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CHAPTER 1

THE OLDER GENERATION

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I KNOW LITTLE ABOUT MY GRANDPARENTS. THEY LIVED IN the countryside in Shandong Province, which runs along the centre of the east coast of China, and died early, except for my father's mother, who died in 1974 at age eighty-two. She came to visit our Beijing home twice, once in 1961 and again in 1962. That was all I saw of her.

The first time we met she was sixty-nine. Her teeth were gone, her mouth shrivelled, and her hair silver-grey. She was a small woman, five-foot- one and weighing no more than ninety pounds, with delicate features and fair skin. She wore her hair in a bun at the nape, and her attire was that of a typical countrywoman in the old days: her body was deeply hidden in a loose, dark- coloured Chinese jacket buttoned at the side, and she wore loose, black slacks string-tied at the bottom even on the hottest summer day. Her bound feet were packed in many layers of white fabric and fitted into a special pair of triangular-shaped shoes. In old China women's feet were bound to reduce their length. Before a young girl's feet were grown all her toes except the big one were bent under the sole and her insteps were folded. Her feet were then swathed tightly with long cotton bands to keep them in that position. For months she had to endure the pain as she walked. The deformation then became permanent and the pain diminished. A woman with natural, "large" feet was considered ugly, while a woman with a pair of three-inch golden lotuses was considered beautiful. Although not quite the ideal three inches, Grandma's feet didn't miss it by far.

Everything about Grandma seemed odd, not just her appearance. When I asked what her name was she said: "Fan Shi," which means "maiden name Fan." I had to think for a while before I understood. In old China all married women were referred to that way — Zhang Shi, Li Shi, or whatever Shi. I had only read names like that in novels. We were now in the sixties, some ten years after Liberation. Grandma couldn't be so old-fashioned as to keep using that kind of name. "Maybe she has two names," I thought. I asked again: "What is your name? Your own name?" She repeated "Fan Shi." Then, seeing my still-incredulous look, she asked for paper and pencil. I took her to the writing-table where they were. She sat down and, with much ado, drew two barely recognizable characters in extra-large size — Fan Shi. It was her only name.

Every morning before getting up Grandma sat on the bed, combed her hair, made the bun at the nape, and then patiently wound the long, long strips of cotton tightly around her feet. The winding was essential to keep her bound feet in shape. Some days the ritual was completed smoothly. Other days it wasn't, and she would untie the binding and begin again and again until it was absolutely comfortable.

In those days Grandma's style of clothing and triangular shoes were available in department stores. When my parents went shopping for her, Grandma would go along to make sure that everything fit. She couldn't keep up but didn't want us to wait for her, so inevitably she trailed way, way behind. I joined them on a couple of these outings and saw how she walked, splay-footed, in tiny steps, hurriedly moving her legs at almost a run. After a few hundred feet, she would become exhausted and have to find somewhere to sit down and rest.

A Chinese who was lucky enough to visit Beijing never missed a chance to see its many historical sights. Grandma came twice, each time for more than two weeks, but she never saw anything. Whenever my parents proposed sightseeing, she would say she wasn't interested. It was too tiring.

My father, Houren, was born in 1917 in a village in Qufu County, Shandong Province, the home of Confucius. Father seldom talked about his birthplace and never took us back to his home. The Communists didn't think very highly of Confucius because of his feudalist doctrines — his belief, for example, that sons should obey fathers, wives should obey husbands, and everyone should obey the emperor — and Father was a Communist. Whenever I filled out a form, however, I always wrote "Qufu" under "Native Place" (one's father's home town) with pride, as if I were related to the great saint by sharing his home town.

Father was his parents' last child, and he was much younger than his two older brothers. Smart and good-looking, with bright, piercing eyes, a straight nose, and a nicely shaped mouth, he was the apple of the family eye. They weren't rich, but it was decided that he should go to school so he could have a brighter future. Everyone — his parents, his two brothers, and their wives — was willing to work in the fields to support him.

In the 1920s getting to school in the countryside was not easy. It was miles from Father's home to the school, and he had to cross a swift river with no bridge over it. When he was too small to ford the river by himself, the task of carrying him over fell to his second sister-in-law. He never forgot this. More than forty years later, one day in the seventies, I walked into my parents' bedroom and saw Father searching the drawers of their chest. He was wearing one of his usual suits, navy-blue cotton with a high Mao-style collar. Both the top buttons on the suit and the white shirt inside were open.

"What are you looking for?" I asked.

"I'm looking for the last letter from Peiquan," he answered. Peiquan was the eldest son of this sister-in-law. Several times recently Peiquan had asked my parents for money.

"He's a pain," I said. "Why don't you ignore him? Why don't you ignore them all, now that my second uncle is dead?"

"What do you know about them?" he said sharply. "I wouldn't have got through school if it weren't for my second sister-in-law! Many times in summer and winter, in rain and snow, she waded through the river carrying me on her back. She's like my second mother."

I stood there stupefied. Father was a reserved person, and he almost never talked about himself. This was the first time he had ever told me anything detailed about his childhood and his relatives.

"Since your second uncle died, I've sent her money from time to time." Father put the pile of letters in his hand back into the drawer and continued in a softer tone. "Not long ago, when I was in Nanjing for business, I went to visit her and left her more money. I really want her to live well in her old age. Unfortunately, she never spent the money on herself. She gave it away to her children," he sighed.

Father was a high-ranking officer. In the Chinese administrative system there were twenty-six ranks. Ranks one to thirteen were classified as high- level, fourteen to seventeen were middle-level, and the rest were low-level. Father was in rank eleven. He started his revolutionary career in 1937 and became a Communist Party member in 1938.1 always marvelled at the force that drove him through the dangerous years, and I used to pester him to tell his revolutionary stories, expecting to hear earth-shaking plots. But he rarely talked.

"What do you want me to say?" he would ask.

"Tell me why you joined the revolution in the beginning."

"To beat the Japanese devils," he replied.

During the Japanese invasion in the Second World War, Chiang Kaishek's ruling party, the Kuomintang, had a policy of non-resistance, which was very unpopular. Maybe the Chinese weapons weren't powerful and the Chinese troops weren't well trained, and maybe we wouldn't win, but most Chinese thought we ought to fight — better to die than to become a slave without a country. In contrast, the Communist Party was determined to fight the Japanese to the end. "Only the Communist Party can save China" became the common view among students. Many people joined the revolution then without knowing what Marxism was, as did my father, who was studying in a teacher's college at the time. He became a Communist afterwards.

In the twelve years from 1937 to 1949, Father worked underground for the party, sometimes as a teacher in a village, sometimes as a grocery store owner in another small town. He changed his name frequently. Right before Liberation he was called Zhu Yun, which means Red Clouds.

My mother, Xiutian, was also from a peasant family in Shandong Province. Her village was in a different county from my father's. In Mother's youth the tradition of binding feet was still in force in the countryside. But Mother didn't want her feet bound. No matter what her parents said — that she would grow up ugly, that no man would marry her — she wouldn't allow them to touch her feet. "It isn't up to you!" her mother said, then pushed her down on the bed, grabbed her feet, and bound them. Mother couldn't stop that, but whenever she was alone tending cows on the hill, she loosened the bindings to release her feet. Before going home, she would wrap them up again just tightly enough to pull the wool over her parents' eyes. Her feet never became as small as they should have. In early 1945 the Communist Party liberated her village. All young women were called on to abandon foot- binding, and Mother's feet finally went free.

Mother wore normal shoes and walked like a normal person. But I had seen her feet and the legacy of the binding when she washed them in a basin. Her insteps were higher than normal, and only her two big toes could stretch out naturally. "Was it painful when your feet were bound?" I once asked. "How can it not be? Each step was a heart-stopping agony!" were her exact words.

Father met Mother while he was working in her village. She wasn't a stunning beauty. Her face was broad, and her eyebrows drooped and thinned at the end, but she did have large eyes and a fair complexion. The real thing that attracted Father to her, however, was her revolutionary fervour.

Mother's family was lower middle class. They didn't have enough land to live on and had to sell their labour. When the Communists liberated her village, she learned that the revolution was to benefit the poor people and she was naturally in favour. She became active in revolutionary work to support the front where the Communists were battling the Kuomintang. She sewed shoes and clothes for the soldiers, like many other women in the liberated areas. To celebrate each Communist victory, she joined the team that performed Yang Ge, a simple dance popular in northern China, in which the dancers hold up the ends of the wide red sashes that bind their waists while twisting their hips and performing certain steps. "You don't know how well your mother twisted Yang Ge!" I heard Father say several times. Mother always blushed and told him to be quiet.

My parents got married in 1945. Soon after that the two of them left home to live and work in the "enemy-occupied regions." "I never got one good night's sleep in the days we were in the underground," Mother used to tell me She was not as reticent as Father and didn't mind reminiscing about their earlier days in the revolution. "We never knew when the devil [the Kuomintang forces] would find out where we were staying and attack. Often I was awakened by a guard shouting, 'The devil is coming, quick, get up!' I jumped up, picked up my small package, and ran. The package contained all our possessions. We had no home, no furniture, no trunks, only a little clothing. Bombs and bullets flew around us, but I wasn't afraid. The worst was to die, and we were all prepared to do so any moment."

Every time the western New Year or Chinese New Year holidays approached, groups of children would begin setting off firecrackers in the streets. I hated the sudden explosions and always tried to avoid them, even if it meant taking a longer route. But Mother marched right through the crowds of boys lighting firecrackers without blinking. "Aren't you afraid?" I asked her. "No. I've heard too much bombing and shooting. This is nothing!"

She also liked to talk about an unfortunate older brother of mine who didn't survive the war: "He was a big, well-built boy who ate a lot, a good boy who never gave us any trouble. 'Mama, mama,' he'd call me sweetly. Your father and I should never have taken him with us in that environment. One day he became sick with pneumonia. His little face was crimson from fever, his windpipe blocked by phlegm, and his breath rasped. Although our team had a nurse, we had little medicine. There was nothing we could do but watch him suffer and unconsciously grasp the air with his hands. Poor child. In a couple of days, he was gone."

CHILDHOOD IN SHANDONG PROVINCE

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IN 1949 THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA WAS BORN. MY parents became "cadres," or civil servants, in the new government. In China people are divided into workers, peasants, soldiers, students, merchants, and cadres. White-collar workers, administrators, civil servants, teachers, and engineers are all classified as cadres.

At the beginning of the Communist regime civil servants received no salaries, but were provided with the necessities of life under a special distribution system. When a new child was born, the family would get an increase in supplies. In a way it was as if all the children were supported by the government. This helped to stimulate a higher birth rate for several years. My parents had five children, two girls and three boys.

My older sister Aihua, which means Loving China, was born at the end of 1945 during the civil war. For her sake and their own, my parents entrusted her to a peasant family. There must have been some arrangement between my parents and this family, but I don't know what it was. Quite a number of revolutionaries did the same thing. Some told the peasants that the arrangement was only temporary; some said they were giving up their children permanently. The revolutionaries had little choice at the time. After Liberation, however, when they assumed power, many went to take their children back.

My mother reclaimed Aihua after compensating the peasant family with a sum of money. At first the peasants didn't want to let Aihua go because they had grown very fond of her. But under Mother's persistence they took the money and gave their permission. When Mother approached Aihua, she ran to the peasants, clung to them, and started to cry. To her, the peasants were her parents. Who was this strange woman? "Don't be silly. It's for your own good!" Mother plucked Aihua free and put her on the back of a donkey. Ignoring her kicking and blubbering, the little animal bore her off. Aihua's homecoming was not a happy one. For many years to come she didn't accept our parents.

As a general rule in China, the older the child, the shorter he or she is. Aihua was the eldest and shortest, only five-foot-one as an adult. Like my mother, Aihua was of medium weight and a bit short-legged. But she had a beautiful round face, a nice mouth, and large bright eyes. She always wore her hair in two braids at the back.

While Aihua was the problem child in my family, my older brother, Xinhua, was the model. He was born before the Republic's birthday, hence his name — New China. In early 1958, when we lived in Jining City, a small city in the south of Shandong Province, two cadres I had never seen before came to our home one evening to talk with my parents. It turned out that Xinhua, eight years old at the time, had done a good deed that brought honour to the family. He found a purse on the street that contained eighty yuan, a large sum in those days, took the purse to the police, and helped them to find its owner. The two cadres were from the city municipality and they had come to my parents to praise Xinhua and arrange for him to be received by the mayor at a meeting of all primary school students in the city. Soon all the children in Jining knew Xinhua's name. For a while, when I walked down the street I kept my eyes peeled for lost items, but to no avail.

Not only was Xinhua an honest child, but he also had a talent for making speeches, attracting people to him, and getting along well with them. He was a leader all his life, starting in primary school. No wonder my father favoured him. In Xinhua, Father saw his successor.

I was born February 16, 1951. My name, Zhenhua, means Vitalizing China and is rather a common one for boys. In old China girls were often named after flowers or jewellery, but my revolutionary parents weren't about to follow the old traditions. In their eyes, boys and girls were born equal and should all be raised to be revolutionaries and patriots.

I was an ordinary-looking girl. Looking at myself in the mirror, I sometimes felt my face was a bit too wide, my eyebrows needed a bit of thickening at the ends, and my eyes could have been larger. But other times I felt pleased with my appearance — at least my smile was nice.

According to my brothers and sister, I was my mother's favourite because I was "clever" and had a "sweet tongue." I am not sure about this, but I do remember when I was about six Mother often took me, and me alone, to work with her. During her breaks she would feed me fruit juices or other treats.

The elder of my younger brothers, Weihua, or Defending China, was born in February 1952, during the Korean War. Most Chinese supported the government when it sent troops across the Yalu River. The slogan "Fight the Americans and Help the Koreans, Protect Our Homes and Defend Our Country" was seen everywhere and seemed right. US imperialism was overrunning our neighbour before our front gate. Would we be next?

Weihua had a distinctive mole below the centre of his eyebrows. Auntie Wang, a middle-aged countrywoman who was our nanny from 1954 to 1959, used to say that it would have been a very auspicious thing had the mole been just a bit higher. As it was, Weihua's fortunes were in no way exceptional. He didn't talk much and didn't attract too much attention. Of the five children Weihua remained the most anonymous.

My youngest brother Jianhua, or Building China, was born in the peaceful times of 1954. My parents thought that from that time on the main task facing the Chinese was to build China. Jianhua was the tallest and best looking of us all, blessed with both of my parents' good points. He had long legs, wide shoulders, a narrow waist, and big, wide, and bright eyes. If his eyebrows were only a little thicker, I would declare him perfect in looks.

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Excerpted from "Red Flower Of China"
by .
Copyright © 1992 Zhai Zhenhua.
Excerpted by permission of Soho Press, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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