Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (6 page)

After she removed the mercury and glass from my mouth and was sure I had not swallowed anything, the nurse joked with the other girls, telling them that they had better watch me because I had become so hungry I was even eating thermometers. “You are an unusual little cat,” she said. “You pull out your needles and you eat thermometers and you are hungry all the time.”

I responded, naturally, with my customary “meow.”

I made friends with some of the adult patients once I was able to walk around the ward. They were happy to see me and sometimes gave me treats and told me stories. I explored the hospital and found it to be incredibly filthy, just like my room. Each time I moved a tray or a
towel, cockroaches scurried out. The cockroaches, however, were not as frightening as the rats that came out in the dark. Late one night the other girls in the room awakened me with terrified screaming. I bolted upright and saw all three girls huddled in one bed, the sheets pulled up high around their faces. They pointed to the far side of the room where I saw, in the moonlight, a score of fat rats moving in an orderly column along the wall and out the door. They were so bold, even the screams didn’t faze them. They proceeded with military precision, each a few inches behind the one in front of him, just as if they were supposed to be in the room—as if they were landlords and we were intruders.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said, “they’re just rats. Leave them alone and they’ll leave us alone. We had lots of them in our basement in Tianjin.”

One of the older girls said, “Of course you’re not afraid. You’re a little cat and cats are not afraid of rats.”

“You’re right,” I said and let out a loud meow toward the rats. The girls clung to one another and giggled nervously. But after several seconds they lost a bit of their fear and scooted together to the foot of the bed, leaned far over the rail and, following my example, meowed. Our kitten quartet grew louder. Occasionally a rat paused and flicked an annoyed glance our way. When that happened, the other girls stiffened and went silent, but not me. I meowed even louder. The rats sensed nothing ominous in the noise and went on with their business.

We stayed awake for a while waiting to see if they might reappear. And they did. The same little long-tailed gang materialized at the door carrying pieces of food or garbage or dragging a dirty bandage behind them. They crossed the room defiantly and made their way through a crack near the bottom of the wall and disappeared.

I attempted to talk the other girls into overcoming their fear. But they remained terrified whenever they spotted the nocturnal trespassers and insisted that I take command of the defense of our room. My fearlessness never failed to restore their courage.

What did disturb me during my stay in the hospital and remained with me was the dead body I saw one warm Saturday afternoon.

My roommates and I were wandering around our ward when we heard a commotion followed by screaming and wailing downstairs. We ran to the stairwell to see what was happening. We saw a man lying on a table in the lobby. Several doctors and nurses surrounded him. They were frantically pushing on his chest and clearing his mouth and shouting at him. Around the doctors and nurses was another circle—this one of children, all of them small, crying and screaming hysterically. We began to descend the stairs to get a better look, but a nurse ordered us to go back to our room. We scurried up the stairs to the landing and huddled together and watched.

I saw a woman about my mother’s age. She was crying and screaming louder than anyone else. The doctors worked on the man for perhaps fifteen minutes, then stopped and looked at one another and shook their heads. They covered him with a sheet. The woman and the children moaned and screamed, and the woman attempted to touch the man, but she was pulled away from him and led from the lobby. One of the nurses wheeled the table with the body down the hall.

Later that day, when we asked a nurse what had happened, she told us that there was a reservoir near the hospital. Two boys had been swimming there with their father. A part of the dam that formed the reservoir had come loose. The hole in the dam created a strong undercurrent. When the children swam near the hole, they were pulled under the water and held against the stones. Their father rushed to rescue them and pulled the children to safety, but he was too exhausted to save himself. He was sucked against the dam and drowned.

It was the first time I’d seen a dead person. The man looked peaceful, as if he were asleep. And what slowly registered in my mind was the dedication of this man for his children. He’d given his life for them. When I asked the nurse further about the incident, she said, “He died for his sons.”

I was deeply affected by the episode and for many days afterward could hear the children—the little boys and girls wailing for their poor drowned father.

My roommates and I talked about it. One girl said she’d seen a nurse sitting on a chair in the lobby crying later that afternoon. When I saw how hard the doctors and nurses worked to help people, I liked them more, even the doctor who had scolded Papa. I remembered that no one would give me a seat on the bus when I came to the hospital. The anger of the doctor at Papa, I concluded, came not so much from his dislike of Papa as from his concern for my health. This was new to me. My roommates and I came to share a deep affection for the doctors and nurses who cared for us. We felt almost like a family with them. Perhaps that was why, as my health improved, I did not really look forward to leaving the hospital.

One by one my roommates were discharged. Finally, after sixty days, it was my turn. The doctor said I was well enough to leave. Papa came to get me. As we left, the nurses came to say goodbye to their “Little Cat.” I wanted to cry. Instead, I just waved to them. Then, in my sadness, I remembered something. Just before the door swung closed behind me, I turned and gave a very long and gentle “meooooooow.”

All the doctors and nurses clapped their hands and laughed.

That autumn I was enrolled in first grade at Meishanlu Elementary School. When I was not working or studying, I played with Xiaolan and other friends and told them about my stay in the hospital.

One thing was delightfully different at home after my return from the hospital. In my absence, Papa had initiated a nightly ritual of telling stories to my brothers. He placed my younger brother in the crib and pulled a chair next to it, and my older brother sat on a stool beside him. Papa turned off the light and told his tales in the dark.

I brought a stool to sit next to him. But Papa refused to let me stay. “This is for the boys, Maomao,” he said. “Go to your room.”

I strained to listen from the next room. Grandmother and Mama sat on my brother’s bed talking or reading. Some nights Mama fell asleep waiting for Papa to finish his tales, and he gently awakened her and laid my brother in his bed and led Mama from the room.

After a while I discovered a way to get closer to the nighttime ritual. After washing the dishes and putting them away, while my older brother was studying and Papa was working, I took my blanket and crawled under my brother’s crib. There, huddled tightly against the
wall, wrapped in the blanket, I remained still and nobody noticed my presence.

Papa was a superb storyteller. I was enthralled by his sonorous recitations, his voice rising and falling and his tone changing as he created compelling narratives for his sons. Sometimes, when a story was funny, I clamped my hand over my mouth to smother a laugh, while my brothers hooted uncontrollably an arm’s length away. In the shaft of light from the next room, I watched Papa’s slippers dance and saw my older brother’s feet shift back and forth. Above me was the intermittent squeak of the crib springs as my younger brother rolled from side to side. We were enchanted, especially when Papa spoke in the voice of a character. We fell helplessly and blissfully under his magical spell.

Some of Papa’s stories were traditional Chinese tales that we heard in school, but never as compelling as he told them.
The Journey to the West
, the saga of the Monkey King, was a favorite. But my brothers and I loved most the stories he brought back from his student years in America. What was spellbinding about them was not so much the characters’ adventures as their strange and funny-sounding names.

One of my early favorites was “The Pearl.” He’d translated the story from English into Chinese, and his translation was widely used in classrooms in China. “Once upon a time,” he began, “there was a happy family. A papa named Kino, a mama named Juana, and a little baby named Coyotito.”

As he said each name, my brothers giggled.

“Say the names again, Papa,” my older brother begged.

“Kino and Juana and Coyotito, the baby.”

We did not understand the story but we loved the names, especially Coyotito. I had no idea what a pearl was or why it should be of great value or cause people to be happy or unhappy. But that made no difference. I adored any story about a happy family with funny names.

Papa could shorten or lengthen a story as he wished, depending on when in the evening he began it. Not until years later did I learn that
“The Pearl” did not have a happy ending and that little Coyotito died. Papa left that out. In fact, he left a lot out; he used only the names from the book and made adventures we might easily understand. With stories like that, all three of us slept peacefully in a world of happy endings.

When he was finished with a story, Papa would put my older brother back in our room. I would scurry from beneath the crib and wait in the darkness of the kitchen or against the wall in the hallway while he returned with Mama to his room and I found my way to my bed in the dark.

Papa also told us tales from
David Copperfield
and
Oliver Twist
, which enchanted us. But my favorite, by far, was
Huckleberry Finn
. I loved the story more than any other because it was about a black man and his family. We were a black family. We were mistreated and distrusted and watched, and when anything went amiss, we were blamed. I did not understand, but there was no need to understand any more than there was a need to understand hunger or disease or death. They just were.

The stories we heard in school were about red families and heroes. But at home, Papa told us about a heroic black man and his black family. I was so delighted by this that I repeated the stories about Huckleberry Finn and Black Jim to Xiaolan, who was inspired by them, too.

Papa described Huckleberry and Black Jim floating on a raft down the Mississippi River in America. We loved words like Huckleberry, Polly, Jim, and, of course, that most magical and musical of all words, Mississippi. My brothers asked Papa to say every unfamiliar word again and again, and each time he did, they’d laugh. I smothered my own giggles until tears ran down my cheeks.

When Papa described the boy and the black man on a raft on the river, I imagined it was the story of a boy with a father who was very much like Papa, escaping from somewhere bad to somewhere good, and I delighted in that familiar theme. I wanted the story to go on forever. One night Papa said the raft finally carried Huckleberry and Jim
all the way to Chicago, where they went ashore and enrolled in the University of Chicago.

That thrilled me. I loved the way Papa translated the word “Chicago.” He pronounced it
zhi jia ge
, which in Mandarin literally means “Big Brother.” The words warmed me and made that distant city sound like a nice person. My big brother, Yiding, and I were developing a special bond. He accompanied me around the campus, played with me in the sandpit and on the playground. So it comforted me to learn that Huckleberry found a big brother at that university as well. The selection of Chicago was not mere whimsy. Papa had lived there for three years while he worked on his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. He sometimes talked about the city with affection and pride.

Papa went on and on, often losing himself in his words. There were nights after my brothers had fallen asleep when he’d continue his recitation as if he knew I was under the crib listening. At other times Papa sat quietly and didn’t say anything for a long time. On those nights I lay on the floor unseen, hearing my younger brother breathing above me. After a while, Papa would move his chair away from the crib. I’d hear the paper crinkle as he fished a cigarette from a pack, and I’d hear him remove a wooden match from a small box and strike it. After lighting his cigarette, Papa would pour himself a cup of wine and sit smoking and drinking.

From my hiding place I followed the glow of the cigarette dancing in the dark like a lazy firefly. Papa would smoke one cigarette after another and rock back and forth in his chair. After drinking several glasses of wine he’d hum or sing softly, slurring his words. When he tired of this, he’d sit quietly. Then the silence would be broken by sudden sobbing. Sometimes he recited the names of men he knew during his years in the concentration camp. I knew the names because I’d heard him telling Mama about the men. “I helped bury them,” he told her. “I can never forget them. I put each of them in the frozen earth in the dead of winter.”

He told Mama they came back to him in his dreams. They called to
him, and he could hear their voices and see their frozen tears when they spoke of their families far away. “They were younger and stronger than me,” he moaned. “But they died and I lived … Why? So much of life makes no sense.”

If Papa had known I was in the room, he would have spanked me. He didn’t want me to hear his stories and he didn’t want me to know his private pain. But I did hear and know. Just me. Night after night.

I understood little except that this was another face of Papa. When he thought he was alone at night, he removed the mask he wore in the light and I saw him not only as Papa but also as a secretly sad and haunted man.

One phrase that he repeated mystified me. I wanted to ask him about it but could not without revealing I’d been in the room with him. The phrase was “It’s not over. It’s coming … I see it.” Sometimes he said it with resignation. Sometimes with regret. Sometimes with fear, and sometimes with something like humor, but in a strange unfunny way.