Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (20 page)

At the end of September 1969, the four of us went to Gao Village. Mama found a truck going that way and secured a ride for us. Mama and I rode in the cab with the driver, and my brothers rode in the back with some of our belongings. The ride was long and grueling and the country roads deeply furrowed by the recent wet weather. Exhaust fumes flowed freely into the cab of the truck and the driver smoked constantly. In a short time I became sick to my stomach. I vomited in the cab and the driver became angry and swore at me. After that he drove with both windows down and often stuck his head out for fresh air.

When we arrived near the village, I was weak and sick and sore. All my muscles ached. Carrying our bags, we walked across the countryside for a quarter of a mile. I was stunned by my first look at Gao Village. Filthy women and children adorned in rags approached us. The women helped my mother carry our luggage. The children stood around gaping at me.

I had never before seen children as dirty as these. None of them
wore shoes. Everyone came with us as we proceeded through the village to a dilapidated shed. “This is your new home,” Mama said, opening the door and stepping inside. I followed her in. The crowd pushed from behind and many of them entered the rickety structure with us.

I was unpleasantly surprised. The walls were mud and the floor was dirt. Wood beams crossed overhead, and on them was piled straw for the roof. The ceiling was low. It was especially low for my mother who was tall for a Chinese woman. At five feet seven, she was about six inches taller than most men in the village. The structure, Mama explained, was previously the village warehouse, used to store rice, seed and tools for the production team. Villagers had built a four-foot-high mud wall down the middle to separate our living quarters from the storage area.

In our quarters was one double bed. There was a clay stove just inside the door and a chamber pot in a corner of the room. In another corner was a large clay water jar. Our trunks were stacked against the wall. There was no electricity and no window. The only light came from the doorway.

“Where will I sleep?” I asked Mama.

“On the bed,” she answered, pointing to the double bed. “We all sleep on this bed.”

The shed was filled with wide-eyed villagers watching our every move and listening to us as though we were a performing troupe.

After looking over the room, I told Mama, “I think I need to go to the bathroom. Where is it?”

“I’ll show you where to go,” she said. She tore two pages from a notebook next to the stove and led me outside. A dozen steps away was a large open depression in the ground. As we approached it I noticed that it seemed to be seething as if it were alive, and was making a loud buzzing sound, something like a dull persistent stringed instrument. As we stepped closer, the entire surface began to rise, quickly, like black steam from a pot. I realized that the cloud ascending into the air was millions of blackflies that fed on the surface of this sewage hole. Whenever
anyone approached, they buzzed around overhead, then resettled when one left.

Around the pool was a mud wall, about a foot high, but it had eroded in parts. The sewage pool itself was a circle of about six feet in diameter. At the edge were two bricks wedged in the dirt. Between them at a sharp sloping angle were several other bricks that formed a trough into the black pool. Mama said, “You stand on these, turn your backside to the pool, squat and relieve yourself. Put one foot on each outside brick. Be sure to relieve yourself on the middle bricks. If you relieve yourself directly into the pool, it will splash on you and the flies will follow you back inside.”

Mama helped me position myself. I was about to untie and lower my trousers when I realized that a dozen children and adults had followed us to the open latrine and were watching me with fascination. Mama asked the audience to leave, and when they had gone, she handed me the notebook pages. “We don’t have a toilet paper ration here,” she said. “This is how you do it. You crumple it up in your hand, then open it and crumple it again. Do this several times to soften it, and then it is comfortable to use.”

When I got back to the hut, I told Mama I needed to wash my hands. “The water is in the jar,” she said, pointing to the large container in the corner. I lifted the wooden cover from it and stuck my hands in the water.

Mama blurted out a plaintive “
No!
” She startled me, and I pulled my hands from the jar immediately. “That’s our water supply,” she said. Too late. She showed me the gourd ladle I was supposed to use to draw water from the jar, pour it into a basin and wash my hands there. My carelessness had just contaminated our water.

Early the next morning Yicun told me, “I want to take you to see a pet dog.”

I’d never seen one before. Dogs were not allowed as pets in the city. Wild dogs ran in packs and came into the city at night. Officials often hunted them down and trapped them and beat them to death. I was intrigued by the idea of a pet dog. This was to be my first adventure in the countryside. We skipped out of the shed and ran along the path between the village huts. As we ran, a big black dog lunged at me, seemingly out of nowhere. He caught me from behind, growling ferociously and bit hard on my right calf. I fell to the ground screaming. The dog released me and ran away. I was bleeding and in terrible pain. Villagers came running from every direction when they heard my cries. One old woman approached waving a large cleaver over her head, cursing the dog. She examined my injured leg and announced, “This is very serious.”

A crowd hovered around me, all of them shouting advice or asking what had happened. Because the local dialect was new to me, I could not understand most of what they said. It sounded like hysterical clatter
and heightened my anxiety. The old woman quickly took charge and told one of the men to carry me home. The woman had a weathered, wrinkled face and walked with a pronounced stoop that diminished her slight stature. She was the shortest of the village women but appeared to have unquestioned authority in this matter. The others instantly followed her orders without question.

Hearing my cries, Mama was shocked to see a man carrying me. Yicun was also crying from fright. “What happened?” she asked.

The old woman responded sharply, “Don’t just stand there. Hurry up and get some rice water.”

“Rice water?” Mama asked. “What is it?”

“You city people!” the woman shot back impatiently. “Just put rice in water and stir it with your fingertips and give it to me when the water colors.”

Mama grabbed a fistful of rice and stirred it in a bowl with water and then handed it to the woman, who dipped her hands in it and washed my wound with the water. When it was clean she sprinkled the rice water on my head.

A moment later her eyes rolled back in their sockets and she turned her face toward the ceiling and broke into a shrill haunting incantation. “Child, come home, child, come home, child, come home.” The women who had followed her into our shed joined with her immediately and their chorus became a drone that grew louder each time they repeated the stanza. They closed their eyes and began waving their hands back and forth over their head, like long leaves of grass bending in some invisible wind.

Mama was bewildered by all of this. She stood aside, shifting her gaze back and forth from the women to me, wide-eyed. I was silent, mesmerized by the whole thing. I momentarily forgot the pain and fright from the dog bite. Quickly the chant spread from dwelling to dwelling as villagers emerged and stood in front of their huts, raising their hands to the heavens and joining in. Peasants from the nearby fields heard and came running, chanting as they approached.

After a while the old woman stopped and everyone else quieted. She listened for something in the air. She looked at my mother and said, “The dog that bit this girl scared her soul from her body. We are calling her soul home. If we don’t, her soul will be wandering far away and she will lose it forever.”

At a signal one of the women grabbed our broom and a young woman put me on her back. Another filled a small bowl with dry rice. Then everyone left our shed and began parading in a long column through the village. The woman with the bowl of rice headed the procession. The woman carrying me followed close behind. The other women, along with my mother, came after them. Children brought up the rear and joined in the chanting. They proceeded up and down the path through the village. The woman holding the broom waved it back and forth in a wide arc “to sweep away bad luck.”

The woman at the head of the parade threw rice in a circular motion as if planting. She kept repeating, “Child, come alive. Child, come alive.” When she threw the rice, chickens came running to snatch it.

Eventually the procession returned to the place where the dog had bitten me. At that point a new chant began. It continued until the woman directing this ritual paused, closed her eyes, listened for something and then relaxed. She made several silent circles around the spot and pronounced that my soul had returned. The crowd slowly dispersed.

Mama carried me home. As she approached our shed, I remembered what had happened after she found me in the hospital in Hefei and asked, “Mama, are they Christians? Did they baptize me?”

I felt her stiffen at my words. She slowed and turned a complete circle to make sure no one else could hear us. “No,” she said. “I’ll explain it to you when you grow up. Keep it a secret between the two of us for now.”

————

The nearest elementary school was a twenty-minute walk from Gao Village. It consisted of three dirt-floor rooms in a straw-roofed mud building. One room served as living quarters for the teacher, and the other two were classrooms. Students were required to bring their own stools and desks. I had a crude little three-legged stool about a foot tall. I had no desk. The elementary school system had recently shifted from six to five grades. Chairman Mao had issued a directive to revolutionize the system and shorten the amount of time children spent in class. Grades one through three were instructed in one room and grades four and five in the other. I was in the fourth grade.

In the countryside girls attended school, if at all, only through the third grade. After that they worked in the fields. The peasants considered girls to be “giveaways,” meaning they would someday live with the family of their men. Consequently, educating them was a waste. I was the only girl in my classroom. There were half a dozen girls in the other room. Because I was the oldest girl in the school, it became my duty to cook for the teacher, who lived at school. There was a large clay stove in the center of our classroom, and the teacher taught while I sat on my stool and tended the stove.

The teacher himself had only an elementary school education. Yet this distinguished him from the illiterate villagers. He was once a peddler, walking from village to village beating on a little drum to attract people when he approached. He sold toys and candy. When the villagers needed a teacher for their children, they asked him to stay on. He had a son who was in my class. The teacher and his boy were unusual to us because they were members of the Uighur minority of western China and they were Muslims. They no longer prayed openly each day—that was forbidden after the Communist takeover—but they did not eat pork, and during part of each year, they did not eat during the day. When he spoke privately with his son, none of us could understand a word.

Some of the teacher’s clothing was unusually colorful, as was the small rug he kept on the dirt floor of his living quarters. But perhaps
most unusual was his practice of wearing shoes every day. Only in the dead of winter or during special celebrations like weddings did the peasants or their children wear shoes. But the teacher was never without his. When school was not in session, the teacher and his son did not mix with other villagers, nor did they join the groups working in the fields during planting and harvest. They kept to themselves and no one in the village seemed to mind.

In Gao Village there was a curious absence of other girls my age. There were many girls three and four years older than me and some two or three years younger. But I was the only one born in 1958. Late one morning while the other children were playing outside and the teacher was sitting at his desk smoking, I brought him his lunch and asked, “Teacher Lu, why am I the only girl in the upper grade in this school? Where are the other girls my age? I don’t even see them working in the fields.”

He responded, thoughtfully and somberly, “Once there were many little girls your age here. I remember passing through the villages in those years and seeing them.” He paused wistfully and looked out the window at the sky.

“Where are they now, Teacher Lu?”

“They’re all dead.”

“Did they get sick?”

“No,” he said. “There was no sickness.” He looked away and thought for a moment and sighed. “You’re too young to understand, Yimao.”

He drew on his cigarette, held in the smoke for a time, then turned his face up and slowly exhaled, studying the blue spiral that floated on the air, as if trying to read meaning into it. He whispered, “They died because there was no food. There was no food in any of these villages during that time. There was a famine. You don’t know what that means, do you?”

“I do, Teacher Lu. My grandma in Tianjin starved herself to save me during a famine.” I felt a sudden urge to cry.

“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this,” he said sympathetically.

I held back my tears and asked, “What happened here?”

“My wife … did the same thing,” he said. “She saved all of her food for our children. She died first.” His voice broke and he paused for a moment. “After she was gone, there was still not enough food. My daughter was five. My son was two. You remind me of my daughter.”

“What happened to her?”

“My daughter,” he answered softly. “Her name was Xiaobao—Little Treasure. I took my Little Treasure to Nanjing. I couldn’t watch her starve. I told her I had a big surprise for her in the city. I took her to a Muslim restaurant near the Drum Tower. I can even remember the name of the restaurant—Ma Xiang Xing. I ordered her a plate of squirrel fish and a cup of tea. It cost two yuan, sixty fen, all the money I had. Her eyes lit up when she saw the food. She smiled for the first time in months and began eating. I watched her for a few minutes. I said, ‘Papa has to go to the latrine. You wait right here for me.’