China's Son Read online

  As my fury receded into a trickle of dull pain, I tried to digest what Teacher Lan had tried to tell me. There were people out there who were still trying to get me. Why didn't they leave me alone and let me just be like the rest of the kids? Who were they?

  NINE

  In the middle of the semester, a young teacher named Sing organized the yearly elementary school Ping-Pong match for the purpose of qualifying for the commune and eventually the county championship event. He was a decent guy with a head of salt-and-pepper hair.

  I had always admired him for his many talents—calligraphy, basketball, writing, and he could play all kinds of musical instruments.

  Each time he passed me, he greeted me readily. In fact, he was the only teacher who joked with me. One afternoon he came to my class and sat next to me with his arm over my shoulder. “How would you like to participate in the school championship match? I know you're pretty good.”

  “I'm not sure my political background would allow me to do so,” I said uncertainly.

  “I'll take care of it. You just make sure to be there for the game.”

  “Okay.” My heart leapt with joy.

  As far as Ping-Pong was concerned, there was only one other boy who played as well as I. If I wasn't there to challenge him, he would take the title, hands down.

  That evening, I borrowed my brother's paddle and played three games in the match at the school cafeteria, a temporary game room. I spun and struck. Within two hours, I had defeated all the other players. The next night, with Sen, Siang, Mo Gong, and Yi watching from the windows, I beat my enemy, Han, and another opponent to become the champion for our commune. When the results were announced the next day at the morning exercise break, the whole school turned and looked at me. After so many years, I felt once again as though I belonged there. Proudly I waved my hands and bowed my head to their cheers.

  The gratitude I felt for Teacher Sing was beyond words.

  “We'd like to hold a swearing-in ceremony among us five at Mo Gong's tomorrow,” Sen said one day. “What do you think?”

  “You mean sort of like in ancient times, when the outlaws cut their fingers and let the blood drip into their wine and drank it together to become sworn brothers?” I asked excitedly.

  “That's it,” Sen said.

  “And say something like, ‘can't be born on the same day, but would like to die at the same moment.' ” Mo Gong quoted a phrase from a well-known classic about a bunch of outlaws hiding deep in the mountains, who became sworn brothers and fought the establishment.

  “I'm in,” I said. “What do we need to do?”

  “Prepare a banquet with some hard liquor.”

  The next day I went to Mo Gong's house, a two-story place that was totally empty since his parents had taken off again to sell shoes in another county. Siang had bought two lively young ducks from the market with my five yuan, and brought three pounds of pork from home. Yi came up with some vegetables and the noodles, and Sen ventured back home and had us sit under his kitchen window while he passed out some much-needed lard. We all pitched in to buy the liquor and cigarettes.

  During his apprenticeship days, Yi had learned to cook. He was the only one who knew anything about it. I had resumed my usual job of washing the vegetables, picking over scallions and cutting them to match the specifications of the chef. Mo Gong chased the ducks in the backyard, causing the dirt and dust to fly, and Siang sharpened a knife, ready to behead them.

  “Da, I want you to write some rules for us to go by,” Sen said, squatting next to me.

  “Let me think about it,” I said.

  When the food was finally brought to the table, along with chopsticks, spoons, and plates, we couldn't help shaking our heads in surprise. The two ducks, well simmered with garlic, ginger, wine, and Yi's secret soy sauce recipe, lay on a large plate with their skinny heads on one side. Next to them sat a deep pot with steaming pork shoulders, succulent and juicy. A king's feast was about to begin, and our stomachs growled in anticipation.

  It seemed more like a normal, happy family meal than a swearing-in ceremony for a bunch of self-proclaimed outlaws. What civilization had done to us since the time of the kings and dynasties! We sat in order of seniority—Sen, Mo Gong, Yi, Siang, and me—clockwise around a circular wooden table. Sen opened the first bottle of liquor, a locally brewed rice wine that gave out a pungent fragrance of grain, and poured us each a tall glassful.

  Wearing a serious look in those famous cold eyes, Sen declaimed, “Fate has brought us together. From now on we are brothers, not by blood, but by spirit.”

  “What happened to our swearing and all?” Mo Gong asked.

  “That was the ancient thing. There's no need for slitting open our fingers,” Sen said. “But I asked Da to write out a few rules that we all should live by faithfully.”

  “What happens if one of us doesn't follow the rules?”

  “Here.” Sen pounded his big fist on the table. “I'll take care of it.”

  “What if it's you?”

  “The second-in-command would take over and have me punished the same way. Okay, what's the rules, Da?” Sen asked.

  I took out a piece of paper and read solemnly: “ ‘No betrayal. No better friends outside than us. We suffer together, enjoy together. No jealousy. And we are all equal.' ”

  “Does everyone agree?” Sen glanced at each of us intently.

  We nodded.

  “You all meant it, didn't you?” Sen shouted like an older brother.

  We nodded again.

  “This is serious. Anyone who can't live up to these rules, leave this place now,” he shouted. “I don't want traitors in here.”

  The drama seemed to work. Everyone was quiet and thoughtful. For the first time, we all realized that it wasn't just food, drinks, smoking, and having fun together. It was more than that now. We were bound by rules. The moment filled me with strength, courage, and emotion. I felt I had grown a few inches.

  “Now, bottoms up,” Sen said, casting a long look at me in particular. “Da, you gotta do it.”

  “But I've never had anything this strong before,” I protested. “Can I just have a few sips first?”

  “This isn't strong—see?” Sen poured the whole thing down his throat. His face suddenly twisted into a fierce grimace. Then he turned red down to his neck. He opened his mouth as wide as he possibly could and waggled his tongue, fanning his mouth, wildly gasping for air.

  After a long pause, when the liquor apparently had settled, Sen said, “See, I did it.” His voice was raspy like sandpaper. We covered our mouths, trying not to laugh.

  Then everyone did the same thing, clockwise.

  When my turn came, I pinched my nose, closed my eyes, and downed the contents of the tall glass. As I had expected, it burned all the way to wherever it went inside my body. I could picture the flow of liquor, a stream of hot liquid steel, burning every inch of me. The miracle of pure alcohol. I instantly felt dizzy.

  “How does it feel? Here, have some soup,” Sen said, holding the spoon to my mouth. Yi and Mo Gong supported me, and Siang stuck a piece of duck inside my mouth to dispel the bad taste.

  “Like fire.” I coughed a few times, swallowed the soup, and chewed on the duck. My head was throbbing, and things began dancing around me. The whole house seemed to be moving in circles.

  “Now, brothers,” Sen said, “it's time to eat.”

  They dug into the duck. I went for a cigarette.

  “Don't smoke now, it'll be like oil on fire, on top of liquor,” I heard the wise voice of Yi say. But I lit one nonetheless. It felt heavenly.

  For the rest of the banquet, I sat there dazed, watching the others laugh, chat, joke, drink, and smoke. They saved some food for me before we all went to sleep for the rest of the day.

  When I awoke in darkness, my head ached as if a brick had hit it, throbbing with waves of pain each time I turned it. I struck a match and lit a candle and saw my newly sworn brothers snoring like a litter of puppies, huddled in one another's warmth. Sen was drooling on Yi's face and Siang was holding an empty bottle, his legs over Mo Gong's shoulder. I felt hungry and bet my friends would feel the same way. So I warmed up each dish and cleaned up the place, while putting on a kettle of fresh green tea to brew. Then I woke them up; they blinked like it was murder to be woken at this hour.

  “Let's eat. Aren't you hungry?” They nodded, scratching their heads and yawning.

  “First, hot tea to wake you all up, brothers!” I smiled as I served the steaming tea.

  “Ah! I feel a heck of a lot better now with the tea, Da,” Sen said. “Thanks. I'm sorry the liquor knocked you out like that. I didn't know it was strong enough to catch fire off the match. We all got knocked out.”

  “It was so strong my mouth still feels like rubber, and the food tastes like an old rag,” Siang said.

  We couldn't help laughing at ourselves. But laughter wasn't the best thing at this moment. Each movement multiplied the pain attacking our heads and necks.

  “I think they put fire powder in the liquor. It was a fake, Sen.” More laughter. More pain.

  By this time my dad had become quite an acupuncturist. Before Grandpa died, he had had a minor stroke, and Dad, unable to afford an acupuncturist for him, would study books on the ancient art, staying up late every night, sometimes even taking the old classics on Chinese herbal medicine to bed with him. After Grandpa died, Dad began offering free services to close friends and neighbors. Soon his reputation spread. He began to see patients in our home and sometimes even made house calls.

  Under Dad's care, a few patients who had been paralyzed regained their ability to go to the bathroom and eat on their own. As his renown spread, a truck often drove him to treat patients in remote towns. Dad was shy about charging a fee, which would have made him an illegal practitioner. But people brought grain, rice, bananas, fish, shrimp, and all manner of food to repay him for his services. One of the patients even secured a temporary job at the county's canned food factory for one of my sisters.

  Dad was a happier person. Even though he still had to work at a few more labor camps, he was treated differently. At one camp near the Ching Mountain, Mon Hai, a burly man with an unsightly birthmark over his right eye, was the supervising cadre. One evening he sent for Dad to be brought to his cabin. Much to my father's surprise, the cadre offered him a cigarette. Dad bowed humbly. Normally, the campers summoned to Mon Hai's cabin were there to be lectured or humiliated until midnight.

  “I need a favor from you,” Mon Hai said in an unusually low voice, after first closing his door and window.

  “Anything, sir, I am here to be reformed.”

  “No, no, no, please sit down. I wanted you here for a different matter—shall I say, a private matter.” The Communist smiled, revealing his gold-capped front teeth. “My dad fell last night and had a stroke. He is still in a coma and the doctor says he is paralyzed.”

  “I am sorry to hear that.”

  “You know what the doctor also said?” Mon Hai lit a cigarette for my father.

  “What did he say?”

  “That you are the only one in this area who could cure him.”

  “No, no, I'm an amateur. It is purely a hobby, that's all. I did try treatments on my own now-dead father, but I would not call myself a doctor or anything like that. You should really seek other help,” my father mumbled nervously.

  “Are you saying no to me?”

  “I'm not, cadre. You don't understand,” Dad said.

  “Then what is it?” Mon Hai asked. “Money? That's no problem. My brother is the head of a fertilizer factory and he has loads of money.”

  “No, it is not money.” Dad shook his head.

  “I know what it is. You are afraid.”

  Dad remained silent.

  “It's totally understandable. I would be also if I were you, but please don't be. Just try to treat me as if I'm one of your regular patients.”

  Yeah, right. Dad could still feel the pain inflicted on his back where Mon Hai had kicked him for slowing down at another campsite. Mon Hai's father sounded as if he was in critical condition, and if anything happened to him, Dad would be blamed.

  “I really wouldn't feel comfortable, cadre.”

  “Look at me, Doctor, I also have a heart.” The cadre pulled open his shirt for emphasis. “I apologize for what I have done to you.”

  “No, no. There is no need for that.”

  “I shouldn't have kicked you.” The man's eyes turned misty. “I'm sorry. I will make it up to you.”

  Dad was quiet, watching this bear of a man tearing his guts out.

  “Even if I agree to take a look, I wouldn't be able to do so. We are not allowed to leave the campsite.”

  “I'll take care of that.”

  Dad was told to stay in his cabin the next morning while the rest of the campers rolled out of their beds and headed for the chilly mountain to dig some more hills and fill some more valleys. At nine o'clock, a biker came by and picked Dad up, carrying him to Mon Hai's house a few miles away.

  It turned out to be a light stroke. Mon Hai's old man was only sixty-five and in good health. It took Dad about two months to bring him back to where he could walk with only a slight limp.

  At the reform camp, Dad hardly had to touch his farming tools. He had been ordered to stay behind and write confessions, but in fact all he did was read his medical books and be taken to see the patient every day. He was allowed to come home for dinner after dark three times a week. The rest of the time he spent at the cadre's cabin, where Mon Hai would do his drinking and pour out his admiration for Dad. It was there that Dad learned that the good food, liquor, and cigarettes that Mon Hai shared with him all came from the campers, who bribed Mon Hai for lighter work and a guarantee that they would avoid punishment. In one of his drunken states, Mon Hai even revealed that he had occasionally slept with the young wife of a newly branded counterrevolutionary, a camper under his supervision. He further admitted that he slept with the wife at her request because she wanted to ensure that the poor young man would live to see his infant son.

  Dad itched to inflict some pain on that son of a whore and offered Mon Hai the use of his needles to cure his drinking addiction, but he refused.

  One day Mon Hai was suddenly rushed back from the work site where he spent an hour a week on inspection. Two strong young men took turns carrying him on their backs.

  “Chen, come here,” they said to my father. “Mon Hai was hurt.” A rock had rolled down the side of the hill and landed on his waist, bruising him badly before bouncing off into a ditch.

  “Doctor, I think I could use some of those needles you got there,” Mon said, looking up in pain from his bed.

  “I think so too,” Dad replied.

  During the following weeks, Dad gave Mon Hai double the number of treatments necessary. He chose longer, thicker needles and spun them harder, telling Mon that he would improve faster that way. Mon Hai would shake with fear as he watched Dad slowly prepare the needles, wiping them on an alcohol pad. He would squirm in anticipation of the pain until the needles were actually inserted under the skin; then his hysterical and terrifying screams could be heard for miles around.

  Before each session Mon Hai begged for more, and during every session he cursed and rolled in agony. After each of my father's visits, he would shed tears of gratitude. His pain soon disappeared, and Gang Chen openly became known around camp as the Doc.

  Dad was discharged from labor camp early that year and received a glorious report on how his anti-Communist way of thinking had improved. The report was signed in big letters by the now-healthy Mon Hai, who ironically was selected by the people of Yellow Stone as an outstanding member of the Communist party. His picture appeared on a wall outside the commune headquarters, only to be washed off a week later by a cold winter rain.

  TEN

  Zhang Tie Shan, an army recruit from north China, wrote a big zero on his college exam paper accompanied by the following words: “To make revolution, one need not answer above questions.”

  Instantly he became a hero throughout China, epitomizing the true spirit of the Cultural Revolution. School became chaos. Everyone ran around mindlessly, doing nothing. Teachers could do almost nothing to remedy the situation for fear of being branded stinking intellectuals or counterrevolutionaries.

  Our fifth-grade classes were made up of three categories: labor, politics, and self-study. We dug up the playground and turned it into vegetable plots so that young kids could labor under the scorching sun and have empty but healthy minds. We had to bring all the necessary tools to water, weed, and harvest the vegetables, then sell our crop back to the teachers at a discount, using the money to buy more seeds and plant more vegetables.

  In the political science classes, teachers read the newspaper to the students. When we were left to study on our own, the chairs became hurdles. We jumped them and counted the minutes until it was time to go home.

  Every day after class, Dad read me classics that we had buried under the pigsty. In the mornings I learned to play the bamboo flute. Dad said a real scholar should know poetry, chess, calligraphy, and music.

  The flute was the cheapest thing to study. Dad bought me one from the local market. At sunrise every morning, I got up, pulled the skinny bamboo flute from under my pillow, and tiptoed to the backyard and down the steps that led to the Dong Jing River. I'd wash my face with the refreshing water and postpone my morning bowel movement because it gave me more power as I blew the flute. Each day, I broke the silence of the morning in Yellow Stone, standing by the river and playing innocent folk melodies. The sound bounced off the water, crossed the vast green fields, and ended in a lingering echo as it reached the mountains on the horizon. The occasional mooing from the buffalo told me that at least someone was listening.

  One day, Dad came back from a month's stay at a labor camp and rushed to the backyard where I was practicing.