Mao's Last Dancer

  During those summers, some of the nights were unbearably hot. We had no fans in our house, and the breezes were too slight to blow away the swarming mosquitoes. To keep us out of mischief during these hot summer nights, the adults always told us stories. The most popular storyteller was the Wuho man, who had given my niang the cure for our warts. We loved him. He told good Kung Fu stories and countless fascinating fables. When he died a few years later, I went to see his body lying in a simple coffin. It seemed as though his body had shrunk. He had no children, so his coffin was donated by the neighbors and his burial ceremony was simple. I missed him and his enticing stories—they had a profound effect on my life.

  One of my favorite activities on those summer days was catching dragonflies. They would rest on the water in the dams and I would sit by the edge and wait for them, a bamboo broom at the ready. I would tiptoe up to them, sweep them with my broom into the water, and then lift them out. Then I would tie the females to a wooden stick and circle the dragonfly aloft, so she would attract male dragonflies. I would pull down the mating pair, slowly, in circles, and catch the male when it was within reach. I caught flies or worms to feed my dragonflies, and I would let them go at night.

  I also liked to catch crickets, but only male crickets, which we used in cricket fighting competitions. I loved the sound the crickets made—it was just like music or singing. Night or day I would follow the crickets’ singing until I caught one, but we had to take care because we often looked in dangerous areas where there might also be snakes. The crickets were smart little creatures: they concealed their homes well, and would stop their singing long before I got close. A lot of patience was needed.

  I was kind to my crickets and tried to provide them with the best food and housing I could. I kept them in glass bottles with rocks, dirt and even grass, along with their water and food, but often my brave cricket fighters would become big and lazy on the good food I fed them. I would reward my top fighter with a female for company. It is not surprising then, that one of my favorite fables the Wuho man used to tell us was about a cricket. We would sit around the Wuho man in a huge circle, mostly with no clothes on because it was so hot, and he would begin, one hand smoothing his long silver beard, his ancient pipe in the other:Once there was a Chinese emperor who loved cricket fighting. Each year the emperor required the governors in each province to donate their best crickets. To win the emperor’s favor, each governor ordered his people to search for the best crickets all over the land.

  Under a mountain in a small village lived a poor family, with one ten-year-old son. They named him Brave Hero. His father was a courageous hunter and his mother was kind. They loved their boy. He was the sunshine in their eyes. One day the father came home from the mountains with his biggest catch, a beautiful cricket. He named the cricket Brave Hero, after his boy. The father was relieved—he would have been fined heavily if he hadn’t found a cricket within twenty-four hours. The young boy was beside himself with this cricket. He begged his father to allow him to look at it. At first his father said no, but the boy kept begging and he eventually relented. Just as the boy opened the bamboo tube in which the cricket was kept, the cricket jumped out and hopped away. Their rooster nearby ate the cricket up. The boy’s father was in such a rage over the loss of the cricket that he ordered his son to find another cricket or else never return. The poor boy went into the mountains. They found him next day lying on a big rock, almost dead. The father cried his heart out. As he picked up his son’s limp body, a small and ugly cricket jumped on the boy’s pale face. The father brushed the cricket off and carried the boy home.

  The parents wept over their dying boy. They placed him in a coffin in the middle of their living room waiting for the last breath to leave him. As they prayed in front of the coffin, they heard the faint sound of a cricket. It was the same ugly cricket that the father had brushed away from the boy’s face before. The father was very annoyed and threw it outside. Moments later the governor came to collect the cricket and the father told him that he had none. Just as the angry governor was ordering his guards to burn down the house, they heard a cricket singing from the house. Its sound was strong and loud. They followed the sound to the bamboo tube and found the same little cricket inside. The governor thought the hunter was playing a joke with him when he saw this ugly little cricket and he threw the cricket toward the rooster. Just as the rooster was about to eat the cricket, the cricket jumped onto the rooster’s crown and after a brief struggle the rooster dropped dead. The governor was very impressed. He asked the hunter if he had a name for the cricket. The hunter told him that he called it Brave Hero. Brave Hero quickly became the number one fighter in the kingdom. He never lost a fight. He even beat the emperor’s fighting roosters. The emperor treasured him.

  Back in the mountain village, the boy was still breathing. As long as their son breathed the couple would keep him lying in their living room. As the cricket-fighting season drew to a close, the emperor ordered the governor to reward the original finder of the cricket with some gold and silver because the cricket had given him such pleasure. But the parents’ sorrow was too deep. Material things could not bring their son back. One day, Brave Hero mysteriously disappeared from his royal cage in the palace. On that same day the boy became alive again. The little cricket was Brave Hero’s spirit. He had turned himself into the cricket to save his family.

  I loved this tale. I loved the boy’s bravery and I wished that I too could turn myself into a cricket and save my family from poverty. What a shame Chairman Mao didn’t like cricket fights.

  Our childhood in the Li Commune could never be just games and fables of course. It was around this time that the Cultural Revolution reached its most chaotic period, from about the middle of 1966. Jing Tring and I were too young to participate—six, seven, eight years old. But my three eldest brothers did. They would go out in the evenings and return late at night. They would tell me horror stories about the young Red Guards, how they burned and destroyed anything that had a Western flavor: books, paintings, artwork—anything. They tore down temples and shrines: Mao wanted communism to have no competition from other religions. Communism was to be our only faith. The young Guards would travel to other regions and investigate possible counterrevolutionary suspects. They only had to mention Chairman Mao’s name and the Red Guards would not have to pay for a thing. For a brief period, those young Guards nearly bankrupted China, and the country teetered on the edge of civil war as different factions of the military supported different government leaders. But back in the New Village, we knew little of that wider picture.

  My parents tried their hardest to persuade my brothers to stay home on those evenings. They even threatened to lock them out if they returned too late. But in reality there was nothing they could do—there was an unstoppable political heat wave sweeping through China. Emotions ran high and wild, especially among young people and especially in the major cities.

  Then, one day, the well-respected head of our village was accused of being a counterrevolutionary. My brothers and I watched as a group of counterrevolutionaries were paraded through our village, with heavy blackboards around their necks and tall, pointed white paper hats on their heads. Their crimes were written in chalk on the boards around their necks and their names were written on their hats. They had to stand on a temporary platform in the center of the commune square and confess their crimes to the massive crowd. We went along to watch. The officials and Red Guards handed out propaganda papers. The noise from the crowd was horrendous. One man kept shouting propaganda slogans with a handheld speaker. People were shouting and jeering. During their confessions the accused had to lower their heads to avoid the objects that were thrown at them. If anyone looked up, he would be regarded as arrogant or too stubborn to change and too deeply influenced by capitalist filth. They could do nothing right: if they spoke softly they were smacked and accused of hiding something, and if they spoke loudly they were kicked and accused of having an “evil landlord-like att
itude.” Their confessions were often disrupted by the man with the handheld speaker, who shouted revolutionary slogans such as “Knock down and kill the capitalists!” or “Never allow Chiang Kaishek and the landlords to return!” or “Never forget the cruel life of the old China and always remember the sweet life of the new China!” And of course there were the endless “Long live Chairman Mao! Long, long live Chairman Mao!” slogans. The revolutionaries constantly pulled the counterrevolutionaries’ heads back up to humiliate them even more. Often their hats would come off—almost all of them had shaved their heads to avoid their hair being ripped out.

  My parents told us that the head of our village was a good man. I was confused. I couldn’t understand what crime he could have committed. A few days later, however, the communist revolutionary leader led a big crowd to the head villager’s house. Only then did I realize that he’d been missing from the group of accused during the parade and rally.

  The door of his house was locked when we got there and the leader banged on it, screaming, “Open the door, open the door! Otherwise your crime will be increased tenfold!”

  Eventually the door opened. His wife stood there, begging mercy for her husband. She told the communist leader that her husband was so sick he couldn’t even get off the bed. The leader didn’t believe her. He demanded to see him, but when he did he became convinced that the head villager was indeed very sick. A few years later, I remember seeing our head villager sitting by his gate on a little chair. He looked pale and motionless. He’d lost all his hair. Even his eyebrows were gone. I felt desperately sorry for him, but by that time I was one of Mao’s young Guards too, and I felt guilty for even thinking that way.

  I witnessed many rallies and parades during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards said they were killing the class enemies, which included the landlords, factory owners, successful businessmen, Guomindang Party members and army officers, intellectuals and anyone who might pose a threat to the communist government. But there was one particular rally that still, to this day, makes my heart bleed. It was a huge rally. My friends and I went along as usual. We heard the communist leader read out the sentences for about fifteen landlords, factory owners and counterrevolutionaries. Then they were loaded onto a truck. We could see their pointed white hats, with their names written on them in black ink and with a huge red cross struck through each name. They were taken to a nearby field. Despite the adults’ warnings, my friends and I followed as fast as we could. By the time we got there, an excited crowd had formed a semicircle around the accused. There were so many people that nobody noticed us peeking through the cracks between the crowd’s legs.

  I saw the men standing against a mud wall. Someone started counting. Two of the men crumbled onto their knees. One started to scream, “I’m innocent, I’m innocent! I didn’t do anything wrong! Please let me live!” Another screamed, “I have young children! They’ll starve to death without me! Have mercy for my family!” Then I heard someone shouting, “Yi, er, san!” One, two, three . . . Guns fired. The sound ripped through my heart. I saw blood splatter everywhere. The bodies fell down. I screamed, and ran home as fast as I could.

  I wished I had listened to the adults. I wished I’d never witnessed this. It haunted me in many of my dreams.

  5

  NA-NA

  Chairman Mao’s regime not only changed the way we lived; it also changed the way we died. Even the treatment of the dead changed under Mao’s rule. Everything changed under Mao.

  One day when I was still about eight, I wanted to impress my niang by cooking lunch for the family myself, when she was late coming back from working in the fields. So I placed some of the leftover food on a bamboo steamer and tried to be creative by adding a couple of my niang’s precious eggs in a seafood sauce. The fire was hard to make that day, and the room soon filled with smoke. To see if the food was properly cooked, I lifted the big, heavy wok cover. I was so short that I had to stand on a little stool, and the wok cover was engulfed in steam. As I lifted the cover the stool fell from under my feet. Steam from the wok gushed out at my face. I crashed forward onto the scalding edge of the wok, burning my skin, and my niang’s six precious newly purchased plates were knocked to the floor, smashed.

  I was terrified! I knew it had taken my parents all year to save enough money to buy those plates. And now, there they were, in a thousand pieces on the floor at my feet.

  I ran to Na-na’s house next door. If we were ever in trouble, we’d go to Na-na’s. My parents would never yell at us in front of her. Was I ever in trouble now!

  “What’s wrong?” she asked when she saw my frightened face.

  “I’ve broken Niang’s new plates!” I sobbed.

  “How many did you break?” she asked.

  “Six.”

  “How many?!” she shouted. I wasn’t sure if she hadn’t quite heard me or if she couldn’t believe I had broken all six. My niang had proudly shown the plates to Na-na only the day before.

  I repeated the number louder, and stuck out my thumb and my little finger on my right hand to indicate the number six.

  “Oh! Wo de tian na!” My god! she exclaimed, with an expression of disbelief. “How did you manage to break that many?”

  I quickly told her what had happened. Niang would be so upset when she found out.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. You can have lunch with me.” Na-na looked at me reassuringly. “You broke those plates by trying to help your niang. You’re a good boy. You shouldn’t be punished for this.” Then she murmured to herself, “What a world we’re living in now. A mother of seven has to work in the fields! I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

  She had already cooked her lunch and was placing some food on her wooden tray as she spoke. When I saw the amount of food on the tray, I knew she only had enough for herself.

  “You go ahead and finish the food,” she said. “I’ll wait to eat with your niang later.”

  I hesitated. Na-na’s food was provided by my parents and my uncles and aunties. Her food was always better than ours.

  “Your niang will be home any minute if you don’t hurry. I wouldn’t be around when she gets back if I were you!” she said.

  I gobbled up her delicious bread roll quickly and ran out. When I returned home late that afternoon I found my niang very upset. I heard her sigh to my dia, “Our niang was trying to help cook our lunch. She accidentally slipped off the stool and broke all our six new plates! She is getting on in age.”

  “Is she all right?” Dia asked, concerned.

  “Yes, miraculously she didn’t hurt herself at all,” my niang replied.

  I was eternally thankful to my na-na for saving my skin. I quietly slipped into her house that evening and whispered in her ear, “Thank you, Na-na!”

  “What?!” she shouted.

  I was so afraid others might find out the truth if I said it any louder, so I just gave her a big kiss on her bony cheek and went back home.

  My na-na’s health became progressively worse for the next half year. My fourth brother, Cunsang, who always had a special bond with her, began to sleep in the same bed to watch over her. But still she worsened—she couldn’t walk, she became unable to eat, lost her bowel control and gradually slipped away from us. She died about a year after I broke the plates.

  As was the local custom, her body was laid in a coffin, in her living room, for three days. The smell of incense filled our houses.

  “Why does Na-na’s body have to stay here for three days?” I asked my third brother, Cunmao.

  “In case she comes alive again.”

  “How can a dead person come back to life?”

  He told me a story then, which he’d heard from a friend: “A couple were looked after in their old age by their only son and daughter-in-law,” he began. “They were not well cared for. Most of the time they were given leftovers to eat.”

  “Shouldn’t they have been kind to their mother and father?” I interrupted.

  “Not
all people are kind to their elderly as we are in our family,” he continued. “One day, a distant relative of the old couple took pity on them and quietly slipped two hard-boiled eggs into their hands. They were so excited that they quickly peeled the shells off and just as they were going to eat them they heard their daughter-in-law coming toward their room. The wife told her husband to hurry up and eat his egg. Fearing their daughter-in-law would accuse them of stealing the eggs, the old man quickly put the egg in his mouth and swallowed it whole.”

  “Why didn’t he chew it?” I asked Cunmao.

  “He didn’t have any teeth left,” he replied. He knew by that stage I was gripped by his story. “Let’s stop here,” he said. “It may be too scary for you.”

  “Please, please! I promise I won’t get scared!” I begged.

  “Only if you promise me that you won’t tell our parents I’ve told you this story if you can’t sleep at night because of it!” he said.

  “I promise, I promise with all my heart!” I pounded my fist on my chest.

  “You swear?” he asked.

  I spat on the ground and stamped on it with my foot.

  “All right,” he continued. “The old man choked on the egg and instantly stopped breathing.”

  “Was he dead?” I gasped.

  “Of course he was dead!” Cunmao replied. “So they bought him a cheap coffin and had a cheap burial. In the meantime, the old lady didn’t want to remain in this world without her husband and begged her son to bury her as well.”