"Yes, please! Dance for us, please!" the crowd urged.
Mary and I looked at their eager faces. We exchanged a glance and Mary nodded.
"Are you sure?" I asked.
She nodded again. "Let's do an arabesque lift from Nutcracker."
So a small space in the middle of the street was cleared for us and the crowd gathered around. I lifted Mary high above my head, then flipped her down into a fish dive. The crowd gasped, then cheered and roared with applause. "Zailai, zailai!" More, more! they demanded.
I picked Mary up with one arm and twirled her around in circles. The villagers screamed with delight.
By the time we went back inside, my niang and my fourth brother had prepared a table full of colourful dishes. It was too hot inside so they set two more tables up in the shady courtyard, so there was one for the men, one for the women and a third for the children. Big bottles of local beer were popped open under the tables and there were many "gan beis" that night. All of my brothers could cook and each of them cooked their favourite dish.
So many questions were asked about our life in the West. My parents had told them something of it, but still they wanted more and hung on our every word. They had little idea, of course, of the ballet world from which Mary and I had come. But they were not celebrating the famous dancer that night. For them, they were just happy that their sixth brother had finally returned. I fitted back into my sixth son position just as though I had never left, nine years earlier. So much had changed, but what endured was love and trust.
My family bombarded Mary with questions. They wanted to seat her at the men's table as a special honour, but she insisted on sitting with the women even though she only spoke very limited Chinese. She told my parents that she just wanted to be treated like everyone else in the family. She wanted no special privileges.
Rather than stay in a hotel, Mary and I had decided to stay with my parents, but I worried that Mary would find it hard living in such poor conditions. There was still no bath or shower and no hot water. The hole-in-the-ground toilet outside was exactly the way I remembered it from my childhood. And although Mary liked Chinese food, I wasn't sure she was really ready for three weeks of it in our village.
But Mary took everything in her stride and everyone loved her. I translated for her as much as I could that night, but when I eventually lost my voice through talking too much she stopped asking me questions.
Then, within days of our arrival, the local police came. They took our passports. We became suspicious, worried. They told us it was for registration purposes. We could only hope that we would get them back before we were due to leave.
Everywhere we went in the commune in those three weeks, people's eyes were fixed on us. They couldn't stop talking about Mary-her hair, the colour of her eyes, her white skin. They watched her every move. Only when she said "Ni hao" to them, did they remember that Mary was a person too and they would burst into laughter.
My parents' house was still much the same as when I had left. Only a few changes signalled to me that now it was nine years on. The pigsty, chicken yard and vegetable patch were gone, replaced by a clean, paved courtyard, but the inside layout of the house was exactly the same. I was disappointed to see that my beloved newspaper on the walls and ceilings had been replaced with bright flowery wallpaper: I would have liked another word- finding game with my brothers. The earth kangs were still there, but now the windows had big panes of glass and there were even electric fans to keep the house cool. Now we wouldn't have to rely on the breeze to blow the mosquitoes away. Small motorised blowers for fire-making replaced my beloved windboxes. There was clearly a huge improvement in my parents' lifestyle. "And it's all because of your financial help," my niang said.
We got to know my six nieces and one nephew while we were there too. There was only one boy amongst my four brothers' children. My parents would have liked more grandsons, but the one-child policy had now been strongly enforced in China. My second brother and fourth brother were the only two of my brothers classified as peasants, so only they were allowed to have a second child if their first wasn't a boy. My other brothers were salaried people and so were considered in the same way as city folk-one child only, regardless of gender.
"But what happens if you do fall pregnant with a second child?" Mary asked.
"The government will force you to have an abortion," one of my sisters-in-law replied. "Even if you run away, they will track you down, force you to have an abortion, and you'll be penalised."
Mary thought it was nothing short of barbaric.
"Mary, can you have six extra boys and give us one each?" another sister-in-law asked, and everyone laughed. Deep inside, however, I knew how they felt. Not producing a son to continue the family line was considered the worst betrayal of your ancestors. I looked at my third brother while he was cooking and I realised that what my parents had done, all those years ago, giving him to my fourth uncle who couldn't have children, was one of the greatest sacrifices they could have made. I looked at my third brother's beautiful daughter, Lulu, then looked at my nephew and my other nieces. I felt sad that they, like most of the next generation of children growing up in China, would have no brothers or sisters. We had survived through generations of dark and impoverished living because of this one strength, because of the unconditional love and unselfish care of each other within our family unit. It was all we'd had.
During our three weeks in Qingdao, Mary and I spent a day each with every one of my brothers' families. We started with my big brother Cuncia, and his wife and son, who lived in a small two- bedroom apartment provided by the Laoshan Post Office where he was now a senior manager.
Cuncia had spent over sixteen years in Tibet, one of many Red Guards who had responded to Mao's calling. He had worked hard and been promoted to the head of the Communist Youth Party in the Tibet Post Office.
It was then that my brother had met and married another native of Shandong Province, and they'd had their son. But then, in 1981, the Chinese government suddenly changed its policy towards Tibet. All Chinese living and working in Tibet were ordered to return to their home province.
Cuncia told us that he had first been promoted to the position of deputy head of the post office in a large county called Jiaoxien. He was loved and respected. But one day, in 1983, he was suddenly called into his boss's office and swiftly demoted. To his utter surprise, one of the opposition party Red Guards had become jealous of his rapid promotion and still held a grudge against him-he had lodged a complaint to the government about an incident where my brother had slapped a party leader during a heated argument at the height of the Cultural Revolution. It was an incident that had happened over twenty-five years earlier.
"I'm only one of millions of victims," my brother explained to Mary. "I am, like so many people in China, still amazed at how badly I was manipulated and betrayed by Mao and the Gang of Four. The Red Guards of yesterday were the epitome of the communist spirit. Now we are searching for answers. We have to live with our injured pride and our lost beliefs."
I felt so much sorrow for Cuncia. I knew what he said was true- he had spent the best part of his youth pursuing nothing but propaganda. But the Cultural Revolution didn't just rob him of his youth, it crushed and destroyed his spirit and his soul. His trust in his society had vanished. Even his sacred family values had been called into question by Mao and the Cultural Revolution.