bracelets disappearing from his mother’s wrist. This very shoebox under the five-drawer chest had been used to hide a copy of On the New Democracy, printed on the coarse paper used in Mao Zedong’s border region. The book had been smuggled into the city by his father’s mysterious friend Big Brother Hu. This was the earliest publication he had seen of Mao Zedong’s writings, and it was hidden with the silver dollars.
Big Brother Hu was a teacher in a middle school, and whenever he visited, any children were chased off. However, he quietly looked forward to this talk of “liberation” and deliberately went in and out of his parents’ room. He heard bits that he understood. The fat postmaster, a landlord, said that the Communist bandits advocated sharing property and sharing wives, eating from one pot of food, and rejecting blood ties. He also said they engaged in rampant killings. His parents did not believe the postmaster. His father, laughing, said to his mother, “That maternal cousin of yours,” that is, her father’s maternal cousin, “is a Communist bandit with a pockmarked face, if he’s still alive. …”
This maternal uncle had joined the underground Party in Shanghai long ago, while at university. Afterward, he left home and went off to Jiangxi province to take part in the revolution. Twenty years later this uncle was still alive and he eventually met him. His pockmarked face was not frightening, and, flushed with alcohol, he looked even more heroic. He had a resounding laugh but was asthmatic and said that during those years when he was a guerrilla fighter he couldn’t get tobacco and often dried wild herbs to smoke. This maternal uncle came into the city with the big army, put notices in the newspapers to look for his family, then, through relatives, found out what had happened to this maternal cousin of his. Their meeting had something theatrical to it. His maternal uncle was worried about their not recognizing him, so he wrote in his letter that he could be identified on the railway platform by a white towel tied to the top of a bamboo pole. His soldier aide, a peasant lad from the countryside, was there waving a long bamboo pole over the heads of the thronging crowds. Sweat was pouring off the rim of the lad’s army cap, but, regardless of the heat, he kept it strapped on to hide his scabby head.
Like his father, his maternal uncle was fond of drinking. Whenever he came he always brought a bottle of millet liquor and a big lotus-leaf parcel of chicken wings, goose liver, duck gizzards, duck feet, and pork tongue. These savory delicacies filled the whole table. The soldier aide would be sent away and the two men would chat, often until late into the night; his maternal uncle would then be escorted back to the army compound by his aide. This maternal uncle had so many stories to tell—from his early years in an old-style big family on the decline, to his experiences in the rolling battles during the guerrilla war. He would listen even when he couldn’t keep his eyes open, and refused to go to bed even after his mother had told him several times.
Those stories came from a world totally alien to the children’s stories he had read, and from children’s stories he turned to worshipping revolutionary myths. This maternal uncle wanted to encourage him to write, and had him stay in his home for a few months. There were no children’s books in the house but there was a set of The Collected Works of Lu Xun. This uncle’s method of teaching was to have him read one of Lu Xun’s stories during the day and then, after returning home from official duties, he would ask him to talk about it with him. He couldn’t understand those old stories; moreover, at the time, he was more interested in catching cicadas in the weeds and rubble by the wall. His maternal uncle returned him to his mother and, with a loud laugh, conceded that he had failed.
His mother at the time was still young, not even thirty. She didn’t want to rear a child or be a housewife anymore, and instead wholeheartedly threw herself into the new life; she started working and didn’t have time to look after him. He had no problems with school-work and immediately became a good student in the class. He wore a red scarf and didn’t join the boy students in their dirty talk about girls, or in their pranks. On Children’s Festival Day on June 1, he was selected by the school to take part in the city celebrations at which he presented flowers to the exemplary workers of the city. One after the other, his parents had been honored as exemplary workers of their work units and awarded the prizes of enamel tea mugs and notebooks printed with their names. For him, those years were also lucky years. The Youth Palace often had singing and dancing programs, and he hoped that one day he would be able to go on stage to perform.
He attended a fiction recital, at which a teacher read a work by the Russian writer Vladimir Korolenko. The story took place on a snow-swept night, and the first-person narrator was driving a jeep on a mountain road when the brakes failed. He saw a light on the cliff and struggled up to the house where there was an old woman. In the middle of the night, the howling wind made it impossible for the narrator to fall asleep and, listening to the wind, he seemed to hear someone sighing from time to time. Thinking he might as well get up, he found the old woman sitting by the solitary lamp in the room, facing the banging door. The narrator asked the woman why she hadn’t gone to bed. Was she waiting for someone? She said she was waiting for her son. The narrator indicated that he could wait instead. It was then that she said her son was dead and that it was she who had pushed him down the mountain. The narrator naturally couldn’t help questioning her about it. The old woman gave a long sigh and said her son deserted during the war and came back to the village, but she did not allow her deserter son into the house.
The story somehow moved him deeply and it made him feel that the world of adults was incomprehensible. Now it was he who had deserted. The thoughts that had circulated in his mind from childhood had determined that he would later be declared the enemy. However, he would never again return to the embrace of the homeland that had nurtured him.
He also recalled that the first time he thought hard about something was probably when he was eight, because of where it had taken place; it was soon after he had written his first diary entry. He was leaning out the window of his little room upstairs when he dropped the rubber ball he was holding. It bounced a few times, then rolled into the grass under an oleander bush. He begged his young uncle who was reading below in the courtyard to throw the ball back to him.
His young uncle said, “Lazy bones, you threw it down, so come down and pick it up yourself.”
He said his mother told him he was not to come downstairs to play until he had finished writing his first diary entry.
His young uncle said, “But what if I pick it up and you toss it down again?”
He said he hadn’t tossed it down, that the ball had dropped by itself. His young uncle reluctantly threw the ball into his window upstairs. Still leaning out the window, he went on to ask his young uncle, “The ball dropped down, but why didn’t it bounce back? If it bounced back the distance it dropped, I wouldn’t have had to trouble you to get it.”
The young uncle said, “It’s all very well for you to say so, but this has to do with physics.”
He then asked, “What’s physics?”
“It has to do with a basic theory and you wouldn’t be able to understand.”
His young uncle at the time was a middle-school student and greatly inspired his respect, especially with his talk of physics and some basic theory. He remembered these words and terms and thought that while the world looked ordinary, everything in fact was profound and unfathomable.
Afterward, his mother bought him a set of children’s books, Ten Thousand Whys. He read through every volume but nothing impressed him, except for the question about the beginning of the world, which has always remained in his mind.
Remote childhood is hazy, but some bright spots float up in memories. When you pick up one end of a thread, memories that have been submerged by time gradually appear and, like a net emerging from the water, they are interconnected and infinite. The more you pull, the more threads seem to appear and disappear. Now that you have picked up one end and again pulled up a whole mass of happenings from different times, you can’t start anywhere, can’t find a thread to follow. It’s impossible to sort them to put them into some sort of order. Human life is a net, you want to undo it a knot at a time, but only succeed in creating a tangled mess. Life is a muddled account that you can’t work out.