a mirror and imagine how I’d feel if I had a face like Chunting’s, which everyone in the family adored. Laolao never made jokes about my looks, she always complimented me, especially my feet.
I decided that I would write about Laolao for my project. I put down my book and moved closer to her, and told her.
“I’m just an illiterate old village woman. That’s all there is to the story!” Laolao protested as she spit shells into a plastic bag. People of her generation didn’t like to talk about the past. They chose to forget.
I smiled and got my pen ready to take notes anyway.
Laolao came close to having her feet bound, my essay started.
In 1911, the Xinhai Revolution spread like wildfire from the south to the rest of the country. It ended the Qing dynasty in 1912, and the new government became devoted to eliminating traditions they believed to be feudal and backward; foot binding was one of them.
The revolutionary order did not make its way to Laolao’s village until the mid-1920s, when Laolao had just begun having her feet bound: Her parents wanted their four-year-old to have tiny feet—a prerequisite for a good marriage. Laolao’s feet were tightly wrapped with a white cloth eight feet long and four inches wide. To force the four toes (except the big toe) to point down toward the sole of the foot, her mother and grandmother used both their hands to pull the cloth tight. At first, my grandmother, Little Guiqin, was told to practice walking so she could get used to the pain. The torture lasted for a few hours a day. She’d painfully and slowly pace up and down the yard. She’d cry and cry but then she got lucky. Less than a week after the initial binding, revolutionaries put a stop to the tradition. Gradually, Guiqin’s feet began to recover.
* * *
Laolao’s stories helped me to understand more about her own life but also about others of her generation that are not written about in history books.
In the 1920s, Chinese warlords—independent military commanders who ruled various parts of the country—were fighting with each other for power and territory. The Nationalist Party launched a military expedition against them to unify the country. The expedition began from the nationalists’ base in Guangdong and spread all the way to the northern cities.
One day, when Laolao was five years old, news spread that an army would stop at her village on their way to Dongbei, the northeastern provinces. The villagers didn’t know to which warlord the army belonged, but they knew it was best not to deal with the soldiers, who were no different from bandits.
Laolao’s father decided the family should hide in his cousin’s village for a few days. They left enough food for their donkey and tied him to a fence in the yard. But her father was still worried. After three days, he said the army must have left and that it would be safe to sneak back home via a secret path running through the wheat field, which was tall enough to hide him. He set off with only his friend, but, unbeknownst to them, two soldiers were on the other side. When they spotted my great-grandfather, they started to shoot. His friend lay down in a ditch, but my great-grandfather ran. The men shouted at him to stop, but he kept running. Then a gunshot hit him, boom, and he fell down dead.
The two soldiers left him lying there, and after they were gone, my great-grandfather’s friend sneaked back to Laolao’s family with the news, but he was unsure about the identity of the shooters. Were they local gangsters wearing looted uniforms? The nationalist soldiers coming from the south? Or locally hired soldiers belonging to the warlord? It didn’t matter: A poor man’s death meant nothing in a time when countless people died in the war every day. The only condolence from the local government was a coffin made from cheap willow wood.
With his death, the family had no adult men left. There were just two widows at the head—Laolao’s grandmother, who had lost her husband a few years before, and Laolao’s mother, who had five young daughters, including a one-month-old. No men meant no stable income. Her mother and grandmother fed the whole family by selling handmade baskets and mats.
* * *
At fifteen, Laolao married my grandfather. Their wedding night was the first day they met. It was not her decision to marry him, or not—it was arranged. He left home one year later for a business in the Tianjin capital, leaving her behind to take care of his three younger brothers, along with his five aunts, who visited often.
“At twenty-one, I gave birth to your oldest uncle, Shoukui. And then four other sons came one after another, then your mother…”
“Wait, no, Mom has three older brothers.” I stopped and put my pen aside.
“I gave birth to nine children in the next twenty years, but two died. I never told you.”
I was thirteen years old, but my eyes started to tear up. Laolao never showed her emotions in front of her children and grandchildren. She said she had stopped crying long ago. She wiped my eyes with her handkerchief and I continued writing her story, which I encouraged her to continue.
The newborn mortality rate in China back then was high. One of her sons died from pneumonia and the other of meningitis. She locked herself in a storage room for several days to mourn them.
In traditional Chinese culture, babies who died were not considered family members. They were tăozhài gui, “little ghosts” who came to the family to collect “emotional debts”—their parents must have hurt them in their last life, so they return to make them sad. The two little boys were wrapped in reed mats, covered by pink and deep purple morning glory blossoms, and buried at the riverbank. No one spoke about them again.
My grandmother found some relief after she and my grandfather managed to purchase their own farmland. They had saved for years, but only three days after they received the title documents, the Communists announced that all land now belonged to the public, as part of the People’s Commune movement. Their new home became the public kitchen, their land confiscated. I had heard only some bits of this story before, told by other family members. But it was so different to hear it from Laolao. I realized that, once again, my grandmother had had no say in her destiny.
Laolao described to me how riddled with worry her mind became at that time. Many of her days and nights were spent in fear. Her home had been “borrowed.” What was next? she wondered. Villagers said the children would be the next. Soon they will be shared too, the women would say. The government will take our children away, to raise them in a collective camp where they will learn how to be the “successors to the Communist cause.”
It sounded dramatic but so did a famine, and that had proven to be possible.
A few years after the war, during the Great Famine (1959–1961), anything alive and breathing was caught and eaten by the villagers—first wild rabbits, snakes, dogs, and
later, rats and insects. When the grain sacks were empty in the public kitchen, it would be a long time before the government sent the next batch. Laolao would take the children to dig up grass to eat. Many villagers did this, and soon the farmland was just dirt, so Laolao would peel bark from the willow trees. She’d boil this for hours, cut it into pieces, mix it with a special flour made from smashed corncobs, and steam it. Thanks to the bark and corncobs, they made it through the worst days.
I listened to Laolao and took notes, pushing her for more details even when her voice got low.
In the winter of 1963, Laolao got pregnant and decided that she would give away her newborn son. They were totally impoverished, and she wanted him to be with a family that could afford to look after him. “But when the baby smiled and his fingers touched my face, my heart melted and I couldn’t do it.”
She tugged on a pillow and lay down. “I need to rest,” she said. “I’m tired.” I hugged her. We agreed to continue the project later. I knew talking about the past was hard for her. I felt grateful that she had opened up to me, and it made me cherish her even more. I also felt a twinge of guilt about how little I had considered what she and my grandfather had gone through. They spoke in pieces and fragments, but I don’t know that I was ever listening much to them.
Growing up, I watched Laolao live so frugally. She didn’t have fancy clothes. She never threw away a piece of fabric. She spent her time mending broken things, from sheets and jackets to socks, gloves, and towels. Even when life improved in the 1990s, if I left a few grains of rice in my bowl, she would eat them herself, reaching over with her chopsticks.
“When your mother was your age, she ate rice only in her dreams,” said Laolao.
I used to put my hands over my ears to protest against these old tales of hardship.