“I have received reports about you,” he said, pacing in front of the classroom. “Really bad reports.”
My heart began to race. “What kind of reports?”
“You have been saying antirevolutionary and antiCommunist things to your classmates, haven't you?”
“No, I haven't.” He was trying to paint me as a counterrevolutionary, just as they had done to Yu Xuang, a fifth-grader whom they had locked in the commune jail for further investigation. It was a dangerous situation.
“I have never done anything like that! You know that!” I said, using the best defense a nine-year-old could muster.
“I have the reports here”—he waved a thick sheaf of paper—“and I can ask these people to testify against you if necessary.”
“The people who wrote those reports were lying. I have never said anything against our country or the Communist party.”
“Shut up! You have no right to defend yourself, only the chance to confess and repent,” he spat out angrily. His voice deepened. “Do you understand what kind of trouble you are in now?”
“I have nothing to confess!” I was losing control again. My throat dried up and my arms began to tremble.
“I said, shut up! You have today and tonight to write a confession of all the treasonous things you have said, to explain the motivation, and to state who told you to say these horrible things. Like perhaps your father, mother, or your landlord grandparents.” He was trying to involve my family. They would put my dad in prison. They would take Grandpa out into the street and beat him to death.
“They did not tell me to do or say bad things against the party! They didn't!” I cried. I couldn't afford to have my family dragged into this. I was scared and began to sob helplessly. The sky had just caved in and I felt that nobody could help me. I would be a young counterrevolutionary, a condemned boy, despised by the whole country. I would be left to rot in a dark prison cell for life. That was what had happened to Shi He, another high school kid, who was caught listening to an anti-Communist radio program from Taiwan, and worse, to the banned Teresa Deng's love songs. His prison sentence had been twenty years.
I don't remember how long I cried that morning. When I walked home alone in the afternoon's setting sun, I felt the weight of shackles already around my ankles.
A condemned man at the age of nine! Confession tomorrow! The thoughts played over and over in my mind.
When I got home, I told Mom what had happened and she started sobbing, hitting her face and chest and pulling out her hair. She mumbled hysterically, in broken sentences, that their generation had brought the curse to the next generation. After a while, she sat down quietly, weak and limp like a frightened animal. Finally, she got up and sent Si and Jin to Dad's camp to ask for advice. They got to talk to him by using the excuse that Mom was very sick again.
It was after midnight when, breathless, they ran back. I was still sitting in my room, staring at a piece of blank paper. I had not eaten anything. For the first time in my life, I had absolutely no appetite.
The message from Dad was simple. There was nothing to confess.
Go back to school tomorrow and tell them that, he instructed. What were they going to do to you? Nothing, if you did not confess. Everything, if you did. If school becomes too hard, then quit. Dad's words gave us power and courage even from afar, allowing me to feel hopeful again that everything would be fine. But I dreamed that night of the teacher's face and smelled the dank odor of a dark, wet prison.
The following day, I dragged myself along the cobbled street, my eyes fixed on the ground, wishing I were as tiny as a mosquito. When I entered the classroom, there were silent stares from the other children.
The lesson was on fractions, but nothing sank in. My mind kept wandering to the piece of paper I carried with me. What would the teacher say? What were they going to do to me? Each hour of class crawled torturously by. I couldn't wait to hand in the confession and run back home to my family.
Finally, the day came to an end. My classmates filed out as I put my books in my schoolbag and prepared to face the teacher.
“You're not going anywhere, are you?” La Shan questioned sternly, not looking up from the homework he was grading.
“I was just going to give you this.” I pulled out the piece of paper. “May I come up to your desk, please?”
“You have your confession?” he asked sharply, arching his eyebrows.
“I thought long and hard, and all that I have to say is here, honorable teacher.” I put the “confession” on his desk and turned to walk away.
“Stop!” His voice was so angry and disgusted it startled me. I stopped and stood there with my head down, afraid to look at him.
“You confessed nothing?” he screamed at me. “Did your parents tell you to write this?” He crushed the paper into a ball and threw it at me.
“No, it is all from me and it is the truth. I swear upon my ancestors' graves that I am honest and innocent.” Tears trickled uncontrollably down my face. I was so nervous that my head began to feel hot again.
Desperately, I felt myself losing my logic and calm.
“You are a liar, Chen Da! I am going to refer your counterrevolutionary acts to the principal and party secretary of the school. I wished to handle your case here, but you are not cooperating, so now you force me to go to higher authorities.”
The teacher dropped me off in the principal's office and left. The principal didn't even bother to look at me. He was cleaning his huge wooden desk as I stood nervously in the corner.
The principal, Mr. Gao, was a frog of a man. He had bowed legs and walked with a wide side-to-side swing. Despite a mustache, his face was bland. He was about fifty and, in addition to being the school principal, had recently been promoted to the position of party secretary.
Older students once told me that he loved fondling little girls' hands and shoulders and enjoyed having young female teachers iron his clothes in his dormitory room late at night while he conferred his seasoned political wisdom on them. He was the most zealous objector to romance among the young teachers because, it was said, he couldn't bear the idea of anyone else having his way. His wife was a heavy smoker, with yellow teeth and ugly wrinkles on her face. They were a well-matched couple.
He asked me all kinds of questions and urged me again to make a confession. I declared my innocence over and over.
For the entire week that followed, Mr. Gao met with me daily, either in between classes or after school. He went on mumbling his advice and making threats to stop my schooling. I sat quietly during those sessions, much more alert and logical than in the presence of the teacher. Though Mr. Gao was the top dog, he somehow didn't scare me. He muttered rather than talked and he was an incoherent speaker.
He would start a line of argument then totally lose himself in it until he had to ask me blankly, “Where were we?”
Finally, one day he said, “If you do not confess, I am sending your case to the commune and the police.” This time, his face was deadly serious. “You have left me no other choice. In fact, the police chief asked about you the other day and recommended that you appear on the public humiliation platform with Yu Xuang during his confession in front of the whole school.”
Gloomily, I headed for home, hoping there was a god who could turn the whole world around, send me a new, bright day full of colors, but it was hopeless. A family was registered at a certain commune. You couldn't move anywhere else unless the government reassigned you.
There was no escape.
As the day of Yu Xuang's public denunciation approached, Mom quietly said to me, “Go pack. You are leaving tomorrow.”
“Where am I going?”
“To Wen Qui's home.” He was a distant cousin who lived in Ding Zhuan, another tiny town about twenty miles west of Yellow Stone.
“They will catch me.”
“No, they won't come after you. They were just threatening you.”
“What about school?” It was my future.
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“We will worry about that later. You can still be the best student after missing a few lessons.”
I went into her arms. “I'm scared.”
“Don't be.” She held me tight. “Wen Qui has already been secretly informed of your coming.” The next day, as the sky shed its first ray of light, I crept out our back door, crossed the wooden bridge that swung and squeaked in the wind, and started my half day's journey on foot. I carried a bag of clothes, a small bag of dried yams to contribute to Wen Qui's household when I got there, and two pieces of sweet rice cake, which was my favorite treat, and which Mom had stayed up late preparing for me. As soon as I crossed the Dong Jing River, I followed Mom's instructions: ducked low and disappeared into the lush milelong field of sugarcane to avoid bumping into anyone. The morning dew still kissed the sharp leaves that innocently scratched my face and arms.
Beyond the sugarcane field lay a narrow dirt road winding into the mountains. Though I had walked this scenic path a few times before, it was scarily quiet in the early dawn, so I sang out loud and whistled as I ran along, my bag bouncing on my back. When I was halfway to my destination I sat down to rest by a large pond. I leaned against an old pine tree and unwrapped my first piece of rice cake. As I sank my teeth into the sticky sweet rice, I was reminded once more of how good life could be if one weren't a political fugitive running for his life.
I took off my shoes and waded in at the shallow edge of the pond, scooping up a handful of the fresh springwater to drink. It tasted as sweet as the mountain itself. Everything was so peaceful I couldn't help skipping a few rocks and watching the ripples spread out gently. I remembered the time my dad and I competed at this very pond to see who could skip a rock the farthest. I had thrown a stone so hard that I had skidded and fallen into the soft young wheat, and now, again, I could hear Dad's hearty laughter at my antics.
When I got to the Quis' home, it was lunchtime. Wen's sister was the wife of my uncle. The family had been forced to move to this small mountain village remote from Yellow Stone because his father had been a wealthy fabric merchant. Wen once said his father could judge the quality of a fabric by blindly feeling it behind his back. The Quis lived in the house of a former landlord, a man whose family had all been executed by the Communists.
I stayed there for a week before it was deemed safe for me to return.
I heard that at the public humiliation meeting Yu Xuang was sentenced to four years of labor reform in a juvenile prison. He was beaten unconscious after being thrown off the stage. No one had come to inquire about me.
Mom said later that she had spent the entire day on her knees in front of Buddha, praying for my safety.
FOUR
I quit school after I came back from hiding. I kept expecting the teacher, the principal, or the police chief to show up any day for my capture. I asked Jie and Buckle, who still talked to me occasionally, whether they had heard anything about a public meeting to be held soon in the school. They said no.
I spent my time weeding the sweet potatoes in the fields, building a dirt wall in our backyard, carrying lunches and dinners to my brother and sisters in the fields in little bamboo baskets slung over my shoulders, and spreading wet hay to dry before storing it in the evenings. Bugs crawled everywhere and the moist hay's sharp, bladelike edges made my skin itch constantly.
As I became more and more settled into the routine of a young farmhand, part of me was dying inside. I felt old and rejected, a misfit.
The people I worked with were all older farmers who could no longer work the fields.
I no longer played. I had aged and had become an outcast. By now, everyone knew the reason why I had quit school.
Sometimes the kids shouted outside my house, calling me the “little counterrevolutionary,” daring me to come out and fight them. I would clutch a sharp spade and wait behind the door in case they burst through and attacked us. A few times, stones were thrown against our windows. One morning Mom found a dead bird in our backyard, headless. I suspected the teacher had urged his gang to come after me.
Whenever Mom asked me to run out to buy some soy sauce, I checked the street first, then darted out and back. The last thing I wanted to do was cause any more trouble.
But every night before I went to sleep, I wrote in my diary, trying not to forget the words I had learned. I made up a lot of signs for the words I didn't know. There was nothing good to write about. Often I found myself drawing a picture of La Shan, the chinless skunk, and adding a huge bullet hole on his forehead. Someday I wanted to avenge all the things that had been done to me. Maybe when I grew up or maybe when the world changed.
Then one day a kindhearted teacher named Mr. Lan from our neighborhood dropped by to have tea with us. He casually mentioned that he had brokered a deal with the school to allow me to enter group eight of the fourth grade. He said, smiling, “It's better than being a farmer and genuine pearls shine even in darkness.” I remembered that line for a long time.
With mixed feelings of joy, fear, curiosity, and suspicion, I dusted off my books and prepared for the frightening ordeal of going back to face the very same people I had tried to avoid.
On Monday morning, shock hit me as I stepped into the classroom of the fabled group eight. The kids hooted at me. It took me a second before I noticed that the seating arrangement was unlike that in any other classroom. The desks were separated into two corners. One was for eight girls in the front. The other was in the far back corner for the boys. There was a large empty space in the middle of the room where trash and paper planes were piled up.
The teacher gestured with his cigarette in the direction of the boys' group and absentmindedly said, “Pick a chair for yourself over there.”
“Which one?” I asked. The dirty faces from the boys' corner looked dangerously back at me.
“Any seat, I said.” The teacher, whom I came to know as Mr. Chu, swiped his arm in that general direction again.
I nervously walked down the open space in the middle and took a seat at the edge of the group next to a fat, ugly little guy.
“Whaddya doing here, big shot?” my new neighbor shouted, stretching his arms to mark his territory line on the desk we shared.
Somehow, I had a feeling they knew I had been kicked out of group one, where all the brightest students and the snobs were.
By the second class, I was able to answer eighty percent of the math questions, and by the third, the class had found a new star. At the end of the day, a big guy with a nasty cut, who was known as the King, walked over and patted my shoulder, announcing, “From now on, you can sit next to me and do my homework whenever I feel like it.” I was flattered by the intimacy and readily agreed. It wasn't as if I had any choice. The boy was a head taller than me and was surrounded by all his lieutenants, each more devilish than the other. They seemed to be the class Mafia.
That night, lying in bed, I was convinced that I couldn't have found a more nurturing environment to revive my student career. My classmates were animals, but they couldn't care less where I had come from. They respected me.
I considered it a tragedy when group eight was dissolved at the end of the term. A school closer to the villagers reopened and the students happily went back to their own school. I got placed in group two, next door to the hateful faces I tried to erase from my memory forever. Each day I ran past the doors of group one as fast as possible, for fear of bumping into them and getting into trouble. In the new group, I soon became the recognized top student. I began to hear some good words from a few of the teachers. But a gang of students in my new class was organized against me. It was headed by a sneaky boy called Han, whose father had fallen out with mine after a bee-raising business they had started together failed. The others in the gang were Quei, the son of a local politician, and Wang, whose father was a carpenter and an enemy of some of my father's good friends.
During this time, Grandpa was slowly dying. He was seventy-seven years old. Almost every day, I found writings on the
blackboard that debased and humiliated him.
On the day he died, we carried him in a wheelbarrow about twenty miles away to the city of Putien for cremation. I wore a white shirt and spread pieces of paper money over the bridges we passed and chanted sayings like “peaceful passing” to the imaginary soldiers guarding the bridges. In the crowd that watched the procession, I saw the three ugly mugs of Han, Quei, and Wang, smiling without pity or sympathy. They even made faces at me. I bit my lips, trying to control my sadness and hatred. Tears poured forth as the strong voice of revenge cried out within me. I wiped away my tears and walked on with my family, pushing Grandpa's body along the dirt road to Putien for two more hours.
When we got there, four young monks were hired to carry Grandpa up the mountain to the cremation site. I knelt before his body with my family like a pious grandson, sobbing farewell as an ancient monk torched the woodpile beneath Grandpa's flimsy coffin. Flames shot up against the setting sun. My beloved Grandpa was no more.
FIVE
Even in wintertime Yellow Stone was laced by the greenness of the surrounding wheat and fava bean fields. Yellow wildflowers were scattered across the green carpet like solitary souls still searching for their destiny. The water of the Dong Jing River lay calm and pensive, as if quietly dreaming about the coming spring.
Farmers flocked to the market square to trade goods for the new year, a week away. The narrow streets of Yellow Stone became filled with mules carrying food and vegetables. Bicycles strained beneath the double weight of two riders, and noisy tractors fought their way among crowds of people carrying sacks of produce slung over their shoulders.