The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir (8 page)

8.

S
ECRETS

M
other always envied the close relationship between Father and Grandma. My maternal grandmother, or
po-po
, died when Mother was still a little girl in circumstances I can only describe as mysterious.

I had not given much thought to the fate of Po-po until Mother took me and my younger sister on a visit to her home village in September 1974. It was also in Henan, just seven kilometers from Father’s village. Mother hadn’t been home for fourteen years and she had planned the trip for a long time. It was a chance for us to meet her relatives, and an opportunity for Mother to become better acquainted with Father’s kin, whose help would be needed for Grandma’s burial.

Mother spent willfully in the month before the trip: new shoes, bolts of cloth for her sisters, jackets for her brothers. As the gifts piled up on top of Father’s old desk, I overheard Grandma grumble to Father: “Why is she wasting our money on her family? They treated her so badly. Do you think her stepmother will even be happy to see her?”

Stepmother? This was news to me. Since we hardly had any contact with Mother’s family, they were rarely discussed. I asked Mother about Po-po and her answer was terse: her own mother died and her father had remarried. Did your step
po-po
treat you nicely? “No,” Mother said, and by her tone, I understood the subject to be closed. I felt a new sympathy for Mother.

Her father, my maternal grandpa, or
gong-gong
, met us at the train station. I had seen him once before when he stopped in Xi’an two years earlier. Mother looked just like her father; both had high cheekbones; big round eyes; flat, platelike faces; and loud, booming voices. Mother was crying when she saw Gong-gong at the station and they were soon conversing in what sounded to me like some obscure dialect.

After two hours on a long-distance bus and another hour riding a horse-drawn cart, we finally reached our destination. Gong-gong’s house was big and dilapidated and had packed-clay walls. Step Po-po looked nothing like Grandma. She appeared to be only a few years older than Mother, though she wore the same blue baggy shirt with buttons down the side. Her feet were unbound and she was quite thin. Step Po-po greeted us in a soft voice I strained to hear, quite different from Gong-gong’s howling. She patted my head gently.
This was the evil stepmother?
I said to myself. She brought me a small bowl of water. Tired and thirsty, I took a big gulp, but the water tasted strange and bitter, as if poisoned. I grimaced. Po-po giggled and everyone else laughed. Water from the village wells had been polluted for years. People simply had gotten adjusted

The next day, when Gong-gong took Mother to see Father’s birthplace, we followed an uncle, and outside a tiny grocery, met an elderly woman, who was in her seventies. She touched my sister’s face, saying she took after Mother. I sat next to her while our uncle ran some errands. “I used to be your neighbor for many years,” the old woman said. “Your mother had a hard life.” I asked why and she seemed surprised at my ignorance. She looked around to make sure we couldn’t be overheard and whispered, “They threw your
po-po
down a well and killed her. Then, your poor mother’s sister was kidnapped. I wonder how she is. Your step Po-po didn’t like your mother.” My uncle came back and the old lady immediately switched topics and complimented me on how smart I was, though the bombshell she had dropped had left me deaf. Po-po, murdered? Was that why the water tasted so strange? Gong-gong was a strong and smart person; why couldn’t he protect her? Why was my aunt kidnapped? Did they shove rags in her mouth to silence her, like they did in the movies? My imagination ran wild. I wanted to be with Mother, to ask her questions, but she was busy with her half sisters and half brothers.

None too soon, it was time for us to leave. At the station, as Mother lugged our bags, which bulged with gifts from her relatives, Gong-gong carried me and my sister onto the train first. While we were waiting for Mother, I blurted out the question that had bothered me throughout the trip: “Did they throw my
po-po
in a well?” Gong-gong was stunned for a moment and then mumbled in a low voice that scared me. “Nonsense! Who told you that?” He glared at me before turning to help Mother hoist our bags onto the luggage rack and then walked off the train. Mother waved at him from the window, asking him to go without waiting for the train to leave. He nodded, but didn’t move, except to wave. He didn’t look at me.

As the train roared out of the station, I told Mother about the old lady. “Yes, many people say your
po-po
was thrown in a well,” she said. Her voice was calm, detached, as if we were talking about the weather. “Was there water in the well or was it a dry well?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “It was so long ago. I don’t remember much.” Then Mother said her sister was kidnapped while she was playing on the street one day and sold to a miner in Anhui Province. They married and had five children.

I wasn’t satisfied with Mother’s answer and later asked Father, who used a phrase that came up whenever he was reluctant to answer my question. “There are many things you don’t understand. Mother will tell you more when you grow up.”

I waited for fifteen years. Mother and my younger sister came to see me in Shanghai in December 1989 before I came to the United States. We spent a carefree week together. None of us knew how long I would be gone, but I wanted to get something settled in my mind and nervously brought up the subject of Po-po, though I didn’t expect Mother to tell me anything I didn’t already know. She surprised me with a story that sounded as if it had come straight from a gangster movie. For many years, Mother said she was loath to talk about her family because many of her relatives had strong ties with local underground societies.

My mother was born in 1938 into a family of land-owning farmers. Her grandfather was village chief and headed a secret martial-arts society. But in 1936, his clan became involved in a dispute with another underground society and, on a summer evening, he was stabbed to death near the village entrance. The murderer was never caught.

Her father, my
gong-gong
, was the only boy in the family. He had eight sisters who were each strong-willed and ran the household after their father’s death. In 1932, at the age of fourteen, Gong-gong had been married to a girl from a nearby village. She was ten years older than he was, as was the custom; boys from well-to-do families married girls who could be both wife and maid to the rest of the family. Though many well-off families required that the feet of girls be bound, hers were not because she was needed to help in the fields. Po-po was as strong-willed as her sisters-in-law and had a fiery temper, which I could easily imagine given Mother’s explosive tendencies. She had problems with Gong-gong’s siblings from the start. The sisters disliked the way Gong-gong listened to his wife and not them. While irreverence for the husband’s family was grounds for divorce, in rural areas the end of a marriage stigmatized both the woman’s and the man’s families. “Accidental death” was the usual way to deal with disobedient wives. They must have felt further emboldened by the fact that Po-po came from a poor family and there was little likelihood of serious consequences.

After eight years of marriage, Po-po had given birth to two girls and a boy. Mother was in the middle. When famine hit Henan Province in 1942, Gong-gong’s family did not have the resources to survive and many succumbed to starvation. When Po-po disappeared, it was assumed she had gone home to visit her parents, but she never came back. The official version was that she had starved to death on her way home, though there was no body to prove this. Villagers said that Po-po had been abducted by strangers, tied up, and tossed into a well. That account of events was plausible, and suspicion fell on the sisters, who were said to have connections with a secret society and conspired to kill Po-po. One of Po-po’s brothers showed up in the village threatening to avenge the death of his sister, but he was waylaid and beaten to death by unknown assailants, presumably gang members. In the absence of contrary evidence, death by starvation was accepted as Po-po’s fate.

With no one to care for them, Mother and her two siblings suffered tremendously. When her younger brother died of starvation, Gong-gong and other members of the family left in search of food. They took Mother with them because she was an obedient child. But not her sister, who pestered them about Po-po’s death. Soon her sister was lost. Gong-gong said human smugglers had snatched her away. Mother was now alone.

Gong-gong married a much younger woman from a wealthy family. Unlike Po-po, she was even-tempered and knew how to please her sisters-in-law. Over the years, she gave birth to six children—three boys and three girls. Mother was miserable. She did the work her stepmother would not and was seldom given anything new to wear. There grew a mutual dislike between them.

In 1953, Gong-gong begged a sister of his who had moved to Xi’an to take Mother and find her a husband. Mother was fifteen. She stayed with her aunt for three years until a matchmaker found a suitable young man who had migrated from the same region and lived with his widowed mother. After two meetings, they were married. The young man was my father.

Father recalls that he was to meet two girls on the same day, chosen by separate matchmakers, and he picked the one who had come from the same region as he had. He brought her to see Grandma, who approved of her big round face and big eyes, a traditional measure of beauty, and her strong bones meant she could do hard work and give birth to many children. On their second date, Father showed up at the house of Mother’s aunt, bearing gifts—two sets of clothes for Mother—and proposed that they marry, which they did after the formal three-month engagement. The Communist government was still replacing China’s currency and people in Xi’an paid for most important things in sacks of flour. Father generously offered fifteen sacks to compensate Gong-gong’s sister for taking care of Mother. Thus, my parents were married in 1957 and my elder sister was born a year later. Finally Mother felt she had a family of her own.

When I asked if Mother believed the story that Po-po had been murdered, she acknowledged that it was highly possible. However, she did not want to dwell on the past. “The past was past and I wanted to let it go,” she said.

However, I found it hard to let it go myself. For years, Po-po’s death and the kidnapping of Mother’s sister lingered at the edge of my thoughts. I even developed the habit of going out of my way to avoid wells. I found it strange that the murder theory floated around the family circle for more than thirty years, but no one asked for a criminal investigation. Occasionally, during my visit to Mother’s relatives, I would press them with the question. They either ignored me or silenced me with the perfunctory response: “It was during the time of the famine and so many people died in the rural areas. Nobody really knows what happened.”

The issue resurfaced in the summer of 1976, when Mother’s sister, Aunt Xiuying, who had been kidnapped as a young girl, came to Xi’an for a visit.

At the train station, I recognized her right away. She had the same loud voice, round face, and high cheekbones as Mother. She was choked with tears when she saw Mother, and soon everyone was crying. She met Grandma and was shown the coffin and, between loud sobs, said, “If my mother were still alive, she would be your age. I wish I could give her a proper burial. We don’t even know where her body is.” No one knew what to say.

Over the next week, Aunt Xiuying left a trail of tears and unpleasant arguments with her close relatives in Xi’an. Seeing Grandma’s coffin triggered painful memories, and she redoubled her efforts to find her mother’s murderer. She confronted Gong-gong’s sister, who had brought Mother to Xi’an. What was her role in Po-po’s death? Gong-gong’s sister was visibly shocked, but insisted Po-po had died of starvation and Aunt Xiuying was too stubborn to accept the facts. The visit ended badly and, once word of it got around, other relatives who might have known a thing or two about Po-po’s death avoided her. Even Mother began to distance herself, urging her sister to be more diplomatic. I admired her stubbornness and fiery spirit. I wished Mother could have been a little more tenacious in finding out the truth, but Aunt Xiuying said Mother was only four years old when it happened, which was probably too young for her to have many memories of their mother.

Aunt Xiuying’s visit rippled across Xi’an. After she left, we were all too busy with the living to worry about the dead.

Letters between Mother and her sister became fewer and more infrequent. When I was a freshman at a university in Shanghai, I saw that Aunt Xiuying’s hometown was along the route of the twenty-seven-hour train journey from Xi’an. I wrote Mother for permission to visit her sister on my way back during the winter break. I was given reluctant approval. I hoped to somehow reconcile them.

Aunt Xiuying’s second son picked me up at the train station with his tractor, and she was waiting outside her small apartment building when we wobbled up in the dark. Everything was covered in coal dust: the trees, the building façade, the stairs, and her skin. When I washed my face, the water turned black. Before I could even sit, the sobbing started. “You are all grown up. Your mother and I had a hard life. Our mother was tossed in a well when we were so young.”

Her husband, the coal miner, stopped her. He was shy and when dinner started, he didn’t come to the table. Instead, he sat in the dark corner, chain-smoked, accompanied with occasional coughing. His face was as wrinkled and dark as my aunt’s.

That night, I asked Aunt Xiuying about her abduction. Between sobs, she told me what she believed had happened.

She had just turned eight when Po-po disappeared. She refused to accept the official version of Po-po’s death and bombarded Gong-gong with questions. Her obstinacy alienated her from all the adults in the family. She felt lonely and took to playing alone outside the village. A distant relative whom she called uncle came along while she was in a field and whispered to her that he knew where her mother was. This uncle enticed her away and handed her to a stranger, who gave Aunt Xiuying a candy and put her on a horse-drawn cart. The stranger was part of a human-smuggling ring, and Aunt Xiuying was taken by train to Anhui Province. Each time she asked to go home, he beat her into silence. The now-long-dead “uncle” was an opium addict who owed money to a local opium dealer. Threatened with losing a hand if he didn’t pay up, he agreed to trap some local girls for them. Aunt Xiuyin was first sold to a family as a bride to a seven-year-old boy, and she cared for her “husband” as a nanny would, feeding and bathing him, but a year later, the boy dropped dead. The family attributed their son’s death to the marriage, called my aunt a man-killer, and sold her to another family. Her new owner worked her all day and made her sleep on the cold kitchen floor, beating her for every mistake. Then a neighboring couple promised to help her escape her misery, which they did, only to betray her and sell her back to the human smugglers. This was in 1948. Aunt Xiuying was taken to the mining city of Huaibei, where there was a profitable market for brides because no girl would willingly marry a soot-covered coal miner. She was bought by a man fifteen years her senior. He was my uncle.