The doctor sighed, shaking his head, and said to a nurse, “Amnesia. Let’s hope he’ll get his memory back soon.”
A brief checkup showed that except for a broken wrist Guhan was physically well, though he had lost his mind, unable to remember anything before the earthquake. Because he had nothing but some cash and national food coupons on him — in his underwear — it was impossible to ascertain who he was. Among the refugees there was a small group of unidentifiables. One man remembered his name as Wenyao but couldn’t recall his surname or where he came from; several children had lost their parents and couldn’t tell where their homes had been.
Guhan was given a name, Sweet Apple, and was assigned to collect trash at the field hospital. Every morning he held a short shovel or a wicker basket and walked about the camp with Wenyao. Together they picked up scraps of paper, rags, broken bowls and bottles, animal and human feces. They then burned the garbage in a pit. Guhan didn’t enjoy the job, but he had no idea what else he could do. Everybody was too busy and too tense to complain. The medical staff worked around the clock, and the kitchen served free meals day and night. Group after group of injured people came and then left. Those who hadn’t been identified stayed, doing chores to earn their meals at the hospital, which remained the same — two dozen tents encircled by a barbed-wire fence.
Because of his carefree state and unlimited access to food, Guhan gained weight rapidly. A month later, when trees began shedding leaves and the millet fields nearby turned yellow waiting to be gathered in, he was no longer a skeletal man. Now he looked healthy and a little robust, his ribs covered with a thick layer of fat, and he wore the large-sized uniform. His wrist had healed. Still, he looked like a half-wit and would smile at every woman he met.
The hospital was ordered to return to Yingkou City before winter came. Guhan heard that bulldozers had finished dig-ging collective graves and burying corpses in Taifu, and that airplanes had sprayed enough insecticide over the city to wipe out the swarming flies and mosquitoes. Now construction workers moved in to replace the soldiers. Before the hospital withdrew, Guhan, along with the other unidentifiable ones, was handed over to the Administration of Taifu City.
There were too many homeless people for the city to take care of, especially the elderly and the orphans. As winter was coming, it became difficult for the citizens to continue to share tents and shacks. Most of them had been living in small groups, each of which consisted of several broken families. By October, many people had left Taifu to stay with relatives in other provinces; yet the quarter-million people who remained had to be accommodated properly. At the moment, most of the construction teams were busy building huts for schools, so that children would have temporary classrooms to study in during the winter. After that, more huts had to be set up for stores, restaurants, banks, inns, bathhouses, police stations. And although the residential housing did not take priority, it was crucial for the city’s stability. Therefore the newly formed City Administration encouraged people to work in teams to construct shacks for themselves for the winter, using the bricks, rocks, and wood left in the ruins, in addition to the building materials donated by other provinces. The Construction Bureau provided a few shacks as models, which were low-pitched and cozy inside and had roofs made of straw, reed mats, and tar paper. In mid-October forty thousand soldiers were sent in to help the civilians build residential shacks.
Meanwhile, another movement was also under way, which was called Form New Families. The authorities urged the thirty thousand people who had lost their spouses in the earthquake to marry again, as a way to promote social order and provide havens for homeless children and old people. The temporary orphanages and old-folks homes simply couldn’t take in so many of them. Soon a slogan began circulating among the survivors: “We must live on!” It not only silenced the voices against the family-forming movement but also helped bring around some of those who had made up their minds not to remarry. As soon as the residential shacks were built, branches of the Party, the Youth League, and the Union all set about matchmaking for the people who had lost their spouses. This undertaking proceeded nicely. Every weekend some group weddings would take place, at each of which more than a dozen new families were established — candies, dried dates and persimmons, roasted peanuts and sunflower seeds, and fresh fruits were supplied in washbasins. Every one of these families comprised at least three members, usually from three homes.
Since this was an emergency measure, love wasn’t always taken into account; so long as a couple didn’t dislike each other, a marriage certificate would be issued to them. People ought to help one another in such a situation. Also, these were men and women who were accustomed to family life and needed it badly; in their hearts there was the natural longing for such a union. We all know how miserable loneliness can be. Besides, there were two great incentives to an immediate marriage: the city promised to grant the newlyweds priority for housing when the apartment buildings were completed the next summer, and they would have an advantage over others for job assignments as well. Therefore thousands of people signed up for the family-forming movement. As long as you were healthy and normal, you were entitled to a spouse and a child or two, sometimes even to an old mother or father.
Already over fifty, Guhan no longer had strong sexual desires, but he was persuaded to help others and entered his name for a family. He looked like a normal man now, working as a clerk in the city’s waterworks, because his handwriting looked handsome and he could do sums. But it wasn’t a permanent job. Nobody knew who he was, and the authorities wouldn’t run the risk of employing a man with an unclear background. So he was on piecework, copying bills and numbers.
His bride-to-be, Liu Shan, was a small woman in her late thirties who had lost her husband and two daughters. When they met in an office in the Civil Bureau’s cottage, she didn’t ask Guhan any questions but just gave him a look. Her oval face was soft and smooth; her slight figure reminded him of a bullet, probably because she had sloping shoulders and wore quilted trousers.
“Do you agree to marry him?” an old woman cadre asked Liu Shan the next afternoon when the couple met in the office again. The bride-to-be nodded without a word.
Turning to Guhan, the official asked, “How about you?”
He gave her a big smile. She said, “You think you’re lucky, huh? Look how young and how pretty she is.”
He smiled again, and that settled it. With a flurry of writing she filled in a red glossy certificate for them. “Love and respect each other,” she said solemnly, revealing two broken teeth. “Com-rade Sweet Apple and Comrade Liu Shan, may you remain a devoted couple to the end of your lives.”
Compared with other men, Guhan wasn’t a bad choice; he looked gentle, strong, and well educated. To him, Shan was a fine woman. She worked as an accountant in a department store, so she must know how to manage money in a household; her voice was so quiet that she must have an even temper; her hands, small and slim, looked dexterous; her earlobes were thick, which was a sign of wealth. In a word, she seemed full of the makings of a good wife. The couple were assigned a new shack and a four-year-old boy named Mo, who would bring them an additional twenty-four yuan a month.
The wedding took place the next Saturday inside a large tent across the street from the Civil Bureau. Twenty-one couples, most of whom were middle-aged, became husbands and wives officially that evening. At the mouth of the tent two strings of firecrackers exploded; then the names of the brides and grooms were announced inside the tent. After a round of drums, pipes, gongs, and horns, together the couples sang “Even My Parents Are Not as Dear as the Party and Chairman Mao” and “Our Gratitude to the People’s Army.” Then a vice mayor, a spare man in steel-rimmed glasses, spoke briefly and gave them the city’s congratulations. After the speech, he presented to each couple the gift of a rice pot and a kettle.