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斷簡殘篇黑崽子《貧民窟里的童年》

芦笛
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加入时间: 2004/02/14
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标题: 斷簡殘篇黑崽子《貧民窟里的童年》 (846 reads) 时间: 2010-1-15 周五, 上午2:04

作者：芦笛在驴鸣镇发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org

再次多謝各位關心。我又發現了幾個軟碟，陸續打撈出了《黑崽子》片段，把比較完整的第二章貼在這裡，諸位看看就知道我那《高玉寶寫書》是何意思了，這第二章讀上去的感覺就是patchy，或曰零碎，我確實是英文文盲，不具備寫書的能力。而且用英文寫太花時間太傷精神，有那功夫，我還不如用中文好好地把這輩子寫出來。但問題是我沒那精力，必須最有意義的利用殘生，而我已經說過了，我自己認為現在在做的就是最有意思的事。

Chapter 2. Childhood in a slum

My life started as segments of pictures. One picture was of a heavy wooden door. Somehow I banged my head against the door and it hurt so much. I was crying loudly while Mummy was hurrying towards me across a huge hall. Another picture was of an endless corridor. Mummy was running after me with some food I hated. Mummy was yelling: "Just one more bite, baby!" when I fell over. Then I cried out very bitterly since it was all Mummy's fault. Yet another picture was of a huge round table with so many fruits on it. To my irritation, I was not allowed to touch them and the adults said something to me which I did not understand except that I had to wait. The most impressive picture, however, was taken late at night (or perhaps just an evening). I suddenly woke up from a sound sleep and saw Mummy standing in front of a strange door. A glow of soft light from inside the door lit her beautiful face. She was sunk deeply in thought and looked somewhat sad. Then she put some glistening things into the door and locked it. It would take two decades for me to see another built-in wardrobe and realize what the mysterious door I saw that night was.

Then, the pieces of the pictures became larger and grew into an interrupted movie. We were moving out of our big house. (I was too young to know that we had to move out, because an army commander wanted to move in.) I liked the moving so much as it was noisy and exciting: wardrobes, desks, lamps, sofas and chairs were everywhere. From among all this mess came the excited screaming of my brother and sister: they were playing hide and seek. Although they refused to let me join them, saying I was too young and good for nothing, I could still jump up and down on the spring mattress, which was tremendous fun but was not allowed when the adults were less occupied. The most thrilling experience, however, was stroking our cat through a sack and hearing her mewing. She was put in there for the move.

My memory became intact in our new house. Although the house was not a third as big as the previous one, it still had five or six rooms. It was in this house that Mother started to work. …..

Father was a frightening figure in my earliest memories. At that time, he still wore a Western business suit with a tie, never smiled and rarely talked to us. One evening he came home and went straight to bed. As Mother took me to her bed (in China, young children sleep with their mothers), however, he suddenly jumped out of his own bed which was opposite ours and started shouting and cursing, waving his fists aimlessly. I started screaming and Mother quickly took me to another room. Next morning I was still frightened, but Mother assured me that Father would be all right now. He was just drunk last night.

"What is 'drunk', Mummy?"

"Too much alcohol, dear. A terrible thing."

"Why should Daddy do a terrible thing?"

"Because he was unhappy. He does not normally do it." She said with a soft sigh. "But this time they say he is a 'Big Tiger' and may send him to laogai."

Only many years later would I understand the meaning of these words. Since most of my life, as well as those of all the Chinese people at that time, was entangled in political campaigns, I will have to make some explanation here.

As incredible as it appears now, the communists, after they had won over the hearts of most Chinese people including my parents, never had faith in their cause. They were continuously haunted by the nightmare that their crushed enemy would miraculously make a counter-attack, seize back power and slaughter them in their millions. Their reaction to this imagined danger was countless political campaigns, which became the Chinese way of life.

In such a campaign, a certain class or group of people would be singled out as targets. The mass media would denounce the prospective enemies and call on people to reveal and struggle with them. A series of meetings would be held at every "work unit" (factories, production groups, schools, shops, enterprises, neighborhood committees, etc) to encourage people to report to the authorities anyone who might be guilty. After the authorities finally decided the list of the victims, mass meetings called "struggle sessions" would be held to disgrace them. The victims would be made to bow or kneel to the participants. Everyone would step forward to give a speech full of obscene accusations. Nobody would be allowed to sit on the fence and the victims' families were ordered to join the struggle and betray their loved ones. The victims would have to confess everything, abuse themselves and beg for mercy. If they did not surrender, the mobs, orchestrated by the organizers, would turn ugly and beatings and torture would often follow.

Throughout the campaign, the victims would be quarantined and their communications with their families cut off. The ordeals would go on for months. Only after the toughest nuts were cracked would the decisions about their fate be made public and put into effect. In the earliest campaigns like the "Suppression of Counter-revolutionaries" or the "Land Reform", millions of victims were summarily shot or beaten to death by mobs. Later it was more probable that the victims were sent to a camp for laogai (reform through forced labor) or laojiao (education through forced labor).

Through these political campaigns, the regime wanted to achieve multiple purposes: to intimidate people in general (or put in a Chinese way, "to frighten the monkey by killing a chicken"); to test people's loyalty and find "undependable elements"; and to make most people stain their hands with the "class enemies"' blood and thus leave them no choice but to share their fate with communists to the end.

The campaign that made my father drunk was called "Five Antis". It was launched in 1953 to teach the national bourgeois (my father's class) a lesson. Ostensibly, the aim of this campaign was to reveal and punish the unlawful capitalists (called by the government "Big Tigers") who were supposedly involved in any of five crimes: evading taxes, bribing officials, fraud, stealing state property and economical espionage. My father was one such Big Tiger. A mass rally had been held in the city stadium with thousands of participants and he had been one of the targets.

He was seized by panic. The taxes that his company had supposedly evaded far exceeded the whole capital of the company. It seemed that suicide was the only solution. Indeed, quite a few of his acquaintances in the business circle had already chosen this road.

But he hung on and bent low. He confessed anything they wanted him to confess, claiming that he was a dirty criminal who only deserved a bullet in the head. However, he begged the great Party to give him another chance so that he could "wash his heart and change his face to be reborn as a new person".

He was not sent to laogai. After months of ordeal, the absurd accusations were quietly dropped. His company was finally declared to be a "basically lawful enterprise" while those who committed suicide were convicted of being "Big Tigers".

Of course, at that time, I did not know anything about this. To me, Mummy was the whole world and I grew up in the loving atmosphere surrounding her. Life meant her smile, her soft talk, the beautiful rhymes and songs she sang to me before I fell asleep and the fascinating stories she told me during the evenings after she came back from her work... The only pity was that I would soon not have much chance to see her. When I was four years old, she had to send me to kindergarten so that she could work full time….. As our family finance went along the downhill track, she started to work harder and harder to support the family and came home later and later in the evenings. Neither was Father at home often. After the "Five Antis" campaign, he took off his Western suit and started wearing a Mao suit like everyone else. When he was at home, he always looked gloomy and troubled, rarely speaking to the kids.

At the age of four, I was a thin, weak and timid boy suffering from rickets and malnutrition. Although my kindergarten was only some eighty yards away from home, it was always a hard trip for me to walk there. During the summer, exposure to the sun would cause sharp headaches and sometimes even make me vomit. During the winter, cold wind would cause nettle rash on my face and hands. But the scariest experience was to walk through the gigantic chickens kept by the local residents. It would take a long while for me to muster enough courage to run past those savage-looking roosters or capons standing on both sides of the narrow road to my kindergarten. They even haunted me in my dreams and many a time I woke up in horror at midnight.

I was also plagued by unhealthy imaginations. One day, I refused to go to the kindergarten and kept crying in protest. So Mummy had to stay home looking after me. She asked me to stay home as she had to go out to the next courtyard to fetch water from a well there. Shortly after she left, I was suddenly gripped by fear. I ran out of the house to the riverside to look for Mummy as somehow I remembered it was the place she told me she had gone to. I failed to find her there and only saw a few boys playing on the riverbank. Somehow I got even more scared and completely lost my senses. I ran crying along the street for about half a mile until a passer-by stopped me and sent me to a policeman who was directing the traffic at a crossroads nearby.

When Mummy came back and found that I was not home, she immediately went to my siblings' schools and dispatched them in different directions to look for me. Finally, it was Mummy who found me standing by the policeman in the centre of the crossroads.

Although I remember this anecdote vividly, I never remember what compelled me to flee from home. Many years later, Mother told me:

"Little Di, you really scared me to death that time. You know what you told me then? You said you had seen many ugly 'American soldiers' in your room! You also said that you had seen many of them rising out of the water in the middle of the river!"

Although I did not have the faintest idea what American soldiers were like, I knew they were devils, monsters and everything a small and unhealthy boy was vaguely afraid of. The Korean War had just ended and the anti-American propaganda was still in full swing. At the age of four, I had already been taught the fundamental communist doctrine -- hatred.

We lived in our new house for less than a year before we had another move. Father was accused of evading tax again and he had to surrender the house to the state as compensation. Before our new house was warmed up, however, it was turned over again for another "tax evasion" case. We stayed in a cheap hotel for a few days, while my father tried to work out how to evade this "evading" business as he was penniless now. He did not have to work long as the Party finally lost its patience. In 1955, a year after we finally settled down in a slum, the government told him to close down his company. He was fired there and then and went home without a cent in his pocket. He had to be supported by his wife for a whole year before he was finally appointed as an accountant in a state-owned enterprise.

In 1954, my family moved into the slum where I would spend my childhood and youth and would not leave until I was married.

Although ours was a big family, I was most close to those whose ages were not too different from mine. They were Lusheng, and Luxiao. The other siblings were too old to be friends. At that time, they were either at universities in other provinces or at high schools.

Lusheng, four years older than me, was the boss of the young kids. She started to be our baby-sitter as early as I could remember. When we were on school holidays, she had to look after all of us, and especially keep an eye on the naughty Luxiao and me. The normal way she kept us quiet was to lead us to a nearby book-renting shop. With the two cents Mother had given her, she would rent a picture book and all of us would read it in turn. After we were all finished, we would exchange it for another book with other children there and read that one for free. If we were lucky, we could get yet another free book and the reading would keep us occupied for half a day.

Luxiao, two years older than me, was a brilliant and handsome boy. Up until my youth, he had been my idol. Unlike his feeble and timid brother, he was strong, bold and extremely naughty. Whilst I was even afraid of chickens, he enjoyed riding pigs which were kept loose on the open ground behind our school by the local residents. He would approach an unsuspecting pig, murmuring something to coax it, then suddenly jump onto its back and hold the bristles tightly. While I was aghast watching the hog running like mad, he would scream in excitement. He enjoyed this kind of sport many a time until one day the hog jumped over a ditch and threw him into the filthy and stinky muddy water.

As my shepherd, Luxiao often led the innocent lamb into big trouble. Once we were playing on the city wall and had an argument with another gang of boys. They dared us to jump off the wall. Encouraged by Luxiao, I, a six-year-old boy, closed my eyes and jumped off the five-yard-high wall. I fainted upon landing. When I came around, his first words gave me tremendous comfort for my sacrifice for the family honor. "Don't tell Mom about this, please, please!" he pleaded desperately. To my great pleasure, I found myself suddenly so important that even he, the powerful shepherd, would need my help sometimes. It would be worth all the pain only to see his occasional weakness, especially because normally he just gave orders and would use his fists to reinforce them were they not carried out.

He often got himself caned by Mother for his naughtiness. The trouble was always the result of a fight with some boy or other in our neighborhood. Once he jumped over a little girl sitting on the ground. Unfortunately, his foot hit her on the head and the girl fell over bursting into tears. When the girl's mother came to our home in the evening, Mother immediately apologized to her profusely, promising to cane Luxiao severely so that he would learn the lesson. However, the lady, well-known for her bad temper, would not let it go so easily.

"You'd better watch your whelp more carefully next time!" She shouted, her saliva splashing and her face scarlet. "My husband is not good-humored and he'll beat your whelp to death if this happens again. Killing a capitalist's son is just like killing a fly and nobody will give a damn! Beware whom you are dealing with! We are working class, not stinky capitalists like you! Try to remember this for your own good!"

That was the first time I saw Mom, the paramount authority in my world, insulted in front of her children by another adult. I was shocked and bewildered. But Mother said nothing. Only after the lady had left, did she silently wipe her eyes. Then she gave Luxiao a terrible caning. She also dictated two sentences to Luxiao and asked him to recite them at least three times a day. They were: "Flee as soon as the princess is in sight. Mom will cane me if I do not keep three zhan (about ten yards) away from her".

The title of "princess" contains more irony than bitterness, for the whole neighborhood was a slum and our working class neighbors were even worse off than us stinky capitalists. Even a bewitched princess would not be banished there.

We lived in two rented rooms in an ancient two-storey house which, together with other shabby houses in the same compound, occupied an area of about 450 square yards accommodating 26 households. Our home was in the deepest of these pigeonholes. To get in, one had to pass through a dark narrow path up to its end. We lived downstairs and there was another family living upstairs. As the upper storey floor was just a single layer of thin planks, we could hear clearly when our overhead neighbor dropped a pin on the floor. We often had an indoor downpour when our overhead neighbor happened to kick over a water jar on their floor. Such indoor downpours would become routine when "wet seasons" came. Many times in the night, we would be woken up by big drops of water and would shout to our sound-asleep neighbor, asking them to collect the rain water which leaked through the sieve-like roof. Then, with the music played by water dripping into containers from upstairs, we would pick up our dreams again.

As we shared side walls with other neighbors, light came through only two windows (one in each room) on the rear wall. Unfortunately, outside the window, one yard away, there was a wall partitioning another courtyard from ours. So there was not much light coming in through the windows. We did not mind this much, because human beings were not plants and could live without light. The only problem was that when you came in from the bright sunshine outside, you would be blind for a few minutes.

The front of our rooms was mainly blocked by another neighbor's room, leaving only a narrow space for us to get in and out. This space also served as our kitchen which could only accommodate a small clay stove and a big urn containing drinking water. We prepared our meals inside the room and only went out to the "kitchen" to cook. When someone came in or out of our rooms, cooking would have to be halted in order to give way to the passer-by.

Our rooms were actually a large room partitioned by a wall of planks. The outer room served as our living room, part of the kitchen and my father's bedroom. A round table in the corner served as the cooking bench and dining table, as well as the desk on which we kids did our homework. In the partition wall, there was a gap formed by a missing plank. Through this "door" we got to the inner room. There were three beds, a wardrobe and a few wooden boxes in it. With all these beds, there was no spare space apart from a narrow path between them. The beds also served as our stores as coal, shoes and other sundries were kept underneath them.

We also used the inner room as our living room. When we received our friends, they would sit on a bed. Sometimes this could be quite embarrassing. Most families then just had hard beds made of planks while ours were shamefully of Western style with spring mattresses. Thus, when my friends came to my home for the first time, the moment their bottoms touched the bed, they would let out a panicked cry before they realized that the bed was not actually collapsing. Then they would spend ten to fifteen minutes studying that damn bed so as to satisfy their curiosity about its structure and reliability. At these moments, I felt so ashamed of our wealth, even though it was past. Indeed, years later, when I was condemned as a "Black Whelp", a classmate of mine indignantly revealed to the class that I was from such a decadent exploiting family that we slept on soft rather than hard beds!

Actually, we were not the only residents of our rooms, since we shared them with rats. They were everywhere underneath the floor. After supper, if there was any food left on the table (which was the normal place to store it as a fridge only existed in my parents' memories), it had to be covered with a heavy bowl. Still, somehow the rats did not seem to have a food crisis as they became bigger, fatter and bolder. One night I was suddenly woken up by a sharp pain in my face, only to find a rat jumping down from my head after it had bitten me. We tried to keep cats but they were inevitably scared away by so many huge rats. We also used poison which worked very efficiently. But this caused the problem of locating the carcasses when they started to stink. This turned out to be a daunting task as our rooms were so crowded. It was very formidable to remove all the jars and cooking utensils from underneath the table and the coal, shoes and other sundries underneath the beds.

We had only one 15-Watt electric bulb in the outer room over the dining table. Under the light we children did our homework in the evening. There was no light in the inner room. Thus, Father was the last to go to bed as the light had to be kept on until everyone in the inner room was in bed. With a glow of light from the next room, we got undressed and went to bed. When we needed to find something in the inner room in the evening, we used a torch. When we used it, we did not press the button continuously but pressed it on and off repeatedly. This was Luxiao's scientific discovery. He claimed that in this way the batteries would work for much longer. However, even though we kept flashing our torch as if it had a faulty connection, the batteries inevitably ran out one day. Then Mother decided that we could not afford more batteries and light was after all not that important. Again, it was resourceful Luxiao who created light for us. He used a hand mirror to reflect the light from the outer room into the inner room. This improvised search light did not help much at night. But it was extremely useful in the daytime when we needed to dig a pair of shoes out of the coal pile. Without my brother's invention, one could see nothing in the darkness underneath the beds.

For our diet, rice was the main food. At a meal, steamed rice was served along with two or three small dishes of vegetables which were for sharing between two adults and four kids. The dishes would never become empty at the end of the meal, as we rarely touched them. Even when we were very young, we knew that times were difficult for our parents, as they had to support all the children. Following Mother, everyone resisted the temptation of the dishes so that the others could have one more bite.

To make a meal was a difficult project with fundamental importance for a Chinese family. Perhaps for this reason, the normal phrase we used to greet friends was not "How are you?" but "Have you eaten?" The cooking project started with shopping. One would have to buy rice, cooking oil, vegetables, meat, coal, wood, and so forth separately from different state-owned shops. Since there was always a long line of customers, shopping was very time-consuming. The most tiring job was to buy rice or coal as we normally bought them once a month. We had to spend half a day waiting in the line, and then carry a hundred pounds of rice on our shoulders or several hundred pounds of coal on a trolley, walking a few hundred yards back home. If it was coal, we had to unload it from the trolley onto the pavement in front of our house and then carry it piece by piece into our rooms. Small pieces of the coal were then pushed in under our beds with a spade and the large pieces piled at a corner of our inner room.

The most difficult job was to buy meat. Although it was rationed like everything else, only the luckiest ones could get hold of the best cuts. When word went around that the meat shop was going to sell ribs, livers or kidneys (about which the Chinese have high opinion concerning their nutritional values), Mother would get up at three or four o'clock in the morning to line up at the shop in the hope of having some luxurious food to improve her children's health. For decades, she quietly did such shopping until the age of 77. In her last shopping trip, she got up at three o'clock in the morning and stood in the line in the icy drizzle until noon. After she finally brought the precious ribs back home, she was unable to cook them as she was running a fever and her legs had gone numb. She took to bed and was ill for a week. After she recovered from the fever, she could not stand on her feet any more. She was permanently paralyzed.

Because of the difficulty in shopping, people were well prepared for any unexpected good luck. Mother always had several string bags in her pocket for unexpected purchases. When we saw a long line anywhere, we would automatically join it first and find out what was being sold later. Once Mother and I went to see a film and we saw a long line in the high street. She immediately joined in the line and asked me to find out what people were trying to buy. I walked along the line towards its head. To my great embarrassment, it led me to a public ladies' room.

After the shopping was done, the next task was to make a fire. According to Marco Polo, it was our ancestors who had discovered coal as a combustion material. Hundreds of years later, we still benefited from the prototype of the stove they had invented. The stove was like a bucket made of clay with grates partitioning it into two chambers. To make a fire, one had to chop wood into fine pieces and lay them in the upper chamber. The wood pieces were then lit with a piece of burning paper and small coal pieces were laid onto the fire. When the fire was set, a fan was used to fan air into the lower chamber through a window in its wall. This was an exquisite craft especially for a young kid. Luxiao often mocked me as I always failed halfway through the process. I would fan either too early so that the wood fire would be put out or too late so that the wood would burn out before the coal was lit.

As our ancestors knew nothing about thermodynamics, the stoves were made such that half the coal would be turned into smoke rather than heat. When more than twenty stoves in our slum, none of them equipped with a chimney, released smoke simultaneously at meal times, the scenery was literally breathtaking. It was much thicker than the worst fog I later saw in England. If any neighbor happened to fry chilli which was a favorite local dish, then you would cough your head off while shedding tears like a fountain.

The worst time for cooking was summer. Although our "kitchen" was sheltered by the roof, there was a big hole in the gutter. When it rained, all the water collected from the whole roof would flow down through the hole to form a spectacular waterfall which landed just beside our stove. If there was a downpour, two persons would be needed to complete the job of cooking: one holding an umbrella for the other who was busy frying vegetables. If some water dropped into a wok full of oil, then your face and hands would be stung by a thousand wasps. Perhaps in order to prevent this, the thoughtful government made sure that we could never fill our woks with oil. For almost three decades, the monthly ration of vegetable oil was 50 grams per head.

We got our drinking water from a public tap which was three hundred yards away on a street corner. One of us carried two buckets with a shoulder pole and waited patiently in a long line. When it was our turn, we threw a two-cent coin into a metal box guarded by a watchful old woman, filled the buckets and carried them home. This process would be repeated three times until the water urn in our "kitchen" was full. It was there that I came to know that not everyone was as honest as us. Once a month, when the metal box was opened and the old woman collected the coins, the whole street would reverberate with her hoarse curse. Then everyone in our community would know that it was the "opening day" and some heartless bastards had thrown in pieces of metal or glass instead of coins.

Mother took care of everyone's clothing. She made all our clothes by herself in her spare time. However, as we could not afford to buy cloth often, most of the time she just mended old clothes. I was always wearing my brother's retired clothes covered all over by so many patches that one could hardly find the original cloth. When I started growing fast in my late teens, my trousers looked like an accordion, as they had been extended quite a few times, each time with a piece of cloth of different age and color. Despite this, we all felt warm and never cold. Mother took great care to ensure that. She also made quilted clothes for winter. The worn-out clothes beyond repair would never be thrown away. They were used to make mops, towels and above all, our shoes.

To make shoes, Mother would cut rags into pieces and glue them with flour jelly layer upon layer against a level wooden board, until the layers of rags became like cardboard. After this stuff dried, she tailored it into the shape of a shoe and covered it with a piece of new cloth. Finally it was sewed onto a piece of rubber cut from a waste lorry tire and became a shoe. With my new shoes on, when I saw some of my friends were barefoot even in late autumn because their mothers were less caring or capable, I would always feel tremendously proud of my mother. I wore these home-made shoes until I was eighteen when Mother bought my first pair of leather shoes.

Our laundry was done by hand by Lusheng before we grew a bit older and washed our clothes ourselves. She started this job when she was 13. I used to help her carry bowls of clothes to and from a river about a mile away where she did the washing. But she would not let me rinse clothes fearing that I might fall into the river.

Originally, there was a small toilet in the courtyard. It had no window and was completely dark if the light was not on. To get in there, one had turn on a switch at the door. However, as the wall and the switch were so damp, one could get an electric shock when touching the switch. I had had to jump high many times before clever Luxiao told me the correct way of handling the tricky switch. The trick was an absolute masterstroke: to turn it on, one should not use one's finger, but its nail. Later in 1958, the omnipotent government decided to take over and look after everything. They closed down all private toilets as they had done with private enterprises and started to run public toilets as they ran peoples' communes or any other trade. Thus, to relieve ourselves, we had to walk more than a hundred yards to a public toilet shared by the whole community. If you happened to see a man running in the street, he might not be so sporty as you would guess, but most probably just had diarrhea. When he finally got there, however, his heart might sink, as quite often there was a long line in the toilet, especially in the rush hours.

In the winter, we took baths in a public bathhouse. We bought the cheapest tickets, got undressed and jumped into the "large pool" full of hot water with forty or fifty naked men in it. In other seasons, we boys went swimming in a pond or a river and cleaned our bodies in the process. But we did this under the highest secrecy, as swimming was strictly forbidden by our parents. On hot days, Mother would check our skin and eyes every evening. If signs suggested that Luxiao and I had swum, she would give us a good caning. Her punishment was based on sound fears: two classmates of mine were drowned.

Actually, we were reasonably well off. Most families in our house had only one room with an area as large as two double beds. Some rooms were like sealed boxes as they had no natural ventilation and illumination and were very damp. The lights had to be kept on even in the daytime. In such a room lived a family of five. All of them had to sleep on their only bed, lying across, not along, the length of the bed. They slept that way for decades and never complained about sores on their necks or backs.

For another example, there was a family living next to a public toilet. In a summer full of thunderstorms, the partition wall got eroded and finally collapsed and thus turned their room into an integral part of the toilet. They lived like that for more than half a year until the busy official finally got the wall rebuilt. Even this was not for their sake but because the residents of the whole community now had to walk miles to another toilet.

Nonetheless, we were never miserable. As in the West, my childhood was carefree and full of joy. Perhaps we were even happier than Western children. We felt sorry for them as they were not so lucky as us to be "brought up soaked in a honey jar". As observed so accurately by Taoists, happiness is just a subjective feeling resulting from comparison.

Our happiness, however, was not entirely based on false comparisons. Actually, there were quite a few better-off families like my father's friends. Unlike him, they kept part of their estates and had good incomes. But this did not bother us. Both Confucians and Taoists have a tendency to idealize and glorify poverty and the communists turned this into a religious faith. Under their rule, wealth was condemned as a crime and evaluation of one's morality was proportionally linked to his poverty.

Thus, I never felt disadvantaged or even ashamed just because I was poor. Even today, living in the West, I still have no regret or self-pity for my childhood. If a time machine could allow me to start my life all over again, I would choose without hesitation to be brought up in our slum, for Mother was there. Like a magician, she turned our slum into a magnificent palace with the touch of her love. For this love, it would be worth all the hardship, humiliation, insults and harassment I went through just to live with her, even if I had known that there was an entirely different world.

Like most Chinese mothers, she never openly expressed her love with such words as "honey", "darling", "sweetheart" (to cater to Western readers, I added a few such words in her conversation in this book). She did not even say "I love you" to us once. She did not have to say it as no one would do this to oneself. The sole purpose of her life was to bring up her children and let them all receive higher education. She hated being illiterate, or as she put it, "to be blind with eyes wide open". It was her lifetime regret and she was determined not to let this be repeated within her family, although she fully understood what kind of sacrifice she had to make to keep her oath.

Education was not free. From university down to kindergarten, one had to pay for everything: tuition, books and food. My father only had a modest salary. To cover all our expenditure with it would be "to put out a fire on a cart full of wood with a cup of water". There were two ways to fill the gap: either to ask the older children to leave university or for Mother to toil herself to her last breath. For Mother, it was a simple matter since the first option never occurred to her.

….

Even so, the income was still not enough. The beginning of a new academic term was always the worst time. When I saw Mother frowning, I would know it was for the tuition fees. Then we kids would sit on the pavement of our street with a few things in front of us: pieces of furniture, brocade, silk, porcelains, etc.

The major undertaking was more clandestine. It was the job of Lusheng and Luxiao, both being much more quick-witted than me and thus suited for the underground activities. The job started in our inner room when our upstairs neighbor was out. Luxiao would use pliers to remove the precious stones from a ring, a brooch, or a bracelet which used to be Mother's jewelry, and threw the stones into the drains or hammered them into powder on a brick. The gold frame would then be hammered into a coarse piece so that nobody could recognize what it had been. Then either he or Lusheng would hold it in his or her pocket, take it to a bank and sell it using a pseudo name. The reincarnation of the jewelry was absolutely necessary, as the bank (like a toilet, it belongs to the government) only bought precious metal by weight. There were no jewelry shops and only a maniac would try to sell it to ask for trouble. For reasons I do not understand even now, a child selling precious metal was less suspicious.

Thus we just kept financially afloat. Finally, in 1956, Big Sister graduated from a famous university in Beijing. The festive air in our slum, however, was soon dispelled by a long letter from her. In that letter, she said that she had long been ashamed of her disgraceful bourgeois family. Had it not been for the money that she needed to finish her studies, she would have long cut off her correspondence. Our family never had and would not have her as a member. Ever since she took the oath when she joined the underground communist youth league before Liberation, she had been regarding her "family" as the class enemy. The only regret she had was that her breaking off from such a family came so late. From now on, we would never hear from her again.

Mother fell ill and took to bed. She remained there for almost a month. For weeks, she lay there weeping silently. After she finally got up, she calmly started her routine again. In the following years, she never mentioned this, though she tried to contact Big Sister and even took a nation-wide trip in 1971 to look for her. But all her efforts were in vain. Finally, in 1982, we received a letter from my sister's husband which informed us of her death. Despite her loyalty, the Party never trusted her and she died of an undiagnosed disease quite miserably. When Luxiao, who represented the whole family attending her funeral in Beijing, came back and reported to us about his mission, Mother was silent for a long while. Then she said: "Poor girl. She should have contacted us long ago. But it was not her fault..."

As it turned out, this was not the only blow Mother would receive. The following years would see her dream being shattered piece by piece. She would come to realize that it was not a simple matter of her willpower to have her every child receive higher education.

Despite her toil, Mother was never too busy for us. After school, we would go to her workshop to see her. We sat on the floor in her workshop, talking to her about everything that had happened in our lives until she urged us repeatedly to leave her, go home and finish our homework.

Sunday was the most exciting day if Mother was not working. She had so many stories in her memory: stories from her own life, from local opera and folk tales. Sometimes we went to the cinema with her, and interpreted for her as she did not understand Mandarin. We even went to watch local opera a few times as Mother had been a great fan before "Liberation". She would tell us the local stars' names even though their faces were painted with grotesque colors. She also took us to the zoo to see the first tiger and the first lion arriving there while enjoying our delicious ice lollies.

Alternatively, we would go to another park and rent a boat. After Luxiao and I rowed it for a while, Mother wanted to have a go herself. Then she observed with innocent surprise: "Strange. I never thought water was this hard!" We had such a good laugh that we almost capsized our little boat.

She also took us to Lotus Mountain, a famous local scenic spot. On such occasions, she would tell us how to appreciate the different green colors of the forest, the ever-changing color of the sea, the funny figures formed by clouds, the pearls rolling on leaves of water-lilies after a shower, and the purple profiles of remote mountains against the setting sun... Then she would become quiet for a long while before she finally let out a contented sigh and said: "Isn't it wonderful?"

作者：芦笛在驴鸣镇发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org

上一次由芦笛于2010-1-15 周五, 上午3:02修改，总共修改了3次

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