When I reached the upper concourse I could see, through the windows that gave out onto the tracks, that the train was already full and then some. Young people were climbing on through windows, pushing one another into doors, even staking out spots on the roof.
I stopped. People behind me jostled past and kept trying to get on. I saw it was useless. Older men, tired-looking men in work-stained clothes, got off the engine in front and shouted at people to get off. Youths only stuck their heads and arms out of windows and shouted back at them. Finally some Hong Weibing, Red Guards, jumped off from the front of the train and went up and down the track pulling people off. “The people’s train has to run,” I heard one of them admonish a boy as he pulled him off and dumped him on the platform. The workmen climbed back on and the great chuffs swelled to life and the Hong Weibing leapt aboard, one by one, as it started to roll. Finally with a scream it pulled out.
“You might as well try to fish the moon out of the ocean,” someone said at my elbow. I turned, and there was a girl my age watching the scene beside me. She had long hair in braids and a white blouse, as I did, but otherwise we looked nothing like each other. She was small, with a face the shape of a teardrop, while I had a more angular face and a longer build. “You have to be waiting up here when they arrive,” she said, “and be the first one on.”
“What we really need is a southbound train that ends here, so it will empty out. I’m Zhang Guolin.” I touched a finger to my nose.
“Huang Meiying,” she answered, of herself. It is a strange thing, because this was a girl I knew for only fifteen or twenty hours of my life, more than forty years ago, and yet I remember her name with utmost clarity. I remember what I thought when she told me, too: Meiying, pretty and brave. It was a common name. A bit old-fashioned, maybe, but because of the “brave” part, most girls felt no need to change it.
We worked together. One held the place in front while the other scouted for rumors of arrivals. Finally there was a southbound train that ended here and would turn around for Beijing, and we were in front. We held our prearranged stations at the platform’s edge. No one would move us. The shout went up and people poured up the staircase, onto the concourse, to the cement expanse where we stood, unyielding.
“Tongzhimen!” came the howl from the front, Comrades! The engineer, distinguished by his age and the filth on his clothes, leaned from his car. “You will board the cars in an orderly manner!”
People laughed at this as the passengers streamed from the train, a river of blue cloth and young black heads which had to part and flow around us because of the way we stood our ground. The instant the cars were empty we pushed and shoved our way on, and found ourselves running, laughing, down the empty aisle of a hard-bed car, rows of plain wooden berths, six in each open cubicle, with one common aisle. It was littered, and it still smelled of close-packed youth, but what was that to us? It was our car. It would take us to Beijing.
Not that we were to lie down; there would be far too many people for that. But we had a place to sit, pressed side by side on a lower berth, she by the window and I next. That was more than most had. Many stood in the aisle, or leaned nodding in half-sleep between the cars through the journey. The luckier ones managed to find space to slump to the floor. But we were comfortable. And because we had each other we could get hot water while it lasted, or relieve ourselves after it was gone. One could get up while the other defended our place.
In our little bay, designed for six passengers, at least twenty had pressed in. Everyone was hungry.
After some hours and the exchange of many revolutionary ideas, it was agreed that anyone who had any food would bring it out for all in our knot to share.
As I dug in my bag I glimpsed the kinds of foods others were drawing forth: peanuts in a twist of newspaper, dried fruit, small packages of crackers. And then I put out my tin box.
All eyes flew to it. It had the weight and size of real food; when I cracked the lid, the aroma rushed out, unstoppable. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, for I had taken the box from Nainai without looking inside.
Now I lifted off the lid, and drew in my breath. It was Guangzhou wenchang ji, a Cantonese dish Nainai loved. Velvet-braised chicken breast, thin-sliced Yunnan salt-cured ham, and tiny tender bok choy were layered in an alternating pattern. All three were meant to be taken together, in one bite. The arrangement glistened under a clear sauce. As soon as I saw it my mouth longed for it. That must have been what Nainai’s friend brought her from the south, Yunnan ham. So special. It had been meant for me, and now everyone was staring at it. With a plunging heart I realized how opulent and bourgeois it appeared.
“What’s that?” someone said.
“She said she didn’t know,” said another.
“How could you not know?” said a third, this time to me.
I held the tin box, terrified.
Then Huang Meiying, next to me, spoke up with a boldness I had not expected. “She doesn’t know because an old lady handed it to her on the way into the station. I saw it. I was right behind her.”
“What old lady?”
“I never saw her before,” said Huang.
“Did she say anything?”
Silence. It was my turn. Little Huang was looking at me. I cleared my throat. “She said, Long live Chairman Mao.”
“Maybe it’s poisoned,” someone said.
“It’s not poisoned,” scoffed another. “I’ll show you. I’ll eat some.” He tasted it, lifting one set of the three slices in the incandescently simple sauce and dropping it in his mouth. I wanted to scream at him. I was about to collapse from hunger. And this was ham, from Yunnan, made for me by my Nainai. I wanted it.
I still remember the feeling of tears burning behind my eyes when he swallowed and his face registered such pleasure that everyone else had to have it too, and I saw it handed around. Quickly it was gone. Everyone had something to say. It was rich, it was ostentatious, it was not the plain food we were supposed to eat, yet they ate it in a blink. Huang Meiying saw my tears. She pressed my arm. Then someone in the cubicle said he wished he could find the old lady and teach her a thing or two, and after that both of us sat quiet for a long time, afraid to say anything at all.
Hunger kept me from falling asleep that night. It was not the first time or the last. How many young people today could do what I did? Could my own daughter do it, Gao Lan? No. Yet that was when my character was forged, especially when I was sent to the northeast in 1970. And it began four years earlier, that night when I fell asleep hungry, wedged up with my back straight on the train to my adulthood. In my memory hunger is mixed up with those times the train stopped and sat on the tracks, far from anywhere, the window open, the night air cool, the countryside black and formless. I made a promise to myself that night. No matter how much work it took, I would not be hungry, and neither would my children.
It was for this reason I told Gao Lan we must file the claim against Shuying’s father, so the two of them would never, ever be hungry.
As for Gao Lan’s secrets, I decided to let them rest. I had told her long ago that Old Gao, her father, did not have to know the whole truth. We would file the claim. That would be all. It was a necessity. She and the child needed support.
To this she agreed, for it was the undeniable truth that no matter how much Old Gao and I loved the little girl, we were growing old. “All life’s uncertain,” I said to Gao Lan. “Should we just wait for our death with folded arms? Or provide for her?”
“I don’t think you will go to see Marx anytime soon,” she had answered, invoking the old joke that had been popular under communism when referring to death, jian Makesi qu. Going to see Marx.