God's Double Agent (3 page)

I was never detected.

My parents helped many people in the village, and word of their hospitality quickly spread. Every day, a beggar would knock on our door.

“Pianyi,” Mom instructed me from her bed. “Bring food for them—get the best we have.” Only the revered people in society, parents and elder villagers, could address me using my nickname. If my friends or peers called me “Cheap,” it would be a real dishonor. But when my mom called me that, it was a sign of affection and even hope, especially when her hopes of my future comfort were juxtaposed with the beggars at our door.

Though we scarcely had enough for ourselves, we always managed to have enough to share just a little with a courtyard full of beggars. I served them the best we had to offer and listened to their stories as they ate their food. Sometimes they laughed as they told their tales of woe, but sometimes they wept. Because my own mother had been a beggar, their stories of poverty
penetrated my heart. There, in my courtyard, is where I learned compassion. It’s also where I learned resistance.

Sadly, my parents’ generosity came at a great cost. Both of them had true hearts for the poor, but they frequently gave away much-needed food. Financial stress is said to be one of the greatest causes of marital strife. Add disability and an oppressive government into the mix, and things really get hard. At night, my sister Qinghua and I would huddle in the sitting room and hear them arguing through the thin walls. The shrill bitterness scared me. When things got really bad, however, the quarrelling didn’t stop with shouts in the night. That’s when my mom would wake my sister and me, grab our hands, and say, “We’re going!”

Sleepily, we would put on our shoes and trudge out the door, up and down hills, and through graveyards on our way to my maternal grandmother’s house. She lived fifteen miles away and was my mom’s safe haven whenever she and my dad fought. In the moonlight, our feet sometimes faltered. We tried not to cry. After a few miles, however, Mom’s anger would give in to fatigue and she’d kneel down and weep with us. We never made it all the way to our grandmother’s house in one night. The distance was too far and our legs were too short.

My mother would knock on the doors of complete strangers in the middle of the night. “Do you have a place for me and my two children to stay?” she would ask. Nothing scared her. Years of begging had created a hard shell around her. Me? I was a different story. I wanted to be home, in bed, with our whole family, in peace. But that was elusive. Oh, we’d go back. After a time, Mom would calm down and we’d begin the long walk home. Things would generally be the same, but Mom struggled. Gradually, it was like the strong survival instincts that had kept her alive during her years of begging on the street evaporated.
Formerly a strong, determined woman, she seemed to have lost the will to fight through her hard life.

A few times she tried to commit suicide. There were no guns to end life quickly, no sleeping pills to pass unconscious into death. Once she ran to a well used for the community’s water source, and we had to convince her not to jump. During another bout of her sadness, my sister and I ran around the kitchen, confiscated all the knives from the drawers, and buried them in the backyard.

Her life was challenging. Without any medical care for her lung disease, she never could quite catch her breath. But the worst part was her cough.

“Go down to the garden and bring me a sweet potato,” she’d tell me, between heaves.

Absent any real medicine, she felt that somehow a steamed sweet potato seemed to settle her throat.

But even when her coughing subsided, she laid in our bed, called a
kang
, which was made of baked mud and concrete. It was connected with the kitchen stove in the next room. Heat transferred through the bed and warmed the room without having to build a fire. My mom was on one side of the bed, and my father slept on the other. We stuffed ourselves between them. Believe it or not, this was cozy, especially in the winter when the kitchen stove kept us all warm.

Mom, however, was in agony. She’d spit the mucus from her lung infection onto the floor all day. Whenever I heard her begin a particularly bad coughing fit, I would grab a shovel and run to her bedside. My job was to scoop up the spit off the floor to take it outside. And then one day, as my mother’s health deteriorated, my dad woke up in the morning with a terrible realization. He was paralyzed.

For two full years, he joined my mom in the kang, not able to work. This left us without an income. We had some food to eat, but we had to ration it so strictly my stomach never felt full. Once
I walked by the community kitchen where people were preparing food for the harvesters. Since my father couldn’t work, he couldn’t be part of the harvest festivities. That day, an aroma seized me. They were making fritters, long pastries made of special dough. After they’re fried, the little confections are light and airy, almost hollow inside. I instantly desired them above all else. Since I was so little, I decided, I could probably get into the kitchen without anyone seeing me. I stood outside the kitchen acting nonchalant. My heart was beating fast, but at the right moment I slipped into the kitchen and found an entire stash of these sweet treats. I ate them like a wild animal, one after the other, hoping I wouldn’t get caught. No one noticed, and I walked home with—for the first time in a very long time—a full stomach.

Every few months, the government would set up a projector to show a movie. It was a major social event, because the producers had to cross dangerous mountains and rivers to travel to all of the small Chinese villages. Roads in our impoverished region were challenging to navigate and were only accessible via bicycle or horseback. I don’t recall ever seeing a car in my childhood. We rarely had visitors of any kind. That’s why everyone, especially the children, really anticipated the arrival of the movies. The movies were usually stories about Communist Party heroes, but we loved them. The movies were advertised for weeks in advance, so the children got up early to put chairs in the best spots. One morning, I woke up early enough to snag a premiere spot for my little chair, right in the front row.

As the sky darkened enough for the movie to begin, I left my sick parents at home and made my way to the movie site. The other kids had the same idea I’d had, and we settled in for the night’s festivities. For whatever reason, probably because they noticed my clothes were tattered and threadbare, the other kids made fun of me that night.

“Look at Xiqiu’s clothes,” one boy in a group of my friends laughed, pointing at me as the movie began. We never had new clothes. Neighbors gave us their old clothes, and our hand-me-downs were mended with obvious patches.

“Are you sure that’s a shirt, or is it just some threads trying to cover his little chest?” another piped in.

I didn’t listen to them and looked straight ahead, trying to pay attention to the movie. When I finally got to the point where I could tune them out, however, I suddenly felt a warm sensation on my back. They had gathered together and urinated on me.

As I walked home, my sticky clothes clinging to me, my heart ached.

Why did people have to treat us with so little respect? We were already poor and without social status. Why, on top of that, did we also have to deal with such mockery? Poverty, I decided, was the reason we suffered. As long as I didn’t have money, people were going to bully me. On that walk home from the mobile movie, I made a decision. I needed to become a millionaire. The fact that I was a urine-soaked peasant didn’t deter me. Education was highly prized in China, and after Mao’s reign, could be a road out of poverty. If I studied diligently, perhaps I could get into college and make enough money to get rich and support my family.

When I was eight years old, I went to a Communist Party–controlled school where I learned about reading, writing, and atheism. Studying was easy for me because I had a knack for quickly understanding issues and remembering facts. Also, my teachers recognized leadership qualities in me and appointed me classroom monitor year after year. This was a prestigious title because presumably it was always given to the most responsible student in each class who could maintain order if the teacher stepped out, report anyone who dared to break a rule in the teacher’s absence, make sure everyone worked, and help out the teacher in the classroom.

I loved the attention.

“Xiqiu.” My teacher called me to the front of the class toward the end of fourth grade. “You’ve been a very good student. You’re very capable and eager to work.” I tried not to stick out my chest in pride, but this made me feel very special. Then he said something very surprising. “In fact, I’m going to hold you back so you can do another year in my class. You will repeat fourth grade.” We were taught to never question the teacher. So when the headmaster visited our classroom later that day, I was silent as my teacher pulled him aside soberly. “Xiqiu has some terrible hearing problems, so he hasn’t understood very much academically this year,” he said. “I recommend he repeat this grade.”

Of course, I could hear just fine. But what made me valuable to the teacher was that I could run errands. Instead of progressing into the fifth grade with my friends, I repeated the fourth grade to essentially become my teacher’s unpaid personal assistant. For example, when his mother needed wine, I traveled to town and bartered for it. My teacher was taking advantage of me. Who was I, after all? However, in that culture, it was considered a privilege to work for the teacher and his mother, so I actually enjoyed it. After all, not many fourth graders could barter like me.

But the joys of school never quite isolated me from the problems at home. One afternoon, I came home and heard my mom coughing. I grabbed my shovel and ran in to her, ready to perform my normal clean-up duty. This time, it sounded different. Her cough was relentless and overpowering. In fact, as I watched her double over in pain, I knew one thing. She was dying.

I can’t remember how long it took Qinghua to come home, but it seemed like she’d never arrive.

“Mother is dying,” I whispered, as I ran out to meet her in the courtyard. “What do we do?”

Of course, we had very few options. Actual doctors wouldn’t come all the way out to our area, and we definitely couldn’t afford to travel hours away to the county hospital. Our only source of medical help was a local “barefoot doctor,” who wasn’t a doctor at all. In fact, barefoot doctors got their name because they were farmers who worked without shoes in the rice paddies and just did the best they could to treat villagers’ basic ailments in their spare time.

My sister dropped her books and we ran to our local barefoot doctor’s home. “Help us, please,” she called from the courtyard. He and his wife opened their door and looked at our tearstained faces and our tattered clothing. With one glance, they knew we weren’t good for the bill. The doctor, completely absent of regret or any other emotion, shook his head no. I cried, kneeling in front of the main gate, but the door began to close.

“I offer myself to you!” my sister said, desperately trying to figure out a way to entice them. “I’ll work in your fields during harvest time for free! I’ll pay you back!” They didn’t even acknowledge her offer before they slammed their door in our faces, leaving us to deal with the impending death of our mother alone.