Dr. Bethune's Children Read online

  Before leaving, Yangyang’s father asked me what carriage I was in and told me where Yinyin was sitting. He said he hoped I would take care of her. “Should I call her over to introduce you?” he asked.

  “No need,” my mother said. “They have met before.”

  I did not know whether she meant seven years before or recently in the street. I could feel that Yangyang’s father’s wish that I take care of her made my mother unhappy. Before we parted, she whispered in my ear not to pay too much attention to that little vixen who had crawled up out of the rubble.

  I did not follow my mother’s advice. Soon after the train left, I went along to Yinyin’s carriage. Noting that my forwardness did not make Yinyin uneasy, I asked the middle-aged woman sitting beside her whether we could change seats. “She is my cousin,” I said. “I want to sit with her.” The woman was pleased to comply.

  I will never forget that trip. In fact, from the day I saw Yinyin near the entrance to the high school, I realized that my life was on the cusp of a major change. Yinyin replied to my questions during the trip, but barely said anything else. She was a good listener, and she was also curious about the scenery outside the window. When the train was getting close to our destination, she told me this was not the first time she had been to Beijing. Seven years previously, after the earthquake, she and some of the other orphans were first taken to Beijing before being sent to other parts of China. “But that time, I arrived in Beijing from the opposite direction,” she sighed. “The city seems to be a kind of stage for a few scenes in my life.”

  A Secret

  Dear Dr. Bethune, soon after the start of Grade 5, Yangyang asked me whether I had seen the announcement posted up by the Municipal Revolutionary Committee. Every two weeks, such an announcement was pasted on all the important bulletin boards in the city and one of them was by the entrance to our school. The announcement was about the latest bunch of criminals to be sentenced, with their names, birthdates, birthplaces, details of their crimes (we found these the most exciting parts), and sentences. The announcement was called “the latest fruit” of the Cultural Revolution. The names of the convicted were arranged in order of the seriousness of the crimes they had committed. Capital crimes were listed first, and the names of those guilty were identified with red crosses. Then came those who were not to be executed immediately, followed by those sentenced to life in prison. The more red crosses an announcement had, the more people paid attention.

  Every term, we were brought to a public trial. The criminals were tied up and dragged onto the stage. When they heard that they were sentenced to death, some would just collapse while others would stand up even straighter than they had before. These two opposite reactions inspired me with terror over the death penalty. After the trial was over, those condemned to immediate execution were dragged onto a truck and taken to the execution grounds.

  Most of the audience at such public trials had come with a collective, as many units made attendance at a public trial a form of political study for their members. I remember the one we attended with our school in Grade 3 vividly. On the bus back to school after the trial, Foreign Affairs was relating his experience as the commander of an execution squad to our homeroom teacher in the row in front of me. He spoke really loudly, as if he wanted us all to hear about his glorious past, five years earlier, when he was a platoon leader in a factory militia. One day, he got a special mission, shooting live targets. There were six men to execute that day—two current counter- revolutionaries, one historical counter-revolutionary, one rapist-murderer, and two burglar-murderers. Describing this as a rare opportunity, the commander insisted that every bullet strike its target, just as on the firing range. Foreign Affairs’s platoon was known as the “platoon of sharpshooters,” and this was why they had been chosen for this glorious revolutionary task. “So you were a sharpshooter!” our homeroom teacher commented contemptuously. Foreign Affairs leaned over to her and said, “Do you even have to ask?” I did not know what he meant, but our homeroom teacher evidently did. She laughed broadly and pushed Foreign Affairs away.

  The person in our class who had the most experience of such public trials was Dumb Pig. In addition to being in the audience once every semester with our school, he often went alone. He had even followed the execution truck to the execution grounds a couple of times. At first, we thought he was bragging, but when we heard the details during enhanced training, we had to believe him. After the criminals were dragged off of the truck at the execution grounds, he said they were split into two groups. One group was untied so they could start digging their own graves. After they had each finished, they were bound up again and ordered to kneel down by their respective graves. The members of the execution squad prodded the backs of their heads with their rifles and pulled the trigger. The other group of criminals was then untied so they could fill in the graves and they, too, dug their own graves before being bound up again and shot in the back of the head. Their graves were filled in by the execution ground personnel.

  Dumb Pig’s account made my hair stand on end. “Why don’t those criminals try to escape when they are untied?” I asked him. Dumb Pig looked at me with contempt. “Where are they going to run to?” he asked. “Each one’s leg is roped to another’s!” Only Girl came up with a good way to die. She said that if she were a criminal sentenced to death, she would intentionally dig her grave as slowly as possible. “See how well that works for you!” Dumb Pig said mockingly. “You’d have the opposite effect.” He said that once he had seen a dumb ass do just that. (Dumb Pig’s use of the term “dumb ass” to refer to such a person amused us). A couple of the people on the execution squad beat that dumb ass with a rifle and let his groupmates dig his grave—which they did almost immediately, so that that dumb ass was the first one executed.

  Those details opened our eyes and were passed around class next day. Not a few pupils regretted that they had recited the Old Three too quickly and lost the chance at enhanced training, because that meant passing up the chance to hear Dumb Pig’s amazing experiences. A few pupils even felt that the school should arrange for us to go and witness an execution, which would have a better pedagogical effect than just attending a public trial. Yangyang did not agree with this suggestion. He was more interested in death itself, not execution. One day during enhanced training, he asked us to imagine we knew we were going to die the next day. What would we do with the last hours of our lives? Dumb Pig retorted that he’d thought about that a lot. He would go and kill people, he said, as many as possible. I had never thought about it before. When Yangyang was waiting for my reply, I thought I would rather kill myself to end the torture of waiting. For a long time after Yangyang’s death, I regretted having said that. Once again, Only Girl surprised us with her choice. She said that she’d finally memorize “In Memory of Dr. Bethune” once and for all, so this shadow wouldn’t follow her to the next world.

  Yangyang laughed out loud. “What a great idea for delaying death,” he said ironically.

  Then he told us a story about delaying death, which he had just read in a book called A Thousand and One Nights. This was a book about a vicious king who would kill the woman he had just spent the night with, until one day the woman he chose told him an interesting story. The king was hooked, and he decided to delay her execution until she finished the story. But the next day there was another story, and then another. She kept on telling these endless stories to put off her own death. She saved many women’s lives because, a thousand and one nights later, the king had changed completely. He married the woman who could tell the great stories and became a good king.

  “What a great book!” Dumb Pig said. “Bring it us next time.”

  “I can’t,” Yangyang said. “It’s a poisonous weed.”

  Dear Dr. Bethune, like you in a barren, mountainous area in China in the late 1930s, your children in China in the early 1970s had no access to any books except those that were labeled one-hundre
d-percent revolutionary. Burned to ashes, smashed to a pulp, or sealed in a warehouse, all those great books were labelled “poisonous weeds.”

  “Why is it a poisonous weed?” Dumb Pig asked, displeased.

  Yangyang shook his head and said he did not know.

  “Maybe because there is a king in the story.” I said. “Communism sees all kings as nasty people, so of course a book about one of them is a poisonous weed.”

  “But we have Chairman Mao,” Only Girl said. “Isn’t a chairman equal to a king?”

  Dumb Pig rolled his eyes. “No wonder you’re not only bad at Chinese, your mathematics is also a problem,” he said, disgusted. “How can a chairman be equal to a king?”

  “I think Chairman Mao would hate this book for sure,” I said. I don’t know where the idea came from, but I was quite proud of myself for coming up with it.

  “What do you mean?” Yangyang took the idea and ran. “Do you mean it’s a poisonous weed so Chairman Mao wouldn’t like it, or that it became a poisonous week because Chairman Mao wouldn’t like it?”

  There was a certain logic to this, but I didn’t mean either, and the way he used what I said to connect Chairman Mao with a poisonous weed frightened me.

  Dear Dr. Bethune, please let me return to where I started. Hearing that I had not yet seen the announcement, Yangyang dragged me off to the new announcement at the school entrance. “I’ve got something important to tell you,” he said.

  When we had caught our breath, he pointed at a name in the middle of the list and asked: “Do you know who that is?”

  “How should I know?” I said annoyed. But I immediately reflected that maybe it was something I should know or something worth knowing. So I asked him, “Do you?”

  Yangyang whispered that it was Dumb Pig’s father. His words shocked me. This is the first time that someone I knew had been related to a criminal. I started to read his father’s crime word by word. I was terrified. “What crime did he commit?” I looked at the strange crime and asked Yangyang. Yangyang shook his head to say he didn’t know, either. But he said he would ask his mother.

  The next day, after self-study, I asked Yangyang if he had found out what sodomy meant. He paled and did not reply, and I did not dare to ask again. The conversation between Yangyang and his mother about that crime was in his notebook. I read it soon after her son’s death. When he asked what Dumb Pig’s father’s crime was, his mother seemed very uncomfortable. Yangyang’s mother said that it was a kind of reprehensible crime. Dissatisfied with this response, Yangyang annoyed his mother by saying that all crimes were reprehensible. Provoked by Yangyang’s words, she said people who commit that particular kind of crime are not human. “They’re even worse than homosexuals!”

  This made Yangyang tremble from head to toe. This was the first time he had ever heard his mother use the word homosexuals. He asked her what that meant. He had been waiting such a long time for this opportunity. And what he mostly wanted to know was whether homosexuality was a crime, or whether the names of homosexuals might appear in an announcement. “Of course it’s a crime,” his mother said firmly. “Sending that kind of person to prison is really too good for them.” She paused, coughed, and added, “That kind of person deserves to go to hell.”

  Dumb Pig’s father was sentenced to ten years in prison for sodomy. Yangyang expressed his sympathy for the son in his notebook, and he claimed he could fully understand his shame and pain. “It can’t be easy to be the son of a criminal,” he wrote, at the end of this notebook entry.

  Before going to the May Seventh Cadre School, Yangyang’s father had gone to the kindergarten to say goodbye to him. Yangyang had never told his mother this. It was a sunny day, around noon, and he was taking his nap. A teacher at the kindergarten woke him up and took him to the entrance, where his dad stood with his luggage, waiting. Taking a handful of candy out of his pocket, he crouched down and held Yangyang’s hand flat, wanting to put the candy in it. But Yangyang did not accept them, saying he wasn’t allowed candy or snacks in the kindergarten. After a long silence, tapping at his shoulder, his father told Yangyang he was going somewhere far, far away and might not see him for a long, long time. Glancing at the luggage and at his father, Yangyang felt frightened, especially at his father’s repetition of the words far and long. Not knowing how to express himself, he looked down. And he could feel his father looking him over with sad eyes.

  When he was leaving, his father told Yangyang that he had come to say goodbye against his mother’s wishes. “This is our secret,” he said. “A secret between two men.” he said. These last words made Yangyang all the more afraid. He was afraid of secrets.

  And Yangyang never told his mother about the second time we went to Graveyard Hill and about the flashlight we found. That, too, was a secret between two men. A secret between him and me. Now I am telling you, so you have become the third man to know. Dear Dr. Bethune, you were our common father. You should share in all of our secrets.

  I was sad when my mother told me over the phone from Montreal about Yangyang’s father’s disappearance. Over the next week, I called my mother another couple of times. In the end, she told me that the investigation into his disappearance had been closed. “Everyone says he’s more amazing than his son,” she said. “Because he disappeared into thin air.”

  She also told me that Yangyang’s father’s disappearance was mainly the result of his relationship with the man who had been the projectionist at the neighbourhood movie theatre. Their relationship had been discovered by accident not long before. About ten years younger than Yangyang’s father, the projectionist had taken early retirement when the movie theatre stopped operating. One day, not long ago, he was standing in the entrance of the movie theatre, which was now a restaurant called Real Sichuan Food, when he was hit be a speeding motorcycle and killed.

  Going through his personal effects, the projectionist’s wife discovered a sealed envelope in which she found some photographs of her husband with Yangyang’s father. The photographs had been taken soon after Yangyang’s father had returned from the May Seventh Cadre School, about thirty years ago now. They enraged the projectionist’s wife, who found them “disgusting.” She rushed to Yangyang’s home to confront Yangyang’s father, but he was not there. The furious wife handed the envelop to Yangyang’s mother, expecting that she would react strongly to the photographs.

  But she was wrong. Yangyang’s mother looked through the photographs one by one and seemed to appreciate them. Her expression was calm. Her voice was calm. “Everyone considered your man handsome. He looks even more handsome in photos than he did in real life,” she said slowly. “If that little vixen who crawled up out of the rubble were still alive, she would finally know why she never succeeded in seducing her adoptive father.”

  In the end, she stuffed the photographs into the envelope and returned it to the projectionist’s wife. “You should take good care of your man’s personal effects,” she said. “You can count yourself happy to have spent your life with such a handsome man.”

  His relationship with the projectionist and the madwoman’s abnormal response to the projectionist’s wife soon spread around our little community. Yangyang’s father never showed himself in public again.

  A Father

  Dear Dr. Bethune, five years after our first trip together, Yinyin and I got married in the autumn of 1988. Our union caused our families, or more accurately our mothers, irreparable harm. Yinyin and I were no match, they both agreed, and neither were our families. But each thought it was the child of the other family that did not match her own.

  The news that we would register our marriage infuriated Yangyang’s mother. She rushed to our home and attacked our door with a brick she had just picked up off the road. At the time my parents did not know what had happened, as they had not yet received my letter. Hastily blocking the door with furniture, they too were livid.

  “I
knew this would happen sooner or later,” Yangyang’s mother yelled, bashing on our door. “I knew you had your eye on my daughter.”

  At her yells and the sound of the brick hitting the door, a number of neighbours came round to see what was happening.

  Unable to bash the door down, Yangyang’s mother sat down on the ground. “That retard son of yours! He can’t even memorize ‘In Memory of Dr. Bethune’!” she yelled, crying. “He’s got some nerve, seducing my daughter like that. As if he deserves her!”

  I don’t know whether my mother’s account was true or not. When Yangyang’s father rushed over, she said “that madwoman” was surrounded by the neighbours. Yes, that was the first time she described Yangyang’s mother as “that madwoman.” And she has never referred to her in any other way since that day. Her hostility to her was now out in the open. According to my mother, Yangyang’s father pushed through the human wall to stand in front of his wife. He tried to pull her up and away, but she pushed his hands away. “I want compensation!” she screamed, hitting the ground with the brick. “I want my daughter back!”

  With the help of the neighbours, Yangyang’s father finally succeeded in getting the brick out of her hands, then they pulled her up off the ground and took her away.

  Yangyang’s mother kept struggling and yelling at Yangyang’s father, calling him “a traitor” and “an insider,” all the while hollering for compensation. As all your children knew, “traitor” and “insider” were labels your great friend applied to Liu Shaoqi, his major rival in the Communist Party, whom he launched the Cultural Revolution to destroy, politically and physically. Yangyang’s mother also shouted that she was going to Beijing to stop us from consummating the marriage. “I swear I’ll get your retard son for ruining my dear daughter.”