Big Mother wrote back, “They turn into wretches.”
It was 1956 and Big Mother’s family had been in Shanghai for almost a decade. In quick succession, she had given birth to two more fluffy-haired boys with soft, triangular eyebrows. Ba Lute had insisted on naming them Da Shan (Big Mountain) and Fei Xiong (Flying Bear). What next, Big Mother had shouted at him, Tasty Mutton? The walls of the alleyway house had begun to press in on her like a jacket grown too tight. This morning, for instance, Da Shan was jabbing all ten fingers into his younger brother’s screaming face. Meanwhile, Sparrow was deaf to everything but the records he had borrowed from the Conservatory. Her oldest son was about to graduate with a double major in piano and composition but, night after night, he sat with his foolish forehead pressed to the gramophone, as if the machine was his mother. He was transcribing Bach’s Goldberg Variations into jianpu and the bourgeois music fluttered through the house, on and on, until Big Mother heard it even when the rooms were silent. Meanwhile, her hero husband was busy leading another land reform campaign, he was always away, overthrowing a landlord’s family, repossessing fields of mung beans, flax and millet, and maybe the air itself, on behalf of the People. And if it wasn’t land reform, it was song and dance troupes, political study sessions, Party meetings, or private flute lessons for yet another influential cadre. Did he even teach at the Conservatory anymore? At home he was petulant and insufferable, and looked at Big Mother and the boys as if at a very dirty window. She ignored him. It wasn’t difficult. The insults that should have pricked her heart were as harmless as porridge.
Still, those pretty piano notes were mocking all the movements she made. They dripped from the kitchen to the bedroom to the parlour, seeping like rainwater over the persimmons on the table, the winter coats of her family, and the placid softness of Chairman Mao’s face in the grey portrait framed on the wall. She thought he looked doughy, not at all like the handsome, intrepid fighter he had once been. Regret crawled through her heart and limbs; did it crawl through Chairman Mao’s? Despite her best efforts, loneliness was encroaching upon Big Mother Knife.
Around noon, after the boys had left for school, Ba Lute unexpectedly arrived home. Her husband carried his army bag over his shoulders, and grinned as if he’d just won a nasty brawl. His padded coat was the same oyster-shell blue as the winter sky, except for a streak of what looked like blood, and it saddened Big Mother that the outside world, with all its hatreds, both petty and historical, had come inside her home.
“Stupid me,” she said. “I thought the war ended in 1949.”
Ba Lute had been gone for six weeks and, at the thought of seeing his family again, had broken into a run as soon as he entered the laneway. His wife’s indifference made him feel like a beggar. Big Mother was still in her nightdress and her curly hair stood up on her head like cotton batting. He couldn’t decide whether to scold her or comfort her.
He threw down his copy of Jiefang Daily and a pack of Front Gate cigarettes. “The Party has launched another bold campaign. Aren’t you interested? And why aren’t you dressed?”
“Oh, good. A new campaign. As Chairman Mao says, ‘After the enemies with guns have been wiped out, there will still be the enemies without guns.’?”
He ignored her tone. “Haven’t you been reading the papers?”
“They closed our office because the pipes froze,” Big Mother said. “Everything flooded. We’re a unit of more than two hundred people and the committee has to find a new space for us. So I’ve been liberated.”
“That’s no excuse to stay indoors and feel sorry for yourself!”
Big Mother eyed her husband.
He sighed and tried to soften his tone. “Isn’t there anything to eat?” He took off his coat and went to the water basin, drinking straight from the dipper. Underneath all the padding, she saw that Ba Lute’s clothes seemed far too large, as if he had halved in size. Perhaps he had donated his flesh to the peasants. She got up, smashed around and finally slapped some food down in front of him. Ba Lute acted as if hadn’t eaten in a week. After polishing off a mountain of rice and a leg of chicken, their entire meat ration for the week, Ba Lute conceded he had missed her.
She sniffed. “Is it so bad out there?”
“The usual.” He found a clean cloth and wiped his mouth, then his whole face, pressing down on his eyes. Ba Lute had always been too round and cocky for his own good. This new thinness gave him a vulnerable, starved look, which confused her. He ran the cloth over the back of his neck. “Our land reform policy is glorious, but the People are in disarray. Still, it’s necessary work we’re doing. No one can say otherwise.” Without seeming to realize he was doing it, he started humming “Weeds Cannot Be Wiped Out.”
“You and land reform,” she said. “You’d think your mother gave birth to the idea.”
Ba Lute was so startled that he laughed. He checked himself and said abruptly, “Go to the devil, how can you joke like that? You’re going to get yourself killed.” As he put the cloth down, his hands shook. “Big Mother, you’ve got to learn to hold your tongue.”
She looked at the bone on his plate. Picked clean. “You’re home for awhile, are you?”
“I am.”
“Good. Because I’m going to Bingpai to see my sister.”
“Eh?” he said. His eyebrows lifted so high she thought they would fly away. “But what about your husband?”
She picked up the bone and chewed on the end. “He’ll survive.”
Ba Lute smiled but then, thinking over what she said, frowned. He slapped his hand on the table, working himself up into a grand annoyance. “Big Mother, listen here. Don’t you know we’re right in the middle of a life-and-death campaign? Please! Don’t look at me like that. I’m telling you, there’s a war going on in the countryside.”
“It’s always a war with you people.”
“There you go again! Now just hold on and think it through.”
Once Ba Lute got going, she couldn’t stop him. She stared hungrily at his empty plate.
“Some of these peasants, these desperate people,” he continued, “have to be forced to remember every humiliation. Forced! They have to be driven nearly out of their minds with grief before they can find the courage to pick up their knives and drive the landlords out. Of course they’re afraid. In the whole history of the world, what peasant revolution has ever made a lasting change?” He rubbed his bald head again. “I know what I’m talking about, don’t think I don’t. Anyway, it was all calming down but the new campaign stirred everyone up again. Encouraging the masses to criticize the Party! And now they’ve done it….”
“My work unit has already issued me a travel permit.”
“Your husband forbids it.”
“Chairman Mao says women hold up half the sky.” She took his plate, picked up the chicken bone and flung it towards the scraps bucket. She missed. The bone hit the wall and stuck there. “Be a model father,” she said, “and look after your sons.”
“Do you always have to be so stubborn?” he yelled. Ba Lute slumped forward over the table. “You weren’t so pigheaded when I married you.” He was like that. He exploded and then settled right down again. Like a trumpet.
For the first time in two months, Big Mother felt slightly better. “It’s true,” she nodded. “I wasn’t.”
—