One soothing July evening while I was humming a tune to congratulate myself for being born into a Poor Class family, my grandma ushered me to her room and told me the following story. "We should thank your great-grandpa for picking up the habit of smoking opium.” She took a match and lit the small oil lamp on her old, still elegant dressing table. “Selling his land. Paying for his habit. Otherwise we would be in the Landlord Class."

She sat on the bedside and signalled me to sit on a wooden chair opposite her. Unlike other village women, her bed was always neatly made—with her quilt folded in a ready-to-sleep fashion. The inside cover was a home-made white cotton sheet, and the outside a faded dark blue with many lively sparrows standing in twos on small tree branches.

I had learned in our history class that in the 1800s, Britain and France sent a great deal of opium to China in exchange for gold bullion. The Chinese fought two Opium Wars, first with Great Britain between 1839 and 1842, then with Britain and France from 1856 to 1860. Defeat of the Chinese resulted in the ceding of Hong Kong to Britain and the opening of five treaty ports to foreign traders. I had not known that our family benefited from opium.

After sipping some tea, my grandma continued, with a serene composure.

"Your great-grandpa was a respectable school teacher who owned a large amount of farm land, about three hundred mu. My father was also a school teacher, and they were good friends. When your grandpa was three and I was six, we were engaged. A few years later, your great-grandpa started to smoke opium and became addicted to it. He could not carry on with his teaching job and sold most of his land. Your great-grandma complained and wept constantly. In one of their bitter arguments, he broke two of her front teeth. Feeling greatly humiliated, she drowned herself in a pond. Your great-grandma was from the Song Clan, the biggest and wealthiest in the Song Village across the Han River. Her brothers were indignant. They gave your great-grandpa a good beating and burned his house. Deep in debt and poor in health, your great-grandfather sent your grandpa, who was barely nine, to work as a cowboy for a rich villager.

"When he was sixteen and I was nineteen, we were married. Although your grandpa was poor and my family was much better off, an engagement was an engagement.”

She sighed, a complex expression in her luminous dark eyes. Lament? Submission to fate? I couldn’t tell. Framed by night, illuminated by the oil lamp, her tender, lined face was unfathomable. Sitting with her creased hands folded neatly in her lap, her whole being was a statue of time elapsed, of legend relayed.

"By 1949, we had about ten mu of farmland and a small house. Naturally we belonged to the Poor Class. Thanks to opium, your uncle had the option of going to university and working in the army. Your father joined the Party. Now you may have the opportunity to go to senior high school." I was a fortunate girl. At the age of fourteen, I could be one of the seven, among fifty-six junior high school graduates in our class, to be chosen by the best senior high school of Mian Yang County. In 1970, eligibility to attend a senior high school depended upon grades as well as one's family background. Fifteen of us passed the exams, but there were only seven spaces. Among the seven, at least two must be girls. I knew that my chances were good because my math was the best of all the girls and my Chinese was the second best. I also had a third advantage: my family belonged to the Poor Class.

In 1949, Mao Ze-dong classified every household: the Landlord, the Middle Class, and the Poor. The landlords were the exploiting class and were the target of the proletarian revolution -- they needed to be reformed into labouring people. The Middle Class were the friends of the revolution, while the Poor Class were the revolutionaries. In terms of promotion and school opportunities, the Poor Class was the priority.

Our village, Qiong-li-he or Riverside, was right at the centre of the Jianghan plain, an agricultural zone stretching miles and miles through the middle of Hubei Province. The high land grew cotton, wheat and beans, whereas the low land produced two seasons of rice.

The thirty-six households in our village were either in the Poor Class or Middle Class as none was a big land owner. To provide a target for the frequent class struggle meetings, the commune leaders moved a Landlord Class family from a neighbouring brigade to our village. The Jans were arranged to live next to our house because nobody else wanted them as a neighbour. My father volunteered to have them as he was then the Party secretary of the production brigade, which was made up of ten teams or villages.

The Jans had four daughters and a son. The eldest daughter, Da-ju, had married into another Landlord family miles away from our village. In the early 1950s, the Communists shot her father-in-law because he was the biggest land owner in the region and had exploited many poor people. Their land was distributed among the poor and later confiscated by the state. Her husband kept a diary of the events and was found out when their house was ransacked in 1964 during the Four-cleansing Socialist Education Movement. Fearing the harsh treatment from the Communists, he and his brother hanged themselves. Da-ju followed them a few days later.

Their second daughter, Er-Ju, was married to a man who was paralyzed from the waist down. Their parents were hesitant but Er-Ju was willing. Since the man was injured while making bricks for the collective, his injury was a “glorious one.” He could protect Er-ju politically.

Lan-ann, the Jans youngest daughter, was four years my senior and became one of my three best friends in my early childhood. Although she was from a Landlord Class family, I liked her the most. She was honest, tolerant and generous.

Lan’s mother had a great sense of humour. One rainy afternoon, I had broken an expensive thermometer and my mother smacked me. With tears in my eyes, I went to see Lan. Her mother offered me a snack and teased me, "May-ping, what's the matter with you? Raindrops in your eyes?" Amused, I forgot my sorrow immediately. Drying my tears with my handkerchief, I observed that Lan’s mother carried her thick hair in a rather elegant fashion—a sickle-shaped green jade pin fastened the round bun.

To strengthen the will of the Poor Class revolutionaries, it was necessary to have class struggle denunciation meetings. Lan’s parents were the target at such meetings, being the only Landlord Class family in our village.

In the early 1960s, I saw Lan’s parents criticized several times but none was as devastating as the one in 1964, when I was eight years old. One moonlit evening in June, all the villagers, except the elderly and children, were summoned to the large threshing ground of the production team. A reddish ray from a small oil lamp hanging on the pole of a water pump crane signified a bad omen to me. Usually we just used the moonlight for a normal production team meeting.

I squeezed through the many legs of adults to the front. Lan’s parents were kneeling down on the small earth stage. Her father’s face was anguished, her mother’s submissive.

A young man named Bere jumped up in front of Lan's parents and shouted loudly, his right arm waving in the air, "Jan Shi-yi and Yun Jiu-xian, I denounce you. Listen, why did you name your youngest daughter 'Lan-Ann'? What was your motive? 'Lan' means 'to stop,' and 'Ann' means 'entering.' Do you mean to stop the Communists from entering mainland China? Do you dream of the return of the Kuomintang from Taiwan? You miss your lost paradise under the Kuomintang, don't you?"

Bere’s thunderous performance upset me. Pushing my way out, I looked for Lan. She was hiding at the back of the crowd. “Let’s go home,” I said gently to her. She shook her head, not looking at me.

I started to resent Bere. I had some faint idea that Bere was seeking some personal gain by being so active because we all knew that he had only one eye, the other being a false one from a dog. We also knew that he was having a hard time finding a girlfriend—several times the go-between's efforts had failed because no girl wanted to marry a One Eye. By being politically progressive, he hoped to attract the attention of a girl.

A few more people denounced Lan's parents but with milder remarks. Next the crowd shouted some slogans: "Down with dishonest landlords!" "Consolidate our proletarian dictatorship!"

Then the crowd started to sing:

Thinking of the old days under the landlords, ahr, ahr, ahr (rising tone);
Tears rolling down my checks, ahr, ahr, ahr (falling tone);
The landlords wearing silk and jade and no work; ai ha yo;
They had rice piling up like mountains; ai ha yo;
We worked in the fields all year long, ai ha yo;
All we harvested went to the man-eating landlords; ai ha yo.

Suddenly, thunder shook the sky; hai hai hai;
Here come the Communists and Chairman Mao; hai hai hai;
We were liberated; we became master of the land; hai hai hai;

“Um, um, um,” Comrade Liu, a cadre sent by the county organization, purposefully cleared his throat. “Who would like to speak of the bitterness under the Kuomintang, the bandits who ruled China before our great saviour Mao came in 1949?” Quickly sweeping the crowd, he smiled awkwardly, as there were no volunteers.

Liu turned to my grandpa, who was comfortably sitting on a bamboo chair, smoking his home-rolled cigarette, apparently unaffected by the emotion of the crowd.

With an even voice, my grandpa talked about his miserable childhood working for a rich villager after he lost his mother. He spoke of the hard times from 1958 to 1960 when we only had vegetables and sweet potatoes to eat, as we had to support the new China with our grains. My brother was standing beside him. He pulled the back of my grandpa's cotton shirt signaling him to stop, but he didn't. Comrade Liu smiled awkwardly, overlooking my grandpa's misplaced “bitterness,” an error from old age and poor memory.

"The Communists were leading from1958 to 1960, not the Kuomintang," my brother reminded him afterwards. Grandpa chuckled. We never found out whether he could distinguish between Communists and Kuomintang or confused them on purpose.

I ran home while the crowd was singing:

To sail, a ship depends on a helmsman;
To grow, crops need the sun;
To carry out a revolution, we need Chairman Mao.

When I got back my grandma was still up talking with a few grannies. Though as anxious as an ant in a hot frying pan, I held my breath; standing beside her, waiting for the first possible break in their gossip-conversation, which was usually as long as the wrapping cloth for their bound feet.

“Her door was locked in the front for a long time after lunch. I saw her walking to her back door through her yard. Then I heard the back door bolted. What do you think she was doing? Ai ha, it’s as clear as daylight. She is stealing a man,” a square woman named Yan in her fifties was sharing her scholarly analysis with the group.

I became intensely interested. I stared at her loose-muscled face, yearning for more details. I knew she was referring to Lu, a woman in her forties, who carried her long dark hair in a bun fastened by a butterfly-shaped silver pin. She had large breasts and bottom, which the village men considered sexy and attractive.

Rumour had it that besides a loving, thick-headed husband she had three lovers in the village: Team Leader Yin, Accountant Zhang, and my grandpa. For this reason, Lu was all flattery with Grandma on the rare occasions when they ran into each other.

Lu lived two doors from our house. Only the night before, while dozing off on our bamboo chair outside, I overheard Lu talking with my mother, cursing Yan, “May her tongue rot from gossiping; her private parts mildew from long-time-no-use.” Then they started to talk in whispers. I strained my ears but couldn’t make out what they were saying. In a minute, Lu started to hum an underground song, Eighteen Touches, by which a man engaged a woman prior to the act. Her soft voice came:

Your long, dark hair feels like silk;
Your forehead broad and smooth;
Your eyebrows a willow-branch;
Your eye lashes thick as a bush, in which I am lost;
Your eyes luminous, inviting as autumn water…

I didn’t understand the meaning of the lines and soon I fell asleep. I had forgotten all about it until now.

“An elf, that’s what she is!” Yan’s condemnation sounded more jealous than contemptuous. Her husband died of starvation in 1959 and no man had been attracted to her for the past five years.

“A fox elf!” a short, skinny woman named Mar echoed.

“Um, she even uses two mirrors, one in the front, one in her back, to do her hair!” Yan seemed exasperated now. My eyes moved from Mar’s to Yan’s face and rested there. Her three-layered chin was like a loosely stitched oil-cloth bag, opening and closing as she stretched her head to emphasize a point.

“Don’t stare at me like that, child. Go and play!” She suddenly became aware of my intensely curious eyes.

I shuddered and drew my eyes to moonlit ground, where my shadow was tiny compared to her massive bulk. Embarrassed, I pinched Grandma’s thin shoulder, a signal that I wanted her undivided attention.

"Ai-ya-ya, my precious grand-daughter wants some cold tea," my grandma said affectionately while slowly getting up from her homemade willow chair, holding my eager hand.

"Grandma, is it true that Lan's father exploited the poor peasants before Liberation?" I asked as soon as we were alone.

"Not really. I knew Lan's grandpa. He was a man of learning and Lan's father was just a spoilt young man. Lan's mother has worked hard to serve her parents-in-law and her husband. Poor thing! She doesn’t deserve this harsh treatment. Lan's grandpa hired a dozen people to help in the fields but he treated them well." My grandma was tall so I had to stretch my neck all the way back to see her expression. Her thin face looked meditative and earnest.

I believed my grandma's words and trusted her judgment. I started to doubt what we learned in school, that all landlords were bad people, but I kept my thoughts to myself.

That night I had a frightful dream. My grandma, dressed in an elegant traditional blue silk Qi Pao and gold earrings, the way she looked in an old photo, was being denounced. “Wei Ju-xiang, why did your father name you chrysanthemum? Bourgeoisie! Your father was a well-off genteel intellectual, wasn’t he?” The voice was Bere’s, but I couldn’t see his face. “Ha ha, gold earrings?” He tore the earrings off my grandma’s ears. Blood trickled down her silk dress. “Oh, Grandma!” As I ran to her, I awoke.

After the denunciation meeting, Lan played alone. I tried to talk to her several times but she pretended not to hear me. One starry evening I asked her to jump elastic ropes with me.

"My name is no longer 'Lan-ann' but 'Ju-ying,'" she told me in a flat tone. She appeared to be very serious when she talked; her childhood playfulness was gone.

"I don't like the sound Ju-ying. Can I still call you Lan?" Two drops of tears, as big as soybeans, were glistening in her large black eyes, one drop in each eye. I did not know what to do when a big girl like Lan cried. Taking out my red-green dotted handkerchief, hesitating for a moment, I put it in her hand. It was a sacrifice for me because I did not share my handkerchief with anybody, not even my sister.

Taking the folded handkerchief, she dried her tender tears.

"Yes, you can call me Lan, but don't let my father hear it," she whispered.

I nodded, understanding. I knew Lan was afraid of her father. So was I. I never saw him smile or laugh even once. He was assigned to do the dirtiest and heaviest work in the production team.

A few days later, another "mass meeting" was held on the same spot.

"Silence, silence," Comrade Liu declared importantly, "Today, we are going to denounce Yin, who has abused his power."

Silence. The silence was immediate and solemn.

The villagers could hardly believe their ears. Yin was the team leader who had had great power over their lives for several years.

Yin walked slowly to the front of the crowd, his usual majestic air disappeared. In a repentant voice, he started his confession, “I have committed a crime, an unforgivable one. In the past three years, I have stolen at least one thousand jin of grain from the production team. My trick was quite simple: after midnight when the village was quiet, I would open the storage bin, put about a hundred jin of grain in my large bags, and carry the bags home with a shoulder pole." He lowered his head as if feeling ashamed of his conduct.

"Ai-ya! My Heaven! Who would have thought of that!" Many villagers were shocked.

“Son of a turtle egg!”

“Man’s face, wolf’s heart!” Others were angry.

They felt betrayed. After all, Yin was a Communist Party member and a symbol of Mao's revolutionary line.

About a month before, I heard that a villager going to the outdoor toilet in the middle of the night had seen Yin carrying grain home, but did not dare to report it for fear of Yin's retaliation. The night before, Comrade Liu, the county cadre, who was living in our village to help carry out the “Four Cleansing Movement,” happened to come back late from a district meeting and ran into Yin with two bags of grain. Yin was so scared that he wet his pants. He knew then that his future was cast with dark clouds, so were his children's.

About two months after Yin’s denunciation meeting, while I was eating a late lunch after school, my grandma casually remarked, “Lan-ann's family and Yin's are voluntarily moving to Sha-hu. The government has given them each a thousand yuan, enough to build a new house in Sha-hu.”

I had heard about Sha-hu. It’s in our neighbouring county, Hong-hu. An area where farm hands were needed to open new land, it is known as a place of rampant Schistosomiasis. The disease is caused by a parasite that crawls into a person’s body through blood vessels. Village men who went to work in Sha-hu often came back with bloated stomachs and swollen legs. The disease is neither fatal nor curable.

“I tried to persuade Lan’s mother not to go but she isn’t the one who makes the decision. It’s Lan’s father. He has set his mind to go.” After putting some cotton stalks into the stove, Grandma stirred the long beans in the wok.

“I’m used to this place and don’t want to go anywhere.”

Placing the bowl of cooked beans in front of me, she murmured, “Gold nest, silver nest, not as good as the old nest.”

At this moment, I heard noises in the direction of the pond beyond our front yard.

“What’s the noise about?” I asked Grandma. “Oh, it’s Tan, Team Leader Yin’s wife. She is pretending to drown herself in the pond.” My grandma said as a matter of fact. After a sigh, she went on, “Well, Yin wants to go to Sha-hu but she doesn’t. Now the decision is made and she wants to have it reversed. She has been begging the Party secretary for days but he wouldn’t change it.”

Frowning at my half-finished bowl of rice and stealing a look at Grandma, I complained, “Mn-hmm, you have put too much rice in my bowl. Now I can’t finish it.”

She knuckled my head affectionately and said, “That’s a bad excuse. Now run along. Monkey. I know you want to see Tan and the crowd.” I was born in the year of monkey and was thin and quick like a monkey.

I ran to the pond in one breath. Who wouldn’t want to see a show like this? A dozen kids were already there when I arrived. Among them was my classmate, Rong, who lived at the lower end of the village. She took my hand and we sat down on a dead tree trunk. It was a cloudy day so we didn’t have to worry about the sun scorching our face. We carefully watched Tan’s every movement as if she were a circus performer.

Tan was sitting at the edge of the pond patting the water and howling loudly, “My good neighbours, save us! Please save us! I don’t want to be parted from you. I am one of you, alive or dead.” Tan was petite, wrapped with energy. She was in her early thirties and had borne three sons and a daughter for Yin. Her dark hair was loose on her shoulders; her sun-tanned face was determination incarnate; there was not a drop of tears in her round dark eyes.

Behind her were many vigorous lily pads, some sleeping on the water, others standing above it. A light current of air was rocking the standing pads back and forth as if improvising a back stage dance for Tan. Rong whispered to me that Tan had been there since morning. She was waiting for the Party secretary to come and relent.

As Tan chanted the same words again and again, I lost interest in her. Instead, I examined Rong. My friend was three years older than me, taller and fuller. She had stunning black eyes and a round chubby face matched with cherry red lips. Unlike me, Rong’s interest was not in books but boys. At the age of eleven, she received love notes at least once a month.

“Look, more people are coming.” Rong pulled my thoughts back to Tan.

Three village women came to the edge of the pond to pull Tan out of the water. But Tan would not go. Her wailing was louder than ever.

I heard the women say, “Come on, you don’t have to go. There must be some way to change the decision.”

“Why? Yin didn’t consult you when he made the request to go?”

“No. He was so ashamed for what he did that he felt he had to leave.”

“No, no, no. A thousand no. He doesn’t have to. We have known him since he was a boy. He didn’t mean to steal the grain from us. It was an honest mistake.”

“Everyone makes mistakes.”

“We are ready to forgive him.”

After these sweet and useless words, the three women left, for it was near dinner time.

Tan slid into the water again and started another round of howling.

Darkness fell; the Party secretary still did not show up. Finally Tan got up and went home.

There was much excitement in the village in the following week. Lu’s second daughter Qing’s engagement to Yin’s second son was called off since Yin was no longer the team leader. Lu sent words that she was willing to engage her daughter to Dan, Rong’s brother, for Dan, being intelligent and articulate, would have a bright future. Rong confided to me that Lu paid an evening visit to her mother; Dan and Qing were to be engaged as soon as Yin’s family left. For the sake of formality, they needed a matchmaker, which would not be a problem as several women in our village specialized in matchmaking.

A month later, Yin’s family was gone, and so was Lan’s. Before they left, Lan’s father had their house torn down and sold the wooden frame.

The night before Lan’s departure, she revealed to me her biggest secret. She liked Dan very much. Lan said that Dan had integrity, a quality she most appreciated. “Oh?” I was dying to know more details but I sounded as if I was barely interested.

“Dan rescued me from an embarrassment. Last Wednesday afternoon between classes, two girls were bullying me and calling me names. Dan came over and stopped them with a severe look.” She was completely self-absorbed and happy.

“Oh, he is so good. I’ve never had a chance to thank him.” Lan’s face lit up with love, the most divine feeling in the world.

“Do you want to say goodbye to Dan before you leave?” I was more curious than wanting to help, for I had never seen with my own eyes how lovers express their feelings for each other.

“No. He doesn’t even know I exist. He is so grownup and I must look insignificant to him. Besides, who wants to marry a daughter from a landlord family? I don’t want to drag him down. I am telling you this only because I am leaving and perhaps will never see him again.”

I had read somewhere that true love was about making sacrifices. Now I was witnessing it. How exciting! Lan and I were going to talk more, but her mother called her to sleep; they had a long journey walking to Sha-hu the following day.

The first few weeks of Lan’s absence were unbearable. Every time I passed by the spot where her house had been, I ran fast before tears came out.

When I missed Lan, I would sit by myself or ask my grandma to tell me a story from her “old days.” She was my caretaker and first teacher, the best I had ever had.

I was born at dawn of a fine May day so I was named May-ping. Although there was a small clinic a mile away, nobody bothered to go to the clinic for childbirth. Instead, my father sent for a trained nurse. My mother was twenty and she could barely take care of herself, to say nothing of me—a skinny baby—about five jin. My grandma wrapped me and took me over to her warm blanket.

I remember this rainy afternoon when I was about three years old. My mother was embroidering a new pillow case for me. I said that I loved her the best. Later when my grandma asked me if I loved her the most, I said yes. At dinner time, everybody was present—Grandpa, Grandma, Father and Mother. I was sitting on the lap of my grandma when she suddenly asked, "May-ping, among all the people in the world, whom do you love the best?"

I looked at my mother who was nervously watching me, and I said loudly, "Both Grandma and Ma!" Everybody laughed.

According to my grandma, I should become a school teacher when I grew up. I started to talk when I was barely two. Furthermore, I had a sharp tongue. She compared my tongue with that of a dozen other kids in the village, and mine was the sharpest—with an almost pointed end and slim all the way through. She would brag how I defeated a well-educated provincial cadre who was in our village for three months to assist with the Great Leap Forward. Comrade Ai, the cadre, was arranged to live in our house because my grandma was noted for her open-mindedness toward new things.

1959 was a hard year for China. Rice was scarce because we had to "sell" most of it to the state to support the socialist construction in cities. Our great leader Chairman Mao said, "Workers and peasants are one family, and it is the Big Socialist Family.” Therefore it was our duty to supply the workers in the city with cotton and grain.

In springtime when we ran out of grain, we ate carrots, sweet potatoes and vegetables. Some villagers complained, but my father never did. “It’s a necessary sacrifice since our socialist republic is very young,” he would say.

Grandma usually prepared my meals and fed me before the adults came back for lunch. One day, Comrade Ai returned earlier than usual. He appeared to be very surprised: "Aha-aha, May-ping, I got you. You little brat! How come we don't have egg fried rice, yet you can have it?" His eyebrows puckered.

I pretended that I did not hear him, pursing up my lips. As soon as his back was turned, I said proudly, tilting my head and stealing a look at my all-smiling grandma, "I’m not eating yours. It's my grandma's!"

He put on a serious face and looked into my naughty eyes: "I am going to report you."

"I am not afraid of you. Our family is in the Poor Class!" I knew that only Landlord Class people were criticized in our village.

But I was still worried that he would report me. I had some faint idea that to have more than others was disapproved even if you belonged to the Poor Class. It seemed that everybody in the village should be poor together — that’s why we needed a revolution.