“I promise you,” Sparrow said. “I’ll keep all our secrets.”
The old man nodded. He was already half-submerged in his own memories.
“The year I met Wen the Dreamer,” Comrade Glass Eye said, “there was famine everywhere. In 1958, during the Great Leap Forward, the true face of our Revolution was revealed. Why did our leaders dream that every farmer could be reborn as a steelmaker? How did they imagine that a boy who had studied the fields all his life could make iron ore out of nothing? I think it is much more serious than ideology, production and material needs. We had to become only what they proclaimed us to be, we existed to be forged and re-forged by the Party. Here in this village, the communal kitchen was shut down for lack of food. The ground and the trees were stripped bare. Nobody had a pot to cook their soup in, let alone soup itself. In six months, half the people starved, first the children and the old, and then the rest.
“It is a pitiful death, this useless wasting away, and it was a silent famine because few in the city knew what was happening in the countryside. All they knew was that food enough was coming in through the proper channels. All the grain had been requisitioned, you see, they took it away and left the countryside with nothing.” He nodded his head, and turned his face to the undulating line of land and air, to the grey mountains in the distance. “In the Northwest, our own famine was a catastrophe. We had no ceremonies. What can the Party say at the funeral of a convicted rightist? To them, he had already died long ago.
“But I was fortunate in my gifts. If I may say so, hunger inspired my most ingenious creations! Over time, your uncle became my tall and trusted assistant. Wen the Dreamer and I made pulleys and tools out of nothing more than the desert wind. Every storehouse can be broken into — every camp administrator’s private quarters, every cook’s kitchen — if you have the right hands and the right tools. Dreaming Wen could reach the highest windows, he could stretch like an expanding ladder. We had a motto, Brother Wen and I, not to waste anything in the wastelands. We ingested compost, animal feed, we welcomed any nutrient under the sun. From the Party to our stomachs! From the sun of Chairman Mao to our lips! We promised ourselves that we would seek out the last edible crumb on this empty plate and find a way to eat the plate itself, if necessary. There would be no slow death for us, only a slow regeneration. Every day we woke up and cursed our leaders, the Revolution and history, and we worshipped life, learning and the future.
“Do you know why I was sentenced to re-education through labour, Young Sparrow?” He smiled, as if he was about to tell a long and satisfying joke. “Let me digress and offer you this tale within a tale. Well, my crime begins with my mother. During the civil war, she left my father and ran away with a Nationalist soldier, a fighter for Chiang Kai-shek. My father, it must be said, was not the easiest man. He used to fall asleep wearing his own shorts on his head to keep out the cold, and when he woke in the morning, he would forget they were there, and go out into the village just as he had gone to sleep. My mother, meanwhile, was the brightest star in the village, intelligent, kind and lovely, and twenty years younger than him. Her Nationalist lover was, in fact, a childhood friend. Just as the civil war was breathing its last, he crept back to the village under cover of night. They disappeared together. Chairman Mao was all but leader by then. My father feared my mother would be caught, charged with sedition and executed. He couldn’t sleep and became so worried that he wasted away, as if he, himself, was on the run. But, one morning, a letter arrived from my mother. She told us she had followed her lover and General Chiang Kai-shek out of the country and into exile in Taiwan. And so, she was gone forever.
“I knew my mother loved me as much as she loved her sweetheart; thus she would never be happy separated from him or me. One thing I have learned, dear Sparrow, is that light is never still and solid and so it is with love. Light can be split into many directions. Its nature is to break apart. My mother only wrote to me the once; I never heard from her again. But I kept that letter all my teenaged years and I felt her suffering and believed that she felt mine. We were connected, as surely as this blade of grass is attached to the soil below.
“My father’s love for her, meanwhile, was set to flow evermore towards her, no matter where she went or what she did, and it burned brightly until the end of his brief and patient life.
“Anyhow, by 1955 I was a bachelor and an orphan, and the Chairman chose this moment to launch his brightest campaign. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom,’ he told us. ‘Let a hundred schools of thought contend!’ We were told we must question ourselves, our superiors, and the state of our nation so as to make a country that was both unified and just. Young Sparrow, I had spent too long in my workshop, alone with my crystal radios, homemade batteries and amplifiers, in a closed room where inanimate objects listened to me and to one another. So I came forward with my mother’s letter in my hand and I asked that her crimes be forgiven and forgotten. I thought that if she was rehabilitated, she would be allowed to come out of exile and return to China, and I could see her once more. Love is a revolutionary act, I argued. My mother had broken with the Old Ways, with the suffocating hierarchies of Confucianism, and she had embraced her destiny.
“What a mistake. I should better have argued that Emperor Hirohito and Chiang Kai-shek deserved a villa in France, paid for by the Communist Party of China. I should have heeded the wise saying, no flower can bloom for a hundred days. Every joke ends! At first, they listened to me and were compassionate. ‘Brave Edison,’ they said, ‘it is right that you show this fidelity to your lost mother. You are a faithful son of the Revolution!’ The Hundred Flowers Movement was still a spring bouquet and anything could be said. It was an exciting time, my friend. All of us, young and old, were awakening towards freedom. I felt a deep pride in my country and I know I wasn’t the only one. So of course, I didn’t stop there. I went on about the waste in the village bureaucracy, the favours and bribes that bankrupted the poor, the laughable quality of our scientific education, even the quality of our trains. ‘With all the gifts of our homeland,’ I proclaimed, ‘we should be the flowering tree of modernity!’
“The Anti-Rightist Campaign began. Everyone with something to lose, from our Great Helmsman to the local village brute, had heard enough. They summoned me to a meeting in town. I was convinced that my mother had finally arrived and I would see her again! I spent a fortune on a new set of clothes and a jade necklace for her. A very bourgeois thing to do, I admit. When I arrived at the hall, there were hundreds of people already there. I searched every face for hers. A dozen times I thought I saw her.