The problem started a couple of months before, when a family claimed to be friends with one of the members of Mao’s inner circle, later known as the “Gang of Four.” They took up residence in a luxury building—the only one left in the city that still had working revolving doors, heating, air-conditioning, and electrical elevators.

  I knew that building very well. Father had worked in the boiler room there. I passed by it every day on my way to school. A couple of foreigners remained in Shanghai after 1949 and it seemed as if they all lived in that building. One was a tall Russian man with a white turban around his head. For some reason, he always walked around with a pail in his hand and never seemed to notice anyone else around him. Another one was a Jewish woman who walked around with a thick veil so that no one ever saw her face. The rumors were that she had no nose because her husband had cut it off. My friends and I tried several times to approach her and find out if were true and then ran away screaming for fear of seeing her noseless face. We never found out why she would not let anyone see her face, or, indeed, if she really did not have a nose.

  When the newest tenants moved in, they refused to pay any rent or utility fees, and demanded that the workers renovate their apartment for free. The angry workers wrote an open letter of criticism against this abuse on a posterboard. Before the letter was to be displayed in the lobby, the workers asked Father for his support by signing the letter. Since he was the local union leader for his company, he gladly complied.

  A few days later, the revolutionary leaders of his company called Father and expressed their anger about the poster. They warned him that his signature made him look disloyal to the Party, and told him he was being investigated as the plotter behind the poster.

  It might have ended there but a couple of weeks later, someone noticed a thumbtack had been pressed into the wall of the company cafeteria—right on the giant painted head of Chairman Mao. This was clearly an intentional anti-revolutionary crime, whose perpetrator intended to assassinate the great Chinese leader. In a public meeting, the leadership expressed their determination to capture this criminal and have him prosecuted.

  The final damning evidence came in the form of a dead cat, which was found outside the boiler room where Father worked. Killing a cat was a serious offense in those days, since “cat” in Chinese was pronounced mao. With the leaders still holding a grudge against my father for putting his signature on the poster, the company decided to kill two birds with one stone, whether they were the right birds or not. They would prosecute my father for both the thumbtack and the dead cat, fulfilling their public commitment to catch the anti-revolutionary criminal at large, and punish my father for signing the poster. This is how our lives as enemies of the people began.

  Chapter VII

  Life without Means

  We were not allowed to visit Dad after the ruckus Mother caused. We did not know if he was still imprisoned in the same place or if he was even alive. Mother and I went to the prison several times and always found the iron gate locked.

  No one brought us any news. When I met Father’s co-workers on my way to school, they walked by me as if they had never known me, their eyes focused at some distant object, their faces emptied of any expression. At first, I kept on staring at them, expecting some delayed greeting. I thought the hope in my eyes would soften their hearts and bring back the smiling faces I was used to. But it didn’t happen. I was not in their world anymore. They didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I kept looking backwards to see if they would turn around and give me some sign that they were the people I knew, the people who used to hold me, tickle me, and give me candies. Gradually, I realized that all those men and women I used to call “uncles” and “aunts” were not my friends anymore.

  Now I knew that because of my father, no one wanted to be close to us. I decided that it would be best if I kept myself away from everyone. As soon as school was over, I hurried home. I learned to look at the ground as I walked. The thought of my quiet little home and my mother and sisters comforted me. I knew I would always have them.

  One late afternoon, my father’s mother surprised us with a visit as my sisters and I sat in the dark kitchen drawing pictures. We watched with crayons in hand as our grandmother squeezed her ample body through our narrow door, and stumbled into our living room.

  “Pumpkin with scallions! What kind of dinner is that!?” Her eyes caught the humble meal my mother had prepared for us.

  How can she even see the tiny pieces of scallion? I marveled. It was so dark I couldn’t even tell the colors of my crayons. My mother seldom turned on the lights these days.

  “Two fen a kilo isn’t cheap enough to lure anyone to buy it,” my grandmother kept on. “People are tired of eating pumpkins. They are rotting in piles at our market. Who can eat any more of them?”

  We lived on pumpkins that fall: steamed pumpkin, stir-fried pumpkin, roasted pumpkin … pumpkins cooked in every possible way. In fact, pumpkin was the only thing that kept us from starving.

  “By the way, I came here to tell you that An Chu’s sister Xin Feng has denounced him. She went to the neighborhood meeting and declared that he is no longer her brother.”

  My grandmother said this very casually, as if it were no big deal.

  We all froze in the dark. The air was thick and still. Xin Feng was my father’s youngest sister and my grandmother’s favorite.

  “Xin Feng is graduating and doesn’t want to be sent to the countryside because of her anti-revolutionary brother,” she went on nervously. “Of course, I know you’ll understand.”

  Mother quietly turned on the light. No one said anything.

  My grandmother suddenly felt awkward seeing five pairs of eyes staring at her. She started to back out of the door. Then she got angry.

  “Don’t act so shocked. You would have done the same thing in her position.” And then, she was gone.

  On the fifteenth of the month, Mom sent Ping and me to collect Dad’s paycheck. She instructed us to check the cash and buy five kilos of rice from the grain shop on the way home. We walked to the accounting office and presented Father’s name seal to a clerk. Although she always talked to us, this time she only acknowledged us with a nod before opening a drawer and taking out a stack of paychecks. She went through the entire stack twice and looked puzzled. She went to the back of the office and made a call. Soon, she came back and returned the seal to us. “I’ve checked with our party secretary,” she said. “The company has decided not to pay your father anymore since staying in detention is not work.” She walked back to her desk and started to flip through some paper as if nothing had happened.

  “Comrade Aunt, Comrade Aunt …” I kept on calling since I didn’t know her name. Finally, she rose from her chair and came back to me.

  “What do you want?” She grew impatient. “If you want to know more, go and find the party secretary. It’s his decision.”

  “But how can we live without Daddy’s paycheck?”

  “That’s not my business.”

  Ping and I walked away, shocked. We already knew that Father’s paycheck wasn’t much, but it was the only thing that put food on the table and coal in our stove. We didn’t have to tell Mother what happened. When we went home empty-handed, without the rice or the money, her face went black.

  Usually we managed to scrape by, illegally selling some of our rice vouchers to stretch Father’s meager salary. Now, with his income gone, Mother started cutting back on everything. The first thing to go was the fuel we used for cooking.

  To help, Ping and I combed the streets and parks for sticks and newspapers, but they didn’t burn long enough to make a meal. Luckily, we found a local research lab that dumped its used coal near its garbage bins. We went through the ashes and found quite a few half-burned coal nuggets, so we filled our pockets with the black prizes and ran home to show Mother.

  Every day after school, Ping and I hurried home, put down our school bags, picked up a basket, and rushed toward the ash heap. The garbage bins gave off terrible smells, but we had to find enough charcoal before dinnertime or starve. It was hard work combing through the burnt-out coal slag and finding a few coal nuggets disguised under a coating of white powdery dust. Ping and I picked up the grayish white lumps, rubbed them with our hands, and scraped them with our nails until we saw the dark charcoal underneath. We soon learned to tell which ones to scrape and which to let go by weighing them with our hands. The good ones were heavy, and we put them into our basket; the light ones we threw back into the pile. We worked until our legs became numb from crouching, our nails hurt from digging, our throats became clogged with dust, and our patience ran out. Then it was time for us to carry the basket home, wash up, and help Mother with the cooking.

  The coal bits were too small for a conventional stove so Mother created a homemade one in the backyard. She assembled a few bricks in a half-moon shape with an open front. Then she laid down some rolled-up paper, twigs and branches, and, on the very top, a pyramid of our precious, half-burnt coal nuggets. It was time to cook. She put on our iron wok with rice and water and struck a match. Our proud faces were lit up by the glow of the stove. We twittered in Mother’s ears and rubbed tears from our eyes when the wind blew smoke in our faces, patiently waiting to get the first whiff of cooked rice.

  With no money coming in, Mother started to sell her memories in exchange for food. Piece by piece, she said goodbye to the keepsakes of her past: jade figurines, silver spoons, lacquer trays, silver necklaces, embroidered silk quilt covers, and a pair of gold spectacle frames that belonged to Grandpa Ho De. Her hands lingered in the air as she held each object and looked at it for the last time before wrapping it in a cloth and going out to the pawnshop.

  Mother asked me to come with her whenever she went to the “Exchange Center.” People usually went there to sell things that they no longer wanted or needed. Often the man behind the counter would look at our things and then look at Mother, not quite understanding why she wanted to sell such nice things for a fraction of their worth. As soon as the transaction was done, Mother stuffed the money in her little purse without checking the amount, grabbed me under the arm, and ran out of the store, as if we were shoplifters. She became very pale and had to lean against a wall, too weak to continue our walk home. I held her arm, tried to support her with my light frame, and we staggered home together.

  After we got back to the house, Mother would have cramps and cold sweats. I often found her curled up in the bathroom with a bucket in front of her, throwing up. I waited by her side until she stopped and asked me to carry her to bed. I sat with her, afraid that she would not get better and that we would lose her.

  Every time Mother got sick, Ping and I quietly took over the house and chores. We filled Wen’s baby bottle with sugar water and changed her diaper when she cried for mama. She cried a lot when Mother was sick. Sometimes we couldn’t figure out why and didn’t know how to help her. We made watery rice for lunch by adding last night’s hot water from the thermos to yesterday’s leftovers. When night came and Mother didn’t get out of bed, we mimicked her way of starting the stove so we could make dinner. I blamed myself for being young and useless when the stove disobeyed me, giving out massive amounts of smoke instead of fire. Sometimes, it stuck out a tiny fiery tongue at me to build up false hope—and just as I thought it was going to spread, it turned into a puff of smoke and disappeared. We kept on trying, encouraged by our growling stomachs. By the time the fire started, Ping and I looked like we worked in a coal mine. I thought about how Father looked when he was a charcoal delivery boy. Luckily, we didn’t have to parade ourselves around the city the way he did.

  The best we could do with the fire was to make a kettle of hot water, a pot of half-cooked rice, and a bowl of half-raw Chinese cabbage, always with either too much or too little salt. Another day passed without Father, but we would go to sleep with something in our stomachs. What would happen tomorrow? No one knew.

  Normally, no situation seemed impossible for Mother. Lately, however, I saw her staring blankly. She was getting very low on things to sell. The last time, she sold her best jacket.

  “Well, I don’t have any occasion to wear it, anyway,” she said to me before she surrendered it to the shop attendant.

  What could she sell next? I wondered. If Father did not come home soon, I feared for our lives.

  One Sunday morning, Mother said she had to go out on her own. She looked strange and didn’t take anything with her. We all stood quietly and sent her off with our silent good wishes. Without Mother, the day felt very, very long. The house echoed with only our voices. The floor bore only our steps. I could feel the cold, fall air that had already settled into our concrete walls and floor.

  Ten-year-old Ping was our little mommy. On her tiptoes, she divided up the leftover rice and cabbage and made us lunch. Rice in lukewarm water did not taste good. Would Mother be home soon? We felt subdued and had little interest in playing. Minutes dragged into hours until the sun slipped below the horizon and we could barely see in the dark one-room house.

  By then, we were aching for Mother to come back, and we feared the long night ahead. If she did not return, who could we turn to? There were too many questions. I could not explain to myself why Mother left and felt hurt that she did not invite me to go along. It was also unlike her not to leave us in the care of a grownup with food and plenty of instructions.

  To escape from the darkness inside the house, Ping, Min, Wen, and I held each other’s hands and ventured out. As we headed toward the front door, I spotted a strange object in our yard. A closer examination sent waves of fear through me.

  “It’s a chicken,” I screamed, “and it’s dead!”

  My proclamation sent us instantly retreating backward into the house, our teeth chattering and our hearts beating like drums. We gathered behind the door in the house, and hugged each other tightly to gather enough strength to fight the darkness and fear.

  Even in the gloom, I could see the chicken. Its feathered, lifeless body and straight legs spoke of death. I closed my eyes to get rid of the image, but it kept coming back, like a nagging premonition. For some reason, the feeling of my sisters’ quivering hands comforted me, telling me we were not alone, but I could not shake off the feeling of bad luck surrounding us. With our arms curled around each other, we waited in the darkness, hoping only to see the sun and our mama once more.

  We were asleep when Mother finally turned on the light. She found us curled up together behind the door and carried us to bed. We did not hear her come home.

  Many years later, I asked Mother why she left us that day and where she went. After a long silence, she told me that she had decided to end her life. She wandered aimlessly around the city, searching for an easy, painless exit: A river, a bridge, or a tall building. She did not know how to go on without Father, without money, without a future, without even a past. Then a voice came to her telling her that she was baptized as a Christian, and was not allowed to take her own life. She stopped and dragged herself back home.

  After her crisis and unexpected salvation, some good luck came our way. Mother got a temporary job as a candy wrapper in Shanghai Number Two Food Company. She was paid by the number of candies she could wrap in a day. Her income was pitifully low, but we would not starve to death.

  Chapter VIII

  Great Grandmother’s

  Prophecy

  “ I want you to go and visit your grandparents this morning,” Mother said to us matter-of-factly as we sat down for breakfast.

  We were never close to my father’s side of the family, and rarely got invited there even though they lived only a few blocks away. I knew that my grandmother never liked me or my sisters, although no one ever said so. The few times we were there each year, I observed Grandmother spending most of her time around my cousin, Wei, son of my father’s brother, the only boy born in our generation. She teased him, tickled him, hugged him, and gave him candies. She gave us lectures. She would not have missed us if we were not there.

  Mother could see our thoughts on our faces. As she ladled porridge into our bowls, serving us each some thinly sliced pickled vegetables with toasted sesame seeds, she talked in a slow voice.

  “Today is your grandfather’s birthday,” she said. “Normally, your dad buys some presents and goes there for dinner. But he is not home. He cannot visit his father. Now you are old enough to take the responsibility and help him out.”

  “But they never invite us when they have parties,” I spoke out with my childish sense of justice. “Why should we go there now and give them anything?”

  “You can’t change how other people behave. But you can make things better by behaving properly yourself. That includes going to see your grandparents today.”

  Mother made it impossible for us to argue against going. Besides, we were doing this for Father. With that said, Mother sent Ping and me on our way with a small basket of apples.

  It was a bright Sunday morning in May. The sun caressed us and a gentle breeze lifted our spirits. It was too pleasant a day to worry about our grandmother’s cold stares and aunts’ sharp tongues.

  “Don’t worry, Ping, we’ll leave as soon as possible,” I said as I skipped along. “Let’s just drop off the apples and tell them that we have to go home and help Mother with something.”

  I was looking forward to leaving my grandmother’s house long before I got there.