Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin [2]
My parents lived with my father’s six brothers, their wives, his two sisters, and their children—over twenty people crammed into a six-room house. As the youngest daughter-in-law, my mother’s status in the Li family was the lowest. She worked hard to prove her worth.
Often she would not see my father until late in the evenings, because he worked at two jobs, either away in the fields or carting building materials, all day long. The family would sit for dinner by candlelight, the men eating at one table and women and children eating at others.
The women of the house would sew, wash, clean, and cook. The speed and quality of my mother’s work won her mother-in-law’s approval. To cook well was a sign of love and care. My mother was often sent to deliver the food to the men in the fields, because of her unbound feet. Her sisters-in-law, envied her such freedom.
My mother’s mother died within the first year of my parents’ marriage, so my mother would visit her father once a year, even though he never loved her in the same way as he loved his sons. A son could work in the fields, bring home a daughter-in-law, and carry on the family line.
My parents continued to share a house with my father’s family. Their first son was born about a year after their marriage, their second just over two years later, their third two years after that, and their fourth in 1955. My mother eventually came to be known as “that lucky woman with seven sons.”
My family’s crowded house had a small front courtyard. Inside were four rooms: two small bedrooms, a slightly larger bedroom, and the kitchen/living room with two built-in woks. There was no refrigeration and no running water, only a huge clay pot for storing drinking water. The woks backed onto the bedroom walls, which were covered with newspaper and contained the chimneys. Fire and smoke would travel through the walls on the other side to retain heat, but as the night wore on our beds became colder.
The floor was reddish earth. During wet weather, water always seeped in and my father would have to dig out the wet floor and wait for a dry day to replace it with new earth, pounding it down with a huge wooden hammer.
Clothes were stored in papier-mâché boxes my mother made, stacked on the two small beds during the day and moved onto the floor at night. There was also a main kang, about the size of a small double bed. Eventually my parents and all their sons had to share those three beds. The main bedroom was also the room where my family ate.
After waking each morning on the freezing beds, we would fold the blankets into rolls and tuck them neatly away. What remained was a bamboo mat. A wooden tray would be placed on the mat and the family would sit around it, crosslegged, to eat each meal.
My family went to one of the village wells to fetch water, carrying it in two buckets that hung from either end of a bamboo pole balanced across one shoulder. The adults and the big boys would carry big buckets, the little boys smaller buckets. Water was heated in the big wok, and basins were used for baths. (There was a public bath in the commune shared by over ten thousand people, but my family couldn’t afford to use it.) We had no bathroom, only a toilet—a hole in the ground in the front courtyard. You had to stand or crouch on two wooden boards, one on each side of the hole. There was no roof, so it was freezing cold in winter. Half the toilet was inside the wall and half outside, to allow the waste to be collected and taken to the fields as fertilizer. The village crap-man poured the waste into his wheelbarrow, which he pushed through the narrow streets. People would move aside to allow him to pass. One day he had a collision with a bicycle. The foul contents of the wheelbarrow ran all over the street. What a stink! Even after the neighbors washed the area over and over, everyone avoided that street for a long time. Neighbors tried to have him replaced, but nobody wanted to be the next crap-man.
My family had to make use of every inch of their front yard.