After her footsteps died down, the house was quiet again. Father, Mother, and Second Uncle were not awake yet. They usually went to bed late and for them, the sweetest sleep came in the morning. When the clock struck seven, they reluctantly got out of bed. Next I heard them take brass basins from the washstands and go into the kitchen to wash their faces. Later they brushed their teeth in the yard, puffing the water out onto the ground with a great noise. After this, they would say it was too late, no time for breakfast, and rush out of the house like a gust of wind.
During this time I often lay awake. I could hear everything, because in Nainai's house the walls between rooms were made of wooden boards and the ceiling was just a few layers of rice paper. This was typical of all the old houses in Beijing. The theory must have been that among family members there ought to be no secrets. Brick walls were used only to keep away outsiders.
The old women and the children were the last ones to get up and have breakfast. No need to hurry. We had plenty of time to play and tell one another stories. In those days, no one had heard of the thing called “electric view,” so of course we did not miss it. We were busy enough without television.
In the yards, there were cicadas singing in the trees, and we tried to catch them with melted rubber bands put on the tips of long bamboo poles. At the foot of brick walls were crickets, which we captured by pouring water into the crevices in which they hid. In the second yard there were two big earthen vats in which goldfish swam leisurely among water lilies. Under the eaves, swallows made nests to raise their young. Sometimes we picked flowers from the locust trees and sucked the honey from them. Sometimes we waged miniature tugs-of-war with the leafstalks of poplar trees.
Occasionally we would go treasure hunting in Nainai's old trunks. Among the things we found were a shiny peach seed that was carved into a tree and five babies—Nainai said this was called “five sons excel in the imperial examinations”—a silver spoon with a spray of plum blossoms engraved on the handle, a jade pendant in the shape of a calabash, coral beads, ink sticks, silk flower hairpins, embroidered handkerchiefs, old coins overgrown with green rust, mah-jongg pieces . . . Many of these had a little history. While Nainai was telling us about them, time flew away. Soon the adults began to come back from work one after another.
At six thirty, the whole family sat down at a big round table. The food on it was steaming hot and delicious. All the dishes were placed at the center of the table. People used their chopsticks to pick whatever they liked into their own rice bowls. No one was forced to eat anything because it was good for her. No one was told not to talk. Now the family was together, naturally people wanted to tell one another the interesting things they saw or heard during the day. If someone wanted to laugh, it was all right. “One good laugh makes a person ten years younger,” as the Chinese saying goes. If someone was late—Third Aunt sometimes had to stay at the hospital and Shenshen might miss a bus—no problem. Others would go ahead and eat. Enough food would be set aside and kept warm in the kitchen for her. At Nainai's dinner table, there was neither hierarchy nor formality. Everybody had a good appetite.
After dinner, sometimes Second Uncle would take Little Ox, Little Dragon, and me to the nearby Dong'an Market to go window-shopping. Dong'an in Chinese means peace in the east. During the Cultural Revolution the name was changed to Dong Feng, which means east wind. It was from Chairman Mao's quotation, “the east wind will prevail over the west wind,” meaning China and other socialist countries in the East will triumph over the capitalist countries in the West.
In 1956 the market was still Peace in the East and had numerous privately owned small shops in it. Occasionally, Second Uncle would buy something for us: clay dolls, masks, tiny glass animals, and pagodas of porcelain . . . None of them was worth much money; yet each gave us a lot of joy.
On other evenings we would ask Second Uncle to show us martial arts. At such a request, he would unlock a big wooden chest painted red on the outside and take out his weapons: a shiny blunt sword, a pair of wooden daggers, a red-tasselled spear, and a shield with the design of a laughing tiger. Next he would run around the yard fighting with invisible enemies, jumping, kicking, yelling, dodging blows, and striking back. I watched him with awe and admiration, thinking that he was a great kung fu master like the ones I had heard about in stories. Only after I grew up did I realize that Second Uncle's martial art was just a show. Being an opera fan, he learned it from the stage and performed it at home to amuse us children. It was no good in real combat.
On hot summer evenings his audience included almost the entire family who stayed out in the yard “to ride the cool,” as people in Beijing put it. All the adults were waving big, round palm-leaf fans to cool themselves and drive away mosquitoes. Shenshen was the only one who stayed inside, for her hobby was to make clothes. At that time, she had just bought a new sewing machine. As soon as dinner was over, it would start to hum like a honeybee. When the evening grew old, I fell asleep to its soothing sound, as so many generations of Chinese before me had found sweet dreams in the hum of spinning wheels.
To me, Shenshen was the prettiest woman in Beijing at the time. Her figure was slender and her dresses were beautiful. Her face was the shape of a duck's egg, very smooth, and her eyes were always smiling. To this day her childlike smile remains vivid in my mind, but in the real world it vanished once and for all in 1957 when Second Uncle was labeled a Rightist.
That year, a million scholars and cadres fell prey to the Anti-Rightist Movement. Their downfall came from their naïveté in politics and their trust in the Chinese Communist Party. At the beginning of the movement, the Party urged people to criticize their leaders so as to help them discover and correct mistakes. Later, however, the political wind shifted and those who did what the Party told them to do became class enemies. Their criticism was turned into evidence against them, “evil attacks on the leadership of the Communist Party.” But Second Uncle did not even criticize his leaders. So how did he become a Rightist?
According to Third Aunt, who told me the following behind closed doors in 1975, before the Anti-Rightist Movement, Second Uncle had made enemies at CAAC, the Chinese airline, where he worked as an accountant. There some of his superiors, taking advantage of their positions, traveled to places for private reasons. When they came back, they wanted Second Uncle to reimburse them for the costs of such trips. The latter turned them down, saying it was against the rules that the leaders themselves had made.
This, of course, offended people. He made them lose money. He made them lose face too. For he turned them down bluntly, in front of other people. So the leaders hated him, but they said nothing. “When a gentleman wants to avenge himself, waiting for ten years is not too long.”
Second Uncle, on the other hand, was totally unaware of what was going on in these people's minds. He came back home with a clear conscience, thinking that he had done the right thing. He slept well at night and forgot the whole thing the next morning.
The leaders waited till the Anti-Rightist Movement to avenge themselves. When the campaign started, they were the ones to decide who would get the “cap” in their work unit. That was very convenient. They put the “cap” on Second Uncle, even though he had not criticized the Party. The theory was since Second Uncle was from a capitalist family, he must bear some conscious or unconscious grudges against the Party and the socialist system.
Nobody dared challenge this theory, knowing the leaders had more “caps” in their hands ready to deal out. Throughout the movement, Second Uncle never had a chance to defend himself. Nor could he find any place to appeal against the decision made by those leaders. Thus Second Uncle, despite my childish belief that he was a great fighter, was defeated and eliminated in the very first round of the merciless political struggle that would entangle every Chinese in the decades to come.
Father and Third Aunt survived the campaign. Father, being an old revolutionary, had more political experience than others. When he was at Jinchaji, he had heard a great deal about the Yan'an Rectification Campaign that took place in 194Z. During that campaign, intellectuals had been the targets. So he would always think twice before he said anything.