Two years after the Party sent Father to labor reform, Ruyu was sent away to be reeducated herself. I came home one day from playing in the street to find my first maternal uncle standing in a daze in the middle of our living room, his face as white as the crumpled letter that he held in his hand. Millions of educated youths had been deemed out of touch with Revolution, so they would be sent “up to the mountains and down to the villages,” where they could “build up and take root” by learning from the “poor and lower-middle peasants”—or so my uncle whispered to me as Mother and Ruyu sobbed in the other room.
“It’s a great opportunity for Ruyu,” he said, kneeling beside me so our heads were at the same level. “She’ll be united with the agricultural class.”
Later, on the day before Ruyu was scheduled to leave, I came home to find Mother sitting on top of Ruyu with her knees on Ruyu’s arms and slapping her repeatedly in the face.
“Don’t fight back,” Mother said. “You must endure everything and come back to me when this madness is over.”
Ruyu cried and nodded. Mother spat in her face and slapped her again.
“You have a big mouth,” Mother hissed at her through her own tears. “They will probably dislike you there. You must promise me that you won’t fight back.”
“I promise,” Ruyu blubbered. “Mom, I promise!”
Mother had her back to me and could not see me. I tiptoed forward and took Ruyu’s hand, which was purple from lack of blood flow. She squeezed my fingers with her own.
The next day, after we had seen Ruyu off at the train station, Mother and I moved into the home of my first maternal uncle in a big concrete domicile in the Haiyuncang neighborhood. My first maternal uncle was kind to us. There was not much space in his apartment, so Mother and I slept on a cot in the kitchen. Mother was a delicate woman, and the separation from Father and Ruyu was difficult for her to bear. Despite the clear line she had drawn between herself and Father, she had received a degrading new work assignment: sweeping the streets and cleaning the public toilets. She did not speak much anymore, and she often fell ill.
There was no more school. Mostly I walked around the streets during the day. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that my family had a black background, so it was hard to make friends. People did not trust each other. Nobody wanted to be denounced by association. Eventually I fell in with boys who also had black backgrounds. We stayed together to avoid getting beat up. My closest friends were three boys with the surnames Ai, Ouyang, and Zhao. We called ourselves brothers. We were all twelve or thirteen years old.
The four of us had a lot of fun together. We would play war together, pretending to be spies and guerrillas. There was not much to eat in those days, and sometimes we would work together to steal food from the street stalls. We especially loved to eat hong dou bing—flaky pancakes filled with sweet red bean paste. Zhao would watch the street stall for hours and then tell us what we had to do. Usually Ouyang would be the one to make a distraction. He would beg for food and throw tantrums in the street. I would steal the hong dou bing while the stall manager was dealing with Ouyang. Then I would pass them to Ai. Zhao always said Ai was the best actor, but the truth was, he was simply the most innocent-looking, and his way of speaking was very clean and pleasant. All of us were troublemakers, but Ai did not look the part.
This was the kind of life I was living when we found out that Ruyu had committed suicide. We knew Ruyu had killed herself because one of Father’s cousins, a well-connected Party cadre who had been trying to get Father out of labor reform, sent a letter to my first maternal uncle. He did his best to use language that would not be censored. Ruyu had failed in her reeducation, he wrote to my uncle. She was too stubborn and did not accept the teachings of Mao Zedong Thought. She refused to change her name, Ruyu, which reflected her Bourgeois, intellectual family background. Ultimately, she chose to end her own life despite the endeavors of the patient Revolutionary cadres and poor and lower-middle peasants who tried to help her. There were also a few sentences about how Father was progressing well in his reeducation and learning how to become unified with the working class and studying the lessons of the Revolutionary Martyr Lei Feng. Some other sentences in the letter had been redacted by censors.
The news sank Mother into a depression that lasted for the rest of her life. Being around her reminded me of everything we used to have. Like Ruyu, she failed to adapt to the circumstances and make a new life for herself. I tried to remember Father’s voice saying “Suí jī yìng biàn, suí yù ér ān.” I spent little time at home. Because of my black background, I could not join the military or apply for secondary school. I passed the days in the street with the brothers. We stole things and chased girls. Sometimes people beat us, and other times we beat people. Sometimes we were dragged in front of crowds at struggle sessions and denounced, but these exercises were becoming tired and meaningless. Almost everybody had been denounced at some point. Nobody cared that much about making Revolution anymore.
The brothers and I grew up during those years. We went from stealing treats to eat to stealing rice and cooking oil to sell on the black market. Our biggest customers for stolen goods were government officials and Communist Party cadres. Our dealings with them gave us useful connections. Sometimes our customers asked us to run different kinds of errands for them. Occasionally they asked us to beat someone, but usually they just wanted us to scare someone. We also helped them spy on and blackmail people. I loved the thrill of using the tricks I had learned to avoid detection. I was fast and clever. Maybe if I’d had access to more sources of calcium I would have been quite a good point guard, haha.
There was one customer of ours who gave us the most jobs. He asked us to call him Mr. Dong. We did not know his real identity, but we speculated that he was a senior Party cadre. He paid us well and treated us like humans, which was nice of him. He liked to call us his little monkeys, since we all belonged to that zodiac animal, and we took a certain amount of pride in this nickname. Over the years he cultivated our skills and gave us more and more responsibilities. Eventually he asked us to stop working for other customers. We did what he asked, because he was our biggest client, and also because we were afraid of him.
In ’77, Dong asked us to help him with a bigger project: smuggling in goods from Hong Kong. One of us would have to go “upstream” to Hong Kong, and one of us would have to go “midstream” to Luohu. Zhao was the one who maintained contact with Dong, and he said he had no interest in leaving Beijing. The rest of us were dying to escape. We drew lots, and Heaven favored me. I would go to Hong Kong! Ouyang would go to Luohu. Ai and Zhao would stay in Beijing.
Dong arranged all my travel documents for me, including my first passport, and I took most of the cash that he advanced to us. I felt bad about leaving Mother in Beijing, but she urged me to take the opportunity to get ahead. She knew I was breaking the law. She didn’t care. After the Party took away her husband and her daughter, she lost all respect for the government.
After I arrived in Hong Kong, I got a room in Chungking Mansions, the cheapest accommodation available. Chungking Mansions was a famous sort of giant slum building filled with hustlers and desperados, and I fit right in. It was an exciting time in my life. I visited stores that had the portable, high-margin products we wanted: Philips VCRs, Zojirushi rice cookers, Casio wristwatches. I cut deals with wholesalers and found boatmen to run the goods across the water to Ouyang in Luohu.
Once the operations were in place, I had lots of time on my hands. In that big international city I did not have a single friend. I spent a lot of time at a bar in Kowloon called the Deep Blue Sea. The bar had a fish tank filled with tropical fish and real coral. I would go there to drink American beer and shoot pool and stare at the fish. Growing up in the hutongs of Beijing, I never imagined that such splendid creatures existed. I had never seen the ocean at all. But in Hong Kong, I saw the ocean every day, and I liked to think about how grand it was, and how it could be seen from so many different places. And I thought about how there were other people staring at the ocean in all those faraway places, and maybe some of those people had also lost their families, like I had.
I went to the movies in order to learn Cantonese and English. During the American movies, I slumped low in my seat so that I could not read the subtitles at the bottom of the screen. I saw the same movies over and over again. My favorites were the American musicals, which reminded me of Peking opera. I was awestruck by the rich and carefree lives of the Americans in the movies. Everything looked like so much fun. When Grease came out in 1978, I began to style my hair like John Travolta. Lucky for you, there are no surviving photographs from those years, haha.
After Chairman Mao died, China began its period of Reform and Opening-Up under President Deng Xiaoping. It soon became unnecessary for me to remain in Hong Kong. I hired some people to maintain our operations there and moved back to Beijing in ’81. I rented a new flat for Mother and me, and although she remained depressed, she told me that she was proud of the success I had achieved. We inquired all over regarding the fate of Father, but nobody had any news for us. Eventually I became resigned to the likelihood that he had died in a labor camp. Mother was still unable to move on. She rarely socialized or left the apartment. It was in this weak state that your mother pounced on her, haha. Linda was a dedicated missionary, and she had learned to speak excellent Chinese. She could stun a crowd of Chinese people just by saying a few sentences. She had a nice way about her, and everyone liked her, even though she talked a lot of nonsense about Jesus Christ. Mother was walking home with two bags of groceries one day when Linda asked if she could share her burden. Pretty soon she was coming around all the time and reading the Bible to Mother in Chinese.
I was glad that Mother had made a friend, even if it was a Jesus-crazed American. Also, I was enthralled by Linda. Her blond bangs and blue eyes reminded me of Olivia Newton-John. When she became my friend, too, I discovered that she was a great listener. I was telling lies to everyone, even though they all knew I was bending the rules. But because she was an outsider, I could tell her everything, and she told me that I could be forgiven. I sang Chinese operas for her and also “Greased Lightning,” which she found extremely humorous. She sang hymns and praise songs to me in her beautiful, clear voice. Anyway, you can surmise what happened next.
Mother died shortly after you were born. Lianying was three. At that point the brothers and I were really making a lot of money. In addition to the smuggling, we did a lot of other jobs for Dong and his friends. Ouyang had great business instincts, and Zhao was a natural strategist. Ai was our figurehead: the smooth-talking, handsome one. As for me, well, as you say in basketball, I could execute the play. Together we grew fast, and China’s young markets grew with us. Everyone had gotten sick of being Communists, and they really applied themselves to being Capitalists, haha. But my heart was not in it. After Linda gave me the happiness of a family, I felt more fear about working underground. Of course, she did not approve of my line of work, either. Once Mother passed away, we were no longer tied to Beijing. We wanted to move to the United States and start a new life.
Leaving was not simple. The brothers and I had pledged our lives to each other as teenagers. We had tasted each other’s blood. I proposed the idea of starting a restaurant in the United States, pointing out that we could use our connections and our capital to create a successful, legitimate business, and I assured them that my protégé, Sun Jianshui, could eventually take my place in Beijing. Ai supported my idea, but Ouyang and Zhao agreed to the move only if I continued to act in the interest of the brotherhood in the United States. And they made me wait a few years until certain affairs were settled and Sun Jianshui had more experience. I did not want to quarrel with them. It seemed like a reasonable compromise at the time.
The only question left was: Where to go? My “in-laws” wanted nothing to do with us, and your mother had no desire to return to Missouri. We thought about places where a Chinese restaurant might succeed. I knew only that I wanted to be close to the ocean. Then one of Linda’s missionary friends told us about a trend: many wealthy Taiwanese were relocating to the San Gabriel Valley. Your mother gasped in delight when we looked at a map of the area. San Dimas is Saint Dismas, she said. The repentant thief.