Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (70 page)

With that vital seal and by the skin of our teeth with less than twenty-four hours to spare we had accomplished our mission.  We still had to find the clerk in charge of our registration books, but we knew that that was not going to be a big problem.  The authorization had been obtained.  I relaxed immediately into stomach pains and diarrhea.

I struggled back with the others to the county town.  It was dark by the time we arrived.  We made for the government guesthouse, a drab two-story building standing in the middle of a walled enclosure.  The porter's lodge was empty, and there was no one visible on the grounds either.

Most of the rooms were shut, but on the top floor some bedroom doors were half open.

I entered one, after making sure there was no one in it.  An open window looked out on some fields beyond a dilapidated brick wall. Across the corridor was another row of rooms.  There was not a soul around.  From some personal things in the room and a half-drunk mug of tea, I gathered that someone had been staying here very recently.

But I was too tired to wonder why he or she and everyone else had deserted the building.  Without even the energy to close the door, I threw myself onto the bed and fell asleep fully dressed.

I was jolted awake by a loudspeaker chanting some quotations by Mao, one being: "If the enemy won't surrender, we will eliminate them!"  I was suddenly wide awake.  I realized our building was under attack.

The next thing I heard was the whine of bullets very close by, and windows breaking.  The loudspeaker yelled out the name of some Rebel organization, urging it to surrender.  Otherwise, it screeched, the attackers would dynamite the building.

Jin-ming burst in.  Several armed men wearing rattan helmets were rushing into the rooms opposite mine, which overlooked the front gate. One of them was a young boy shouldering a gun taller than himself. Without a word, they raced to the windows, smashed the glass with the butts of their rifles, and started shooting.  A man who seemed to be their commander told us hurriedly that the building had been the headquarters of his faction, and was now being attacked by the opposition.  We had better get out quickly but not down the stairs, which led to the front.  How then?

We frantically tore the sheets and quilt covers off the bed and made a sort of rope.  We fled one end of it to a window frame and scrambled down the two stories.  As we landed, bullets whistled and hissed into the hard mud around us.  We bent double and ran for the collapsed wall.

Once over it, we kept running for a long time before we felt safe enough to stop.  The sky and the maize fields were beginning to show their pale features.  We made for a friend's place in a nearby commune to catch our breath and decide what to do next.  On the way, we heard from some peasants that the guesthouse had been blown up.

At our friend's place, a message was waiting for me.  A telegram from my sister in Chengdu had arrived just after we had left Nana's village in search of the registrar.  As no one knew where I was, my friends had opened it and passed the message around so that whoever saw me could let me know.

This was how I learned that my grandmother was dead.

23.  "The More Books You Read, the More Stupid You Become“ I Work as a Peasant and a Barefoot Doctor (June 1969-1971)

Jin-ming and I sat on the bank of the Golden Sand River, waiting for a ferry.  I rested my head on my hands and stared at the unruly river tumbling past me on its long journey from the Himalayas to the sea.  It was to become the longest fiver in China the Yangtze, after joining the Min River at Yibin, 300 miles downstream.

Toward the end of its journey, the Yangtze spreads and meanders, irrigating vast areas of flat farmland.  But here, in the mountains, it was too violent to build a bridge across it.  Only ferries linked Sichuan province with Yunnan to the east.  Every summer, when the torrent was high and fierce with the melted snow, the river claimed lives.  Just a few days before, it had swallowed a ferry with three of my schoolmates in it.

Dusk was descending.  I felt very ill.  Jin-ming had spread his jacket on the ground for me so I would not have to sit on the damp grass.  Our aim was to cross over to Yunnan and try to hitch a lift to Chengdu. The roads through Xichang were cut off by fighting between Rebel factions, so we had to try a roundabout route.  Nana and Wen had offered to get my registration book and luggage, and those of Xiao-hong, to Chengdu.

A dozen strong men rowed the ferry against the current, chanting a song in unison.  When they reached the middle of the river, they stopped and let the ferry be carried downstream toward the Yunnan side.  Huge waves broke over us several times.  I had to hold on tight to the side while the boat listed helplessly.  Normally I would have been terrified, but now I felt only numbness.  I was too preoccupied with the death of my grandmother.

A solitary truck stood on a basketball court in the town on the Yunnan bank, Qjaojia.  The driver readily agreed to give us a lift in the back.  All the time, I kept turning over in my head what I could have done to save my grandmother.  As the truck jolted along, we passed banana groves at the back of mud houses in the embrace of cloud-capped mountains.  Seeing the gigantic banana leaves, I remembered the small, potted, fruitless banana by the door of my grandmother's hospital ward in Chengdu.  When Bing came to see me, I used to sit beside it with him, chatting deep into the night.  My grandmother did not like him because of his cynical grin and the casualness with which he treated adults, which she considered disrespectful.  Twice she came staggering downstairs to call me back.

I had hated myself for making her anxious, but I could not help it.  I could not control my desire to see Bing.  Now how I wished I could start all over again!  I would not do anything to upset her.  I would just make sure she got better although how I did not know.

We passed through Yibin.  The road wound down Emerald Screen Hill on the edge of the city.  Staring at the elegant redwoods and bamboo groves, I thought back to April, when I had just returned home to Meteorite Street from Yibin.  I was telling my grandmother how I had gone to sweep Dr.  Xia's tomb, which was on the side of this hill, on a sunny spring day.  Aunt Jun-ying had given me some special 'silver money' to burn at the tomb. God knows where she had got it from, as it had been condemned as 'feudal."  I searched up and down for hours, but could not find the tomb.  The hillside was a battered mess.  The Red Guards had leveled the cemetery and smashed the tombstones, as they considered burial an 'old' practice.  I can never forget the intense flame of hope in my grandmother's eyes when I mentioned the visit, and how it darkened almost immediately when I stupidly added that the tomb was lost.  Her look of disappointment had been haunting me.  Now I kicked myself for not telling her a white lie.

But it was too late.

When Jin-ming and I got home, after more than a week on the road, there was only her empty bed.  I remembered seeing her stretched out on it, her hair loose but still tidy, biting her lips hard, her cheeks sunken. She had suffered her murderous pains in silence and composure, never screaming, never writhing.  Because of her stoicism, I had failed to realize how serious her illness was.

My mother was in detention.  What Xiao-her and Xiaohong told me about Grandmother's last days caused me such anguish that I had to ask them to stop.  It was only years later that I learned what had happened after I left.

She would do some housework, then go back to bed and lie there with her face taut, trying to fight back the pain.

She constantly murmured that she was anxious about my trip, and worried about my younger brothers.

"What will become of the boys, with no schools?"  she would sigh.

Then one day she could not get out of bed.  No doctor would come to the house, so my sister's boyfriend, Specs, carried her to the hospital on his back.  My sister walked by his side, propping her up.  After a couple of journeys, the doctors asked them not to come anymore.  They said they could find nothing wrong with her and there was nothing they could do.

So she lay in bed, waiting for death.  Her body became lifeless bit by bit.  Her lips moved from time to time, but my sister and brothers could hear nothing.  Many times they went to my mother's place of detention to beg for her to be permitted to come home.  Each time, they were turned away without being able to see her.

My grandmother's entire body seemed to be dead.  But her eyes were still open, looking around expectantly.  She would not close them until she had seen her daughter.

At last my mother was allowed home.  Over the next two days, she did not leave my grandmother's bedside.  Every now and then, my grandmother would whisper something to her.  Her last words were about how she had fallen into this pain.

She said the neighbors belonging to Mrs.  Shau's group had held a denunciation meeting against her in the courtyard.  The receipt for the jewelry she had donated during the Korean War had been confiscated by some Rebels in a house raid.  They said she was 'a stinking member of the exploiting class," otherwise how could she have acquired all that jewelry in the first place?

My grandmother said she had had to stand on a small table.  The ground was uneven and the table wobbled, and she felt dizzy.  The neighbors were yelling at her.  The woman who had accused Xiao-fang of raping her daughter hit one leg of the table ferociously with a club.  My grandmother could not keep her balance and fell backwards onto the hard ground.  She said she had felt a sharp pain ever since.

In fact, there had been no denunciation meeting.  But that was the image that haunted my grandmother to her last breath.

On the third day after my mother came home, my grandmother died.  Two days later, immediately after my grandmother was cremated, my mother had to return to detention.

I have often dreamed of my grandmother since, and awakened sobbing.  She was a great character vivacious, talented, and immensely capable.  Yet she had no outlet for her abilities.  The daughter of an ambitious small-town policeman, concubine to a warlord, stepmother to an extended but divided family, and mother and mother-inlaw to two Communist officials in all these circumstances she had little happiness.  The days with Dr.  Xia were lived under the shadow of their past, and together they endured poverty, Japanese occupation, and the civil war. She might have found happiness in looking after her grandchildren, but she was rarely free from anxiety about us.  Most of her life she had lived in fear, and she faced death many times.

She was a strong woman, but in the end the disasters which hit my parents, the worries about her grandchildren, the tide of ugly human hostility all conspired to crush her.

But the most unbearable thing for her was what happened to her daughter.  It was as though she felt in her own body and soul every bit of the pain that my mother suffered, and she was finally killed by the accumulation of anguish.

There was another, more immediate factor in her death: she was denied proper medical care and could not be looked after, or even seen, by her daughter when she was fatally ill.  Because of the Cultural Revolution.  How could the revolution be good, I asked myself, when it brought such human destruction, for nothing?  Over and over again, I told myself I hated the Cultural Revolution, and I felt even worse because there was nothing I could do.

I blamed myself for not looking after my grandmother as well as I might have.  She was in the hospital at the time when I had come to know Bing and Wen.  My friendships with them had cushioned and insulated me, and had blunted my awareness of her suffering.  I told myself it was despicable to have had any happy feelings at all, by the side of what I now realized was my grandmother's deathbed.  I resolved never to have a boyfriend again.  Only by self denial I thought, could I expiate some of my guilt.

The next two months I stayed in Chengdu, desperately looking, with Nana and my sister, for a 'relative' nearby whose commune would accept us. We had to find one by the end of the autumn harvest when food was distributed, otherwise we would have nothing to eat for the following year our state supply ran out in January.

When Bing came to see me, I was very cold to him, and told him never to come again.  He wrote me letters but I threw them into the stove without opening them- a gesture I had perhaps picked up from Russian novels.  Wen came back from Ningnan with my registration book and luggage, but I refused to see him.  Once I passed him on the street, and looked straight through him, catching only a glimpse of his eyes, in which I saw confusion and hurt.

Wen returned to Ningnan.  One summer day in 1970, a forest fire broke out near his village.  He and a friend rushed out with a couple of brooms to try to put it out.  A gust of wind threw a ball of flames into his friend's face, leaving him permanently disfigured.  The two of them left Ningnan and crossed into Laos, where there was a war going on between left-wing guerrillas and the United States.  At the time a number of high officials' children were going to Laos and Vietnam to fight the Americans secretly, as it was forbidden by the government. These young people had become disillusioned with the Cultural Revolution, and hoped they could get back their youthful adrenaline by taking on the "US imperialists."

One day soon after they got to Laos, Wen heard the alarm which signaled that American planes were coming.

He was the first to leap up and charge out, but in his inexperience he stepped on a mine which his comrades had planted themselves.  He was blown to smithereens.  My last memory of him is his perplexed and wounded eyes watching me from a muddy street corner in Chengdu.