Anchee Min - Wild Ginger

"You can count on that… How is your father?"

"He is out of the hospital."

"What did he have?"

"Tuberculosis. He worked as a miner for twenty-eight years."

"Is he getting well?"

"The doctor told him to eat whatever he likes."

"What does that mean?"

"He is not expected to live long."

"I'm sorry to hear that. If there is anything I can do to help, please… I can always fetch you the bean milk, for example." Wild Ginger and Evergreen were staring at each other. "Oh, let me introduce you two. This is Wild Ginger, my classmate, my best friend. Evergreen, my neighbor."

"Wild Ginger? That's an unusual name."

"Not as unusual as Evergreen, the Communist party secretary in Madame Mao's famous opera."

"Are you an opera fan?"

Wild Ginger didn't seem to want to answer the question.

"Her mother is," I answered for her. "Her mother is an opera singer."

"My mother is an enemy," Wild Ginger said bluntly.

I turned to her. "What are you doing?"

"Telling facts. So Evergreen doesn't confuse me with who I really am."

"But isn't this a terrible way to introduce oneself?"

"I thought we came to ask for help. Should we tell the truth?" Wild Ginger shot back.

"No, we don't need help." For a strange reason I suddenly changed my mind. I wasn't sure what it was. Something stirred me and my pride rose. It forbade me to be pitied.

"What kind of help, Maple?" Evergreen asked.

"Nothing. Actually, I'm just showing Wild Ginger around. What's new with you, Evergreen?"

Wild Ginger was puzzled. But she followed me.

Pulling the poster to the side Evergreen answered, "I have been preparing for the coming Mao Quotation-Citing Contest. I am trying to recite three hundred pages. I want to upset my own record."

"Ambitious!"

"I suppose that's what devotion and loyalty are all about."

"Can anyone participate?" Wild Ginger asked.

"It's an open contest."

"Wild Ginger has been calling you outside the window," Mother said. It was Sunday morning. I was chopping wood and my mother was cooking. "She sounds troubled. Where are you going? Maple, take the garbage with you."

I shot downstairs. Wild Ginger came to me with a tear-stained face. "My mother…" she choked.

It was an ongoing rally. Mrs. Pei was the subject of the denunciation. A board hung on her chest reading FRENCH SPY. A middle-aged man wearing dark-framed glasses was reading a criticism aloud. He was clotheshanger thin. His features were donkeylike. His mouth was a child's drawing of a boat sailing above his chin. He shouted, "Down with the French spy and long live Chairman Mao!"

"It'll be over soon." Standing behind the crowd I comforted Wild Ginger.

"Friendly is being cooked in a wok," she said to me without turning her head.

"Now?" I was shocked.

"They took him this morning…"

I held out my arms to embrace her.

"Don't touch me!" She pushed me away. "People will see.

"It looks like your mother is fainting," I observed.

"That's what that man wanted. He wants to see her suffer."

"Who is he?"

"Mr. Choo. My mother's ex-admirer. He is an accountant at the fish market. He lost her to my father sixteen years ago."

"How do you know?"

"I read his love letters to Mother. I read all my mother's letters, including my father's. Of course I couldn't understand them. They were in French."

"Where are the letters?"

"Gone."

"You've burned them?"

"They were disgusting."

"Does your mother know?"

Shaking her head, Wild Ginger sat down on the ground. On the makeshift stage Mrs. Pei looked as if she had passed out. She leaned over a chair. Her body was motionless. The organizer pronounced that she was "faking death," and ordered the rally to continue.

Mr. Choo picked up his speech.

The crowd watched.

Wild Ginger closed her eyes and buried her face in her palms.

The sun was getting hotter. My head was steaming.

"Let's go," I said to Wild Ginger.

"I wish she were dead. I wish I were dead," Wild Ginger murmured.

As a form of punishment, Mrs. Pei was ordered to sweep the lanes in the neighborhood. For the first few weeks Mrs. Pei dragged her sick body about and did the work. She got up at four o'clock in the morning and swept until the sun rose. When she was too sick to get out of bed, Wild Ginger took over.

I didn't know that until early one morning when a cat's wail woke me and I opened the window and heard a sha-sha-sha-sha sweeping sound. It was still dark. The streetlights colored the tree trunks orange. The whistle of a steam engine came from a distance. The wind tore the old posters off the wall. Papers scratched the cement ground. The sound carried for a great distance, like nobody's shoes walking by themselves. Suddenly I saw a familiar figure moving with a broom.

I don't remember how long I stood by the window. My body hung halfway over the sill. The day was slowly dawning. I heard the steps of the soldiers of the Shanghai Garrison Group jogging. Their barracks were about a mile down the street. The sound was crisp, like hard brushes scrubbing woks.

I didn't realize that Mother had been standing behind me until she softly asked me what got me up so early.

"Wild Ginger is sweeping the lane for her mother."

Mother came behind me and looked. She sighed deeply.

I closed the window and went to put on my clothes and shoes.

"Where are you going?" Mother asked.

"Mama, may I take the broom with me?"

"It is the work for… enemies," Mother warned. "Don't get yourself in trouble."

She was wearing a cloth surgical mask and her mother's indigo canvas jacket with worn corners. She had two sleeve cases on each arm and was in her own army boots. I approached her quietly. She collected the garbage, swept it into a bag, and then carried it to a bin. Lifting the lid, she deposited the trash. She then laid her broom on the ground and went to an old well and looked in.

"Wild Ginger," I called.

She turned around. Her eyes asked, What are you doing here? When she saw that I was holding a broom she understood. She took her mask off. "This is none of your business, Maple."

"You won't be able to cover the lanes all by yourself before school."

"Go home, please."

"What are you doing sticking your head in the well?"

"I'm trying to fetch a dead cat."

"Dead what?"

"Cat, a cat."

"It drowned?"

"It's some activist's trick to give my mother a hard time. They want to be able to say that she loafed on the job, on the cleaning, so they can torture her more."

"What if you just leave it there?"

"It will rot and smell."

"It's not your fault."

"Like I said, my mother is in no position to defend herself."

With two brooms working like a pair of giant chopsticks, we got the dead cat out of the well. After we deposited it in the garbage bin Wild Ginger went on to finish sweeping the rest of the lane. I went to the other end. I swept quickly. All my joints participated in a race against the breaking daylight. Soon my arms were sore and blisters were forming on my palms. My shoes were wet from dew. Finally, Wild Ginger and I met in the middle. It was six-thirty. The sun was up.

"See you at school," I said.

She nodded and turned her face away.

Each dawn I came out. We met in the darkest moment of the day. Wild Ginger no longer rejected my help. In school we stuck together like one person and her shadow. In Hot Pepper's eyes, we had become a two-member gang. She had stopped attacking me and Wild Ginger. It was hard to believe that Hot Pepper didn't call her wolfy brothers. I guessed that, after all, her brothers couldn't come to the school to fight every day. Hot Pepper had learned that Wild Ginger was a desperado who would risk her life to win a moment.