The rest of the summer passed faintly. Its balmy heat evaporated before the clear, cold light of autumn. I did not see my friends. I remained mostly in the house, though my mother would sometimes take me shopping with her, weighing my small frame down with heavy items as we left the market. On the way back, I must have appeared to the people on the street not so much a child but a collection of floating shopping bags. When we got home my arms were aching, but I didn’t mind. The feeling of not being seen, of being camouflaged, was soothing.
As that strange, fateful summer reached its end, I was on the cusp of a new beginning. The day I’d go to a new school, to high school. I remember the day itself. The cool crispness of our early-morning start, the starched smartness of a school uniform acquired second-hand, re-seamed by my grandmother and then washed by my mother until it felt as good as new. I remember the cool autumn breeze against my outer layers, and on the inside, the warm, slushy anxiety at work in the pit of my belly. What would the other children be like? Would they be bigger than me? Would I make any friends?
Since the night I had been taken to the police station, there were moments where my body would feel heavy and I would struggle to breathe. My heart would race ahead of its own accord and a ribbon of dizziness would ripple across my brain. Objects would lose their coherence; the sky would become an indistinct haze of bright while everything below would collapse into streaks of dark shadow. I would have to stand still for a while before it passed, closing my eyes, listening to the thrum of my heart.
As we got to the school gates, I surveyed the school. It was a large building but of a simple design. It had three floors with many windows running across in neat rows. Its concrete was a smooth ochre that contrasted with the dark, cloudy windows. On the roof there were some large Chinese letters, skeletal figures which spelt out the word Ming – the name of the school. ‘Ming’ means ‘brightness’ but there wasn’t much of that; even the ochre paint on the walls had faded. As I watched, a small army of children flowed across the courtyard and through the main entrance. My heart began to beat faster. The feeling of that weight on my chest. I looked up at my mother. I couldn’t see her face, for it was wreathed in shadow and above her the sky had become a blinding expanse of light. I blinked. I mumbled.
‘I don’t feel well. Perhaps we could come back tomorrow instead.’
I could not see my mother’s face, but even as I was uttering these words I knew they were futile. Her voice was hard as stone.
‘You are going. You are not a little girl any more. We paid a lot for that uniform of yours. We pay a lot for you.’
I turned away from her as the dizziness fizzed and sparked in my brain like an electric storm. The ground seemed to rear up in front of me, and I barely managed to keep my balance. I moved forward, joining the crowd of children flowing into the building. Inside was the smell of body heat and plimsolls, and the muffled, excited whispers of children pressed together, pushing through a long thin corridor until finally we spilled out into a large assembly hall.
We were made to sit while our names were read out, and we were directed to one or other of the six teachers who stood with arms folded, watching. My junior school had been small; two streets from our home, it was little more than a renovated apartment with a small backyard where fifteen or so children would play. Compared to this, it was tiny. We students looked at each other apprehensively, our eyes scanning the rows and rows of children, expectant, unsure. I sneaked fleeting, nervous glances, not wanting to expose myself, anxiety broiling in my belly.
And then I saw Gen. At first I couldn’t quite believe it. My fear turned to excitement; in seeing someone I knew, I felt hope. As though the strangeness of the situation had been undone and now there was something familiar to hold on to: a solid rock in an otherwise sweeping, tumbling cascade of unknowns and intangibles. I smiled, I tilted my head, I raised one arm – I did everything I could to get his attention. And then, in that sea of children, his gaze found mine. I had thought I might never see him again and yet there he was.
He looked different in his uniform, taller and more severe, more adult – even though it was only a few months since we had last seen each other. But it wasn’t simply that. In the moment I saw him, I was returned to that place; the sense of pain bleeding through my shoulder, the violence of my own screams echoing in my head. But the horror of the experience we had shared was tempered by my relief at seeing him again. So I smiled all the more. His eyes moved across me. I saw in them a flicker of recognition. And then he looked away.
Perhaps he had every right to ignore me. He’d taken the blame for my crime. He’d been interned and I hadn’t seen him since I left that building. I hadn’t seen any of my friends since that awful night.
But there is a loneliness that comes from being in the midst of people, especially when they are all strangers. You hope desperately for a nod of recognition, a smile of understanding. Everyone else knows each other, it seems, only you are all alone, and the awareness of that makes you flush and tremble. It’s akin to being naked in a crowd perhaps – you feel your own vulnerability intensely. So when you see someone else – even if it is someone you don’t particularly like – that recognition gives you a sense of security and relief, and you feel warmth towards the person in question. On seeing Gen I felt a great warmth, not simply because I could see that he was okay and unharmed, but because he was someone who tethered me to the familiarity of my past and my friends, and his appearance made the strangeness and isolation of this new reality that much easier to bear. But he had turned away.
That was such a shock to me. I felt utterly alone. They began to call out names. We formed lines. I moved through the process with a sense of disorientation. I felt angry at my mother – why had she insisted on sending me to this place? Those summer evenings of playing in the streets with my friends now seemed to represent the sweetest of freedoms, and a period of wonder from which I had been forever exiled. I thought about Al Lam. I knew she had hated the fact that her parents were going to take her away, but in that moment I envied her. It seemed to me that she had escaped.
I was led into a classroom and directed towards a desk. The teacher seemed impossibly old, though perhaps she wasn’t much more than forty. Her tidy, dark hair was streaked with grey, her face was soft and a little plump, and she had dark, limpid eyes. Her name was Chu Hua, and her name, she explained, meant a type of flower: bright and colourful, and, more importantly, one that grows well in the right conditions. That was her mission for us, she explained. She would help ‘grow’ us in the right conditions.
She was very smiley, so I liked her, and I’d always wanted to be taller than I was, because being tall was a major currency at that age. The taller you were, the more the other kids listened to you. So the idea of being ‘grown’ was a compelling one. I tried to prick up my ears and listen to what she had to say. As for Gen, I neither knew nor cared what class he had been put into. He could go to hell as far as I was concerned.
Chu Hua explained that there would be a time for listening and a time for questions. When the time for questions came, we should address her as ‘miss’ or, if we preferred, ‘madam’. One smaller boy at the back of the class, who reminded me a little bit of Fan, asked in a small, querulous voice: ‘Can we call you “plant grower”, if we want?’
For the first time, ‘madam’s’ soft doughy face darkened. Her lips tightened.
‘No, that would not be a good idea.’
Her expression brightened once more.
‘A people are a people. But they are also a legacy.’
I had always been intrigued by words. I would try and hold on to them, especially the ones I didn’t know. I’d roll them around in my mouth, tasting them, like a sweet. ‘Legacy’ was one I didn’t know. I murmured it under my breath.
‘Yes?’
I suddenly realised the teacher was looking at me.
‘Do you have something to say?’
I felt the red flush climb high in my cheeks, and the gazes of the other students burning into me. She hadn’t spoken in a cruel way, exactly. And I desperately wanted to respond, to explain that I too wanted to grow like a flower, that I wasn’t trying to be rude. But the words got caught in my throat as I felt myself blush.
Chu Hua turned away and her face lit up once again.
‘Our legacy involves people just like you!’
She pointed at us, beaming.
‘People with ordinary lives, just like you, are what makes our country so noble and free. Humble people but loyal people, the type of good people you will grow up to be. And do you know who was one of the best?’
We did not.
‘A humble, loyal man named Lei Feng.’
We blinked.
‘Let me ask you something more.’
Her features were animated, enthused.
‘How many of you use a toothbrush?’
We glanced around at each other. A few of the braver ones at the front raised their hands. Gradually the rest of us followed.
‘Well, Lei Feng was a great soldier who was once your age. And like you, he also used a toothbrush. And do you know what? He used that toothbrush until all the bristles fell away, but he kept rubbing his gums with that toothbrush for decades after because he would not allow himself to use a single voucher from the People’s State to buy a new one. He did not want to cost the communist ideal!’
I was impressed by this. Lei Feng must have been very brave indeed, for I knew what it was like when the bristles on your toothbrush started to disintegrate: it got very painful very quickly. And while the idea of using only the wooden stump, rubbing it up against your teeth, seemed kind of odd, it also showed great determination. And, according to Chu Hua, this wasn’t the only determined or brave thing this Lei Feng had done. Apparently he’d also refused to use spades and gloves in the fields, resorting to his own hands, so that his comrades could use the utilities he himself had declined. And he would do this in the frostiest winter conditions.
Unfortunately, Lei Feng had died in an accident.
The same small boy squeaked out from the back of the class:
‘What kind of accident?’
Chu Hua gazed at him in a haughty fashion. And then, without responding, turned and beamed at the rest of us.
I wondered if the accident had involved some form of frostbite.
‘Now,’ Chu Hua declared, ‘we are all to sing a song honouring Lei Feng’s memory.’
There were many verses of that song. Many. The first ran:
Learn from Lei Feng’s good example,
Loyal to the revolution, loyal to the Party,
All of China seeks to marvel,
In his good stead, we hope, with faith and hearty!
Each of us had to learn a verse, and then recite it. I was working with a cross-eyed and severe girl at the desk next to me. When our turn came round, she recited her lines perfectly, but I stumbled and misspoke. Again Chu Hua looked at me.
‘When you are not supposed to speak, you mumble. When you are supposed to speak, you mumble. Can you do anything but mumble?’
A ripple of laughter ran across the class. For the second time I felt humiliated. I bowed my head. Then we did some maths, which was okay. In fact, it was a relief. I finished it quicker than some of the others as I had always been good at maths. In the interim, I jotted down the words of the verse I had misspoken. I went over them in my head. At the end of the lesson, as I had suspected, Chu Hua – or ‘madam’ – asked us to recite the verses about the peasant hero Lei Feng once more.
When it came to my turn, I recited my lines perfectly. Because they were automatic, dull even, I no longer worried about them. And that, in itself, felt good. I was no longer on the spot, no longer ‘naked’ among my peers. In committing a series of words to memory and reciting them automatically, I could become almost invisible. Nobody would look at me. Nobody would bother me. Nobody would see.
. . .
Those first few years of high school passed in much the same way. Chu Hua had a formal manner; she required us to memorise lines of verse or maths formulae, and when a student faltered or failed she combined her acid tongue with her sour voice to draw attention to their humiliation in front of the others. And yet, at the same time, she seemed genuinely concerned that we learn, and every now and then would award sweets if a student achieved a particular milestone. She was a bureaucrat – unquestioningly devoted to the state whether under Mao or the present incumbent – but there was a sense that the rules she imparted would see us right in the future, and this seemed important to her. Though I had no real evidence, no knowledge of her life outside the small crucible of our class, she struck me as being profoundly lonely. Perhaps it took one to know one. As time passed, the memories of my childhood friends – Jian, Zhen, Fan, Al Lam – gradually softened, fading into the mists of the past, and I no longer missed them with the same fierceness. I became comfortable in my isolation; it was like an old, mottled blanket I could slip over myself, a barrier between my being and the world. I would recite my lines in class automatically and when the teacher’s attention moved on to the next student, I would drift off into a gentle world of my own imagining.
Of course, Gen was still there. He was not in my class, but I would see him every now and then in the corridor with other boys, but more often than not alone – in the courtyard at the back of the school, under an old blossom tree, a book propped in his hands. He was, perhaps, lonely too, but it never seemed to bother him. Even from a distance he had that same aloofness I remembered. Since that first day in the new school, we had not so much as acknowledged one another’s presence. He had become someone I was only ever-so-slightly aware of. I would catch sight of him from a distance, and there was a faint flowering of memory, both bitter and sweet. The time spent with my friends that summer mingled with other images, other sensations. The sour odour of a man’s sweat. The acrid scent of bleached floors. The feeling of a steel desk, glimpses of faces, hard and angry. I could not talk to Gen about what had happened that night. And yet it lay there between us, a darkness, never quite dispelled by the crowds of schoolchildren gathered in the courtyard, chattering and shouting boisterously in the afternoon sun. It would be several years before he and I would speak again, and that exchange would not take place in school.
Instead, it happened in Tiananmen Square.
When Chu Hua announced the school trip, she was smiling radiantly, her eyes so impossibly happy they were shining with tears. In the years she had been our teacher I had never seen her that way. She explained to us in a halting voice that it was her class, our class, who had been selected to make the trip. One of my classmates, Qiang Bolin, blurted out the question we had all been thinking: ‘Where are we going?’ Usually, if a student spoke without being asked, Chu Hua would fix them with a withering gaze; our teacher would look at you until it became painful and you would murmur repentance under your breath. But not this time. Chu Hua couldn’t control her excitement as she squealed in delight:
‘We are going to Tiananmen Square. We have been granted access to the mausoleum. You are all going to see … him. You will all have the privilege of seeing … the Chairman.’
We gasped. Alongside Confucius and the First Emperor, Mao Zedong had become one of the emblems of Chinese history and grandeur, even though Mao had only been dead for a handful of years while the others had had their reputations burnished by millennia. Even though many members of our families still bore the wounds of the Cultural Revolution. Of course, we children knew nothing of such things – or if we did, we intuited them vaguely, at the edge of our consciousness, like a dark and primordial memory one can no longer quite grasp. So we screamed and clapped on hearing the announcement, and rather than curtail our boisterousness, Chu Hua smiled all the more, tears of pride sparkling in her eyes.
When I got home, I was full of myself. I had managed to do well at school, not just because I kept my head down, but because I’d travelled some distance from those early days when I had played on street corners with my friends. Then, I had struggled to figure out the syllables and patterns of the Mandarin script; now I was much more at home with them. More than that, I found I liked disappearing into the books we were given. Each unlocked a world with its words, allowing the reality before me to evaporate, so I might slip into a more lulling and faraway existence.
I was as excited as the others. Like them, I knew Mao as a figure who could slay giants – I’d seen his image reflected back at me in a never-ending series of walls, posters and flags. He was someone who had stridden across China in a single Long March, who had vanquished all our enemies. In the minds of us children, he was somewhere between hero and god: a fairy-tale figure who kept the monsters from the door. And now I had been chosen to see Mao Zedong himself. To stand only a few feet away from him. To gaze upon his face.
When I returned home that Friday, I was buzzing with excitement. I ran into my mother the moment I stepped through the door. Sensing I was happy about something, her face fell. But I couldn’t hold back. I told her that I’d been selected to go on a trip to see the Chairman. I almost sang the words.
My mother flinched, as though she had touched something hot. At the same time, there was a real moment of indecision and struggle in her face. The honour that I and my classmates had been accorded was a real one. Not just to visit the mausoleum but to be allowed into the inner sanctum. To be in touching distance of the Chairman himself. As a young adolescent, I had my mother figured out in that respect. She was conflicted because, although she baulked at the thought of praising me, at the same time she knew such an honour would also reflect well on her.
She stood there for a few moments; she was still a little taller than me in those days, so she was still able to look down on me. Torn as she was, she eventually snapped:
‘You make sure you don’t do anything to shame our family. Not in front of the … the Chairman.’
I giggled involuntarily. I didn’t mean to. It was the way my mother had spoken: sharp and declamatory, and then her voice had hesitated and softened. ‘Not in front of the … the Chairman.’ Despite my own sense of reverence for Mao Zedong, he was nevertheless dead, and anything shameful I did was unlikely to be picked up on by him. Nevertheless, in my head I pictured the cadaver of the Great Helmsman suddenly punching his way through the barrier – like a zombie in one of those banned American films – before bursting out of the mausoleum, and rampaging through the city in order to find my mother and let her know exactly how shameful her daughter’s behaviour had been.
Unfortunately my mother was not privy to the humorous vision my mind had conjured up so instead she slapped me hard across the back of my head.
By the weekend before the class trip to Tiananmen Square, more and more of our neighbours had found out about the honour I had been gifted. My Aunty Zhao slipped into our apartment on Sunday evening, surprising us at the table. She was apologetic and yet she was looking at me with an expression of wonder, as though seeing me for the first time. She and my mother kissed cheeks in the way they always did, and Aunty Zhao apologised in a soft mumble for having interrupted our dinner, but her eyes never left my face. After a silence which began to grow uncomfortable, she darted towards me and slipped a single red rose onto my lap, a flower which had been carefully wrapped with cellophane.
‘I know that they say you can’t actually get that near. But, if you get the chance, my niece, please lay this flower as close to … as close to him as you can!’
For the first time I felt not so much proud as embarrassed. Nevertheless, I promised my aunty that I would. She nodded her head and shuffled out of the room.
We continued to eat. My mother’s eyes narrowed and she glowered at me.
‘You’d better be on your best behaviour! You had better not disgrace Mao!’
My grandmother laid down her chopsticks. She looked at my mother.
‘You haven’t forgotten what happened at the end of the fifties, have you, daughter?’
My mother, sharp-eyed and cautious, looked at my grandmother.
My grandmother continued to munch a potato, turning it over in her mouth rhythmically and relentlessly like a tumble dryer. Her voice was placid, unassuming.
‘I don’t like to dwell on the past,’ my mother remarked warily.
‘But the famine, Daughter. I am sure you remember that. The bodies in the streets. You remember them too, right?’
My mother’s face was taut with an emotion I couldn’t decipher.
‘What’s that got to do with anything? He was the leader of our country. He took us into the modern era. He gave us so much. You, you can’t make an omelette … without, without breaking eggs!’
‘And the cannibalism. In the countryside. Do you remember when that started happening, daughter?’
There was something terrible in my grandmother’s toad-like face, something which belied the calmness of her voice.
My mother was ashen-faced. She arched towards my grandmother, extending a long brittle arm across the table, jabbing a finger.
‘You, you won’t talk about such … vulgar things in front of my children.’
In the same moment, my little brother Qiao, who was then almost six, raised his smiley face still slick with grease. He looked at our mother.
‘What means … hanaballmism?’
My grandmother ruffled a sticky patch of my brother’s cowlicked hair with affection, but her gaze never left my mother.
‘You are right, daughter, I shouldn’t be so … vulgar!’
The tautness in my mother’s face seemed to relax. She turned to her food once again.
‘But I tell you this much,’ my grandmother continued with that same terrible calm. ‘The bodies they left rotting on the dirty ground, they were vulgar enough. They caused quite a stench. I can still remember the smell of them. But I doubt it was anything compared with the smell that bag o’ shit gives off in his clean and comfortable mausoleum.’
My grandmother looked at me, and all the sarcasm and sharpness in her expression were gone. Instead, there was a sadness which I couldn’t quite fathom.
‘Congratulations on your big day, granddaughter. I am proud of you. But if you get too close to him, don’t forget to hold your nose!’
My mother shrieked at my father, who’d been watching the exchange from his world of subdued silence.
‘Do you have nothing to say about this?’
She looked at the rest of us in anguish. As though we had betrayed her, everything she had done for us. And at that moment, I felt as though we had, somehow. She picked up the closest plate and dashed it to the ground. The sound it made ripped across the room and even my grandmother jumped in shock.
Not for the first time, my mother left the table in tears.