By day the work was very hard. At night I shared a room with nine other women. Five slept side by side on one big bed on the southern side of the room; the other five on the northern side. Between the two beds there was a passage some five or six feet wide. In such a room I had privacy only when I woke up at three o'clock.
Knowing that no one was watching me, I felt safe enough to ask myself: what kind of person am I? A die-hard Manchu aristocrat like Nainai, my grandmother, or an educated new peasant in a new society? Am I a true believer of communism or a hidden counterrevolutionary with many dangerous thoughts? Is my life meaningful only because I can serve the people or work for the revolution? What is the purpose of my life? What things am I willing to sacrifice for the sake of my dreams? And what are those, I know by now, I won't give up despite the dreams my parents and I have cherished? In trying to make our dreams come true, what foolish things have we done? What crimes have we committed? If the crimes were committed out of good intentions for the world, would heaven punish us for them or pardon us? If there is no retribution from heaven, should there be no indictment from the court of my own conscience?
2
Old Monkey Monster
Speaking of dreams, I recall a famous Chinese dream in which Chuang Tzu, an ancient philosopher, became a butterfly. In the spring wind he fluttered his wings; he danced among flowers. He drank dew and rested under a green leaf. His heart was ever so happy and serene. When he woke up, he was Chuang Tzu again. Wearing a scholar's hat and a long robe, he sat in his study meditating on the nature of all beings including himself. “Am I really Chuang Chou who dreamed that I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly who is dreaming that I am Chuang Chou?”*
When I look back on what I have been, sometimes I, too, am perplexed. The pictures that remain vivid in my memory don't seem to fit together.
—In the fifties there was a black-eyed and black-haired Chinese girl on Lake Geneva. A precious pearl on the palms of her parents, followed everywhere by her devoted Chinese nanny. Pink satin dress. White leather shoes. Colorful hairpins. She was proud. She was nice to people. Tourists were charmed by her. They asked to take her picture.
—In 1966 there was a Red Guard who jumped on a train and traveled over a thousand miles to Guangzhou to spread the fire of the Cultural Revolution. She criticized First Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang to his face for his tolerance of capitalism and saw drops of sweat as large as soybeans roll down his face. An order issued by her and her comrades shook the city like a hurricane. In its wake, thousands of privately owned shops were devastated.
—In the early seventies there was a peasant on a pig farm. Her face was dark brown and weather-beaten. Her hair was as dry and brittle as straw in late fall. She had strong muscles and a loud voice. She loved to eat dog meat with raw garlic. Her face did not change color after she gulped down several cups of Chinese liquor, which was more than 60 percent alcohol. Although her clothes and boots carried a lot of stinking mud, the work she did was neat and she took great pride in it.
—In the nineties there is a Chinese professor in an American college. She has a Ph.D in comparative literature. She teaches Chinese language and a variety of courses on Chinese culture and literature. To her American colleagues and students, she is very Chinese. Yet her Chinese friends say that she is westernized. Some suspect that she is a feminist, because she is too independent. She has a son, whom she chose to raise by herself after a divorce. It seems unthinkable that she is doing quite all right without a husband.
Can these be the same person? Can this person be me? Among these, which is the real me and which are the roles I have played? Once in a while I even doubt my memory. But I am sure of one thing: since I was a child, I had a feeling that the materials of which I was made were ill at ease with one another.
My parents brought me into this world on December 1, 1950. My father, people said, was an old revolutionary. He joined the Chinese Communist Party in the early 1940s. My mother, who graduated from Yanjing University (now called Beijing University) the year before I was born, was a new enthusiast for the Maoist revolution. She, like many of her peers, believed that only the Chinese Communist Party could save China. It would provide secure jobs for intellectuals and liberate workers and peasants from slavery. It would root out corruption that had plagued all the previous governments and revive China's economy that had collapsed in the 1940s.
One thing the adults liked to tell my generation when we were young was that we were the most fortunate, because we were born in new China and grew up under the red flag. In my case only part of this was true. I was born in new China. But when I was one year old, my parents took me to Switzerland. There I grew up under a red flag, not one with five golden stars symbolizing the Communist Party and four hundred million Chinese, but one with a large white cross on it. That must have messed things up for me from very early on.
In Switzerland we lived in Bern and Geneva, in quiet and comfortable surroundings. At that time there were four of us in our family: Father, Mother, Aunty, and I. From Monday to Saturday, I hardly saw my parents. They were both busy working at the Chinese consulate. In the morning they always left in a great hurry; in the evening unfinished work, meetings, or banquets kept them away. By the time they got home, I was already fast asleep. On Sunday, Mother usually slept until noon and Father until two o'clock in the afternoon. So in those years Aunty was about the only one who was always there for me.
Aunty, I later found out, was no relative of ours. She was my nanny. My paternal grandmother, whom I called Nainai, hired her in Beijing shortly before I was born. Five days after Mother gave birth to me, that is, as soon as we left the hospital, Aunty took over the work from Mother. Henceforth day and night, it was she who fed me, washed me, and rocked me in her arms. I fell asleep to her soft wordless songs. It was her smile and her voice that I remembered when I was a baby. My own mother, on the other hand, left me when I was barely one month old. She flew to Switzerland to resume her work. As for my father, I did not meet him until I was one year old. At that time he came back to report on work. While he was in Beijing, he celebrated my birthday with me. Afterwards he took Aunty and me to Switzerland.
On arrival at our new home, Father said: “Now in China it is a new society. Everybody is equal. There are no more masters and servants. People are of one big family. So let Rae, our little girl, call her Aunty instead of nanny from the start.”
Thus I learned to call her Aunty. For me, the word Aunty was dearer than Mother and Father put together, and over the years I became more important to Aunty than her own daughter, whom she had tried hard to forget. I do not know when my parents found out how I felt or how they took it when they found it out. Were they sad or glad of the fact that because of their dedication to the revolutionary work, they let a nanny steal the heart of their only daughter whom they insisted they loved very much?
When I say this, I do not mean that I did not love my parents. Of course I did. Yet that love was different. It was rational, unlike the mysterious tie that bound Aunty and me together, body and soul. By this, I mean if a misfortune was about to befall Aunty a thousand miles away, I would feel it in my blood. I would have bad dreams at night. Such premonitions were hard to explain; yet they turned out to be right when I had them in 1978. In contrast, when my mother died suddenly in 1976, I did not feel anything. I learned the bad news the next day from Father's telegram.
In the late 1950s, when I came back to attend elementary school in Beijing, I discovered that my attachment to Aunty was not unique. Many of my classmates, who were children of high-ranking cadres, were just like me. They loved their nannies, aunties, or grandmothers more than their own parents. Sometimes the parents became so jealous that they told the nannies to go home. Others let the nannies stay for the children's sake. Of these parents, many were richly rewarded a few years later. That is, when the Cultural Revolution broke out and the parents got into trouble, the nannies took the children into their own homes and brought
