by Ping Fu
Hunger
I am at a loss.
When I was finished writing, I would turn the papers upside down and put them under a stack of untouched flyers. If you read it right side up, it was a history of Communist teachings saved by a dutiful student. But if you turned the pages over, you would discover my secret journal of daily happenings and reflections on my situation. Even though I was terrified of what might happen to me if anyone ever discovered this, I didn’t want to burn the papers or throw them away. I had to share my suffering, confusion, and sense of loss with somebody, and the journal was the only one I could trust.
—
One day, while the Red Guards were conducting one of their routine searches of our rooms, they found my journal.
“What is this?” a pudgy, unpredictable eighteen-year-old named Ming asked, eyebrows arched. I could feel my blood pressure rising, but I said nothing. I watched as he continued to read, turning one page after another, seemingly in slow motion. I felt utterly naked before him. He surely saw on the back sides of those sheets of propaganda my questions about why I was here, my longings to return to Shanghai and my former life, my doubts about the Red Guards themselves—dozens of traitorous thoughts that easily could have warranted having me killed. Yet his face remained impassive.
“You black elements are all the same,” Ming said. Then he walked out of my room carrying my journal in his hand.
I remained there, frozen in fear. My mind raced, imagining what might follow. Would I lose all the writings and be publicly humiliated? Worse, would the Red Guards torture and beat me? Might they even kill me? What would happen to Hong if I died? Who would take care of her? A few minutes later, Ming returned. The Red Guards would be building a bonfire at noon, he told me, and I was expected to be there to watch my frivolous pages burn before a crowd.
I spent the next hour huddled in a corner of my room, shaking. At the appointed hour, I lurched like a drunk, unable to control my movements, down to the common area of our dormitory. There were several large fire pits on the NUAA campus, which had been built a few years earlier to burn scrap metal for steel production during the Great Leap Forward—China’s effort to compete with Western countries on industrial power. One of these pits was located next to our building. I saw that the Red Guards had built a fire with wood chips and coal in the pit for the sole purpose of publicly burning my journal.
Several dozen people stood gathered around the fire. They had been summoned to witness my humiliation. Some looked at me with accusing eyes, others with compassion and sadness. We all were so accustomed to the ridicule, tempestuousness, and unjustifiable brutality of the Red Guards that I’m certain some of the onlookers couldn’t help but feel relief. At least, this time, they were not the victims. Others surely saw me as a weak, corrupt, hopeless person who deserved to be punished.
“Here goes your journal,” Ming said loudly as soon as he saw me walking toward the pit. He burned it slowly, one page at a time, passing some pages to other Red Guards to burn. They laughed and spit into the pit as they tossed the papers into the fire.
The familiar hand scribbles that had become my best and only friends flickered and darkened into ashes. I felt a deep pain in my chest and couldn’t make a sound. I was allowed no voice in this world. Even the silent conversation between my head and the page had been taken away from me in a violent fashion. I’ll just end it myself, here and now, I thought, and leapt toward the flames. But someone grabbed hold of my arm from behind so vigorously that his fingernails cut into my flesh.
“It is easier to be shot than to die a slow death by fire,” a male voice whispered in my ear. I don’t know who it was that stopped me from destroying myself. I didn’t turn around to see.
After all the pages were burned, Ming walked over to stand beside me. I knew he would shoot me then and there if I dared to utter a word of protest or even make eye contact. “Listen up,” Ming said, pointing at me with his index finger and ordering me to face the crowd. “Remember this always; let it burn into your memories: This is a Cultural Revolution. That means no writing stupid counterrevolutionary stories. This is your final warning. You will stop writing unless you write for the Party. Otherwise, you will burn just like these pages.” We were dismissed.
In truth, I was lucky. For some reason I’ll never know, Ming had chosen to let me off easy, and I suffered no further punishment. But after that day, I became a different person, one who no longer clung to anything or anyone. I broke out in hives every time I touched a pencil and stopped writing. I grew even more introverted. My ears filled only with silence. My eyes saw only flames. All that was left behind was a body resembling me.
—
Winter descended with its bitter winds. When I had to, I rose early and walked, shivering, through freezing rain to attend study sessions. Otherwise, I generally stayed inside the room, caring for Hong and our household. I hardened to the cold, retreating further and further inward.
Then, one icy day in February 1967, a most unexpected warm breeze blew into Nanjing. I received a letter from my Shanghai Mama. I recognized her handwriting at once on the envelope. I couldn’t believe that the mail office had allowed this letter to come through to me without being confiscated by the Red Guards. Worried that it might be taken away, I hurriedly tore the envelope open and read:
My dear Little Apple,
After you left, I was ill for many weeks. Sitting on the bed, I am thinking about you now. How do you get by every day? Are you cold? Are you hungry? I am so sorry that I couldn’t take care of you anymore. I was terrified of the way you discovered that I was not your birth mother. I saw the pain in your beautiful eyes; it ripped my heart into pieces.
I still have your things in my room. That little red dress of yours, I hug it to sleep every night. I love you so dearly, my Little Apple. Please don’t hate your Shanghai Mama.
Your brothers will be sent down to the countryside, each in a different place. The youngest will go to the north, in a place that borders Russia. I am so worried about him, as I am worried about you. How can a thirteen-year-old boy survive such harsh conditions by himself? Your big sister is at home. She works at a factory nearby.
Take good care of yourself and your little sister Hong. Your Nanjing Mother and Father are in the countryside paying loyalty to Chairman Mao and devoting their lives to the Communist cause. They will come home when they are reformed.
My Little Apple, be good and take care.
Many kisses and hugs,
Shanghai Mama
My eyes filled with tears of both joy and sorrow. I read the letter over and over again, each time feeling more alive. The sound of Hong’s giggles crept back into my ears. I was able to hope once more. I might see my Shanghai Mama again someday.
Sometimes in life, out of the clear blue sky comes a vicious storm. We must seek out the shelter of a cave in order to survive. We might feel as though we’ll never escape the dark crevasse. But there is always hope. Just when I felt like giving up, a stranger would leave food at my threshold or a letter from my Shanghai Mama would arrive. I clung to such moments of grace, no matter how small, as proof that behind every closed door, there lies an open space.
BECOMING AMERICAN: 1984–1988
MY INITIAL PERIOD of settling in at the University of New Mexico was easier than I had anticipated. Friendly staff from the International Student Center located a Chinese student from Nanjing; he helped me establish my new life. They signed me up for English as a second language (ESL) classes and placed me temporarily in an apartment with two American sisters who were studying law. I could live there rent free until I got my feet on the ground.
The gregarious sisters and I communicated through facial expressions and full-body gestures, like a game of charades. They knew I was desperate for money, so they connected me with one of their professors, an Iranian man who had recently divorced and was in need of a babysitter. I could
n’t speak English, didn’t understand American culture, couldn’t drive, and had never written a check. But here was one thing I knew how to do.
The very next day, I started my new job. As I walked into the professor’s apartment, I saw dishes piled up in the kitchen sink, heaps of dirty laundry, and toys strewn across the floor. I cleaned the house thoroughly and played with the professor’s five-year-old daughter for seven hours. When the professor returned home, he asked me how much I wanted to be paid. I hadn’t yet figured out the American system of prices and payments, so I just shook my head. He handed me a one-dollar bill. It didn’t seem like enough.
When I walked back into our apartment, I showed my roommates the money. They didn’t understand. So I drew two clocks onto a piece of paper: one showing the time I had started, the other showing the time I had finished. Then I drew an equal sign and placed my dollar bill next to it.
The sisters pointed at the dollar bill and drew their eyes wide in surprise. They shook their heads, their faces turning purple with indignation. “No, no,” they said. They called the professor at once and scolded him for giving me so little money. They made him come over and pay me ten dollars per hour. I learned later that he had told them it was all a mistake; he’d thought I didn’t want to be paid. But the sisters didn’t believe such nonsense.
I prepared an authentic Chinese meal for the sisters to thank them for their hospitality. Although they smiled politely and made little humming sounds of contentment as they ate, I got the impression that they didn’t like it very much. I soon discovered that “Chinese food” was Americanized here—sugary red fabrications of sweet-and-sour pork, pot stickers that got dumped straight from the freezer into deep fryers—so unlike Shanghai Mama’s fresh shrimp with lotus seeds and grilled pork belly with red cabbage.
A few days later, I went to work cleaning for a kind Japanese woman who owned a futon shop. She introduced me to several families in search of housekeepers. I worked hard and took extra care with their delicate items. Even though I couldn’t communicate with them verbally, I understood that they were happy with my work—they grinned widely when I entered their homes and referred me to their friends. I made five dollars an hour cleaning houses, and soon I had more clients than I had time.
Within a month, between housekeeping and babysitting, I was earning enough money to strike out on my own. I moved into a run-down house with four other Chinese students. Rent was just sixty dollars a month, which we split five ways. Still, I could barely afford UNM’s out-of-state tuition. Some days, I ate nothing but bananas because they were cheap, nutritious, and relatively filling.
One night, I dreamed that I was drowning. I awoke to water splashing on my face: a desert downpour had found its way through the cracks in the roof. I ran into the bathroom to grab a towel and screamed. There, in the bathtub, were hundreds of cockroaches, a black army on the march. The loneliness that had set in when I left China deepened. Was I destined to grow old in this run-down house without ever seeing my family again?
—
I needed to make sufficient money to cover UNM’s pricey out-of-state tuition and living expenses. When I asked around, people told me that I could earn more money as a waitress. But I didn’t speak English well enough yet, so I took a job busing tables at a Chinese restaurant in a shopping mall. It paid as little as housekeeping, but the owner promised me that I could advance to waitressing when my English improved.
I identified with the African American and Mexican workers who clocked in every day, cleaning the restrooms and washing dishes with me: we were all struggling to climb our way out of poverty. I loved the rich tapestry of cultures and ethnicities in the United States: Japanese, Chinese, Italian, German, Iranian, Brazilian, South African, Latino, Australian, and so on. In China, there was very little diversity except in the border regions. Nearly everyone in the country’s highly populated eastern area where I had grown up was Han Chinese.
People’s upward mobility and freedom of choice in America were the envy of the world. I’d never experienced that, and found it to be intoxicating. At the same time, I was surprised by how limited people’s thinking could be. It seemed to me that some Americans had a very narrow view of life, even though their society was so much more open than China’s. In China, we didn’t believe the propaganda that the government fed us on a daily basis. In America, I realized that propaganda still existed, only it was far subtler. It came from the media companies and advertisers rather than directly from the government. It was clever, with a lot of science behind it. People could end up brainwashed without even being aware of it. We didn’t have free speech in China, but we were free thinkers. In America, I sometimes wondered if the opposite was true. I found people’s sense of superiority when it came to foreign policy unsettling: they seemed so certain that the American way was the right way. I also observed how influenced women were by their female role models in magazines and Hollywood movies: being sexy was more important than being wise.
I knew that I had to master English in order to excel in America, but learning a new language was not an easy task at the age of twenty-five. Jane, my first English teacher, was a classic beauty with dark hair and eyes as wide as an owl’s. On the first day of class, she gave us a placement test. I could hardly answer a single question, even though I was permitted to use my Chinese-English dictionary. An hour passed by, and Jane came by our desks to collect our test papers. Next we would have an oral exam, she explained, a test of our ability to speak. She then wrote on the blackboard, “Take a break.”
I took out my dictionary, but even after having looked up each of the words, I still couldn’t make sense of this curious phrase. What does she want us to break, I wondered—our pencils? I watched as other students walked out of the classroom, which only puzzled me more. Why don’t people stay for the next part of the exam? Soon I was the only person remaining in the classroom. Jane approached my desk and gently explained the American idiom. There were dozens of other such embarrassing occasions that I still remember.
Marcy was another of my English teachers. She was finishing her PhD in journalism and had taken a part-time job at the local TV station. Like a fashion plate, Marcy changed her clothes two or three times a day, and her hairdo nearly as often.
A single mother, Marcy had quite an influence on my early life in America. She invited me to live with her in her orderly, comfortable two-bedroom apartment, offering me free room and board in exchange for occasional babysitting. I was thrilled to get out of my leaky, shared house. As I wished, Marcy practiced English with me tirelessly every chance she got.
One day in class, Marcy announced excitedly that she would be appearing on TV in a few moments. We all hovered around the television set in our classroom to watch. But all that appeared on-screen were glimpses of Marcy’s hand holding the station’s microphone. The next day, she told us that the director had cut her out of the piece because she had “held the microphone like an ice cream cone.”
Although I had majored in literature in college, watching Marcy struggle to find a job in spite of possessing the intellect, good looks, and savvy required to succeed as a journalist validated my choice to find a new field of study. Not only did I have insufficient English skills to pursue an advanced literary degree, but also earning such a degree would not make it any easier for me to find a secure, well-paying job.
—
After about three months of busing tables, I was promoted to waitress as promised. I memorized the menu, including the names of the sodas, beers, and wines we offered, all of which were unfamiliar to me. The job turned out to be a great fit. Even my ineptitude at English proved valuable. I came up with a simple shorthand system for taking orders, using the initials of the foods and their numerical order on the menu to indicate what my customers wanted—B1 was the first beer on the list, RW5 was the fifth red wine on the list, and so on. With this system, I was able to serve people more quickly than the other w
aitresses. I also figured out how to plan out in my head routes, like the Chinese shipping lines etched on my grandfather’s maps of old, for picking up and distributing my orders with maximum efficiency. The owner told me that I was a natural and gave me more tables to wait, which meant more tips.
With no savings to buy a car and little public transportation available in Albuquerque, I continued to commute to work every day on a bicycle I had bought for ten dollars at a yard sale. When one of my colleagues, a young African American waitress named Aba, found out that I was riding alone through the city an hour each way, sometimes after midnight, she offered me a ride to and from work.
“Not just tomorrow,” she told me. “Every day.” I was appreciative of her offer.
Aba was stunning enough to be a model, with a warm personality that felt like a ray of sunshine directed right at you. Everyone loved being served by her, and regulars would request her section. As we became friends, Aba noticed that the hostess would often seat people who were known not to tip well in my section. Aba offered to speak to the manager on my behalf. The hostess immediately started giving me better tippers, and soon I was making enough money to put aside some savings each month. In China, I had grown up with no right to complain and had never learned how to be assertive. Watching Aba, I marveled that in America people could ask for fair treatment and respect.
Aba and I grew close. In general, I tucked China away, not speaking about it or dwelling on the past. I had to build a new life in the United States, and I didn’t want to waste time clinging to memories of my family or wallowing in the hardships of my youth. But as my English improved, I shared bits and pieces of my China story with Aba, and listened to her tales of racism and discrimination in America.
“I’m black, too,” I told her on our drive to work one day. “The Communists say they have red blood because they were born poor. I have black blood because I was born into an educated merchant-class family.”
