Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [28]
Zhang Dou’s autobiography
I’m Zhang Dou, twenty-two years old.
I’m taping this video now in Miaomiao’s house in the rural Huairou district just outside Beijing.
I’m from Henan Province, where my parents were peasants. I’ve had asthma since I was a child, but I’m quite tall—at thirteen, I looked like I was sixteen. It was then that I was abducted at the railway station and taken to do slave labor in an illegal brick kiln in Shanxi Province. I made bricks for building houses for about three years, and I almost died from several asthma attacks. Once I tried to run away and was rescued by some strangers who took me to the local Labor Bureau, but the Labor Bureau sold me again to another illegal brick kiln. Six or seven years ago the illegal brick kilns in that area were exposed by the national media. Many of them were closed down and many child laborers were saved. Most of them were of the same age and background as me—all of them were missing persons. I met a number of reporters then, and one of them was Miaomiao from a Guangzhou paper. We hit it off especially well, and she told me I should write an article describing what had happened to me. I didn’t write anything very good, but Miaomiao really liked it and wanted to help me get it published. Then I was sent back to school. My mother died quite young and my father went south to work. I went back to school to do the first year of middle school over again.
A year or so later, I got a letter from Miaomiao. She said the media had all been told that they were not to publish any more news about the illegal brick kilns because it would damage the nation’s image. My piece couldn’t be published; it could only be posted on the popular liberal Internet Web site Tianya. I received quite a few comments until it was “harmonized” off the net by the web police.
Miaomiao gave me her e-mail address, and when I went into town I sent her an e-mail to tell her I didn’t want to go to school anymore. There was nobody with me at home, and I wanted to go and find a job. Miaomiao wrote back and told me to come to Beijing and stay with her. She’d quit her job on the paper in Guangzhou and moved back to Beijing. She said the office world was too horrible and the pressure was too great. She would rather be a freelance writer and work from home.
Just after my seventeenth birthday, I went to Huairou district outside Beijing to find Miaomiao. She now lived in the countryside.
She taught me how to make love and how to play the guitar. I discovered that she was an excellent cook and baked cakes and cookies, too. She had three cats and three dogs, all strays that she’d brought home with her. She said that before the Beijing Olympics there were so many demolitions and relocations that many people left their dogs and cats behind, and so Beijing was full of stray dogs and cats. Even valuable golden retrievers became dog meat and were sold for only seven yuan a pound in the farmers’ market. I was also a stray that she had taken in, and now I didn’t have to worry when my asthma flared up.
She wrote articles and television scripts to provide for us. Sometimes I would work at a nearby pet clinic, and I became very chummy with the clinic staff because I was always bringing cats and dogs in for treatment. Miaomiao had bought a small house from some peasants. It had three north-facing rooms, a separate kitchen, and a bathroom with a shower. We lived there very happily with all the cats and dogs for a year and three months, until Miaomiao turned thirty-two.
Then we heard that the whole country was in chaos, and people in Beijing were very frightened. The first thing we worried about was running out of food, both for ourselves and for our dogs and cats. When another crackdown was announced, things settled down, but Miaomiao would not let me go outside for fear I might be arrested. I stayed indoors for a whole month. Food supplies were very short then, and many more people abandoned their pets on the streets again. Every