My family was very poor, but there were even poorer people than the Li family in our commune. By the time I was born there was deprivation and disease everywhere. Three years of Mao's Great Leap Forward and three years of bad weather had resulted in one of the greatest famines the world had ever seen. Nearly thirty million people died. And my parents, like everyone else, were desperately fighting for survival.
I was my parents' sixth son. I was born on 26 January 1961. By then my parents had been married for fifteen years and the Li family had grown to become a large extended family. Our na-na, my father's mother, lived next door, and his fourth brother (we called him Fourth Uncle) lived next to her. Our third uncle's family lived in front of us, but he died of an unknown disease in his early thirties and left four young girls and a boy. My father, who we called Dia, and our fourth uncle, became their de facto fathers.
It's a Chinese custom that the mother stays in bed for a month after giving birth. Their babies are delivered at home by a local midwife. To get out of bed and work before the month's end was supposed to be bad for the mother's health and it could do unthinkable harm in her later years. But I was born just twenty days before the Chinese New Year and this was the busiest time of the year for my mother, my niang. Because of my birth she was far behind in her preparations for the feast. She had no daughter to help her. Our na-na tried to help but she had bound feet. So my niang didn't have the luxury of staying on her kang for that first month.
My life began with near tragedy for my parents. When I was just fifteen days old, my niang left me on our kang and wrapped me in a cotton quilt before going to the kitchen to make her bread rolls for the Chinese New Year. Mothers in China always wrapped their babies' arms tightly against their bodies and laid them facing up, so the baby's head would grow to the normal shape. That day my niang had so many rolls to steam that the kang where I was lying got boiling hot. I was probably suffocating in the tightly wrapped quilt. I struggled my right arm loose, and the kang badly burnt the middle of my arm.
When my niang first heard my screams, she thought I was crying for milk. She had none left in her breasts so at first she did not respond. By the time she came to check on me, the whole elbow area of my right arm was severely burnt and blistered.
The burn quickly became infected. Two days later, my entire right arm had swollen up and turned bright red. My parents had no appropriate medication. They could not afford to take me to the hospital. The burnt area gradually became full of pus and I developed a dangerously high fever. I screamed constantly day and night.
They finally had to borrow some money from our relatives and friends to take me to the hospital. "Your son has a severe infection," the doctor informed my parents. "He is too young to take any medication. You should have come earlier. Your only alternative is to apply some herbal medicine. But I can't guarantee this will work."
"What will happen if it doesn't work?" my niang asked, desperately afraid.
"He may lose his right arm. As soon as you see the infection spread, bring him in and we will have no choice but to cut his arm off," he replied.
My parents looked at their tiny son and couldn't believe that he might grow up with only one arm. My niang's guilt was beyond description. My dia kept telling her that there would be a cure somewhere. They took the doctor's prescription and purchased the herbs from a local medicine shop. My niang followed the doctor's instructions and stewed the herbal ingredients in the wok. They applied the dark liquid to my arm. It didn't help. It made the infection worse and the redness began to travel away from my arm.
My niang started to panic. She took me to see many healers who lived in our area and tried their different secret family recipes, to no avail. Then my fourth aunt said to my niang, "An old healer told my mother once that bai fang helps infections. Why don't you try it?" Bai fang was a meat tenderiser that looked like white rock salt. It was full of acid. At first my niang didn't take the suggestion seriously, but with all other options exhausted she decided to give it a try.
When she first applied the bai fang I screamed like a stuck pig. She couldn't bear to see her son suffering such pain and she seriously doubted whether a meat tenderiser would ever work, so after a few tries she stopped the treatment.
But my fourth aunt believed strongly it would work. "Ni tai sin yuen la!" You are too soft-hearted, she said to my niang. She locked her door, crushed the bai fang into a powder and rubbed massive amounts onto my raw, exposed muscles. She was literally rubbing salt into an open wound. I screamed non-stop the whole day. Every hour she would wash my arm with warm water and reapply masses of bai fang.
Years later my niang confessed, "I was outside your fourth aunt's door and my heart bled each time you screamed. The sound of your cries was like a thousand sharp knives cutting into my guilty heart! Several times I banged on your fourth aunt's door, trying to take you away. Thank the gods for your fourth aunt's determination. She just ignored me."
My fourth aunt wasn't really sure whether this bai fang would work either. She nearly gave up many times that day. But she knew this was the last chance they had to save my arm.
By the end of that day I had lost my voice completely from screaming. But my aunt's determination saved my arm. The infection slowly went away. A large scar remained, and in years to come, in moments of crisis, I would always touch it. It would become my link to my niang and a reminder of her love.
Three years later, my niang gave birth to her seventh son, my youngest brother Cungui, who we called by his nickname Jing Tring. My parents knew they couldn't provide enough food to feed the sons they now had, and as far as I can remember there was never enough food. Meat, seafood and eggs were all on a strict quota system, along with oil, soy sauce, sugar, salt, wheat and cornflour, rice and also coal. Every family was allocated a very small quantity of these items each month, but often they were not available at all.
We ate a lot of dried yams. They were the easiest things to grow, so most of our land was used for yams. I was often woken up at five o'clock in the morning by my niang to go to the yam fields with my big brothers before they started school for the day. We each carried a shovel and a bamboo basket made by our dia, to dig for any yams that might have been overlooked by the peasants during harvesting. We were cold and hungry but the hope of those yams for breakfast always kept us going. Often the fields had already been turned over by others in equally desperate circumstances, and we returned home with empty baskets.
During summer, every family's front yard and roof was covered with slices of these yams drying in the sun. They looked like snowflakes. Some people even laid them out on the street. But if rain came, you had to quickly pick them all up, for if they got wet they soon went mouldy. Once they were dried, the sliced yams would be stored in a huge clay pot in my older brothers' bedroom or in our dia's attic.
Dried yams were our basic food for most of the year. We occasionally had flour and corn bread for a treat, but those were my niang's special reserves for relatives or important visitors. We had dried yams, steamed or boiled, almost daily, week after week, month after month and year after year. Dried yams were the most hated food in my family, but there were others in the commune that could not even afford dried yams. We were luckier than most. We were luckier than the thirty million who starved to death. Dried yams saved our lives.
One year, I remember that our commune experimented with growing peanuts on a few small pieces of land, but it was a disappointingly meagre crop. After the peanut field had been harvested, a group of boys my age, about five or six years old, followed some of the older boys with spades and bamboo baskets, trying to find peanuts in the ground that, like the yams, might have been missed by others. None of us found many peanuts after hours of earth churning, but on the edge of the field one of the boys discovered a rat hole, a lucky find for starving boys! He immediately started digging. We gathered around him as if he were a magnet: rats always stored food for winter, so we were all excited and envious of the boy's find. We knew not to kneel by the rat hole because local superstition told us that if we did the rat tunnel would disappear. So the boy dug as fast as he could, with his arse in the air. Several times he nearly lost the tunnel because the rats tried to block it. Then he found that it branched out in different directions and soon he discovered three stores: one of peeled peanuts, one of half-peeled and the third of unpeeled peanuts. We never saw the rats; we thought they had a secret escape route.