Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (12 page)

They were chanting, “DOWN WITH JIANG ZHONGJIE!”

Jiang Zhongjie, my grandmother, was sitting on the bed next to mine, holding my little brother on her lap. I looked at her, and she averted her eyes to the door. My brother sat still as a stone on her lap.

The crash of the building’s front door being flung open was followed by a thunder of fists hammering on our door and shouts of “Open up!”

Papa hurried to comply. The moment he released the lock, Red Guards rushed into our apartment bellowing, “Down with landlord Jiang Zhongjie. Where is she? Where is the criminal?” They had discovered that her family had owned property in Yangzhou before the Communists seized power in 1949.

Two girls saw Grandmother and bolted across the room, grabbed her by the arms and held her tightly. “Move!” one of them yelled at my brother, and he dropped from her lap to the floor with a whimper. The Red Guards jerked Grandmother to her feet.

She managed to ask meekly, “May I go to the bathroom … please?”

“Are you trying to play for time, you landlord dog?” a Red Guard yelled.

Mama appeared and explained that Grandmother suffered from diabetes and had to use the bathroom often. “I will help her go to the bathroom,” she said. There was a public toilet on each floor of our building. The Red Guard leader, a mean-looking girl with narrow, snakelike eyes and a face flat as a plate, asked, “Will you guarantee that this landlord will not jump out the window and kill herself to escape revolutionary justice?”

“I do,” Mama replied. “She will go with you. But with her bound feet she cannot go far.”

Mama helped Grandmother to the bathroom. I watched as three Red Guards stationed themselves outside the door to prevent an escape.

Minutes later Grandmother hobbled out. She disappeared in the mass of the howling uniformed boys and girls.

I didn’t move. My little brother sobbed, “I want Grandmother!” Mama hurried over and held him. Nobody seemed to know what to do.

Nearly three hours later I heard the familiar sound of Grandmother slowly ascending the stairs.

Her hair, which she kept carefully knotted in a bun at the back of her head, had come undone and was tangled and disheveled. Her blouse was torn. Her face shone with perspiration. Papa helped her sit down and handed her a cup of water.

“They took me to the sports field,” she said slowly, as if waking from a nightmare. “Other elderly people were there. They had us stand in a line and put dunce caps on us. The Red Guards slapped us and the crowd shouted and denounced us. They unknotted my hair and threatened to cut it all off.”

Grandmother tried to sip her water, but her hands were shaking so badly she could not hold it to her lips without spilling it. Mama took the cup and helped her drink.

“They ordered us to leave Hefei within twenty-four hours,” Grandmother continued. She began to cry. “What will I do?” she sobbed. “What did I do to deserve this at the age of seventy?”

There was a banging on our door. Papa jumped up and timidly opened it. He returned to the room followed by a tall, muscular Red Guard in a clean, smartly tailored uniform. He pointed an accusing finger at Grandmother and announced, “Members of the landlord class may no longer live on the campus of Anhui University. If she is not gone by tomorrow night, this entire family will pay a price.” His gaze was steely and unwavering and his tone angry. He looked at each of us before abruptly turning and walking out, leaving the door ajar.

Mama and Papa tried to think of a way to allow her to stay with us. Mama decided to go directly to the local headquarters of the Red Guard and make a personal appeal. She had to go alone. Papa’s presence was likely to inflame the Red Guards.

She arrived at the headquarters only to find that the same young man who had just left our apartment was in charge. When he saw Mama, he groaned, “You! Have you come here to waste my time?”

Mama steadied her nerves and quietly presented Grandmother’s case. “My mother-in-law is very old and a severe diabetic,” she said. “She has lived with her son and been supported by him since 1951. She cannot survive without us.”

“Enough!” the commander cut her off and smacked the desk with his open hand. “Shut up!”

Mama stopped talking and stood subserviently before him.

“She is a class enemy,” he sputtered. “You … get out!”

When she got home, Mama told us what had happened. We listened in sadness and fear.

It was decided that Grandmother must move to Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, where she had been born and grown up. When the political turmoil ended, Papa comforted her, he would bring her back to us. “It is just a matter of time,” he said.

The next morning Mama made arrangements to cancel Grandmother’s residency permit. Papa helped her pack. He put her belongings
in cardboard boxes. My brothers and I tied the boxes with string and, despite our heavy hearts, did what we could to cheer her up.

Mama and Papa waited until dark to leave, to avoid Red Guards who might spot them and harass them. Yiding was asleep when Grandmother left. I watched her go. She cried quietly and lovingly caressed Yiding’s forehead. She held my younger brother’s hand and put her arm around my shoulder and said goodbye. She hobbled on those tiny bound six-toed feet across the room, out the door and was gone.

Papa summoned a pedicab to take them to the train station. He had wired his distant cousin to meet her in Yangzhou and look after her. He asked Grandmother to write after she was settled.

The cousin met Grandmother’s train the next morning. He took her to the office of the local Party secretary, who was in charge of residency permits.

The secretary was irascible and unsympathetic. “You are a landlord,” he said. “Why are you in Yangzhou? Anhui Province does not want you. Jiangsu Province does not want you, either.”

“I lived in Yangzhou in the past,” she answered in a quivering voice. “This was my home.”

“Damn it, didn’t you hear me, old thing?” the Party secretary roared. “Are you deaf?”

“But I have nowhere to go,” Grandmother pleaded.

“That is your problem,” he replied. And with a wave of his hand, he dismissed them.

Despite this setback, the cousin was able to help Grandmother. He had lived in Yangzhou many years and knew which Party officials could be influenced by special favors. A small payment in gold was discreetly made to the Party secretary, and a silver bracelet was delivered to his son. Grandmother received her residency permit two days later. Another secret transaction secured her food ration coupons.

Grandmother was assigned a room in the same large house where she had grown up. It had been confiscated by the government and subdivided into quarters for ten families. The other residents treated her
with contempt, refusing to talk to her or offer any assistance. Grandmother was familiar with her tiny room. It had been constructed when her great-grandfather transformed a space at the end of a hallway into a family shrine. A small round window facing east provided the only light. A stonemason had been commissioned to engrave a granite block with the family tree—going back eighteen generations. The stone was two meters tall, one meter wide and half a meter thick. It was set on a black granite pedestal. Paintings of several ancestors had once adorned the walls of the shrine.

When the house was subdivided, the paintings were taken away, but the stone proved impossible to move without destroying the walls. So government officials closed and locked the room and left the stone where it was. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards attempted to haul the monument into the street, but it was far too heavy for them. So they toppled it and chiseled away a few of the names before abandoning it. The fallen granite slab nearly covered the entire floor. The partially obstructed door to the room could be opened only a few inches. Grandmother had to squeeze her way through it. There was no furniture in the room and she used the stone as her bed.

She lived in fear. She was afraid of the other residents of the house. She was afraid of the Red Guards. She was afraid of local officials. She was afraid that the insulin she needed to take twice daily for her diabetes might become unaffordable or be denied her at the pharmacy.

She cut her dosage by half.

We learned later that because of the reduction of insulin, she sometimes went into shock. When she collapsed in the hallway, the other residents merely stepped over her.

My parents sent her money each month, but my father’s salary was reduced so drastically that he was unable to help her as much as she needed. One month his money arrived late and Grandmother worried more. She reduced her insulin intake further. Her health deteriorated rapidly.

One summer afternoon in 1967, she lay down on her granite bed
and again went into insulin shock. She was unnoticed and unattended for several hours. That evening she died alone, wrapped in a blanket on a granite bed bearing the names of her ancestors, in a house her family once owned. Among the names engraved on the stone beneath her body were those of her grandfather and the great-grandfather of her cousin Jiang Zemin, the future president of China.

Papa received a telegram notifying him of her death. He applied for leave to go to Yangzhou. By the time he was given approval, his cousin had already held a memorial service for Grandmother. Papa arrived just in time to attend the burial. He remained in the city, which he’d left in 1937, to visit places and people he remembered from his childhood. When he came home he told Mama about the burial and about his thoughts while wandering the streets of Yangzhou. He remembered that Grandmother had lived a lonely life as a widow for ten years before he’d returned to China. She’d come to live with him and expected the last years of her life to be peaceful.

Mama asked if he’d cried at his mother’s burial.

“No, I have no more tears for the dead,” Papa said. “I only have tears for the living.”

The Red Guards broke into factions in late 1967. Armed with everything from swords to automatic rifles and grenades, they went to war with one another. Each faction in Hefei initially referred to itself as the Good Faction and to the other group as the Fart Faction. Both were dominated by university and high school students. Some members were children scarcely older than me. A brutal element was added to the mix when factory workers joined the fight. Industry in Hefei and other cities came to a stop. The streets became a battleground.

Soon after the factional fighting commenced, armed Red Guards stormed our school shouting, “NO MORE SCHOOL, GET OUT!” They waved weapons over their heads as they ran from room to room. The students and teachers fled in terror, leaving behind books and papers. Within hours the Red Guards had transformed the building into a fortress. The faction that occupied my school called itself the Jinggangshan Red Guards, after the mountain range where Chairman Mao had lived during the civil war. They assigned lookouts and snipers to the second-floor windows and the roof.

Day and night we heard explosions and the clatter of gunfire.

When prisoners were taken or arrests made, immediate public executions followed. Boys and girls were hanged from trees or from buildings with signs around their necks describing their crimes. Photographs of the dead appeared in newspapers as did flyers with detailed reports of the fighting and lists of “revolutionary martyrs.” Food became increasingly expensive. Meat disappeared from the public markets. Vegetables and flour were available in small amounts from a few daring vendors who appeared and disappeared on an irregular basis. Public transportation came to a halt. Anyone might be seized, arrested, shot, stabbed or hanged if he ventured into the street.

In the midst of the brutality and chaos, I was surprised one morning to hear the milkman call from outside. I had not heard him in several weeks. I hurried down the stairs. The milkman was nowhere in sight. I saw his bicycle lying on its side. Broken bottles lay scattered around a puddle of milk. A short distance away a dozen Red Guards squatted in a circle on the sidewalk, each drinking from a bottle of milk. Two of them had rifles slung over their shoulders, and beside another was a long iron pipe.

Where the milkman customarily parked his bicycle, the sidewalk was spattered with blood. A Red Guard spotted me. His eyes narrowed and he glared venomously at me and said something to the others, who turned in my direction. “Get out of here before we break your neck!” one of them yelled.

I dropped my pot and bolted up the stairs. Once I was inside our apartment I tiptoed to the window to look down at the Red Guards. They were flinging empty milk bottles high into the air and laughing when the glass broke in the street. One of them pulled up the milkman’s bicycle and pedaled away. The others ran behind him, laughing, trying to jump on.

I went outside to retrieve my pot and look for the milkman. I found a trail of blood and followed it around the corner, where it ended in a large dark pool. I called for the milkman. There was no answer.

In the face of the escalating violence, political meetings and confession sessions were suspended. Many university students and staff fled Hefei and sought safety with relatives or friends in other places. My mother’s family was in Tianjin and my parents wondered if that distant city might be safer for us. The trains were running, although they were always packed with Red Guards rushing around the country making revolution. My parents were not sure how difficult it might be to put us all on a train. One afternoon they walked to the train station. They found thousands of people crowded around the terminal and lined up along the tracks.

Each train that pulled into the station was rushed by a frantic mob. People crammed so tightly into the cars that many were forced to lean far out the windows; there was room for only the lower half of their bodies inside. Others climbed to precarious positions atop the cars. Papa and Mama came home that night nearly in tears. They said it was more dangerous to leave Hefei than to stay. Escape was impossible.

We learned later that when the crowded trains entered a narrow tunnel outside Hefei, those atop the cars and hanging out the windows were knocked from the trains, cut in half or decapitated.