Anchee Min - Wild Ginger

"Chairman Mao teaches us"-the daughter interrupted the mother-"'It is impossible for one class member to love the member of his opposite class."'

"You were your father's everything!"

"I don't want to hear it."

"How can you have the heart to do this?"

"You are insulting me, Mother."

"For God's sake!"

"The hell with God the ghost-head!"

"You'll be punished for scorning the Lord."

"To be born of such parents is to be punished. I have been serving my sentence. I have been called a little spy in every school I attended, and I have been treated with distrust from both authorities and classmates. No matter how hard I've tried, no one has accepted me. Look!" She pulled up her sleeves and revealed bruises.

Suddenly I understood her habit of scratching. It was not a skin disease but the healing of her bruises that made her itch.

"Don't make me say words that will hurt you, Mother," Wild Ginger continued. "All I want in life is to be able to be accepted and trusted, to be a Maoist like everyone else in this country. This is not too much to ask, is it? Is it, Mother? But because of you and that Frenchman, I am doomed."

"Help me, God." Mrs. Pei buried her face in the pillow.

"Sure, help me, God, the devil is taking my child," Wild Ginger said hysterically. "Mother, don't force me to make a report on you. Outcast and rejected as I am, I will denounce you and move myself out of this stinky house!"

Mrs. Pei began to shiver under the sheets. After a few deep breaths she said, weeping, "Jean-Michel, take me, please. For I can bear no more…"

What the daughter expressed here didn't make sense to the mother, but it made perfect sense to me. To become a Maoist for our generation was like attaining the state of Nirvana for a Buddhist. We might not yet understand the literature of Maoism, but since kindergarten we were taught that the process, the conversion-to enslave our body and soul, to sacrifice what was requested in order to "get there"-was itself the meaning of our lives. The sacrifice meant learning not only to separate ourselves from, but to actually denounce, those we loved most when judgment called. We were also taught to manage the pain that came with such actions. It was called the "true tests." The notion was so powerful that youths throughout the nation became caught up in it. From 1965 to 1969 millions of young people stood out despite their pain and publicly denounced their family members, teachers, and mentors in order to show devotion toward Mao. They were honored.

I understood the importance of being a Maoist. I myself tried desperately to survive the "true tests." I must say that we were not blind in believing in Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Worshiping him as the savior of China was not crazy. The truth was that without him leading the Communist party and its armies, China would be a sliced melon, swallowed up long ago by foreign powers like Japan, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Russia. The information I brought back from school was confirmed by my father, who was a teacher of Chinese history. The Opium War in 1840 was a good example of how close China came to being destroyed. The incompetent emperor of the Ching dynasty was forced to sign "hundred-year leases" opening coastal provinces and ports for "free trading." This took place after the foreign soldiers burned down Yuan-ming-yuan-the emperor's magnificent palace in Beijing-and the Allied commander pleased himself with a Chinese prostitute on the empress's bed.

The Japanese invasion in 1937 was another good example of thé government's incompetence. It demonstrated what the foreigners were really up to when they talked of "free trading." China was not allowed to say no to their greed. When she did, the "rape" took place. During the Japanese occupation, thirty million Chinese were killed. Just in Nanking alone, the Japanese slaughtered as many as 350,000 people and raped eighty thousand women.

The pictures of heaps of severed heads we were shown as children could not have been more horrifying. In fact there was no need to show them. The memories were recent and fresh. Every family kept its own record of lives lost or damaged. It was Mao who showed China how to stand up to the invaders. It was Mao who saved us from being be headed, buried alive, bayoneted, raked with machine gun fire, doused with gasoline and burned. No one in China would argue that except my father, who whispered once in a while that the Japanese surrender in 1945 had a lot to do with their defeat in World War II. Besides Mao's effort, the Japanese were pressured to give up China by Stalin's Red Army in Russia. In other words, Mao happened to harvest other people's crops while working on his own. Unfortunately my father's view got him in big trouble. Nevertheless he didn't contradict the fact that Mao was the hero of China. It became natural for people to follow Mao. That was the point of all the education we received at school: to believe in Mao was to believe in China's future. They were the same.

For me it was understandable that Mrs. Pei disagreed with her daughter. Mrs. Pei had been mistreated for marrying a foreigner. But who could easily forget the image of the thousand-year-old imperial palace engulfed in flames? Who could escape the memories of fleeing one's home? Mrs. Pei's experience made her hate Mao. And that was exactly the opposite of where Wild Ginger stood. Wild Ginger couldn't make her mother understand how she felt.

Wild Ginger wanted to be a Maoist, a true Maoist, the one who would save China from disaster. It would be a different kind of Maoist than Hot Pepper's. In my opinion, Hot Pepper took advantage of Maoism and she had no understanding of what being a Maoist meant. Wild Ginger called Hot Pepper a "fake Maoist." I couldn't agree more. Hot Pepper was shouting slogans only to bully her way around, like a fake Buddhist who not only ate meat but also killed. Wild Ginger believed that one day Hot Pepper would be punished for what she had done to ruin Mao's name.

I sat on a little stool by the stove in Wild Ginger's dark kitchen. Wild Ginger was pouring bleach into a water jar.

"What did your father look like?" I asked.

"I'm thinking about burning his picture. You may take a look at it before I light the match."

Wild Ginger put down the bleach and went behind a cupboard. She reached inside a fuse box and searched. Out she came with a tiny mud-colored box. Dusting off the dirt she opened the lid. Inside was a handful of objects: colored soap wrappers, little glass balls, empty matchboxes, Mao buttons, and a palm-size framed photo of a young couple. The woman, although barely recognizable, was Mrs. Pei. Her slanting eyes were bright and filled with a butterfly smile. The man was handsome. A foreigner. He had curly, light-colored hair, a high nose, and deepset eyes.

"Are you shocked?" asked Wild Ginger.

I nodded and admitted that I had never seen a foreigner before.

"You don't think I look like him, do you?"

"Well, you have his nose."

"Why don't you say I have my mother's eyes? I mean they are almond shaped and slanting. They are one hundred percent Oriental."

"Well, that's true. Except the color of your pupils."

"Well, if there were eye dyes, I would dye them black."

"It doesn't bother me the way they are. I like them."

"Anyway, I consider myself lucky."

"Lucky?"

"My eyes are the only things that make me look Chinese. Imagine the other way around!"

"According to Hot Pepper everything that's non-Chinese is reactionary."

"Someday I will roast that bitch."

"Your mother is beautiful."

"She used to be."

"From the photo, she looked happy with your father."

"I suppose she was happy. It's a shame that she has never recovered from his death."

"Your mother is quite ill."

"She is dying. She wants to die. She has stopped going to the hospital. I am not important to her. She talks about disowning me."