The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir (11 page)

In a morbid way, we children felt grateful for Mother’s surgery, which had inadvertently transformed Mother into a gentler person. Notably, she spanked us less frequently. We used to joke that the doctor must have operated on Mother’s brain too.

Meanwhile, we also noticed Father’s changing attitude toward Mother. There was still no holding hands, kissing, or buying flowers, like married couples do in the West. Father expressed his appreciation for Mother in the typical way of a Chinese man. When my elder sister took a business trip to the city of Qingdao, known for its leather products, Father pulled her aside and told her to buy Mother a pair of leather shoes. But he never bought anything for her himself.

12.

M
ORTALITY

O
n a gloomy day in January 1976, China learned over breakfast that Premier Zhou Enlai was dead. By lunch, white paper flowers hung on the bare tree branches in the front gardens of my school. Funeral music, of the martial Communist kind, blared from loudspeakers. At lunchtime, teachers and seniors handed out black armbands in front of the cafeteria; everyone looked grim. In our English class, the teacher put aside the regular textbook and taught us two phrases: “Mourn the great revolutionary leader Zhou Enlai” and “Turn our grief into strength.” I was only eleven and knew little about Zhou except that he was an important leader of the Revolution; it was hard to sustain sadness for the death of someone who meant nothing to me from a time I never knew.

Father was more concerned with the wider ramifications of Premier Zhou’s death because Zhou was considered a leader in the reform of traditional practices and rituals. The official radio news said that he had left word with his wife that his body be cremated and his ashes scattered over “our vast motherland.” Soon there were reports of a flood of requests for cremation and the scattering of ashes into the sea or on mountains. I wondered if Grandma would change her mind and perhaps want to have her ashes spread in the Yellow River—China’s cradle of civilization—that flowed past her old village. I earnestly hoped she would, because I wanted to be able to brag to my classmates that Grandma was part of the river that nurtured us all. It seemed, at the time, to be a glorious end.

Father picked me up on Saturday and he had me take off my black armband and the white paper flower on my chest. “Grandma doesn’t want to be reminded of death,” he said. I knew that Father would use Zhou’s cremation to try to talk Grandma out of being buried. Over dinner, he got quickly to the point about Premier Zhou’s cremation. “Premier Zhou was a powerful person and he could do anything he wanted, but he chose cremation.” Grandma was ready for him: “He was a progressive Party member and I am not; he did not have children and I have four grandchildren. I may be an old-fashioned ignorant woman, but I want my body to be buried so that my grandchildren will be blessed.” Mother parried: “How do you expect your grandchildren to be blessed when their father is in big political trouble because of you?” But Grandma had heard that argument many times before and ignored it.

Over the next few months, Father lived on knife’s edge. During my weekend visits, he would talk about how local authorities had started a new round of cracking down on burials, encouraging people to follow Zhou’s example. Father told me later how he worried that local officials might come under pressure from above to uncover illegal burials and that they would force him to surrender the coffin. “I felt like we were thieves and had done something terribly wrong. Each time I walked into a meeting, I was convinced that someone had reported me to the Party secretary, who felt obligated to punish me.” But the Party secretary never said anything, and nobody at my new school knew about Grandma’s coffin.

It was the Year of the Dragon, supposedly lucky, but it turned into a year of calamity in China. My family had only a taste of it. On the night of August 16, as I dozed off while doing my homework, the lamp began to swing and the house started shaking. Mother grabbed me and my younger sister, and Father hoisted Grandma on his back, and we dashed out of the house. No one dared move after the first shock and we slept in the open. Our neighbors did the same. The next night it was raining heavily, and again the house shook. The epicenter of the quake was in neighboring Sichuan Province, in the sparsely populated area of Songpan, so the death toll was low. A similar quake had hit three weeks earlier and virtually wiped out Tangshan, a mining city not far from Beijing, but the government imposed a news blackout and we did not learn of it until well after the event.

During the day, the government radio used Chairman Mao’s teaching that “Man will conquer nature” to urge calm and said the authorities were well equipped to handle natural disasters. When my parents were home in the evenings, they would share horror stories about families in Tangshan trapped under the rubble, waiting for help that never arrived because the hospitals had been damaged and many doctors had died. Humanitarian gestures from the West were looked upon with suspicion—Father said foreigners used the guise of helping out to infiltrate the country—and the government had refused international aid following the Tangshan earthquake. Mother would describe how thousands of bodies had been thrown into a big pit and buried right away for fear of an epidemic. She described them so vividly that it seemed as if she had been there. When my sister asked her to verify the sources, she would always attribute the stories to colleagues whose relatives or friends had been called to help with the rescue efforts in Tangshan.

Suddenly, the word “earthquake,” which old people like Grandma had never heard before, entered our vocabulary and struck fear in our minds. When the earth shook violently that night, it became the most horrifying threat to us, more so than the evil Soviets who, we were taught, planned to attack China with atomic weapons. We slept in our clothes and were told that if we couldn’t run, we should crawl under a bed or a table.

Interestingly enough, Grandma became more scared than we children were. With her bound feet, she wouldn’t be able to run if the earthquake hit. She pleaded with Father not to give up on her. “I don’t want to die alone,” she said, choking up. She had Father clean out the space under her bed so she could hide in there if there was no time to run out. Her expression of fear surprised me. I had always thought that Grandma was not afraid of death and was looking forward to reuniting with her deceased husband. Nonetheless, I was sympathetic to her vulnerability and vowed never to abandon her. Grandma was touched.

During the next few days, we experienced several aftershocks. No one had much faith in the ability of our houses to withstand a sizable seismic event, and there was nothing coming from the media or the leadership to suggest otherwise. Rumor and speculation were the only sources of news. The prevailing rumor at that time was that another major earthquake could hit Xi’an soon and that the government was withholding that information for fear of chaos. People began to take matters into their own hands. My neighbors took home sheets of plastic and wooden sticks from the factory and pitched tents in the open area in the middle of the residential complex. Several stubborn old folks, claiming that they had lived long enough and were not afraid to die, did not bother to move into the tents. An elderly lady even jokingly suggested that Grandma sleep in her coffin. “The lid is sturdy and it’s quite safe in there,” she said, “and if you get killed, you can close your eyes, knowing that all they have to do is bury you.” Grandma was not amused. She told Father that she wanted to be where we were and did not mind living in the tent.

When the rainy season set in during the fall, the tent became dank and life was miserable. However, each time we considered dismantling the tent and moving back indoors, there would be a new rumor that another earthquake was imminent. The source was always a friend of a friend who knew a senior government official. The rumor was spurious at best, but no one was prepared to take the risk, to gamble with their lives. Father brought some concrete from work and added to the floor of our tent, built a more durable bamboo frame, and covered the tent with corn-stalks that he had picked up in the field nearby.

In October, my boarding school made the unusual move of canceling classes for two months while other local schools continued uninterrupted. When my parents were away at work and my siblings at school, I was left alone at home with Grandma. Bored, I would sneak back into our empty house, lie on top of the coffin, and stare at the ceiling. The big wooden beams, which used to give me such a sense of sturdiness, appeared menacing. I lifted the heavy coffin lid, put it aside, and slid in, lying on sacks of wheat flour that Father had stored there. Feeling safe and comfortable, I carefully closed the lid over me. Inside, it was complete darkness. I could hardly breathe and darkness seemed to be swallowing me alive. I panicked, pushed the lid open with all my might, and jumped out. The coffin, to which I had become so accustomed over the past year, looked suffocating.

In the following week, I could not resist going back to our empty house even though the sight of the coffin had started to spook me. I was rummaging in Father’s drawer and found a stack of books and Beijing opera magazines from the 1950s. The government regarded most Chinese and foreign books and operas published or performed before the Cultural Revolution as “poisonous weeds.” Only those about the Communist Revolution were allowed. And here they were—magazines featuring stories and colorful pictures of those banned operas on full display. I flipped through some pages and became lost in my reading, absently sitting on a small bench next to Grandma’s coffin. I realized that many of the stories that Father had told us were from those magazines. I began to understand why he loved traditional Beijing operas—each of which had extraordinary plots. The stories were completely different from what I had read before—the pulp propaganda about revolutionary heroes fighting class enemies. I was drawn in by those publications, which made me temporarily forget about the fear of earthquakes and death.

My favorite story was
The Wild Boar Forest
, an opera adapted from the Chinese classic
Outlaws of the Marsh
. It is set in the Song Dynasty and tells of a senior military officer who is framed by a corrupt prime minister and sent to a remote prison. The prime minister instructs the jailers escorting the officer to murder him when they get to the Wild Boar Forest. But a monk, whom the imprisoned officer had befriended on a visit to a temple and who had become his sworn brother, rescues him. The descriptions of how the monk ambushed the officer’s jailers in the Wild Boar Forest have been etched in my memory.

“It was dark and deep, the most treacherous forest in the region. Many warriors lost their lives there. The officer hoped they would have it behind them before dusk, but the jailers deliberately dragged their feet. At noontime, one yawned and pretended to be sleepy. The jailers took out thick ropes and bound him tightly to a tree. Then, they revealed their true intent and pulled out their weapons. The officer begged for mercy, but to no avail. Helpless, he closed his eyes and prepared for his death. One jailer was about to raise his big thick wooden stick when a thunderous howling rose from among the trees. The jailer turned around and saw a big fat monk, who growled, ‘I’ve been waiting here for hours.’ The officer opened his eyes and saw it was his sworn brother the monk, and he marveled at how fast the monk’s hands and feet were as he knocked the jailers to the ground. He was ready to slice off their heads with his knife when the officer asked him to stop. ‘Spare their lives,’ he said, and the monk sheathed his knife.”

I must have been there for hours when Grandma found me. “It’s dangerous to be here all by yourself,” she said. Worrying that Father might lock his drawer, I pulled out some magazines and books, and hid them in the coffin before going out with Grandma. Over the next few weeks, when the opportunity presented itself, I would slip away from the tent, sit by the coffin, and read about warriors, emperors, and even a female ghost who refused to leave the world before avenging her murderer. In a story called “Qin Qiong Sold His Horse,” a warrior named Qin Qiong was marooned at an inn following a failed mission. When money ran out, he was forced to sell his favorite horse. At the market, he encountered another warrior, who generously offered Qin money to tide him over. The two became sworn brothers and joined the rebellion against the Sui Dynasty. They parted over different political views and ended up joining different military factions. One day, Qin learned that his army had set a trap for his friend. He tried to tip him off, but he arrived too late. His friend had been beheaded. Out of sadness, he buried his friend and built a temple so he would be remembered.

These stories conveyed messages that ran counter to what we learned at school, that the Revolution was more important than friendship. I had learned a different set of values—friendship could transcend ideologies. Friends protected and made sacrifices for each other. I was so inspired by the warrior stories that I persuaded two close friends at school to become my sworn brothers. Like those ancient warriors, we planned a ritual where we would prick our wrists to draw a drop of blood, which would be put in a bowl of water that we would drink from. We would chant, “We were not born on the same day, but, if needed, we will die for each other and leave this world simultaneously.” One boy’s mother found out and notified Father. He was furious and asked how I had become so poisoned with those ideas. When he realized that I had read his magazines, he simply said, “Those are ancient stories. Nobody does that now.” A week later, when I was home over the weekend, my sister said Father had burned all the books so I wouldn’t get myself into more trouble.

As the books and magazines tempted me away from the real world, Father was moving in the opposite direction. The constant threat of earthquakes jolted him out of his obsession with Grandma’s burial, forcing him to come to grips with reality. Before winter approached, Mother showed up at my school, where we slept inside a big tent pitched in the school playground. She had brought me a new winter jacket and a pair of underpants, and a pair of soccer shoes that I had asked for a long time ago. “Your father is worried that it might be cold sleeping outside,” she said. “He took money out of Grandma’s funeral fund and asked me to buy clothes for you and your siblings.” I was overwhelmed by Father’s unexpected generosity. I remember that all I could say was, “How is Grandma? I hope her coffin didn’t get damaged.” In fact, when Mother spotted a roof leak that dripped water onto the coffin lid, Father simply put a bucket there without fussing over it. He didn’t even bother to paint a new layer over the damaged area after the leak was fixed.