Across a Green Ocean (20 page)

My family lived next door to Han’s; maybe many years ago we were related. All the children played with one another and blended in, until you couldn’t tell which family they belonged to. Han and I were both the youngest sons in our families, he of four siblings and I of five. Together, we faced down our older brothers, who were always beating up on us, and our older sisters, who were always scolding us for something we had done by accident, like muddying up the floors they had just cleaned. Whenever that happened, they blamed both of us equally, and we received the same amount of scolding and the same number of smacks. They called us two jumping beans, both halves of the same chestnut.

We did not look the same, though. Han had an open, inviting face and a mobile mouth that easily laughed. I was quieter, spoke less, and had ears that stuck out. Han was also taller and bigger than I was, and when he outgrew a jacket or a pair of dungarees, his mother would give them to my mother for me to wear. We all did this, so that by the time the clothes were passed down from the oldest to the youngest child, they were in disrepair. Han always tried to outgrow his clothes faster, so that they would be in better condition for me to wear.

We were the same age and in the same class at school, with me always sitting in the seat behind Han. I have to admit that Han was better at his schoolwork. He was quicker witted and always seemed to know what the teachers wanted to hear. At the same time, he could mock the teachers behind their backs, and they would never catch him. When we were ten years old, I made a special enemy of our history teacher, Teacher Mu. She was a spinster and looked about fifty years old, even though we all knew she must’ve been around thirty. But although she seemed ancient, she was strong. She would beat students with a paddle if they did not answer questions correctly or spoke out of turn. Other teachers used corporal punishment as well, but they were usually men. Somehow, being beaten by a female teacher was more of an insult.

One day, Teacher Mu was giving a lesson on the history of sanitation. According to the textbook, in 1952, Mao Zedong launched a patriotic sanitary campaign against the bacteriological warfare of the United States. People’s homes were checked by a special sanitation committee to make sure they were adequately clean. Patriotic citizens had good hygiene, and they learned to brush their teeth twice a day and to wash their hands before meals and after using the toilet. Teacher Mu made it sound like before the 1950s, no one did this.

To show the importance of sanitation, Liu Shaoqi, who later became chairman and then was denounced as a traitor, paid a visit to a city in the interior of the country. He greeted people from all walks of life, from the mayor to the night soil collector. You know what night soil is, right? It’s what’s taken from the outhouses after people are done doing their business. The night soil collector puts it in a cart and dumps it outside of the city in the fields, where it is used as fertilizer. Then the vegetables that are grown in the fields are taken back into the city to be sold. That’s why it’s important to wash your vegetables carefully before you cook them. Collecting night soil is still done all over China today.

Anyhow, as the story goes, Liu Shaoqi walks up to the night soil collector and commends him for doing such an important job. He says that the lower and dirtier the work, the more patriotic a citizen is for doing it. Then he shakes the night soil collector’s hand.

“I hope the night soil collector washed his hands first,” Han whispered to me.

Without thinking, I laughed out loud. It might as well have been a clap of thunder for the way it rang out in the classroom.

Teacher Mu fixed her stern gaze on me. “Master Liao, what is so funny?” she demanded.

“N-nothing,” I said.

“If you don’t tell me what you were laughing at, you will stay after class.”

I nodded, my head hanging down in defeat. We all knew what staying after class meant. With other teachers, you had to wash the blackboard or clap erasers. With Teacher Mu, it meant that she would get out her paddle, tell you to bend over, and let you have it.

When I looked over my shoulder, I saw that Han’s face had gone pale. He had not meant to get me in trouble. But it was my fault—I didn’t have to laugh at what he said. If I had told Teacher Mu what I was laughing at, she would have made him stay after class too. If he had spoken up and taken the blame for what had happened, she would have still punished me for being the one who laughed. There was no point in both of us being punished.

After class, Han hung around until Teacher Mu told him to leave unless he wanted a beating, too. I knew he would stand just outside the door, waiting until the ordeal was over. Knowing he was so close made me feel that I could better endure what was going to happen. Teacher Mu told me to pull down my pants and lean over my desk. Then she thwacked me twenty-five times with her paddle. At least Han told me it was twenty-five; after the first few I stopped counting. Those blows stung, but then it seemed that I got used to it and didn’t feel anything. I knew the real pain would come later.

Han told me that when he was hiding outside the classroom door, every time he heard the paddle come down, he pinched himself on his arm. That’s how he knew how many times I had been struck. Indeed, he later showed me the red welts that ran down his left arm, from his shoulder to his wrist. They were like miniatures of the welts that had now started to rise on my own skin. That was also the only apology he ever gave me for the part he had played in my punishment. He never said he was sorry. Maybe he didn’t think words would be strong enough.

After I came out of the classroom, Han helped me walk home from school.

“Is it that bad?” he asked.

“No,” I said, but I had to clench my teeth not to cry. It wasn’t because my bottom hurt, but because, infinitely more shameful, I had wet myself.

When we got home, Han helped me change and snuck my soiled pants to his house. Perhaps he just threw the pants away, as they were likely ones I had inherited from him, anyway. After that, our relationship went back to the way it had been before, usually me getting into trouble for something that Han had instigated. But we were children then, and children do not think about the consequences of their actions. Besides, I had my chance to get revenge on Teacher Mu six years later, when our positions of power had changed. Until then, all I had thought was that someday, when I became a teacher, I would be much better and more understanding than that miserable Teacher Mu.

Even though our families lived next door to one another, Han’s father and my father couldn’t be more different. My father worked at an iron-smelting factory on the outskirts of Beijing, leaving home early in the morning and coming back late at night, his face blackened by the end of the day. He wanted something better for me and hoped that I would become a teacher, even though I was not particularly good at my schoolwork. Han’s father owned a shop that traded some foreign goods, like cigarettes and face powder and even some books in English. There was also something that set him apart from the other fathers in the neighborhood: religion. I didn’t understand what that meant until I was a teenager.

When I was thirteen, an American missionary named Mr. Frazier came to live in the neighborhood. He offered to teach English to the local children, but I was the only one, at the suggestion of my father, who took him up on it. I suppose that at the same time I was learning English, Mr. Frazier was teaching Han’s father about Christianity. I liked my missionary teacher, especially compared to my Chinese instructors. He had an easy manner about him, and was patient with my frequent questions about America. He told me that he was from a place called the Ohio River Valley, and that he had left behind a wife and two sons. My mother felt sorry for him and often invited him over for dinner. And, strangely enough, I seemed to have an aptitude for this foreign language.

Mr. Frazier’s method of teaching was not to sit in a classroom, but for us to take walks around the rambling back streets of Houhai. He would encourage me to describe what I saw in English, stepping in now and then to provide the necessary vocabulary word.

Once, he asked quite seriously, what I thought of the people I saw: Did they appear content?

I glanced at the small shops, the owners sitting outside on stools and fanning themselves, chatting with their customers or people walking by. No one looked like they were in want of anything. I remembered something my father had told me, about hundreds of people who had died from hunger and floods when I was a child. But that had mostly affected the peasants, not city folk. My father sounded sure that nothing horrible like that would happen to us.

“I guess they look happy?” I said.

Mr. Frazier smiled. “There is no right or wrong answer. Maybe they are happy, as you say. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there was change afoot.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Just that there is something in the air. You can smell it.” Mr. Frazier winked at me and walked on.

I sniffed the air, but all I could smell was the faint fishy odor coming from the lake. I still had no idea what Mr. Frazier was talking about. That evening I related our conversation to Han and asked what he thought of it.

“Your foreigner teacher sounds crazy,” he said. “I would be careful around him if I were you, or you’re going to start saying crazy things too.”

In general, Han scoffed at my English lessons. He would mimic my tones and say that I would start looking like a foreigner, that my nose would become bigger and my face as pale as that of a ghost. But I think he was jealous of my lessons that didn’t include him, that I knew something he didn’t. That this was one subject in which I was better than him.

Then, in the summer of 1966, Mr. Frazier went back to America. He said he had been recalled by his church, but all of us knew that something else was going on, even if the adults never spoke of it. Of course, religion during this time was effectively banned. Although we were aware of the atrocities that were occurring in the rest of the country, even in Beijing, we were sheltered from most of it. Because my father worked with metals, he was considered useful to the state. Han’s father cleared the foreign goods from the shelves in his shop and started selling Mao badges and commemorative plates. He replaced the cross that hung on the wall with a propaganda poster that featured the Great Helmsman’s face.

Then one day Han confided his father had started stealing away in the middle of the night, only to come home in the early morning.

“What do you think he’s doing?” I asked.

“Maybe he has a gambling problem,” Han guessed. Gambling was also banned during this time, but people got around it, as they got around everything. “Maybe”—and his eyes grew wide—“he has a mistress!” I should add that we were sixteen years old and knew nothing about women.

“I don’t think so,” I said, more out of respect for Han’s mother, who had always been kind to me, than knowing what a mistress did.

“I’m going to follow him the next time and see what he’s up to,” Han said. “Will you come with me?”

“I’m not sure.” I hesitated. “What if my father catches me?”

“
Your
father sleeps like a log. He’ll never wake up.”

This was true; my father was so exhausted by his proletarian job that the house could come down around his ears and he wouldn’t stir.

So one night I snuck out of our compound and met up with Han without anyone knowing. We followed his father’s shadow at a safe distance, down streets and alleyways, until he entered what appeared to be an ordinary house like our own. Maybe he did have a mistress and another family, I thought. Han and I found a window, and through the glass we saw my father sitting among several other men I did not recognize. One man was standing in front, reading from a book.

A sudden intake of breath from Han. “They’re
praying
.”

I asked, “Is your father a
jidu tu?
” A Christian. “How can that be?” For some reason, I thought that religion had stopped when Mr. Frazier had returned to America.

“He isn’t,” Han said. “He wouldn’t do that to our family. There must be some mistake.”

He started to walk away, and I ran to keep up with him. At the time, neither of us knew that his father was in a house church and part of an underground network. Although these churches appeared after 1949, they proliferated during this time period when religion was illegal—some of them still exist today.

Even though Han and I didn’t fully understand what we had just seen, we knew it was something serious. At one point on our way home, Han stopped and turned so abruptly that I almost ran into him.

“Promise me you won’t tell anyone about this,” he said. Even in the softening moonlight, his eyes were hard.

“I promise,” I said.

 

“So my grandfather was a Christian?” Michael wonders aloud.

“Yes, are you surprised to hear that?” Liao asks.

“No, it’s just funny. My mother’s the one who’s the Christian in our family. My dad never liked it.”

“Well,” Liao says, “now maybe you know why. It was dangerous back then to be religious. A little bit today, even.”

Michael hopes Liao will continue with his reminiscing, but Ben taps his watch. “We should go if we want to see Qinghai Lake.”

The three of them get back into the car and drive northwest. There are few vehicles on the road, just some motorcycles and trucks that are headed from the city to distant townships. The rolling green mountains are bleak, occasionally punctuated by a gleaming white stupa capped with gold. One distant hill is covered by what appears to be ants. Then, as they get closer, the dots morph into animals that look like a cross between a buffalo and a skunk, with white stripes down the backs of their dark, woolly hides. Michael realizes that these are yaks, the source of the smelly butter. A herdsman, dressed incongruously in a muddy-looking suit and cap, turns his head to watch the car pass.