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.

 

 

An Unforgettable Journey to Parents’ Hometowns (Part 1)

 I. From Zhijiang to Taoyuan

In the winter of 1967, the initial upheaval of the Cultural Revolution—the rebellions, factional struggles, and armed clashes—had passed, and the situation was beginning to move from chaos toward stability. With Mao Zedong’s intervention, military-control groups were stationed in various institutions and began restoring the order that had been lost. Revolutionary committees were also established at different levels, composed of military cadres, veteran cadres, and leaders of mass organizations, including rebel groups.

At the time, the Zhijiang Revolutionary Committee decided to resume education at Zhijiang Middle School, which had been closed for a year and a half. Zhijiang No. 1 Middle School and Zhijiang No. 2 Middle School were merged to form Zhijiang Middle School. My father, who had previously been principal of Zhijiang Teachers’ School, was brought back into service as deputy head of the preparatory group for Zhijiang Middle School and took part in rebuilding the school.

Although he and I were still living at Muyepo in Qiliqiao, he went into town to work every day and returned home at night.

In January 1968, in the depths of winter, my parents made a bold decision: my mother would take me to my father’s hometown in Taoyuan to bring my younger brother Sanmao back, and then continue on to Changde, my mother’s hometown, to visit her family.

My father could not go with us because he was busy preparing for the reopening of the school.

Sanmao, who was then a little over three, and my youngest brother, Simao, who was just over one, had been hurriedly sent to their grandmother in the countryside of Taoyuan when the Cultural Revolution began in the summer of 1966, in order to protect them from unpredictable dangers.

 

 

The whole family on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, photographed in the summer of 1966 at Muyepo, Zhijiang.

 

The year 1967 had been the worst year of armed conflict during the Cultural Revolution. In Qianyang Prefecture—today’s Huaihua City—the fighting was most severe in Chenxi, where there was an ordnance factory. Neighboring Yuanling County was little better.

Unfortunately, both places lay along our route to Taoyuan and Changde. Because of the Cultural Revolution and the armed clashes, long-distance buses had already stopped running in the autumn of 1966.

We had recently heard that long-distance bus service would resume before the Spring Festival, but we did not know exactly when. So this trip home was fraught with uncertainty and carried a certain degree of danger.

Why did my parents decide to make the journey under such circumstances? I do not know.

When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, society had descended into chaos, so my younger brothers Sanmao and Simao were sent to their grandmother’s rural home in Taoyuan to avoid the Red Guards’ upheavals. Now that the armed clashes had stopped, Mao had called for stability, most workplaces were beginning to resume production, and schools were preparing to reopen.

Sanmao was already over five years old. The educational conditions in the countryside were extremely poor, while those in Zhijiang town were much better. Although the middle schools had been closed, primary schools had continued to hold classes. It was true that during the Cultural Revolution they did not teach the cultural knowledge regarded as belonging to the “feudal, capitalist, and revisionist” traditions, but the teachers were generally well qualified. There was always the possibility that academic subjects would eventually be restored.

For my mother, this was a trip home to visit her family. For me, it was my first trip to my parents’ hometowns. I had been born in Hongjiang and raised in Zhijiang, and I had never before visited either of their old homes.

The distance from Zhijiang to Taoyuan—and Changde was a little farther—was 341 kilometers. There were no expressways in those days. Under normal circumstances, taking a long-distance bus would have required three days: one day to Chenxi, the second to Yuanling, and the third to Taoyuan.

But we were traveling at a time when public transportation had collapsed and there were no regular buses.

My parents first contacted a grain-hauling truck belonging to Hunan Xiangyun Transport Company through acquaintances. From Zhijiang to Chenxi, we rode in a Jiefang-brand truck operated by Xiangyun.

The driver was a man in his early thirties, gentle and refined, with an efficient manner. The cab had only one passenger seat. I was ten years old and somewhat taller than other children my age, but I was still a child, so I had to sit on my mother’s lap. No one checked such things in those days; even the Public Security Bureau had effectively shut down.

The sky was gloomy throughout the journey. There was still snow on the ground, and it was bitterly cold.

As we traveled, my mother chatted with the driver. She told him that it had been nineteen years since she had left home to work, and that her two children were still being looked after by their grandmother back home and needed to be brought back.

The driver was understanding and sympathetic.

About four hours later, we arrived in Chenxi. We thanked the driver and got off.

At the wharf on the Yuan River, we bought two tickets for a boat to Yuanling the following day. This was another consequence of the lack of bus service. The tickets were relatively easy to get because Chenxi and Yuanling were not far apart and water transportation was well developed. There were plenty of boats.

After buying our tickets, we found a small inn near the wharf and settled in for the night.

The next morning, we went to the wharf and boarded a motorboat. It was small, carrying only about twenty passengers, slightly larger than an ordinary ferry. At the rear was an underwater propeller powered by a motor that burned diesel fuel. The engine was located in the middle of the boat, and its noise was deafening. The entire boat smelled of diesel.

There were no seats. We could only sit on the narrow wooden beams that ran along the hull.

The boat had probably not originally been intended for passengers. It was likely a cargo boat. After the bus service stopped, people had no choice but to travel by river, and the operators began carrying passengers as well. Conditions were poor, so there were few passengers—which was why we had been able to buy tickets for the very next day.

The boat moved very slowly. The weather remained gloomy, and it was difficult to see across the river. Wind came through from every direction, making the boat bitterly cold.

Chenxi and Yuanling are only 68 kilometers apart, and we were traveling downstream, yet the journey took seven or eight hours—an entire day.

When we reached Yuanling, we happened to find that the bus station was not far from the river wharf. My mother and I found an inn, put down our things, and immediately went to the bus station to buy tickets to Taoyuan.

By then, the date for resuming bus service had already been set—about three days later.

Outside the station were enormous red banners proclaiming:

“Congratulations on the Resumption of Service at Yuanling Bus Station!”

Colored streamers fluttered everywhere, creating a festive atmosphere.

Yuanling lies east of Taoyuan and Changde, northwest toward Jishou, the capital of Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, and southwest toward Anjiang, the former seat of Qianyang Prefecture.

In the past, western Hunan and the Qianyang region—today’s Huaihua—had no railway, making Yuanling an important transportation hub. Once Yuanling’s long-distance bus system collapsed, all the major routes—to Changde, Jishou, and Anjiang—stopped running.

This directly affected transportation and daily life across the three regions of Xiangxi, Qianyang, and Changde, and indirectly affected places as far away as Changsha, Shaoyang, and Guizhou.

The resumption of service therefore involved more than just the Yuanling-Taoyuan and Yuanling-Changde routes. Service to Jishou and Anjiang was also being restored. In short, the reopening of Yuanling’s long-distance bus network was a major event for western Hunan, Qianyang, Changde, and the surrounding areas.

We entered the ticket hall and asked at the ticket window.

We were told that all the tickets for the first day had long since sold out. In fact, the entire first week’s tickets—the tickets for all departures before the Spring Festival—were gone. The earliest tickets available were for the following week, after the Spring Festival.

There was no way we could wait until after the New Year.

But there were no tickets.

In those days there were no scalpers. Even if we had wanted to pay a premium for a scalped ticket, there was no one to buy one from.

There was nothing we could do but leave.

Before we had departed from Zhijiang, my father had anticipated the difficulty of buying tickets. He had told my mother:

“If you can’t get tickets, keep going back to the station to check whether anyone has returned theirs. You can buy a returned ticket directly from that person. People return tickets all the time.”

So after dinner, my mother took me back to the bus station.

We stood there for a while but saw no one returning tickets. Before long, the ticket clerk finished work and closed the window.

My mother thought no one was likely to return a ticket that day and was preparing to take me back to the inn.

Just as we were about to leave, a middle-aged man came hurrying toward the ticket window. When he discovered that it was already closed, he turned around in disappointment. He walked slowly toward the exit, looking around from time to time.

My mother noticed him, and he noticed my mother.

She asked, “Are you here to buy a ticket, or to return one?”

He replied, “I’m here to return a ticket. Something came up and I can’t make the trip.”

My mother was delighted.

“We need tickets. If you’re willing, could you sell them to me?”

He was overjoyed and said yes. Then he asked, “They’re for Taoyuan. How many do you need? I have two.”

At the time I was standing some distance away from my mother. I was only a child, so he assumed she was traveling alone.

“We’re going to Taoyuan too,” my mother said. “We happen to need two tickets.” She pointed at me. “My son and I.”

The man was very happy. He would not have to make another trip to the station the next day.

So my mother bought his two tickets—and they were tickets for the very first departure on the first day of resumed service.

My father had indeed been experienced. Without his advice, we probably would not have thought of waiting around for returned tickets.

Just like that, the major problem of getting tickets was solved. We would take the first bus to Taoyuan on the very day service resumed.

 

Itinerary Map

 

Three days later, the day finally came.

Early that morning, red flags were flying all over the bus station and drums were beating loudly. A large crowd had gathered, presumably organized according to official instructions. There were speeches by officials, giving the occasion the feel of an inaugural ceremony.

We boarded our bus, the Yuanling-to-Changde route. There were also buses for Yuanling-to-Jishou and Yuanling-to-Anjiang. Altogether, perhaps five or six buses departed at the same time, all decorated with large red flowers and colorful streamers.

Ours was the first departure. More buses would leave later, though I do not know how many trips were scheduled each day. I estimate there must have been at least three, because after a year and a half without service, there were enormous numbers of stranded passengers who needed to be moved.

At around nine in the morning, after the officials cut the ribbon in front of the station, the buses filed out one after another and slowly pulled away amid the cheers of the crowd.

I was somewhat excited. It was the first time I had ever been sent off by a cheering crowd. It felt pretty good.

The distance from Yuanling to Taoyuan was about 300 li, through nothing but mountains.

Three hours later, the bus reached Guanzhuang. We were still in Yuanling County, but we were about halfway there. The bus stopped for quite a while so everyone could use the restroom, and then we continued.

Another three hours or so later, we reached Taoyuan County. We got off. The bus’s final destination was Changde, so some passengers remained aboard to continue their journey.

My grandmother lived in Yanggongqiao Brigade, Ligonggang Commune, Taoyuan County, about 100 li from the county town.

Although there was a road, there was no regular bus service. We spent one night in the county town. The next day, we took a bus to Qijiahe—today’s Qihe Town—and then transferred to Ligonggang. Finally, we walked three or four kilometers to Yanggongqiao.

I think it was probably my uncle, Shang Zhonglun, who came to meet us, though I no longer remember whether he met us in Qihe or Ligonggang.

By the time we arrived at my grandmother’s home, it was already the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth day of the twelfth lunar month. The New Year was only a day or two away.

We finally saw my younger brothers Sanmao and Simao, whom we had been separated from for two and a half years.

Sanmao was six at the time, and Simao was three.

 

II. Grandpa Shang and Grandma Yang

My paternal grandfather, Shang Botian, was still alive then. He was about seventy.

My grandfather Shang’s mother had first married my grandfather’s father and given birth to my grandfather. The Shang family had been extremely poor. Later, whether because his father died young or for some other reason, my grandfather’s mother took him and remarried into the Yang family. She later gave birth to Yang Grandpa.

Thus, my grandfather Shang and Yang Grandpa were half-brothers, sharing the same mother.

The Yang family was considerably better off than the Shang family. They owned some farmland, which they normally worked themselves and supplemented with temporary laborers during the busy farming seasons.

Although my grandfather Shang had gone to live with the Yang family, he retained the surname Shang.

Yang Great-Grandpa died young, and Yang Grandpa inherited the family property. My grandfather Shang initially helped Yang Grandpa manage the farm, but the property still belonged to the Yang family.

Because my grandfather Shang was poor, he could not afford to marry. He reached the age of forty without a wife and had already resigned himself to remaining a bachelor for life.

But then the Shang family would have no descendants.

So he discussed the matter with the still-young Yang Grandpa. They decided that Yang Grandpa’s eldest son—my father—would be given to him as an adopted son and take the surname Shang.

The thinking was that Grandma Yang could still have more sons. That way, the Shang family would have someone to carry on the family line, while the Yang family would also have descendants.

And so my father, who had originally been surnamed Yang, became Shang, and he began calling Grandpa Shang “Dad.”

Because Grandpa Shang already lived with the Yang family, my father in effect continued to live in his own family home. Apart from the change of surname and form of address, little else changed.

After all, they were brothers. Later, Yang Grandpa gave Grandpa Shang several mu of farmland so that he could live independently.

With land of his own, Grandpa Shang’s financial situation improved. He married and eventually had a son of his own, Shang Zhonglun.

Although the Shang family now had a male heir, Yang Grandpa did not change my father’s surname back to Yang. First, he could not go back on his promise. Second, he was still young and could have more sons.

But fate had other plans. Grandma Yang never had another son.

The Yang family therefore faced the prospect of having no male heir.

Later, Grandpa Shang and Yang Grandpa discussed the matter and, without telling my father—who was then studying at Taoyuan Teachers’ School—arranged a marriage for him. They tricked him into returning home and then pressured and persuaded the not-yet-twenty-year-old young man to marry a girl he had never even met.

They soon had a son, whom they immediately gave the Yang surname. This solved the family’s urgent problem.

But for my father, the marriage was a form of torment.

They divorced in the early 1950s, and the Yang family naturally kept the elder brother. That had been the purpose of the marriage in the first place. There was also an older sister, who remained with her mother.

Yang Grandpa also died young.

At the time, Grandma Yang was about sixty-three or sixty-four and lived in her own house next door to the Shang family.

My father had three younger sisters, two of whom were already married. The only one still living with Grandma was the youngest, Yang Shuyuan. She was twenty-three or twenty-four and worked as a teacher at a local school.

The youngest aunt was the prettiest of my father’s sisters and was still unmarried.

Yanggongqiao was deep in the mountains, isolated from the outside world, with poor communications and a backward economy.

Two examples give a sense of what it was like.

After the 1911 Revolution, the entire country had prohibited men from wearing long queues and women from binding their feet. But the people of Yanggongqiao, including those in Ligonggang, knew nothing about these changes.

So men continued to wear queues, and women continued to bind their feet.

My grandmother was about four or five years old at the time and had only just begun having her feet bound. If information had reached the village more quickly and she had been allowed to stop, she would have had normal feet.

It seems that it took at least another three years for people there to learn that foot binding was no longer necessary. Only then did my grandmother stop.

By then, however, her feet had already become larger than bound feet but smaller than normal feet, with pointed toes. She could not buy shoes anywhere and spent the rest of her life wearing cloth shoes that she made herself.

Another example was bicycles.

When we arrived, we discovered that very few people there had ever seen one. They regarded bicycles almost as strange creatures and called them “foreign horses”—yang mama.

Whenever someone rode a bicycle through the village, crowds gathered to watch.

Perhaps bicycles were simply too expensive and difficult to obtain. And in such mountainous rural areas, they were of little practical use anyway. But the name “foreign horse” inevitably reminded me of the late Qing period, when Chinese people commonly referred to imported goods as yanghuo, “foreign goods.”

Grandpa Shang was still not well-off.

Before the New Year, he bought a pig’s head, cut it apart, and put it into a large cooking pot. Then he cut several dozen pounds of radishes into chunks about an inch square and added them to the pot with the pig’s head.

Every day, they would ladle out a large bowl, reheat it, and eat it.

The pot of pig’s head and radishes had to last more than ten days, sometimes even a month.

This was the finest delicacy they could afford, and they could enjoy it only around the New Year. Most local families ate much the same thing during the holiday: pig’s head meat stewed with radishes.

Even though we lived in town, meat was rationed. Each person received one jin—half a kilogram—of pork per month. Eating meat was itself a rare luxury.

Pig’s head stewed with radishes was hardly a sophisticated meat dish, but I had never eaten it because the government supply stores did not sell pig’s heads. Even if I had wanted to buy one, I could never have obtained the necessary meat coupons.

My father occasionally sent money to Grandpa Shang and Grandma Yang, but never very much.

Grandma Yang’s situation was somewhat better because her daughters helped support her, and the youngest aunt had a salary. Around New Year, they could afford to buy some pork, fish, chicken, and other food for the family.

There was a small stream in front of their house. A wooden bridge crossed it, with a roof over the bridge, somewhat like the covered wind-and-rain bridges in Zhijiang, except that this one was tiny.

The bridge was called Yanggongqiao. It was probably built with funds donated by an elderly man surnamed Yang.

 

Yanggongqiao, photographed in April 2017, during my second visit.

 

There were no shops or places of entertainment anywhere nearby, so I went to the bridge every day.

The north wind was fierce, the sky gray and overcast, and the water beneath the bridge had frozen.

One day I met a little boy on the bridge. We looked at each other curiously but awkwardly. After a while, we began talking.

He asked where I was from and how old I was.

It turned out that he was the same age as me—ten—but he was a head shorter.

He was a child from a neighboring household. We did not know each other and had little to talk about. I did not see him again over the next several days.

When the land reform was carried out, Yang Grandpa was classified as a middle peasant. In fact, he owned more than ten mu of farmland, which was quite a lot. Later, he gave several mu to Grandpa Shang.

He did not employ permanent laborers. When there was little farm work, he did it himself; during the busy seasons, he hired temporary workers.

There were many people like him in the area, and they were generally decent people.

During land reform, there were no landlords or rich peasants in Yanggongqiao. Most were middle peasants, including Yang Grandpa.

In another place, owning that much land might already have been enough to qualify someone as a rich peasant, making him a target of political repression.

People in the mountains were not necessarily generous—after all, they were very poor—but they were generally kind. If someone had never wronged me, why would I want to label him a rich peasant?

The next day, Grandma took us to see the ancestral graves.

They were only thirty or forty meters from the house. She explained that a feng shui master had examined the site and declared it an excellent location. There were mountains several li away in front of the graves, and she explained what the various peaks symbolized and how they would protect the descendants and ensure them a good future.

I was very young and understood little. I heard what she said but did not make much of it.

While writing this passage, however, a line from the song Father’s Grassland, Mother’s River suddenly came into my mind:

The river sings the blessings of our ancestors,
Blessing the wandering children to find their way home.

The journey from Zhijiang to Taoyuan had been full of difficulties. Yet when we were in the situation described by the old saying, “After mountains and rivers seem to have come to an end, suddenly there is a way forward,” we repeatedly encountered kind people and good fortune, and eventually arrived safely at our ancestral home in Taoyuan.

Could it be that our ancestors, watching over us from beyond this world, had been protecting us all along?

Grandma pointed to a stretch of mountains and said, “This used to belong to the Yang family.”

Then she pointed to a stretch of farmland.

“These fields used to belong to our family too.”

Fortunately, the Yang family had been classified as middle peasants and therefore still counted as part of the laboring people.

If they had been classified as rich peasants or landlords, and someone had reported these remarks, this could easily have been interpreted as keeping a record of property to be reclaimed after the revolution—a sign of wanting to “reverse the verdicts” and restore the old order.

But the people there, though poorly informed, were not malicious. Even if someone had overheard her, no one would have reported her.

With nowhere else to go for entertainment, Uncle Zhonglun heard that many people were taking trucks to Niucheri to have some fun. Wanting to give me at least a little “entertainment,” he took me aboard an open-bed Jiefang truck.

The truck was packed with people. But it was the dead of winter, so at least we could shield one another from the wind.

From Yanggongqiao to Niucheri was about 45 li, all through mountains. The road was primitive and badly uneven. Cliffs rose directly beside the road, and a fall would almost certainly have been fatal.

It was the end of the twelfth lunar month, and the winter wind was bitterly cold. Even with all those people packed around us, standing in the open truck was freezing. The wind blowing against us throughout the journey was miserable.

Niucheri was the seat of a commune, located on the border between Taoyuan and Yuanling. It was extremely remote. There were no regular buses and little to see.

What I remember from the trip back is simply the mountains: bare mountains, a few scattered small trees, tufts of dead thatch growing from cracks in the rocks, patches of unmelted snow, and, occasionally, wooden houses perched on the slopes.

On New Year’s Eve, Grandpa Shang, Shang Zhonglun, Grandma Yang, the youngest aunt, Sanmao, Simao, my mother, and I ate the New Year’s Eve dinner together.

It consisted mainly of several large bowls ladled from the big cooking pot of pig’s head stewed with radishes. There were far more radishes than meat. We simply reheated them and put the bowls on the table.

There seemed also to be a chicken dish, a bowl of cured pork, some tofu, and some vegetables.

By the standards of the time, this was an extremely sumptuous meal. It was also the best meal we had eaten since leaving home.

There was no electricity there.

After dinner, there was nowhere to go, so everyone gathered around a fire pit and talked. The fire made the room reasonably warm. Elsewhere indoors, apart from being sheltered from the wind, the temperature was probably about the same as outside.

We probably went to bed around nine or ten.

At three or four in the morning on New Year’s Day, it was still pitch-black.

Uncle Shang Zhonglun got up, put on his padded jacket, and went outside to set off firecrackers.

It was too cold for the rest of us to get up and watch.

Before long, the sound of firecrackers began coming from distant households, one after another, echoing through the mountains.

The New Year had arrived at Yanggongqiao.

On the third day of the New Year, my mother, Sanmao, and I left my grandparents’ home and set out for Changde.

That was my mother’s hometown. She had left in 1949 and had not been back for nineteen years.

For Sanmao and me, it was our first trip to our maternal grandmother’s home.

 

Written on September 20, 2026.