Yiyun Li - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

This was the story of every one of our Great Papas. For dynasties they were the most trustworthy members of the imperial family. They tended to the princesses’ and the concubines’ most personal tasks without tainting the noble blood with the low and dirty desires of men; they served the emperor and the princes with delicacy, yet, unlike those young handmaids who dreamed of seducing the emperor and his sons with their cheap beauties, Great Papas posed no threat to the imperial wives. There were wild rumors, though, about them serving as playthings for the princes before they reached the legal age to take concubines, and unfortunate tales of Great Papas being drowned, burned, bludgeoned, beheaded for the smallest mistakes, but such stories, as we all know, were made up to attack the good name of our town. What we believe is what we have seen— the exquisitely carved tombstones in our cemetery, the elegantly embroidered portraits in our family books. Great Papas filled our hearts with pride and gratitude. If not for them, who were we, the small people born into this no-name town?

The glory of our town has faded in the past century. But may I tell you one boy’s story before I reach the falling of Great Papas in history? As a tradition, the boys sent to the palace were not to be the only sons, who held the even more sacred duty of siring more boys. But the greatest among our Great Papas was an only son of his family. His father, also an only son, died young before he had the chance to plant more seeds in his wife’s belly. With no uncle or brother to send them money from the palace, the boy and his widowed mother lived in poverty. At ten years old, after a fight with the neighbors’ boys who had bragged about their brothers accepting gold bricks from the emperor’s hands, the boy went into the cowshed and cleaned himself, with a rope and a sickle. According to the legend, the boy walked across the town, his male root dripping blood in his hand, and shouted to the people watching on with pity in their eyes, “Wait till I become the best servant of His Majesty!” Unable to endure the shame and the despair of living under a sonless and grandsonless roof, his mother threw herself into a well. Twenty years later, the son became the master eunuch in the palace, taking under his charge twenty-eight hundred eunuchs and thirty-two hundred handmaids. With no brothers to send his money to, he saved every coin and retired as the richest man in the region. He hired men to dig out his poor mother’s coffin and gave her a second funeral, the most extravagant one ever to take place in our town. It was in the ninth month of 1904, and to this day our old people haven’t stopped talking about every detail of the funeral: the huge coffin carved out of a sandalwood tree, stacks of gold bricks, trunks of silk clothes, and cases of jade bowls for her to use in the next life. Even more impressive were the four young girls the son had purchased from the poor peasants on the mountain, all of them twelve years old. They were put into satin dresses they would have never dreamed of wearing and were each fed a cup of mercury. The mercury killed them instantly, so their peachy complexions were preserved when they were paraded in sedan chairs before the coffin. With burning incense planted in their curled fingers, the four girls accompanied the mother to the other world as her loyal handmaids.

This Great Papa’s story was the brightest page in our history, like that one most splendid firework streaking the sky before darkness floods in. Soon the last dynasty was overthrown by republics. The emperor was driven out of the Forbidden City; so were his most loyal servants, the last generation of our Great Papas. By the 1930s most of them lived in poverty in the temples around the Forbidden City. Only the smartest ones earned a fair living by showing their bodies to Western reporters and tourists, charging extra for answering questions, even more for having their pictures taken.

THEN WE HAVE a short decade of republic, the warlords, two world wars, in both of which we fought on the winning side yet winning nothing, the civil war, and finally we see the dawn of communism. The day the dictator claims the communist victory in our country, a young carpenter in our town comes home to his newly wedded wife.

“It says we are going to have a new life from now on,” the young wife tells the husband, pointing to a loudspeaker on their roof.

“New or old, life is the same,” the husband replies. He gets his wife into bed and makes love to her, his eyes half closed in ecstasy while the loudspeaker is broadcasting a new song, with men and women repeating the same lyrics over and over.

This is how the son is conceived, in a chorus of Communism is so great, so great, and so great. The same song is broadcast day after day, and the young mother hums along, touching her growing belly, and cutting carefully the dictator’s pictures from newspapers. Of course we never call him the dictator. We call him Our Father, Our Savior, the North Star of Our Lives, the Never Falling Sun of Our Era. Like most women of her generation, the mother is illiterate. Yet unlike others, she likes to look at newspapers, and she saves the pictures of the dictator in a thick notebook. Isn’t she the woman with the greatest wisdom in our town? No other woman would ever think of watching the dictator’s face while pregnant with a son. Of course there has always been the saying that the more a pregnant woman studies a face, the greater the possibility of the baby owning that face. Years ago, young mothers in the cities liked to watch one kind of imported doll, all of them having a foreign name, Shirley Temple. Decades later, movie stars will be the most studied faces among the pregnant mothers. But at this time the dictator is the only superstar in the media, so the mother has been gazing at the dictator’s face for ten months before the baby’s birth.

The son is born with the dictator’s face, a miracle unnoticed by us at first. For the next ten years we will avoid looking at him, for fear we will see his dead father in his face. The father was a hardworking man, nice to his neighbors, good to his wife. We would have never imagined that he would be an enemy of our newborn communist nation. Yet there are witnesses, not one, but a whole pub of evening drinkers.

What gets him killed is his comment about heroes and sows. At this time, we respect the communist power above us as our big brother. In our big-brother country, the Soviet Union, it is said, women are encouraged to produce babies for the communist cause, and those who have given birth to a certain number of babies are granted the title mother hero. Now that we are on the same highway to the same heaven, the dictator decides to adopt the same policy.

The young carpenter is a little drunk when he jokes aloud to his fellow drinkers, “Mother heroes? My sow has given birth to ten babies in a litter. Shouldn’t she be granted a title too?”

That’s it, a malicious attack on the dictator’s population policy. The carpenter is executed after a public trial. All but his wife attend the meeting, every one of us sticking our fists high and hailing the People’s victory, our unanimous voice drowning out his wife’s moan from her bed. We shout slogans when the bullet hits the young man’s head. We chant revolutionary songs when his body is paraded in the street. When we finally lose our voices from exhaustion, we hear the boy’s first cry, loud and painful, and for a moment, it is difficult for us to look into one another’s eyes. What have we done to a mother and a baby? Wasn’t the dead young man one of our brothers?

What we do not know, at the time, is that a scholar in the capital has been thrown in jail and tortured to death for predicting a population explosion and calling for the dictator to change the policy. Nor do we know that in a meeting with the leader of the big-brother country in Moscow, the dictator has said that we do not fear another world war or nuclear weapons: Let the Americans drop the atomic bombs on our heads. We have five hundred million people in our nation. Even if half of us are killed, we still have two hundred and fifty million, and these two hundred and fifty million would produce another two hundred and fifty million in no time.