Dr. Bethune's Children Read online

  Graveyard Hill was not a formal cemetery. It was just a place where local residents buried their dead, ignoring the Municipal Revolutionary Committee’s prohibition against ground burial. People usually buried the dead on the sly, but I did see one big burial parade. The pallbearers got into a fight with the police and militiamen who were waiting at the crossroads close to our home. In the end, the coffin was confiscated and pushed into the prison van parked at the side of the road. One bystander told me the deceased would be taken away for cremation.

  The fight and the police van gave me the impression that cremation was the same as execution—a death sentence, something frightening. You never suffered the pain of fire, dear Dr. Bethune. You must be counting your lucky stars. Let me add that your great friend only stopped breathing thirty-seven years after you did. He didn’t suffer the pain of fire, either. Nor did he break the prohibition on ground burial. In fact, he was not disposed of after death in any way, but was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, in the centre of Beijing, at what we call “the heart of our fatherland.” His people can still see his dead visage there today.

  Yangyang looked around. His ease and relaxed demeanour made me feel ashamed. “Sometimes I wonder what death is like,” he said in an ordinary voice.

  “Don’t talk of such things,” I said quietly. “It’s scary.”

  “What’s scary about death?” Yangyang asked. “The people in the Old Three are all dead.”

  “Can you please not use that word?” I begged him. I regretted coming with him to a dim, forbidding place. Think about it. If ghosts suddenly jumped out from behind a grave, where would we run? I doubted my great saviour would be able to save even himself in such circumstances.

  “There’s nothing scary about death at all,” Yangyang said, patting my shoulder.

  “Don’t speak so loud,” I continued to beseech him. “And don’t touch me. I’m scared.”

  “Dead people won’t hurt us,” Yangyang said with certainty. But then his expression turned very serious. “Only the living can hurt us,” he said.

  Later, I often recalled this declaration of Yangyang’s on Graveyard Hill. It gave me the impression that, even though we were best friends, we were living in different worlds because we felt differently about so many things. At the time, though, my mind was occupied only by fear. I was not in the mood to understand the truth in Yangyang’s statement. I just wished he would say as little as possible.

  Yangyang seemed unable to stop. “Do you believe in an immortal soul?” he asked.

  This question did elicit my interest. “I do,” I replied. “But my mother always criticizes me. She’s a Communist Party member. She says that Party members are materialists. They don’t believe in souls. And we are Chairman Mao’s Red Guards, the inheritors of the communist cause, so we should not believe in souls, either.”

  “My mom said the same thing,” Yangyang said. “She’s not only a Party member but also a mathematics teacher. She says math has nothing to do with the soul.”

  “I think it does,” I said.

  “I think so, too,” Yangyang said. “Math is like the soul. It will continue to exist after we die.”

  “I don’t want to die,” I said. Only then did I realize I had uttered the word that made me so afraid.

  “Neither do I,” said Yangyang.

  Then came what seemed like an endless silence. I believed Yangyang was contemplating the mystery of death as I was.

  Suddenly a faint beam of light interrupted our silence. It was coming from the grove. “What is it?” asked Yangyang, pointing towards the source of the light. I was so scared I’d broken out in a cold sweat.

  “What is what?” I asked anxiously, refusing to look where he was pointing.

  Yangyang turned my face in the direction of the grove. “Look at the light, the beam of weak light,” he said.

  “What could it be?” I asked.

  “Your voice is shaking,” Yangyang said.

  “So is yours,” I retorted.

  Yangyang looked at me in disbelief. “I’m not afraid of dead people,” he said. But his voice was trembling.

  It was like the light of a flashlight. That’s what I thought, but I did not dare to speak. I remembered what Yangyang had just said. “You just mentioned living people,” I said despairingly. “I don’t want to get hurt.”

  “Maybe we’re imagining it,” Yangyang said, noticing my fear of the living.

  “Why would we both be imagining the same thing?” I asked. I didn’t think we were imagining it.

  Yangyang’s bravery was frightening. He recommended we go down immediately to find out what on earth the light was.

  I was terrified. I didn’t dare go down with him. But I wasn’t willing to get separated from him, stuck all alone on Graveyard Hill amidst all the graves. I had no other choice but to stay by his side. We trotted down, bent over at the waist, and then crawled for bit. As we approached the grove, the light got clearer and clearer. It hadn’t been our imagination.

  But when we got about thirty metres from the grove, the light disappeared.

  Yangyang and I had just climbed behind a grave. We stopped there.

  I had the feeling that disaster was upon us. I stuck my cheek to the grave mound, smelling the ground and the grass. At the same time, I reflected that a dead person was lying right under my body, and that made me all the more afraid. I put my hand on Yangyang’s back, wanting to discuss countermeasures. Then a blood-curdling scream came from behind the grove of trees. I felt Yangyang shudder.

  The scream was really strange. I couldn’t tell whether it was a male or a female ghost, or whether it was a scream of pain or joy. Before I had time to react, the scream turned into the sound of panting. I still could not tell whether it was a male or female ghost, but it was panting harder and harder, more and more scary, as if the ghost were approaching us.

  I pushed Yangyang hard. “What do we do?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Yangyang impatiently.

  Then the panting stopped. We had obviously exposed our presence. After a frightening silence, the ghosts ran like lightning out of the grove. Yes, there was more than one. Ghosts! The shadows and the sounds of the footsteps clearly indicated that there was more than one. I was limp with fear. Then I felt Yangyang pull me hard. “Run!” he ordered. I ran with Yangyang, like crazy. We kept running until we reached a lighted road.

  A Flashlight

  Dear Dr. Bethune, Yangyang did not come to school on Monday. After mathematics class, which was taught by his mother, she called me to the front of the classroom. She asked me where I had gone with Yangyang on Saturday. According to our agreement when we parted that evening, I replied that we had gone to the reservoir. His mother stared at me for a long time and said, “You are not telling the truth.” How could she tell that I was lying?

  Then she also lied, saying that Yangyang was not in school because he had come down with a fever on Saturday night. That was not the case. The reason Yangyang missed class on Monday was not because of a fever, but because there was still a bruise on his face from when his father had beaten him on Saturday night.

  The next day, when Yangyang came back to class, the bruise had not completely disappeared. After political study ended, he sat with me on a bench in the schoolyard and told me what had happened at his house on Saturday night. “Why was your father so rough with you?” I asked. He said he did not know. He said his father had never beaten him like that before.

  When he got home that evening, Yangyang had not followed our agreement and said we had gone to the reservoir. He did not know why, but he fell apart as soon as he saw his mother and told her what had happened on Graveyard Hill. When his father got home, Yangyang was already in bed, not yet asleep. He heard his mother tell his father what had happened to us, and when she mentioned the two ghosts, he lost control. He drag
ged Yangyang out of bed, beat him savagely on the head, and kicked him to the ground. “I told you it’s not safe there, why did you have to go?” he growled.

  “That was nothing,” Yangyang said to me. The worst thing was when his father dumped out all of the silkworms he was raising and stomped on them, crushing them to death. His mother was unprepared for this violence. “She started crying and yelling,” he said, “but she didn’t do anything else. She didn’t know what to do.”

  After his parents had gone to sleep, Yangyang told me, he wrapped up all the crushed silkworms in smooth rice paper. Then he put the paper parcel in a little wooden box and hid the box in his satchel. He asked me whether I could go with him to Graveyard Hill after class.

  I was taken aback, since we had vowed we wouldn’t go back there. And I was still angry at Yangyang. He should not have put me in the position of lying to his mother. So I hesitated. Yangyang said he did not want to go back there again, either, but he wanted to bury his silkworms under the mulberry tree. Half-joking, he reminded me, “Don’t forget, I’m your great saviour.” His smile accentuated the bruise on his face. I ended up agreeing to his request.

  So that’s what we did after class, and this time we weren’t interested in the scenery at all. We did not stop or dilly-dally. We did not say anything. We just rushed to the mulberry tree that we had not dared to approach on Saturday. We weren’t interested in it, either. We just knelt down and started digging.

  Before burying the wooden box, Yangyang opened the cover. He got me to pick a few mulberry leaves, which he gently placed on the top of the parcel. Then he very carefully closed the box and put it in the ground. “Goodbye, my little comrades,” he said, covering the grave with earth. I saw tears trickling down his cheeks.

  More than thirty years have passed, Dr. Bethune, and I can still clearly see Yangyang’s tears. At that moment, I suddenly realized how truly distraught my great saviour was. It was he who now needed my help, but I did not know what to do. I was quite shaken. “Let’s go home,” I whispered in his ear, tugging his shoulder.

  “Give me a minute, okay? I want to spend a little bit more time with them,” he said, staring at the smallest and most recent grave on Graveyard Hill.

  I went to the other side of the mulberry tree and wandered around. I was glad I had not broken the agreement I had made with Yangyang on Saturday evening. I had not told my parents what had happened to us. It was weak of him to tell his mother, I thought.

  Then a reflection in the grass not far away caught my attention. I walked over, curious, and knelt down. What I found surprised me. “Come and see,” I yelled, rushing over to Yangyang. “There’s a flashlight in the grass.”

  He remained kneeling. He didn’t say anything.

  I picked up the flashlight and waved it in front of him. “I found it over there,” I said, indicating the other side of the mulberry tree. “Do you remember the light?”

  Yangyang’s expression changed. He didn’t look surprised. He looked shocked. He grabbed the flashlight and looked it over furiously. “My mother was right,” he said, his voice shaking.

  “About what?” I asked. “What did she say?”

  Yangyang was shaking. He told me that when his mother heard about our encounter on Graveyard Hill, she had laughed and said there was no such thing as ghosts.

  “Are you alright?” I asked.

  “I’ll never raise silkworms again,” Yangyang said gazing vacantly into the dark sky, furious. He didn’t seem to have heard my question.

  I didn’t know what silkworms had to do with my find. “Are you alright?” I asked again.

  Yangyang looked at me and made a strange request. “Can you take the flashlight home with you?”

  “No,” I said. “The ghosts will come looking.”

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Yangyang said impatiently.

  I looked down.

  “What we encountered cannot possibly be a ghost,” Yangyang said. “This flashlight is the best proof of that.”

  I had no idea how a flashlight could prove there were no ghosts, and I took Yangyang’s request as a sign of weakness. Then, on an impulse, I asked, “If there are no ghosts, why don’t you dare to take it home?”

  Yangyang looked at me with a terrified expression. Then he burst out crying. He covered his face with his hands, his body shaking as he lay on the ground. This was the first and last time I saw Yangyang so distraught. “Because, because . . . I’ve told you, the scariest thing is living people, because living people . . . I’m afraid of living people.”

  Dear Dr. Bethune, I still regret my question to this day. I know how much it hurt my best friend, my great saviour. I did not hurt him willingly. I would never have done that.

  A Lie

  Dear Dr. Bethune, Yangyang’s notebook had a long note entitled “A Flashlight.” I have read it many times. After I read it the first time, I felt let down, because Yangyang didn’t even mention the flashlight in the note. Instead, he wrote about his father. I couldn’t understand why.

  I have now finally figured out how apt the title of the note is. Dear Dr. Bethune, I record it below, to show you what an incredible impact you had on our lives. Please bear in mind it was written not long before Yangyang left this world. He was thirteen years old.

  Who is my father? Maybe I should not ask in this way. But I really don’t know. When he went to the May Seventh Cadre School, I was still in kindergarten. Last spring, after the visit to Graveyard Hill, he beat me. I don’t know whether he regrets it now. To be honest, I don’t hate him. He’s just become a stranger. But I am a little afraid of him. He picked some mulberry leaves for me, which I found quite strange. One evening after he beat me, he announced, “Your mother has sacrificed everything for you. When you grow up, you have to take care of her.” It was like he was telling me what to do after he died. I found that strange, as well. His relationship with my mother was also weird, always fighting. When they fought, his voice was always softer than my mother’s. He always said less than she did. One time, my mother accused him of always thinking of himself and of not being devoted to others. I knew she was deliberately misquoting “In Memory of Dr. Bethune” to belittle him, because in the May Seventh Cadre School he had always won the Old Three recitation competitions. The towels we used at home, the enamel cups, and the wash-basins are all prizes he won in these competitions. Sometimes, Mother cursed him long into the night. One time, she said she wanted to get a divorce. I was so anxious. At first, I sympathized with my father, because he said less than my mother. I don’t sympathize with him anymore. And that’s not because he beat me, but because I found out why he beat me. Sometimes, the less you know the better.

  Yangyang never told me why the flashlight upset him so much. On the way back from Graveyard Hill, that day after class, he repeated several times that he would never raise silkworms again. When we parted, he urged me to hide the flashlight and not tell anyone about it.

  “I can’t even tell your mom?” I asked on purpose.

  “Especially not my mom.” At the time I did not know what especially was supposed to mean. But I know Yangyang never told anybody about the flashlight. He never even drew it in his notebook, just used it as the title of his note.

  When I was walking with Yangyang to the air-raid shelter on the Saturday, I realized something serious was about to happen. When he gave me his notebook to take care of forever, I felt all the more apprehensive. But I didn’t want to think about it. And I never could have imagined what did happen.

  On Monday afternoon, I was in geography class. Our teacher, a tiny old woman with a submissive manner, had grey hair and a weak voice. She was the only teacher in the school we were not required to show respect for, because her husband, once the most famous physics teacher in the best high school in our city, was now a criminal counter-revolutionary and was serving his sentence in jail. Only when he was released a
few years later did we learn of the two incidents that led to his conviction. One time he claimed in class that nature’s laws were supreme, and that Chairman Mao’s notion that “man will triumph over nature” was a kind of idealism. This was considered an open challenge to the authority of the Communist Party. Another time, during class break, he was chatting to a few keen students and described America, home to the great number of Nobel Prize laureates, as a great country. We all knew that the word great was only to be used to describe our own fatherland. How dare he use it to praise imperialist America, the Paper Tiger despised by your great friend? This was taken as a betrayal of socialism.

  Our geography teacher had just written the word Tibet on the blackboard in preparation for a discussion of how much the enslaved Tibetans loved our great saviour—who was of course also their own great saviour—when our homeroom teacher opened the door. She had a serious expression on her face. She did not greet the geography teacher. She just walked to Yangyang’s desk and searched through it, but did not discover anything except for the end of a pencil. Then she turned to me. “Come with me,” she said.

  I followed her to the Office of Foreign Affairs.

  It was a very clear day, but the atmosphere in the office was stifling. A police officer was sitting by the desk. He looked less flustered than Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs did not introduce the police officer to me, and he did not indicate that I should sit down, either. I was starting to feel very nervous. Then I noticed my homeroom teacher sitting on the cot by the wall, which reminded me of the discovery Dumb Pig had made during enhanced training. I looked down and tried to contain my smile.

  “When was the last time you saw your friend?” Foreign Affairs asked in a severe tone of voice. He said “your friend” and not “Yangyang,” which took me aback. This cold substitute made me feel Yangyang had already gone somewhere far away.

  I pretended I was trying to remember. “The day before yesterday,” I said.