Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin [6]
My niang was an open-minded person, receptive to new ideas. Mao’s Cultural Revolution boasted that one of the great achievements of the Red Guards had been the establishment of evening schools aimed at teaching the uneducated peasants Mao’s communist ideas. We were all given copies of The Quotes of Chairman Mao, which everybody called the Little Red Book. I was six years old then and I remember two enthusiastic young Red Guards coming to teach my niang to read. She never learned to recognize words, but she could memorize entire paragraphs of Chairman Mao’s sayings. She would practice while she was washing, cleaning, sewing, and cooking: I often saw her lips moving as she silently recited passages. She was considered a model student.
One day, while my niang was trying to make a fire to cook dinner, two young Red Guard girls came into our house to check on her progress. She was having a terrible day and couldn’t get the half-burned coal to light. She was polite and explained that she didn’t have time just then and asked them to come back another time. Just as she was going to start cooking, the two girls came back to test my niang on her understanding of the Little Red Book. They had to report back to their group leader.
I could see my niang’s anger growing. Eventually, she handed one girl her wok flipper and asked her to take over the cooking. The two girls just stood there and looked very confused. By now my niang was at the end of her patience. She roared at them: “I could learn Chairman Mao’s sayings every day, all day long, until I die, but who is going to do my cleaning, washing, and cooking? Who will bathe my sons, sew their clothes, cook for my family every day of the year? Do you think Chairman Mao’s words will fill our stomachs? If you can come back every day to help me do all of these things, I will learn whatever you want me to!”
The two girls left, red-faced. That night my niang told my dia what she’d said to the two girls. He just smiled. The girls never returned to our house again.
By the time I was eight, hard work and poverty had begun to wear down my niang, strong as she was. She woke one morning complaining of dizziness and didn’t eat any breakfast. My youngest brother, Jing Tring, and I were home with her. She had planned to do a lot of washing that day, so she packed up a heavy clay basin full of clothes and with a washing-board under her other arm, headed off to the dam on the steep Northern Hill.
I begged her not to go. “I’ll fetch you some water so you can do your washing at home.”
“It will be slippery at the well with all the ice around it. Do you want to die in the well?” she replied impatiently. She walked out the door.
A couple of my friends came over to our house to play that morning. Then, around noon, a neighbor rushed to our house, shouting, “Hurry! Your niang has fainted halfway between the dam and your house!”
My dia was not yet home from work; often he had to finish his quota of lifting heavy materials for the morning before he was allowed to take his lunch hour. That morning he’d said he would try to get back for lunch because he knew our niang wasn’t well.
I asked my friends to look after Jing Tring, then rushed to my fourth uncle’s house, but the door was locked. In a panic I rushed to another neighbor’s house, but realized immediately she would not be able to help: she had tiny bound feet. It would take her all day to walk up the rough dirt road. Then I ran as fast as I could toward the dam. Tears streamed down my face. I was afraid I was too small to be of any help.
I found my niang lying on the side of the road, her clay basin broken, the pile of washed clothes scattered around in the dirt. I shook her violently. “Niang! Niang, wake up!” I shouted, panicking, fearing she was dead.
A few minutes later she slowly opened