Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin [3]
The commune allocated each family in the village a piece of land. My family’s was one twentieth of an acre, halfway up the Northern Hill, about fifteen minutes from home. It was so small it could only be used to grow essential foods such as corn and yams. On Sundays, our entire family worked on this land with my father. Everything was done by hand using shovels, picks, hoes, sickles, and ploughs.
The villagers had no say in what to plant: the central government in Beijing decided that. My family’s area planted mainly wheat in the winter; corn, yams, and sorghum the rest of the year. The government would get the biggest portion, at a set price. The rest was divided among the peasants according to the number of members in each family and how many points the family earned during the year. The most a man could earn in a single day was ten points—about one yuan (equal to approximately seventeen US cents at that time). Women received about half a man’s earnings.
One year, there was a severe drought and nobody was paid a single yuan. The village had to borrow money from the local government to lend to every family so they could buy food to survive. It took more than two years to repay that loan, and still the peasants had to eat anything that moved, and some things that didn’t, including tree bark.
My family was very poor, but there were even poorer people in our commune. By the time I was born, three years of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and bad weather had resulted in one of the greatest famines the world had ever seen. Nearly thirty million Chinese died. My parents were desperately fighting for survival.
I was my parents’ sixth son, born on January 26, 1961. By then my parents had been married for fifteen years. Our na-na, my father’s mother, lived next door, and his fourth brother (we called him Fourth Uncle) lived next to her. Our third uncle’s family lived in front of us. He died quite young, leaving four young girls and a boy. My father, who we called Dia, and our fourth uncle became their de facto fathers.
When I was just fifteen days old, my mother, who we called Niang, left me on our kang, wrapped in a cotton quilt, before going to the kitchen to make her bread rolls for the Chinese New Year. Mothers in China always wrapped their babies’ arms tightly against their bodies and laid them facing up. That day my niang had so many rolls to steam that the kang where I was lying became boiling hot. I struggled my right arm loose, and the kang badly burned the middle of my arm.
When my niang first heard my screams, she thought I wanted milk. She had none left in her breasts so at first she did not respond. By the time she came to check on me, the elbow area of my arm was severely burned and blistered.
Two days later, my arm had swollen up and turned bright red. My parents could not afford to take me to the hospital. I developed a high fever and screamed day and night. Finally they had to borrow some money from our relatives and friends to take me to the hospital. “Your son has a bad infection,” the doctor informed my parents. “Your only hope is to apply some herbal medicine.”
“What will happen if it doesn’t work?” my niang asked, desperately afraid.
“He may lose his right arm,” he replied.
My parents purchased herbs from a local medicine shop. My niang followed the doctor’s instructions and stewed them in the wok. They applied the dark liquid to my arm. It made the infection worse.
My niang started to panic. She took me to see many healers who lived in our area, to no avail. Then my fourth aunt said, “An old healer told my mother once that baifang helps infections.” Bai fang was a meat tenderizer, full of acid. My desperate niang decided to give it a try.
When she applied the bai fang I screamed like a stuck pig. She couldn’t bear to see her son