Fox Spirit 67: A Baby, then a Wedding
“We were sent to Anhui. To a small village called Two Ox Village.” Sara stirred at the name, and Ruth Cheng paused, as if expecting Sara to speak. But Sara remained silent, and Ruth went on.
She had lived with Hope Du and her husband Red Wave Hua; each day she worked in the fields, and fed the pigs. She still could not eat turnips without remembering those hungry days. But she felt lucky – Auntie Du and her husband were kind. They had no children; although she was a girl they still treated Ruth as a gift to them. And their standing in the village was very high; they were very good peasant stock; no history of money or landlords in their family.
There was a work group of young sent-down men, housed in a rough dormitory on the edge of Two Ox Village. One of them, Ocean Wave Cheng, was able to demonstrate his good calligraphy to the local party committee, and they put him to work painting large-character posters denouncing the rightists. This saved him from being worked to death. Some of the other sent-down students died in the fields.
It was natural that Ruth and Ocean Wave should come together – they were both from Beijing, even knew some of the same people. They were very young, and very foolish. When Ruth missed her monthly flow for the second time, when she first realized she might be pregnant, she had never been so frightened.
“You must understand,” Ruth said in a soft voice. “The state controls who can give birth. To be pregnant without approval, without being married, was a crime against the state. And only the state could approve a marriage. Even in a country village like Two Ox, sixteen was too young to get an approved marriage. So I was guilty of two crimes already. And I had seen and heard of terrible things.”
She stopped speaking, her hands twisting in her lap. When she spoke again her voice was even softer.
“One day, while I was still in Beijing, our Red Guard unit was summoned to the neighborhood square. One of the girls in the unit had been discovered to be pregnant. She would not name the father. They tied her to a table in the square and cut the baby out of her. She screamed until she could not scream any more. They took the baby out, waved it as if it were a chicken whose neck they had broken. Then they burned it. The girl writhed on the table, bleeding. Finally they cut her loose, but she was already dead.
“That night, one of the boys hung himself in the guard room. I think he must have been the father.”
“There were stories of even worse things being done. A girl who had kept her pregnancy secret went into labor. The Red Guard tied her ankles together and left her… but this is too harsh to talk of.”
Sara shuddered, speechless, her imagination sheering away from what Ruth Cheng was saying. The silence was stretching on too long. She could not stand it.
“This pregnancy – your pregnancy – it was Storm?”
“Yes.” Ruth Cheng hesitated. “I always wanted to talk to Storm, to make him understand, to put himself in his father’s shoes. Ocean Wave loves me. He wanted to protect me and the baby the best he could. But we were only sixteen, seventeen. We had no one. If it had not been for Auntie Du…. ” She fell silent.
“What did she do?”
“Auntie Du and her husband were kind, as I said. They had grown fond of me; they also admired Cheng. I was afraid to speak to her but of course she noticed when I wasn’t bleeding every month. She spoke to me. She had a plan in her mind which would save us, and save the baby.”
Auntie Du had put it about that she needed Ruth to work in the house, doing weaving, mending, sorting the grain, preserving the foods. She managed to make the village Party Representative believe that it was she, Hope Du, who was pregnant. Everyone congratulated her; after so many years, to finally conceive. She said that having a younger woman in the house had brought her good luck. She kept Ruth inside, while every day she wrapped herself in extra clothing. Fortunately it was winter, and Ruth also wore layers so no one could see her shape.
When Ruth’s time was due, they could not call the village midwife. Auntie Du was the only one to help her. Ruth could not cry out, for fear that someone would come and discover the true mother. Her son was easy on her; he came quickly, as if he knew already there was a secret to be kept. After it was over Auntie Du told the village that the pains came so quickly there was not time to call for the midwife, and that since Ruth’s mother had been a doctor Ruth had been able to help her.
There must have been some who suspected, but no one said anything – the whole village congratulated Auntie Du and Uncle Hua on their new son. He was named Bao Feng – Storm.
“How could you manage?” Sara asked, caught up in Ruth’s story. “How could you feed him?”
Ruth relaxed slightly, sensing the sympathy in Sara’s words. “It was hard,” she answered. “I, the servant, could say nothing, only join in the congratulations. I had to nurse Storm in secret, or press out milk into a bowl so that Auntie Du could feed him. I had to stop nursing him early for fear of discovery – I think that is why he is now so thin.
“When Storm’s first birthday was celebrated, I myself made a red jacket for him; I was so proud when he sat inside the fortune circle and chose a book from all the different things offered for him to play with. But I had to give congratulations to Auntie Du, tell her how fine a son she had, what a scholar he would be – all the time thinking it was such bad luck for a mother to speak so of her own child! I prayed that the gods would not hear me, and then prayed that the Party would not know I had prayed to the gods.
“It was fours year later that Cheng and I dared to ask for permission to marry. Twenty-one was still very young, but on the farms the rules are less strict, and we had worked hard and given no trouble. Auntie Du invited Cheng to move into our house, to share my room. Storm called me “Xiao Ayi” – Little Auntie – and Ocean Wave was “Xiao Shu” – Little Uncle. We were like a family, only it was all a lie.”
The Ten Years Turmoil ended. Ocean Wave’s parents were rehabilitated – everything that had happened to them was “a mistaken excess of zeal.” Ruth’s father-in-law returned to his position in the party as soon as Deng regained power after Mao’s death. Cheng’s mother was able to take her violin out of hiding. Her piano had been destroyed, but her students gradually reappeared. As soon as Ocean Wave’s parents began to feel a little bit safe, they wanted their son back.
Ruth’s mother also wanted her daughter. Hundreds, thousands of other parents, those who had survived the Turmoil, wanted their children. The government slowly relented, and began to allow the city’s children to return. Ocean Wave and Ruth applied for university; both were accepted. Two Ox Village was so proud to have two students at Bei Da. They gave Ruth and Ocean Wave a huge good-bye celebration. And so they left – they returned to their old lives.
“And Storm? What of him?” Sara felt a flicker of her earlier anger.
“We couldn’t bring him with us,” Ruth answered quickly. “He was not officially our son. He belonged to Auntie Du and Uncle Hua.” She stopped, again choosing her words. “I knew, we both knew, he would be well taken care of. In the cities it was still not so certain. Food was sometimes hard to get, we were told. We thought he would be safe as the son of peasants, safer than as the grandson of bad elements. And Ocean Wave was eager to see his father again, and his mother, and also frightened, because of what had been done to them.
The current marquee exhibit at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco – open to view through September 18 – is of Chinese art on loan from the National Palace Museum, Taipei. The exhibit includes wonderful paintings of misty Chinese landscapes and scrolls-ful of imperial gatherings and parades. It includes beautiful ceramics, enamel-work and lacquerware, some examples pristinely simple and others decadently ornate, something for every taste.
And then there is the calligraphy. This is a class of artwork which is so foreign to Western eyes as to almost not be recognizable as art. In China, a fine hand at calligraphy is seen as reflecting a worthy soul. There are standard forms which have originated with revered scholars or national heroes and have been passed down as models for centuries. Emperors proved their right to celestial status by elegantly inscribing poems in tribute to a masterpiece of painting on the painting itself, adding to, not subtracting from their artistic value. Imagine if Louis XIV had written a sonnet in the upper left corner of the “Mona Lisa”!
This exhibit of the Emperor’s treasures also highlights another Chinese art form which is opaque to my Western eyes: stone food. When I was a child and didn’t want to eat my dinner, my mother would remind me of the starving children in China. Perhaps the cyclical famines which are part of China’s history through the second half of the 20th century have sparked the Chinese obsession with food, which extends down to the simplest daily greeting. (The Chinese equivalent of our “How do you do?” is “Ni chi le ma?” which translates to “Have you eaten?”)
Chinese Puzzle Box 