Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (68 page)

I was still wondering how I looked when Bing walked into the ward.  His appearance was nothing out of the ordinary, but a certain air set him apart.  He had a touch of cynicism, which was rare in those humorless years.  I was very much drawn to him.  His father had been a departmental director in the pre-Cultural Revolution provincial government, but Bing was different from most other high officials' children.

"Why should I be sent to the countryside?"  he said, and actually succeeded in not going by obtaining an 'incurable illness' certificate. He was the first person to show me a free intelligence, an ironic, inquisitive mind which did not take anything for granted.  It was he who first opened up the taboo areas in my mind.

Up to now, I had shunned any love relationship.  My devotion to my family, which had been intensified by adversity, overshadowed every other emotion.  Although within me there had always been another being, a sexual being, yearning to get out, I had succeeded in keeping it locked in.  Knowing Bing pulled me to the brink of an entanglement.

On this day, Bing turned up at my grandmother's ward with a black eye. He said he had just been hit by Wen, a young man who had come back from Ningnan as the escort for a girl who had broken her leg there.  Bing described the fight with deliberate nonchalance, saying with a great deal of satisfaction that Wen was jealous of him for enjoying more of my attention and company.  Later, I heard Wen's story: he had hit Bing because he could not stand 'that conceited grin of his."

Wen was short and stout, with big hands and feet and buck teeth.  Like Bing, he was the son of high officials.  He took to rolling up his sleeves and trouser legs and wearing a pair of straw sandals like a peasant, in the spirit of a model youth in the propaganda posters.  One day he told me he was going back to Ningnan to continue 'reforming' himself.  When I asked why, he said casually, "To follow Chairman Mao. Why else?  I'm Chairman Mao's Red Guard."  For a moment I was speechless.  I had begun to assume that people only spouted this sort of jargon on official occasions.  What was more, he had not put on the obligatory solemn face that was part of the act.  The offhanded way he spoke made me feel he was sincere.

Wen's way of thinking did not make me want to avoid him.  The Cultural Revolution had taught me not to divide people by their beliefs, but by whether they were capable of cruelty and viciousness or not.  I knew Wen was a decent person, and when I wanted to get out of Ningnan permanently, it was to him that I turned for help.

I had been away from Ningnan for over two months.

There was no rule that forbade this, but the regime had a powerful weapon to make sure I would have to go back to the mountains sooner or later: my residence registration had been moved there from Chengdu, and as long as I stayed in the city, I was entitled to no food or any other rations.  For the time being I was living off my family's rations, but that could not last forever.  I realized that I had to get my registration moved to somewhere near Chengdu.

Chengdu itself was out of the question, because no one was allowed to move a country registration to a city.  Moving one's registration from a harsh mountainous place to a richer area like the plain around Chengdu was also forbidden.  But there was a loophole: we could move if we had relatives who were willing to accept us.  It was possible to invent such a relative, as no one could keep track of the numerous relatives a Chinese might have.

I planned the transfer with Nana, a good friend of mine who was just back from Ningnan to try to find a way to get out of there.  We included my sister, who was still in Ningnan, in our plan.  To get our registrations moved, we first of all needed three letters: one from a commune saying it would accept us, on the recommendation of a relative in that commune; a second from the county to which the commune belonged, endorsing the first; and a third from the Sichuan Bureau for City Youth, sanctioning the transfer.  When we had all three, we had to go back to our production teams in Ningnan to obtain their approval before the registrar at Ningnan county would give us the final release. Only then could we be given the crucial document, which was essential for every citizen in China our registration books which we had to hand in to the authorities at our next place of residence.

Life was always as daunting and complex as this whenever one took even the smallest step outside the authorities' rigid plan.  And in most cases there were unexpected complications.  While I was planning how to arrange the transfer, out of the blue the central government issued a regulation freezing all registration transfers as of 11 June.

It was already the third week in May.  It would be impossible to locate a real relative who would accept us and go through all the procedures in time.

I turned to Wen.  Without hesitating for a moment, he offered to 'create' the three letters.  Forging official documents was a serious offense, punishable by a long prison sentence.  But Mao's devoted Red Guard shrugged off my words of caution.

The crucial elements in the forgery were the seals.  In China, all documents are made official by the stamps on them.  Wen was good at calligraphy, and could carve in the style of official stamps.  He used cakes of soap.  In one evening all three letters for the three of us, which would have taken months to obtain, if we were lucky, were ready.

Wen offered to go back to Ningnan with Nana and me to help with the rest of the procedure.

When the time came to go, I was agonizingly torn, because it meant leaving my grandmother in the hospital.

She urged me to go, saying she would return home and keep an eye on my younger brothers.  I did not try to dissuade her: the hospital was a terribly depressing place.

Apart from the revolting smell, it was also incredibly noisy, with moaning and clattering and loud conversations in the corridors day and night.  Loudspeakers woke eve none up at six in the morning, and there were often deaths in full view of other patients.

On the evening she was discharged, my grandmother felt a sharp pain at the base of her spine.  She could not sit on the luggage rack of the bicycle, so Xiao-her rode it home with her clothes, towels, wash bowls, thermos flasks, and the cooking utensils, and I walked with her, supporting her.  The evening was sultry.  Walking even very slowly hurt her, as I could see from her tightly pursed lips and her trembling as she tried to suppress her moans.  I told her stories and gossip to divert her.  The plane trees that used to shade the pavements now produced only a few pathetic branches with leaves on them they had not been pruned in the three years of the Cultural Revolution.  Here and there, buildings were scarred, the result of the fierce fighting between Rebel factions.

It took us nearly an hour to get halfway.  Suddenly the sky turned dark.  A violent gale swept up the dust and the torn fragments of wall posters.  My grandmother staggered.

I held her tight.  It started to pour with rain, and in an instant we were drenched.  There was nowhere to take cover, so we struggled on. Our clothes were clinging to us and impeding our movements.  I was panting for breath.

My grandmother's tiny, thin figure felt heavier and heavier in my arms. The rain was hissing and splashing, the wind slashed against our soaked bodies, and I felt very cold.  My grandmother sobbed, "Oh heaven, let me die!  Let me die!"

I wanted to cry too, but I only said, "Grandma, we'll soon be home ....”

Then I heard a bell tinkling.

"Hey, do you want a lift?"

A pedal-cart had pulled over; a young man in an open shirt was straddling it, rain running down his cheeks.  He came over and carried my grandmother onto the open cart on which an old man was crouching. He nodded to us.  The young man said this was his father whom he was taking home from the hospital.  He dropped us at our door, waving off my profuse thanks with a cheerful "No trouble at all," before disappearing into the sodden darkness.  Because of the pressure of the downpour, I never learned his name.

Two days later my grandmother was up and about in the kitchen, rolling out dumpling wrappings to give us a treat.  She started to tidy up the rooms, too, in her usual non stop way.  I could see she was overdoing things and asked her to stay in bed, but she would not listen.

By now it was the beginning of June.  She kept telling me I should leave, and insisted that Jin-ming should go as well, to look after me, since I had been so sick last time in Ningnan.  Though he had just turned sixteen, Jin-ming had not yet been assigned a commune.  I sent a telegram asking my sister to come back from Ningnan and look after our grandmother.  Xiao-her, fourteen at the time, promised that he could be depended on, and seven-year-old Xiao-fang solemnly made the same announcement.

When I went to say goodbye to her, my grandmother wept.  She said she did not know whether she would ever see me again.  I stroked the back of her hand, which was now bony, with bulging veins, and pressed it to my cheek.

I suppressed the surge of tears and said I would be back very soon.

After a long search, I had finally found a truck going to the Xichang region.  Since the mid-1960s Mao had ordered many important factories (including the one where my sister's boyfriend Specs worked) to be moved to Sichuan, particularly to Xichang, where a new industrial base was being built.  Mao's theory was that the mountains of Sichuan provided the best deterrent in case the Americans or the Russians attacked.  Trucks from five different provinces were busy delivering goods to the base.  Through a friend, a driver from Peking agreed to take us -Jin-ming, Nana, Wen, and me.  We had to sit on the back of the open truck because the cabin was reserved for the relief driver.  Every truck belonged to a convoy which met up in the evening.

These drivers had the reputation of being happy to take girls but not boys much the same as their brotherhood the world over.  Since they were almost the only source of transport, this angered some boys. Along the way I saw slogans pasted on the trunks of trees: "Strongly protest the truckers who only take females and not males!"  Some bolder boys stood in the middle of the road to try to force the trucks to stop. One boy from my school did not manage to leap away in time and was killed.

From the lucky female hitchhikers, there were a few reports of rape, but many more of romance.  Quite a few marriages resulted from these journeys.  A truck driver who took part in the construction of the strategic base enjoyed certain privileges, one being the right to transfer his wife's country registration to the city where he lived. Some girls jumped at this opportunity.

Our drivers were very kind, and behaved impeccably.

When we stopped for the night, they would help us secure a hotel bed before going to their guesthouse, and they would invite us to have supper with them so we could share their special food, free.

Only once did I feel there was something faintly sexual on their minds. At one stop another pair of drivers invited Nana and me to go on their truck for the next leg.  When we told our driver, his face fell a mile, and he said in a sulky voice, "Go ahead then, go ahead with those nice guys of yours if you like them better."  Nana and I looked at each other and mumbled in embarrassment, "We didn't say we liked them better.  You are all very nice to us .... We did not go.

Wen kept an eye on Nana and me.  He constantly warned us about drivers, about men in general, about thieves, about what to eat and what not to eat, and about going out after dark.  He also carried our bags and fetched hot water for us.  At dinnertime, he would tell Nana, Jin-ming, and me to join the drivers to eat while he stayed behind in the hotel to look after our bags, as theft was rampant.  We brought food back for him.

There was never any sexual advance from Wen.  On the evening we crossed the border into Xichang, Nana and I wanted to wash in the river, because the weather was so hot and the evening so beautiful.  Wen found us a quiet bend in the river where we bathed in the company of wild ducks and twirling reeds.  The rays of the moon were pouring onto the river, the image scattering into masses of sparkling silver rings.  Wen sat near the road with his back studiously to us, keeping guard.  Like many other young men, he had been brought up in the pre-Cultural Revolution days to be chivalrous.

To get into a hotel, we needed to produce a letter from our unit.  Wen, Nana, and I had each secured a letter from our production teams in Ningnan, and Jin-ming had a letter from his school.  The hotels were inexpensive, but we did not have much money, since our parents' salaries had been drastically reduced.  Nana and I would get a single bed between us in a dormitory and the boys would do the same.  The hotels were filthy, and very basic.  Before going to bed, Nana and I would turn the quilt over and over looking for fleas and lice.  The hotel wash bowls usually had rings of dark-gray or yellow dirt on them. Trachoma and fungal infections were commonplace, so we used our own.

One night we were awakened about twelve o'clock by loud bangs on the door: everyone in the hotel had to get up to make an 'evening report' to Chairman Mao.  This farcical activity was in the same package as the '1oyalty dances."  It involved gathering in front of a statue or portrait of Mao, chanting quotations from the Litfie Red Book, and shouting "Long live Chairman Mao, long long live Chairman Mao, and long long long live Chairman Mao!" while waving the Little Red Book rhythmically.

Half awake, Nana and I staggered out of our room.

Other travelers were emerging in twos and threes, rubbing their eyes, buttoning their jackets, and pulling up the cotton backs of their shoes.  There was not a single complaint.  No, one dared.  At five in the morning we had to go through the same thing again.  This was called 'morning request for instructions' from Mao. Later, when we were on our way, Jin-ming said, "The head of the Revolutionary Committee in this town must be an insomniac."