The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir (9 page)

My uncle hadn’t had an easy life either. He lost both parents as a young boy and was raised by a relative who ran a small restaurant. In his teenage years, he became addicted to gambling and constantly stole money from his relative. Unable to break his addiction, and having stolen from his relative and lost again, he was too ashamed to go home, so he went to Huaibei and signed up to dig coal. He was thirty-one when he bought and married my aunt, who was just sixteen. My aunt said her new husband treated her generously and, once they grew to trust each other, he gave her his wages to manage. He could become abusive after a couple of drinks, but after her years of virtual slavery, Aunt Xiuying felt secure and could tolerate his “bad temper tantrums.” After the Communist victory, the Party made sure abducted women were free to leave if they wanted to, and my aunt said she thought about it. Though she had given birth to a son, she missed her home. With the help of a street soup vendor who recognized her accent as that from his own town and had heard about the murder of her grandfather, she managed to track down Gong-gong.

Aunt Xiuying returned home only to find that reality was quite different from her imaginings. She had problems accepting her stepmother and soon confirmed her childhood suspicions with whispering villagers too intimidated to speak out about what they had heard of Po-po’s death. She confronted Gong-gong and his sisters, but was met with a wall of silence. She found herself an unwelcome guest; the home she imagined did not exist. She returned to her husband in Huaibei and gave him four more children. Gong-gong visited several times and they were able to rebuild a relationship of sorts, but she never forgot her mother. When I asked if she thought Gong-gong was responsible for Po-po’s murder, she defended her father, just as Mother had done. “Our father was too young and weak. He was marshaled into the plot. He had no choice.” However, Aunt Xiuying could not forgive Mother, seeing her silence as betrayal. “People who were involved in Po-po’s death treated your mother very well, so she thinks the murderers are her closest family.”

I had the strong impression that the biggest tragedy Aunt Xiuying had suffered was not the kidnapping and abuse, but the loss of her mother; she needed closure, which was what Grandma was also seeking by insisting on a proper funeral. “Like my mother, your grandma doesn’t want to be alone anymore,” my aunt said.

9.

R
ECOVERY

T
he coffin and
shou-yi
seemed to work against the evil spirits, or maybe it was Dr. Xu’s herbal medicines; Grandma survived her illnesses and recovered. Unfortunately, she became too weak to cook for the whole family every day, but having dominated the kitchen for decades, she found it hard to give that up.

Most of my childhood memories about Grandma are associated with her cooking. While she reigned, she had her ritual. Since rice was a southern crop and not readily available in the north, Father loved noodles and buns, and Grandma cooked them almost every night, starting from scratch, from flour to dough to finely cut noodles and puffed-up steamed buns. Thus, we all became noodle aficionados. She didn’t bring out the food or set the table until Father came home. She wouldn’t budge even if Father’s meetings kept him until very late and we were all hungry.

Grandma would never allow Father to enter the kitchen or touch the laundry. As a consequence, Father relied on her for everything. When Mother took over the kitchen, she inherited Grandma’s ritual, always dishing out the first bowl of noodles or dumplings for Father and then Grandma. Unlike Grandma, who thought her son was irreproachable, Mother would constantly tease Father for his inability to prepare the simplest meal. Grandma hated seeing her son reprimanded by his wife. She complained to other women in the neighborhood about how badly Mother treated Father. My younger sister overheard Grandma’s complaints and reported them to Mother, who became upset. Father would shake his head. “Two tigers cannot coexist on the same mountain! They will kill each other.” Mother and Grandma were both born in tiger years of the Chinese calendar.

Grandma later saw Father’s inability to cook as her biggest failure, and she didn’t want me to be exposed to ridicule. Sometimes, before Mother came home in the afternoon, we would mix flour into dough and knead it to the right texture for noodles, cover the dough with a piece of wet cloth, and let it sit for fifteen minutes. Then we would use a rolling pin to make a big round sheet, which we folded and cut into either thin or wide noodles. I also learned to make steamed buns. A tough job in those days was to make corn more appetizing and appealing. About thirty percent of our food ration was corn. I was sick of eating corn bread and corn gruel. Eating corn was not only a necessity but also considered a proletariat duty. At my boarding school, we all pretended how much we loved it because it was the staple food for early revolutionaries. One day, at the cafeteria, I tossed into a garbage can a hard, cold corn bun. A classmate saw it. I had to write a self-criticism in my journal, confessing that I was under the influence of the bourgeois and had discarded the precious corn bread, made by the blood and sweat of revolutionary peasants. Grandma taught me how to make what she called “silver and golden” rolls, containing layers of wheat and corn. They were much easier to swallow. I used to tell Grandma: “When I grow up and earn lots of money, I’ll never touch corn again.” Nowadays, hardship food such as corn bread is coming back as a type of healthful food that is served only at high-end restaurants in China. I still avoid it at all cost. The mere thought of it gives me heartburn.

The only time that our whole family took a break from corn was during the Lunar New Year. Along with loud firecrackers came wheat and meat in abundance, even in those years of hardship. Preparations would begin eight days before the first new moon with an offering to the Kitchen God, who would report back to heaven. Grandma would first melt crystal sugar cubes in a pan and then fill a dozen triangular buns. She then placed the buns on top of a shelf in the kitchen because Father forbade Grandma to set up an altar for the Kitchen God. She said it was important to bribe the Kitchen God with sweet treats so his report would say only sweet things about the family, or at least make his mouth too sticky to say anything.

It seemed as if Grandma cooked nonstop for a week, emptying an entire sack of wheat flour saved up over the year, mixing in water to make the dough for all sorts of wheat buns. Tradition had it that no one should enter the kitchen on the New Year so all the buns had to be prepared in advance: Round buns with a festive red dot on the top were plain; mouse-shaped buns contained minced pork and vegetables; and buns shaped like golden nuggets had red bean paste inside. Grandma and Mother boiled the red beans and mashed them with sugar into a paste. By New Year’s Eve, Grandma had stockpiled more than two hundred buns, enough to feed the family and visiting relatives for a fortnight.

While Grandma cooked, Mother worked her sewing machine, which clanked late into the night, turning out four sets of new clothes for me and each of my siblings. All children had to wear new clothes on New Year’s Day. In those days, the most popular style was a green jacket in imitation of a Communist soldier, with two front button-flap pockets and two small red rectangular badges on the pointed collars. I had this same style of outfit throughout my elementary and junior high school years. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, the final touches on her sewing done, Mother would take over the cooking, preparing dumplings that would be served on New Year’s Day morning and frying different shapes of wontons—“layered roses” and “flying kites”—for guests to eat with candies, watermelon seeds, and tea.

Today, people paste big red posters with messages such as
gong-xi-fa-cai
or
MAY YOU PROSPER AND MAKE MORE MONEY IN THE COMING YEAR
. In the 1970s, there would be big red posters put out on the neighborhood walls by the Party that urged people to
CELEBRATE A SAFE AND REVOLUTIONARY NEW YEAR
. The Party wanted to simplify traditions and urged people not to spend lavishly on food and liquor or gamble at cards, all of which were traits of the old society. Despite the Party’s relentless campaign, they made slow progress with the New Year, which still retained many of its traditional trappings. The New Year was much anticipated by both children and adults. There were no red envelopes with freshly minted cash from adults, but it was the only time we had new clothes and could eat big white steamed wheat buns for a week. My parents never scolded us during New Year’s, but we were forbidden to say anything inauspicious that could, Father said, ruin our luck for the whole year.

Even during New Year’s, Grandma’s funeral dominated our agenda. It was time to visit the uncles and aunties who would be part of the burial plan. The Lunar New Year of 1976 set everything in play. On New Year’s morning, as the stream of Grandma’s well-wishers thinned out, Father packed a stack of gift boxes of sweet cakes and put them on the back of his bicycle. Father might be frugal with us, but he was generous with gifts; being seen as stingy among friends was considered shameful. Often, he wouldn’t allow us to eat the sweet cakes brought by others to our house and would instead rewrap them to give to someone else.

With the gifts all packed, Father lifted me in front of him and began our trip around the city to cultivate connections. First, we stopped by a certain Uncle Wu’s house, located in a labyrinth of run-down huts and buildings in the eastern section of the city. Uncle Wu, who had been introduced to us by the daughter of Grandpa’s first cousin, was the locomotive engineer who would transport Grandma on the train. After half an hour of chatting and updating him with news about Grandma, we each gave a box of festival cakes to Uncle Wu’s mother. Our next destination was the apartment of an uncle whose mother was the aunt of Grandpa. That uncle managed a group of drivers at the Provincial Transportation Department. He had the truck and driver. I nicknamed him “Uncle Blinky” because he sweated a lot and blinked his eyes nonstop when he was nervous.

Our visits took until early evening. As I grew older, I wanted to spend the New Year with my friends and was a less and less willing participant in Father’s visits; but he insisted that I accompany him as the eldest grandson. So began another of our rituals, the annual negotiation, which began with more warrior stories between visits and escalated into increases in my monthly pocket money.

His stories were the best treats of the Lunar New Year. Father, who struck people as taciturn and shy, was transformed at story time. He painted vivid word pictures, oftentimes drawing on old operas, movies, or books that had been banned. Before beginning a story, he would warn me: “Don’t share them with others. Some are related to feudalistic themes. It could get your dad into trouble.” Some stories, like this one, were clearly intended to reinforce what he had said about the benefits of Grandma’s burial.

“An ancient general named Xue Rengui grew up poor. A local saint told him he should improve the
feng shui
of his family by moving the graves of his ancestors to a different location. He did and his fortune began to change. Soon Xue left home to join the army. Before departing, he did not know his wife was pregnant. His bravery soon gained him promotions. One day, a flood hit the imperial palace and many officials abandoned the emperor. Xue jumped into the flood and saved the emperor from drowning. Grateful for his heroic deeds, the emperor made him a general and he won many victories. Eighteen years later, he went home for a visit. As he neared his village, he spotted a tiger attacking a teenage boy. He aimed his arrow at the tiger, killing the animal, but also hurting the boy. Both the boy and the tiger fell into a deep ravine. When he arrived home, his wife said, ‘Your son went out in the woods to meet you. Did you see him?’”

Before Father revealed the ending, he would ask me to guess. “Where do you think his son was?” He stopped his bicycle and wouldn’t move again until I had the right answer.

“Did his son die after he had fallen into the ravine?” I asked eagerly.

“No, he survived because he had the blessings of his ancestors,” Father said before we got back on the bike and rode to the house of Uncle Li, the Party official who was supposed to protect Father from any political fallout in case our burial plan ran into problems.

10.

E
THNICITY

I
n her relentless pursuit of a proper burial, Grandma was willing to convert to Islam and even change her ethnicity from Han Chinese, the single largest ethnic group in China, to Hui, a minority group that practices Islam. She had heard that there was a government mandate that exempted the Hui people from the burial ban out of respect for Islamic traditions. In her mind, the conversion could be done easily—as long as she gave up pork and started to eat lamb, the public security office would change her ethnic status on her city registration card and she would be spared cremation after death.

In the 1970s, there were about forty thousand Hui people in Xi’an—today there are about sixty thousand, among a population of eight million in the city. The Hui people were among the city’s earliest residents and were descended mostly from Arab and Persian merchants and soldiers who had traveled the Silk Road since the seventh century when Xi’an was a prosperous cosmopolitan metropolis. Their Muslim traditions and customs survived down through the centuries, even though the Party banned all religious practices in the 1970s and some Hui Communist Party members were forced to eat pork to symbolize their break with “feudalistic and superstitious practices.” Most Hui persisted in their faith and prayed secretly at home.

The majority of the Hui people lived in the western section of downtown and had created for themselves a labyrinth of traditional houses and mosques built in the Chinese architectural style. The mosques were closed during the Cultural Revolution and some were converted into schools or factories. But each time I visited the area, it was like stepping into a different world: The men wore white skullcaps and the women headscarves, and the restaurants were halal
and the air smelled of roasting lamb. They make Xi’an’s most famous dish—pita bread soaked in mutton soup, which was delicious and filling. The Hui people looked no different from me and my siblings, except their hair sometimes had a slightly brownish hue and some had blue eyes.

Before Grandma surprised us with her conversion request, my parents had also started to take a keen interest in the Muslim community, but for a different reason. They were searching for an alternative source of food to supplement our ration.

Though the Party propaganda machine constantly congratulated the country for its hard work in producing bountiful harvests, even into my adolescence food was always a problem for our family. No matter how Grandma and Mother tried to stretch our rations, they never lasted the month. During the summer wheat harvest, Mother would rise at dawn and walk out to the countryside in search of recently harvested fields where she would gather up any wheat ears missed by the peasants. Father would dry the wheat in the courtyard and take it to a nearby village mill to be ground into flour. I recall Mother returning home empty-handed after hours of scrabbling on her knees in the dirt. Some peasants had caught her in a field, accused her of stealing the food from their mouths, and confiscated the ears of corn she had found. At home, she cried tears of humiliation and vowed never to scavenge again for leftovers.

The lack of adequate wheat and corn worried my parents. During one of Father’s consultations with Dr. Xu, he advised Father to introduce more protein into our diet. “They will eat less if you add some meat or lard to the food,” he told Father. Since pork or chicken required ration coupons, Father traveled to the Hui quarters and visited the home of a Muslim colleague, whom we addressed as Uncle Liu, to ask if he could buy halal mutton, which didn’t require coupons, at a discount.

A week after Father talked with his Hui coworker, he came in with the hindquarters of a sheep wrapped in linen slung over his shoulder. Grandma knitted her eyebrows, her face crumpled like paper, and she wrinkled her nose. “I can’t eat that,” she said. “The smell of mutton makes me sick.” Mother let the mutton soak in water for a day before mixing it with two roughly chopped large white turnips and linen packages of star peppers with cloves and peppercorns in our large pot, and let it stew over a moderate fire. Father closed the windows and doors so the smell wouldn’t make Grandma sick.

Mother served mutton soup with noodles every other night and I began to like it, especially after she added vinegar, cilantro, and some pickled green vegetables to enhance the color and flavor. Grandma cooked and ate separately.

One weekend, I was surprised to find Grandma heating up a pot of mutton soup in the kitchen, wearing a surgical mask. “I want to try the noodle soup too,” she said, and at dinnertime she ate with the rest of us, trying to slurp down the noodles. Pleased that his mother had finally come around, Father said with his mouth full, “It’s good for you in the wintertime.” Mother was suspicious. She put down her chopsticks and questioned Grandma with a phrase popular in the movie world where a Communist would ask an enemy spy what his real motive was: “What kind of medicine are you hiding in the gourd?”

Grandma wouldn’t look at Mother and instead addressed Father. “Jiu-er, do you have
guanxi
at the local public security bureau? Is there any way we can convert to Hui?” she asked. “We can offer them a gift if necessary.” What did she mean? From where had this urge to follow Allah come? Father stopped eating. “Why do you want to be a Hui?” And the truth came out. A neighbor, Mrs. Liao, had dropped by that morning. Having lived near the Hui district, Mrs. Liao knew the government let the Hui people maintain a large cemetery and bury their dead according to custom for fear of offending them. When officials seized a small section of the cemetery for construction of a factory, the Hui demonstrated for days until the authorities abandoned the plan.

Grandma’s conversion request shocked me because it was at the time when the racial tension between the Han and the Hui had escalated after a Hui person had hacked a Han policeman to death in the city’s busiest shopping district. The mere mention of the Hui struck fear in the minds of many Han people. Ma Dasheng, a young Muslim in his early twenties, was hitching a ride and managed to stop a truck at a busy intersection in downtown Xi’an, close to the Hui section. As he was about to board the truck, a police officer intervened and forbade him from taking the ride. The two got into an argument. The official version has it that Ma ran over to a halal restaurant and came back with a kitchen knife and stabbed the policeman to death. Officials were outraged—it was the first time a policeman had been murdered since 1949.

Rule of law continues to be in its relative infancy in China, and back in 1975 the judicial system was barely functioning. The city was controlled by a Revolutionary Committee consisting of officials who had excelled during the Cultural Revolution. The committee didn’t have to think too hard, and it gave Ma a public trial in front of ten thousand people and sentenced him to death. The Hui community staged a demonstration and petitioned the government to spare Ma’s life because of his young age. The appeal for clemency was rejected. Rumor had it that the Muslims were plotting to abduct Ma if he was to be paraded around the city.

The day of Ma’s execution was a Sunday. Thousands of people gathered to watch the parade, which was accompanied by the usual loudspeaker exhortations glorifying the “iron fists of the proletariat dictatorship.” Father refused me permission to attend the parade and execution. He had also heard about the abduction plot and didn’t want me to get in the middle of a riot. With the possibility of both defiance and risk, how could I resist? Public trials were popular entertainment and, on the excuse of visiting a classmate to borrow his notes, I joined my waiting friends and we headed into the city. I had never seen so many uniformed policemen. Dozens of military trucks with machine guns mounted on the roofs of their cabs passed by and groups of soldiers were scattered around the city. We had hoped to see Ma, but were told that his truck had already left for the execution ground. Apparently, he was wedged between two guards and his eyes were closed—he already looked dead. A rumor went around a week later that Ma had been killed before his execution to thwart any attempts to rescue him.

Murders are becoming more commonplace these days, and Xi’an has its fair share, but, overlooking the more extreme incidents of the Cultural Revolution, murder was virtually unheard of and the killing of a cop in broad daylight was terrifying. For months, Mother told me to stay away from the Hui section for fear of retaliation against the Han people.

We never told Grandma about the murder because Father told us to keep bad news from her. In the following week, Grandma kept pressing her case. “I know being a Hui person, you can’t eat pork,” she said. “That’s not a problem. I can eat mutton. It will make me sick at first, but I can get used to the taste. I’ve put up with all sorts of hardships before and this is nothing.” Father wasn’t amused. “You can’t change your ethnic status,” he said. “And I don’t think that eating lamb qualifies you as a Hui. I’ll go to jail if the government finds out I lied about our ethnic status.”

Grandma’s ignorance was not unusual; many people then thought the only difference between Hui and Han was that Hui didn’t touch pork, though none of us knew why, not Father, not even my teacher. I heard a story that Hui people, hounded and murdered by a non-Muslim ruler in Persia, fled their country. One day, a group of Hui people hid in a pig shed from soldiers who attempted to capture them. When their persecutors arrived and planned a search, the pigs dashed out to attack the soldiers and scared them away. Since then, Hui people have considered pigs sacred animals and refused to eat pork. While people in other cities called pork
zhu-rou
, or “pig meat,” we referred to it as
da-rou
or “big meat” in Xi’an for fear that mentioning the word “pig” would offend the Hui people.

I only found out about the simple truth that Muslims consider pork to be unclean years later. Even now, ignorance about Islam persists; during one of my recent trips to Xi’an, people were still repeating the “sacred” hearsay about Muslims and pork. The lack of trust and communication had probably led to misunderstanding and conflicts in the first place.

Grandma’s interest in becoming a Hui lasted only until she learned that the Hui people did not use coffins but instead were buried in shrouds. During a visit to our house, Father’s Hui colleague elaborated that burial usually follows soon after death, and thus had to be nearby and without the complicated ceremony demanded by the Han. Grandma wanted a coffin, she wanted to be taken back to Henan, and she wanted the ceremony. The subject of becoming Hui was given its own quiet burial.