In 1966, the year Nainai died, I was seventeen. I was born in the same year as our nation, a fact that gave me pride and also my name, Guolin, the country’s Welcome Rain. This was my generation. Later we were termed the Lost Ones because we had lost our educations, but I always bristled at that. Being lost was a state of mind. On the contrary, we showed we had the fierceness for anything. When we were sent to the countryside in 1970 we endured privations such as even our mothers and fathers never did. I went two years without oil and salt. That is something most people today cannot imagine. Yet those ten years of chaos did not break us. The one thing that did break us had already happened, might in fact have made the Cultural Revolution possible, and that was the famine. Looking back, I have thought that only people who were starved as children could do the things we young people did.
We were town people. We did not suffer like those in the countryside, but still, of 1961 I remember mainly hunger. We hoarded every grain, every stalk of wilted vegetable. An egg was a miracle.
We sold everything possible to get more food. Nainai, my grand-mother, wanted to sell her coffin. At this my father put his foot down. “Impossible,” he said. “You have had it for years. Leave it.” And indeed the coffin was one thing they never sold off, and she was to use it to be put in the earth as she planned, five years later.
But what I remember, back further, is the day in May 1956 that Nainai went to buy the coffin. She journeyed to a dark little shop in a small village outside the city, on a day deemed auspicious by her almanac.
At seven, I was too young to accompany her, but I did go with her in the years that followed. We would travel to the village together to visit the shop, where she would look at her coffin and reassure herself that no one had made off with it and that it was indeed as fine as she remembered.
It was. The renowned local wood was oiled to a dull gleam, and there was a strong iron latch to seal it tightly within the earth. To see it comforted her. She knew that safe within, she would never have to wander in some murky, in-between world. She would remind me of this as the old man hunted through the stacks of coffins in his little warehouse to find the one that belonged to her.
When he located it in the pile he would light a little bean-oil lamp for us in the darkened storeroom, so we could sit there for a while. “A good coffin is important,” she would say. “How else are the Gods to know I led a supremely good life and am to be treated well in the next world?”
“They will know,” I used to tell her. She was to be buried in her ancestral village, after all, which lay in the hills a little farther to the south and from which one saw a long way, across a green valley. The beauty of the place alone would bring her to the Gods’ attention, I felt – if there even were Gods. At that time we were taught that there were not. In fact at certain times it was dangerous to even say such things aloud, but we were in a warehouse at that moment, out in the countryside. No one was near. So I let her talk.
After the famine passed her health declined. She had grown very thin, like all of us, but when we rebounded, she did not. It was another five years or so until she went away. In those last years she was small, sharp-edged, but still clear. Mother dressed her bound feet every day, and her long linen dressings hung in looped rows at the end of her bed, their peculiar fragrance dusting the air around them even when they’d just been washed. She did not so much walk as plant one foot in front of the other, and when she went outdoors she usually had one of us at each elbow. In her walk there was a delicate pathos, graceful even in her advanced age. I can say that now. Back then, when I was young and saw her as a feudal old lady with little more left in her than a whiff of dry breath, she infuriated me. She was the past. She was everything we hated. I thanked the heavens I was born in my own time, so I could serve my country in free, natural health.
Up to the end, though, once or twice a week, she cooked. She made the dishes she loved from her childhood, fried tomatoes and tofu, hot and sour cabbage, soup noodles with pickles. Once she made a rich soup of tilapia with matchsticks of daikon. To buy a live tilapia at that time was sufficiently extravagant to attract attention. Once was all right; it could be explained as a family celebration. But she could not cook it again.
My mother sat down with Nainai and explained why. “The idea now is that everybody eats simply. You know, cu cha dan fan.” Crude tea and bland rice. “We should eat only the most basic foods. To cook anything else is not wise, even if we had the money, which we do not.” She was gentle and clear. Nainai may have nodded submissively, but she was already deciding not to listen. She may not have called for tilapia again, but within her constraints she cooked what she wanted.
In August of that year the railways and hostels were thrown open to youth, free of charge. We could ride anywhere we wanted in China, mix with laobaixing, or old hundred names – the masses. Our job was to talk with people and in this way advance revolution.
I had to go. I was compelled by my age, by the times, by the depth of my beliefs. People don’t like to say it now, but those times, though they were bad, also had some good. We were living for something. Between people there was a kind of ren qing, human kindness, which I don’t feel anymore.
It was a flame I was, at that age, unable to resist. My little bag was packed in minutes. My mother begged me not to leave. She said it was dangerous. She wrapped her arms around me as if she could keep me. I lifted her hands off. “Do you think this is something for me and my friends? We are supposed to exchange revolutionary ideas. Besides, I am seventeen. I’m a grown woman.”
I could see how this drained both my mother’s and my father’s faces. They were children of the modern era; they had gone against their own parents, insisting, for example, on choosing their own marriage partners and careers. Of this they’d always been proud. That it was my turn made them less happy. They were silent.
Nainai did not say anything either. Most likely she did not hear anything. She was cooking with her back to us. A friend of hers had visited her earlier with some foodstuffs from the south, and with this she was preparing a meal. I shouldered my little pack and went to say goodbye to her. Despite how old she was I never thought this was the last time I’d see her.
“Deng yixia,” she said when she saw I was leaving, Wait a moment. “Let Nainai prepare you a box to take.” Before I could even answer she had taken a tin box and begun to arrange food in it.
“I don’t need dinner,” I told her. We needed food to sustain our lives, of course, but according to new thinking, it was a necessary inconvenience. “I don’t want it.”
She was calm. “Who’s going to feed you where you are going?”
I had no answer for this, and the truth was I did want dinner, badly, and so after I had gone one more time to trade stiff, anguished goodbyes with my father and share an embrace with my mother I returned to Nainai, and embraced her too, and took her box.
When I reached the station I was grateful they had not come with me, for the huge hall was an ocean of parents, terrified, tearful. I don’t know if I could have endured their being part of it. As I made my way through the crowd I felt the strangeness of being alone. Which train would I take? To what place? Beijing. That was the heart of the country, and I was the Welcome Rain. I hurried toward the track with hundreds of others like me, part of a moving current. When we got close I saw a stocky comrade up ahead raise his hands and roar, “Beijing che lai!” Beijing train’s here! We surged together, one undulating form, toward the great staircase that led upward. There was chattering and laughing around me. I was pushed and buffeted. I shoved and shouldered back.