God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [86]
My nanny came to see me one day, and when I heard her talking in the courtyard, I rushed out of the house, but I was groping my way and tripped and hurt my head. She clutched me to her bosom, examined my eyes in the sun, and said, “It’s terrible. The child has rooster eyes.” The nanny also told my grandma that she had taken me to a fortune-teller once and the master had said disability would be part of my fate.
So I was probably destined to be blind. But, according to my nanny, the master also saw another possible future as he did his calculations based on the hour, date, and year of my birth. “This child could be a powerful figure, a government official, at least at the county level. But you have to keep him in the countryside until he is three years old. Otherwise, his fate could change. He could end up with a disability either on the face or on his feet.” Unfortunately, my parents brought me back to the city three months before my third birthday.
Liao: Do you believe such things?
Wen: I do. My grandma took me to another fortune-teller when I turned four. That person said similar things about my future.
Liao: What did the doctors say about your sight?
Wen: I used to have a sister, a year older. She died of smallpox in 1946. Since I was then their only child, my parents really doted on me. They took me to hospitals and spent lots of money on eye specialists. My mother had to pawn almost everything to cover the medical expenses. All the doctors gave the same diagnosis—the nerves in my eyes were damaged. I had tried all sorts of meds—herbs, pills, ointments, injections. I probably saw more than twenty doctors in the space of a year. My parents became discouraged. The family was broke and I was still blind. At that desperate moment, someone recommended we see a foreign doctor, a missionary.
The friend said the foreigner was a priest and worked for a church hospital on the top of Wang Mountain. He claimed to be doing God’s work. My father was a little skeptical. Would the foreigner treat a nonbeliever? That friend, who was a follower of that foreign religion, reassured my father that God treated every sufferer equally. So we went. The friend took us to the hospital.
Liao: It must have been a Catholic hospital.
Wen: I have no idea. In my neighborhood, people call Christianity “yang-jiao” or “the foreign religion.” It was quite popular. The Nationalist government had temporarily moved its capital from Nanjing to Chongqing during the Japanese invasion. Many Americans ended up living in my city. Plus, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife were both Christians. Before and after World War II, many Western missionaries came to Chongqing. They built several churches, hospitals, and charity centers. Our indigenous Buddhist and Taoist religions only require people to burn incense and worship.
Liao: Where was Wang Mountain?
Wen: It wasn’t far from my home in Huangjiaoya, next to Huangshan in Chongqing, where Chiang Kai-shek used to stay. My parents left in the morning and didn’t come back until late in the afternoon. They brought back a bottle of eye drops. I was playing by the entrance. They told me excitedly: “Baby, sit still. We’re going to wash your eyes.” I sat still. I was tired of being in the dark. For people born with blindness, the darkness is all they know, but I used to be able to see and it was hard for me then.
Before they used the eye drops, I was washed with a wet cloth—Grandma used up two basins of water—and the area around my eyes was cleaned and sterilized with alcohol-soaked cotton balls my parents brought back from the hospital. The missionary doctor must have told them to do all that. After about a week, I could tell the difference between light and dark, and after a few months I could tell when the sun was setting. It was like light splashing