as the word “big shit.” When the boys realized this, they were thrilled by it. They chased the poor girl all over the classroom, chanting in a chorus: “Oh, oh! Her father is a big shit!” The emphasis each time fell on the last two words. Soon the girl started to cry while she tried to deny that her father was an ambassador, or a big shit. It made quite a scene. Finally the teacher had to intervene. The boys were rebuked for their bad behavior and the girl was consoled.
If this incident was funny, another had more serious consequences. This time the girl who was jeered at by the boys was a manual worker's daughter. Perhaps her parents’ income was low. During the winter, her family did not have enough money to buy coal briquettes that most people in Beijing used at that time for cooking and heating. So each morning she had to go to the dump near our school to look for coal.
The work must have been hard. In winter at six thirty, it was still pitch-black outside and the northwest wind cut people's faces like sharp blades. At the dump, she had to dig out from the garbage the coal briquettes others had used the day before, knock them open one by one with an iron poker, and gather those that were still black in the middle. From time to time, the wind blew ashes into her eyes. As she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, her face grew stained. Her nose was running from the cold. Her hands were chapped. She was wearing shabby clothes to save the better ones for school. It took her a long time to collect enough coal for her family. While she was doing this, her classmates were sleeping in their warm beds. Their apartments had central heating.
One morning a boy in our class saw her at the dump. Later he couldn't refrain from telling others about his discovery. Pretty soon everyone in our class heard about this. The boys chanted: “Yo! Yo! Cinderella! Picking coal stones!” The girl's face turned red, but she did not cry or try to deny it, as the other girl did. She merely sat there with her lips tightened. After that, she shunned her classmates during the day and went home as soon as class was over. The next year she disappeared from our class. Maybe she transferred; maybe she dropped out. She probably dropped out, since other schools were all quite far away. Nobody cared enough to find out about what happened to her. She had no friend in our class.
This small episode was soon forgotten. In 1958 people's minds were occupied by great things, such as the realization of communism in China. What was communism to me at that time? Well, my parents explained to me that communism was the ideal society for humankind, in which everybody was selfless and therefore everybody could take whatever he or she wanted. And no matter how much he or she took, there would always be an abundance of everything. So no one would need to worry about it. That was wonderful! I liked communism, for there were a few things that I definitely wanted to get: candies, popsicles, and above all, little person's books!
Little person's books in China were not only popular among children, even adults enjoyed reading them. They were half the size of a paperback book, from one to two hundred pages long. On each page was a black and white picture in a frame and underneath it a brief description of what was going on. The stories were of a wide variety: some were classical; others were foreign. Many were about revolutionary heroes.
Little person's books were not expensive. In those days, they cost about twenty Chinese cents apiece. Yet Father would give me only one for each week. That always happened on Saturday evenings, the beginning of our weekend when everyone was the happiest. As soon as dinner was over, I would follow him into his room and watch him unlock his big wooden bookcase. There a stack of new little person's books would appear in front of my eyes. All had been carefully selected by Father himself to make sure that the pictures were well drawn and the stories interesting. I loved reading these books! It was from them that I first got to know Monkey and Pigsy in Journey to the West, Zhuge Liang and his generals in Three Kingdoms, the one hundred and eight heroes in Water Margin as well as Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello. I really wished that I could have all the books in Father's bookcase at once plus some others I saw at the bookstore. So I really looked forward to the realization of communism in China!
Perhaps the adults wanted something for themselves from communism as well. For they worked for it with such zeal that they forgot their meals, took no nap in the middle of the day, and often “spun round the axle,” a phrase invented at the time to mean working through the night into the day and then through the day into the night. Their slogan was “Make one day equal twenty years.”
That was the spirit of the Great Leap Forward, during which campaigns came and went like ocean waves. Everybody was involved. Everybody was a bit dizzy in the head. Once there was a campaign to raise the output of iron and steel, during which people all over China built small furnaces in their work units. Traditional methods were used to produce iron. We primary school students helped by going all over the big yard, collecting anything that we thought was iron. We dug up a lot of rusty nails, found a few bottomless basins and a broken chamber pot. Some students, fearing that their team might fall behind in the competition, stole iron woks and kettles from their own homes. I did not do such a thing, for I knew it would upset Aunty. Despite all the efforts, the iron produced in the big yard was no good.
The campaign to eliminate the four pests (flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows) was much more effective. For three days in a row, there was no class at school. What we did was to sit on top of our two-storied classroom buildings, beating drums and gongs, banging on the bottoms of iron basins and cooking pots, waving banners, and shouting at the top of our voices. This was a unified action. The idea was to have people all over Beijing make a great noise so that sparrows would have nowhere to land. In three days all of them would die of exhaustion. So we had a great time making noise on the roof. By the end of the third day, splendid results were reported from the battlefields. Thousands of sparrows had fallen from the sky, and so had numerous other birds, beneficial ones as well as harmful ones. Well, that was the necessary sacrifice sometimes one had to make for the revolution. Compared with communism, our paradise on earth, the death of some birds was a small price to pay.
Later Aunty got involved in this campaign too. In the summer of fifty-eight, instead of a nap, every day after lunch she would go out with a fly mat under her arm, a small stool, and a matchbox. Only she and I knew that she had a secret spot behind a man-made hill in the recreation area of the big yard. In the past kids must have urinated there, so the place smelled. The smell attracted flies, and the flies attracted Aunty. So for a whole summer there she was, sitting in the hot sun, waiting patiently for the flies to land. After she killed one, she would pick up the body carefully and put it in the matchbox. She did this not for communism though. She did this for my sake, knowing there was a competition going on in my school. Each day we were required to bring the flies we killed to school. The teachers would count them and write down the numbers on a chart. Needless to say, I never fell behind in this match.
Aunty was always willing to help me in any way she could, especially in 1958, for in that year all of a sudden she found that she hardly had anything to do. In order to prepare for the oncoming communism, various work units hurriedly set up dining commons, laundries, and kindergartens. My parents insisted that we all eat at the dining common, together with others, so as to practice living and thinking collectively. Meantime all our clothes went to a newly opened laundry co-op where the inexperienced workers, Aunty complained, ruined our silk and woolen clothes. My parents had a hard time convincing her that these were the negligible shortcomings of a new phenomenon, which we should continue to support.
In addition, my parents decided to send Lian, my younger brother, to kindergarten so as to plant the spirit of collectivism in him at the age of two. The kindergarten he went to was open to kids from the big yard only. People said it was excellent, because it was modeled on Russian kindergartens. It had a large playground, a sizable wading pool with a mushroom-shaped fountain in the middle, flush toilets, new bathtubs, and many expensive toys.
Besides the modern facilities, the teachers there were young and educated. Everyone had a diploma of some kind. This was indeed different from the old grandmas in neighborhood day care centers who would let the kids do almost anything they wanted to do. Lian's teachers, on the other hand, emphasized rules and
