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.
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