To boost the nation’s morale and overcome its economic crisis, China’s top leadership called on the people to follow the principles of “self-reliance and hard struggle” and to succeed through prudence, diligence and spartan living. For the next quarter of a century, millions of Chinese people looked up to their government, faithfully followed orders, silently swallowed hardships, and waited hopefully for some miracle to happen. Yan and An Chu were just two of them.

  Chapter II

  Culture Shock

  Within hours, Yan, Ping, and An Chu found themselves a home in Shanghai, settling down in the slum with An Chu’s parents and his six brothers and sisters.

  Before their arrival, all eight members of the Sun family were jammed into a one-room wooden hut on whose dirt floor there was barely enough room to fit all their beds. A tin roof supported by bamboo rods hung over the edge of the shack under which sat the family kitchen made up of a charcoal stove, a picnic-style table, and a home-made wooden cupboard. To accommodate the new couple and baby Ping, a bed was temporarily squeezed into the open kitchen until An Chu could build himself a hut next door, or find somewhere else for them to live. For the time being, three generations and eleven souls nestled together under one shaky roof.

  Amidst the deafening shriek of cicadas, humming mosquitoes hunting for their meals, parents calling their children to come home, clucking chickens heading back to their coops, the occasional crash of a bowl or dish, a child’s crying, and a father’s cursing, Yan tried to put Ping to sleep on the straw mat of their new wooden bed. An Chu sat nearby at the kitchen table, staring at the aggravatingly red sky.

  His mother came and sat across from him just the way they did the night before he left Shanghai.

  “It’ll be a hot day again tomorrow,” she said. “Just like today.”

  An Chu looked long and hard into the distance. “It wasn’t so bad. You think nature is bad? Man is worse.”

  His mother stared at him with concern, prompting An Chu to return to the present.

  “I’m glad to be home, Mom.”

  “I’m glad you are,” Ya Zhen smiled. “I was afraid I’d never see you again. I wouldn’t even know where to begin looking for you in that giant, empty desert.”

  “It’s even emptier now,” he said quietly. An Chu felt a chill run down his spine imagining the deserted streets of Zhang Ye, now abandoned by all but the silent crowds of the dead.

  For a while they sat in silence. Then Ya Zhen glanced over at her new daughter-in-law fanning the baby. She was still in shock realizing that her son was married and had a child.

  “I thought all of your good luck would have brought me a grandson instead of a granddaughter. You are the third-generation first-born son, you know, and now our luck runs out with this daughter. You named her Ping … might as well have named her Ping Chong.”

  Meaning poverty.

  An Chu didn’t reply.

  “Had you married a lucky woman, you would have had a son,” Ya Zhen pressed on.

  An Chu still didn’t reply.

  She shook her head.

  “Do you know what you want to do?”

  “I’d like to do many things but I have to figure out what I can do. How is Pei and his business?”

  “Oh, he is a lucky boy. He made an important friend somewhere, a communist leader, so they say. He really liked Pei and got him a government job. Your friend left the shantytown and moved his whole family out of here in no time.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “No, why should he? He is an important person now,” his mother said with a touch of envy.

  “What happened to my business?”

  “What business? You never had any business. I’m sure the people you worked for found someone else to fix their problems. Besides, life is so hard now. I doubt anyone is fixing anything these days.”

  An Chu felt hurt by his mother’s blunt comments, but they were probably true. They put an end to the little hope he had of getting his old job back. Where could he work? He couldn’t possibly find Pei now, not in a city as immense as Shanghai. And even if he did, An Chu wasn’t a person who would ask for favors.

  Looking around the dismal hut, he shook his head and sighed.

  “I always thought you could have bought a better place with that ruby ring,” An Chu said, changing the subject.

  “I could have,” Ya Zhen replied more loudly than he expected, “except that your uncle—”

  “What did he do?”

  “He is not much of a blood relative, that beast,” she said as she stared at the burning sky in the distance. Her hands turned into fists. “He forced me to pay him before we left his charcoal store or he said he would call the police and say we stole his things. He claimed he had spent a lot of money on us and we were cheap, ungrateful, poor relatives. Your grandparents were too timid to say a word. Your father was their first-born son, you know. They should have come out, said something, bundled up their quilts, and left along with us, except they preferred living under his roof to going to a shantytown. They still wanted their dignity. But how about us?!”

  An Chu saw tears welling up her eyes and regretted raising the subject. “It’s okay, Mom. At least we got away from that rascal.”

  She was still indignant. “He has enough gold to choke himself and he still wanted more.”

  A long silence followed, during which An Chu went back to worrying about his family’s future, while his mother lamented her family’s past.

  “I want to give you some money to start,” she finally said in a barely audible voice. “Don’t make a fuss about it.”

  She took a quick look around to make sure no one was near before she pressed a roll of paper money into his palm. “Don’t tell anyone, including your father. You know how your sisters are.”

  “Thanks, Mother,” An Chu said. “I have a family now and I know I have to find something to do soon, very soon.”

  I’ll start looking tomorrow, he thought before he bid his mother goodnight.

  Yan had a hard time adapting to her new life in the shantytown. Slum life was a culture shock to her. Her life had been spiraling down for some time, transforming her from a privileged daughter of the middle class to a shopgirl and finally, a refugee. But Yan was never exposed to the camp-style life of the truly down-and-out. Having her bed out in the open on public display was a nightmare to her. It made her feel naked.

  When she first arrived, she only dared go to bed after the entire shantytown turned off its lights and fell asleep. She got up when the roosters began their first dreamy squawks. She would not allow the slightest possibility of a stranger staring at her in her sleep. Privacy was an important matter to her. Yan was brought up that way. She was taught to speak in a quiet voice, be polite, and shy away from strangers. Now her private bed was on public display twenty-four hours a day in a shantytown where anyone could stroll into anyone else’s territory without permission and stay as long as they wanted.

  The whole town was a big family. No one seemed to mind each other’s presence and intrusions, even when they were in their nightgowns or undergarments. Every fight between a husband and wife was observed or heard by the public and then became the topic of other people’s gossip and dinner conversations. Here, no one bothered to hide anything from anyone else. They couldn’t, anyway.

  The day after her arrival, Yan made an exploratory trip to the town pump to wash her baby clothes and diapers. A cluster of women sat among piles of laundry, enthusiastically talking about something. Seeing a stranger, they went quiet for a moment and looked her up and down with silent eyes. Without getting a greeting or word from her, they glanced at each other, as if saying, “Who does she think she is?” and quickly resumed chattering.

  “Did you see Old Chan this morning?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Oh, you should have seen him. He had a black eye and was washing the dishes! He was so ashamed he did not lift up his head, not once!”

  “Don’t tell me his wife hit him again! What kind of man gets beaten by his wife?”

  “What kind of woman would hit her man? She throws him out of the house almost once a week. He has to sleep in the chicken coop.”

  “Serves him right for marrying a woman twice his size.”

  “She’s already given him five sons. I guess he has to pay her.” At that, they burst out laughing, their soapy hands punching each other. Yan felt embarrassed. She ran back home with her half-washed laundry.

  Yan decided that she did not belong in this worn-out, nosy, low-class not-much-of-a-place. She carefully avoided befriending anyone and maintained her privacy in any little way she could. When it was time to feed Ping, she did not join the new mothers outside sitting in a circle, chatting and laughing, with their babies sucking on their bare breasts. Instead, Yan ran into her in-laws’ hut and nursed her baby under the privacy of a blanket. She avoided drawing water at the town’s only pump during busy hours. Any conversation stayed in the general realm of “Hi.”

  Yan sewed a cover for her bed. Then she dragged home a stack of giant straw bags from the vegetable market. The bags had been thrown into the trash after the vegetables had been emptied out. Yan carefully picked out the undamaged ones and sewed them together to make a giant straw blanket, which she hung over the sides of the open kitchen. Now her bedroom had “walls.” Nevertheless, it was still in the family kitchen where everyone came and went at all times.

  Since this was the only home she had, Yan was determined to make the best of it and found multiple uses for everything around her. The giant, wooden family washbasin was placed outside the hut as a playpen for Ping, who was always neatly dressed like a baby doll, while all the other babies in the slum crawled on the ground and explored their world amidst vegetable peels, stinking garbage, and animal waste. No one worried about cleanliness here, yet almost every baby was ruddy-cheeked, seemed to be vibrant and healthy, and grew to adulthood.

  When Yan and An Chu first arrived, all eleven members of the family ate together. As vegetable vendors, An Chu’s parents always managed to put at least some food on the table. In lean times, they threw chopped cabbage skins into a pot of rice so everyone would have enough to eat. In good times, or when sales were exceptional, they would bring home a little fish or meat to make their children happy. In a period of famine, mealtimes should have been happy times, but Yan soon found eating at the Sun family table the most stressful parts of her day.

  An Chu had one younger brother and five younger sisters, two of whom were going through the terrible teens and who just happened to be in charge of the family’s affairs when their parents were at work. Neither one of them liked Yan or Ping and all the extra attention they were receiving. The two sisters mocked their brother for marrying a “princess”—especially one with no money. Yan came to the Sun family without a dowry, which a bride needed to gain respect and her proper position in the husband’s household. The dowry was a marriage tradition as ancient as China’s five-thousand-year history and so embedded in the culture it could not be uprooted by Communist ideology. Of course, Yan’s sisters-in-law conveniently overlooked that the Suns were too poor to throw a wedding ceremony for the new couple, an obligation of the groom’s family.

  The two sisters were displeased to see their brother spending most of his time on Yan and Ping, and they turned their anger on the newcomers.

  At every meal, the more costly dishes were intentionally placed beyond Yan’s reach. Any effort to reach out with a pair of chopsticks was met with cold and lasting stares. This simple tactic worked better than the two sisters hoped, intimidating Yan and showing their power. Yan was too proud to extend her arm across the table to serve herself what she wanted to eat. Instead, she ate the few mouthfuls of whatever was placed in her bowl and then excused herself as quickly as possible.

  On a couple of occasions, when her husband or her mother-in-law placed some braised pork and fish in brown sauce in her rice bowl, Yan gratefully enjoyed the rare treat. But the two sisters quickly seasoned the meal with unappetizing words for Yan to digest with her food.

  “Whatever she ate will turn into diarrhea,” one said with a stone-cold voice.

  “Yes! Who does she think she is?” the other continued.

  “There are no princesses where we live,” they growled. “So don’t pretend.”

  “No, no, An Chu, it’s too private! People might see us!” They imitated Yan’s bedroom conversation in her high-pitched voice, punctuated by hysterical laughter.

  Yan’s face turned scarlet. She had to bite her lip and hold her breath to hide her distress and avoid a disastrous confrontation. She was so upset she felt her liver was bursting. She had never known people so mean.

  Then and there, Yan made her decision—she was determined to start her own household.

  “I’d rather have a glass of water for dinner than swallow their insults,” she swore.

  “Can we please move to a hut of our own?” Yan begged her husband when she could no longer hold in her feelings.

  Her husband was surprised by her sudden request. “What’s the matter? Isn’t everything alright?”

  “Of course … yes,” Yan assured him.

  “My sisters aren’t giving you a hard time, are they?” he asked, looking into her eyes. “They have mean streaks, you know.”

  She was too embarrassed to repeat the senseless assaults, so she looked down and shook her head. “I just want my own home, my own food, a little more privacy. Then, Ping can take a nap without a crowd around to wake her up.”

  “That’s true,” An Chu admitted. “I’ll make us our own hut.”

  Chapter III

  Be It Ever So Humble …

  With nothing more than a pile of scrap wood collected from the gutters and alleys around the shantytown, An Chu was ready to build a tiny one-room hut next to his parents’ shack.

  Using a hammer, some nails, an ancient saw with rusty teeth, and his bare hands, An Chu soon made four crude walls, a shaky roof, a wooden bed, a table, and a couple of chairs. He and Yan became the proud owners of a home they could call their own, even if it was only a glorified mass of splinters. Yan was happy that she could finally sleep without worrying about strangers staring at her. An Chu was happy that Yan was happy. Now all they needed was a way to make money.

  Every morning, Yan got up at dawn, just as the roosters started their first calls. She hurried to the market, although it was so dark she could hardly see a thing. She had to feel her way forward blindly, determinedly pushing aside the still air with every step, guided only by millions of tiny twinkling eyes, too far away to light her path.

  Yan selected the best cabbage skins and gently spoiled vegetables, which had lost their sale value during their trip from the countryside and would otherwise end up in the garbage. Since her in-laws worked in the market, she soon got acquainted with a few friendly vendors who were sympathetic enough to spare her the best of the rejects before the ill-fated vegetables were sent to the city dump where the city’s poor waited and scavenged for food they could not afford to buy.

  A golden hue in the distance told Yan that she was getting closer. Lit by strings of bare, 15-watt light bulbs, the outdoor market was about two blocks long and crowded with several dozen vendors and their wooden stands. The dark shadows of customers, some still in their pajamas and homemade slippers, flowed around the bamboo baskets as their owners searched for the freshest green vegetables that had just arrived from the countryside. Lavender-colored eggplants, slender cucumbers, and a kind of fuzzy green squash oddly called “midnight blossoms” were lined up side by side on large, flat bamboo trays. Shanghai bok choy, cabbages and delicate “chicken-feather” greens spilled over long wooden boards. It was so dark that people were afraid of mistaking potatoes for radishes, scallions for wild onions, and watercress for bean shoots. So, they bent down and checked the trays carefully, making sure they were actually getting what they wanted. Meanwhile, vendors dragged large, heavy straw bags out of their carts, sliced them open with a knife, and took out more fresh produce a handful at a time, checking each piece and refilling their stands. The rejects rested in heaps next to their feet. Sometimes the vegetables were so muddy that they had to be washed in a basin before they could be sold. Others were sprayed with water to bring more money. Smart customers would insist on wet vegetables being shaken before they were weighed.

  “Daughter-in-law of the Sun family, come,” an old woman vendor grabbed Yan’s arm. She bent down and searched under her feet until her hand touched a slightly slippery pile of roots. “Here are some radishes,” she said as she tossed them into Yan’s basket. “They are a bit spoiled but tender. You’ll be able to make something out of them.”

  “Thank you,” Yan said gratefully.

  “Not at all. Come back tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll find something else for you,” she shouted before vanishing among her small crowd of customers.

  The old woman’s words warmed her heart. Yan walked on. She didn’t bother to admire the vegetables on the stands. She knew she couldn’t afford them. Her job—not as easy as you would think—was to persuade some of Shanghai’s sharpest merchants to give her what they were going to throw out anyway. A few were nice enough to say yes, but many lied rather than give away their wares and said they were saving the moldy piles for a friend or relative. Others, sensing an opportunity, wanted to sell her the spoiled vegetables at a lower price. It embarrassed her that she didn’t even have a few petty fen to pay for them, and she never learned very well how to beg. Sometimes she wandered back and forth through the market without getting anything. But under no circumstance did she ever approach her in-laws’ stand. When she couldn’t find enough to fill her basket, it was time to visit the city dump.