Katherine (2 page)

Katherine said the first thing she would like to know about us was what it was like to grow up during the Cultural Revolution. She said the words emotionally. It made us feel strange because we were taught to despise emotion. We were taught only to say, “I love you, Chairman Mao.” Not “I love you, Mama.” Never “I love you, Papa.” The word “passion” in our dictionary meant devotion and loyalty toward Communism. Emotion was considered poisonous. Since we lost our faith in mankind, our minds had become deserts.

How were we to tell our western teacher that we refused to face what we had done? How could we make her understand that we’d been trying to forget that we had denounced others, fought, and murdered? We said, “It was not our fault.” We said that phrase in one voice. We shouted, “Not guilty.” The Party said that it was not Mao’s fault either, it was someone else’s, some lowlife, some whore like Madam Mao, Jiang Ching. She had made our lives miserable. Now that she had been sentenced to death, we would be untangled from her web. We were on our way to great happiness again. How could we explain this nonsense to Katherine?

We could feel the sickness course through our paralyzed bodies. Yet we had to continue to breathe. The Communist struggle was breaking down.
Bin-bai-ru-shan-dao
—Our defeated troops collapsed like a mountain in an earthquake. We tried to build a new life, but all we knew of the world was Russia, Albania, and North Korea, countries that were once our comrades-in-arms. We used to think that we existed only to eliminate them, but all of a sudden we were to be partners with the capitalists. On TV our new leaders wore western suits instead of Mao jackets. The events on TV looked
like cartoons, but no one wanted to go to jail, so no one asked questions.

Our newspapers still proclaimed that the globe would not spin without China. “Another good example of a starving person who slaps his face until it swells to pass himself off as well fed,” my father would say as he sat on the chamber pot trying to take a hard shit. “The fact is either China opens its doors or the imperialists will push their way in. Period.”

“Shut your trap!” my mother said, chopping long beans in the kitchen.

Lying on my bed, I thought about Katherine, the foreigner, one of those imperialists I was taught to shoot.

*   *   *

T
he East Sea Foreign Language Institute was on the west side of Shanghai, a forty-five-minute bicycle ride from where I lived. The school, established in the great socialist style, was to serve the working class. The Party’s Central Bureau required that a portion of the student body be actual workers, peasants, and soldiers.

I was twenty-nine years old in 1982, enrolled in a special work-study English program. Odd days I went to school; even days I worked on the assembly line at the Victory Road Electronics Factory. I earned forty yuan—about five American dollars—a month. The factory employed five hundred workers. We had to wear surgical masks because the air was so polluted. We worked with a toxic chemical solution called “banana water.” The government gave us milk coupons as compensation.

*   *   *

I
was living again in Shanghai, my hometown, yet I felt homeless. My parents, my brother, and I shared a two-room apartment on Forest Road in the center of the city. We didn’t have much to say
to each other. We left the house in the morning and returned in the evening like ghosts.

My mother would prepare dinner for us. She would try to cook with as little peanut oil as possible, but still we would run out by the middle of the month. She and my father would fight about how to use peanut oil economically.

My father called himself an ex–shop clerk. In fact, he was an ex-convict. It took the government twenty years to declare him innocent. He didn’t get along with anyone and was sick of everything these days. He would either pretend to be blind or deaf, or he would throw a temper tantrum. When he was angry, he would throw cups or shoes at me and my brother. “Go ahead, hit your children!” my mother would yell as she dragged us away from my father. “Kill them—save the government a couple of bullets!”

Sometimes at dinner my mother would try to get my brother to talk and would ask him what had happened on the road that day. My brother was a thirty-four-year-old bus driver. “I wish I had the courage to commit suicide,” he’d reply. Or, “I wish I’d run over that fat-assed policeman this morning.” Mother would say, “Oh, thank you, Buddha of the Southern Mountain, for another damn good day!” Our father would hiss, “Animals!” Mostly, though, we watched the tips of our chopsticks as we ate.

I pitied my father. He had intestinal cancer. Half his guts had been removed and replaced with plastic tubes. The radiation made him bald. I had a hard time living with him; still, I could not imagine life without him.

My brother and I would wash the dishes and then quickly find an excuse to leave. Once out the door, we would go our separate ways. I never knew where he went and never asked because I didn’t want to tell him where I was going. Actually I never knew where
I would go. I usually wandered around the streets aimlessly. I would watch people move around the city, feeling numb and purposeless.

Shanghai had a population of fourteen million, a monstrous boiling pot of human dumplings. The streets were crowded every hour of the day. Many were people like me with no room of their own. But others were people who came from faraway villages to look for work to raise enough money to buy fake city residency papers. When they ran out of money, they might be forced to sell blood or children or themselves to survive. Shanghai was a place where desperate people came to risk their lives.

The sweaty smell of a crowd, this is the smell of Shanghai. Walking on the main streets, we had no choice but to rub against each other. This Shanghai was Mao’s creation. It represented his ideal China—“power in numbers.” Our parents responded to Mao’s call to make China invincible and so we were conceived. Because of my mother’s poor health, her third and fourth babies didn’t make it. My mother was guilty of not being a “pregnant activist.”

Since kindergarten I understood that I was one drop in the ocean; I was one of the billions. I grew up learning to walk like a weasel, zigzagging through the forest of thighs on the streets. I wouldn’t apologize if I hit others accidentally with the spikes of my umbrella on rainy days; if I had to say “Pardon me” each time, I wouldn’t be able to get through the streets at all. Besides, no one ever apologized. People were used to this.

*   *   *

N
ineteen eighty-two was a year depression swam through the veins of the nation. “Like a strong arrow at the end of its strength” is how my mother described the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. “Can’t change
feng-shui
, the course of fate.” I sensed that she said it with some relief. She called herself a veteran of the war of
living. She said she was ready to surrender. I looked at her and thought that giving up was probably a good idea. What else was there for her to do? She was fifty-four years old and had the face of a bitter melon, deeply wrinkled and drawn. My father too. They looked very, very tired.

The roads were jammed with buses and bicycle riders, waves of pedestrians and traffic police. Everyone yelling like so many dogs barking. After a while I wouldn’t hear a thing. The crowd would flow past my eyes like a silent film. Then I would flow with them, feeling weightless, in a washed-out light.

I would stay out until the deepest dark of night, my shoes covered in dust. Thinking about the future depressed me. I was a member of the “stuck” generation: made old by our past, yet too young to surrender to fatalism. After years of devotion to Communism, I am left only with these facts: my home is still as small as a pig shed, the bamboo beds still creak, the chamber pot still stinks, the lines at the markets are still long. Yesterday’s reactionaries are still alive; some of them live right next door. They smile at me now—I who used to shout that they should be fried alive and eaten crispy when I was a child wearing a Little Red Guard’s armband. Their wrinkled lips whisper in one vicious voice, “Teeth that take root in the land of bitter hearts will grow up to bite the enemy to death.” I fear them now.

The map of the East used to be covered with red dots, but now it looks like the webbed, bloody spit of a TB patient. Our old man, the great Chairman Mao, laid out like an ancient mummy in the memorial hall, hiding forever under a crystal tube, took every explanation with him. It was still called the Communist Party and Mao’s portrait still hung on the front wall of the Heavenly Peace Gate at Tiananmen Square. But what happened?

“Zebra Wong—Mao’s Good Child” was written on the award
certificate I won in grade school. I was seven years old and so proud. Tears came to my eyes every morning when I prayed for a long, long life to Chairman Mao.

As a teenager, my greatest wish was to die for him. All the children at school wanted to do the same. We hoped that we would be given the chance, whether it was in Viet Nam in battle against the USA, or on the Soviet border absorbing machine-gun fire in our hot-blooded chests, or even on the street saving a child from getting hit by a bus. Anything. We were willing to do anything to honor Mao.

Sixteen years after the revolution we had to ask ourselves why, when we had worked so hard, so happily, were we now so miserable?

We resented what Communism had done to our lives, but we couldn’t escape Mao. We couldn’t escape his myth. The only truth we knew was that he had created us. We were his spiritual offspring; we carried his genes. The blood that pumped through the chambers of our hearts was his blood. Our brains were stuffed with his thoughts. Although we were furious with our inheritance, we couldn’t change the fact that we would always be his children.

My generation had become disillusioned with the government. Yesterday’s glory and honor only brought us embarrassment in today’s capitalistic world. We did not have a proper education. The Chinese we wrote read like Mao quotations, the characters we printed looked crabbed and ugly. But how could we forget the thousands of bottles of black ink we used to make posters from Mao’s Little Red Book? Our entire youth was written across these posters.

My education from age seven to eighteen was spent learning to be an honest Communist. We worshiped Mao and his teachings. He was like Buddha—we could not expect to understand everything
immediately. We believed that if we spent a lifetime studying, we would have a total awakening by the end.

We waited patiently until Mao died on September 9, 1976, only to discover that the pictures blurred with passing time, that the ink on the posters dripped with the wash of each year’s rain, that the paper peeled off and was blown away by the wind, that our youth had faded without a trace. We “awakened” with horror, and our wounded souls screamed in devastation. How am I to explain what I have become?

*   *   *

A
Chinese saying goes, “If the father is a rat, the son will only know how to dig holes.”

We discovered that we were brought up to be double-dealers and we couldn’t deny such truths any longer. We learned the art of survival by fighting the war. We learned to distrust; we acted like heartless robots, our souls wrapped in darkness—we asked no questions. We convinced ourselves that tears were only the pee of naughty monkeys.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was pronounced officially “ended” in 1980. I was now a former revolutionary, a status shared by millions.

Chairman Mao had described himself as a servant of the people, but he was just another emperor. For twenty-seven years he played with our minds. Our heads were jars of Maoist pork marinating in five-thousand-year-old feudalist soy sauce. The spoiled mixture produced generations of smelly rotten thoughts. The thoughts multiplied like bacteria.

Since 1976 we had been singing an elegy for Chairman Mao; now we were singing for our own vanished souls. White elegiac couplets were fluttering in the east wind, covering the entire sky
of the Middle Kingdom. The tears of sad ghosts rained down and salted the land, desiccating the roots of spring.

It was at this moment in history, one day in April 1982, that the pink peonies opened their tender lips to kiss the night dew, that grass-green leaves stretched their little hands to touch the soft spring breeze, that she came to us from America.

*   *   *

S
he was a different animal. Katherine was allowed by the school authorities to behave as she pleased because she was not Chinese. Everyone was watching her. To us she was America. Since 1980 the school had invited a group of foreign scholars to teach, but most of them were old ladies and gentlemen. They didn’t talk to the students outside of the classroom—they knew the rules. But not Katherine. She was a newcomer. I wondered how she even got herself accepted by the Chinese authorities. She wrapped herself in vermilion. Her red lipstick made us uneasy. Like an evening star, she appeared quietly in our lives, in complete harmony, and before we realized it, she was installed above our heads. The curtain of night had descended. The sound of humans faded. Air became soft as silk. Lying in my bed at night, I would think about Katherine and her red lipstick. The auburn-haired, lynx-eyed, snake-bodied, beautiful foreign devil.

*   *   *

S
he pronounced her name twice for us. Katherine something, Katherine Holy-something. It sounded like “good luck” in Chinese. Katherine Good-luck. It didn’t matter what her last name was—Chinese never bothered with names that exceeded three syllables. We would just try to use the first three syllables: Kan-si-ren.

Frustrated, she asked the class to translate her name according to how it sounded in Chinese. We smiled in shyness. We wouldn’t
tell her. But she wouldn’t give in. Someone said in a small voice that her name sounded like “Kill-a-dead-person.”

Katherine laughed until tears came to her eyes. Such a laugh. A wholehearted laugh, a burst of laughter. It surprised us. No one laughed this way in China. Our hearts beat with strange excitement.

She said the problem was that we did not pronounce her name correctly. The “th” sound in her name should not be pronounced “tsi.” We tried hard. Some of my classmates had been studying English for years; they were taught by the same teachers who used to teach Russian. Katherine couldn’t understand what they were saying. Finally someone made her understand that we had no “th” sound in our language. “But you should learn to do it,” she said. “Because I, your teacher, do not like to be called Kill-a-dead-person!”