Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin [4]
But my fourth aunt still believed it would work. “Ni tai sin yuen la!” You are too soft-hearted, she told my niang. She locked her door, crushed the bai fang into a powder, and rubbed massive amounts onto my raw, exposed muscles. I screamed nonstop. Every hour she would wash my arm with warm water and reapply bai fang.
Years later my niang confessed, “I was outside your fourth aunt’s door and my heart bled each time you screamed. The sound of your cries was like a thousand sharp knives cutting into my guilty heart! Several times I banged on your fourth aunt’s door, trying to take you away. Thank the gods for her determination. She just ignored me.”
My fourth aunt nearly gave up many times that day. But her determination saved my arm. A large scar remained, and in years to come, in moments of crisis, I would touch it. It became my link to my niang, a reminder of her love.
Three years later, my niang gave birth to her seventh son, my youngest brother, Cungui, whom we called by his nickname, “Jing Tring.” My parents knew they couldn’t provide enough food to feed the sons they already had. Every family was allocated a very small quantity of meat, seafood, and eggs, along with oil, soy sauce, sugar, salt, wheat and corn flour, rice, and coal each month. Often they were not available at all.
We ate a lot of dried yams. They were the easiest things to grow. I was often woken up at five o’clock in the morning to go to the yam fields with my big brothers before they started school for the day. We each carried a shovel and a bamboo basket. We dug for any yams that might have been overlooked by the peasants during harvesting. The hope of those yams for breakfast kept us going. Often the fields had already been turned over by others in equally desperate circumstances, and we returned home with empty baskets.
During summer, every family’s front yard and roof was covered with slices of these yams drying in the sun. Some people even laid them out on the street. But if rain came, they had to pick them all up quickly: if they got wet, they soon turned moldy. Once dried, the sliced yams were stored in a huge clay pot.
We had dried yams, steamed or boiled, almost daily, week after week, month after month, year after year. They had no taste and stuck in our throats. Dried yams were the most hated food in my family—but there were others in the commune who could not afford even dried yams. We were luckier than most. Luckier than the thirty million who starved to death. Dried yams saved our lives.
We rarely ate meat. Once a month we would wait in long lines at the market for the fattest piece of pork available.
Mealtimes in my family were always sad for my niang. There was often nothing for her to cook. Out of respect for our elders, we would always wait for our dia to start. One day, when my niang served dinner, it was clear there was not enough food for everyone.
“I don’t feel hungry,” our dia said. “I had a good lunch.”
Each of us had our chopsticks in hand, but we hesitated. Our niang gave our dia an annoyed look and made “zhi, zhi, zhi” sounds with her tongue. “Don’t you dare not eat! Your health is our entire family’s security. We will all only drink water if you starve yourself to death!”
“I’m not hungry,” our dia protested.
Our niang picked up some food with her chopsticks and put it in our dia’s bowl. We started to eat only after he took the first bite. Our parents always ate slowly to allow us more food. On many occasions our niang told us to leave the best food for our dia because he was our breadwinner. But our dia told us we should give the best food to our niang: if it were not for her we would all have only “north-west wind” for dinner.
It was always like this. Seven pairs of hungry eyes would look at our parents, but we all knew how difficult it was to get any food at all.
To survive, my niang worked every spare hour she had in the fields, as well as cooking and looking after her boys. Often she had to swallow her pride and borrow food from relatives or neighbors.