2. Long March
Stories of the Chen Clan: Part One. A Shanghai Childhood
“Traveling greatly distracted me, but what truly cured me of my illness was you, my little darling,” grandma had told me on many occasions. To her, I was a new beginning. A new chapter in a life book that had been defiled and trampled on time and again.
Babies are needy creatures. Those plump rosy cheeks, those miniature hands and feet, those heart-melting smiles and heart-wrenching cries, those little features that give you thrills of nostalgia and remind you of a purer, younger self, are all designed to seduce and conquer. I had spent the first year of my baby’s life doing nothing but feeding, bathing, wiping feces off her butt, and carefully watching her every move so that she would not fall off a bed or a cliff.
My parents did not have that kind of time when I was an infant. Their life had been torn apart by the Cultural Revolution. For their generation, going to school during the Revolution had meant reciting political slogans, military drilling, and even an occasional day of bashing and beating teachers who were the enemy of the Revolution. Now that it was all over, they could either waste away in a dead-end factory job they had been assigned to, or get a college degree to hopefully move onto something better. You couldn’t just quit your job back then. The stabilizing structure of Chinese society was based on Work Units — a genius way of tracking and controlling a large population. There was little mobility between work units. They were no more escapable for workers than dark holes for light. If you had been assigned to the “electronics” unit you would never have anything to do with the “textile” unit, even if you were a highly skilled seamstress. One may only hope to gradually move up the unit by acquiring critical connections or seniority or experiences or, to some extent, new qualifications.
My parents would put in their mandatory eight hours at work during the day. Once home, they’d erect in the living room a flimsy folding screen — with trite but elaborate embroideries of emperors and empresses on it — and plow through tombs of books on their separate desks, often well into the night. My grandma was left alone to tend to my needs, and she took on the job with great enthusiasm.
It was a shame that the fog that devoured the memories of our early childhood only started to dissipate from age three. Surely a lot had happened before then that was forever trapped in the dark limbo beneath our consciousness. I wish I could recall the taste and flavor of more than a hundred baby dishes grandma had prepared based on her meticulous research — all for a cure of anemia I was born with. I wish I could relive the sensation of discovering a larger world beyond the confine of home — that first taste of a raindrop on the tip of my tongue, that first walk through the muddy grass, that first stone-skipping on a pond, that first carousal ride. I had done all of those during the long walks grandma had insisted taking me on, though the memory of which was entirely lost and perhaps only found again in the eerie feeling of a transmuted familiarity when a similar occasion arose later in life.
“Your Nainai loved to take you on long walks”, mom had told me. “You two would run off just after lunch and come back when the sun was already setting. You were barely three when it all started. It used to break my heart to see blisters on your tiny, tender feet. I’d say Mama the kid is way too young for this, and your Nainai would retort that it was never too early to start training for the ‘Iron Feet’. It may come in handy someday!” Mom and I would both chuckle and before she asked I’d say yes, yes, you guys have many times over told me about grandma’s long marches.
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***
For grandma, to have the stamina to cover an extremely long distance on foot was indeed a matter of life or death. When she was seventeen and already twice-widowed, she had one night followed her elder brother and walked out of the little seaside village where she had been raised in abject poverty. She wouldn’t have left had it not been for the murderous Japanese troupe that was on its way to occupy the village, for the corpse hanging high from a pole by the edge of the nearest town — a bloated face and desiccated limbs, blowing in the wind like a grotesque straw man put out during harvest seasons. Indeed, she would have swallowed the bitter snickering from a few rotten apples in the village who had told everyone else she was a bad omen, a black widow, an unwanted woman. She would have stayed in her parents’ squalor of a house, three times a day adding weeds and tree barks to thicken the rice porridge so her family of seven would live on for another day. Yes, she would have stayed on and remained unmarried, so that she could lend her long-suffered parents a helping hand and when their final days came, offer them the proper burial they deserved - with a daughter’s utmost respect - deep in the soil they had toiled upon all their life. But on a wintry January night, her revered elder brother convinced her to choose life, and choose this illicit little Party that had been quietly organizing itself in and around the countryside. They set out walking, for a whole night and another full day, until they reached the local headquarter in the City of Weihai. Only then could she take off the blood-stained straw shoes and wrap her feet in warm bandages offered to her by the friendly folks at the headquarter, who insisted that she called them comrades from then on.
A decade later, when grandma had long shed her small-village-girl awkwardness and instead, taken on a measured and composed persona of a reigning Party’s cadre, she would once again answer the call to walk again — a call put out by the Chairman who she had loved with a daughter’s submission, a lover’s intensity, a pilgrim’s awe.
This time the journey — the Southern Expedition — would take her more than a week, from the country’s capital to the then backwater province of An-hui, covering nearly seven hundred miles. China’s then scattered railway would carry her, on and off, for part of the journey. At times she had only her own feet to depend on. She did hit her lucky strike once, when her legs were cramping beyond consolation and her feet bleeding. The hostess she was staying overnight with in a village south of Ji-Ning admired the gallantry in the young woman. The grey-haired hostess had wanted to do the same years ago — to break free from the confine of the poverty-stricken countryside, to embrace a Party that promised, above all, food and shelter and an equal treatment for women. But she was already a young mother then and the thought of leaving her newborn was unbearable. Many years later she learned the strategic location of her village and applied herself to providing free shelter to the sojourning communists. She gave my grandma a gift that morning — an extra large wooden wash basin that both of her children had swum in as babies. She took her by the hand to the creek at the edge of the village, instructing her to float down the stream in the makeshift wooden boat until she reached the next village. It’d save her a good day of walking.
“I was scared out of my wits”, grandma said of that fantastical morning, “but the romantic girl in me thought I’d rather die floating down the river like a fairy lady than of the excruciating pain from walking on my blistered feet. Once in my little boat, fear evaporated along with the morning fog. All I could feel was a kind of liberation I had never tasted.”
I liked to imagine the twenty-something grandma, on an early spring morning, gently gliding by fields and barns and grazing sheep, patches of thin ice knocking around the wash basin, echoing the hostess’ dream of freedom my young grandma was carrying with her.
***
Nainai’s long-march stories were told and retold when I was growing up. Eventually facts and imaginations were so intertwined that the stories took on the mythological sheen of folklore. Whenever I, the preschooler, showed the first sign of discontent on those hikes grandma had taken me on, she’d remind me of the dozens of shoe soles she had worn out during her Southern Expedition, and the complete liberation when a woman could rely on her own feet to explore the world. I’d then continue to trail her like an unleashed puppy in awe of the master. But most of the time I was simply happy to be outside our cramped apartment and tour the city with grandma. My favorite loop involved an incense-filled temple, a bonsai store featuring plants stretching into odd constellations, a dumpling joint where my mouth would water on cue, and a butcher’s shop resembling a dark museum of animal carcasses. I remember one crisp autumn day. Grandma and I had made that familiar five-hour loop and were on our way home. The sun had disappeared behind the pastel clouds that were fast turning into a bluish black. When we turned onto our tree-lined street, it was so quiet that we could only hear the crunchy sound of feet grinding the fallen leaves that carpeted the pavement. Street lamps casted two shadows in front of us, one long and lean, the other short and stout, both with spiky unkempt hair, hands locking. A small bag of steamy dumplings were dangling from my elbow. That image was etched in my brain. I had, in my adulthood, walked that final stretch of the journey in my dreams and daydreams over and again. It was the safest place where I could find shelter and tranquility.
That same evening when I coiled in bed waiting for grandma — we had such a little living space back then that for twelve years I co-slept with grandma — a pang of sadness attacked me. I was merely six years old and the physical pain it initiated was an unfamiliar sensation. It had been a wonderful day, like all the days when we had gone on long walks. In my content and happiness, my mind suddenly veered off to a foreign place to pick up the signal sent by the cosmos declaring the effervescence of such happiness, that I would one day lose my most beloved nainai, and that it was the law of nature. The little me froze in awe of such realization. I quietly shed tears and wet the pillow. Can we please make a deal? The little me commuted in silence with the mysterious Force. Nothing can help, everyone has to be gone someday, said the Force. I understand that. But please only take her after she is really, really, really old and I have been living thousands of miles away from her for a really, really, really long time. For that you can shave a full year of life off me. I said to the Force with the utmost resolution I could muster. Silence filled the dark space. Grandma came to bed, holding my hand and putting it on her chest. She fell asleep quickly and my hand rose and fell following the rhythm of her breath. I saw a shape and a gentle nod in the pitch darkness.
