My Childhood Friend, Hu Jian

I first met Hu Jian in the early 1970s.

Both of our parents worked at Zhijiang Middle School, and both families lived on the school grounds. My family lived beside the small auditorium. The public bathhouse stood a little way to the front and left of our home, and the public toilets were about thirty meters behind and to the left. The bathhouse, toilets, and the buildings where we lived all stood beside an earthen embankment more than two meters high. On top of it was a large vegetable garden, perhaps forty meters square.

Hu Jian’s family lived in the middle of a row of one-story classroom buildings along the northern edge of the garden, facing the school cafeteria far away to the south.

Hu Jian was a little older than I was, though I do not know whether the difference was one year or two. He was the youngest in his family, with an older brother, a second brother, and an older sister. Both his father and mother were Chinese-language teachers.

His mother, Teacher Ye Zhuqin, came from Cili on the shores of Dongting Lake. She had graduated from Taoyuan Teachers’ College and had come to Zhijiang with Teacher Hu at an early age to teach. Teacher Ye had an elegant bearing and dressed very appropriately. She spoke softly and always wore a smile.

She taught me only once. Our regular teacher was ill, and she came to substitute. Her beautiful Mandarin reading aloud stunned us at once. Other teachers either spoke an imperfect, heavily accented Mandarin or simply read the lessons in their native dialects. Only Teacher Ye’s reading made us understand what reading aloud really was, and what power it could have.

Teacher Ye placed great importance on educating her children. This was during the later years of the Cultural Revolution. Primary schools continued to hold classes, but the curriculum consisted mainly of studying quotations from Chairman Mao, along with a little simple arithmetic. Middle schools had only just resumed after the first four years of the Cultural Revolution. My father had been temporarily assigned to organize Zhijiang Middle School, and Hu Jian’s parents had also been recruited as teachers. But the school mainly taught political texts. Mathematics and the sciences were offered, too, though at a very elementary level.

Hu Jian’s oldest brother belonged to the “Old Three Classes”—the three graduating classes whose schooling had been disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. At the time, he seemed to be working in a machinery factory. Sometimes, when I went to Hu Jian’s house, I saw Teacher Ye discussing Tang poetry and Song lyrics with him, along with tonal patterns, rhetoric, and literature. I had never heard anything like it. Although I could not understand much of what they said, I felt that their conversations were refined and beautiful.

His brother was intelligent and did well in school. He was just about to take the college entrance examination when the Cultural Revolution began, and his fate was unfortunate.

After I became acquainted with Hu Jian, together with Chen Xiaohong, whom I already knew, the three of us—children of similar age living among the school families—soon began playing together.

At that time, Xiaohong and I had stopped speaking because of an “academic dispute” more than a year earlier. We had long since gotten over our anger, but neither of us could bring ourselves to make the first move. Through Hu Jian, however, we were able to play together. Hu Jian had a very good temper and was sensible. He always spoke and acted in ways that all of us could accept.

Most of our games were “war.” Each of us recruited a group of younger children. We were the “commanders,” and they were our “underlings,” following our orders. Then we would fight a “Three Kingdoms war.”

Our weapons were our hands, shaped into pistols. Our bullets were the “Bang! Bang!” sounds we made with our mouths. Whoever made the “bang” first, as long as the other person was exposed, was “dead.” Our shots never missed; every bullet hit its mark.

The three groups fought independently. There were no alliances. Everyone was an enemy. There was no referee, and sometimes someone who had been “shot dead” would argue that he had not even shown his head, so how could he have been killed?

Most of the time, however, everyone followed the rules. Whoever was “killed” would step forward voluntarily and say, “I’m dead,” and then go off to play something else so that the opposing side would not misunderstand. The group with survivors at the end was the winner of the “Three Kingdoms reunified under Jin.”

A battle usually lasted thirty or forty minutes, sometimes as long as an hour. It was exhausting: we had to run, hide, and keep watch. This kind of “physical warfare” required many people, and often we could not start a battle because there were too few players.

So most of the time we engaged in “warfare of the mind”—playing Chinese chess.

At first, because Xiaohong and I were not speaking, each of us played separately against Hu Jian. Neither of us was his match. I cannot remember whether I ever defeated him. In any case, I lost far more often than I won. My victories could be counted on one hand; I usually lost. Xiaohong was not much better. Of the three of us, Hu Jian was clearly the most intelligent.

Sometimes, when he was playing against me or Xiaohong, he would suddenly say halfway through a game, “I have something to do. You take over for me,” and then leave.

That was how Xiaohong and I began playing directly against each other. Gradually, this happened more often, and sometimes we were able to play an entire game from beginning to end. We still did not speak, but the ice in our hearts had already melted.

I do not know whether Hu Jian really had something to do each time, or whether he deliberately gave us opportunities to play directly against one another and reconcile. He never urged us to make up, so to this day I do not know what he was thinking.

Apart from gun battles and chess battles, Hu Jian and I most often played at learning to ride a bicycle.

His family had bought a new bicycle. I cannot remember whether it was a Flying Pigeon or a Forever. In those days, a bicycle was a luxury item. Most families did not own one.

Hu Jian was eager to learn, so the two of us practiced on the basketball court behind my house. I held him up, and then he held me up. We fell many times, but neither of us cared much about whether we ourselves were hurt. What mattered was whether the bicycle had been damaged. It was an expensive possession, costing more than a hundred yuan.

At that time, university graduates who had just begun working earned only a little over forty yuan a month. An apprentice worker initially earned just eighteen yuan a month. Even veteran teachers like Hu Jian’s parents made only a little over sixty yuan.

We became addicted to learning to ride. Sometimes his parents would not let him use the bicycle, and we could do nothing but fret impatiently, unable to settle our minds.

Gradually, we learned to ride short distances without being held. We circled the school grounds along the concrete path beside the athletic field. Trees and buildings flashed past us. It felt as though we were flying, and the exhilaration was indescribable.

But excitement made it easy to lose concentration, and then we fell more often.

We began learning during the summer vacation. Once the autumn term started, we could practice only on weekends. Still, we made great progress, and by late autumn we could ride around the campus without much trouble.

One Sunday in early winter, Hu Jian felt that he had become a good rider. He set off alone on his bicycle, leaving the school and following the road along the river toward the power plant. Unfortunately, he fell off the road along the way. He was badly shaken up, and the bicycle was damaged as well.

Fortunately, it was early winter and we were wearing plenty of clothes. If it had been summer, and we had been dressed in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, the consequences would have been even worse.

The next day, I went to look for him and found him covered in adhesive bandages. That was how I learned what had happened the day before. I was relieved that he had not asked me to go with him. Otherwise, I would also have been responsible for the damaged bicycle.

The bicycle was repaired and became usable again, but his parents no longer allowed him to ride it. Naturally, I could not ride it either.

Hu Jian was one grade above me and graduated a year earlier. He was sent to work with a production team in Zhupingpu Commune, more than ten miles to the west. I graduated a year later and went to Shuikuan Commune, more than thirty miles to the southeast.

During that period, we rarely saw each other and knew little about one another’s circumstances. We did not meet again until shortly before the 1977 college entrance examination.

In 1976, Hu Jian became a substitute teacher at the commune middle school. This was a very good opportunity at the time. If he performed well, he might be appointed as a regular teacher and become a state employee—someone on the government payroll, guaranteed a livelihood by the state. So he worked very hard.

By 1977, he had officially become a regular teacher.

But in early summer of 1977, the decision to restore the college entrance examination under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership had been formally announced. Most of the high-school graduates from the previous ten years began preparing for the examination, afraid of missing this rare opportunity.

At the time, I was working as a substitute teacher at a village primary school. Because the production brigade could not find anyone to replace the three of us sent-down youth teachers, they refused to release us to return to town to study. At the beginning of November, we had no choice but to leave without saying goodbye and return to town to prepare.

The examination in Hunan was postponed until December, giving us an extra month to study.

Hu Jian was still teaching at the commune middle school. He had come to town for a training course. One evening after dinner, I was taking a walk and saw him playing basketball on the school court. I called out to him. He immediately stopped, came to the edge of the court, and began talking with me.

He told me about his situation. He said it would be difficult for him to leave his job. If he resigned in order to prepare for the college entrance examination, the school might not preserve his teaching position. If he failed the examination, he would have no way back.

Policies changed constantly in those days, and no one knew whether there would ever be another college entrance examination after this one. He therefore did not dare to take the risk.

In the end, he found a relatively secure solution: he would take the humanities examination.

He was teaching Chinese at the time, so preparing for the humanities subjects was relatively easy for him. He would not have to resign in order to study. Although he was stronger in science and actually preferred science, he had to compromise in order to keep his teaching position.

I also felt that this might be the safer choice.

We therefore took different examinations: he took the humanities examination, while I took the science examination.

The result was that, by squeezing in bits of study time around his work, Hu Jian ranked first among all humanities candidates in Zhijiang County. He received a perfect score in mathematics. Everyone thought there was no question that he would be admitted to a university, and probably to a very good one.

But what happened next was extremely strange. When everyone who had been admitted had received their acceptance letters, Hu Jian still had not received any notice at all.

What I later heard was that, because of the influence of the Cultural Revolution, political screening of humanities candidates still placed great emphasis on family background. Hu Jian’s parents did not come from politically acceptable backgrounds, so he was eliminated.

At the time, however, Qianyang Teachers’ College—later moved to Huaihua and renamed Huaihua Teachers’ College, and now known as Huaihua University—was eager to recruit talented students. It admitted a group of candidates who had performed well but had not been accepted by other universities through an expansion of its enrollment.

I was busy preparing to begin university myself and did not see Hu Jian again at the time. After I entered university, I heard that he had been admitted to the mathematics department of Qianyang Teachers’ College.

By rights, he could have entered a very good university to study the humanities. Instead, fate had played a cruel trick on him, sending him to Huaihua Teachers’ College to study mathematics.

He was the most seriously underutilized of all the candidates from Zhijiang that year. I knew how intelligent he was. If he had had enough time to prepare, and if it had not been for that unreasonable political screening, he would have had no difficulty getting into Tsinghua or Peking University.

During our university years, we had almost no contact. I only heard that some of the students admitted to Qianyang Teachers’ College through the expanded enrollment, feeling that their talents had been wasted, stopped studying seriously and simply drifted through school. Some even went to the nearby Anjiang Cotton Mill to flirt with the female workers and were reprimanded by the school.

I heard nothing about Hu Jian. I hoped he would overcome his discouragement and regain his spirits.

The next time I heard news of him, he had graduated and stayed on at the college as deputy secretary of the Youth League committee. This made me both happy and surprised. It showed that he had not become dispirited at school, but had performed very well and won the appreciation of the leadership.

Although he was better suited to a professional field, the teachers’ college was intended to train primary and secondary school teachers. It had neither the capacity nor the plan to develop specialists in mathematics, so that path was not open to him.

After that, we continued living far apart and did not see each other. It was not until 1986 or 1987, when I was working in Changsha, that we met once.

By then he had married Zhang Huichun, a fellow native of Zhijiang and a younger classmate at Qianyang Teachers’ College.

Before the 1977 college entrance examination, Zhang Huichun and I had both taken part in training with the Zhijiang basketball team. I was on the men’s team and she was on the women’s team, but we shared many training sessions. This continued for about a month, until I left for university.

So I knew her well: she was cheerful, frank, capable, and efficient. I thought Hu Jian had made a very suitable choice in marrying her.

We met in Changsha and talked about his circumstances. By then, he had become secretary of the college’s Youth League committee. The school had long since moved to Huaihua and was now called Huaihua Teachers’ College.

He looked full of energy—confident, calm, optimistic, and cheerful, just as he had been in childhood.

Later, I went to the United States to study, and we were even farther apart. We had little contact.

In the summer of 2006, I returned to China for the first time. When I arrived in Zhijiang, I called him and asked whether we could meet.

“Of course,” he said. We immediately arranged to meet at noon the next day at Laoganma Zhijiang Duck Restaurant, opposite the Surrender Memorial Arch in Qiliqiao.

At eleven the next morning, I took a bus to Qiliqiao. Before long, Hu Jian and Zhang Huichun arrived from Huaihua, more than thirty kilometers away, in a small car he had bought not long before.

The restaurant was not large. Directly across from it stood the entrance to the Surrender Memorial Arch. We sat at a table beside the window. The Wushui River lay fully before us, winding through the landscape. Sunlight glittered on its surface, and the sight filled us with ease and delight.

Hu Jian said that the restaurant’s Zhijiang duck was quite good. We ordered a duck and several other dishes, eating and talking as we went.

I had already heard that he had become deputy secretary of the school’s Communist Party committee. Apart from owning a small car, however, not much else seemed to have changed.

We met again when I returned to China for the second time in 2009. That time, we gathered at a farmhouse restaurant in Huaihua, along with several of his middle-school classmates, whom I also knew.

After that, I returned to China fairly often. Whenever he was in Huaihua, we would meet.

Later, I learned that Huaihua Teachers’ College had been renamed Huaihua University and that Hu Jian had become its Party secretary.

In 2009, I received my master’s degree in library science. On one occasion, he said to me, “If you’re willing to come back, I’ll have you serve as the university librarian.”

Perhaps he was joking. In any case, I never made up my mind to return to China.

A few years ago, he retired. A university in Changsha hired him as a vice president, and later, it seemed, he became president.

Recently, Zhang Huichun told me on WeChat that Hu Jian had now retired completely. The two of them were enjoying their retirement together.

Although his talents were once wasted, he never sank into despair. He kept working hard, remained optimistic, and continued to move forward. That is extraordinarily rare.

“There are things you never need to remember. There are people you will never forget.”

Hu Jian is one of those people.

 

Written in 2021.

 

Teacher Xiao and Big Wang

Teacher Xiao Xianhe was my extracurricular arts teacher in elementary school. She was in her early thirties at the time, of medium height, neither plump nor thin, with short hair and a brisk, capable appearance. I have seen her name written as Xiao Xianhe – 肖先河, Xiao Xianhe – 肖仙荷with a different character for “xian,” and even Xiao Xianhe 萧仙荷with different surname. I suspect that “肖先河” was a name she adopted during the Cultural Revolution to make her revolutionary credentials clear. “肖仙荷” sounded more like a woman’s name to me, and may have been her real name.

Before the Cultural Revolution, our school was called Lotus Pond Elementary School. After the movement began, it was renamed Red Guard Elementary School. It stood at the northernmost edge of Zhijiang town. One side bordered the old city wall, beyond which lay farmland and low hills. In spring, we could hear frogs croaking in the fields.

Walking north along Little North Street, one crossed a small bridge over a large pond and entered Red Guard Elementary School. After going through the gate and walking several dozen yards to the left, one came to a smaller pond. It had once been filled with lotus blossoms, which was how the school got its original name. Some people believed the name came from the large lotus-filled pond in front of the school. That was possible too. In any case, there were lotus ponds both outside and inside the school.

After the school was renamed Red Guard Elementary School, nobody looked after the ponds, and the lotus flowers gradually became sparse.

Once through the gate, one walked straight ahead, climbed a few steps, and arrived at a courtyard. Facing the courtyard was a tall ancient temple. The other three sides were lined with wooden buildings: classrooms near the entrance, and teachers’ living quarters on the left and right.

Teacher Xiao lived in a room halfway along the right side of the courtyard. Her child was still very young.

At that time, our Chinese classes consisted only of studying quotations from Chairman Mao. Arithmetic classes still taught a few other things. We still had physical education, but music and drawing had disappeared. So Teacher Xiao never actually taught me in a classroom.

There were no longer any athletic teams. Instead, every school had an arts propaganda troupe, whose full name was the “Mao Zedong Thought Arts Propaganda Troupe.” The troupes frequently rehearsed dance numbers and choreographed singing, all of it consisting of revolutionary songs. Teacher Xiao was in charge of the Red Guard Elementary School troupe. She was its leader and coach, although those were not her formal titles.

With the sports teams gone, the arts troupe became the face of the school. As the teacher responsible for it, Teacher Xiao worked extremely hard and had tremendous drive and ability. The teachers in charge of such troupes at the various schools all had to be that way to do the job. Our Red Guard Elementary School and South City Elementary School were the two elementary schools in the county seat, and their arts troupes were the best in the county. Every year, at the countywide elementary-school performance, the two schools competed for first place.

When the troupe won the performance competition and brought honor to the school, Teacher Xiao was the chief person responsible. She received both the glory and the pressure.

Most of the troupe members were girls—pretty students who could sing and dance. They often had to come to school early in the morning to practice posture, singing, and dancing. Sometimes they rehearsed after school in the afternoon as well, always under Teacher Xiao’s direction.

Her child was still very young. During much of the Cultural Revolution, hiring a nanny was considered an act of exploitation. So Teacher Xiao did not dare hire one. She had to care for her child while also leading the troupe. She trained the students in the courtyard for two reasons: there was plenty of room, and it was right outside her door, making it easier to keep an eye on her child.

At the time, I was dull, awkward, and shy, with not a trace of artistic talent. I could not sing, much less dance. I was physically weak and devoted myself to getting stronger, so I liked playing ball, running, swimming, and exercising. I had never thought of joining the arts troupe, and I certainly had no talent for it. I had known Teacher Xiao for years, and we would exchange greetings when we met.

When I was probably in fifth grade, Teacher Xiao once approached me and said she was putting together a dance that needed a male warrior to wave a flag. She thought I would be perfect for the role. I told her I had no artistic talent and did not want to join the troupe. After she mentioned it several times and saw that I was genuinely uninterested, she stopped bringing it up. The matter was forgotten.

In the second half of 1969, the Cultural Revolution entered a relatively stable phase. Because of the Zhenbao Island incident, relations between China and the Soviet Union had become extremely tense. Chairman Mao called for “digging deep tunnels, storing grain everywhere, and not seeking hegemony,” and air-raid shelters began to be dug throughout the country.

Zhijiang organized its work units to dig a shelter along South-North Street for an entire year. Each unit was assigned a task, and our teachers took part as well, though we children were too young to participate. In the end, they dug an air-raid shelter more than a kilometer long, over three meters deep, and four or five meters wide. Teacher Xiao’s troupe sometimes went to the construction site to perform for the people digging the shelter.

Before long, construction began on the Xiangqian and Zhiliu railways. This was a major state-organized project. The Xiangqian Railway ran east to west, from Changsha, Hunan to Guiyang, Guizhou. The Zhiliu Railway ran north to south, from Zhijiang (枝江, not 芷江 – my hometown. They have same pronunciation, but different characters), Henan to Liuzhou, Guangxi. The two lines crossed at Huaihua, more than thirty kilometers east of Zhijiang. They were part of what was known as the Third Front construction program.

 

Xiangqian Railway（湘黔铁路）Construction Site 

At the time, the “First Front” consisted of major coastal cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. The “Second Front” consisted of inland cities of moderate size, such as Changsha, Nanchang, and Hefei. The “Third Front” referred to small towns and mountainous areas in places such as western Hunan, Guizhou, Yunnan, and Sichuan—regions far from the coast but with inland plains and relatively convenient transportation. The government wanted to move major military-industrial enterprises to the Third Front in case of a sudden attack by American imperialism or Soviet revisionism.

The Xiangqian and Zhiliu railways were built entirely by peasants from the areas along the routes, without the participation of the Railway Corps. The laborers who came to Zhijiang were from the counties of Xinshao, Shaodong, Lianyuan, and Xinhua in the old Shaoyang Prefecture, center of Hunan. They lodged in the homes of local residents—under their eaves, beneath their roofs, or in their main halls. Our school also emptied some classrooms to house them.

Their living conditions were extremely poor. They slept on the bare floor, brought their own grain, and cooked for themselves. The food was inadequate, and they sweated heavily every day while finding it difficult to bathe.

Although they were civilian laborers, they were organized and managed along the lines of the Railway Corps. The administrative levels were modeled on the county, commune, and production brigade, but renamed the Xiangqian Railway Construction Corps: the XX Regiment at the county level, the XX Battalion at the commune level, and the XX Company at the brigade level. Each unit had its own red flag, which was planted at the construction site. They had no military uniforms and received none of the benefits of regular troops.

One day, Teacher Xiao suddenly came to me and said she wanted me to perform in a program. It was not a dance but a kuaiban skit（快板）—a comic performance delivered largely in the rhythm of bamboo clappers. It would not be difficult, she said.

I shook my head and told her I could not act and did not agree. So Teacher Xiao went to my mother and asked her to persuade me. My mother urged me to take part, but I still refused. Apart from feeling that acting was not my strength, I did not want to spend time with the affected, delicate girls in the troupe. I thought they would be difficult to deal with. Playing ball on the court was much more straightforward.

This time Teacher Xiao did not give up. She continued to approach my mother. I was puzzled and asked my mother why Teacher Xiao was so determined to have me perform. My mother said that Teacher Xiao wanted me to play a big, burly railway-construction soldier.

I was thin and weak, but I had a large head, a broad face, and was relatively tall. Once I put on clothes, my skinny arms would not show. In Teacher Xiao’s eyes, I was the ideal choice. My mother also pressed me to accept. Unable to refuse any longer, I agreed.

The play was a kuaiban skit about railway construction, somewhat like a comic sketch, except that most of the dialogue was recited in kuaiban rhythm. There were three characters: a company commander, a platoon leader, and a soldier named Big Wang.

The company had three bamboo baskets for carrying earth, a type of tool common in western Hunan called a piaji, or benji in standard Mandarin. There was a large one, a medium one, and a small one. Obviously, one company having only three baskets was not realistic, but a play could not be too realistic.

The three people came into conflict over who would get the large basket. Big Wang got up early and managed to take it first. But the platoon leader later used a little trick to deceive him and take it away. The company commander was even more cunning and eventually tricked the large basket out of the platoon leader’s hands.

In the end, Big Wang was left with the small basket. A large man was forced to carry a basket completely out of proportion to his body, making him look awkward, ridiculous, and hilarious.

Teacher Xiao cast me as Big Wang, my classmate Yang Yu as the platoon leader, and female classmate Ai Hongying as the company commander.

I appeared first as Big Wang. The opening lines I remember went something like this:

Up early at dawn, determined to get the big basket.
Luck was on my side—I reached out and took it.

Those are the only lines I still remember.

The dialogue was all catchy kuaiban verse. Teacher Xiao stood below the stage, tapping the rim of a drum with a drumstick to produce the rhythm. We recited our lines onstage to that beat.

At the first rehearsal, once I stepped onto the stage, I had no idea where to put my hands or where to look. There was one scene in particular in which I had a heart-to-heart conversation with Ai Hongying, the company commander, while sitting very close to her.

She was a girl, and very pretty—probably the prettiest girl in the school. At that time, of course, there was no such thing as a “school beauty,” because that was considered a bourgeois concept. In those days, boys and girls did not speak to one another. I was so nervous that I kept my head down and stared at the floor.

Teacher Xiao repeatedly told me to raise my head and look at “Company Commander” Ai Hongying. I did raise my head, but I still could not bring myself to look directly at her. I do not know whether Teacher Xiao failed to notice or noticed and decided not to interfere. In any case, I somehow got through it.

Once the play was more or less ready, we began going out to perform.

In those days there was no television, and the only films available were Tunnel Warfare（地道战）, Fighting South and North（南征北战）, and the model operas. Cultural life was desperately impoverished. Whenever an arts troupe performed, it was the biggest entertainment event for ordinary people. The troupes mostly sang revolutionary songs, usually in the form of choreographed singing or dancing. Yet people still came eagerly to watch.

Our first performance was at the Zhijiang County Auditorium.

That day, the eight-hundred-seat auditorium was almost full. I had never performed onstage before. When I stepped out and saw the sea of heads below me, I panicked. I could only look straight ahead, afraid that looking down would make me even more nervous.

Teacher Xiao reminded me from below the stage and fed me lines at crucial moments. Ai Hongying and Yang Yu, meanwhile, were veteran members of the arts troupe, seasoned performers. Their composure gradually helped me calm down. In the end, we made it through without any major mishap.

There had been no small-sketch-style kuaiban plays like ours during the Cultural Revolution. The plot rose and fell, and it was lively and funny. My two classmates had genuine performance experience and played their roles convincingly. My own rawness, clumsiness, and shyness should have been fatal flaws, but they may have happened to suit Big Wang’s honest, simple-minded, inarticulate nature.

The audience responded enthusiastically, and the program became very popular.

For Teacher Xiao, putting on a slightly comic, genuinely funny kuaiban play on a stage crowded with revolutionary songs and dances involved political risk. Casting a complete novice like me was another dangerous gamble, because the performance could easily have failed. Yet it succeeded.

I could not help admiring Teacher Xiao’s courage, judgment, and ability to rehearse and direct a performance.

From then on, Teacher Xiao took us to all kinds of performances. We appeared many times at the county auditorium, and we also performed on the stage in the school courtyard for the railway laborers living nearby.

Because there was virtually no entertainment in those days, even a low-level amateur program like ours drew a packed audience every time. Before long, most of the residents of Zhijiang and most of the railway laborers living around the town had seen our performance. Some had seen it more than once.

Sometimes, when I walked along the streets of Zhijiang, someone would shout at me:

“Big Wang!”

Without realizing it, I had become a little famous.

We performed the program for a little over a year, until the roadbed work on the Xiangqian and Zhiliu railways was largely completed and the laborers gradually returned home. We soon graduated from elementary school and entered Zhijiang School, which had just resumed classes.

After that, I rarely saw Teacher Xiao again. Following high school, I was sent to the countryside, then took the college entrance examination, went to work, and eventually left China. I never saw her again.

Several years later, Teacher Xiao staged the same kuaiban play once more. Some people remembered me as the original Big Wang and came to tell me about it.

About ten years ago, when I returned to my hometown and wanted to invite some of my former teachers to dinner, I thought of Teacher Xiao. I asked around and was told that she had retired long ago, left Zhijiang, and gone to live with her child. I was also told that she had developed facial paralysis and no longer wanted to see people.

How could someone as fine as Teacher Xiao have developed facial paralysis? She had always been fiercely proud and had insisted on showing everyone only her best side. Naturally, she would not want to be seen with a paralyzed face. I understood, and decided not to disturb her.

The house where Teacher Xiao had lived was still there. It was now part of the Confucian Temple, a nationally protected cultural heritage site.

I went to visit the temple. The stage where we had once performed was there but teacher Xiao was gone. The house stood empty, leaving behind only a few unforgettable memories.

 

Written in 2019

Teacher Li’s marriage

I first heard of Teacher Li Fuzhen (李复珍) on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. People said she had married Uncle Ji (姬), a regimental-level cadre who had transferred from the army to Zhijiang and was about twenty years older than she was. Since the county magistrate was also a regimental-level cadre, Uncle Ji was one of the highest-ranking officials in Zhijiang.

Uncle Ji was already in his fifties, while Teacher Li was in her thirties. He had received a little schooling in his youth and joined the revolution in 1938. He had fought in many battles and been wounded. By then, his health was poor. He was bloated and heavily overweight, suffered from numerous ailments, and moved slowly. He looked like a frail old man.

Teacher Li was much younger. She had a well-proportioned figure, graceful manners, and quick reactions. She looked very young. The two of them did not look like husband and wife at all. They seemed more like father and daughter.

Naturally, such a marriage attracted considerable attention in this remote little county town in western Hunan. I was only a child, but I heard people discussing them.

I did not know them personally. The first time I saw them up close was one day in late summer or early autumn of 1966. The Cultural Revolution was entering a state of madness. The Red Guards of Zhijiang held a huge parade. At the front marched rebel Red Guards and revolutionary masses. At the rear came the “ox demons and snake spirits” and the “landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists,” all paraded through the streets with placards around their necks. They included landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, capitalist-roaders, Nationalist warlords, reactionary academic authorities, capitalists, the children of landlords, and people accused of every imaginable crime.

The capitalist-roaders were former county leaders, including the county magistrate, the county Party secretary, and various bureau chiefs. They were considered especially reactionary. Not only did they wear placards, they were also forced to wear tall paper hats as they were paraded through the streets.

Uncle Ji was dragged out to be paraded as well. By then his health was so poor that he could no longer walk. He had to sit on a flatbed cart, which Teacher Li pulled through the procession. Both of them wore placards. Uncle Ji’s read “Military Bully Who Infiltrated the Revolutionary Ranks.” Teacher Li’s read “Landlord’s Daughter.”

I stood stupidly at the side of the street, watching the landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists pass by. I did not understand why they were “bad people.”

The sun was merciless, and the weather was unbearably hot. Uncle Ji was barely alive in the heat, curled up half sitting and half lying on the cart. Teacher Li was drenched in sweat. With a placard hanging from her neck, she struggled to pull the cart, walking expressionlessly down the street alongside the other “bad people.”

As they passed me, I felt terribly sorry for them.

By the middle of the Cultural Revolution, social order began to recover. The lives of Uncle Ji and Teacher Li gradually returned to normal. The Red Guards no longer came to harass them, and their living conditions improved considerably. With his spirits lifted and Teacher Li taking such good care of him, Uncle Ji’s health also improved. He could stand up and walk on his own again. He became much more alert and talkative.

They began participating in social activities, organizing elementary-school children like us to study and help maintain public order. Through my mother, I joined some of the activities they organized, and I began to have closer contact with them.

My mother told me to call them “Uncle Ji” and “Auntie Li.” I have called them that ever since.

In addition to organizing study sessions, they had us help manage the market, with the approval of the local Industry and Commerce Bureau. We put on red armbands and went into the streets to chase away peasants who came into town to sell vegetables.

The newspapers said that city residents had to buy vegetables at state-run markets because state-run markets were operated by the state and were therefore socialist. Vegetables grown by peasants on their private plots, on the other hand, were capitalist and had to be prohibited. At first, I believed this completely and energetically chased away the vegetable sellers.

Later, I heard Sister Tang, who lived next door and worked in the market division of the Industry and Commerce Bureau, complain to my parents. The state-run markets had very few vegetables, and what they did have was often poor. The peasants’ vegetables filled that gap. At the same time, peasants had nowhere else to earn money. Selling vegetables and eggs gave them the cash they needed to buy cooking oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, cloth, thread, needles, and other necessities. Allowing peasants to sell vegetables was therefore beneficial to everyone. Why call it capitalism and prohibit it?

Sister Tang’s specific job was to manage the market, and her main task was to stop peasants from selling vegetables. Yet she strongly resisted doing so. This shook me deeply. Later I learned that my mother sometimes bought vegetables directly from peasants. I became very conflicted.

Perhaps the authorities changed their minds, or perhaps Auntie Li suddenly saw the matter differently. In any case, we soon stopped doing it.

When I entered middle school, Deng Xiaoping returned to power and emphasized improving the quality of education. We began having homework and examinations, and life became busy. I seldom went to Auntie Li’s home anymore.

After graduating from high school, I went to the countryside as an educated youth, and my contact with them became even less frequent. When I occasionally ran into Auntie Li on the streets after I returned to town, we would chat for a while. She was in good spirits, looked healthy, and enjoyed talking.

After I was admitted to university, the government began implementing policies to correct the injustices of the past. Uncle Ji began receiving the benefits accorded to old Red Army veterans and was assigned a very nice bungalow. They started traveling frequently to Changsha and Beijing for Uncle Ji’s medical treatment. They also traveled to many other places, visiting old comrades and friends with whom they had lost contact for years.

When they returned, they would tell us about what they had seen and share the photographs they had taken.

Whenever the weather was good, Auntie Li went every morning to the Martyrs’ Stadium outside Zhijiang No. 2 Middle School to teach middle-aged and elderly people tai chi or other forms of exercise.

Sometimes I happened to pass by just as she had finished teaching, and we would chat for a while.

At some point, she began telling me stories about her youth.

Her family had originally been one of the prominent families in Zhijiang. They were well-off, and she herself was intelligent, studious, and interested in many things. In her teens, during the 1930s, she was sent to a girls’ middle school in Changsha. This was extremely unusual for someone from Zhijiang at the time.

In addition to reading, she loved sports. She enjoyed both ball games and track and field. She once competed in the Hunan Provincial Middle-School Games and won the championship in the three throwing events—the shot put, discus, and javelin.

When she recalled those days, she became visibly excited, her face glowing with happiness. She once showed me photographs from that period. She was beautiful and youthful, in the prime of her life, wearing a 1930s-style school uniform. Her face was innocent and pure. In another photograph, she wore a medal and looked utterly confident.

Although she had been a champion in the throwing events, she was remarkably slender.

She reminded me of the female students in The Song of Youth and Early Spring in February.

Not long afterward, the War of Resistance against Japan broke out, and her dream of attending university was shattered.

But one can imagine how much political pressure her family background must have brought her after Liberation in 1949.

She told me a great deal about her adolescence, but almost nothing about her experiences after Liberation. She never told me how she came to marry Uncle Ji, either. By the time they married, she was already 35. I do not know how much helplessness lay behind that marriage.

Perhaps marrying an old Red Army veteran like Uncle Ji was supposed to free her from the nightmare of having the wrong class background. Yet she had not escaped the nightmare of being paraded through the streets during the early Cultural Revolution.

She never once complained to me about any of the suffering she had endured.

Because of her strong athletic foundation, she learned everything quickly and performed it well. Whether tai chi, dance, or calisthenics, she practiced with real skill and precision. She did not merely exercise herself; she also taught everyone else free of charge.

Most of her students were younger than she was. My mother, for example, was seven or eight years younger than Auntie Li and was one of her students.

For more than a decade, Auntie Li taught tai chi voluntarily in Zhijiang. She became one of the familiar sights of the Martyrs’ Stadium every morning.

She always greeted people with a broad smile and overflowing warmth. No one would have imagined that she had lived through so many hardships.

Not long after I graduated from university, I returned to Zhijiang. Auntie Li told me that she had recently taken part in a Hunan provincial senior citizens’ long-distance running competition. She had won the women’s 5,000-meter cross-country race and would represent Hunan in the national senior citizens’ long-distance running competition.

I also loved sports. I had been a member of my university track-and-field team, had competed in the 5,000 meters, and had taken part in cross-country races. So she came specifically to ask me about training and competition. In fact, she knew at least as much as I did.

She was already in her sixties, yet she was full of confidence in life. Her spirits were high, and her body was strong. I genuinely admired her refusal to grow old and her determination to keep improving.

At the same time, Uncle Ji still needed her care. Yet she managed everything so well.

I thought to myself that with an attitude and a body like hers, she would surely live to be a hundred.

Not long afterward, Uncle Ji died in his eighties. Everyone who knew them said that without Auntie Li’s devoted care, he could never have survived the Cultural Revolution.

When I recalled his barely living body curled up on the flatbed cart, I realized that not only had he survived, he had lived for more than twenty additional years. Without Auntie Li, that would have been impossible.

After Uncle Ji’s death, because they had no children, Auntie Li adopted the daughter of a distant relative. The girl was already twelve or thirteen when she was adopted. She had grown up in the countryside and had a poor educational foundation, so she struggled with her studies.

But she was not particularly diligent. She was fond of good food and disinclined to work. As she entered adolescence, she became rebellious and even began dating which was not allowed in school in her age at that time. Whenever Auntie Li criticized her, she would run away from home. Auntie Li was angry and anxious, but there was nothing she could do.

The situation left Auntie Li depressed, and she no longer had the heart to come out and teach tai chi. Worry and frustration kept her from sleeping well, and her health steadily deteriorated. Everyone felt that the girl had made Auntie Li’s life a complete mess.

In 2006, I returned to China for the first time and invited many of my former teachers to dinner. Auntie Li was among them.

She was already in her eighties. She had truly grown old and looked thin and frail. The vitality she had once possessed was gone. Still, she was very happy to see me, and we chatted for a while. Because there were so many people there, we did not have much time to talk.

Not long after I returned to the United States, I heard that her adopted daughter and the girl’s boyfriend had deceived and stolen from her, making off with a large sum of money—her life savings.

The loss had a devastating effect on her life. Although some of the money was eventually recovered, the psychological blow was fatal.

She died not long afterward, not reaching the age of ninety.

Written in 2019

Xiaohei (Little Black)

       

Xiaohei’s full name was Xiong Xinglong (熊兴隆). He was my neighbor when I was a child. Xiao means young, little, small; Hei means black. Because he looked black, so he had the nickname “Xiao Hei” – a boy with a little bit black skin, only the parents and best friends knew and used nickname.

Xiaohei’s father, Teacher Xiong Fanwen, taught at Zhijiang Teachers’ College at the time. He was an honest, unassuming man, plain-looking and about 1.65 or 1.66 meters tall. Xiaohei’s mother was also of average height for a woman, yet all three of their children grew up tall and good-looking. Xiaohei reached about 1.78 meters, while his older sister and younger sister were around 1.7 meters or close to it.

Xiaohei was clever, but extremely mischievous and unbelievably bold. He was a year older than me, half a head taller, and very sturdy. He liked teasing and bullying younger children, and I was bullied by him more than once. I was therefore quite afraid of him.

We often went to play in the gymnasium about twenty meters from our homes. Once, while we were playing there, he suddenly said to me in a menacing voice, “I’m going to beat you up tomorrow!”

I was so frightened that I began to cry, standing at the gymnasium entrance. An adult passing by asked what had happened. I said, “Xiaohei said he’s going to beat me up tomorrow.”

The adult laughed. “He’s going to beat you up tomorrow. Why are you crying today?”

Later, the adult even told my parents the story as a joke.

For a long time, I wondered how I could have behaved that way. But after learning a little psychology, I came to understand that, from a psychological point of view, anticipatory fear is perfectly normal. Xiaohei may have forgotten about it the next day, or perhaps his anger had passed, or perhaps I simply did not go out to play with him. I can no longer remember. In any case, he never actually hit me.

But he often gave me that same feeling of terror in advance.

The most outrageous thing he ever did still makes me shudder when I think of it. One day, a group of us children were having a battle with chinaberries in the school auditorium.

Chinaberries are the fruit of the chinaberry tree. They are about the size of a peanut, oval-shaped, with flesh on the outside and a pit inside. They cannot be eaten, but birds love them. In autumn, chinaberry trees drop large quantities of fruit. Because the berries are so small, being hit by one does not hurt very much, making them ideal ammunition for children’s battles. We would gather great numbers of them and throw them at one another.

That day, Xiaohei and the children on his side were on the stage, hiding behind the walls at either end and using them as cover. From their elevated position, they threw chinaberries down at us. We were below the stage, crouching behind benches and occasionally standing up to fire back.

After we had been fighting for a while, I stood up again. The moment my head appeared above the bench, Xiaohei hit me squarely in the forehead with a large white object. My forehead suddenly grew hot, and blood began pouring down my face.

It turned out that Xiaohei had unscrewed the enamel cover of a socket on the lighting-control panel beside the stage. The cover looked rather like a bicycle bell. He had thrown it straight at me.

The blow split open a gash more than two inches long in my forehead. It missed my eye by less than a centimeter. Later, I received many stitches at the hospital, and even now I can still see the scar.

Teacher Xiong came to our home in person to apologize.

After that, I was afraid to play with Xiaohei for a long time.

Not long afterward, Zhijiang Teachers’ College and Zhijiang No. 2 Middle School exchanged campuses. To this day, I still do not understand why they did so. We moved to Muyoupo, east of the airfield, which had previously been the site of Zhijiang No. 2 Middle School. During World War II, of course, it had been used by the American Flying Tigers and was part of an American air base.

We moved there, and Teacher Xiong went ahead first. But his three children were still in town, and while the family was still trying to decide whether to move everyone together, the Cultural Revolution began.

Because Teacher Xiong had been born into a capitalist family, he was subjected to struggle sessions. As a result, Xiaohei’s mother and the three children never moved to Muyoupo. We no longer played together.

Xiaohei’s grandfather was the eldest master of the Xiong family. The Xiong family was no ordinary family. One of its members, Xiong Xiling, had served as premier during the early years of the Republic of China. In Zhijiang, the Xiongs were a prominent and well-known household, and they were also related to the family of Shen Congwen.

I do not know the exact relationship between Xiaohei’s family and Xiong Xiling. I do not know whether Xiong Xiling was his grandfather or his great-uncle.

In any case, Xiaohei’s grandfather had a son with a servant girl. Because the woman had not been formally married into the family, the child was considered a disgrace to the Xiongs. I do not know the details. All I know is that Teacher Xiong enjoyed none of the advantages of the Xiong family as a child. Instead, he suffered humiliation and abuse. He was eventually sent to an orphanage run by Americans and grew up there.

During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards denounced Teacher Xiong as the “puppy of a capitalist” and demanded that he confess how he had oppressed the poor.

Teacher Xiong helplessly explained, “My capitalist father and I are related only by blood. My mother and I were treated with contempt in the Xiong family and were hardly better off than the family’s hired laborers. I took part in none of their exploitation and enjoyed none of the benefits of their capitalist wealth. They abandoned me, and I grew up in an orphanage. Yet now you treat me as a member of the exploiting class and struggle against me. This is terribly unfair.”

Perhaps the Red Guards realized that he was not a capitalist-roader. Perhaps they experienced a moment of conscience. After a few struggle sessions, they let him go.

Teacher Xiong had received a good education at the orphanage. He played the accordion and violin very well, and he could also play the piano. During the relatively peaceful days in the later years of the Cultural Revolution, we could sometimes hear him playing on the balcony of his home. It was beautiful music.

After classes resumed toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, Teacher Xiong substituted for our politics teacher twice. But he was not a good speaker. He did not look at the students while teaching; instead, he gazed out the window at an angle of about forty-five degrees, as if talking to himself. He simply followed the textbook and probably did not dare improvise for fear of making a mistake.

He may have been a man of considerable inner substance, but teaching was not his strength.

As Xiaohei grew older, he became much better behaved. I no longer heard that he was causing trouble everywhere. But he still had enormous energy. He was decisive and daring, and among people his age and those a few years younger, he had considerable influence. There were always plenty of people following him. He was practically a big brother whose word was law.

By then we were no longer neighbors, and I did not play with him anymore, so I knew little about what they did. But from time to time he would create such a commotion that even someone like me, who paid no attention to him, could not fail to hear about it.

Around 1975 or 1976, he persuaded two companions to climb through a window into the school library in the dead of night. The three of them stole several baskets of books and carried them away.

The incident alarmed the county Public Security Bureau. A special investigation team in town solved the case, eventually discovering that the “masterminds” were three young men, all under twenty.

Of course, Xiaohei stole the books because he loved reading and writing. He had read many books. In those days, when the idea that “reading is useless” was widespread, young people who loved books were rare.

The books sold at the Xinhua Bookstore consisted mainly of Chairman Mao’s works and revolutionary “red books.” Works such as Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, and Water Margin were classified as “yellow books.” Almost all major works of world literature were also considered “yellow books” and were banned.

These were exactly the books Xiaohei wanted to read. Since the Xinhua Bookstore did not sell them, the school library had them. But the library lent books only to teachers for “internal circulation,” and Xiaohei naturally had no right to borrow them.

So he had no choice but to “take” the books without permission.

The Public Security Bureau probably took into account the fact that Xiaohei had stolen the books in order to read them, not to sell them. In fact, there were hardly any books to buy at the time—or rather, no one dared buy “yellow books.”

Deng Xiaoping had also returned to work, and society was becoming less sensitive about people reading “yellow books.” In the end, the authorities merely gave the three young men a stern warning and let them go.

Later, none of them was affected when they applied for university admission. This suggests that the incident was never entered into their official records.

I also wanted to read “yellow books” at the time, but I did not have Xiaohei’s courage. Instead, I went to the library and pleaded with the elderly librarian, Teacher Yin Shiji, to let me come inside and look at the books.

The library was not open to students then. Only teachers could enter and borrow books. Teacher Yin could not lend me anything, but he thought I was an honest and obedient child, so he allowed me to stay inside and read.

In truth, I merely flipped through the books, skimming them rather than reading carefully as Xiaohei did. And I only went occasionally, nowhere near as often as he read.

“Read ten thousand books, and your writing will flow as if inspired.”

As Xiaohei read more and more, he became thoroughly familiar with poems, literary allusions, and historical references, and he could use them effortlessly. He wrote beautiful prose. He also studied many calligraphy manuals and became fascinated with practicing Chinese calligraphy. In the end, he developed a graceful, flowing hand in semi-cursive script.

When the national college entrance examination was restored in 1977, I heard that Xiaohei applied to the Chinese department at Peking University. He had heard that Peking University’s library had the largest collection of books among China’s universities. His purpose in taking the entrance exam was to read every book in that library. That way, he could read them openly and would no longer need to steal them.

But Xiaohei was very much a specialist. He disliked mathematics and the sciences, and during the Cultural Revolution the schools had taught almost nothing. As a result, he did poorly on the entrance examination. His mathematics score, people said, was zero.

He failed to get into Peking University, and in fact did not get into any university.

Not long afterward, he was recruited as a worker by the Huaihua Railway Sub-Bureau. Because he possessed such fine handwriting and wrote such beautiful prose, he was a rare talent in those years, when every industry was being revived and capable people were desperately needed.

He did not work on the front line for long before his abilities were noticed and he was transferred to the sub-bureau’s administrative offices. A few years later, the Guangzhou Railway Bureau took an interest in him and transferred him to Guangzhou, where he wrote documents for the leadership and worked in publicity. He became a favored figure within the bureau.

Although he never attended university, few graduates of a university Chinese department possessed literary knowledge and calligraphic skill equal to his. He had failed in the examination hall but prospered in his career. He was doing exceptionally well.

I saw him once after I entered university. It was during summer vacation, when I had returned home to visit my family. One day I was walking through a small lane in town and saw him with several young literary enthusiasts, all people I knew.

They all loved literature and held themselves in high esteem. They had also failed to get into university, or had failed to get into the universities they wanted, because they had been weak in certain subjects.

Xiaohei had only recently joined the Huaihua Railway Sub-Bureau and had not yet found his footing at work. As I passed, he looked at me coldly without saying anything. Two of the people beside him made a couple of casually sarcastic remarks.

I smiled, did not stop, and walked straight past them.

Xiaohei was tall and handsome. He was intelligent, wrote beautifully, and had beautiful handwriting. His slightly cold expression, his willingness to take responsibility for his actions, and his focused, serious way of doing things attracted many admirers. He was also very popular with young women.

I heard that his wife was the “flower of the bureau”—a very beautiful woman who treated him well. Later, it was said, she developed a terminal illness. He cared for her devotedly, neither clinging excessively nor abandoning her, until she died. In that sense, he was a man of loyalty and feeling.

I heard nothing about him for many years. Then, a few years ago, I learned that he had died of cancer. He was in his fifties—a man who had died far too young.

Recently, one of my teachers forwarded me a video of a visit to Xiaohei’s father. Teacher Xiong was ninety-five years old and still healthy, able to take care of himself, playing the piano every day with a clear mind.

In the video, he mentioned Xiaohei. He said that his son had not taken care of his health and had become too overweight, which was why he had died young.

Teacher Xiong himself remained broad-minded. He loved music, lived without competing with the world, and so had enjoyed a long life.

 

Written in 2021.

The Reed-Flower Hen (芦花鸡）

When I was little, what I wanted most was to have a dog. But our work unit did not allow us to keep one, so I had to settle for other animals. The animal we raised most often was the chicken.

When I was nine, our family moved from Zhijiang town to Muyoupo at Qili Bridge. The area was surrounded by fields and grassland. We bought two chicks just as spring arrived and the tadpoles in the fields were turning into little green frogs. Frogs were everywhere in the grass beside the rice paddies, hopping and leaping about. When we walked, they would often bounce right onto our feet.

Every day I took a slender bamboo pole, tied a small net to its end, and went into the grass to catch frogs. There were so many that I could catch dozens in half an hour and put them into a sack. When I got home, I would open the sack in the backyard. The frogs would leap out, and the two chicks would chase after them, peck them, and swallow them. They would keep eating until their necks were enormously swollen, and only then would they stop.

With such abundant nourishment, the chicks grew at astonishing speed. Before long they had become half-grown chickens. During the day, when I let them out, they searched the grass for insects and tiny snails. But as they grew, they became increasingly unlike ordinary chickens. They had slender bodies, long tails, and very small combs. It was impossible to tell whether they were roosters or hens. They ran incredibly fast, and after a short sprint they could fly seven or eight meters. They could easily catch grasshoppers and even peck frogs.

Ordinary chickens, when released, would return to the coop by themselves at dusk. But these two often failed to come home. Where had they gone? At first we had no idea and searched everywhere. Eventually we discovered that they had flown into a tree.

There was a large peach tree behind our house, near the fork in the path leading to the toilet. At dusk, the chickens would fly up onto branches as high as a person and squat there like birds. Every time, we had to climb the tree, catch them, and put them back into the coop. Sometimes we forgot, or were simply too tired, and let them spend the night in the tree.

One evening, a teacher went to the toilet and heard a muffled clucking in the tree. He could vaguely make out the chickens and assumed they were wild pheasants. He picked up a stone and began throwing it at them. Just then I happened to come along and quickly shouted, “Don’t throw stones! Those are our chickens!”

The teacher asked, half believing me, “How could your chickens be sleeping in a tree at night?”

It took a long explanation before he finally accepted that they were not wild pheasants.

After that, we made a point of bringing them down from the tree as early as possible every evening and putting them in the coop, afraid that someone else might mistake them for wild birds and kill them. We raised them for more than a year. By then they had grown into full-sized chickens and looked more and more like pheasants. They laid no eggs and never crowed; they seemed neither male nor female. And having to climb the tree every day to catch them was simply too much trouble. In the end, we had no choice but to kill them and eat them.

Then the Cultural Revolution began, and the school ceased to function. My mother was sent far away to attend a study session, while my father was sidelined. There were no students at the teachers’ college, and no one was in charge. At the elementary school I attended, my teachers taught nothing except quotations from Chairman Mao.

My elderly maternal grandmother was taken back to her hometown of Changde by my older cousin. My paternal grandmother came to take my two younger brothers back to their home in Taoyuan. When she arrived, she brought us a reed-flower hen from Taoyuan.

The reed-flower chicken is a large, sturdy breed known for its good meat and high egg production. The one my grandmother brought was a mottled reed-flower hen, with an upright neck, a round body, and a pert, raised rear. She walked neither hurriedly nor slowly, but with great dignity. When she arrived, she weighed about three pounds. We raised her for a little over a year, and she had only just begun to lay eggs.

 

 

After my grandmother left with my brothers, we moved again. Our new home stood at the top of a slope forty or fifty meters long. The ground flattened out at the summit, and three or four hundred meters along a rough road was the airfield. Several two-story school buildings stood scattered around the area, a few dozen meters apart.

We lived in a row of one-story houses along the edge of the slope. The rooms faced the level ground, while the back of the building extended out over the incline, supported by very tall brick pillars. They resembled the stilt houses along the river in Zhijiang, except that those houses stood beside the river and were supported by wooden pillars.

Our room was at the very end of the row, at the corner that turned toward the slope. The door opened onto the incline, and we had to climb up and down a set of wooden steps to enter or leave. Beneath those steps was a straight brick staircase running north to south down the slope. It was forty or fifty meters long and had eighty-eight steps in all.

These were the longest steps in Zhijiang County, and a major route connecting the county town with Qili Bridge, Yanqiao, Luojiu, and the surrounding areas, where tens of thousands of people lived. Several hundred people passed by every day, and sometimes more than a thousand.

On the eastern side of the steps was a mixed woodland of bamboo and trees covering more than ten mu. Tall trees, low shrubs, and broad stretches of bamboo grew there. Wild pheasants, sparrows, crows, and magpies nested in the branches. From time to time, one could also spot small animals such as hares and field mice.

Halfway down the western slope was a small pond, roughly twenty meters across. Seven or eight towering maple trees surrounded it, and beneath them the water’s edge was thick with brambles and tangled grass. The pond was stocked with grass carp, silver carp, and carp. Every morning, one could see countless fish breaking the surface, their mouths opening and closing as they came up for air.

At that time we lived in one large room. A table, two beds, and a few cabinets nearly filled the entire space. The reed-flower hen’s coop had to be placed in the middle of the room. It was a bamboo basket lined with straw and covered with a wooden lid.

At first we did not dare let her out, afraid she would wander away. After keeping her confined for several days, we tried releasing her. For the first few days she merely lingered near the house, too timid to enter the woods. A few days later, however, she was drawn in by the insects and disappeared into the trees, never to come back out.

Every morning I lifted the lid and let her go outside to find food. The woods were full of insects, tiny snails, grasshoppers, and wild berries. Occasionally she wandered through the grass around the little pond, where the damp earth provided plenty of frogs and earthworms.

 

 

At noon she always returned punctually to lay an egg beneath the coop. After laying, she would eat a handful of rice and go out again, returning on schedule at dusk. Whether the sky was clear or the rain was falling, she followed this routine every day. She was wonderfully easy to care for.

She was nothing like the two chickens we had raised before—the so-called “wild pheasants” that laid no eggs, refused to come home, and spent every night in the trees, leaving us exhausted.

After an ordinary hen had laid several dozen eggs, she would usually become broody. To “go broody” meant that she stopped laying and spent the entire day drowsy, her feathers fluffed up, eating very little and sitting motionless in the coop. Even if you tried to drive her out, she would not move. People called such a hen a “broody hen.”

What was she brooding over? Eggs, of course. She would cover the eggs with her wings—in other words, she was trying to hatch chicks. It was an involuntary physiological process. But people raised chickens for their eggs, so they took the eggs away. The hens nevertheless continued to brood, sitting in empty coops with not a single egg in them, sometimes for a month, sometimes for two or three.

People in Zhijiang often described someone who was listless all day and did nothing as being “like a broody hen.” Because of this brooding habit, a hen that laid more than two hundred eggs a year was considered exceptionally good.

But this reed-flower hen never went broody. Occasionally she would fail to lay for a few days, but she soon resumed. She laid more than three hundred eggs a year, and her eggs were larger than those of other hens.

In those days, when food and clothing were both scarce, her eggs became scrambled eggs, steamed eggs, and fried eggs with runny yolks on our dining table. They improved our lives and provided abundant nourishment for me as I was growing.

The world outside was in turmoil. News of armed factional fighting frequently reached us from Zhijiang town, and people were sometimes beaten to death. Classes at the teachers’ college had long since stopped. Big-character posters were everywhere. Most of the teachers had either been subjected to struggle sessions or sent back to their hometowns. Two had even taken their own lives because they could not bear what was happening.

But the bamboo grove and the little pond remained peaceful. The towering maple trees still blocked out the sky. Bamboo leaves rustled in the wind. Fish drifted lazily through the pond. Everything remained as quiet and unhurried as before.

Every day the reed-flower hen went out on schedule, living like an immortal in a world of freedom and plenty. She also knew how to repay kindness. She laid one egg a day. After laying, she would raise her head high and announce the good news with a cheerful clucking—gok-gok, gok-gok—as she paced back and forth across the room.

From time to time she would glance sideways at me, waiting until I took a handful of rice from the rice bin and scattered it on the floor. Then she would walk over without the slightest hesitation and peck every grain clean. Only afterward would she go out again, disappearing into the bamboo grove until evening.

We were content with our simple life, and the reed-flower hen lived peacefully, wanting nothing from the world. Our days were modest but comfortable.

Then winter gradually arrived.

One day my father received a notice from above: the school was not allowed to keep chickens. Those that had already been raised had to be disposed of within a specified period.

Who “above” meant, my father never said, and I never asked. The school had collapsed, and the only people who held power over what could be said and done were the Red Guards.

Kill the reed-flower hen? When I heard this, I was stunned. Such a good chicken had harmed no one. She laid an egg every day. Why should she be killed? I was utterly opposed.

But my parents did not dare disobey the order. First they tried to persuade me, warning that refusing to kill the hen would bring serious trouble upon us. I did not make a scene, but I still would not agree. The reed-flower hen had become part of my daily life—indeed, part of my life itself.

That morning, my parents went to work—or rather, not to work exactly. They went to study quotations from Chairman Mao, read editorials from the People’s Daily, listen to Red Guards lecture on revolution, or attend struggle sessions.

Before leaving, they instructed me: “Wait until the hen comes back at noon and lays her egg. Then don’t let her out again. We’ll kill her when we return in the afternoon.”

After they left, I waited for the hen to lay her egg. But I still let her out.

When my parents returned, she was still somewhere in the bamboo grove. She did not come home until it was nearly dark. As a result, they did not manage to kill her that day.

They knew I was unwilling, so they tried to reason with me again. A few days later, they prepared to kill her once more. Once again, I defied them and let her go.

They had never imagined that I, who had never disobeyed my parents before, would refuse so stubbornly over this matter. Other people had already killed their chickens, but our reed-flower hen was still wandering through the woods every day.

My parents were afraid that if the Red Guards investigated, we would be in serious trouble. So on Sunday, when they did not have to go out, they waited for the poor hen to return and lay her egg, and then they killed her.

That day I felt helpless and deeply sad. No matter how my mother tried to persuade me, I refused to eat the chicken that evening.

Even though she had just laid an egg, there was already another soft-shelled egg inside her, clearly intended for the next day. Then there was a half-formed egg, and another smaller one, until there was a whole string of tiny yolks—at least several hundred of them.

We raised several other chickens afterward, but I no longer remember them. Only this reed-flower hen has remained unforgettable.

 

Written in 2013.