Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (38 page)

I cringed as she told me the story.

“If I had been bitten”—she sighed—“they never would have sent me home. I have the bad family background. The only way I’ll ever leave this place is if I die.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“Black family?”

“Yes.”

She pointed to an empty bed against the wall and said, “That was hers. Now it’s yours. Welcome to Tongxin School.”

As I unpacked, she briefed me on the lessons for the children. They were divided into two classrooms. Grades one, two and three were in one room and four, five and six in the other. She said she would be teaching political studies and math and I would be teaching Chinese and music. In the morning she taught the higher grades and I taught the lower grades. In the afternoon we switched.

That evening and for many evenings after, Dongmei and I talked late into the night. We soon got along like sisters. Dongmei was nineteen and from Shanghai. We were about the same height and weight
and had similar experiences growing up. Her family, too, had been terrorized by Red Guards. She loved school and dreamed of going to college someday. But her assignment to this remote region convinced her that those dreams would never come true.

I told her about my life. I told her about Yiping and my mixed feelings—love of him and fear for the consequences. She suggested I write to him and explain everything. I tried to write to him many evenings but ended up crying so hard I could never finish. I waited instead for a letter from him. None arrived. When I found I could not put my feelings into words, I thought about walking to his school to talk with him about our relationship and our future. Yet I was afraid to be so bold, fearing I’d get into trouble or be embarrassed or rejected. I waited and hoped.

I tried to clear my mind. I began taking walks up the mountainside by myself, always carrying a stick to scare away the snakes. It was peaceful. Tall bamboo and trees surrounded me, lush and green and shimmering with life. The clouds floated low overhead, and mist filled the valleys below. I found a solitary spot at the edge of a steep rocky height. I sat there, dangling my feet over the edge, staring down into the valley and nursed my broken heart.

He is my true love, I thought. I will never love another. He’s the love of my life. I wept. The first and the last. I didn’t know what to do.

As days turned into weeks, my thoughts changed. They became darker. I began thinking about stepping off the cliff, plummeting down through the clouds to the rocks below. My life was so miserable. My heart ached so much. Why not just end it? A single step, a single act of will, was all it took. And then I’d free myself from this turmoil and find peace of mind.

Late one afternoon I stood at the very edge of the precipice and stared down at the mist and the green and gray world far below. I closed my eyes and gathered my courage and was about to take the final step when a voice cried out behind me, “Yimao! Stop!”

I opened my eyes and stepped back.

Dongmei ran to me. “Don’t!” she cried. She took my hands in hers and held them tightly. “Life is hard. But we have to live it,” she said. “We have to. Our fate is better than this. Our lives are going to be better than this. I do not know when or how, but everything will change. This is not the end.”

“No, it won’t change,” I cried.

“It will. Believe me, I’ve felt like you. I’ve sat on this very spot, too, and looked down into the dark valley. I know what you were thinking.”

“I hate my life,” I sobbed. “I’m tired. I don’t want it anymore.”

That night we cried in each other’s arms and slept in the same bed.

I decided not to tempt myself again and didn’t go back to the cliff. Time passed slowly. We taught and talked and sang. We tried to cheer each other up. Yet I remained depressed. Soon my mood began affecting Dongmei rather than the other way around. Her optimism and confidence slowly eroded. My darkness was seeping into her soul. She became quiet. She sat alone outside in the dark. We went through the motions of teaching. The children provided a much needed diversion during the day. We spoke to each other less in our quarters at night. Slowly, along with me, Dongmei lost hope.

“We are going to grow old and die here,” she said to me one evening as we sat on the log bridge and looked down into the river.

I was thinking the same thing.

“There is a way, though. If we were Party members, we would have a better chance of going home. Party members have priority.”

“How could we become Party members?” I asked. “With my background and yours, it is impossible.”

“Well, it is not impossible,” she said. “We might try. It’s better than rotting here, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I agreed.

“There are two ways for people with a bad family background to become Party members,” she explained. “One of them is the basket Party member. That means we bring baskets full of presents to the Party secretary. And after he gets enough presents, he will recommend
Party membership for us and fix the records. Basically, we buy it.”

“We don’t have much to give as presents,” I said. “And we don’t have any money.”

“You’re right,” she said and laughed. “But there is another way.” She hesitated and studied my face before continuing. “It’s called loose-belt Party member.”

“And what is that?”

“That means you sleep with the Party secretary.”

“I what?” I asked. I wasn’t quite sure what she was talking about.

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You take off your clothes. You get into his bed. You do what he likes. And before long, you are a Communist Party member. Then you may make it out of here.”

I was shocked. “I could never do that, Dongmei,” I said. “Could you?”

“I’d do anything. Just look around us, Yimao. Really, now, wouldn’t you? When you’ve been here as long as me,” she said, “you’ll feel the same way. Just wait.”

A week later she visited the Party secretary. He lived in a village about thirty minutes down the mountain. She told me she intended to fill out an application to become a Party member. She washed, borrowed my white flowered blouse, looked at herself in the mirror, pinched her cheeks to make them red, and left.

I lay awake and waited for her. As the night passed, I began to worry. I walked to the bridge to see if she might have fallen. I could not see in the darkness.

Just before dawn, she returned. She was crying.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “What happened?”

She said she didn’t want to talk. She crawled into her bed.

The next night she returned to the Party secretary and the next. Each time she returned home crying.

On the fourth night she went to see him again but returned home in less than an two hours. This time she was fuming.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“That bastard,” she said. “That filthy bastard. He wouldn’t see me tonight to consider my application.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because he was with another girl from another village. And he said my application had been denied.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“That liar,” she said. “I hope he gets bitten by a snake! I hope a tiger eats him. I hope he falls off a bridge! I hope a rock falls on his head! I hope someone cuts him up!”

“What will you do now?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “There’s nothing more to do. It’s hopeless. It’s even worse than hopeless.”

One day the children came to school very excited about something. They told us a fortune-teller was wandering through the nearby villages. He was telling people their future.

When Dongmei heard this, she turned to me and said, “I have to see him!”

“Me, too!” I said.

“Where is he now?” Dongmei asked the students.

“On the other side of the bridge,” they said. “We just passed him on the way to school.”

Dongmei and I hurried outside and saw the lone figure in the distance beyond the bridge. We crossed the bridge and called to him. He turned and watched us approach. He was a surprisingly young man for a fortune-teller—in his mid-thirties, perhaps—and quite good-looking. He had large piercing eyes and a long stringy beard. He held a staff and carried a bedroll and a small wooden box that contained his instruments for telling fortunes.

The children followed us and gathered around.

“We want you to tell our fortunes,” Dongmei said to the man.

He studied us for a moment. “Five fen,” he said. “Each.”

“All right,” she said. “We have that.”

He sat on his bedroll, opened his box and pulled out a worn and soiled deck of ancient cards—long and narrow, with strange-looking faces and symbols printed on them. He sorted and shuffled them and laid them facedown carefully on the box top. He looked at Dongmei and said, “Teacher, take three cards.”

She turned excitedly to me. “He already knows I’m a teacher,” she said. She picked out three cards and handed them to him. He looked at them and closed his eyes and mumbled a long sonorous mantra. The children who had seen him work his wonders before whispered that he was getting guidance from the gods.

It was quiet for several seconds and then he spoke. “Ah, I see. You are very unhappy here. You are from far away.”

“Yes, yes,” Dongmei said. “Shanghai.”

“Yes, Shanghai,” he said. “And you want to go home.”

“Yes, I do. Very much. When?” she asked.

The fortune-teller closed his eyes and appeared to be listening to distant voices that he alone could hear. He nodded acknowledgment. He opened his eyes and looked straight into Dongmei’s eyes. “You will go home,” he said.

“When?” she asked.

“Soon,” he said.

She grinned broadly.

“And you will never grow old,” he said. “Not like me.”

“Oh.” She sighed with relief. “But you are not old.”

“Never grow old,” he repeated. “Not … like … me.”

“Forever young.” Dongmei laughed. “How perfect.”

I picked three cards and handed them to him. Again he chanted and meditated before speaking.

“Will I go home, too?” I asked him.

“Yes, you will go home, Teacher,” he responded. He closed his eyes and listened to his distant voices for a minute before continuing. “But you will grow old. You will grow old far away.”

Before I could respond to his prediction, Dongmei burst out
laughing. “Poor Yimao,” she said. “You will lose your beauty. But I won’t.”

The children all laughed and danced around us.

The fortune-teller watched me. I felt there was something he was not saying. The deeper meaning of his words, perhaps. What had he seen? Could he really tell the future?

“Is there more?” I asked.

He gathered up his cards and put them back in his box. “No more,” he said. “I cannot reveal the gods’ deepest secrets. If I did, I’d lose all my power.”

We paid him and thanked him, and all of us returned to the school laughing. Dongmei was happier than I’d seen her in weeks.

————

Several days after the meeting with the fortune-teller, Dongmei and I ran low on rice. I offered to go alone to the commune headquarters to pick up the month’s ration. Dongmei was not feeling well. She reminded me to watch out for snakes. A crowd had gathered at the commune headquarters. There was a loud buzz of conversation and everyone was crying. A woman approached me, weeping and trembling violently. I stopped her and asked, “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”

“Haven’t you heard?” she wailed.

“Heard what?” I asked.

“The sky has fallen. Our beloved Chairman Mao has passed away in Beijing,” she choked before hurrying on her way, inconsolable.

The crowd was frightened and disoriented. No one could really understand the news. Many disbelieved it and said it was impossible. Chairman Mao dead? How could this be? He was supposed to be immortal. The thought of his passing had never crossed the mind of anyone. Mao was supposed to live ten thousand years! Had he really lived less than eighty-three? I had difficulty getting anyone’s attention
inside the store. But finally, I succeeded in acquiring forty pounds of rice. I hoisted it to my shoulder and hurried home. I never stopped to rest and I ignored the fatigue in my legs. When I at last saw our little school in the distance, my heart began to race. I put down my burden on the far side of the bridge and shouted, “Dongmei! Dongmei! Good news!”

She stepped outside and shaded her eyes as she tried to make me out in the distance. “What is it?” she called.

“He’s dead!” I shouted, laughing as I spoke. “Chairman Mao is dead. The Red Sun has set!”

She ran to me and caught me in her arms, and we spun around laughing.

“That fortune-teller was right,” she said. “We
are
going home, Yimao. This is what we’ve been waiting for.” We burst into tears of joy.

We stayed up all night, singing and reciting poems and dreaming about the future. Dongmei said that when she got home, she’d visit all of her relatives and then start studying for college. “I think I’ll be a doctor,” she said. “What about you?”

“I think I’ll be a professor,” I told her. “A professor of English literature, just like my father. But let’s never lose contact, Dongmei. We have to get together at least once every year, no matter where we live.”

“We will.” She laughed.

————

The entire nation seemed to collapse into a long night of grief and mourning. Funereal music played from every loudspeaker in every village. People wept openly. Dongmei and I were given instructions to bring our students to the commune headquarters to participate in the official memorial ceremony. We set out early in the morning. Because our school was the farthest of the mountain schools from the commune headquarters, we were among the last to arrive. As we approached the headquarters, we saw children from all the surrounding
villages and hundreds of peasants gathered in a gloomy assembly. Dirges blared one after another over a loudspeaker and echoed up and down the mountains.

A large portrait of Chairman Mao draped in black with white flowers around it had been raised above a platform. All of us were ordered to face the picture and bow. Nearly everyone was crying. Some were wailing and flailing their arms about in the air, utterly stricken. Others were merely somber and wept silently and dabbed handkerchiefs to their cheeks. I tried to squeeze out a few tears but could not. Inside me there was too much excitement and joy. As speaker after speaker stood and praised Mao, I wanted to laugh out loud and dance. Dongmei and I exchanged mischievous glances occasionally. Each of us knew what the other was thinking.