this kindergarten the children went to the toilet according to a fixed schedule, which was scientifically designed. When the time came, everybody had to sit on a toilet and afterwards no one was allowed to go back again. He or she had to wait until the next time.
In this kindergarten, Lian was to stay six days and five nights a week. That made him miserable. Every Monday morning before he left home, he would stall for time and then he would start to cry. He looked pitiable indeed, like a little lamb on its way to the wolf's big mouth. My parents and Aunty had to promise him candies and toys so as to coax him into leaving home.
Then each Saturday afternoon when Aunty and I went to pick him up, we always saw him standing behind the iron fence watching the road. As soon as he saw Aunty, he waved his little hands and jumped with joy. As soon as we were out of the teachers’ earshot, he would start begging Aunty again: “Please let me stay home next week. I will be very good! I will help you do small things.” To this, Aunty had to say No many times.
On Lian's third birthday, Aunty got up early, boiled some eggs, and painted them red. In Beijing it was an old custom to give young “longevity stars” red eggs so that they would be healthy and have good luck during the year. The eggs Aunty made were very pretty. So pretty that I wanted all of them. But Aunty gave me only two. The rest she put in a basket and took to the kindergarten. Before long, however, she came back with tears in her eyes. It turned out that she was stopped at the gate, where she was told that family members were not allowed to see the kids during the week. Moreover they were not supposed to send food either. Birthday or no birthday. The rule was the rule. Aunty was so disappointed that she almost burst into tears in front of the teacher. So in the end, I had all the eggs.
Because Aunty felt uneasy getting paid by my parents without doing much work, when the next campaign came and Mother suggested that she learn to read and write, she eagerly said yes. This time the campaign was to wipe out illiteracy in China. From then on, each evening Mother and Aunty would sit down at a desk. Mother would teach Aunty several characters and the latter would spend hours the next day copying and trying to memorize them.
In 1958 Aunty was already fifty-six, an old woman by traditional standards, who did not even know how to write her own name. To start learning those complicated Chinese characters as elementary school students did—that was hard for Aunty, ten times harder than the household chores. Nonetheless she persisted. I never heard her complain that the lessons were too difficult or that Mother went too fast. Soon she was advanced enough to go to the night school that was set up during the campaign. There she got small red flags and paper satellites from her teachers after each quiz as a reward for her good work. When Aunty showed these to me, her face was beaming and she was as proud as a little girl. She would surely have continued, had the campaign not suddenly come to an end in less than a year. By that time, Aunty had learned over a thousand characters, which enabled her to read newspapers and write simple letters.
Years later this turned out a true blessing for me. In fact, it was the only good thing I could think of that came out of the Great Leap Forward. Why was this a blessing? In the seventies, after I worked on the pig farm for a few years, I began to feel very lonely. It seemed that the whole world had passed me by and I was stuck. A toad sitting in a deep well, watching the sky. No one understood me. No one cared to know about the predicament I had. My parents were as bad as others. Their letters echoed the newspaper editorials, saying that educated youths had a great future in the countryside. On top of that, I was very angry at myself, for volunteering and other things I had done. For a while it seemed there was no way out.
But Aunty kept writing to me. Her letters were short and simple, telling me how much she had missed me and how she longed day and night for me to come back so that we could live together once again. These letters warmed my heart and gave me courage to go on living. I don't know what would have happened to me if Aunty had not learned to read and write during the Great Leap Forward. Loneliness and despair might have engulfed me.
8
When Famine Hit
The large-scale famine that set in around 1959 brought the Great Leap Forward to an end. Actually today many people say it was the Great Leap Forward that brought about the famine. Either way, toward the end of 1959 suddenly food became very scarce. Pork, chicken, fish, cookies, candies, nuts, canned goods, fruit, vegetables—in short, all edible things—vanished from the store shelves. Afterwards ration coupons were invented, all kinds of them: grain coupons, cooking oil coupons, meat coupons, fish coupons, egg coupons, tofu coupons, pastry coupons, sugar coupons, cigarette coupons, cotton coupons, cloth coupons, and many more. All of them were of vital importance for people living in cities.
These coupons caused changes. Suddenly money lost its magic power. My great-grandfather would have been heartbroken, if he was indeed like what his grandchildren had described. Without ration coupons, one could hardly buy anything with money. And where did ration coupons come from? Each month, the coupons were distributed by city governments to their legal residents according to their hukou. Consequently those small white cards, which in the past were merely registration of people's legal residency, became of vital importance. One had to have a city hukou to get ration coupons. Peasants were supposed to grow their own food and, beyond that, to deliver tax grain and sell surplus grain to the government. They got no ration coupons.
The coupons, moreover, differed from one place to another. Those who got coupons in Hebei province, for instance, could not use them in Beijing even though Beijing was right in the middle of Hebei province. After this system was established, it became increasingly difficult for people to move. Actually moving from a big city to a small town or to the countryside was still rather easy; but to go the other way, especially to get into Beijing and Shanghai, was harder than walking up into the blue sky. Thus the coupons took away much freedom from ordinary people and put power into the hands of some officials.
However, during the “Three-Year Natural Calamity” (1959-1962), as it was officially called in China, freedom was not the issue on people's minds. Food was the concern. Food became an obsession. When famine hit, everybody's stomach suddenly became a bottomless cave. The more food you put in it, the emptier it seemed to be. With such a rumbling stomach, the dream of communism was forgotten.
With ration coupons, an adult in Beijing was allowed to buy around thirty pounds of grain each month at a subsidized price. Children's rations varied according to their age. In addition, each person got up to a half-pound of meat, half a dozen eggs, four ounces of cooking oil, and some tofu. In fact, the rations varied depending on the supply.
Once in a while fish or animal offal came to the local store and was sold without coupons, on a first come first served basis. The news spread like wildfire in the big yard. Neighbors told neighbors. Friends called friends. People raced one another to the store. Long lines formed within minutes, winding round and round and creeping slowly like a huge serpent. Aunty and I used to take turns standing in the lines. Sometimes it would take two or three hours, sometimes even longer for us to reach the counter. When we were within a hundred feet, both of us were in the line so that we could buy twice the amount a person was allowed to buy.
I did not mind waiting in the line, under the hot sun, or in the chilly northwest wind. What I hated most was to see the food sold out to the person right in front of Aunty and me. At that moment, everybody cried, “Aiya! Meila!” in great disappointment and came to the front to see with their own eyes that all the boxes were indeed empty. But at least such disappointment never came as a surprise. The shop clerks usually warned people when the supply was running low. After that, Aunty and I would take turns going up to the counter to investigate the supply and count how many heads were ahead of us. As long as there was still a trace of hope, we would persist. Holding our breath and watching out for those who might attempt to jump the queue, we yelled, “Be conscientious! Stop squeezing in!” When I did this, no one blamed me for being impolite, and I felt it was exactly the right thing to do.
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