I thought nothing of Grandmother’s sleepless nights until one day in the early 1980s. When life resumed its normality after the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, The Monkey King was the first classic Chinese novel adapted for television – an ideal medium for bringing alive its colourful characters, fantastic stories and magical elements. It was an astonishing success. I, like the whole country, was glued to the box for two months. Every boy in our neighbourhood had a plastic cudgel; everyone could sing the theme song; adults talked about nothing but last night’s television. Even Grandmother, who was half-blind, joined us. The magic was still there, and I was lifted once again out of the mundane world.
One night I woke up to find Grandmother in her usual position and counting the beans. Her posture and expression struck me at once as familiar, not because I had seen them so many times but because they reminded me of something. But what? Then it occurred to me that the monk in The Monkey King sat like this to pray whenever he was in trouble, with the same concentration and calmness; the only difference was that he had a long string of beads round his neck, which he never stopped counting. Was Grandmother praying? I asked her; she nodded. She was counting the beans to remember how many prayers she had said. I asked her what she was praying for. She said for her dead children and husband, for her to join them in paradise, for me not to suffer too much as the unwanted daughter, for my brother, for us all to be healthy, for us to have enough to eat, and for Father not to be a target in the endless political campaigns.
I was astonished. I did not know whether to laugh or to cry. Looking at her, fragile as a reed and with deep lines of sorrow on her face as though carved by a knife, I felt immensely sad. I wanted to shake her by her slender shoulders and wake her up. How could she be so stupid? How could she be sure there was a god up there who would answer her prayers? How could she bank all her hopes on the next world that did not even exist? Why did she blame herself for my being a girl instead of a boy? Why had I never heard her claiming credit for the birth of my brother born four years after me? Besides, what was the point of having gods and goddesses who did nothing for her but made her feel she never did enough to please them? Somehow, though, I knew I would never convince her. My father did not succeed. Those beliefs sustained her all her life. They were her life, her very being. We were worlds apart.
Grandmother must have felt very lonely among us. Despite her love and affection for me, I and my sisters always sided with Father and made fun of her Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The relentless political drill that ran throughout my education had turned me, like most Chinese born after 1949, into a complete atheist. Buddhism was not only bad, it was dead, part of the old life, like the last emperor. As the Internationale says: ‘There is no saviour, nor can we depend on gods and emperors. Only we can create happiness for ourselves.’ The teachers told us that the only Heaven would be a Communist one and we must work for it. China had suffered centuries of wretchedness with no help from the Buddha. Chairman Mao changed our lives. We memorized a verse that was supposed to have been composed by Mao after he took up Communism:
What is a Buddha?
One clay body,
With two blank eyes,
Three meals a day are wasted on him,
With four feeble limbs,
He cannot name five cereals,
His six nearest relatives he does not know …
What should we do with him?
Smash him!
I recited the poem to Grandmother one night when we were following her foot-washing ritual. She did not say anything; instead she asked me if I wanted to hear a story. I nodded for I always liked her stories; some were as magical as those in The Monkey King.
A long, long time ago, Grandmother said, a pigeon was flying about searching for food. Suddenly it saw this huge vulture hovering over it. Frightened, it began to look for a place to hide but could find none. It could see no trees, no houses, just a group of hunters on their way to the forest. In desperation, the pigeon dropped in front of a handsome prince in the hunting party, begging for protection. The vulture descended too and asked for its prey back. ‘I am hungry,’ it pleaded. ‘I have had no luck for days and if I don’t eat something, I will die of hunger. Please have pity on me too.’ The prince thought for a while and said to the vulture: ‘I cannot let you starve. Let’s weigh the pigeon. I will give you the same amount of flesh from my own body.’ His courtiers were shocked, but the prince insisted and sent one of his ministers for a set of scales. Meanwhile he had a knife sharpened. The pigeon was put in one scale, and the prince’s flesh in the other. But no matter how much of himself the prince put on the scale, the pigeon was always heavier. The vulture was so moved by the noble prince he decided not to eat the pigeon.
‘What happened to the handsome prince? Did he die of bleeding?’ I asked Grandmother impatiently, forgetting all about the poem and the clay Buddha. ‘He did not die,’ she said. ‘He was the Buddha in disguise.’ I was so relieved, and got up to take the basin of water away. Grandmother told me many stories like this. At the time I thought that was all they were, tales of animals and heroes. But she was teaching me humility, self-sacrifice, kindness, tolerance: looking back, I can see now how much she influenced me.
My father left the army in early 1966, when I was three, and the whole family moved with him from Harbin in the far north, where I was born, to Handan. It is a small city, with a history going back to the sixth century BC – the remains of the ancient citadel are still at its heart. It is most famous among the Chinese for the numerous idioms which permeate our language. Everyone knows the phrase ‘Learn to walk in Handan’ – it means if you learn something new, learn it properly, otherwise you are just a dilettante. Father said we were lucky to live in this old, civilized place.
Father was made head of production in a state timber factory employing 400 people – but there was no production. Hardly had he settled down in his new job, when the Cultural Revolution began. It was to purge the Communist Party of anyone who was not sufficiently progressive, to shake the country out of its complacency, and to revive enthusiasm for the Communist cause. The Red Guards were the front-runners but the real players were the workers. My father’s workforce was busy grabbing power from the municipal government; people fought each other, armed with guns stolen from military barracks. The city and the timber plant were divided into two factions, the United and the Alliance, with the former in control and the latter trying to oust them. My father tried to persuade the two sides to go back to work but nobody listened to him. ‘Chairman Mao says revolution first, production second. How dare you oppose our great leader?’ one of his workers warned him. Eventually, Father joined the United faction: nobody could sit on the fence or they would be targets themselves. All our neighbours were United members.
My father often told us how much he regretted leaving the army. At least we would have felt safe inside the barracks. Our new home town reminded him of a battlefield, with machine-guns, cannons and explosives going off day and night. In this escalating violence, my mother was about to give birth to her fourth child. Grandmother was happy, her face all smiles. She told Father that all the signs of the pregnancy indicated that Mother would produce a son this time: her reactions were very strong, unlike the previous three times; she insisted on vinegar and pickled cabbage with every meal; her stomach was pointed but not very big; most importantly, two pale marks like butterflies had appeared on her cheeks. My father could not conceal his delight – he did not lose his temper as often as before. He spent many months deliberating on a suitable