by Ping Fu
It is sweat that waters the thirsty ground.
Be sure to value the food for our meals,
As every grain sings a hardworking song.
I had never paid attention to the meaning of the poem before, although I could recite it from memory. Now every word echoed in my mind along with the noises coming from my stomach. I understood what it meant to truly appreciate a meal.
The next day, I awoke to discover our pot filled with cooked rice and vegetables. A few days after that, a few eggs and a cucumber magically appeared. It wasn’t much sustenance for two growing girls, but it made a huge difference. For many years, I would occasionally find prepared or uncooked foods at our door. The food was usually left in the wee hours of the morning, before dawn. I often tried to spy and find out who was helping us in secret, but I never caught sight of anyone. It was another lifetime before I finally discovered our benefactor’s identity.
These gifts of food made me feel a little safer. Here was a sign that, even in the worst of circumstances, there were people willing to watch out for us and even risk their lives. I vowed that I would be like our anonymous donor and do my best to help others, including Hong. I reasoned that I didn’t have a choice about having been born a black element, but I could choose to be good. I could be kind to strangers, bear my suffering without complaint, and learn from Mao’s teachings. In this way, perhaps I could be forgiven for the bad things that my ancestors had done.
—
Zhang had somehow gotten ahold of one of my childhood dolls. It was, in fact, my favorite doll from Nanjing Mother, who had brought it home from a business trip to Hong Kong, which at the time was a British colony. Nanjing Mother would unwrap the doll from its special protective packaging only when I visited.
I used to love playing with this extraordinary little person. Unlike Chinese dolls, Mei, as I called her—the name means “beauty” in Mandarin—had blue eyes and blond hair. It wasn’t ordinary nylon doll’s hair, either; Mei’s hair would stay curled in perfect spirals if you wrapped it around your fingers. She would stare at me lovingly with eyes wide open when sitting up, and then softly close her eyes when I cradled her in my arms and sang her to sleep. I had a small trunk of clothes for Mei, and I would change her often, tying and untying her tiny shoes with great care.
I had last visited Nanjing at Chinese New Year, in early February of 1966, before the fervor of the Cultural Revolution had fully taken hold of China. Nanjing Mother decided it would be best to get rid of this representation of the “foreign devils” that Mao blamed for polluting our country. Nanjing Mother made me say good-bye to Mei, then tossed her into a bin at a collection site designated for garbage. I was so sad, feeling as though I’d lost a best friend.
One afternoon not long after that first bitter meal, I was gazing into the common area from my dorm room window when I saw Zhang sitting in the dirt playing with Mei. She or her red parents must have fished my favorite doll out of the collection center’s bin. The moment I saw Zhang crudely dangling my Mei by her legs, I became infuriated. Mei’s delicate features were covered in dirt, her elegant clothes torn. She must be suffering terribly, I thought. I could feel her in my heart.
I wanted that doll back so much it hurt more than my hunger pangs. It wasn’t fair. I had lost everything. I had no parents, no belongings, no home, nothing. If only, I thought, I could just have this one thing to call my own . . .
Only there was nothing I could do. Zhang was from a red family. Everyone knew her and her mother, who held a critical role in distributing food stamps to residents on campus. They had the power. I was from a family of black elements with no parents to look out for me, and I had no rights. This much had become clear to me in just a few days.
I formulated a plan: I would follow Zhang around whenever I had the chance, waiting for her to put the doll down and forget about her for a moment. Then I would snatch my Mei and hide her in my room. Only Zhang was too careful. She remained constantly vigilant, especially when she brought Mei out of her apartment to play with when I was around. She could see the envy in my eyes, and she wasn’t about to let me win.
—
“Down with the black elements! Down with the black elements!” the crowd chanted ferociously, eager for a spectacle.
To help us reform, we children of black elements were ushered into a large public auditorium jam-packed with people to learn from an adult “struggle session.” I felt like a chicken with its feathers stuck in the wire coop, trapped and terrified. The crowd included many people now occupying the campus, as well as hundreds of peasants and workers from nearby communes who had come to see the show.
A smell of rot from the Red Guards’ heavy boots triggered my first onset of a migraine headache, which would continue to plague me for life. We kids sat watching people walk onstage one at a time to “verbally struggle” with their pasts. They would criticize professors, administrators, students—anyone who represented Mao’s black elements. I was reminded of Shanghai Papa’s talk in our home when someone had shouted, “Revisionist!”
The struggle session grew more and more abusive and intimidating. People denounced their ancestors in the worst possible language, and then made vows to reform in front of Mao’s portrait. If they didn’t behave to the Red Guards’ standards, they were struck.
One day, it was the children’s turn.
My legs began to tremble as I listened to the endless taunts and jeers from the crowd, the repeated chants of “Black element!” I was the third or fourth person to be called onstage. Before me was a sea of angry, curious, and frightened faces. Red Guards hung a sign around my neck made from a piece of chalkboard they’d taken from one of the classrooms at the university. It had my name and the crimes of my bourgeois family printed on it. The chalkboard was so heavy that the wires cut into my neck. I was forced to assume the “airplane position”: arms held out straight on either side of my body like wings. My limbs shook so uncontrollably that I felt as though I were standing on a plank floating in a tank of water.
I could not think of what to say. For that, I received a heavy blow to the head from a tall Red Guard. Blood flowed from my nose and from my neck where the chain was cutting into my flesh.
I had to think on my feet. I repeated some of the same sentences the black elements who had gone before me had used. “My parents are bad people,” I said. Then I took my criticism further: “No, they are not people; they are animals. They take money from the poor. They should be punished and I should be punished.” My voice was flat and mechanical.
The Red Guard slapped me again, knocking me to the floor this time. I heard Hong yelp from somewhere offstage. The tall man then wiped his hand on his pants. “You are not sincere!” he bellowed. “You must dig deeper into your crimes.”
I managed to stand up. Suddenly, I recalled something I’d seen one of the adults do during his struggle session: I started slapping my own face with my hands, left and then right, harder and harder, until I tasted blood in my mouth.
“I am nobody!” I shouted out as loud as I could. “I don’t deserve even to live. Anybody can step on me and squash me like a bug. I am nobody—I am not worth the dirt beneath your feet!”
They let me go.
That was not the first or the last time I was forced to publically humiliate my family and myself. Eventually, I started to believe what I said onstage. I was nobody. I became unquestioningly submissive to the abuse I received. I gave up on craving affection, such as what I had received from Shanghai Mama. I became indifferent to suffering, to the sunrise and sunset.
—
During those first few months, Red Guards gave us “remember the bitterness” meals and lectures nearly every other day. But we received more teachings at these sessions than food, and I learned for the first time what starvation really felt like. My empty stomach growled and gurgled—I was amazed that it could make so much noise.
After a few weeks, I actually began to look forward to the sessions because at least they filled me up. Sometimes, my stomach would get so bloated that it seemed as though I were pregnant. Other times, the meal would make me sick and my body quickly would empty itself out, leaving me even hungrier than I had been a few hours before.
In Nanjing, residents referred to summer as “the season of yellow mold.” It would rain nonstop for days, leaving the air thick and damp. Mold would grow more quickly than spiders scampering from the light, clinging to every wall and surface. During this season, days passed while the Red Guards fed us nothing, nor were we able to attain our rations from the store. It occurred to me that it might not be an accident that there was no food; they might be starving us deliberately. My German neighbor in Shanghai had told me once about how German soldiers had taken millions of Jews like him out of their homes during World War II and forced them to live in “ghettos” before burning them up in ovens. Is that why we had been brought here to live in this ghetto? Was mass extinction awaiting us? Were they going to starve us first, or put us straight into the ovens and burn us alive?
The Red Guards were mostly in their late teens, and they ruled us with a combination of Lord of the Flies brutality and Orwellian exercises in thought control. We could do whatever we wanted, and they could do whatever they wanted to us.
On one occasion, I saw a teacher being thrown head first into a deep well. Later, they beat to death an older boy for a prank he had pulled involving a cat because the Chinese word for cat, mao, has the same pinyin spelling as Chairman Mao’s name, differing only by a subtle tone change. Crime and punishment were meted out haphazardly, so no one among us black elements ever felt safe.
That summer was so hot in Nanjing that Hong and I sometimes went to bed naked on sheets of newspapers spread out across our cement floor. One morning, Hong burst out laughing, pointing at my back. Our sweat had imprinted our bodies with inverted images of Chairman Mao from yesterday’s official news. Hong was too young to understand the consequences, and so was giddy with joy at the trick. But I was fearful that we could be executed for making a parody of our supreme leader. I had to dress us both in long shirts in spite of the stifling heat. Worried that Hong naively would show off her body art, I watched her carefully all day long until we had sweated ourselves clean.
Our time was occupied by study sessions, in which we did nothing but recite slogans from Mao’s Little Red Book, and struggle sessions, in which we denounced ourselves and ate bitter meals. Otherwise we had most of our time free. Along with the other orphaned children of black elements, I would play chase in the dormitory hallways late into the night. We would light fires on our coal stoves just for fun.
One day, several boys came up to me in the hallway outside my room and said, “Let’s go play on the old airplanes.” Hong wanted to come with us, but I insisted that she stay in our room because she was too young. I threatened to tie her to the window frame with a torn piece of sheet and not feed her dinner if she disobeyed. To this day, Hong still remembers how much it upset her that I wouldn’t let her play outside with us.
The boys led me across campus to a warehouse filled with abandoned Chinese-manufactured airplanes. As we slid down the emergency chutes and onto the silver wings, it felt like the greatest playground ever built. I stood inside one of those huge empty carcasses and wondered, How do such small wings carry such large planes into the sky?
Most children of black elements older than I had gone to normal schools for a few years before the Cultural Revolution started, and they took pleasure in showing off their knowledge when we played. I was able to pick up some basic math and science concepts over the years. I remember a particularly smart boy posing an interesting question one day.
“Ping,” he said, “do you know the fastest way to add the numbers one to one hundred?”
I had known how to add and subtract since the age of three, since I had lived in a household with five older siblings who loved to teach me things, and Nanjing Mother had regularly quizzed me in math. But I didn’t know the answer, so I shook my head.
The boy was very proud to share his trick with me. “First, you add one plus ninety-nine, then two plus ninety-eight, then three plus ninety-seven, and so on. That’s how you get to five thousand fifty.” His clever solution fascinated me.
I remember many other challenging questions posed by the older children, including this one: “If one bike has two people on it, and another bike has one person on it, and both bikes are rolling downhill, which one will go faster?” I answered with glee, “The lighter one!” The others told me that I was wrong: the two bikes should travel at the same speed. But why, they couldn’t explain. So they got on their bikes and tried it. Contrary to both our expectations, the bike with two people on it rolled down the hill faster.
Later that day, we went to ask a man who swept the street outside our dorm every morning for an explanation. We knew from our struggle sessions that he had been a physics teacher prior to the Cultural Revolution. The “wise man,” as we later secretly referred to him, didn’t have a simple explanation. He picked up two rocks, one smaller and one bigger, and took us up to the seventh floor of a building he was cleaning. Following his instructions, we threw the two rocks out the window and watched them hit the ground at the same time. He explained to us that the reason things with different weights fall at the same speed is that gravitational force and inertial mass are equal for all objects. The boys had been right, then: in theory, the two bikes should have crossed the finish line at the same time. But in reality, things were more complicated. We had to take into account air resistance, friction, and rotational forces. That’s why the heavier bicycle had won the race. I didn’t understand everything the teacher said, but it fueled my curiosity about how things work.
As we roamed across the NUAA campus discovering walled-off libraries and a stone bridge composed of five magnificent dragons, my imagination also ran free. The intricate carvings on the Five Dragon Bridge reminded me of those on my Shanghai parents’ rosewood bed. I imagined that one day I might learn to be a craftswoman.
Although I enjoyed playing with them, I was careful not to become too friendly with any of the other children of black elements. The Red Guards had warned us that if we spent much time together, they would accuse us of conspiracy and exact whatever punishment they saw fit.
—
The dorm was a noisy place. Every night, Hong’s breathing bubbled like a kettle that needed tending; she suffered from allergies. Outside, through half-closed doors, waves of our neighbors’ cacophonous snores resonated. Beyond the campus, machine guns fired. I learned to block out these noises—it was as though I could make myself deaf. I can still shut down my hearing at will to this day.
Mega speakers perpetually echoed through the dormitory corridors and from the trees outside its windows, reminding us of our crimes and about the class struggle. Every day, the campus was papered with new flyers, Communist propaganda. Posters went up with faces of black elements, their supposed crimes listed underneath.
I had been living at NUAA for a few months when I saw Nanjing Father’s name with a big red X over it. He was listed as a “historical counterrevolutionary” and “American spy.” That was why he had been sent away for reeducation. What exactly had he done? I was curious to know, but I didn’t dare to ask. What about Nanjing Mother? I didn’t know what had happened to her, either, or whether she was considered a counterrevolutionary. I didn’t see her name on any posters.
By that time, I had thoroughly cleared the trash out of Room 202, scrubbed the walls and floor clean, and begun forming a makeshift homestead for Hong and me. For a bed, I found a thin, stained single mattress next to the trash collection site. Sometimes as I wandered around campus, I would come across a chair with a missing leg or other discarded small household items, which I’d bring back to our dorm room. But I thought of what I still considered to be my “real h
ome” constantly: Shanghai Mama’s smile when she woke me up in the morning; the bustling familiarity of mealtimes; feeding my little finches from the library balcony; watching my brothers run with enthusiasm out the door to school together; aromatic steam rising from the stove as my mother cooked all afternoon; the way my forefinger fit roundly into the whorl of a vine carved into my parents’ bed frame; the crinkling sound of rice paper welcoming the ink from my grandfather’s calligraphy brush; Shanghai Papa’s joyful clip-clipping in the garden. I encased these memories in my mind and filed them away like the scrolls that my grandfather kept carefully stowed in his library cabinets.
I knew that I wasn’t supposed to remember my parents or think good thoughts about them. The Red Guards had ordered me during those long, hot bitterness sessions to forget my past and reform my ways by learning from workers, farmers, and soldiers. I was eager to make my black blood flow red. Yet it seemed I couldn’t help myself.
Some nights when I couldn’t sleep, I would get up, as I had that very first night, and record my confusing thoughts in letters to my parents, both Shanghai and Nanjing. Eventually these letters, which I learned I could not send because they frequently were checked by the authorities and used as proof of counterrevolutionary thinking, formed a sort of journal. I’d collect propaganda flyers to use as paper, scribbling my thoughts in a combination of my elementary school Chinese characters and phonetic pinyin.
One evening I wrote:
Dear Shanghai Papa and Mama,
Are you nice people or bad people? I can’t imagine that you are bad people because we were such a happy family. I love you very much.
But how come you didn’t tell me there were poor people? Why did you make the peasant people starve? Why did you taint me with your black blood?
Another night, I wrote a poem:
LOST
Wrong city, all a mess
Don’t trust my guess
Mother’s face, fading in the distance
