Gugu said that she and her mother and grandmother were well treated during the three months they spent in Pingdu. According to her, Sugitani was a fair-skinned young man who wore white-framed glasses and had a moustache. Quiet and bookish, he spoke fluent Chinese. He called my great-grandmother Aunt, called my grandmother Sister-in-law, and called Gugu Niece. She did not have a bad opinion of him. Of course, she only said that privately to members of the family. To others she said that all three were victims of Japanese brutality, subjected to coercion and bribery, though they remained steadfast.
Sensei, I could talk about my great-uncle for three days and nights and never exhaust the subject. We’ll continue this some other day, but I must tell you about how he died. Gugu said he was gassed while performing surgery in the underground hospital. That is how his death is listed in historical documents prepared by the county consultative congress, but a private source claimed that he rode his mule into Pingdu with eight hand grenades on his belt, determined to single-handedly rescue his wife, his daughter and his ageing mother, but unfortunately struck a land mine placed by the Zhao Family Trench militiamen. The source of this account was Xiao Shangchun (Upper Lip), a stretcher-bearer for the Xihai Hospital. A quirky individual, Xiao served as the commune granary watchman after 1949, where he invented a pesticide that was a potent rat poison, for which he was extolled in the local newspaper, which changed his name from the chun that meant ‘lip’ to the one that meant ‘purity’. Later it was discovered that the main ingredient of his rat poison was a banned highly toxic pesticide. He and Gugu were bitter enemies, which makes his account highly unreliable. He once said to me that my great-uncle disobeyed orders by neglecting his patients in favour of playing the hero, and that he’d fortified himself before setting out by drinking two jin of potato liquor, winding up so drunk that he stumbled on one of their own land mines. A gloating Xiao Shangchun flashed a yellow-toothed grin as he continued: Your great-uncle and the mule he was riding were blown to bits, both carried back to the hospital in boxes, bones and hooves all mixed up, and dumped into a coffin. Not a bad coffin, though, one confiscated from a wealthy family in Lan Village.
When I repeated his story to Gugu, her eyes grew wide and she gnashed her silver teeth. One of these days, she said, I’m going to cut that bastard’s balls off!
Boy, she said staunchly, you can forget about everything else, but the one thing you must believe is that your great-uncle was a hero of the resistance and a revolutionary martyr! His body rests in a mausoleum on Martyrs Hill, his scalpel and leather shoes are part of the display in Martyrs Hall. They are English shoes, bequeathed to him by Norman Bethune on his deathbed.
3
Sensei, I rushed through the story of my great-uncle so I could take my time telling Gugu’s story.
She was born on 13 June 1937, the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, which is Duanyang, the day of the Dragon Boat Festival. They called her Duanyang until she started school, and was then called Wan Xin (Heart). Great-Uncle named her, showing respect for local tradition while investing her name with a message. Not long after Great-Uncle’s death, his mother died of natural causes in Chengdu. Members of the Shandong military district launched a large-scale rescue mission to free Gugu and her mother from their captivity, and once they were in the liberated zone, Gugu was enrolled in the Resistance elementary school and her mother was sent to a factory to make soles for cloth shoes. After Liberation, the future for descendants of martyrs like Gugu could not have been brighter, but her mother hated the idea of leaving her hometown and Gugu hated the idea of leaving her. Officials at the county level asked her what she would like to do; when she said she’d like to carry on her father’s work, she was admitted to the prefectural medical school. She graduated at the age of sixteen and was assigned to the township health centre, where she undertook a training course for modern birthing methods organised by the county health bureau. Gugu forged an unbreakable bond with the sacred work of obstetrics. According to her calculations, from the fourth day of the fourth month of 1953, when she attended her first birth, till the spring of last year, she delivered around ten thousand babies, counting two as one when working with someone else. She told you this in person. I assumed she’d inflated the number somewhat, but there had to have been seven or eight thousand at least. She had seven interns, one of whom she called ‘Little Lion’, a young woman whose hair was never combed, who had a flat nose, a square mouth, and a face full of zits. She was so devoted to Gugu that if she’d been told to kill someone, she’d have picked up a knife and done it without asking why.
We’ve already seen how, in the spring of 1953, women in my hometown resisted modern birthing methods, including the old midwives, who spread all sorts of rumours. Gugu was only seventeen at the time, but with her unconventional experience and privileged background, she was already an influential young woman who was held in high esteem. Admittedly, her good looks played a role in that. Putting aside head, face, nose, and eyes, her teeth alone are worth mention. Our water was so heavily fluoridated that everyone, young and old, had black teeth. But after spending her youth in the liberated areas of eastern Shandong and drinking spring water, not to mention being taught to brush her teeth by Eighth Route soldiers, Gugu’s teeth were spared of that noxious effect. Hers were the envy of all, especially the girls.
Chen Bi was the first baby Gugu delivered, a fact that caused her a lifetime of regret — her first ought to have been the son or daughter of a revolutionary, not a landlord’s mongrel. But at the time, the necessity to start something new and do away with old birthing methods would not allow her to take such issues into consideration.
When Gugu learned that Ailian had gone into labour, she jumped on her bicycle (a rarity at the time), a medical kit over her back, and rushed home, covering the ten li from the health centre to our village in ten minutes. Village secretary Yuan Lian’s wife, who was washing clothes on the bank of the Jiao River, watched her race across the narrow stone bridge, so scaring a puppy playing on the bridge it fell into the river.
Medical kit in hand, Gugu burst into Ailian’s room, only to find that the old midwife Tian Guihua was already attending to her. The old woman, with her pointed mouth and sunken cheeks, was in her sixties; by now, thankfully, this torchbearer for the obstructionists is feeding worms. When Gugu entered, Tian was straddling Ailian and pushing down on her bulging belly with all her might. As Tian was suffering from chronic bronchitis, the sound of her laboured breathing merged with the hog-butchering screams of her pregnant victim, producing a tragically heroic aura in the room. Chen E, the landlord, was in the corner on his knees, banging his head in supplication on the floor, over and over, and mumbling incoherently.
As a frequent visitor to Chen’s house, I knew its floor plan well. Two cramped rooms with hanging eaves faced west. The first thing you encountered after entering was the stove, which was backed by a two-foot-high wall. The sleeping platform, the kang, was behind that low wall. So Gugu witnessed the scene the moment she walked in, and was livid with anger; in her own words, ‘the flames were thirty feet high’. She dropped her medical kit, ran up and, with her left hand on the old woman’s left arm and her right hand on her right shoulder, yanked her off the kang. The old woman’s head banged into the bedpan, splashing its contents all over the floor and filling the air with the smell of urine. Dark blood oozed from a head wound. It wasn’t a serious injury, but you wouldn’t have known that by her shrieks of agony. Most people, hearing such pitiful wails, would go dumb from fright. But they had no effect on Gugu, who had seen a thing or two in her life.