Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (32 page)

“I think I saw him,” I said. “Who is he? What is he doing?”

“He’s a lunatic,” she answered. “His family lives in the first apartment at the very front of the church. His father is the snoopy cadre.”

“Is he dangerous?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Just crazy. He follows me every day. Sometimes he walks close behind me and runs away if I turn around. Sometimes he stays at a distance and hides behind trees and buildings.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I told my mother. She told me to ignore him. If I complained to someone else, I’d probably get into trouble because of his cadre father.”

By the time we got to the market he was gone.

“He’s kind of scary,” I said as we stood in line. “How did he get that way?”

“People say he was a student at the university,” she said. “His parents spent a lot of money giving favors to the authorities to admit him to school. They finally succeeded. And because he is over six feet tall and not very bright, the university put him in the PE department to play basketball.

“There he met a tall, athletic girl and he fell in love with her. She was a student in the art and music department. People said she was one of the most beautiful girls in the university. I never saw her, so I can’t say. But they also said many boys had crushes on her. She got a lot of attention.

“She would not talk to him, but he became more and more obsessed with her. He sent her letters and tried to talk to her, but she ignored him.

“Eventually, he became so desperate that something in him snapped and he went crazy. He stopped going to school and he began walking around talking to himself all the time. He became, well, strange.”

“Sometimes when I’m at home I can hear him talking to his parents like a normal person,” I said.

“But he’s not normal,” Yuanyu said. “Believe me, he’s not. He’s crazy.”

After that I discovered him following me several times. Sometimes he’d walk only a few inches behind me. If I looked back at him, he’d either glare defiantly at me or stop and look at the ground sheepishly. Sometimes he seemed to want to threaten me, and other times he seemed threatened by me.

When I told my mother about him, all she did was to caution me to stay away from him because his parents wielded political influence. He had furious temperamental outbursts interrupted by long periods of nearly catatonic silence. He had good and bad days. On good days
he sat outside the church, unmoving and expressionless. On bad days he howled and screamed and pounded on the walls.

One morning after shopping I walked to the public latrine. There were two rooms in the facility, one for men and the other for women. On the women’s side were two rows of holes in the floor. No dividers separated them. I had lowered my trousers and squatted over one of the holes when he suddenly walked in and squatted over the hole opposite me. He leered at me with a big mischievous idiot’s grin. I pulled up my trousers and ran home. As I ran I could hear his footsteps and his breathing close behind me. I hurried into our apartment and slammed the door behind me. I was trembling and out of breath and feared he might burst through the door.

“What’s wrong?” Mama asked.

I found a piece of paper and wrote down what had happened. I was afraid if I spoke that the boy’s father would overhear me.

Mama read my words and pursed her lips and nodded. She opened the door a crack to see if he was outside. But he was gone. The boy became even crazier after that. One morning he took his family’s full night bucket and flung it against our door. We jumped when we heard the loud clatter. Moments later, we smelled the result of his fury. We were afraid to look outside. We heard him scream, “Damned rightists! We know what you’re up to! This is only the beginning! The war has just begun.”

We stared at one another in dismay and fear as he raved. It reminded me of the Red Guards in Hefei. I was afraid that everything was coming back to destroy us. But we weren’t his only targets. He was indiscriminate in his hate. He wandered around at all hours, pestering and accusing people. One evening he walked away and didn’t return. His parents looked for him most of the night and in the morning filed a missing person’s report. He didn’t appear the next day or the next. He never came back. We were relieved by his disappearance. But we dared not express such feelings. On the way to school one morning, about a week after his disappearance, Yuanyu stopped and turned around to
look at the people walking far behind us. “I can’t believe he’s really gone,” she said.

We resumed our walk, and she told me how happy she was that the boy was gone. “Me, too,” I said. “I wonder what happened to him?”

“Why wonder?” she asked and laughed. “When something good happens, never ask why.”

Yuanyu and I did nearly everything together. We walked back and forth to school except when I had CYL meetings. She was not a member of the group. We carried our family laundry to the water faucet and sat on small stools and did the family wash while we chatted. There was a big tree in front of the church where we hung the clothes to dry. We climbed high into the branches when we were finished hanging the clothes and let our feet dangle and watched the world below us. One afternoon while we were sitting in the tree, several policemen appeared and ordered everyone off the street. “Go inside and close your doors, and don’t come out again until we tell you to,” they shouted.

A man asked, “What’s happening? Is something wrong?”

“A foreign dignitary is visiting Wuhu,” a policeman answered. “He’s come all the way from the United States. We don’t want him to be bothered. So just get inside. And stop asking questions.”

Yuanyu and I stayed very still and the policemen didn’t see us. We remained safe in our perch while everyone else disappeared into their dwellings.

Two policemen stationed themselves near the base of our tree. It became very quiet on the street. We could hear the policemen talking.

“Who is this dignitary?” one asked the other.

“A famous physicist. He’s Chinese but he lives in America,” the other answered.

“Famous for what?” the first asked.

“He won a Nobel Prize,” came the reply. “Didn’t you read that in the
People’s Daily
?”

“What’s his name?” the first asked.

“Yang Chen-Ning,” he answered. “But this is hard to believe.
Another Chinese physicist won it with him. Two Chinese! Lee Tsung-Dao is the name of the other one. He also lives in America.” When I heard the name Lee Tsung-Dao, my mouth dropped open and my eyes widened. Yuanyu noticed my surprise but remained silent.

A line of police cars appeared with their lights flashing. Behind them was a long black limousine, the biggest car I’d ever seen. The dark curtains in the windows were drawn shut. Behind the limousine were more police cars. They rushed past below us and the two policemen strained to look inside the limousine. Moments after the motorcade had passed the policemen walked away. People soon emerged from their living quarters and the street came alive again.

I scrambled down the tree with Yuanyu. “You won’t believe this, but we have a trunk in our place with Lee Tsung-Dao’s name written on it,” I told her breathlessly. “And he wrote it himself.”

“Really!” she exclaimed.

“He was my papa’s classmate in America a long time ago,” I said. “He helped Papa pack for his trip back to China.”

I ran home and found Papa sitting at a table reading. “Papa,” I whispered, restraining my excitement. “Didn’t you see who’s here?”

“Who?” he asked.

“Yang Chen-Ning! And the policemen said that he is the friend of Lee Tsung-Dao.”

Papa’s face paled.

“Papa, they said he is an important man now. They are both important and famous.”

“My dear old friend?” Papa murmured in disbelief. “Here?”

“Yes. I saw the limousine.”

Papa’s eyes filled with tears. “Here? In Wuhu? Now?”

“Yes,” I said. “With policemen guarding him.”

Papa smiled a sad smile and held his head in his hands and said nothing more.

Nearly every night I heard Yuanyu’s father beat and berate her. He blamed her for anything that went wrong in the house; even when her brothers didn’t do as well in school as he expected, he blamed Yuanyu. When he was finished, her mother often complained. Yuanyu lay next to the wall and cried, and I could hear her only inches away from me. The sound clawed at my heart. I asked her why her parents behaved that way. She answered very simply, “Because they hate me.”

“Why?”

“I wish I knew,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’m adopted and that’s why they hate me. I think maybe someone gave me to them, maybe during the famine. And now they regret it. Maybe I have a real mother somewhere else. Maybe she misses me. I wish I could find her.”

“Why would you say that, Yuanyu?”

“Because everyone else in my family has big eyes and no freckles. Haven’t you noticed? I have narrow eyes and freckles. I don’t look like anyone else in the family. How can this be, Yimao?”

“I don’t know,” I told her.

“Maybe that’s why they hate me,” she said. “There’s no other
reason. I cook and I shop and I clean and I do the laundry and they hate me.”

Like me, Yuanyu received straight A’s in school. But this didn’t impress her parents. They were concerned only with how her brothers did.

Each night I heard the shouting, the criticism, even the beating and her pleas. Sometimes when we met in the morning I noticed that her eyes were red and her arms and face were bruised. She asked to borrow my long-sleeved shirt to hide her bruises. I felt so sorry for her. But there was nothing I could do. As the school year drew to a close she told me wistfully that she could hardly wait to graduate and get away from her home. “I’ll miss you terribly, Yimao,” she said.

“I’ll miss you, too, Yuanyu,” I assured her.

“But there is nobody else I’ll miss.”

“Promise me,” I said, “that after you graduate and go away, promise me that you’ll write to me whenever you can.”

“I will,” she said. “Will you write to me, too?”

“Every week, Yuanyu. I promise.”

That summer Yuanyu was sent to work in a Production and Construction Corps in the countryside. It was made up of “educated youths” who were all high school graduates. She wrote a letter to me once each month, telling me what her life was like there. “It’s hard work, Yimao,” she wrote. “And sometimes I get very tired. But nobody beats me. I’m glad I’m here. I miss you very much.” I wrote back to her immediately describing school and my friends and activities. And in every letter I told her that I missed her, too, and wished she lived closer.

After several months the tone of her letters changed. She told me that the boys in the Production and Construction Corps liked her. “They come from all over China,” she said. “And there are several of them who like me and talk to me after work and even help me on the job to make my life easier. I am liking it more and more here, Yimao.”

Her letters came less often, and in the spring, they stopped. I wrote a half-dozen letters to her after that but there was no response. I
stopped writing and waited and hoped for the day she’d come home and we could sit in the tree together again and she could tell me stories about her life in the countryside. I planned to remind her that she’d broken her promise to write to me. But before I made her sad, I’d also tell her I forgave her and that my feelings about her had never changed.

————

Our educational curriculum was organized around the principle of Mao’s “open-door schooling.” The Great Helmsman dictated that all students must not merely learn academic subjects in the classroom but also learn from workers, peasants and soldiers. Central to the fulfillment of Mao’s decree was our assignment to work four weeks at a time in local factories.

My first assignment was to a large Popsicle factory on the outskirts of the city. Old women and children sold the Popsicles on the street. They carried little wooden boxes and banged on them with a small block of wood, proclaiming, “Milk flavor, bean flavor, banana flavor, three, four and five fen.” Popsicles were a special treat, a rare affordable luxury. So when I learned I had been assigned to the Popsicle factory, I was excited. I imagined that when I worked there, I’d be able to eat all the Popsicles I wanted.

The factory supervisor was a middle-aged woman who wore baggy blue overalls and a military-style cap. Twenty of us were assigned to her facility. She ordered the boys to work with Master Worker Sun and the girls with Master Worker Wang. There were eight girls in my group. Master Worker Wang took us to a large room with three long tables placed end to end in the middle. She dragged in a big bamboo basket filled with red beans and spread them out evenly on the entire length of the tables.

“Your job is to pick the rat shit out of the beans so it doesn’t get into the Popsicles,” she said. “The rats crawl into the beans and eat them. You must be alert because the rat shit is similar in size, shape and
color to the beans.” She surveyed the beans on the table and picked out a red bean and another particle that looked like the bean and held them up to us. “This is a bean,” she said, showing us what she held in her right hand. “And this is rat shit,” she said, thrusting out her left hand. She threw the bean back on the table and dropped the rat shit into an old tin can next to her on the floor. “The beans are a bit redder than the shit,” she said. “So be careful. If you have doubts, keep in mind that they don’t taste the same.” After the shock of her words registered on our faces, she broke into a broad toothless grin. “Just use your fingers. That should be enough.”

“Master Worker Wang,” one of the girls said, “are there gloves for us to wear?”

“Gloves?” she snarled. “Aren’t you supposed to rid yourself of your bourgeois thinking? Do you see me wearing gloves?” She held up her bare hands. When there was no response, she left and closed the door behind her.

That was it. We stood quietly at first, looking at one another. We could hardly believe that this was what Chairman Mao wanted us to learn from workers. Separating rat shit from beans with our bare hands? Xu Yuqing broke the silence finally and ordered, “Don’t just stand there. Let’s get started. We must do what Master Worker Wang tells us to do.” She dipped her hand into the pile of beans and withdrew a fistful and began examining them. The rest of us began pawing through the beans, feeling for rat shit. Some of the girls were repelled by the exercise, but we had to do it. And we had to do it bare-handed.