by Fan Wu
“Wai po, I wanted to see Great-grandma and Great-grandpa’s pictures,” said Dongdong, jumping onto Fenglan’s lap as she was explaining a photo to Guo-Ying.
She told him that she didn’t have a picture of them.
“You must have at least one.” He raised his head and stared at her innocently.
“It’s been too long and I can’t find them anymore,” she said, recalling clearly how she threw their photos into the fire when the Red Guards’ footsteps and shouting could be heard downstairs.
“I want to see them!” Dongdong insisted. He didn’t stop nagging her until his mother told him that she was going to read him a story.
“Ma, how and when did my grandparents die?” Guo-Ying asked after Dongdong left.
“Didn’t I tell you before that they died of sickness in the fifties?”
“Both of them?”
She looked away from her daughter’s skeptical eyes. “It was difficult to get medicine at that time. There weren’t many good doctors, either.”
“How about Aunt, then?”
“She died of food poisoning during the Three-Year Natural Disaster.” Fenglan replied hesitatingly, not sure if this was the same answer she had given before. “Right after the Great Leap Forward campaign. You know, millions of people died in that famine. The weather was bad. There were droughts and floods all across China.”
“Ma, the weather was just a small factor. The famine was largely due to the government’s wrong policies. You knew that. If they hadn’t built people’s communes, hadn’t forced peasants to leave their lands to produce iron and steel, hadn’t promoted close cropping and deep plowing, hadn’t killed all the sparrows, there wouldn’t have been such widespread famine.”
Fenglan looked at her daughter, a little taken aback by her bold statement. She remained silent.
Her daughter softened her tone. “What kind of food did Aunt eat—the food that poisoned her?”
“She ate poisonous mushrooms.”
“Hmm…” Her daughter sighed. “Did you live together at that time?”
“We did.”
“Did you eat the mushrooms too?”
“I did. They were mixed, some poisonous and some not. She saved the big ones for me and ate the smaller ones herself, the ones that were poisonous.” It hurt Fenglan to say this, remembering her sister’s sweating face, loud panting, and grip on her arm. She didn’t want to go on, but she couldn’t help saying more. “We had picked the mushrooms in the woods, near a village, and had started a fire to bake our harvest right there. She wanted me to eat the big ones, so she told me that she liked the taste of the smaller ones better. I was silly enough to believe her. Later, I managed to find the doctor from the village for help. He was young, barely twenty. He wasn’t a real doctor, and all he had done before was treat pigs and dogs. But he was the only help I could find. He gave your aunt the wrong medicine. I shouldn’t have trusted him. How stupid I was!” She realized that this was the first time she had revealed this information to her daughter.
Her daughter sighed again, then held up a photo of her aunt. “She was very pretty.”
“She was. You have her eyes and mouth,” Fenglan said and stood. “I’m very tired and want to go to bed now.”
Guo-Ying looked into her eyes with concern and said that she would ask her more next time.
Now, alone in the quiet house, as Fenglan thinks of those faded old photos, the door to her memory opens slowly.
Her father used to be a superintendent at an all-female college. He liked to talk about politics with his colleagues and students. Deeply skeptical of the Nationalist Party’s ability to run the country, he longed for a revolution and often wrote articles criticizing the government. He had many visitors, and they sometimes would talk over tea from dawn to dusk, their faces red with excitement. Apart from politics, her father enjoyed practicing calligraphy and began to teach his daughters to write when they could barely hold a brush. Her mother was born of a family that had become rich through selling fabrics. When her family’s business was at its peak, they owned more than half the fabric stores in their city. Tutored at home by an erudite, old-fashioned teacher, she became a good painter and poet. Though she was never interested in politics, she was her husband’s best listener and supporter. After the Japanese occupied the city, her family’s business began to go downhill, and it was devastated further by the Civil War until it went bankrupt in early 1949, the year the Communist Party forced its rival, the Nationalist Party, to retreat to Taiwan.
Throughout the wars, the family moved often but never separated. In Fenglan’s memory, she and her sister were always happy. Many days, they played games on their patio, their mother sitting on a stool next to them, sewing clothes or making shoe pads, her fingers adroit and her posture graceful. Their father, though often writing or reading in his study, would sometimes poke his head out of the window, brush in hand, and watch them play. One of their favorite games was invented by their father. When they played it, they slapped each other’s hands and sang rhythmically.
“You slap my hand once, I slap your hand once, now let’s tell the story about a kid playing with mud.
“You slap my hand twice, I slap your hand twice, now let’s tell the story about two eagles looking for wizards.
“You slap my hand thrice, I slap your hand thrice, now we have a story of three monkeys crossing the mountains.
After they chanted all the way to “You slap my hand ten times,” and indeed slapped each other’s hands ten times, they would start the game over again, sometimes making up their own words. The song didn’t make sense, but they loved the rhythm and never got tired of singing it. While playing the game, they glanced now and then at their parents.
When the Communists entered their city in April 1949, Fenglan, then seven years old, and her sister followed their parents to the widest street, greeting the Liberation Army with thousands of people, who waved small red flags and chanted “Welcome! Welcome!” A squad of young men and women who looked like students were dancing yang ge, a dance they must have learned from the people in the north, swinging their bodies exaggeratedly to the suo na music of “The Sky in the Liberated District.” On that day, her father wore his best blue silk changpao, and his shaved face was smooth and youthful. He hoisted Fenglan onto his shoulders and held her hands to clap. They had pushed their way to the front of the crowd, where they could see clearly the uniformed soldiers marching with rifles against their shoulders. Fenglan had never seen her father so happy, so she clapped as loudly as she could, feeling like dancing on her father’s shoulders.
When her hands hurt from clapping, she played with her father’s glasses. She took them from his nose and put them on herself. She tilted her head upward so the glasses wouldn’t slide down. Everything looked blurred and distorted through the thick lenses. The beautiful orange sun seemed to have exploded into a deep ocean that could drown her. She held the glasses in place with one hand and looked at the procession: the soldiers became slanting shadows. Dizzy and startled, she took the glasses off and wiped her eyes: now the sun was orange again, and the soldiers were striding with straight backs. She turned to look at her mother, who stood with her father, holding her sister beside her. She wore a pink qipao, her hair combed back into a bun, her powdered face illuminated with what seemed like a golden halo. How pretty she was! Fenglan thought. Her sister was applauding, jumping up and down, her long plaits, decorated with two red butterfly bows, bouncing on her chest, her red leather shoes shiny with polish.
Fenglan wanted to put her father’s glasses on again, to see what her sister’s bows and shoes would look like from behind those magic lenses. But her father took them away, saying that he couldn’t see anything without them. At this moment, an official with a pistol at his belt walked over and shook her father’s hand, then her mother’s. They must have known one another. They chatted briefly, wishing one another a bright future in the brand-new society. Before that official returned to the procession, h
e pinched Fenglan’s cheek lightly. “Little girl, you’re very lucky indeed. Now, the Japanese devils are gone, Jiang Jieshi and his Nationalists have escaped to Taiwan. The Chinese people are their own masters. You’ll go to school and go to college someday, becoming a scholar like your father. Aren’t you the luckiest child in the world?”
As he pinched her cheek, she was still thinking about the orange sun that looked like a huge, deep ocean through her father’s glasses, that seemed to be able to swallow her.
Was it an omen? Later, after so many things had happened, after both of her parents had died, she asked herself this question.
Not long after the Liberation, a series of political movements started. Within two years her father lost his teaching position, accused of using college money to buy books for himself, an accusation he denied. Though there was no evidence, her father was interrogated for months and forced to pay reparation to his college. He was also physically tortured. Angry and humiliated, he fell ill and died one year later. Lacking money to buy a coffin, her mother had to wrap her husband in a straw mat and bury him in it. He was wearing the blue silk changpao he had worn four years earlier to welcome the Liberation Army. Before long, her mother, who ate and slept little, calling her husband’s name all the time, died from grief. That year, Fenglan was eleven and her sister thirteen. Then, when she was eighteen, her sister died. In 1962, she met a man from an Anti-rightist Working Team; the man liked her. Though she had no feeling for him—he was much older and had little education—she married him.
Her husband had been born of a poor peasant family, a background favored by the Party. He named their two daughters Guo-Mei and Guo-Ying, meaning “China is beautiful” and “China is outstanding,” respectively. It had never occurred to them that the two names, if read in reverse—meiguo and yingguo, meant “America” and “Britain,” and if the last characters of their names, Mei and Ying, were read with the last character of Fenglan’s husband’s name, Qiang, it became a statement: “America and Britain are strong.” It was not until two years after the Cultural Revolution ended that one of her husband’s friends pointed out this coincidence, which shocked Fenglan and her husband. If this naming thing had been used against them during the Cultural Revolution, they would have been condemned as counterrevolutionaries and thrown into jail. But now, there was no need to change their daughters’ names. Of course, they didn’t know that as soon as their daughters left China they would assume English names that meant nothing in Chinese.
Sometimes, Fenglan thinks that, with her bourgeois and capitalist family background, she wouldn’t have survived all the political tumult had she not married her husband. She has never told all this to her daughters. If they asked how she met their father, she would say that a common friend introduced them, and if they asked how their maternal grandparents died, she would say that they died of diseases.
She doesn’t want to tell them the truth. Not a single word.
To her, the history is a scar that never heals, the best medicine is to forget. What can she do about it anyway? she sometimes reasons with herself. She cannot rewrite the history, cannot bring the buried people back to life or retrieve her lost youth and opportunities. While a country or a people can leave the past behind and restart, as a marathon runner who lags in the beginning of a race because of an ankle sprain can catch up after relaxing his muscles and may even win, there is no recovery for a broken family or a lost life. However trivial a person’s or a family’s suffering may seem compared with a country’s, it is substantial to that person, to that family. All lost lives are lost forever, and the survivors have to live with grief for the rest of their lives.
Of course, Fenglan cannot forget the past as she wishes. It was harder when she was younger. As she was cooking, or breast-feeding her babies, or boxing car parts on the production line, the images of her parents being buried and her sister’s pain-stricken face would creep into her mind. But she didn’t let herself be carried away. She would shake her head, as if this physical movement could wipe out all the memories that were about to explode in her brain. She was eager to distract herself, which was not difficult because her bored colleagues on the production line always had something to talk about: this person’s child peed on the bed the night before, that person forgot to put a bag of tofu into the fridge and it went bad, yet another person discovered that the soup noodles sold by a vendor at a particular market had a few extra pieces of meat in them compared with those sold by other vendors. Fenglan listened and commented on each incident. If they laughed, she laughed with them; if they were angry about something, she told them that they had good reason to be angry. Time went by fast with all the talking. The easiest way to keep from thinking about the past, she realized, was to surround herself with sounds and voices.
At home, when she was alone, she turned on the radio or TV, setting the volume high, letting the sound fill her brain like boiling water filling a thermos. As soon as the water reached the mouth of the thermos, she pushed down the wood cork. At first, the water would bubble and sizzle, shoving the cork upward, but soon all the action would die down and the water would settle quietly. So it was in her mind. Fill, then still.
Later, in the mid-eighties, when a leader in her factory found out that she had beautiful handwriting—a gift from her parents—she was assigned to work in the Propaganda Department, transcribing the leaders’ speeches and announcements, a job she liked because it required her to focus. That too filled her mind and obliterated the memories that were always waiting for her.
She is not the kind of person who likes to think about philosophical questions. If asked whether she has any complains about her life, she would say no. Didn’t millions of Chinese live their lives just as she did in the past few decades? She has painful memories, so have they.
In fact, she feels that life has treated her fairly: her parents were kind and loving; she had a happy childhood, however brief; she didn’t die of hunger or illness in the Mao era; her husband loved her and took good care of her; her daughters both got good educations and have done well in their lives. The old saying goes, “The key of happiness lies in being content.” So she believes.
She has her secret, but she is determined to take it with her to the grave.
After dinner on a Tuesday, Fenglan and her older daughter sit in the family room watching Chinese news on TV while Bob and Dongdong are assembling a Lego plane in Dongdong’s room.
“Let’s turn off the TV. I watch it every day,” Fenglan suggests. It is rare that her daughter has a free evening, so she wants to chat. These days, her daughter talks little; she is forgetful, less patient, and when she cooks, she often mistakes vinegar for soy sauce, salt for sugar. Once, making soup, she poured half a can of salt into it, and if Fenglan hadn’t stopped her, she would have emptied the entire can. Often they have to eat out or order take-out because the food her daughter has prepared is not edible.
Even Dongdong has sensed her mother’s absentmindedness and has been taking advantage of it. Every night, as she supervises his piano practice, she nods idly, saying “Good” to every song, even when he is obviously playing nonsense. Enjoying fooling his mother, Dongdong can barely contain his laughter: he has to bite his lips hard and twist his small body on the bench to keep from giggling.
Once, Fenglan overheard a conversation between her daughter and Bob. To Bob’s inquiry about her recent absentmindedness, her daughter replied that she was just stressed out at work.
Her daughter now turns off the TV with the remote control. She yawns and lies half reclined against a sofa arm, two pillows stacked behind her back. She rubs her eyes, runs her hands over her face, and yawns again. Sitting in a single chair next to the sofa, Fenglan observes her daughter.
“Guo-Mei, have you been very busy at work?” she asks.
“Not too bad.” Her daughter repositions her head on the sofa arm so it’s easier to talk with her mother.
“Do you want me to fix you some ginseng soup? It isn’t easy t
o work in a capitalist country, and you must take care of yourself. You aren’t an eighteen-year-old anymore.” She pauses. “I must have been a burden to you.”
“Ma, what are you talking about? You’re my mother. Don’t speculate too much, everything is fine.”
“Don’t lie to me. I can tell that something is wrong.” She lowers her voice, glancing toward Dongdong’s room, though she knows that Bob cannot understand their conversation. “Did you have a fight with Bob?”
“No. We get along well.”
“Bob doesn’t seem to talk much.”
“He has a tough job. When he gets home, he’s tired.”
“I can see that. Can he work less? It’s not worthwhile putting his whole life into a job.”
“He won’t listen to me. I mean, it’s not up to him. All his colleagues also work very hard. Things will be better after his company completes its IPO.”
“What is that?”
Her daughter smiles. “You won’t understand even if I told you.”
“You two need to talk more. If he’s not happy with me, you should just tell me. It must be hard for him to have me around in his house all the time. He can’t even talk with me.”
“What do you mean ‘his house’? It’s also my house. I own fifty percent of it. Ma, you think too much. Bob is fine with you staying with us. He and I have talked about it before. He can’t speak Mandarin or he’d have told you that himself.”
Fenglan doesn’t believe this but decides not to confront her daughter. “Are you having trouble with your church? Or is there anything wrong with your sister or Dongdong? Do you have a problem paying your mortgage?”
“Ma, I’ve told you that everything is fine.” Her daughter’s voice is slightly higher now. “There’s nothing to worry about. If you really want to know, it’s just that I have a tough project at work. That’s it. It’s actually a good project and will help me with my career.” She sits up, faces Fenglan, and smiles at her. “Ma, I’m glad you’re here, taking care of Dongdong. It’s a big help to me.”
