Wild Ginger (3 page)

Lists of the names of the "newly discovered enemies" were posted on the neighborhood's bulletin boards. Among them was Mrs. Pei, Wild Ginger's mother. She was accused as a spy and was ordered to attend public meetings to denounce her husband and confess her crime. The neighbors and children were asked by the head of the district to keep their eyes on her and report any sign of resistance.

I ran to Wild Ginger to tell her the news. Her house was in an elegant compound located at the deep end of the lane. It was built during the French colonial period before the Liberation and was the greenest district in the city. The house was half hidden in the shade under a large fig tree. The entrance was run-down but still had an elegant look. It reminded me of an abandoned, aging concubine.

I knocked on the door. It was half open. A limping dog came out. "Come on in," Wild Ginger greeted me. "Maple's here, Mother."

I entered the hallway. It was spacious. Off it were old white rooms with windows on three sides. The leaf-patterned curtains were drawn, making the light inside dim and soft. Lying on an old sofa, Mrs. Pei, a middle-aged, gray-haired woman, welcomed me. She was very thin although still pretty, like an old porcelain goddess. Layers of sheets and blankets covered her from the waist down. In front of her, scattered across the floor, were a variety of potted plants. There were orchids, thick-leaved bamboo, camellias, and red grass.

"Mrs. Pei," I said politely.

She made an effort to sit up, but her strength failed her. She lay back down and gasped, "Excuse me." She looked nervous. "Water, Ginger. Come on in, Maple dear. Has anyone seen you coming to the house?"

"No. I hid behind the fig tree for a long time before I knocked at your door. I made sure no one saw me."

Mrs. Pei sighed with relief.

"Have you seen the bulletin?" Wild Ginger asked me.

"That's why I'm here, to tell you about it. It's on everybody's door."

"The neighborhood activists posted them this morning." Her voice was strangely distant and matter-of-fact.

"What ... are you going to do?" I turned to look at Mrs. Pei.

Mrs. Pei said nothing. She stared at the ceiling.

"Does Mother have a choice?" Wild Ginger poured me a cup of water. "She made the mistake of marrying a foreigner. She has to live with the consequences. She knew
that. But it's not fair to me. I am the victim. I am the casualty of her battle. But, Maple, let me tell you, that marriage was not a crime, it was a mistake. A human error."

"It was not a mistake." Mrs. Pei pushed herself to rise. "Nor an error. He is your father!"

"Mother, enough. I hate that man."

"How dare you disrespect your father! You daughter of no piety!" Mrs. Pei groaned.

"I hate that very thought."

"You carry his blood."

"I am disgusted."

"You don't know who he was."

"He was a spy."

"He was not."

"Why did he come to China? What business did a foreigner have to do with China?"

"He loved China. He was a diplomat. It was his job. He wanted to help China thrive."

"No. He was a spy. Spying was his job. He was sent by the Western imperialists. Helping China thrive was his disguise. It was false. Helping the Western imperialists to exploit China was the truth. You were too blind to see it. You were foolish."

"You bastard!"

"The sound of truth hurts your ears, doesn't it?"

"How could you trust what the authorities tell you?"

"I trust Chairman Mao's representatives! I trust Chairman Mao!"

"You've been brainwashed!"

"Watch out, Mother! You are sounding dangerous!"

"I am your mother. I'll risk my life to tell you the truth!"

"You are a pitiful victim."

"Shut up!"

"I pity you, Mother. I truly do. And I pity myself too, although I don't want to."

"Don't listen to her, Maple..." Mrs. Pei fell back to the sofa. Closing her eyes she breathed with difficulty. Her chest was rising and falling. "Ginger is mad, like the rest of China."

"I am not mad, but you definitely are, Mother! You have been living in a dream created by that Frenchman, and worse, you refuse to wake up."

"Ginger!"

"Wake up, Mother!"

"Ginger! I should have listened to my great-aunt! I should have given you the name she had suggested, 'Plain Water.' It was to calm you and tame your character. Oh, how I rejected and upset her! She hired a fortuneteller who told us that there was too much fire in you when you were born. I was told that you would burn yourself into a wasteland. But I didn't care. I liked the passion that fire signified! Your father and I named you Wu-Jiang, 'Wild Ginger,' because we loved the fire in you! We thought that it was special. Your father treasured the wildness. We hoped that you would grow up to be as free as you want to be. But how could I have known it would turn out like this! What a retribution!...Maple, Ginger's father loved China and he loved his daughter. He died of cancer when she was five. He was a noble man."

"Chairman Mao teaches us"—the daughter interrupted the mother—"'It is impossible for one class member to love the member of his opposite class."'

"You were your father's everything!"

"I don't want to hear it."

"How can you have the heart to do this?"

"You are insulting me, Mother."

"For God's sake!"

"The hell with God the ghost-head!"

"You'll be punished for scorning the Lord."

"To be born of such parents is to be punished. I have been serving my sentence. I have been called a little spy in every school I attended, and I have been treated with distrust from both authorities and classmates. No matter how hard I've tried, no one has accepted me. Look!" She pulled up her sleeves and revealed bruises.

Suddenly I understood her habit of scratching. It was not a skin disease but the healing of her bruises that made her itch.

"Don't make me say words that will hurt you, Mother," Wild Ginger continued. "All I want in life is to be able to be accepted and trusted, to be a Maoist like everyone else in this country. This is not too much to ask, is it? Is it, Mother? But because of you and that Frenchman, I am doomed."

"Help me, God." Mrs. Pei buried her face in the pillow.

"Sure, help me, God, the devil is taking my child," Wild Ginger said hysterically. "Mother, don't force me to make a report on you. Outcast and rejected as I am, I will denounce you and move myself out of this stinky house!"

Mrs. Pei began to shiver under the sheets. After a few deep breaths she said, weeping, "Jean-Michel, take me, please. For I can bear no more..."

What the daughter expressed here didn't make sense to the mother, but it made perfect sense to me. To become a Maoist for our generation was like attaining the state of Nirvana for a Buddhist. We might not yet understand the literature of Maoism, but since kindergarten we were taught that the process, the conversion—to enslave our body and soul, to sacrifice what was requested in order to "get there"—was itself the meaning of our lives. The sacrifice meant learning not only to separate ourselves from, but to actually denounce, those we loved most when judgment called. We were also taught to manage the pain that came with such actions. It was called the "true tests." The notion was so powerful that youths throughout the nation became caught up in it. From 1965 to 1969 millions of young people stood out despite their pain and publicly denounced their family members, teachers, and mentors in order to show devotion toward Mao. They were honored.

I understood the importance of being a Maoist. I myself tried desperately to survive the "true tests." I must say that we were not blind in believing in Chairman Mao Tse-tung.
Worshiping him as the savior of China was not crazy. The truth was that without him leading the Communist party and its armies, China would be a sliced melon, swallowed up long ago by foreign powers like Japan, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Russia. The information I brought back from school was confirmed by my father, who was a teacher of Chinese history. The Opium War in 1840 was a good example of how close China came to being destroyed. The incompetent emperor of the Ching dynasty was forced to sign "hundred-year leases" opening coastal provinces and ports for "free trading." This took place after the foreign soldiers burned down Yuan-ming-yuan—the emperor's magnificent palace in Beijing—and the Allied commander pleased himself with a Chinese prostitute on the empress's bed.

The Japanese invasion in 1937 was another good example of thé government's incompetence. It demonstrated what the foreigners were really up to when they talked of "free trading." China was not allowed to say no to their greed. When she did, the "rape" took place. During the Japanese occupation, thirty million Chinese were killed. Just in Nanking alone, the Japanese slaughtered as many as 350,000 people and raped eighty thousand women.

The pictures of heaps of severed heads we were shown as children could not have been more horrifying. In fact there was no need to show them. The memories were recent and fresh. Every family kept its own record of lives lost or damaged. It was Mao who showed China how to stand up to the invaders. It was Mao who saved us from being be
headed, buried alive, bayoneted, raked with machine gun fire, doused with gasoline and burned. No one in China would argue that except my father, who whispered once in a while that the Japanese surrender in 1945 had a lot to do with their defeat in World War II. Besides Mao's effort, the Japanese were pressured to give up China by Stalin's Red Army in Russia. In other words, Mao happened to harvest other people's crops while working on his own. Unfortunately my father's view got him in big trouble. Nevertheless he didn't contradict the fact that Mao was the hero of China. It became natural for people to follow Mao. That was the point of all the education we received at school: to believe in Mao was to believe in China's future. They were the same.

For me it was understandable that Mrs. Pei disagreed with her daughter. Mrs. Pei had been mistreated for marrying a foreigner. But who could easily forget the image of the thousand-year-old imperial palace engulfed in flames? Who could escape the memories of fleeing one's home? Mrs. Pei's experience made her hate Mao. And that was exactly the opposite of where Wild Ginger stood. Wild Ginger couldn't make her mother understand how she felt.

Wild Ginger wanted to be a Maoist, a true Maoist, the one who would save China from disaster. It would be a different kind of Maoist than Hot Pepper's. In my opinion, Hot Pepper took advantage of Maoism and she had no understanding of what being a Maoist meant. Wild Ginger called Hot Pepper a "fake Maoist." I couldn't agree more. Hot Pepper was shouting slogans only to bully her way
around, like a fake Buddhist who not only ate meat but also killed. Wild Ginger believed that one day Hot Pepper would be punished for what she had done to ruin Mao's name.

I sat on a little stool by the stove in Wild Ginger's dark kitchen. Wild Ginger was pouring bleach into a water jar.

"What did your father look like?" I asked.

"I'm thinking about burning his picture. You may take a look at it before I light the match."

Wild Ginger put down the bleach and went behind a cupboard. She reached inside a fuse box and searched. Out she came with a tiny mud-colored box. Dusting off the dirt she opened the lid. Inside was a handful of objects: colored soap wrappers, little glass balls, empty matchboxes, Mao buttons, and a palm-size framed photo of a young couple. The woman, although barely recognizable, was Mrs. Pei. Her slanting eyes were bright and filled with a butterfly smile. The man was handsome. A foreigner. He had curly, light-colored hair, a high nose, and deepset eyes.

"Are you shocked?" asked Wild Ginger.

I nodded and admitted that I had never seen a foreigner before.

"You don't think I look like him, do you?"

"Well, you have his nose."

"Why don't you say I have my mother's eyes? I mean they are almond shaped and slanting. They are one hundred percent Oriental."

"Well, that's true. Except the color of your pupils."

"Well, if there were eye dyes, I would dye them black."

"It doesn't bother me the way they are. I like them."

"Anyway, I consider myself lucky."

"Lucky?"

"My eyes are the only things that make me look Chinese. Imagine the other way around!"

"According to Hot Pepper everything that's non-Chinese is reactionary."

"Someday I will roast that bitch."

"Your mother is beautiful."

"She used to be."

"From the photo, she looked happy with your father."

"I suppose she was happy. It's a shame that she has never recovered from his death."

"Your mother is quite ill."

"She is dying. She wants to die. She has stopped going to the hospital. I am not important to her. She talks about disowning me."

"She was just angry at what you said about your father. I am sure she didn't mean it."

"Maple, she shouldn't have given birth to me."

"How could you say that to your mother? You are being unreasonable, Wild Ginger."

Playing with the photo frame she sighed. "The other day the Red Guards came to rob us. They beat Friendly and broke his left leg."

"Is that why he is limping?"

"Yes. Next time when they come Friendly will be hanged, cooked, and eaten."

"No. They won't do that."

"Oh yes. I heard them talking about it."

The thought chilled me. I was silent.

Wild Ginger sat motionless for a while, and then she slowly slid the photo from the frame and lit a match.

"What are you doing? You aren't burning the picture, are you?"

"Stay where you are."

Squatting down, she put the photo over the flame. I drew in my breath but dared not move. The image of her father curled, turned brown, then black. The flame then ate up her mother. The corners of Wild Ginger's mouth tilted into an ironic smile.

The ashes snowed down on the concrete floor.

"Are you afraid, Wild Ginger?" My voice was thin.

"I can't afford to be afraid." She got up and went to the sink. Unpacking a bag of medicinal herbs, she began to wash and prepare them.