My Name is Number 4 (6 page)

“Long live Chairman Mao! Long live the red sun in our hearts!” screamed the weeping Red Guards in my school when the news about Mao’s blessing was announced. Armed with Mao’s personal permission for violence and chaos, they swept from the school to “smash the Four Olds.” This vague category of new enemies comprised old culture, old customs, old habits and old ways of thinking.

A few nights later a deafening racket of gongs, drums and shrill voices drew my sisters and me out of our apartment into the streets. Wuding Road was a turmoil of milling crowds, bonfires, shouted slogans. Number 3 and I walked around uneasy but fascinated, with Number 5 between us.

We watched as the Guards renamed our street:
Wuding
(Violent Tranquillity) became
Yaowu
(Desire for Violence) to echo Mao’s call. We felt the heat of bonfires fed by books, paintings, embroidery and other “bourgeois goods” confiscated by the Red Guards when they raided local homes. Women with “bourgeois” hairstyles had their tresses hacked off in the street; men with haircuts that “looked like Kennedy” suffered the same humiliation. People wearing trousers with narrow legs were held down while the Red Guards took scissors and slashed the pants open. Those who wore pointed-toed leather
shoes had them torn off their feet and hurled into the fire. Such “rotten Western” styles, the Guards screamed, must be driven out of China.

A few days later I was stopped on my way home from school by two girls who were not of the Five Reds nor Five Blacks, but were “Grays,” children of shopkeepers, office clerks and elementary and middle-school teachers. They belonged to a Red Guard sub-unit, as they were not pure enough for the real thing.

I was fortunate, the girls brusquely informed me. The Guards were going to allow me to join an overnight parade to show Shanghai’s support for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. “Allowed” meant that I’d better turn up and take the opportunity to “educate and reform” myself. I resented their arrogance, but was secretly glad of the opportunity because I was sick of being the object of scorn and abuse at school. Maybe if I took part in the demonstration they wouldn’t call me a shitty capitalist any more.

But I was worried that I could not endure a night-long parade. My period had started the day before. What would I do if the Guards did not let me leave the parade to visit a washroom?

To make matters worse, the hot, humid August weather was producing powerful winds and thunder, declaring the arrival of a typhoon. But the word came down: even if it rained knives, the parade would go on. The demonstration
would show “our true revolutionary spirit as well as our determination to carry on the Cultural Revolution to the end.”

As evening came on under threatening skies, Great-Aunt helped me prepare. She filled my school bag with sanitary paper, adding two extra pairs of underpants in case I needed them. By the time I fought my way through the wind and driving rain to the school, my umbrella had been pulled inside out and I was drenched. I was assigned to the tail end of our parade along with my “brick inspector” sisters, a name we had given ourselves after spending so many hours under the scalding sun, staring at the wall.

We began the slow march along dark streets in pounding rain. It took half an hour to get to the main road, where the congestion of thousands of converging marchers forced us to halt. By now the rain had stopped but the wind had ripped our flimsy paper flags away and we were left holding naked bamboo sticks. Larger red flags rippled and snapped; the black ink characters on the red cotton banners dissolved into meaningless blotches.

Still sodden, we stood buffeted by the gale for more than an hour. I was becoming desperate for a washroom so I could change my sanitary pad. I finally got the attention of a Red Guard and received her permission to leave the parade and go home with a girl who lived nearby. You-mei—Young Plum Blossom—took me to her family’s apartment, which had a huge carved steel door at the lane entrance. Her elderly parents were sitting in the living room, reading, oblivious to the political and atmospheric storms outside. You-mei showed me
to a luxurious bathroom with a flush toilet, bathtub and sink. Embarrassed by the visit, I thanked them on my way out, turning my face away quickly so they would not recognize me if I met them again.

When we rejoined the still noisy parade it hadn’t advanced an inch. The downpour began again. I wished I had a raincoat like most of the others, for it was hard to keep my bedraggled umbrella over my head in the wind. Time dragged. Still we remained rooted in the middle of the dark street. I began to think my daily sweating confinement at school was preferable to this cold and hungry vigil.

After midnight cramps gripped my abdomen again, but all the sanitary packages labouriously prepared by Great-Aunt were soaked. You-mei had disappeared and I could find no one else to take me to their home. Luckily it was dark and the stains on my soaking wet trousers would not show.

By now the crowd’s enthusiasm had diminished. The flags had been rolled up and the banners put away. The chanting of slogans and shaking of fists and bamboo clubs had died down. Finally the word was passed down the stationary parade that our destination was People’s Square downtown, where we would be reviewed by the mayor and other municipal officials. The news caused an enthusiastic stir, since being received by high officials was like being blessed by the Emperor in the old days.

But to me nothing would have been more exciting than finding a toilet. I began to understand the meaning of the word pilgrimage, which I had learned from reading the classic
novel,
Journey to the West
. The night crept on; the rain beat down; the wind howled. My blood flow was heavy and I was growing weak. My teeth began to chatter and tremors shook my body.

At last, the parade began to move. We inched forward through the city streets until pale light showed in the sky.

As dawn arrived we entered People’s Square. In the distance, so small I could hardly see them, three or four figures waved at us from a raised—and roofed—reviewing stand. No standing in the wind and rain for them. Moments later, the Red Guards ran up and down the ranks, telling us that the parade was over and we could go home.

The grateful crowd rapidly dispersed in all directions to bus and streetcar stops, but the transportation system had shut down for the parade. The hordes of marchers, like deflated rubber balls filling the streets, reminded me of the words Father had added to my composition six years before: “The crowd surged like a wave moving through water.” Only now the water was a violent and bitter sea.

Exhausted by kilometres of marching and standing all through the rainy windy night, I began the three-kilometre walk home, chilled to the bone, drained by fatigue and loss of blood. When I woke up it was late afternoon and I found myself lying half on, half off Great-Aunt’s bed in a pool of blood, my clothes still drenched with rain and blood from the night before. I dragged myself from the bed in a panic. It was no use: the blood had long since seeped through the straw mat and stained the bedding.

“Never mind, Ah Si,” Great-Aunt waved off my apologies. “You have a hot bath and I’ll take care of this.”

Number 1 carried the water from downstairs and Number 3 brought me dry clothes. The hot bath was heavenly. After I had finished soaking, Great-Aunt prepared a cup of boiled ginger soup with brown sugar. I didn’t tell her that I’d had to throw away the soaked and useless sanitary paper.

CHAPTER FIVE

W
hen I returned to school in the first week of September, the Red Guards from Beijing had vanished. Nevertheless, the schoolyard looked uninviting, for the typhoon had swept almost all the posters to the ground, blocking the sewers with them, leaving puddles here and there dyed black with ink. This institution that should have been filled with happy schoolgirls at the beginning of a new school year had, in the past few months, been turned into a hateful vindictive place. And now it resembled a ghost town.

I turned and went home. Now, all of us except Number 2 had become idlers, and our lane was full of school kids just hanging around with nothing to do. I was glad to stay at home. But good things never last long. Late one afternoon when most families were preparing supper, we were once
again drawn from our kitchens by the clamour of gongs and the racket of drums.

Some Beijing Red Guards led a group of a dozen local youths into our lane, marching slowly, beating their drums and gongs, shouting slogans against capitalists and counterrevolutionaries, checking the building numbers. Many of the onlookers—among them Boss Luo’s wife from the building next to us, and my friend Ying-ying’s mother—slunk away, no doubt hoping the raid would not be aimed at them.

To my relief, the noisy procession passed our door and stopped in front of Building Number 45. “Yao family! Show yourselves!” the leader shouted. Some Guards began to paste
da-zi-bao
on the laneway walls; others pushed into the Yaos’ apartment, amid shouts of anger and terror.

The raids on our lane had been launched. In the days that followed, the neighbourhood was thronged with Red Guards. Old Yang, a worker at home with an injury, served as our information source, continuously updating his statistics. “So far, eighteen families have been searched. In Building 75 the Red Guards have taken the roof-drains apart to see if gold bars were hidden there. Now they are going through the roof tiles, looking for guns.”

Our neighbours—and we—were terrified. Even a toy drum beating could halt a conversation. The raids spread to the houses near us, then right next door. I watched the attack through Great-Aunt’s bedroom window as she sat on the bed mending socks. The Guards poured ink into dresser drawers and over chesterfields, enraged because they hadn’t found the
gold they thought would be there. They built a bonfire in the sky-well and burned books and paintings, old and new, hurling them into the flames from the upper windows. The senseless destruction horrified me. I wondered whether Great-Aunt still believed that if a person had done nothing wrong she had nothing to fear.

“Ah Si! Ah Si!” Number 1 shouted, bursting into the bedroom and slamming the windows shut before my eyes. “Come with me, now!”

My two sisters stood grim and silent in the front room. My parents’ pride and joy had been our five antique Ming dynasty paintings, each more than two metres long and half a metre wide, done in traditional style. They were watercolours, mounted on silk, with rosewood scrolls at top and bottom. Four were landscapes depicting spring, summer, autumn and winter. The fifth, the centrepiece, portrayed three tigers so fierce and realistic they looked as though they might climb down from the wall and prowl the room. For my entire life they had hung on our walls. No one had ever thought about selling them to bring in much-needed cash.

Now the paintings were spread out on the floor. I looked questioningly at my brother. He was twenty years old now, the head of the family.

“These are the only things the Red Guards could punish us for,” Number 1 said, his face bleak, his voice flat and determined.

We looked at each other.

“What would the Red Guards come here for? To look for gold?” I scoffed.

“If they do look for gold and jewels in the home of a welfare family it will show their stupidity,” he responded, “but these paintings are antiques. They belong to the Four Olds. We have to show them a clean house because if they get angry at us there is no telling what might happen. People have been beaten to death for less.”

Suddenly, I knew what we were going to do. Nobody wanted to say the first word, nor make the first move.

Great-Aunt broke the tense silence. “I will dump the pieces into the garbage bin after dark.” She did not say what we all knew: as a lifelong worker, technically independent and separate from us children of capitalists, she was safe from attack. “Be careful,” she added. “The Red Guards will not let you off easily. Do what you must and let me know when you’re finished.” She returned to her room and waited there.

“All right,” Number 1 said, “one painting for each. Number 2 will be home soon to help.”