The Untold Story of Many a Heiwulei Child

I found myself also saying I was going to burn them, not the next day but right that moment. My heart pounding, I brought the tin box to the outer room, where at the scratch of a match, the first photo I picked up caught fire and gradually curled up like a dry leave before it was dropped into the washbasin before my knees. Without light, I couldn’t really tell who was or were in that photo, but I knew it had, if not one member, two or three or four members of my family. Even though I wasn’t in any of them, those in them were my flesh and blood. I didn’t hesitate, though. For me at that moment in time, no longer were they photos. They were troubles, and I was burning troubles. It didn’t take long, and it wasn’t that hard. One photo after another was burned to ashes. In ashes was my family. The rest of that night was long, and the next morning seemed never to come. All the time I was gripped by the fear that what had happened to Grandpa Yuan had also happened to Mama. That day was the third Monday in August 1966. “Come over,” yelled Wang Nainai from her door. She had gone to run an errand but turned around the moment she got outside the gate. After she pulled me into her room, she shut the door and lowered the bamboo curtain on the window, which was further shielded by a pomegranate tree outside. I didn’t get to ask what it was. I saw. Being shoved forward by two Red Guards was Mama, whose head rested listlessly on the wooden board hanging down her neck with the word counterrevolutionary scribbled across it. She had no shoes on, perhaps having lost them somewhere along the way. Mama was pushed to stand against the wall of the outhouse. When she saw our opened door, she couldn’t help taking a step forward. Realizing I wasn’t inside, she gave a small sigh of relief. The Red Guard who appeared to be in charge asked, “What are you looking at? Isn’t this your black nest?” With one hand, he thrust Mama back to the wall again. Two Red Guards rushed inside the door. The first thing they hauled out was the camphorwood chest. One of them removed a brick from the doorstep and hammered on the lock, the dragon head. The lock didn’t break, but the dragon head was knocked off in its entirety together with the wood it was attached to. While one Red Guard rummaged through the camphorwood chest, another with closely-cropped hair brough outside two carboard boxes. After he dropped both to the ground, he lifted one with the bottom up. Falling out were my picture books. Not interested, he shuffled them aside and squatted to check the other box, which stored Mama’s scrolls of calligraphy. One after another he browsed, and now and then he read with a finger moving down the lines. He was looking for something, confident he would find it. “Ah,” grunted he, standing up. With one hand holding the top and the other pulling down the bottom, he opened the scroll like showing off a trophy. What he found was a couplet by a Song Dynasty poet, which read “As I doubt if any road lies ahead amid mountains and rivers, there comes a village with bright blossoms and shady willows.” For centuries this couplet had been quoted as words of hope and optimism. Mama copied it the day she got a job at the city museum. “She is a counterrevolutionary. Here the evidence,” yelled that Red Guard to the one in charge before marching over to Mama, who slowly writhed to the ground as he kicked her in the shanks. Behind the bamboo curtain I watched between my fingers while my heart flinched at every hit Mama endured. Tears trickled down my cheeks into my mouth, and I swallowed them all. Wang Nainai asked me to leave the window. I didn’t. It was my way of being with Mama. “Nothing else,” hollered one Red Guard through the window to the one in charge, who then signaled for all the Red Guards to gather around Mama in a semicircle. Right there a struggle session started. One Red Guard cursed, “She has a granite skull! Deserves to die!” Another denounced, “Married to a counterrevolutionary, she a counterrevolutionary too. She must be executed!” As it went on, they seemed angrier with the only female Red Guard getting out a pair of scissors from her army green bag. When Mama used her two hands to shield her head, two other Red Guards each grabbed one and squeezed. Once Mama’s hair was gone, the same female Red Guard picked up the bottle in which Mama had kept her ink, held it over Mama’s head, and poured. The ink paused for a second and then slowly dribbled down Mama’s forehead. Unable to wipe it off, Mama simply closed her eyes and let it run its course. Into an inkstone Mama froze.