Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin [13]
It was my fifth brother, Cunfar, who was the closest to me. We were two and a half years apart—and we fought over everything. But I loved him. He was my protector against bullies, my partner in games, and my rival in races.
So I grew up with my brothers, playing outside, under the sun, in the rain, even in the freezing winter. Summer was my favorite time. Except in winter, I hardly ever wore shoes for the first nine years of my life.
One day, late in the afternoon, the sun was setting and we were playing hide-and-seek in the village. I was climbing on people’s walls and roofs, trying to find a good place to hide. I climbed over our six-foot-high stone wall, trying to get behind the three-foot clay pots where the pigs’ food was stored. One of the pots stored fermented millet waste. My foot slipped on the loose stones of the wall, I lost my balance and fell headfirst into the pot of thick, gooey waste. I was only about seven or eight, not much taller than the pot.
Our niang was busy cooking dinner and my fourth brother was her helper. By chance, Cunsang looked out and noticed the shadow of a pair of feet struggling upside down on the toilet wall. He immediately rushed to the pot and pulled me out. “You could have found a better place to die than the millet pot!” he said.
I was gasping for air, seconds away from losing my life.
The streets, the riverbank, the dam, and the hilly fields were our playgrounds. We made our own spinning tops and loved playing marbles. Of course, we often had to help our dia, working our small piece of land. Sometimes we worked on it in the rain, trying to capture as much rainwater as possible in buckets and pots. In winter, when the fields were covered with thick, thick snow, we built snowmen and had snowball fights, chasing each other wildly around. We would roam for hours in this white world, in the vast open space of the fields, with snow falling around us, and return home covered with snow, our ears, noses, hands, and feet bright red from the cold and our bodies steaming with sweat under our quilted cotton clothes. More washing and mending for our niang.
One Sunday, in the middle of a summer drought, my brothers and I had just finished helping our dia carry buckets of water to the yam crops. We were sweating and the hot sun burned our skin, so our dia allowed us to go to the dam to cool down. As the fastest runner I got there first. Some of the older village boys were already splashing in the middle of the dam. The water level was low. The other boys were treading water, but it looked as though they were standing. Without thinking, I dived in. I had never learned to swim, and I panicked when I couldn’t touch the bottom. Every time I tried to yell for help, I would swallow some water, my head going up and down. One of my cousins was with the group of older boys. He saw me struggling and quickly swam to me and pulled me out of the water. A minute later I would have drowned.
About the middle of 1966, Mao’s Cultural Revolution reached its most chaotic period. Jing Tring and I were too young to participate but my three eldest brothers did. They would go out in the evenings and return late at night. They told me horror stories about the young Red Guards, how they burned and destroyed anything that had a Western flavor—books, paintings, artwork—and tore down ancient temples and shrines. Mao wanted communism to be our only faith. The young Guards had only to mention Chairman Mao’s name and they would not have to pay for a thing. For a brief period, they nearly bankrupted China and the country teetered on the edge of civil war. Back in the New Village, however, we knew little of that wider picture.
My parents tried their hardest to persuade my brothers to stay home on those evenings. But in reality there was nothing they could do—an unstoppable political heatwave was sweeping through China.
Then, one day, the