—
A crowd was coming along the road, swaying and heaving in a procession. Big Mother pushed herself onto her frozen feet. She had no idea how long she’d been sitting here, but the women with the shovels had gone home. In the fog, and in their excitement, they had not even seen her as they passed.
As the parade approached, Big Mother could hear their voices more distinctly. Although there was indeed a gong, bells and the occasional burst of singing, it was not a funeral. Certain words were repeated, “stand up,” “have courage,” “devil,” but the shouting was oddly disjointed, as if opposing leaders were battling for control of the slogans.
At the head of the procession, Wen the Dreamer walked with his body crookedly bent. A woman walked behind him. Swirl’s hair fell loose and wild. She was completely tipped forward, as if she carried a piece of furniture on her back, but there was none. The distance between them halved and then halved again. Frenzied faces closed in on Big Mother, crying and groaning. She could not make out all the words but she heard:
“Honour the Chairman!”
“Kill the demons!”
“Long live our glorious land reform!”
I have crossed into death itself, Big Mother thought. Now she saw that her sister’s arms were roped together behind her, in a position that forced her two elbows up into the air. Everyone seemed fuelled by exhaustion, as if they had recently been shaken from sleep. The cavalcade stretched along the road, but they were so absorbed by their own noise that they, too, did not notice Big Mother. The very last person, a small boy struggling to keep up, glanced in her direction but his eyes did not fix on her. He hurried along.
Big Mother stood up and, leaving a wide gap, followed them. The procession continued for at least another hour. Finally, just before the tree line, the shouting faded and the people drained away like rivulets of water. By the time Big Mother reached the end point, her sister and Wen had been untied and were standing, incongruously, by themselves. They were cautiously testing their backs, slowly stretching out their arms. They were carrying their own ropes, as if the ropes were only props.
“Is is really you, my sister?” Big Mother said.
Swirl turned, peering into the darkness.
“Little Swirl,” Big Mother said again, afraid to touch the woman. “Is that you?”
—
Big Mother did not hear the entire story that night or in the nights that immediately followed. All her sister would say was that these parades, “struggle sessions,” she called them, had been going on for the past three months.
“Most of the time, it’s harmless,” Swirl said. “They take us to the schoolyard and denounce us as landlords. We have to kneel, but all they want is a thorough self-criticism. Occasionally, like tonight, we’re paraded through the village.”
Big Mother could not contain her fury. “And the rest of the time?”
Swirl glanced at Zhuli, who was folded into her father’s lap, and said nothing.
Everyone spoke in whispers, as if afraid to wake the gods of destiny, or even Chairman Mao himself. The hut, with its mud walls and straw roof, was meant for animals, that much was abundantly clear. Big Mother wondered where the evicted pigs and cows had gone.
“We’re not suffering,” her sister said.
“It was inevitable,” Wen the Dreamer told her, his voice barely louder than the steam from his tea. “Justice had to be done eventually.”
In this way, two days and two nights passed in a silence that cut deeply into Big Mother. She did not need a lengthy explanation, it was clear what had taken place. But in Shanghai, she had not witnessed the land reform campaign. In the cities, people from all corners of life and with every political affiliation had been reassigned to new quarters. People who had lost their homes were given new ones. It had been part of the war recovery.
On the third night, Big Mother lay on the kang beside her sister and the child, Zhuli, who was already five years old. The child snored vigorously. The kang, heated from below by a charcoal stove, looked like a relic from somebody’s tomb. To make space, Wen’s elderly mother had gone to stay with a relation.
Despite the relative warmth of the heated bed, her sister was shivering.
“Tell me something,” Swirl said suddenly. “Just a few words to distract me from this place.”
Big Mother swallowed several times to alleviate the dryness in her throat. Outside, Wen was smoking; the thin walls might as well be cloth. She told her sister about Sparrow and his brothers, about the jianpu music that ran from page to page. Sparrow never stopped composing. He didn’t breathe, she thought, he only emitted music. “My boys are energetic and have more hidden thoughts than a cartload of books. A mother never knows her children as well as she imagines.”
“How true, how true,” her sister breathed.
Big Mother said she’d been back to an old teahouse where they used to sing, the Purple Mountain Teahouse. “They’ve changed the name,” she said. “It’s now the Red Mountain People’s Refreshment House.” Swirl giggled. “The rooms are closed and all they serve is tea and melon seeds. But, still, the usual crowd comes to chatter, drink a little or fill their canisters. There are even singers who perform the new repertoire, ‘The East Is Red,’ ‘Song of the Guerrillas,’ and all that. It’s stirring, who can argue! Even I want to overthrow something when I hear it. But revolutionary music hurts the ears after awhile. There’s no nostalgia in it, no place for people to share their sorrows. Of course,” Big Mother continued hurriedly, “in the New China such sorrows as we knew are long gone.” She went on to describe a few of the patrons, including the ones who still came with their orioles and thrushes, and the storytellers and balladeers who now told the epic of Chairman Mao’s Long March, in fifty dogged episodes.
“Do you remember that book I told you about,” Swirl asked. “The thirty-one notebooks? The Book of Records.” Her voice barely reached Big Mother, even though they were curled together on the narrow kang.
“You burned it, I hope? Anything that inspires such devotion is surely banned.”
“Burn the Book of Records?” her sister asked. A flash in her voice. Indignation. “How could I?”
“To save yourself,” Big Mother said.
“To save myself, I couldn’t.”
The book was still in its hiding place inside the family home. Tucked into the pages were all the letters Wen the Dreamer had written to Swirl. When those hungry spirits found no silver coins, they would open the walls. Nothing hidden would remain unseen. Swirl described the coded names, how the ideograms used for Da-wei and May Fourth changed, and seemed to refer to compass points on a map. Big Mother felt a terrible chill. The love letters would be bad enough but what was in that book anyway? What if it turned out to be written by a Nationalist traitor? They would all be screwed to the eighteenth generation.