China's Son

  Mr. Sun, the new teacher, came from a village at the foot of the Ching Mountain. He had a sunny personality and was an outdoors kind of guy. In the morning, he and his wife watered the vegetables; then he walked to school. I soon began to tag along behind him like his shadow every morning. He told me many stories during those walks.

  He elected me to be the monitor of the class, a bold political decision on his part, and had me lead the revolutionary songs at the beginning of every lesson. I was that one-percent exception in our harsh reality.

  I was never supposed to be a leader among other students. I was born with a political defect that no one could fix. But once in a while they threw a bone out to us, a bone that we chased around with enthusiasm.

  I was grateful for this bone. I played with it, poked it with my snout, and cherished every moment of being tempted before I sank my teeth into the juiciest part.

  I'd arrive early with the teacher and hit the books. In my spare time, I helped the slower students catch up. I was the captain of our basketball team and a formidable singer in schoolwide competitions. Once I sang so loudly that I was hoarse for the next three days. I read classical stories to the whole room while my teacher sat in the back and graded the homework, stopping occasionally to nod with approval.

  Late in the afternoons, my new friends—Jie, Ciang, and a few others—would urge me to tell them some more stories. We would climb over the short wall in the back of our school and throw ourselves into an ancient orchard. It was a little paradise.

  Our spot was a huge lychee tree with low-hanging boughs. Each of us had a favorite sitting spot. Mine had a back support and a small branch to rest my feet on. The comfort helped the flow of the story.

  Sometimes Jie would rub the soles of my feet, which was good for another twenty minutes. And each time I threatened to end the story, they would beg for more and more, and I would have to stretch my imagination and make a short story longer and a long story go on forever.

  My popularity went unchallenged till one day a big-eyed boy showed up at our door for late registration. I hated to admit it, but he was good-looking. He was there for five minutes and the girls were already giggling at his sweet smile and nasty winking. During break, I sat in my seat, heaving with anger and contempt for this sudden intruder. I contemplated the proper step to take. I thought of going to him and introducing myself as the leader of the class. It was, after all, my territory, and I deserved a certain courtesy and respect from him. You can't just walk in and ruin everything. If he was a decent man (my keen observation of him during the last hour made me feel this was unlikely) then I would give my blessing, offer my protection, and help him settle in on our turf.

  I was, after all, a nice guy with a big heart. I welcomed any bright man as my friend, but no way was I going to walk up to him and shake hands.

  He was surrounded by a fan club, admirers who were fawning over something he was wearing. The girls lingered and giggled. The place was out of control.

  As I burned with jealousy, a negative feeling that as a leader I tried hard to suppress, the hotshot kid broke through the crowd and walked over. He looked straight at me with those attractive, intelligent eyes of his. At that moment, my heart softened. No wonder the girls had lost their minds. I couldn't help being impressed by the clarity and sense of purpose in his eyes, that straight nose, so sculptural and defined, and that square, chiseled jaw. Had he been a general, I would have followed him into battle and fought until the end.

  I stood up with what little dignity I had left and extended my hand to meet his. We shook hands. That was when I saw the buckle. He had this shining buckle the size of a large fist that he wore around his waist.

  There were five stars carved on it. It shone in the morning sun, obviously the result of a lot of polishing by a proud hand.

  “I heard you're the Tau-Ke.” The top man.

  “Hardly, hardly.” High praise called for a humble response, but I was flattered nonetheless.

  “I think this would look really good on you.” He took his belt and buckle off and handed them over to me, just like that.

  “No, no. You wear it.”

  “I've been wearing it since my dad came back from the Vietnam War.” He had the casual art of name-dropping down pat.

  “Your dad was in the war with the Americans?”

  “Sure, he has lots of medals and was at Ho Chi Minh City. White Americans. Okay, okay, okay.” He even spoke English.

  He studied the buckle carefully. A wall of classmates had gathered behind me, watching the exchange.

  “That belt has a little history to it,” he continued.

  “What history?”

  “My dad wore it in the war. It's been hit a few times but it's so strong and tough you can't even see a dent. I'm talking the superbullets from the American weapons.” I was sold on the spot. He became my best friend and we named him Mr. Buckle. He took the nickname in stride.

  One day Mr. Buckle formally invited me to visit his home. I accepted and found myself standing before the threshold of a grand town house near the hospital. His dad was the party secretary of the hospital, enjoying a hero's retirement at an early age. The door of the house opened suddenly, and there stood Mr. Buckle senior. Tall and handsome, a man's man. He had a big smile, large eyes, and thick eyebrows, a pictureperfect hero. It was obvious where the son had gotten his good looks.

  “Come on in, Da.” The father even knew my name.

  “Thank you.” I extended my right hand but he didn't take it. Instead, he smiled and said, “Sorry, I got no hands left to shake yours. Hey, why don't you shake my shoulder.” He leaned over, letting his two empty sleeves dangle, and waited for me to shake his broad shoulder.

  I was so shocked at his armlessness that I stood there unmoving.

  “That's okay, Dad. I don't think they practice shouldershaking in Yellow Stone.”

  “All right, then. Let's cut the ceremony and have some cookies and candy.”

  “Dad, we're not babies anymore. Let me show the guy around, okay? I think he has seen enough of you.” Father and son bantered back and forth like a couple of drinking buddies while I stood by in deep shock. For Buddha's sake, the perfect hero had no arms. My heart was saddened. Like a lost soul, I followed Buckle around the house and the hospital. He took me on a tour, but my mind was still on those arms. I had no appetite when I went home.

  My jealousy was gone. From then on, I quietly watched out for Buckle.

  Before long, Mr. Sun was bidding us a sad good-bye. He was heading for a reeducation camp for teachers. I gave him a small notebook as a gift. The school would be taught by the militiamen and women from the commune. There was a directive from the central government that from now on all schools would be governed by poor farmers; all teachers—a class made up of dangerous and stinking intellectuals—would be reformed and instilled with revolutionary thoughts before they could return to teach China's younger generation.

  School wasn't the same. Our teacher was a sleepy young man, a distant nephew of Yellow Stone commune's party secretary. He had never graduated from elementary school; he misspelled simple words and twisted pronunciations so badly that they hardly sounded like Chinese anymore. The first day he came to class he was shaking, and there were long lulls while he searched through his notes and tried to think of something to say. In the evening, these farmer teachers played poker and drank at the same tables where real teachers used to grade homework. The zoo was being run by the animals themselves.

  To say the least, I was disappointed. I searched outside school for books to entertain myself and yearned for the farmers to leave, to have the real teachers come back from the camp. Although the earliest that could ever happen would be the following year, I nonetheless believed that, like the spring, it would happen.

  THREE

  In September 1971, I entered third grade. Dad had come back from the camp on the mountain and was at another reform camp ten miles away from our town. They made him dig ditches from mo
rning to night to expand an irrigation system that eventually failed to work, while continuing to press for more confessions about my uncle in Taiwan, which had always been China's sworn enemy.

  Sometimes I was allowed to visit Dad and bring him food. I would stand on the edge of the work site, searching for signs of my father among the hundred or so other people being “reformed.” Tired, curious faces would look at me, word would pass on down the line, then eventually out would come my dad from the ditches, his back straight, head held high, and a dazzling smile on his face for his son as he busily dusted off his ragged clothes. I would have nothing to say and could only look at his blistered hands, while he asked how everybody was and how my schoolwork was going. Then it was time to leave; if I delayed, the foreman would chase me off the site with his wooden stick.

  Grandpa was suffering all the time now. An expensive medication was bought to cure him, but he was outraged when he heard its price, since he knew that what it cost could have bought the whole family some decent food for a month. Despite his frail condition, he was still ordered to go to the rice fields every day to chase the birds.

  My eldest sister, Si, had graduated from junior high school. Brother Jin had had to stop one year short of completing it, and Ke and Huang were asked to leave before finishing elementary school. When the Red Guards took over the classrooms, they had made the lives of landlords' children and grandchildren miserable. Si's classmates had hacked at her hair with scissors, which made her look like a mental case, and Jin, while he was still in school, had been constantly hassled and beaten by his classmates.

  One day we received a notice from the local school authorities. It read, “Due to overcrowding in our school system, it has been decided by the Communist party that the children of landlords, capitalists, rich farmers, and the leftists will no longer be going directly to junior high or high school. This new policy is to be implemented immediately for the benefit of thousands of poor farmers.” The curt notice didn't explain the logic behind such a decree. But we understood that they considered us the enemy and a danger to their world. Education could only further our cause and threaten theirs.

  Thus I became the last student in our family. Every day Mom would whisper to me before school that I should cherish this precious opportunity. I should work hard and be a good student, or I would have to stop school like my siblings and become a farmer or a carpenter, with no hope for a better future. She said the more they wanted you out of school, the more you should show them how good you are. She admonished me to behave myself and not give them reason to throw me out.

  The pressure weighed heavily on me. The idea of being a farmer for the rest of my life, working in the fields unceasingly, rain or shine, chilled my bones. I saw my sisters and brothers, still so young, getting up before dawn to cut the ripened rice in darkness before the biting sun made work unbearable. They came home by moonlight after laboring a full day, their backs cramped and sore, cuts on their fingers, blisters covering their hands. Sometimes they were humiliated because the older, more experienced farmers in the commune trashed them for making mistakes. And sometimes they were angry because they were made to work the heaviest jobs, like jumping into manholes to scoop up manure. At night, my sisters often cried in Mom's arms. They were no longer children.

  I looked at school in a different light. It was still a fun place, but now it was much, much more. It was the key to a bright future. I knew if I could somehow stay in school, I would do well. There was hope. I arrived at school early every morning and volunteered to sweep the classroom and clean the blackboard. I still managed to have my morning reading assignment done before the others arrived so that I had time to play and help those who needed some tutoring. But the new teacher wasn't the least impressed with me. I sometimes became aware of him staring silently at my back as I sat alone in class doing my work.

  He was cool and abrupt and seemed disgusted with the little boy who wanted so hard to please him.

  My third-grade teacher was a young man about twentyfive years old. He had icy, protruding eyes and thin lips that squeezed out his words slowly and deliberately. His nose was pointed, with long, black hairs sticking out of both nostrils, and his receding chin melted into his long neck. He had a habit of looking at his reflection in the window, preening and recombing his hair before entering the classroom.

  His name was La Shan.

  La Shan invited many of his students to his dormitory on campus, where they played chess and talked long after school. He also organized basketball games among the students, but I was never included. I stood at a distance, watching them play with the energetic young teacher, laughing and shouting. When I inquired about what they did in his dormitory, my friends Jie and Ciang would tell me that they played and listened to La Shan talk about politics, about things like the class struggle and what to do with bad people like landlords and American special agents.

  I became quieter and less active in his class. He continued to act as if I didn't exist, and I became more and more isolated, but I still carried on my work with pride and always scored the best in quizzes. I missed my teacher, Mr. Sun, terribly.

  In the back of each classroom there was another blackboard on which the best poems or compositions by the students were displayed.

  It was an honor to have your work posted, and mine used to appear there every week. Many years under my grandfather's tutelage had made me the best calligrapher in the entire school, and I had won schoolwide competitions against older students. But since La Shan had become my teacher, my work never appeared on the blackboard.

  He also deprived me of the task of copying the poems onto the blackboard with chalk, a task only students with the best calligraphy were allowed to do.

  I was no longer the head of the class. In my place stepped the son of the first party secretary of Yellow Stone commune, the most feared man in town. La Shan also made him the head of the Little Red Guard, a political organization for children. I was the only one in class who was not a member. I coveted the pretty red bands worn on their arms and had applied to join, but La Shan told me I needed to make more of an effort, that he wasn't sure I was loyal in my heart to the Communist cause like other children from good workingclass families.

  Whenever a Little Red Guard meeting was held, I was asked to step outside. I would hang around the playground by myself until they finished.

  Because I was driven and still confident in my abilities, I worked even harder and volunteered even more for tasks before and after school. It was like throwing myself against a stone wall. The harder I tried, the more the teacher disliked me. He even criticized me in front of all the students about my overzealous attempts to win his praise. This upset and confused me. What more could I do to try to fit into the place that I once used to love? My first real brush with La Shan came when he was collecting the weekend homework. The assignment had been to copy a text of Chairman Mao's quotations, but my work had been soaked in the rain on the way to class and I had thrown away the smeared, useless paper, intending to redo it in the afternoon. When he found out I had nothing to turn in, La Shan called the class to attention. “Students, Chen Da has not done his homework, which he knew was to copy the text of our great Chairman Mao. It is a deliberate insult to our great leader.”

  “I did the homework like I always do,” I protested loudly, “but the rain got it all wet.” The whole class looked at me quietly.

  La Shan turned red, the muscles in his cheeks twitching. He had lost face because I had answered back.

  “What did you do with it?” he demanded.

  “I threw it into a manhole on my way to class because it was all messy.” The students laughed.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I threw it into a manhole,” I screamed back. I knew I was acting irrationally but couldn't stop.

  “You threw Chairman Mao's quotations into a stinking manhole?” His face flamed and spittle flew from his mouth with each word. “Do you realize how severe an offense you ha
ve just committed?” A deadly quiet came over the class. Everyone looked at me, waiting for my reaction. In that split second, I glimpsed the possible serious trouble he could make if he chose to. Mom's words, “Stay out of trouble,” rang in my ears.

  I felt dizzy, as if I had been hit with a club. I already regretted my actions and wished I could take everything back, but it was too late, the damage had been done. I thought of Mom and Dad and the trouble I might have just brought to my family if the teacher blew this thing up.

  My head began to pound.

  “I am sorry, honorable teacher. I will redo my homework and hand it in as soon as possible.”

  He stared at me silently with his icy eyes, looking like a wolf that had just caught a rabbit in a trap.

  “You think it's going to be that easy?” He shook his head slowly.

  “Everybody!” His voice cracked out. “Let's have a vote. Those who wish to have Da thrown out of our classroom, raise your hands.” There was a moment of silence. Then slowly, the son of the party secretary raised his hand. A few more hands from the La Shan club went up. Next the whole class raised their collective hands, even my friends Jie and Ciang.

  I felt trapped. I felt half-dead. I couldn't understand how even my best friends could vote against me.

  “Please, I don't want to leave this class. I would like to stay.”

  “We'll see about that. Class is over for the day,” La Shan said, slamming his book closed and walking out of the room, his disciples trailing behind him.

  I walked home in a daze. Nobody talked to me. I redid my homework and turned it in right away. I waited for La Shan to throw me out of school, but nothing happened. I sat in the back corner of the class by myself. No one talked to me, not even my friends. Occasionally, La Shan would throw disgusted glances my way. The worst thing was when he disparagingly called me “that person in the corner” without looking at me. Why did he take the whole thing so personally, as if I had desecrated his ancestors' tombstone? Then one day during the morning exercise break La Shan called my name and asked me to stay behind while the others noisily poured out of class.