Summer ended with three weeks of nonstop rain. Everything smelled of mold. When I walked through the muddy streets, I tried not to step on the political posters the rain had washed off the walls. I hated getting my hands dirty peeling the grimy paper off my shoes.
Mother replaced the bamboo mat on my bed with cotton bedding.
On a gray fall afternoon, a strange man and woman came to our apartment while Father was at work. Mother introduced the woman as the Communist Party secretary for the city and the man as Comrade Li.
The woman had short legs and long arms. Her baggy blue pants were rolled up above her brown rubber boots. She and Comrade Li did not take off
their shoes and walked around our apartment leaving mud stains all over the floor.
When they crossed the living room to the fireplace, the Secretary Lady tapped her broken fingernail against our blue flower vase on the mantel. “Did this come from overseas?” she asked in a nasal voice.
Without waiting for Mother’s answer, she turned and went into my parents’ bedroom. Comrade Li followed. His blue army pants hung on him like flat balloons. There she opened the wardrobe and rubbed the fabric of Mother’s dresses between her thick fingers.
Leaving the wardrobe open, they walked into my room. She brushed her hand over the yellow silk comforter on my bed. Her calluses caught at the pink embroidered peonies.
I stayed close to Mother as she followed behind them. She wore the smile she gave only to visitors, but she kept rubbing the third button on her white shirt, something she did when she was nervous.
As the Secretary Lady walked toward the kitchen, she waved at Comrade Li. “Come here. Don’t let me do all the work.”
Once in the kitchen, Comrade Li used a chopstick
to poke and stir inside our rice jar. In Father’s study, he picked up Father’s ivory cigarette holder from the bookcase and squeezed it as if he expected a cigarette to pop out. Maybe he had never seen one before. It was a special gift to Father from Dr. Smith in America.
The Secretary Lady turned several of Father’s books upside down and shook them. Notes and bookmarks fell to the floor like dead leaves. She pointed at them. “Take those with us,” she ordered.
Comrade Li bent down and scooped up the little pieces of paper, stuffing them into the big pockets of his army jacket.
The notes were written in English. I wasn’t sure why she wanted them. Father had spent many hours reading those books and taking notes. I bet he wouldn’t be happy if he saw Comrade Li crumpling them up like that.
“Check all the shoes,” said the Secretary Lady.
At the entryway, Comrade Li picked up Father’s brown leather shoes from the rack. He tapped the heels with his knuckles and peeked inside before putting them back. What could he be looking for?
As soon as they left, Mother locked the door and threw all the clothes they had touched in a washbasin,
even her silk robe. I asked if it was because they had dirty hands. She hissed and said, “No questions now!”
If Mother didn’t want them to touch our things, why didn’t she stop them?
That weekend Father moved the furniture and books out of the study. He jammed the books into the bookcases around the fireplace. Mother told me Comrade Li was going to live in Father’s study.
As Father nailed shut the door between his study and our living room, I asked, “Who is Comrade Li? Why are you letting him move in?”
With a serious look on his face, Father continued pounding at a long nail. “He is the new political officer for the hospital, and he needs a place to stay.”
“What does a political officer do?” I asked.
“He teaches Chairman Mao’s ideas. Now let me finish what I’m doing.” Looking stern, he screwed a brass latch onto the upper half of the study door. I knew better than to ask more questions.
So Comrade Li was a teacher? Would Father have to take lessons from him? But how could anyone be smarter than Father?
The following week, Father’s study became Comrade Li’s home. To get into his new apartment, Comrade Li knocked out part of the wall facing the stairway landing and installed a new door. He pasted Chairman Mao’s teachings all over the door. It looked like one of the political study boards that were hanging throughout the city.
I worried Comrade Li would often pick through our things, but he didn’t come to our home again that fall. He greeted me nicely when I passed him in the hallway. One good thing was that Mother stopped scolding me loudly. Soon I got used to him living next to us.
When the first snow covered the ground, Comrade Li wrote one of Chairman Mao’s teachings on a big poster and pasted it to the side of our building.
WASTE IS A GREAT CRIME.
SAVE RESOURCES TO BUILD A NEW CHINA.
The next day, someone shut down the boiler in the basement and we no longer had heat or hot water in our building. Our apartment was so cold we had to wear layers of heavy cotton jackets throughout the day.
The worst part was bathing. Once a week, Mother boiled hot water on the stove and mixed it with cold water in a big wooden tub for my bath. As soon as I took off my winter clothes, I was covered with goose bumps. If the water was too hot, I had to wait to get in. If the water was cool enough to get in, it turned cold before Mother finished soaping me up.
I fought taking baths until one day Mrs. Wong, our upstairs neighbor, heard our argument. She invited me to bathe in her bathroom, where they had a real tub and an airplane-shaped electric heater to keep the room warm. After that, every Saturday I was a happy little dumpling, floating in warm soup.
The Wongs were the only family in the compound who had an electric heater. Mrs. Wong had bought it after Comrade Li cut off the heat. Many neighbors from around the courtyard went to see it. No one had ever seen one before. Comrade Li was not happy about it. He never went to see the heater, and I heard him tell neighbors that someday he would take their heater. I thought that sounded silly. The Wongs wouldn’t let him take their heater. Whenever they passed each other, Dr. Wong looked past Comrade Li, and Mrs. Wong turned her head away.
When I asked Mother why the Wongs didn’t like Comrade Li, she said sternly, “Who told you that? Don’t ever talk like that again.”
“Can we buy a heater?” I asked.
Mother pointed a finger upward toward the Wongs’ apartment. “Only a family that has relatives overseas can afford expensive things like that.” Dr. Wong’s brother sent them money and packages from Hong Kong every week. We used to receive letters from overseas, too, but at the beginning of winter, after receiving a letter that had been opened, Mother became nervous and told Father to stop writing to his friends.
Why would anyone want to open our letters? Did they hope to find money? If they knew that Father’s friends never sent us money, would they stop?
One time when I walked by Comrade Li’s apartment, his door was open. I peeked in and saw a stack of letters on his chair. The one on top was addressed to the dentist who had fixed my cavity, and had recently been declared as a people’s enemy.
Comrade Li couldn’t be the one opening our letters, could he?