When Huang Qiuya returned triumphantly to the ward, Gugu’s blood had seeped all the way to the door. Huang shrieked before crumpling to the floor.
Gugu was saved, and placed on probation by the Party. The reason was not that her relationship with Wang Xiaoti remained suspicious, but that she had tried to use suicide to show the Party what she was capable of.
12
Northeast Gaomi Township enjoyed an unprecedented harvest from its thirty thousand acres of sweet potatoes in the autumn of 1962. After putting us through three abominable years, soil that had refused to grow anything regained its bountiful generosity and its innate ability to nourish. Each acre produced a record of more than ten thousand jin of sweet potatoes that year, and the mere recollection of that year’s crop made me sense a stirring for some reason. A rich yield of sweet potatoes lay beneath the ground. The largest potato unearthed in our village came in at thirty-eight jin. A photo of Yang Lin, the county’s Party secretary, holding it appeared on the front page of Masses Daily.
Sweet potatoes are wonderful, truly wonderful. It was not only a bumper crop in terms of quantity, but the potatoes were rich in starches, they cooked up with a perfect texture, and they tasted a bit like chestnuts, delicious with high nutritional value. Sweet potatoes were piled in every family’s yard, wire was strung along every wall to hang slices of drying sweet potatoes. We had enough to eat, finally enough to eat. No more days of eating grass or the bark of trees; the days when people starved to death were gone, never to return. Before long our legs stopped suffering from oedema; the skin around our middle thickened, and our bellies flattened out. A layer of fat began forming under our skin, light returned to our eyes, and our legs no longer ached when we walked; we started to grow, to really grow. At the same time, women’s breasts swelled and their periods returned to normal. Men’s torsos straightened, whiskers reappeared above their lips, their sex drive was reawakened. After two months of eating their fill of sweet potatoes, all the young women in the village were pregnant it seemed. In the early winter of 1963, Northeast Gaomi Township experienced the first baby boom in the history of the People’s Republic. Two thousand eight hundred sixty-eight babies were born that year in the fifty-two villages incorporated in our commune alone. According to Gugu, this crop of babies was known as the ‘sweet potato kids’.
The health centre director had a good heart. He came to see Gugu after she returned home to recuperate from her failed suicide attempt. As the nephew of my maternal grandmother on her husband’s side, he was a shirt-tail relative, what we call ‘melon-vine kin’. He criticised Gugu for being foolish and hoped she could lay down her ideological baggage and return to work. The Party and the people are blessed with bright-seeing eyes, he told her. Under no circumstance would they treat a good person unjustly or make allowances for a bad one. He urged her to trust the organisation and prove her unsullied record through positive actions in order to be reinstated into the Party as quickly as possible. You’re different from Huang Qiuya, he said privately. Her character is essentially bad, while your roots are red and your limbs are straight. Though you have made missteps, if you work hard you can have a bright future.
The director’s words made Gugu cry bitterly once more.
His words made me cry bitterly as well.
Gugu regained her footing in a pool of blood and threw herself into her work as if on fire. At the time, even though every village was equipped with trained midwives, many women chose to have their babies in a health centre. Gugu put aside her resentment and worked closely with Huang Qiuya, in the capacity of both a doctor and a nurse. She might not shut her eyes once for days at a time, caught up in the business of pulling birthing mothers back from the gates of Hell. Over a period of five months, they delivered eight hundred and eighty babies, eighteen by caesarian section, at a time when the procedure was extremely complicated, and the fact that a small commune health centre obstetrics ward dared to even attempt it caused a sensation. Even someone as ambitious and proud as Gugu had to admire Huang Qiuya’s surgical skill. She was in debt to that one-time enemy for her fame in Northeast Gaomi Township as an obstetrician with both local and foreign skills.
Huang Qiuya was what was known as an old maid. She’d likely never tasted romance, which might explain why she had such an odd disposition. In her later years, Gugu often spoke to us of her old adversary. For the daughter of a Shanghai capitalist and the graduate of a top university to be sent down to Northeast Gaomi Township to work was a case of ‘a fallen phoenix is not the equal of a common chicken’. And who was the chicken? In a tone of self-ridicule, Gugu answered her own question. That would be me. A chicken that pecked at a phoenix. A chicken that beat a phoenix into submission. She shuddered when she saw me, Gugu said emotionally, like a lizard that’s swallowed a hunk of tar. Everyone was crazy in those days. It was a nightmare. Huang Qiuya was a magnificent obstetrician. She could be beaten bloody in the morning and show up in surgery in the afternoon, so focused and composed that not even an opera being performed right outside the window would have had an effect on her. What a pair of hands she had! Gugu said. With them she could create a flower on a pregnant woman’s abdomen… Gugu always enjoyed a hearty laugh at this point; she’d laugh till tears spilled from her eyes.
13
Gugu’s marital situation had become a family obsession. The grown-ups weren’t the only ones who worried about her; even teenagers like me were deeply concerned. But we didn’t dare broach the subject with Gugu since that made her unhappy.
In the spring of 1966, early on Qingming, grave-sweeping day, Gugu came to the village to perform routine exams on girls who had reached child-bearing age. She was accompanied by the apprentice we knew only by her nickname: Little Lion. Eighteen years old, short and stocky, she had a pug nose surrounded by pimples, eyes too wide for her face and dishevelled hair. When they’d finished their exams, Gugu brought Little Lion home with her for dinner.
Wheat cakes, hard-boiled eggs, yellow onions and fermented bean sauce.
We’d already eaten, so we watched Gugu and Little Lion eat.
The girl was so shy she wouldn’t look us in the eye. Her pimples stood out like red beans.
Seeming to take to the girl, Mother asked her one question after another, moving increasingly close to the marriage question. That’s enough questions, Sister-in-law, Gugu said. You’re not looking for a daughter-in-law, are you?
You must be joking, Mother said. How could a village woman like me aspire that high? Little Lion is on the national payroll. There isn’t one among your nephews who’s worthy of her.
Little Lion’s head drooped lower; her appetite seemed to have left her.
My classmates Wang Gan and Chen Bi came running up at that moment. Wang Gan was so focused on the inside of the house he stepped on a bowl of chicken feed and smashed it.
You clumsy oaf, Mother scolded. Why don’t you look where you’re going!
Wang Gan just rubbed his neck and sniggered like an idiot.
How’s your sister, Wang Gan? Gugu asked. Has she grown some?
About the same.
Tell your father when you get home — she swallowed a bite of wheat cake and wiped her mouth with her handkerchief — that your mother mustn’t have another child. If she tries, her uterus will come right out of her.
Don’t talk to them about women’s health, Mother said.
Why not? Gugu replied. I want them to know how hard it is to be a woman. Half the women in this village have a descended uterus, the other half have inflammations. His mother’s uterus has torn loose and hangs there like a rotten plum. But Wang Jiao wants another son. The next time I see him… and you, Chen Bi, your mother isn’t well either —