At five, Cook calls everyone in for dinner. To show camaraderie with the masses in communes—but what is really a way to make sure no one gets more food than he or she deserves—we eat together in the dining room. We’ve all lost weight. We all look pale. We simply don’t have enough to eat.
Ten minutes later, after dinner is over, the others go to their rooms, too weak to do much else. I go upstairs to change into clothes more appropriate for visiting Auntie Hu. I meet Dun downstairs; we put on our jackets, boots, hats, and gloves, and then step out into the freezing air. We take the bus across town to the Hu residence. Usually lights brighten the front windows, but tonight all we can see is a single light flickering from a back room. Dun holds up his bouquet. I ring the bell and wait. I peer through a window, but I don’t see anyone. I ring the bell again and knock a few times. Finally, I see someone coming down the hall through the shadows. It’s not Auntie Hu. I would recognize her lily gait. It’s not one of her servants either.
A tall, surly man opens the door. “What do you want?”
“I’m looking for Madame Hu,” I say.
“No one here by that name. Go away.”
I glance at Dun. Could we have the wrong house? Then I peer down the hall. I see Auntie Hu’s favorite etched glass vase with flowers past their prime in it, her furniture, and the pictures on the walls. No, this is the right place. I look back at Dun and watch as cold steeliness comes over his features.
“Madame Hu lives here,” Dun says in a hard voice. He pushes past the man and into the house. I follow. Dun and I call out for her. People emerge from darkened rooms, some carrying oil lamps, some carrying candles. Nails—squatters—have somehow gotten in the house. I catch a glimpse of one of Auntie Hu’s servants peeking out from around the edge of a doorjamb.
“You! Come here!” I haven’t used that tone since I had servants of my own. The girl steps from her hiding place. She has enough shame to keep her eyes lowered. “Where is she?” It’s less a question than an order.
The girl sucks her lips between her teeth as though that will somehow keep me from getting an answer. She doesn’t know how many people I’ve lost. I raise my hand, ready to hit her.
“Where is she?”
“She left five days ago,” the girl whimpers. “She has not come back.”
“Did she get an exit permit?” Dun inquires. “Is she visiting her sister?”
The girl shakes her head. “Madame Hu didn’t tell me anything. But the next day, the gas and electricity were turned off.”
The surly man who opened the door jabs a finger in my shoulder. “You have no rights here. Get out!”
Dun takes a step, but I put a hand on his arm.
“Let’s go. There’s nothing here for us.”
We go back into the frigid night. We walk almost to the end of the block before I let Dun take me in his arms. I bury my face in his padded jacket, fighting tears.
“Auntie Hu wouldn’t have left without telling me,” I say.
“She would have if she didn’t plan on coming back or if she didn’t have an exit permit. She wouldn’t have wanted you to get in trouble.”
“But she left flowers—”
“A decoy, don’t you think, to protect you and her servants? You can tell the police you didn’t suspect anything.”
This can’t be. “Do you really think she’s tried to escape? She’s an old woman.”
“She’s just sixty, maybe a little older, maybe a little younger.”
“But if she’s caught, she’ll go to prison for a long time. She’ll never survive that.”
“She has a brave heart, just as you have a brave heart, Pearl. We must pray that she is safe and that she gets out.”
A brave heart? It feels like a swollen and aching thing in my chest.
“Let’s get some tea,” Dun says. “You’ll feel better.”
He takes me to a government-run teahouse. We sit as close as we can to the charcoal brazier, but even here cold air whistles through cracks and swirls around our feet. We sip our tea in silence. I stare into my cup, but I’m aware of Dun watching me. I’m surprised by the depth of my sadness. My mother and father are both dead. My sister is far away. My daughter and granddaughter are physically near but could just as easily be a million miles away, since they can’t come to Shanghai and I can’t go to the commune. Auntie Hu was one of only a few links to my past, and now she’s gone.
“Pearl.” I look up and see concern in Dun’s eyes. His expression makes me want to cry. “We don’t know what will happen in life. This is why it’s important for us to move forward, to live, to buy flowers, to—”
“What are you saying?”
“Look at Auntie Hu. She lost everyone, but she acted. Wherever she is, she’s trying to find a better life.” He pauses to let me think about that. Then, after a few moments, he slips off his stool to one knee. The teahouse’s proprietor hurries to our table in concern, but Dun waves him away. “We are not so young, you and I, and things will not always be easy, but would you do me the honor of marrying me?”
The tears that have been threatening finally come, but the drops that fall contain not sadness and loss but great joy.
“Absolutely,” I say.
Dun pays for our tea, and then we’re once again on the street. We’re too happy to go straight back to the house, where we’ll have no privacy. Our best way to be alone is right here, strolling among hundreds of people along Huaihai Road. But we don’t go far before a limousine pulls to a stop just ahead of us. The door opens, and Z.G. gets out.
“I saw you walking,” he says. “I had to say hello.”
Dun puts a hand on the small of my back—a gesture of reassurance or possession? Z.G. gives us an amused smile.
“I’m on my way to a dinner,” he goes on. “They’ll be showing a movie too. Would you like to come? You’re just the kind of people they want, probably more so than me.”
“We’ve already eaten,” I say, even though it was a small meal.
“And we’re on our way home,” Dun adds.
“I won’t hear of it.” Z.G. steps between us, loops his arms through ours—just as he used to do with May and me years ago when we walked together down the street—and leads us to the limousine. “Come, come. Get in the car.”
Z.G. has always had the ability to sweep people along with him, and soon we’re speeding through the streets, the driver honking at pedestrians and people on bicycles.
“Where are we going? What’s the occasion?” I ask.
“There’s a delegation here from Hong Kong,” Z.G. replies. “We’re to show them that China is doing well, that no one is starving, and that they should do more business with us.”
“A delegation from Hong Kong?” Dun asks, perplexed. “That’s a British colony.”
“I know,” Z.G. responds, world-weary. “It’s to be one of those events that’s so vexing in the New China. On the one hand, England is considered an ultraimperialist country, since it was the first foreign power to invade China and it still occupies Hong Kong. On the other hand, England is one of the few countries that recognizes the People’s Republic of China … even though it still aligns itself with the United States—the most ultraimperialist of all countries—in the United Nations to keep China from membership. We must do what we can to win over the few capitalists we’ve got. Ah, here we are.”
The car pulls into the grounds of the Garden Hotel, what used to be the French Club. The brightly lit façade and the walled garden bring back memories of parties I attended here with my sister. It feels strange to walk up the steps and enter the lobby with its crystal chandeliers, sweeping staircase, and marble walls and floors. The art deco grandeur looks dilapidated and musty, but young men and women dressed in old hotel uniforms take our coats, usher us through the lobby, and guide us upstairs to one of the banquet rooms. Inside, the people are divided into three groups: those in the usual gray suits of Communist China’s elite, those in colorful Hong Kong–made cheongsams, and so
me—like Dun and me—who wear Western-style clothes of twenty years ago.
Dun and I accept glasses of French champagne. As Z.G. scans the room, looking to see who’s important, Dun and I tip our glasses in a silent toast. He smiles. I smile. It seems we have a way to celebrate our engagement after all.
We sit down to an elaborate banquet. It’s more food than I’ve seen since I came to China, and it’s fabulous: whole roast squab served with fresh lemon slices and little bowls of salt for dipping; sweet sticky rice stuffed into the holes of lotus root and braised to bring out the greatest sugariness; thin slices of tofu as fresh and light as custard topped by fresh scallops; whole crab sprinkled with chopped scallions, fresh coriander, and chilies; pork belly in honey; soft-boiled eggs topped with caviar and garnished with tiny slivers of pickled vegetable; deep-fried greens coated with sweet syrup, and a whole steamed fish. Our table host tells the Hong Kong guests there’s so much food in China that it’s not necessary to serve rice. “That would be redundant,” he says, and the guests laugh in merry agreement.
Dun and I eat every delicacy designed to impress “our Hong Kong friends,” and we savor every bite. I speak in my best British English to a gentleman who owns a textile factory in Kowloon. He’s hoping to open a factory on the mainland. I listen to Dun practice his English with a woman on his left. He’s deft and humorous. Every once in a while, I glance over at Z.G. He looks good. He hasn’t lost any weight, and I can see why, if he’s been coming to banquets like this.
When dinner ends, we go to an adjoining room with a small stage, where we’re treated to a short program of provincial dances and songs. Then a screen is lowered, the lights dimmed, and a projector begins to whir. I expect a newsreel on the Great Leap Forward. Instead, we get a Laurel and Hardy short followed by Top Hat, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I saw it at the Metropole with May a year before we left Shanghai. After the film, the people from our table come up and ask questions.
“Do all Americans drive cars?”
“Do they all own airplanes?”
“Do all people live in houses like that?”
None of them are from Hong Kong.
Joy
A GOOD MOTHER
I WAKE ON a Sunday morning in March to unnatural silence. The roosters and chickens in Green Dragon have all been eaten. The oxen, water buffalo, and village dogs have also been eaten. I don’t hear the scratching of mice or rats in the rafters and walls, because they’ve been eaten too. There are no birds in the trees, children playing between houses, or people going about their daily chores.
Tao’s brothers and sisters still sleep around us. They need the rest. Last night, they ran out to steal pubescent wheat heads, rub them between their fingers to separate the grain from the husks, and then eat the still-green kernels. It’s completely against the rules, and if you’re caught by the night patrols, punishment is swift and harsh. People have been tied to the scholar’s tree in the square to have their ears, noses, or scalps sliced off or the hair on their faces, heads, or private parts burned. Others have had their eldest sons killed to cut the roots of a family or been deprived of all food until the only thing they can eat is the cotton stuffing in their padded jackets, so they die full but naked.
I was seven years old when World War II ended. Later, in school, we often debated why Germans didn’t revolt against their leadership and why Jews didn’t fight harder for their lives. Now I understand how that happened, because there have been no riots, protests, or uprisings here either. We’re too weak, tired, and scared to do those things. We’ve been brainwashed through hunger, and people still believe in Chairman Mao and the Communist Party.
We’re told no one can leave the commune without written permission. Even if we ran away, what would we find? It’s not as though cafés, restaurants, or wealthy homes pepper the landscape. There’d be no point in begging. We live in constant fear and with constant hunger. We’re trapped by fate, and our destiny looks bleak. Still, we try to be optimistic, but in the darkest way, by reciting a variation of an old proverb. Instead of “It takes more than one cold day for a river to freeze three feet deep,” we tell each other it will take more than five months to starve to death. We don’t know if that’s true.
I’ve been receiving packages from my aunt sent through the family association in Hong Kong and from my mother in Shanghai. Whenever the officials in the leadership hall see the stamps on the packages, they open them, hoping to find officially sanctioned food remittances. They take all my food—except for the powdered baby formula, which no one here understands or wants. Even so, Brigade Leader Lai’s thugs still search our house—and those throughout the commune—looking for food. Anyone found with hidden food is sent away for reeducation through labor. This is certain death, but worse things can happen.
The children’s fearful looks tell it all. They aren’t deaf or blind. They’ve heard about—or maybe even seen—our neighbors who sneak out late at night to cut the flesh from the dead or yank apart the limbs of babies that have been put outside to die. They’ve heard about children who’ve been boiled alive in other villages that make up the commune. They’ve heard about classmates who’ve been strangled by their mothers before being cut up and put into the cooking pot. They’ve heard of fathers trying to convince their wives to eat their little ones, saying, “We’re still young. We can have other children.” It’s all horrifying, but my mind—so dulled by hunger—has a hard time absorbing any of it. I tell myself these things could never happen in our house. Fu-shee is a good mother and she loves her children too much.
Samantha sleeps in the crook of my arm. I peel the blanket away from her face. Her lips and tongue move in a sucking motion. Even in sleep, she’s hungry. She’s five months old but looks more like two months. My milk has dried up, but at least I have formula to give her. That’s more than Tao’s brothers and sisters have. Last night, when the younger ones cried from their hunger pangs, Fu-shee gave them hot water to drink and told them to sleep on their bellies so they’d feel full. They didn’t fall asleep though. Their stomachs can never acclimate to eating green crops, rotting tubers, dried sweet potato vines, or other scavenged leaves, bark, and roots, and one after another child ran to use the nightstool. The stench in the main room was beyond putrid.
I didn’t get much sleep either. Tao and I did the husband-wife thing last night. We had sex because it reaffirmed we’d be fine and reminded us that we’re still alive, but I was disgusted with myself as soon as it was over.
I want to visit Kumei and Yong to take my mind off my hunger and off what I did with Tao. I place the baby next to Jie Jie. I’ll be away only a few minutes. They’ll probably still be asleep when I return. I leave them snuggled on the floor, tiptoe out of the house, and plod down the hill through the village toward the villa.
Many of the houses and other buildings are crumbling, because either the metal that held them together was taken to make steel or the wood was seized to make fires for the blast furnaces. Even a wall in the old ancestral hall, where Z.G. gave his art lessons two and a half years ago, has collapsed. The people sent to live there as punishment died. The scholar’s tree that once stood so proud in the center of the main square has been stripped of its bark and leaves. The ground beneath it is bloody. The willows are as naked as they are in winter. The elm trees that once provided shade along the path out of the village have also been reduced to bare skeletons. The people? We drag ourselves from place to place, vacant looks in our eyes, thinking constantly of food, our legs, stomachs, and foreheads strangely bloated.
A week ago, Brigade Leader Lai made a new announcement over the loudspeaker. “Meals will no longer be served in the canteen. The masses may now pick up food from the canteen and take it back to their homes. You said you missed eating at home. Now you can be with your families again.”
What he meant was he didn’t want to hear people talk about food, which has become more dangerous than discussing politics. He also didn’t want to see any more peopl
e collapse from hunger, die right on the canteen floor, or—even more distressing—watch relatives weep over the dead. Now we send one family member to pick up our daily grain ration of a quarter of a jin of rice or some other starch—less than a fourth of what’s needed for survival—at the leadership hall and bring it home, without everyone having to expend extra energy walking to the canteen, so we can die with our families without others having to witness another death scene.
This isn’t like last year, when a few elders and babies died. A lot of people are dying. Two weeks ago, we received word that my father-in-law died from a fever after working in freezing water on an irrigation project a long distance from here. Brigade Leader Lai doesn’t want anyone to know how many of their neighbors have perished, so we couldn’t tack yellow paper outside the house to announce my father-in-law’s death. We were forbidden to mourn him in public. We weren’t allowed to make offerings to help him on his way to the afterworld. So, buried far from home, he is consigned to becoming a hungry ghost, forever wandering and lost. And we can seek no solace in Buddhism or Daoism for fear of being labeled reactionaries.
Every day Fu-shee, the smaller children, and I fan out in the hills around Green Dragon to strip trees of their bark and leaves, dig up roots, and search for wild grass. We’ll eat anything, and we have. But you can’t eat a leather belt like it’s a crisp cucumber. You soak it, boil it, and chew on it for days. Once we tried eating Kwan Yin soil—named after the Goddess of Mercy. You take dirt, mix in dried grass, boil it, and then eat it. You can imagine how it tasted, and none of us ate very much. That turned out to be a good thing, because a family up the hill ate it three days in a row. The mud hardened in their stomachs and they died painfully.
I know I should be crippled from the horrors I’ve witnessed, but I’m too hungry for emotions. My hunger is all I can feel or think about. It’s like a snake slithering through my brain, down to my stomach, out to my fingers, then down my legs and back up to my brain. It never stops.