My Name is Number 4 (13 page)

Second, the winter was cold there, the notice said. There was no indoor heating system. Bring warm clothes and extra bedding.

Early next morning I left home, glad to escape the funereal silence. I turned in my
hu-kou
and ration coupons at the local police station and was issued food coupons valid anywhere in the country along with special certificates for a pair of rubber shoes, one cotton-blend blanket, and a mosquito net, and for raw cotton and fabric to make clothes and bedding.

When I got home, Number 2 was waiting for me. We sat down at the dinner table and he handed me one hundred yuan, a king’s ransom, more money than any of us had ever seen in our lives.

“I borrowed it from my factory,” he said, “so you can buy anything you need or want.”

I was moved to tears. It would take him years to pay back such a huge sum. I didn’t know how to thank him. And at the
same time, staring at the money through tear-filled eyes, I realized with an awful finality that I was going away from my family, from the apartment where I was born and raised, for the rest of my life.

“Don’t cry, Ah Si,” he said. “Everything will be all right. Come on, Number 1 is waiting to take you to the stores.”

Throughout the shopping trip with my eldest brother I hardly paid attention as he led me through crowded stores and purchased cotton ticking and cloth to make winter clothing. But as we passed one store window what caught my eye, of all things, was a pair of colourful nylon socks, smooth and stretchy and looking like they would fit comfortably. After years of wearing socks mended so often that I had to wear shoes at least a size too large, they seemed to me the height of luxury. I asked Number 1 to buy me a pair. He bought me two.

Mother used to say that “far away relatives are not as dear as close neighbours,” and she was absolutely right, for our neighbours pitched in to help me prepare for my exile. Mrs. Yan was burning the midnight oil making my padded coat and pants.

“The farm is called Da Feng, isn’t it?” she said. “It must be bloody cold there!” She thought Da Feng meant Big Wind because
feng
, meaning wind, sounds the same
as feng
, for harvest.

Ying-ying’s mother’s support was also practical. She gave me two rolls of high-quality toilet paper, white as snow and soft as cotton, which she had bought in the special Overseas Chinese store before the Cultural Revolution. She told me that when I had my period, if I had to walk a lot I should wrap this tissue around the rough sanitary paper.

Great-Aunt kept herself busy all the time, so busy she said she didn’t have time to talk to me. That was typical. Whenever she was sad or angry, silence was her response. She sat in front of the coal stove hour after hour, day after day, roasting flour in a wok, stirring it carefully so it wouldn’t burn. Roast flour was cheap and handy, and when mixed with boiled water it swelled up and filled the stomach. If a little sugar was added, it became a treat. But the procedure took tremendous time and patience and I was shocked to see how much Great-Aunt had prepared for me. She had used up all her food coupons, plus some she had borrowed from neighbours, to buy the flour. That too was typical.

In the following days and at nights as we lay side by side, I waited for Great-Aunt to tell me to watch out for myself because I would be alone, and that she would miss me. I yearned for her to say that somehow we would make do without my welfare stipend or a job for Number 3 and that I wouldn’t have to leave home after all.

By that point in my life, I should have known that hope itself was a fantasy.

PART TWO

DA FENG PRISON FARM

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A
fter an overnight passage on the ship,
The East Is Red, Number 8
, a flaking hulk crammed with miserable teenagers, I climbed aboard a decrepit bus to begin the long ride north of the Yangtze River to the prison farm. The fields around the city of Nangtong in Jiangsu Province soon fell away behind our convoy and we entered a flat and not quite believable landscape, swept by wind so strong it forced its way around the edges of the windows into the buses. For kilometre after kilometre there was not a tree, a building or a human being to be seen under the grey November sky. Raised in one of the country’s largest cities, I had never seen a street empty of people, not even in the middle of the night. I was no expert in country living, but in the countryside surrounding Qingyang, where, before Father’s operation, we had travelled
every year to visit Grandfather, I had always seen farmers working in fields divided by narrow paddy dikes, or walking the dirt roads. There, even in winter, the densely populated land was green and the air heavy with humidity and the rich odours of growing plants. This emptiness could mean only one thing: the soil was no good for farming.

“House, house!” someone yelled from the front of the bus. We had been rattling along for five hours. Through the dust-coated window I saw a cluster of thatch-roofed buildings. The bus turned off the road and bumped through a village on a rutted track. It turned onto a wider road blanketed with white powder. The unfamiliar substance also covered the fields, and seemed like a permanent feature.

The buses ahead of us began to peel off onto narrow dirt roads to the left and right. Mine rumbled across a wooden bridge and pulled up in the midst of a cluster of wattle buildings thatched with rice straw. Everyone fell silent, staring. Around the buildings, desolation: flat, dry, empty fields. I told myself that this must be just a temporary stop.

When the door flapped open, letting in the chilly wind, a middle-aged man stepped up into the bus. “Hello, revolutionary comrades!” he greeted us in a Su Bei accent, using a term that had been out of date since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. “Welcome to the Number One Brigade of Xia Ming Sub-farm of Da Feng Labour Camp … er, Da Feng Farm,” he corrected himself hastily. “Xia Ming is one of five sub-farms; each has six brigades. My name is Chang Wen, and I am the leader of this brigade.”

Reluctantly I stepped down from the bus with the others. The welcoming team consisted of Lao Chang’s assistant, Lao Deng—a short old man whose mouth and eye-corners pointed up, even when he wasn’t smiling; their wives; the doctor; and the accountant. The latter, a tall skinny man, shook hands with each of us, bowing deeply as he did so and smiling, showing his cigarette-stained teeth. Shaking hands was a novel experience for me, as it suggested I was now an adult.

I looked around, searching for some sign of scar-faced criminals, high walls or stout buildings with barred windows, but saw nothing out of the ordinary, just a tiny village with dirt roads and pathways. Dr. Wang, the youngest of the greeting party, whose sharp, bright eyes reminded me of my grandfather, asked the male students to follow him to their dormitory. Lao Bai, Lao Chang’s wife, a chubby middle-aged woman with a piercing voice, called for the females.

“Is this where we’re going to stay?” someone shouted from the men’s dorm.

Our dorm was, like all the buildings, single-story, made of wattle—woven sticks and straw plastered with clay and mud—with a thatched roof and dirt floor. It was on the south side of the village, separated from the men’s dorm by a pathway and from the empty fields by a ditch.

“Come on,” Lao Bai said. “Pay no attention to him. Come in and have a look.”

We filed through the narrow door. My first impression was of heavy odours of dampness, lime, smoke and rotten rice straw. The building was like an oversized train coach, about fifteen
metres long but only six wide. Though it was mid-afternoon, three naked bulbs fought to dispel the gloom. There was a door at each end and three small windows on each side. The dirt floor had been packed hard by many feet; the walls were newly whitewashed, but brown clay was already oozing through. Along each wall ran a low platform of undressed boards supported by sharpened tree branches driven into the dirt and covered with malodorous straw. This was our bed.

As if she had seen into my mind, Lao Bai said cheerfully, “It won’t look so bad when you’ve all spread out your bedding. You city girls are good at decorating, aren’t you? Soon this place will look like home.”

After a short but determined tussle during which many angled to be with their schoolmates or near the windows and everybody fought to stay away from the doors, territory was marked out by the small canvas shoulder bags we all carried. Lao Bai then led us to the canteen on the north edge of the village for a late lunch. Before entering, I looked around for a tap to wash my hands. I spied half a dozen water jars outside a small building, each one as high as my chest and as wide as my outstretched arms. Every one of them was filled with clean water, though it smelled of mud. This shack must be a pump house, I thought, and wondered how I could wash my hands without contaminating the whole jar.

A white-haired man appeared from behind a hut, where he had evidently been working, for his hands were black.

“Can I help you, young miss?”

I explained my predicament.

“Come with me,” he said quietly, and led me through the door of the shack. On the floor was a basin with soap and a towel beside it. He motioned me to use them, then left me alone. Outside again, I scooped a basin full of water from one of the jars, thinking that this must be the village’s fresh water supply.

Once inside the canteen I was asked by several students how I had managed to wash, since none of our luggage had arrived. I told them, adding that the basin, towel and soap could be used by them too, for the old uncle seemed kind enough.

“Young lady, be careful of what you are saying,” Lao Bai cut in, scowling. “You should call no one here uncle or aunt, nor go to their places and use their things. Only those who greeted you on the bus today should be addressed. You must have no contact with anyone else.” She lowered her voice dramatically. “You wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that ‘old uncle’ if you knew what he had done before Liberation.”

Her words sent a bolt of fear through me. Had I been speaking to one of the criminals? Was he a murderer?

“You, all of you,” Lao Bai went on, “stay away from them. You are all young girls. You never know what those curs are up to. If you have to, just call them
Wei
, nothing else.”

Wei
means “Hey, you!” in Chinese, or “Hello” while talking on the telephone. We had been taught all our lives to call a man Uncle or Old Uncle, depending on his age; a woman was Auntie or Old Auntie. To address anyone older than you, even a stranger, by saying only “Wei” was disrespectful.

Lao Bai’s warning had destroyed my appetite. I repeatedly stole glances at the men standing behind the counter, the ones
who had served up our food. No wonder they stood there like blocks of wood, expressionless. No wonder they had said nothing to us and avoided eye contact. But if they were as dangerous and untrustworthy as Lao Bai said, why should we trust the food they prepared?

At a meeting that evening Lao Chang cautioned us never to use the public toilet at night. He didn’t specify whether he was afraid we would be molested by prisoners or fall into the open manure pit beside the unlit latrine. His warning didn’t help my attempts to fall asleep. Around me the other girls talked, sobbed or cried out in their sleep. I was utterly discouraged. I felt as if we were all little lambs in the jungle, waiting to be slaughtered.