Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud. Sun Shuyun

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СКАЧАТЬ home. I was born, his third daughter. Despite Mao’s claim that women were half the sky and the absolute equal of men, my father desperately wished for a son to keep the Sun family line going. A veteran Communist, he none the less believed in a dictum of Confucius, as all Chinese had done for more than two thousand years: the biggest shame for a family is to fail to produce a son. Now my mother had borne yet another girl, instead of the much-wanted boy. Father was so disappointed he did not even visit Mother and me in hospital. We were left there for three days and it was Grandmother who brought us food and took us home. Years later Grandmother told me what happened – the only fight she ever had with Father.

      She prepared a special meal to welcome Father, Mother and me home. But Father, even while he was gulping down the dishes that Grandmother conjured up, could talk about nothing but his headaches and successes during the campaign. ‘They were really backward in the villages. Even the cadres weren’t good Communists. They allowed temples and family shrines to be rebuilt. We had a good go at them. We banged away at the village officials, then we asked them to identify the most superstitious people. If they didn’t cooperate, we would take away their jobs. There were some really stubborn ones; you can guess where they ended up.’

      When Father had finished his meal, he cast a casual glance at me in the pram, shook his head, and sighed. He turned to my mother. ‘Why didn’t you give me a son?’

      My mother was very apologetic. Back in her village, there was a saying: ‘A hen lays eggs. A woman who cannot produce a son is not worth even a hen.’ Years ago Father could simply have taken a concubine to give himself another chance. He could not do that now but he had other ways of showing his displeasure. And I, the unwanted girl, could not be drowned as in the bad old days; instead I would bear the brunt of his disappointment.

      Then Grandmother made a rare intervention; ‘It wasn’t her fault. You should blame me.’

      ‘What has it got to do with you?’ Father asked impatiently.

      Grandmother said she felt responsible for my birth. In the Lotus Sutra there is a passage which many Chinese, Buddhist and even non-Buddhist, passionately believe: ‘If there is a woman who desires to have a son, then she should pray to Guanyin with reverence and respect, and in due time she will give birth to a son endowed with blessings, virtues and wisdom.’ My mother desired a son as much as my father and grandmother, but she was a Communist and would never think that praying, even to Chairman Mao, let alone to anyone else, would get her a son. So Grandmother decided it was her job to do the praying for our family. But she could only say her prayers at home, silently and late at night. She could not go to the temples and bow in front of the statue of Guanyin; she could not offer incense to send a message to her – Mao had all the incense factories switched to making toilet paper in 1963. Grandmother thought it was unpropitious: if the goddess did not hear her prayers or receive her message, how could she ensure a much-desired son for our family? That was why my parents were given a girl, an inferior being.

      Father looked at her in disbelief, apparently wondering whether Grandmother was serious. He had been fighting superstition in the countryside, but here it was, rampant in his own home. Suddenly he thumped the table.

      ‘What nonsense are you talking?’ he yelled. ‘To hell with all your superstitious crap. What is so good about your gods up there? If they’re as good as you boast, how come they let people live in such misery before? How come they were so useless in protecting your children? You know what? They are not worth a dog’s fart.’

      Grandmother was shocked by the anger in Father’s voice – they were the harshest words she ever heard from him. She picked me up and went quietly back to our room.

      From very early years, I had felt I was the unwanted daughter in my family. The one person who always cared for me was Grandmother. I shared a bed with her, head to toe, until I went away to university. My earliest and most enduring memory was of her bound feet in my face. The first thing I learned to do for her, and continued doing right up to my teens, was to bring her a kettle of hot water every evening to soak her feet. The water was boiling and her feet were red like pigs’ trotters, but she did not seem to feel it – she was letting the numbness take over from the pain, the pain that had never gone away since the age of seven when her mother bound her feet. It was done to make her more appealing to men. The arch of her foot was broken, and all her toes except for the big one were crushed and folded underneath the sole, as if to shape the foot like a closed lotus flower. On these tiny, crippled feet, she worked non-stop every day from five o’clock in the morning: making breakfast, washing clothes in cold water, cleaning the house and preparing lunch and supper seven days a week – both my parents were too busy with their work and the endless struggle meetings they had to attend. The only time she gave to herself was this daily ritual of foot-soaking to soothe the pain, restore her strength and prepare her for another day. She took her time. She massaged her feet gently and slowly, unbent the crushed toes one by one, washed them thoroughly, and carefully cut away the dead skin. After I took away the dirty water she would lie down and we would chat for a while. She would say to me sometimes, pointing at her feet: ‘It is tough to be a woman. I’m glad you did not have to go through this.’ Then she would add: ‘Life will be hard for you too. But if you can take whatever life throws at you, you will be strong.’

      I was not sure what she meant. Father was very harsh with me; he would slap my face if I reached for food at table before everybody else, or had a fight with my sisters. I thought she was sympathizing with me for what he did; she was powerless to protect me, however much she wanted to. I was too young then to be able to imagine the trials life might hold – I knew no real pain, nothing like that Grandmother had suffered.

      She was born in 1898 in a small village in Shandong, a great centre of Buddhism on the eastern coast. There were three temples in her village; the biggest one, the temple of Guandi, the God of Fortune, was only a hundred metres from her house. She saw it every morning when she woke up. It was tall; the statue alone was three metres high, carved by the village men in stone from the nearby mountain. It was always bustling with people who came to pray that Guandi, with his indomitable power, would help them to make a fortune. But it had no place for women; the temples for the God of Earth and for Guanyin were where Grandmother went and prayed, for rain and sunshine, for a good harvest, for sons instead of daughters, and for evil spirits to stay away. April, October and the third day of the Chinese New Year were particularly busy in these two temples. People came with clothes, carts, horses, cows, boats, money and anything else you could think of, all made of paper. They were burned to commemorate the dead. In April you changed your summer clothes and in October your winter outfit; and nobody should go without money for the New Year, particularly the dead.

      Grandmother was married at the age of seventeen to a boy of thirteen; such was the custom in that part of China. The boy’s family gained a daughter-in-law, a servant, a labourer and a child-minder all at once. Grandmother cooked for the whole family, did all the chores in the house and helped with work in the field. She took over from her mother-in-law the responsibility of looking after her child-husband. She dressed him in the morning, took him to school, washed his feet in the evening and made sure he did not wet the bed. She cuddled him at night and told him about things between men and women. Occasionally he tried to put this information into practice but it did not come to much. In Grandmother’s words, ‘It was more water than sperm.’ But she was not annoyed because her husband really was a child. Bringing him up and making him a man was expected of every woman in Grandmother’s world. And then, when their husbands were in their prime, the women were often old and exhausted, which gave the men the perfect excuse to take concubines. It was a rotten deal for women but Grandmother did not feel it that way. She accepted it. When her young husband finally acquired the knack of lovemaking at the age of sixteen, they had their first child, and then eight more in the next seven years. With one acre of land, two donkeys and a mule, nine children and one ‘big child’ – her nickname for Grandfather – life, as Grandmother said, was ‘sweet as moon-cake’.

      Then СКАЧАТЬ