Katherine (3 page)

*   *   *

W
e could not take our eyes from her face. Foreign features, made in America. We became fond of, needy for, then addicted to her laughter. She asked us to read. “Choose anything you feel comfortable with,” she said.

I recited a poem from middle school. “Chairman Mao, Oh, Chairman Mao, /You are the red sun in our hearts . . .” I stopped when I heard her laugh. She apologized, saying that she couldn’t help it. She asked me how I learned my English. I replied that I memorized the sounds by their meaning in Chinese. For example, “the red sun in our hearts” sounded like “big monkey in my shoes” in Chinese. She asked how many people practiced this method. Most of us. She laughed again.

She affected us with such openness. The muscles in our faces began to move like a rippling sea. We began laughing with Katherine,
at her, then at ourselves. This was how she started a revolution in our heads—with her laughter.

Our next assignment was to think of a good Chinese name for our teacher. We tried out all kinds of names. We asked our teacher what she liked in nature, plants or flowers? She said she adored peonies. How bold, I thought. I had secretly read the classic Ming Dynasty play
Peony Pavilion
by Tang Xian-zu and the novel
Story of the West Room
by Wong Fushi, in which the peony was a symbol of a secret garden tryst, a symbol of noble passion and desire. I wondered if Katherine knew that.

*   *   *

W
hen Katherine asked us how much we knew about America, we replied that it was a capitalist country that exploited its people, although by now we were somewhat doubtful of this. As children, we were taught that people in America wore rags and the children were starving. It made us think how fortunate we were to live in China. After all, we were protected by our Communist Party. We were inside the Great Wall.

Katherine asked whether we had any doubts about Communism the same way we had doubts about what we knew of America.

No one came forward to answer her question. Katherine must have understood the fear behind our silence. “All right, no politics,” she said.

I had never had personal contact with a westerner in my life. I had only seen pictures of western people. They appeared threatening to me. “We must learn our enemy’s language in order to fight with him successfully” was how Mao’s teaching went. It was printed on the cover of our textbook and dictionary. How strange then that this formidable enemy was brought in to teach us.

*   *   *

T
he Peony, Katherine, was invading our minds. The danger was that we were enjoying it. Our minds had been longing for such an invasion. Coming from America made her a different type of human being. I wondered what her childhood was like. A world filled with fancy toys or a world of starvation? Begging on the streets for food, like the story we were told about the Little Match Girl, who nearly froze to death on New Year’s Eve? Were her parents capitalists or proletarians? Did they buy her pretty clothes or make her wear rags and force her to work from a very young age?

She was generous in her interactions with us—I could detect no mental scars that would suggest mistreatment. Her skin was smooth—no weather damage; her back was as straight as a ballet dancer’s—no years of heavy labor; her hands were thin and long—evidence of a bourgeois lifestyle. In myself I saw her opposite in every way: the mental scars, the damaged skin, the mark of the past, the rotted mind and chewed-up heart.

Katherine’s sweetness upset me and entertained me at the same time. I wanted to ask her: Do you eat dogs or snakes or silkworms? Do you sleep with cockroaches parked on your nose? Why did you pick China? Do you know that just by standing before us you show us how deformed we are?

*   *   *

W
hen she stepped up to the lecture podium, the drama began. We took her in from head to toe. We watched her silently. Thirty of us. Men and women with straight black hair and brown skin. We wrapped her in our silence. We felt comfortable just watching her. We asked no questions. We let her speak, made her keep talking. In silence we felt in control. We watched her mouth as she said, “Repeat after me please: ‘The arrival of a revolutionary upsurge . . .’”

Her hair in the morning was like shooting fireworks against the
blackboard sky. By noon her hair became a big red blooming chrysanthemum, its tips curling like Chinese hair never could. When she turned to write something on the blackboard, we took the opportunity to enjoy her thin back and wide, elegant shoulders. Her hair hung down about a foot and it spread like wild seaweed.

“Repeat after me.” She paced as she read, holding the textbook in front of her. She came near me. “‘Dead men tell no tales, Comrade Party Secretary.’” Katherine looked up in a curious way, then shook her head with a little laugh. “‘Dead men tell no tales, Comrade Party Secretary.’” I repeated after her. “‘Dead men tell no tales, Comrade Party Secretary,’” the class said in unison. As she read the textbook to us, she opened a new universe.

We heard her but we weren’t listening. “‘When one criticizes the doctrine of trailing behind at a snail’s pace, the importance of the matter is greatly exaggerated . . .’” she reads as we imagine life in America. “‘Intercourse between Communist parties shall be promoted around the world . . .’” I see a spaceship landing on a strange planet—a glass ball contains a man-made city; inside are people, cars, trains, airplanes moving like toys, giant plants of perfect color and shape. “‘Comrades must bear the brunt of the attack of the nonproletarian influence . . . The better one understands the nature of the obstacle, the less difficult one will find it to be . . .’” Reality intrudes on my dream. Here stands Katherine, who has the exact features of the ones we were trained to kill.

*   *   *

O
n the odd days I went to work. I hated my job. The noise of the machines beat through my every nerve. By the end of the day my senses were numb. I sat in a dark corner of the factory. I moved like a machine—pick up a roughly molded piece of plastic, bend to file it smooth, flip it over with my fingers, pass it to my other hand to have it cut and drilled on other machines, soak it in a
container of alcohol and gasoline, pick it up, stick it under an electric brush to be cleaned, throw the finished piece into a bin, then pick up a new one . . . Eight hours a day.

For the first time the day went faster than usual, because I was thinking about my class and my American teacher. I went to a public bath after work so I would be clean for tomorrow’s class.

*   *   *

S
he liked to wear black. A black dress made from a soft fabric, a black T-shirt with a knit skirt, a black silk blouse, black leather boots. She wound a black patterned scarf around her neck. She stood like a peacock, exhibiting her body, inviting us with her gestures, her body’s music and heat. She gave our eyes an indescribable pleasure. As a woman, I envied her. I could hardly stand her.

*   *   *

O
fficially I was a “borrowed worker” from Elephant Fields—a remote labor camp in midwest China—working for the Victory Road Electronics Factory in Shanghai. I held temporary residence status in the city, because my
hu-ko
, my city residency card, was revoked when I was sent to the countryside to work as a permanent peasant years ago. Non-
hu-ko
workers in Shanghai were classed as “borrowed workers,” which meant our future was not secure. Everything depended on opportunity and performance.

When I was eighteen, I was one of the twenty million city youths sent to labor camps to be “reeducated by the peasants,” as Chairman Mao instructed. I was sent to Elephant Fields, a remote area with rocky mountains shaped like elephant ears. The city youths were to pick hard, good-quality stones for industrial and military use. The tools we used were no better than what cavemen used. I worked with dynamite.

I lived in Elephant Fields for eight years. My hair turned gray. My memory of the place was worse than a nightmare. I tried very
hard to block my thoughts, not to look back. I kept telling myself that I did what I had to, there was nothing to be ashamed of. It was a way to survive. I was too young to know better. And I probably wasn’t the only girl . . .

I was haunted at dawn, always at dawn. In the last hour of sleep I would see myself holding a burning stick of dynamite, running through the dry brush, jumping off a cliff, jumping off a speeding tractor, jumping off a tree. I would hear myself scream across the dark, dry land, my breath thick and raspy from the rat poison. I would feel the blood slowly dripping from my nostril, spreading, blooming like a flower on my face, down my neck, a huge red pool on the ground.

*   *   *

E
xperience had taught me how to live with shame. During the winter of 1979 my village chief, the Party boss of Elephant Fields, felt guilty about what he had done to me and offered to make a deal. If I promised him I would forever shut my mouth, he would try to get me back to Shanghai. He worked very hard, made transactions through middlemen, and at last managed to “lend” me to the electronics factory.

I left Elephant Fields without even a suitcase. I didn’t want to take a thing with me, not even my clothes. Anything that could possibly be a reminder of what happened, I discarded.

On the morning of the day I was to leave, the wind was strangely still. No sun. No dynamite. Thick clouds, the same color as the dry land. A giant ant crawled toward me. I stood at the cross-road, waiting for a tractor to pick me up. My thoughts were frozen. I felt as if I had never lived here. I stood still until the ant had crawled up onto the back of my neck and bit me. I caught it in my palm, wished it good luck, and set it down. It crawled up my leg and bit me again. I threw it down and ground it with the
sole of my shoe. I looked at the crushed little body and realized that the ant was the symbol of my life at Elephant Fields. With its death I became the murderer of my past.

*   *   *

“N
ever accept a soft silk sheet for what it is: there might be a lethal weapon hidden underneath”—this was what we learned from the Cultural Revolution. We lost faith in each other. We had been living in spiritual isolation, experiencing the terror of loneliness. We tried to treat this terror the same way we’d treat a mosquito bite—by pretending that it did not exist. I shared my mother’s belief in the power of willful delusion: “The heart’s eye can see a melon as a sesame seed.”

*   *   *

M
y boss at the electronics factory was an ambitious proletarian. He believed that if the products he made were used in the world’s revolution against imperialism, he would be promoted and picked by his Party boss to be a Party congressman. He considered that a great honor and did everything he could toward that goal. One day, while he was reading the
People’s Daily
, he asked me if I knew a foreign language. I asked why. Taking a deep pull on his cigarette, he looked at me from behind his thick glasses and said, “You know, English is the most widely spoken language in the world. If you can learn English and translate my factory’s product catalogue, I’ll try to get you a
hu-ko
—you will be a permanent Shanghai resident.”

I could hardly believe he was giving me this lucky opportunity. I told my boss that although I did not know any English, I was willing to learn if he would grant me permission to attend school. When he said yes, I became so charged with energy that I began a “twenty new words per day” self-study program. I tried to figure out everything by myself with a Chinese-English dictionary. I
forced myself to memorize vocabulary words without knowing how they were pronounced. Then I would go to the library to ask the correct pronunciation and write it down phonetically in Chinese characters. Soon after, I began the one-year accelerated program.

My boss was pleased with my progress. I had begun translating his product catalogue three days after accepting the assignment. Attending school didn’t change my status from “borrowed worker,” but there might be a nibble of chance if I did well. I studied and studied, investing everything in hope.

A
woman my age was supposed to find a husband. I felt hopeless. I didn’t know why. Maybe because of the past. I had no desire to do what was expected of me. Yet deep loneliness made me restless. My heart yearned to reach out but my mind refused.

My brother was engaged to a colleague, a bus conductor. He was waiting for me to move out of the apartment so he could get married and live there with his wife. He would never say this to me, but I knew, I knew what I was supposed to do. After all, I was not the son of the family.

I was expected to make space for my brother. I was to find a man who could provide me with a place to live. Many of my former middle-school classmates had gotten married only because there was a room waiting for them. And this was considered happiness.

I was twenty-nine. I wasn’t happy, but I was at least leading a better life than I did at Elephant Fields.

Closing my eyes, I saw myself riding a piece of slippery watermelon rind—I would go wherever it took me.