The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices (10 page)

‘I’m not afraid. I want to experience the birth,’ replied a woman.

‘You may not be afraid, but I am. I don’t want my child to be motherless.’

‘If I don’t give birth to it naturally, how can I call myself a mother?’ The woman sounded impatient.

‘But you know that in your condition you can’t –’

‘The doctors didn’t say it was one hundred per cent impossible!’ the woman interrupted him, ‘I just want to do it myself . . .’ Their voices faded as they walked away.

As I was leaving, Xiao Yao’s mother-in-law furtively slipped me a piece of red cloth and asked me to burn it to ‘drive away the evil influences brought by Mengxing’. I dared not disobey. When I left the hospital I tossed the cloth into the stove of a roadside food stall, but did not tell Mengxing, for she hated to acknowledge defeat.

Three months later, I received an invitation to a funeral dinner from a family I did not know. Listeners often invited me to family events, but they were usually weddings. Strangers are seldom invited to funeral dinners, so I was puzzled. The dinner was being held in a restaurant rather than in a funeral parlour or crematorium, and the invitation asked guests to bring a boy’s name with them. I had never encountered these practices before.

I decided to go, and brought the name ‘Tianshi’ (Heaven’s Key) with me. The host received the guests with a month-old baby in his arms; his wife had died in childbirth. When he found out who I was, he asked me tearfully why his wife had refused to have a Caesarean knowing it would endanger her life. Was the experience of giving birth naturally so important that it was more important than life?

I wondered to myself if this could have been the couple I had overheard in the hospital. I was shocked by this unknown woman’s decision, but on some deep level I understood her desire to have this unique experience. Her bereaved husband could not and did not. He asked me if I could tell him how he could understand women.

I do not know if his baby boy took the name Tianshi, but as I left the funeral dinner I hoped he would be a heaven-sent key to unlock the door to women’s minds for his father.

I only truly understood what it means to be a mother, however, when, in 1992, I visited the industrial city of Tangshan, which had been rebuilt after its complete destruction in the terrifying earthquake of 28 July 1976 when 300,000 people lost their lives.

As the broadcasting station in Nanjing was an important one in China, I often had to travel the country to attend regional conferences on the development of radio and television programming. The sole purpose of these conferences was to parrot Party policy rather than engage in any genuine debate. To make up for the lack of intellectual stimulation, the organisers frequently arranged for the participants to travel the surrounding countryside during the conferences. This gave me many opportunities to interview women in different areas of China.

During one such conference in Tianjin, I took the opportunity to visit nearby Tangshan. The Tangshan earthquake of 1976 was notorious for exemplifying the complete breakdown in communication in China at that time. In 1976, the Chinese government was coping with the deaths of three crucial figures: Mao Zedong, Prime Minister Zhouenglai and the military leader Zhu De. Their preoccupation with this crisis, together with the inadequacy of Chinese technology, meant that they were completely unaware that the earthquake had happened. It wasn’t until a man from Tangshan went all the way to Beijing that the news filtered through. Even then, people thought he was a lunatic. The Xinhua local news agency, which covered Tangshan, found out about the earthquake, not from government central office, but from the foreign press, who had received reports from the more sophisticated earthquake monitoring centres of other countries.

While I was in Tangshan I heard about an unusual orphanage founded and run by mothers who had lost their children during the earthquake. I was told they financed it out of the compensation money they had received. I telephoned to arrange a visit. The orphanage had been built with the help of the local army garrison, and was situated in a suburb, next to an army sanatorium. I heard children’s voices as I approached the low wooden fence and shrubs that surrounded it. This was an orphanage without officials; some called it a family without men. A few mothers and several dozen children lived there.

I found the children exercising in the courtyard, and the mothers making dumplings in the kitchen. The women greeted me with floury hands, telling me how much they liked my programme. Still in their aprons, they took me on a tour of the orphanage.

Each mother lived with five or six children in one large room, simply furnished, but homely. Dwellings of this kind are common in northern China: half the room is occupied by a
kang
, a bed-cum-stove made out of bricks or earth. In the winter, a fire can be lit under the
kang
to keep it warm and at night everyone in the family sleeps on it. Individual quilts demarcate sleeping areas. In the daytime, the quilts are rolled up on one side and a small table is set up on the
kang
to form a living and dining area for the family. The other half of the room is filled with wardrobes, a settee and chairs for receiving guests.

Unlike normal homes, the rooms in the orphanage had been decorated in a riot of colour, according to the children’s interests. Every room had its own style of decoration, but three things were present in all the rooms. The first was a frame containing pictures of all the children who had lived at the orphanage. The second was a crude painting of an eye brimming over with tears, with two words written on the pupil – ‘the future’. The third was a book in which each child’s history was recorded.

The women were very proud of the children, and regaled me with tales about their exploits, but it was the stories of the women that I was keenest to hear.

On my first visit, I managed to interview only one mother, Mrs Chen. She had been an army dependant, and had had three children. I talked to her as I helped her boil dumplings for the children, addressing her as ‘auntie’ as she was of my parents’ generation.

‘Auntie Chen, can I ask you about what happened the day of the earthquake? I’m sorry, I know the memories must be very painful . . .’

‘That’s all right – not a day goes by when I don’t think of that day. I don’t think anyone who survived it can ever forget. Everything was so unreal . . . That morning, before it was light, a strange sound woke me, a rumbling and hooting, like a train was being driven into our house. I thought I was dreaming – dreams are so strange – but just as I was about to cry out, half the bedroom caved in, along with my husband in his bed. The children’s bedroom on the other side of the house suddenly appeared before me, like a stage set. My elder son was staring, mouth open; my daughter was crying and calling out, stretching her arms towards me; and my little son was still sleeping sweetly.

‘Everything happened so quickly . . . the scene before me suddenly dropped away like a curtain falling. I was terrified, but I thought I was having a nightmare. I pinched myself hard, but didn’t wake up. In desperation, I stabbed my leg with a pair of scissors. Feeling the pain and seeing the blood, I realised this was no dream. My husband and children had fallen into an abyss.

‘I shouted like a madwoman, but no one heard me. The sound of walls collapsing and furniture smashing filled the air. I stood, trailing my bleeding leg, facing the yawning pit that had been the other half of my house. My husband and my beautiful children had vanished before my eyes. I wanted to cry, but there were no tears. I simply did not want to go on living.’

Her eyes were filled with tears.

‘I’m sorry, Auntie Chen . . .’ I stammered, overcome.

She shook her head. ‘It’s been nearly twenty years, but nearly every day at dawn, I hear a train rumbling and hooting, along with the cries of my children. Sometimes I’m so frightened of those sounds, I go to bed very early with the children and put an alarm clock under my pillow to wake me before three. When it rings, I sit up until it gets light, sometimes I go back to sleep after four. But after a few days of this, I crave those nightmarish sounds again, because my children’s voices are in there too.’

‘Does it make you feel better to have so many children around you now?’

‘Much better, especially at night. I watch them sleeping and feel comforted in a way I can’t explain. I hold their hands to my face as I sit by them. I kiss them and thank them for keeping me alive.’

‘The children will thank you when they grow up – it’s a cycle of love.’

‘That’s right, from old to young and back. All right, the dumplings are done, I must call the children in. Will you have a little too?’

I excused myself, saying I would be back tomorrow. My heart was too full to speak to anyone else. I left feeling emotionally and physically drained.

That night, I heard in my dreams the rumbling noise and children’s cries that Auntie Chen had described, and woke drenched in cold sweat. Sunlight was streaming through the net curtains, and the sound of children on their way to school filtered through. Relief washed over me.

That day’s meeting finished early. I politely refused an invitation to dinner from some friends in Tianjin and hurried to catch the train to Tangshan. At the orphanage, I spoke to a woman called Mrs Yang, who was in charge of the children’s meals. She was supervising the children’s dinner when I arrived.

‘Look how the children are enjoying their food,’ she said.

‘That must be because you’re a good cook.’

‘Not necessarily. Children enjoy certain things, like food in special shapes. It may just be steamed bread shaped like a bunny or a puppy, but they’ll eat more of it that way. They also like sweet things, so they enjoy sweet-and-sour dishes or Cantonese roast pork. They like food that is easy to chew, like meatballs or vegetable balls. Children always think what their friends have is nicer, so I let them choose their food and swap it as they wish. It stimulates their interest in food. My daughter was exactly the same; if you gave her one portion of the same thing on several different plates, she got so excited.’ She shook her head fondly.

I spoke hesitantly, ‘I heard that your daughter . . .’

‘I will tell you my daughter’s story, if you like, but I won’t do it here. I don’t want the children to see me cry. It’s such a comfort to see them eating and laughing so happily, they really make me . . .’ She stopped, her voice suddenly thick with tears.

I prompted her gently. ‘Auntie Yang?’

‘Not here, let’s go to my room.’

‘Your room?’

‘Yes, I’m the only one to have a room of my own, because my other job is taking care of the children’s health records and personal belongings. We can’t let the children near those things.’

Mrs Yang’s room was very small; one wall was almost completely covered with a photograph that had been so overenlarged that it looked like a painting in pixels of colour. It showed a young girl with lively eyes, lips parted as if about to speak.

Gazing at the picture, Mrs Yang said, ‘This is my daughter. The photo was taken when she graduated from primary school. It’s the only picture I have of her.’

‘She’s very pretty.’

‘Yes. Even in nursery school, she was always acting and making speeches.’

‘She must have been very clever.’

‘I think so – she was never top of the class, but she never gave me any cause for worry.’ Mrs Yang stroked the photograph as she spoke. ‘It’s been nearly twenty years since she left me. I know she didn’t want to go. She was fourteen. She knew about life and death: she didn’t want to die.’

‘I heard that she survived the earthquake?’

‘Yes, but it would have been better for her to have been crushed to death at once. She waited fourteen days – fourteen days and two hours, knowing death was approaching. And she was only fourteen . . .’ Mrs Yang broke down.

Unable to keep my own tears back, I said, ‘Auntie Yang, I’m sorry,’ and put my hand on her shoulder.

She sobbed for a few minutes. ‘I’m . . . I’m all right. Xinran, you can’t imagine what a wretched scene that was. I will never forget the expression on her face.’ She gazed at the photograph again with loving eyes. ‘Her mouth was slightly open, just like this . . .’

Distressed by her tears, I asked, ‘Auntie Yang, you’ve been busy all day, you’re tired, let’s talk next time, all right?’

Mrs Yang composed herself. ‘No, I’ve heard you’re very busy. You’ve come all this way just to hear our stories; I can’t let you leave with nothing.’

‘It doesn’t matter, I have time,’ I reassured her.

She was resolute. ‘No, no. I’ll tell you now.’ She took a deep breath. ‘My husband had died a year before, and my daughter and I lived in a fifth-floor flat allocated by the work unit. We had only one room, and shared a common kitchen and bathroom. It wasn’t a big room, but we didn’t find it cramped. Because I hate extremes of heat and cold, my half of the room was by the inner wall, and my daughter’s was by the outer wall. That morning, I was woken suddenly by rumbling, banging and a violent shaking. My daughter called out, and tried to get out of bed to come over to me. I tried to stand, but couldn’t stay upright. Everything was tilting, the wall was leaning towards me. Suddenly, the wall by my daughter disappeared, and we were exposed on the edge of the fifth floor. It was very warm, so we were only in our underclothes. My daughter screamed and wrapped her arms around her chest, but before she could react more fully, she was thrown over the edge by another falling wall.

‘I screamed her name as I held on to some clothes hooks on the wall. It was only after the swaying had stopped and I could stand still on the sloping floor that I realised this was an earthquake. I looked frantically for a way to get downstairs, and staggered off, shouting my daughter’s name.

‘I hadn’t realised that I wasn’t dressed. All the other survivors were wearing very little too. Some were even naked, but nobody thought about these things. We were all running around wildly in the half-light, weeping and shouting for our relatives.