dining common. When food was in such short supply, it was far better to keep it at home, in Aunty's careful hands. Others were probably thinking along the same lines. So the once crowded dining common was deserted. When friends and neighbors met in the big yard, they exchanged information about restaurants in Beijing: which one put more meat and oil in its stir-fry dishes, in which the rice was cooked with less water so that it would last longer.
“Go to Moscow Restaurant! They sell high-price pastry you can buy without grain coupons!”
“Go to Purple Bamboo! They have live fish these days!”
“Moslem restaurants are better! They have beef and mutton. They put more meat in their dishes!”
“The snack bar outside the Summer Palace serves imitation coffee. It tastes sort of like the real thing. Go and try it!”
So the next weekend we would be at one of these places. The party usually included only Father, Lian, and me. Mother and Aunty always insisted that they needed to stay home to take care of the baby. In those years, everywhere we went the prices were sky high and the quality of the food had never been so poor. A stir-fry dish with a few pieces of meat used to cost less than one yuan. Now it would sell for more than ten yuan and people were still buying it like crazy. To Father, money was not important. It came easily. It went easily. If a meal cost a hundred yuan, it was worth it. Some food in our stomachs was always better than a few cold bank notes. Under this guiding principle, the money my parents saved in Switzerland, four or five thousand yuan, which was a considerable sum in China at the time, was quickly used up. In a couple of years they closed their savings account.
After that, my parents often had to borrow ten or fifteen yuan from Aunty at the end of each month. This amount was paid back in a few days but before the month was over, they borrowed it back again. Aunty, on the other hand, had kept her savings of some fifteen hundred yuan that she brought back from Switzerland. When the famine was over, its purchasing power increased dramatically. But looking back on it, Father was not sorry for having bought so little with so much money. “You and Lian were both growing. I could not let you go hungry. And your mother was nursing a baby. She should not go hungry either.”
But Mother went hungry anyway, voluntarily. Born in the year of the ox, she liked to say, “I am an ox. I am strong. I can eat grass and work in the fields from morning till night. Don't you worry about me.” Thus saying, she took food out of her own bowl and put it into mine and Lian's. Thinking of this, now I am sure that she loved us very much. Yet when she was alive I did not understand this.
Sometimes I wonder why my mother never held me in her arms or called me by those funny “little names,” as Aunty and other people's mothers did. And she never kissed me or Lian or said, “I love you.” Maybe she was ashamed of doing so because she was a professional woman and a cadre? Or were there other reasons that dated back to her childhood? Could it be that my memory deceived me? For lately I have realized how unreliable one's memory can be. Anyway, in i960, when Mother gave birth to a third child, her ration grew to include some extra eggs, fish, and meat. Most of these she quietly and resolutely pushed out of her bowl into ours. In the meantime, she was breast-feeding the baby. (She did not breast-feed Lian and me, for fear that breastfeeding might ruin the figure of which she was very proud.)
A few months later, however, her body began to show signs of “water swelling,” a symptom of serious malnutrition, and her blood pressure shot up to over two hundred. Her face lost its rosy color. It looked as if it were made of yellow wax. Press a finger on her forehead, a hole would appear and stay there for quite a while. Everybody who saw her like that was alarmed, especially Father and Aunty. After that, Mother was taken better care of. But her blood pressure never returned to normal despite remedies such as Sea Treasure Soup and Chicken Blood Shots. Her health was ruined once and for all.
The baby, my little brother, Mother and Father named Yue, which means Leap, to commemorate the Great Leap Forward. This name seems really ironic today. But back in i960, most people who lived in cities were unaware of the link between the Great Leap Forward and the famine. Those who knew what happened in the countryside during the campaign—local cadres lied about the yield; at many places crops rotted in the fields, because peasants were too busy building reservoirs and making iron and steel in their backyards; unscientific methods such as deep plowing damaged the soil—did not dare tell the truth to others. A few people who had the courage to speak up, like General Peng Dehuai, met the wrath of Chairman Mao and lost their positions.
As a result, in the sixties people in Beijing believed what the official newspapers told them: the famine was caused by natural calamities made worse later by the perfidy of the Russian Revisionists. However, our difficulties were only temporary. With a combined effort of the leaders and the common people, they would soon be overcome. And what else? Despite the severe natural calamities, not even one person in China had starved to death. If the situation had unfolded in the past, millions would have perished. This fact itself was another great victory! . . .
It was easy to convince people who lived in Beijing of the above, because their rations were higher than elsewhere. As for the big yard, it had stations out in the northwest. The soldiers there, I heard, were given orders to hunt deer in late fall. Subsequently the meat was brought to Beijing in trucks and divided up among the cadres. Nevertheless, when I looked at the albums, I was surprised to see how thin I suddenly became in 1961.1 said “surprised” because I don't remember being hungry. Aside from Mother's sacrifice, Father had “tightened his belt” for us too. As a high-ranking cadre, he was taken special care of by the government. His privilege at the time was two pounds of meat each month, while Mother got only two pounds of soybeans as a low-ranking cadre. Nearly all of these, like the nutritious food Mother got, ended up taking care of Lian and me.
If the utmost my parents could do in a famine was to spend money, Aunty, who had been a poverty-stricken widow in the old society, was a lot more resourceful. With her, I had quite a few exciting adventures. I remember Aunty and I used to sneak out of the big yard at dusk with cotton sacks hidden in a handbag. We were going to buy illegal rice from the local peasants.
When we arrived at the village, it was already dark. Aunty knocked on a door. Somebody opened it from the inside. Quickly we slid into the yard. No greetings were exchanged at the door. No questions asked either. Once inside, the peasant would take out a sack of rice for Aunty to look at. Aunty reached her hand way down into the sack, took out some rice, spread it on her palm, and tried hard to find fault with it. Then they started bargaining in a low voice. After a while a price was agreed on and money changed hands; the peasant filled our sacks with rice. Finally the peasant would throw some green beans or other vegetables from his garden into the bargain to show goodwill and tell us to come back again.
I watched this process in the dark. Nobody paid any attention to me. This way of buying things was utterly unfamiliar to me. Unlike the state-owned shops where the price of everything was fixed and written on a tag, here everything was negotiable and they expected people to bargain. “Ask a sky-high price. Give an earth-low one in return.” The more Aunty found fault with the peasant's rice, the happier he seemed to look. Sometimes when she said, “Forget it! The price you ask is ridiculous! I'm leaving,” the deal was made. No ill feelings on either side. No real friendship either. It was strictly business.
On our way back, the sacks were heavy. Aunty carried the big one. I carried the small one. It was quite a walk. After a while I was sweaty. Yet I walked as fast as I could. Seeing this, Aunty would say that she was truly glad that I had grown up and was now such a big help. Meanwhile she also warned me not to tell anybody what we had done. Her words made me feel that I was trusted. “Of course I won't tell on her and get her into trouble! I know it is for our sake that she takes the risk. I am ten years old now. I understand such things!”
My parents understood this too, I think, in their hearts and bellies. But to save face or for whatever reason, they had to tell
