God's Double Agent (4 page)

“We can’t stay together,” my sister said, getting up and dusting off her knees. “I’m going to go find help in the next village. Go home to check on Mom, while I see if another doctor will have mercy on us.” The nearest barefoot doctor was three miles away, in my eldest sister’s village.

I watched her hurry away as I ran back home to Mom. My heart pounded with every step. But when I opened the gate, I stopped right beside large bales of hay stacked for winter. What would I find when I went inside? Would my mother be dead? If not, how could I break the news that the doctor wouldn’t be bothered with her because we couldn’t pay?

Overcome with emotion and fear, I stood completely still. Confucius had hailed from my Shandong region more than two thousand years ago, but his philosophies offered no personal
god to whom I could appeal. Mao’s communism certainly didn’t allow for any divine helpers. The only “faith” we had in the village was a collection of superstitions, and we’d tried them all.

For example, when both my parents were bedridden they asked my sister to take a glass bottle and walk ten miles to a mountainous area. There, she took the lid off the bottle, put water in it, knelt on the mountain, and prayed to the gods along with thousands of other people also desperately seeking a solution to their various problems. She burned incense and even money to appease the gods. Then she explained our predicament to whatever supernatural deity might’ve been floating by.

“Mom has lung disease; my dad can’t walk,” Qinghua had said. She hoped a god might hear her and, according to superstition, send a sign from heaven by dropping something into the water: a twig, ashes, anything that wasn’t there when she arrived. She prayed mightily, and opened her eyes. To her delight, a miracle had occurred—there were ashes floating in the bottle! Quickly, she put on the top to protect the magic water and ran home to my parents. “Drink!” she yelled as she pushed the bottle into their faces.

Of course, as promising as dirty water in a bottle sounds, it didn’t have the healing powers we’d hoped. And so Mom tried other superstitious rituals. She had a ritual that consisted of bowing down to the floor, flat on her face, seven times in a row. Then she got up, took seven steps, and did it again. Starting at our home, she’d sometimes make it all the way out to the street, bowing over and over. When she got home, her head would sometimes be bleeding because she bowed so low and with so much passion.

Apparently, the gods rewarded her piety with pain.

It all seemed slightly odd to me. Of course, if you have an open bottle of water near thousands of people burning incense, you might have some sort of ashes fall into the bottle. But I never
said, “The emperor has no clothes.” I wanted it to work. Faith, no matter what its object, might help a bit.

As I stood next to the hay, however, I knew in my heart that the superstitions were powerless. That’s when my mother’s proverb came to mind: “Even a blind donkey can find its way home because of the guidance of heaven.” After years of hearing her say this, I wondered if maybe—just maybe—there was someone in heaven who might actually be able to guide and protect me.

For the second time that day, I fell to my knees. But this time I wasn’t asking a heartless barefoot doctor for help. Right there, beside the hay bales, I called out to my
tian
, which means “heaven,” and
laoye
, which means “grandpa,” to indicate respect for elder people.

“Heavenly Grandpa,” I said, “I’m so scared, and I don’t want my mom to die. Please . . .” I wasn’t even sure of what to say, but I hoped whoever was up there might extend his hand to help, if I asked earnestly. “Please help my mother.”

It was my first prayer.

After getting up, I grabbed my shovel and went into my mother’s room. She was in even worse condition than when we left her, so I sat by her side, shoveling up mucus and spit, until my sister came back. When she returned with a barefoot doctor in tow, I cried out in relief.

He rushed to my mother’s side, gave her some sort of herbal remedy, and told us how to take care of her. He didn’t have much to offer, but we obeyed every one of his instructions to the letter. He was all we had. My mother amazingly recovered and somehow managed to survive this episode.

Deep down, I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe my secret “Heavenly Grandpa” had something to do with it.

3

“We can’t afford to do both,” my dad said to my mom with resignation in his voice. My parents had been discussing the educational options for Qinghua and me for the past hour, and we were eavesdropping from the next room.

When I graduated from elementary school, the province changed how they schooled children. In an effort to get the brightest students all in one place, they decided to send the highest scoring students in all of the villages to a central location. I was honored to be the only student selected from my village. Not only would this help me on my journey toward wealth and respect, I also was pleased I’d receive a better education than the bullies who had tormented me in my village. The only problem was that this would be more expensive for my family and we simply couldn’t afford the cost of the dorm and the necessary food vouchers for daily meals.

“I’ll stay here,” Qinghua said as she edged her way into the bedroom.

“What are you saying?” I asked, grabbing her arm.

“You’re smarter than I am,” she said. “And I’m a girl. I can work in the fields to make some extra money while you go to school.”

Her voice cracked with emotion as she said the words. I let her generosity wash over me before I responded.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded, and with that very slight gesture of her head, the future of my family was placed squarely on my shoulders. My sister’s willingness to sacrifice for me was deeply touching.

I soon packed what few things I had, said goodbye to my family, and headed off to school. When I arrived, I knew my grades had to make my parents proud and justify my sister’s sacrificial generosity.

Being away at school gave me a new perspective of the world. Of my forty new classmates, who were from all over the county, some were wealthy while others were even poorer than my family. Getting to know them allowed me to see past the narrow confines of my village. Suddenly the world seemed bigger, with more possibilities. I lived in a dormitory about fifteen miles from my home. During the week, Qinghua worked in the fields with our half-brother. My parents couldn’t even afford to buy her a pair of shoes, so she had to wear some cheap water shoes. She didn’t like to be seen in them, but every week she walked in those uncomfortable shoes all the way to my school to bring me food.

There was no phone, of course, so I looked forward to seeing her to get updates from home.

Will my mom survive her lung disease this week?
I wondered.
Or will she maybe just give up and kill herself?

These questions would come to me, unbidden, as I sat at my desk and the teacher droned on about mathematics or science. As much as I wanted to pay attention, I couldn’t remove the questions from my mind. Thankfully, my teachers didn’t notice my distraction and I managed to do very well academically. Once again I was appointed class monitor, so I kept my eye out for the other students. Because this was a boarding school, many of us were learning to be independent for the first time in our lives. It was simply hard to be so far away from home. Most of the time, everyone could maintain composure, but one day a fellow student began crying in the middle of class.

“We can’t afford this school anymore,” she sobbed. She was the fifth of seven children, and her parents could barely feed their family. “My mom ordered me to quit school.”

I’m not sure what my life would’ve been like if I’d been born wealthy. However, growing up as the son of two disabled peasants, my heart was acutely pricked by stories of poverty. I knew poverty was the main ailment of our nation. Since education was the only route away from a poor peasant life, I couldn’t bear to think about my classmate being pushed back to her village, forever destined to that hungry existence.

But how could I—a mere student—do anything about her situation? If Qinghua didn’t greatly sacrifice for me, bringing me my weekly food, I’d have nothing. I certainly didn’t have extra food or money to donate to anyone else. Though I didn’t know what to do, I knew I had to do something. The very next week, I organized a team of classmates and traveled to her village. I didn’t have a well-strategized plan to make sure she could stay at school. In fact, when we knocked on her parents’ door, and they answered, I did the only thing I knew to do.

I begged.

“Please don’t let her quit,” I said as soon as I saw them. They were simple, dressed in old clothes. I told them how well their daughter was doing in school, and tried to explain that this was her only chance at a more prosperous future. Slowly, as we talked, the mother’s face softened. Sensing an opening, I made a solemn promise. I had no idea how to keep it, but I made it nonetheless.

“We will take care of her,” I said, motioning to my fellow classmates. “If you let her come back to school, you don’t have to worry anymore about costs.”

That was a deal they couldn’t refuse. They thanked us, and we jubilantly rode our bicycles back to school. With every push of the pedal, however, my mind raced as I tried to figure out how on earth I was going to afford this.

“Will you donate a few food tickets to help my friend get through the school year?” I asked every student I came across when we arrived back at school.

Amazingly, the coupons came in every week. We had enough food for her, and she was so touched by our efforts that she developed a crush on me. I had to spend the rest of the year avoiding her. Her affection made me so nervous!

When I was in senior high, however, another female student in my school faced an even worse situation. She was alone in the world. Both her mom and dad had died, so she was being taken care of by a stepmother and a stepfather. Just like Cinderella, she wasn’t treated as well as the biological children of her stepparents. She really didn’t belong to anyone, and her family looked at her as a drain on their resources. When she went off to school, they didn’t send her any food or supplies. When she came home, they bullied and even abused her.

One day, during her senior year of high school, I saw her crying, holding a tiny bag of crumbs.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“My stepparents won’t send me any food, and I’m hungry,” she said. “Plus, they’re making me quit school,” she said, barely able to get the words out.

It was so close to graduation, it was tragic to take her out of school. Since she wouldn’t return home to loving family, school really was the only rope she could grab to pull herself out of her terrible situation.

“Go get dressed in your finest clothes,” I said to a small group of my classmates. “And meet me back here on your bicycles. We’ve got a mission.”

Once again, I didn’t really have a plan, but I knew I couldn’t plead like I did with the other parents. This required strength. As I pedaled to her village and saw her small house off in the distance, an idea came to me.

“Okay,” I said as I gathered everyone together for a quick
strategy session outside the house. Thankfully, there was a tall and relatively mature student in our group. I pointed to him. “You are now the headmaster. You,” I pointed to a shorter, solemn-looking kid, “are the classroom monitor.”

“What?” he protested. “I’ve never been a monitor!”

“Well, for the next hour you are.” I smiled.

I did a fast head-to-toe assessment of the last few in our group. Even in our best clothes, we still didn’t look that impressive. “Stand tall,” I said to another classmate. “You need to look as old as possible, because you’re going to be the school teacher. And you,” I pointed to the only guy left, “will be the deputy.”

After I assigned everyone a role to play, we rode to her door and forcefully knocked. Her stepparents’ eyes were wide when they opened the door and saw this group of relatively well-dressed strangers.

“We are from your daughter’s school,” I said in a very authoritative tone. The years of being awakened by the Communist Party secretary yelling at my neighbor were coming in handy. “And we need to have a serious talk about your student.”

The mother studied me as I spoke, and I wondered if she was onto our ruse. Since it was too late to change the plans, I swallowed hard and continued. “Allow me to introduce the officials who’ve traveled here to talk to you. Please meet the headmaster, the deputy, the class monitor, and the girl’s teacher.”

I paused to let the severity of the situation sink in for them. Only a very serious offense would merit a visit from all of these educational dignitaries.

“We have heard reports that she is abused at home and is going to quit school,” I said. The stepparents, who were peasants and therefore not used to dealing with the Communist establishment, looked terrified. The woman who’d treated our classmate so severely suddenly held on to the side of the door in what seemed to be fear and intimidation. “Your treatment of her is not acceptable,” I continued. “She is your daughter, and
she has rights. You cannot starve her by withholding food. If you have difficulty, the school will help,” I said. Then, I added an ominous warning. “But if you make her miserable, you will be held responsible.”

After a few days, the girl received word from home. Her stepparents had a change of heart and she could finish her education. To make it even better, food started arriving and she could study without the distraction of hunger. I was brimming with joy because we’d saved a friend from a lifetime of poverty. When I told my sister and mother about it, they laughed. “Oh, who will you take care of next week?” they joked. “
Cao xin ren
,” my mom said, which meant, “You take responsibility in your heart.” In other words, she could tell that I was burdened by other people’s sorrow, so she teased me by calling me “Heart Burden Man.”

I was sensitive, but my Gaomi City high school was run like a military school. Every day, for three years, we began at 6:30 in the morning. Dressed in athletic attire, we were made to run laps around the sports field. Only after we had our physical activity were we able to begin our intellectual pursuits. Our headmaster was known as a harsh disciplinarian who really enforced the rules. In spite of this, he treated me with a lot of respect and loved to talk to me about government and world events.