‘You’ll smash someone’s window if you keep doing that, then you’ll have to pay to get it repaired.’ My mother glanced back to my father and said, ‘Before people go abroad now, the government allows them to buy three domestically produced items tax-free. If you sell just two of them on the black market you can make enough money to last you a year.’
‘We should all go abroad. I’ll teach the violin, you can give singing classes, the children can both go to university.’
‘Do you think you’ll still be able to play your violin with hands like that? And anyway, I’m just a chorus singer now. How could I teach a foreigner? I’ve been singing revolutionary operas for the last twenty years. I’ve forgotten all my Western training.’
‘You were the most talented soloist in the company when we first met. You had a beautiful voice. I’m sure that if you had a chance to sing Western operas again, all your training would come back to you. In America, the government leaves people alone. The rich are rich, and the poor are poor. Everyone just gets on with their lives. I’ve spent every day of the last twenty years regretting my decision to return to China. The only thing that kept me alive in the camps was the hope that one day I might go back to America. Without that hope, I would have committed suicide years ago.’ My father was staring at his left hand. The little finger had been broken when he was beaten up in the camp. Although he was wearing a clean white shirt that night, when I looked at his shaven head and weathered features, it was hard to imagine that he’d once been a professional violinist.
‘Don’t praise foreign countries in front of the children. Now that you’re back, you’ll have to read the papers every day and make sure you keep up with the changing political climate. We can’t let our family be torn apart again.’
‘Mum, will you sing me that Li Gu ballad “Longing for Home”?’ I said. The tune had been in my head all day.
‘Li Gu’s voice is weak and breathy. It has no revolutionary spirit. Our company received a statement from the Ministry of Culture today warning that her ballad has had a corrupting influence on young people and could lead to the ruination of the country. The radio stations aren’t broadcasting it any more, so don’t you start humming it like a fool.’
‘You’re behind the times, Mum. Li Gu’s ballad is old hat. You can buy The Best 200 Foreign Love Songs in the shops now.’
‘Stop making things up! Why am I the only one in this family to have a political consciousness? From now on the four of us must study the newspaper every night and bring our thoughts in line with the Party. Dai Changjie, tomorrow you must adjust our radio so that it receives only Chinese stations. Don’t let that son of ours drag our family back down again. And from now on, Dai Wei, you’re only allowed to play your harmonica inside this room.’
‘When my compensation money comes through we can buy a television, then we won’t have to listen to the radio again.’ My father took another gulp of rice wine. Beads of sweat dripped down his face.
‘Last year, the three popular things to own were a watch, a bicycle and a sewing machine, but we only managed to buy a watch. This year, there are three new things everyone wants to own. I can’t keep up! We might not be able to afford a shelf unit, but I’m determined that we get a sofa… You shouldn’t be drinking so much wine, Dai Changjie — you’ve got a weak stomach.’ My mother pulled the bottle of rice wine over to her side of the table.
‘I’m so happy it’s all over. I can hold my head up now.’ My father gazed at my mother with a look of contentment in his eyes.
My mother walked out and put another charcoal briquette on our stove in the communal corridor. A thick cloud of charcoal smoke wafted back into the room.
~ ~ ~
I picked up the thermos flask and poured some hot water into a pot of jasmine tea, inhaling the tobacco smoke that my father was exhaling. I was thirteen, and had already smoked a few cigarettes on the sly by then.
My father took a sip of the tea and said, ‘Mmm, that tastes good!’ He had a cigarette in his left hand and a pair of chopsticks in his right.
‘I posted several packets of that tea to the Shandong camp.’
‘You shouldn’t have bothered. I had to give them all to our education officers. Drinking tea as good as this while undergoing ideological remoulding would have been considered an act of defiance.’
‘Didn’t you give violin lessons to one of their children?’ my mother asked.
‘That was down in Guangxi Province on the farm supervised by Overseas Chinese. Director Liu was a nice man. He moved back to China from Malaysia after Liberation. It was brave of him to ask a rightist like me to teach his daughter. He even invited me to stay for supper a couple of times. His daughter, Liu Ping, was very talented. With good coaching, she could have become a professional violinist. Once my rehabilitation has been sorted out, I’d like to go back down to Guangxi and pay them a visit.’
My father kept a photograph he’d taken of them pressed inside the pages of his copy of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong. Liu Ping was in a white skirt, and was standing between Director Liu and my father holding her violin in her arms. She looked about twelve or thirteen.
My mother shot me a glance and said, ‘You mustn’t repeat anything you hear in this room to your classmates.’
‘I know, Mum. Dad, can you speak English?’
‘Of course!’ my father replied proudly in English. ‘I’ll give you lessons. I guarantee that you’ll come top of the class in all your English tests.’
‘Dad, Chairman Mao said that we must be “united, serious, intense and lively”,’ my brother exclaimed as he chewed on his last peanut.
‘You shouldn’t go around spouting Mao Zedong’s words like that. Just content yourself with memorising them.’ An anxious look flitted across my father’s face.
‘Anyway, you got the quote wrong,’ I said to my brother. ‘What Chairman Mao said was that we should “unite together, study seriously and intensely, then go home with a lively attitude”.’
Suddenly, all the lights went out.
‘Not another power cut,’ my mother groaned.
I went to my camp bed in the corner of the room to fetch my precious torch. I kept it hidden under my pillow so that I could read my Selected Stories from the Book of Mountains and Seas after everyone had gone to sleep. When it was dark, the torchlight made the battered basket hanging on the wall look like the face of a mysterious ghoul. The dried sprigs of spring onion that stuck out through the holes were the ghoul’s dishevelled hair.
‘Hey, I wonder what happened to the company’s stage designer, Old Li,’ my father muttered. Back in 1958, my father and Old Li were both sent to the same labour camp in Gansu Province.
‘You didn’t hear? He was skin and bone when he was released from the camp. On his first night back, he gobbled a whole duck, four bowls of rice and downed half a bottle of rice wine. He went out for a walk afterwards and his stomach exploded. He collapsed on the street and died.’
‘I lost touch with my fellow Gansu inmates after I was transferred to the Guangxi farm. We rightists weren’t allowed to write to each other. In Gansu everyone thought that Old Li had the best chance of surviving the camp. After we’d been working on the fields all day, most of us would lie on the floor and rest, but he’d still be rushing around, full of energy. He once climbed into the stable and ate a bowl of horse feed and some seeds that had been soaking in fertiliser. His mouth swelled up horribly. Sometimes he’d even eat maggots he found crawling around the cesspit.’