China's Son

I was born in southern China in 1962, in the tiny town of Yellow Stone. They called it the Year of Great Starvation. Chairman Mao had had a parting of the ways with the Soviets, and now they wanted all their loans repaid or there would be blood, a lot of it.

Mao panicked. He ordered his citizens to cut down on meals and be hungry heroes so he could repay the loans. The superstitious citizens of Yellow Stone still saw the starving ghosts of those who had died during that year chasing around and sobbing for food on the eve of the spring TombSweeping Festival.

That year also saw a forbidding drought that made fields throughout China crack like wax. For the first time, the folks of Yellow Stone saw the bottom of the Dong Jing River. Rice plants turned yellow and withered young.

Dad wanted to give me the name Han, which means “drought.” But that would have been like naming a boy in
Hiroshima Atom Bomb. And since the Chinese believe that their names dictate their fate, I would have probably ended up digging ditches, searching for water in some wasteland. So Dad named me Da, which means “prosperity.”

The unfortunate year of my birth left a permanent flaw in my character: I was always hungry. I yearned for food. I could talk, think, and dream about it forever. As an infant, I ate with a large, adult spoon. I would open wide while they shoveled in the porridge. My grandmother said she had never seen an easier baby to feed.

Ours was a big family, and I was at the bottom. There were a great many people above me, with, at the top, my bald, long-bearded grandpa and my square-faced, largeboned grandma. Dad looked mostly like Grandma, but he had Grandpa's smiling eyes. Mom seemed very tiny next to my broad-chested dad. Sister Si was the eldest of my siblings, a big girl who took after Dad in personality and physique. Jin, my brother, had Mom's elegant features; we still haven't figured out just who my middle sister, Ke, looks like. Huang, who is a year older than me, grew up to be a tall, thin girl, a beauty with enormous eyes.

We lived in an old house that faced the only street in Yellow Stone. Our backyard led to the clear Dong Jing River, zigzagging like a dragon on land. The lush, odd-shaped Ching Mountain stood beyond the endless rice paddies like an ancient giant with a pointed hat, round shoulders, and head bent in gentle slumber.

We rarely left our house to play because Mom said there were many bad people waiting to hurt us. When I did go out to buy food in the commune's grocery store a few blocks away, I always walked in the middle, safely flanked by my three sisters as we hurried in and out. Neighborhood boys
sometimes threw stones at us, made ugly faces, and called us names. I always wondered why they did that. It was obviously not for fun. My sisters often cried as we ran and dodged and slammed our door shut behind us.

I once tried to sneak through our side door and join the kids in the street, but Si caught me by the arm and snatched me back, screaming and kicking. She gave me quite a spanking for breaking the do-not-go-out order. When I asked Mom why we had to hide in our dark house all the time, she said that we were landlords, and that the people outside were poor peasants who had taken our house, lands, and stores.

They were making us suffer because the leaders were all bad. There was no fairness, no justice for us. We had to be quiet, stay out of trouble, and wait for better days to come.

When? I would ask. Someday, when you grow up, she'd answer. That will be a long time from now, I'd say. Mom would nod, her eyes gently studying my face as if looking for an answer herself. Then she'd take me in her arms and hum her favorite tune—a simple melody urging a boy to eat more and grow up faster so that he could help plow the land with his dad and harvest the grain.

Restricted to the house, I would silently wander into Grandpa's smoky room and practice calligraphy with him. Some days, when my sisters were in school and Mom was busy and not watching me, I would wander out and wrestle with the neighborhood boys. This was a lot of fun, and I would come back all dusty and tell Mom I had fallen, and she would make me change my clothes.

One day when I was about six I stood on the pavement watching a parade of Red Guards carrying their rifles and red flags and shouting slogans, when a kid from next door, for no obvious reason, smacked me right on the face and
kicked me when I fell. I picked myself up and charged like a bull into my smiling attacker. When he went down, I straddled him and hit him hard on the face and neck. Within half an hour, the Communist party secretary, a thin little man, stormed into our house with the kid's mother. He started shouting at my mom, demanding to see my father, who was away at labor camp. I hid behind a big chair.

“What have you been teaching your kids, to fight the world? To fight Communism?” He shook his fist at my tiny mom. “I could put you in a labor camp too, if you let one of your kids do this again. Do you hear me?” Mom was too busy crying and being nervous. She didn't answer him right away and the secretary took this as an insult. He slapped her across the face, sending her whirling into a corner. I wanted to jump out from behind the chair and hit him with my fists, but fear held me back. I couldn't afford to bring any more trouble to our family. After spitting his dark phlegm on our spotless floor, the man stormed out. Mom sat there, crying. I spent the rest of the day watching her hold a wet towel to her face, where the humiliating imprint of his hand remained. She was quiet. She had nothing more to teach me about the cruelty outside.

Grandpa, who liked to drink a little—to calm his bones, as he put it—saw no future for us. In school, my sisters sat in the back, although, given their height, they should have been in the middle. They couldn't sing in the choir. They couldn't perform in the school plays. The kids could beat them, spit on them, and the teachers would not say a thing.

Grandpa wished he would die soon in the hope that they might treat us better. Dad said that was nonsense. We were fine the way we were.

But everything wasn't fine. We had been stripped of all our property.

Dad was fired from his teaching job, leaving a family of nine with no income. We relied entirely on a small food ration that went up and down with the harvest each year. A drought could wipe out half a year's ration, and a wet season would rot the young rice in the fields.

For months we would have nothing to eat but tree bark and the roots of wild plants. Even a good harvest would only get us through eight to nine months of the year. The remaining months were called “the season where the green and yellow did not meet.” During those months, Dad would be out imploring for a longer grace period on an old loan, and begging to try to borrow more money in order to pay back the debt so that they wouldn't take away the table and chairs. He had already sold the wooden doors and doorframes inside our house to pay for food. Each door was replaced with makeshift planks of rotten wood. But never a day went by without Mom teaching us that we should have dignity in the face of hardship. She would point out to us which land and storefronts used to be ours, and we would feel quietly proud.

For those long months when there was no food, we ate anything that came to our table. One year, we ate moldy yams three times a day for four months. Brother Jin summed it up well when he said, “I'm sick of the yams, but I'm afraid they'll run out.” We learned to live with little and be content with what we had. Even the soupy yams brought laughter to our dining table when everyone was there. But most of the time Dad was away at labor camp, or Grandpa was being detained in the commune jail, waiting for another public
humiliation meeting to be held in the market square, where he would be beaten badly.

Mom taught us to beg Buddha for his protection and help. This was easier than potty training. All you needed to do was wash yourself really clean, button your buttons, get on your knees, and bang your head on the floor before the hidden shrine of the big, fat, smiling Buddha. Ask all you want to ask and you will be answered, Mom told us.

I followed her to the shrine every day—the shrine that was hidden behind a window curtain in the attic, because religion was not allowed in Communist China. I knelt behind Mom and banged my head on the floor noisily, whispering my small requests. My list grew from two items to many. I asked for Dad not to get beaten by the Red Guards, for Grandpa to be well, for Mom not to cry as much. My last request was always for food—more of it, please.