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Yiyun Li
This story I am going to tell you, it is a true story.
The year was 1968. The girl was nineteen, the secretary of the Communist Youth League for her class in a local high school in Hunan Province, China. You probably don’t know much about Hunan, but I am sure you have heard of at least one person from the province—Chairman Mao, our father, leader, savior, our god and our dictator.
So it was in 1968 that the nineteen-year-old Hunan girl, after seeing many men and women being kicked and beaten to death by her fellow Red Guards, expressed her doubts about Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution he had started two years earlier, in a letter to her boyfriend, who was serving in the military. He turned in the letter to the company officer. The officer reported to his superiors, who in turn telegraphed the Revolutionary Committee of her town. Three days later, she was arrested.
She was jailed for ten years, ten long years during which she kept writing to officials of all levels to appeal her case. The letters accumulated as evidence of her failure to reform, and ten years later, in a retrial, she was sentenced to death.
She was executed in the spring of 1978, two years after Chairman Mao’s death. Hundreds of people attended the execution in a local stadium. A bullet took her twenty-nine-year-old life, and that was the end of her story.
But the story I am telling you, it is not over yet.
Because I still have to tell you what happened before the final moment. Minutes before the execution, an ambulance rushed into the stadium, and several medical workers jumped out. I call them medical workers because I don’t know if they were doctors. Do doctors kill? But these medical workers, they were professional, efficient. Working quickly so as not to delay the execution, they removed the girl’s kidneys. No anesthesia.
The bullet entered her brain after the kidneys were taken out. The brain was the sinning organ. The kidneys were amnestied, airlifted to a hospital in the province capital, and transplanted into an older man’s body. The man was the father of a member of the province Revolutionary Committee.
The kidneys outlived her, for how many years I do not know.
The story I am telling you, it does not end when the brain was murdered. Not yet.
Because I still have to tell you what happened to the young woman’s body, minus her kidneys. Like the families of many counterrevolutionaries, her family paid for the bullet that took her life. Twenty-four cents it was, the price of a thin slice of pork in 1978. They signed the paper and paid for the bullet, but they did not dare to pick up the body after the execution. So the girl was left outside the town, in a wild land of stray dogs, crows, and other scavengers. One of the others got to the body first, a fifty-seven-year-old janitor. When jars were later discovered at his home, he admitted to having raped the body. Then he amputated the sex organs and preserved them in formaldehyde for his personal collection.
He was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment.
But the story I am telling you—you may have guessed this by now—the story I am telling you, it is not over yet.
At the time, in the city in Hunan Province, before the final sentence of the young woman, there were people who tried to organize and appeal on her behalf. They did not stop at the woman’s execution, fighting now not for her life but her innocence. Ping-Fan, depurge, was what it was called, for in our country, as in any other communist nation, innocence was determined not by one’s behavior but by the tolerance of such behavior at a certain time. I grew up reading stories of depurge in newspapers and magazines, of people who had been labeled as counterrevolutionaries for ten, twenty, or even thirty years, and now were reabsorbed into our communist family. Some were still alive, but most who were depurged had long been dead. Still, a readmission to the society was celebrated by grateful family members in tears. So you see, in our country, one’s story does not end at one’s death.
Back in the Hunan town, people gathered for the young woman’s posthumous reputation. Hundreds of people joined the protest, and every one of them was punished in the end, years in prison for some, dismissal or suspension from work for luckier ones. One of them, a woman thirty-two years old, an organizer of the protest and mother of a two-year-old boy, was sentenced to death. She signed on the sentence paper and was reported to have thrown away the pen and said, “What makes you all fear death so? Everybody dies.”
I am not sure how to tell the story I want to tell you. Sometimes when I think about the story, it becomes a grotesque kaleidoscope spinning with patterns and colors that startle my eyes. Sometimes I have to shut my eyes in order not to see.
And shut my mind’s eye so I can stop imagining: the clean incision when the scalpel cut into the skin, hastily disinfected for the sake of the kidneys; the short moment between the operation and the death; the parents who gave up not only the daughter’s life but her body; or the boy who grew up not knowing his mother and who was taught to thank the government five years later when she was depurged.
What makes you all fear death so? I do not have an answer. I run away from the deaths of the two young women because I have only enough courage to tell the stories of those alive—for instance, the audience who filed into the stadium and watched the young woman suffer and die. The execution must have taken place in the morning, as all executions have in my country for hundreds of years. Did people go to the stadium first before they went to work, or did they parade to the stadium from different working units, singing Chinese and Soviet marching songs?
I try to see the world through my eyes of 1978. That spring I was five and a half years old, a problematic kid in day care, disliked by all the aunties, as we called the day care teachers. One, Auntie Wang, especially hated me. I knew she hated me, but I did not know why. I feared her more than any other kid feared her; I feared her more than I feared any other person in my life. I was always the first to stop playing and run to her when she called out any order. I would stand in front of her, looking with expecting eyes, waiting for her to praise my promptness. But she saw through my willingness and brushed my head aside with a heavy hand. “Stop looking at me like that. I know you do this just to make us believe you are a good kid. Don’t think you can deceive me.”
I tried not to cry, not knowing that what angered her was my blunt, wide-eyed stare. Auntie Wang turned to another auntie and said, “This is a kid who has too much of her own will.” The other auntie agreed.
I did not know what they meant. I did not have any will except to please Auntie Wang so she would smile at me, or praise me, or at least not yell at me every time I played the guerilla leader. In the day care our favorite game was battle game, boys the male guerilla fighters, girls the female guerilla fighters. Our enemy was Japanese invaders, the reactionary nationalist army, American soldiers in Korea or Vietnam, all in the forms of houses and trees, rails and weeds. I was always the guerilla leader because I was the one who made up the story for our battle games, the one to lead them to charge or retreat.
But before I had won my first battle this morning, Auntie Wang grabbed my collar and brought me to a full stop. “What are you making them do?” she said.
I tried not to look at her, but I did. “Play guerillas,” I said.
“No guerilla playing today,” Auntie Wang said and waved to my soldiers standing beside me. “Go play other games.”
The boys and girls scattered. I tried to slip away, but Auntie Wang stopped me with a thundering yell. “You, did I tell you to leave?”
“No,” I said.
“Right. Time-out for you this morning. Now squat here.”
I squatted between her and another auntie, who was busy knitting a sweater for her son. Auntie Wang reserved this special punishment for me. Other kids served five or ten minutes of time-out standing in front of her, but she always had me squat, for half an hour at least.
Many years later I read in an article that having prisoners squat for hours is a common practice in Chinese prisons. Squatting while holding the legs, putting the whole body’s weight on the heels of the feet, back bending and hips drooping—such a primitive position creates pain as well as shame, the article said.
I wonder if Auntie Wang was an inventive person or if she simply knew the practice. Either way, I had to squat in such a position so often that I was no longer bothered by it. Yes, my legs still cramped, but I could still watch my friends with cramping legs. I saw boys chase one another in meaningless circles, girls gather wildflowers and grass leaves. They did not know how to play a guerrilla game without me.
I sighed. Auntie Wang caught me immediately. “Why did you sigh? Do you think I am wrong to punish you?”
“No,” I said.
“You are lying. Did you not sigh? I heard you. You are dishonest. Do you hate me?”
“No,” I said, trying hard to hold back my tears.
“Liar. I know you hate me. I know you do,” Auntie Wang said.
Such exchanges happened often when I was on time-out. I did not know what made Auntie Wang so persistent in tormenting me. Did she have much fun having me in the day care? I do not know the answer. Many years later, when I was already in America, my mother met her in a shop. Auntie Wang recognized my mother right away and asked about me. In the next five years, as my mother told me, they met in the street many times, and Auntie Wang asked about me every time. I wonder if she remembers me for the same reason I remember her. Sometimes I wonder about it, knowing I will never get to know the real reason, accepting her comment that I was a kid with too much of my own will as the only explanation.
So on this unlucky day, I was bracing myself for a long squatting period when the police patrol drove into an open field by our play yard. There were two tall metal poles at the center of the field. On evenings when movies were shown in the open field, a piece of white cloth would be stretched between the two poles, with people sitting on both sides of the screen watching the same war movie and speaking the lines in a collective voice along with the heroic actors. During daytime the field was left for weeds and insects, and I was surprised to see the police car drive in there, calling through a loudspeaker for the residents to gather in ten minutes. Retired men and women walked out of the apartment buildings carrying folding chairs and stools. Some even carried umbrellas to shield them from the morning sun. The electric bell clanked in the nearby elementary school. A minute later students of all grades rushed out of the school building, pushing and shouting and ignoring the teachers’ orders.
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发表于 2006-1-26 01:15
