Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (35 page)

One evening he stood near the window, catching the last light of the day, holding a volume of poems in one hand and gesturing with the other as he read:

My heart crept into my throat. I forgot the fatigue of the day and the hopelessness of life. His gentle expressive voice lifted me and carried me away. I dreamed with my eyes wide open. I recited from memory:

Yiping watched me as I spoke. I was so embarrassed I had to turn and face the window as my words spilled out.

When I was finished, he began to recite from memory:

He momentarily forgot the rest of the popular Li Bai poem. I waited while he rolled his eyes, trying to remember. I began to say them, and he remembered, and we finished the poem together:

“Li Bai must have passed this way,” he said. I cleared my throat, blushed, and told him I agreed.

When we spoke about growing up, I learned that Yiping and I had shared similar experiences and had many common emotions and memories. We were lonely and homesick. Our souls had been tattered by the years. Our childhoods had been stolen. We comforted each other with our words. Yet we had to be cautious. We knew that in the past, passion was a political sentiment—a feeling we feared when we detected it in the voices or the faces of others. Passion was the private monopoly of those who persecuted others. We had experienced only sorrow, timidity, fear, frustration and regret. But now, here, we sensed a passion in our hearts. We hardly dared look at each other for fear of bursting into flames. We were all embers beneath our skin. Yet we kept a wall between us. We did not touch. We did not hold a glance too long. We knew when to stop. It was not easy. But we knew and we kept our distance.

I looked forward to Yiping’s visits. I combed my hair, washed my hands and face before he arrived. Cuihua laughed at my giddiness. I sensed she was growing jealous, and I’d read that jealousy always led to serious trouble. I decided to be even more careful about the time I spent alone with Yiping.

One afternoon when I was returning home from working in the fields, I heard crying and screaming. I ran the last short distance to our hut. Cuihua was in the midst of a circle of people, rolling around on the ground, her fists doubled up like a baby’s. She was screaming in a desperate high-pitched voice.

“What’s wrong?” I asked a woman.

“Cuihua fell into the latrine,” she said.

In the mountains, rather than simply digging a hole in the ground for the latrine, as they did in the lowlands, they sank a large jar in the ground with the lip extending about half a foot above the surface. They placed two planks across the opening. Relieving yourself was a balancing act. You had to stand over the jar with one foot on each plank. If you shifted too much one way or another, the plank moved and you might lose your balance. I always found it frightening to use the device; every time I squatted over the jar, I was afraid.

Cuihua’s long hair was caked with raw sewage. She was embarrassed about falling in and having to summon several villagers to fish her out. I found the scene comic and tragic at the same time. The villagers were all talking and laughing. Team Leader Huang appeared and asked what was going on. He stepped to the center of the amused circle and said, “Cuihua, get up and wash yourself. Everyone knows you’re a city girl. In the countryside we get dirty now and then.”

“Get dirty now and then!” Cuihua screamed and struggled to her feet. “Look at me! This isn’t dirt! This is the shit from your villagers. I can’t live here anymore. I have no face here. I might as well die!”

“You’re not going to die,” Team Leader Huang said.

“I want to go home to recover from this, Team Leader. I need two weeks. I deserve it. I’ve earned it.”

Team Leader Huang scowled at her but was not unsympathetic. “Okay,” he said. “You can have one week away.”

Cuihua broke into a big smile and hurried toward the river to wash. The next morning as I left to join a group of women picking tea leaves higher in the mountains, Cuihua walked down the mountain carrying her bag, singing to herself.

Several weeks each year the villagers picked tea leaves. As I worked beside them, I saw how incomparably beautiful the mountains were. Thousands of red azaleas bloomed on the adjacent slopes. As the sun crossed the sky, the peaks and valleys in the distance shone as if they had been splashed with fresh blood. From ancient times the tea from these mountains had been offered annually as a tribute to the emperors.
Traditionally, it was harvested only by women. I arose before sunrise and climbed with the others high into the mountains. Each of us carried a bamboo basket to hold the leaves we picked. We gathered just the top three leaves of each branch of the bushes. Because of my dexterity, I was able to pick with both hands, and this amazed the others. We worked all day but still gathered only about a pound of leaves each.

After five days of this work, I became increasingly weak. I fell far behind the others climbing up to the tea bushes. I had to sit down and rest many times during the day. On Saturday I stayed in bed rather than report for work. No one missed me. I stayed in bed the next day. I didn’t cook for myself and I grew even weaker. I ran out of water and was too ill to go to the well. I became dehydrated. I wondered when someone might notice my absence. Cuihua was supposed to return on Sunday, but she didn’t. And she didn’t come back the next day. On Tuesday afternoon Yiping stopped by. He hadn’t seen me in over a week. He said he thought I’d gone home when Cuihua left. He was shocked to see my condition.

He hurried to the well to retrieve fresh water. I was so thirsty I begged him to give me a sip before he boiled it. He comforted me and told me to wait. He built a fire in the stove, boiled the water for me and cooked rice porridge. After I sipped some water I managed to sit up in bed. I had little appetite but he encouraged me to eat. He sat on the edge of the bed and spooned warm porridge into my mouth. When he touched my neck and looked into my eyes, I found my affection for him deepening. I had fallen in love. It was a wonderful feeling. At the same time, I knew that it was forbidden. After I’d eaten, he moved to a stool and read poems to me. He returned to his home that night and came back to care for me the next day.

I was concerned that Cuihua had not returned, but I valued the time I could spend with Yiping as he nursed me back to health.

I could tell by the way he looked at me, by the selection of the poetry he read, by the way he lingered in the hut into the night, that without saying so directly, he had fallen in love, too. I sat silently on a
stool and watched and listened to him read, noticing the way he gently turned the page, the way he moved his arm or his fingers in making a particular point. The music of his voice enchanted me. He could read my heart in my eyes, and I read his feelings in his words.

Yet neither of us knew what to do next. A growing affection between us was doubly bad because we shared a common background—a black family. If we were discovered or even suspected of crossing forbidden lines of emotional attachment, our punishment was likely to be far more severe than that of children of the red families. We heard of the offspring of red families in the mountains who fell in love and married and settled down and lived like peasants. But they fully expected that as soon as the political winds shifted, they would be the first to return to the city. We knew that if we ever settled down in the mountains, all hope was lost of ever getting out.

Yiping and I talked sometimes in a fanciful way about returning to our families and even going to college. We assured each other that our time in these mountains, contrary to what we’d been told, would someday end. Our real future, our actual lives, awaited us beyond the mountains back in the city. We also knew without saying so that romance would surely spoil those dreams. We stayed close yet also at a guarded distance. With others around, we separated and blended in so as not to arouse suspicion. When Party members were present, we didn’t even look at each other.

Yiping lived with two other educated youths from Wuhu. One day after the harvest, when we didn’t have to work, Cuihua and I visited them. After sharing tea, we decided to climb to the top of the highest peak in the surrounding mountains. We packed some steamed rice and poured a thermos of tea, and one of the boys borrowed an ancient hunting gun from one of the villagers. He said he thought he might be able to shoot a bird at some higher altitude and we’d all feast on it.

The ascent was more difficult than I expected. The path rose steeply after a short distance. There were places where we had to proceed on all fours. I was frightened by the heights. I fell behind. Yiping
came back for me. He took my hand and helped me climb and advised, “Don’t look down.”

I was petrified by the narrow steep path. “I don’t think I can continue,” I told Yiping.

“Of course you can,” he calmly assured me. “Just hold my hand and you’ll be safe.”

And so I grasped his hand tightly and looked only at him and moved on. We climbed through a thin mist. Everything behind us was blotted out. When we reached the top of the mountain, the others were waiting for us. The view was truly breathtaking. We could see for miles and miles over the tops of the clouds.

It was an enchanted kingdom. Below us on other peaks we saw flowers in bloom, patches of pink and yellow and red. Birds were wheeling beneath us, unaware that we stood above them. There was no one in the world but the five of us. The sky above was blue, and the white clouds were huge and thick and floated past us like continents. No one spoke for a long time. Cuihua finally turned to say something to me but stopped and gave me a forbidding look. I realized I was still holding Yiping’s hand. I immediately let go and stepped away from him.

We lay down in a circle, our heads nearly touching, and stared up at the endless blue. I closed my eyes and breathed the cool limpid air. The only sound was the gentle breeze whistling over the rocks. Suddenly there was a monstrous explosion nearby. I sat up, my heart pounding. “What’s that?” I asked.

The others laughed. One of the boys had fired the gun.

“Look how scared you are,” Cuihua said. “Did you pee in your pants?”

I blushed. “I’m not scared. I was just surprised.”

“If you’re not scared,” one of the boys said, “then you shoot the gun.” He reloaded it and handed it to me. It was heavy and I had difficulty lifting the barrel. He showed me where to put my hands and how to aim and pull the trigger.

“There,” he said, pointing at a bird floating below us. “Shoot the bird.”

But I was in no mood to kill any animal on this day. So I aimed at a cloud and closed my eyes and pulled the trigger. There was a loud blast, a flicker of fire, and a powerful recoil. I stumbled and fell over backward. I dropped the gun and screamed as though I’d shot myself.

“Well, you scared a lot of birds,” one of the boys said, laughing. “But we won’t have any for dinner.”

Scores of birds in the crags and rocks and bamboo took flight at the sound of the gun. A huge eagle flew up and circled us. It was so beautiful, gliding through the sky. It soared and then swooped down and floated on invisible currents of wind.

On the spot I made up a poem and recited it.

The others listened quietly. Yiping said, “Such sad words spoil a beautiful day.”

“Yimao, you’re making me cry,” Cuihua said. “We should forget our worries today.”

One of the boys added, “It’s too melancholy, Yimao. How about this?”

We laughed. The somber mood created by my words dissolved. We sat together, our toes touching, and shared the rice and passed around the cup of hot tea. There were few words as we ate. We were deeply affected by our surroundings and our lighthearted and careless comradeship.

“We’d better start down before it gets dark,” Yiping said as we finished the rice.

Descending the mountain was even more difficult than coming up. The mist and clouds had thickened and I could barely see the path beneath my feet. Once more Yiping held my hand and encouraged me. When we reached the grassy slopes we sat and slid part of the way down. By the time we arrived at our huts, it was dark. I was exhausted and tired and sore. The next day Cuihua and I climbed to the terraced rice fields with a team of workers. We were so tired we could not keep up with the others. Team Leader Huang asked: “What were the five educated youths doing yesterday? You climb to the top of the mountain without doing anything productive. You don’t cut bamboo, you don’t collect wood or mushrooms. Why in the world do you waste your days like that?”

It would have been impossible to explain to him what we’d done, how we felt. So we responded with silence.