Anchee Min - Pearl of China

Vanguard pretended that he did not know me. He spoke Mandarin with a heavy Chin-kiang accent, and he was proud of being an illiterate. Since becoming the party boss, he had banned the worship of God and made it a crime to mention the names of Absalom, Carie, and Pearl.

When Vanguard learned that Pearl had won the Nobel Prize, he saw an opportunity to advance his political career. He invited Mao’s favorite journalists to Chin-kiang to tour the hometown of the notorious American cultural imperialist. The event caught Madame Mao’s attention. Vanguard was summoned to the Forbidden City to be honored as “Chairman Mao’s great foot soldier.” Madame Mao awarded Vanguard with a work of her calligraphy that read, “The hope of launching a cultural atomic bomb on the world’s Capitalism rests on your shoulders.”

Vanguard called me “the evil twin sister of Pearl Buck” and “Chin-kiang’s shame.” He encouraged children to call me scum. He ordered me to clean out the town’s sewage drains and public restrooms daily. Every Friday afternoon I reported to Vanguard to confess my crimes. Depending on my response, Vanguard would either pass or fail me. If he was displeased, he would add more to my workload. He might order me to clean his office, which was the former British Embassy. If he felt I needed further humiliation, he would order me to walk through the town banging a chime with a stick. I was instructed to shout, “Come and see the American running dog!”; “Down with Willow Yee!”; and “Long live the proletarian dictatorship!” Vanguard hated it when I protested by staring at him in silence.

“I can have you tortured, you know,” he threatened constantly.

Vanguard expected me to tell him the details of my relationship with Pearl Buck.

“I want you to trace back all the way to your childhood,” he ordered.

Papa taught me to forget about preserving my dignity. “Speak the wolf’s language!” If he were me, Papa said, he would toy with Vanguard.

I tried, but it didn’t work. Vanguard was determined to please Madame Mao. He didn’t buy my abstractions and empty words. “How dare you try to fool the Communist Party!” he yelled at me.

To pressure me further, Vanguard organized rallies. They took place in the town’s square. The crowd repeated after Vanguard as he shouted, “Confess or be tortured to death!”

While Vanguard pulled my hair back to show the public my “evil features,” I imagined the opera The Butterfly Lovers. I remembered every detail of Pearl and me going to see the performance together with NaiNai. When Vanguard used a whip to beat me, I saw the birds, bees, and dragonflies flying into Absalom’s church. When the blood came and pain burned inside my body, I heard Carie singing her favorite Christmas song, “What Child Is This?”

In my dreams, I visited Pearl in her American home. The furniture I imagined for Pearl was made of red sandalwood in the style of the Chinese Ming dynasty. I saw the pictures on her walls, beautiful Chinese brush paintings and ink calligraphy. Also, I dreamed of Pearl sculpting. It was something she had said that she would love to learn. We used to watch Chin-kiang’s craftsmen making cookie figures out of sugared flour. For three pennies, we bought our favorite colored animals and opera figures. At our playground behind the hills, Pearl once sculpted a mud head using me as a model, and I did one of her. To emphasize our individual characteristics, I made her nose high and she slanted my eyes. Both faces were smiling because we couldn’t help laughing while making them.

I dreamed of Pearl’s play stove, a real one built by Carie’s gardener. It was located behind the hillside. It was there that we cooked real food. Wang Ah-ma taught us to bake yams and roast soybeans and peanuts. I could still hear the sound of Pearl and me chewing beans as if our teeth were made of steel.

Since moving back to Chin-kiang, I had been praying with Papa. Vanguard had no power over my spiritual being. My resistance against the Communists grew stronger. I decided to try to bore the crowd with my confessions, filling and padding them out with Mao quotations, slogans, and self-name-calling. My typical first sentence would be “I was a cat that lost her way before I was guided back home by Chairman Mao’s teaching.” My second sentence would be “Although I have never read a word of The Good Earth, my desire to read the book is absolutely reactionary and criminal.”

After Vanguard’s lectures and criticisms, it was my task to lead the crowd in shouting, “Burn, fire, fry, and roast Willow if she doesn’t surrender!” To amuse myself, I created variations. “Down with Willow Yee” became “Down with the American running dog Willow Yee!” and then “Down with the big liar, big traitor, big bourgeoisie, big snake, and big rotten, assless, slummy, and poisonous spider Willow Yee!” I began to play with the crowd’s breath. I dragged the sentences out as long as I could. I invented slogans to shout as breathing exercises. My favorite only a few could follow: “Long live our great leader, great teacher, great helmsman, great leader Chairman Mao’s great, glorious, and forever correct revolutionary line!”

In the winter, Vanguard conducted a political rally in the former British Embassy’s ballroom. The crowd was ordered to sit on the floor for hours on end. As I confessed, men smoked cigarettes and played cards, while women sewed their clothes and knitted. Old people napped and babies screamed. Vanguard insisted that my confessions were not heartfelt. He concluded that I purposely resisted reform and ought to be further punished.

I was put to work as the town’s slave.

To those who were sympathetic toward me, Vanguard warned, “The word mercy doesn’t exist in our proletarian dictionary!”

When Vanguard decided to lead Chin-kiang to “enter Communism overnight,” he eliminated the use of chamber pots. Everyone was to use the public restrooms, but because restrooms didn’t belong to anyone, no one cleaned them. They became a breeding ground for maggots, flies, and mosquitoes. It became my responsibility to clean them.

I labored day and night. Rouge helped when she could. Her old job as a textile worker had been given to a relative of her boss, and now she worked as a concrete mixer for a construction company. Close to the Chinese New Year in 1970, Rouge was ordered to work both the night and day shifts. I made my rounds of the public restrooms alone. As my tired hands scrubbed the walls of the feces-filled pits, I felt helpless and exhausted. I asked myself, “What is the point of going on?”

I had to restrain myself from crying or I would wake everyone. Papa was asleep. Rouge was working. The shadow of Dick’s secretary-nurse would not leave me alone. I had finally learned her name, Daisy. My mind’s eye saw that she had a full-moon face, big eyes, and a cheery mouth. She and Dick were embracing in the bed that used to be mine.

“Papa,” I called.

No answer.

I got up, climbed down, and landed on the floor. Papa was not in his sleeping box.

I went searching for him. I checked the washing area and the dining area. Passing the stacked firewood and coal buckets, I arrived in the kitchen. I heard a noise over my head. It came from the storage area behind the kitchen. Standing still, I listened carefully. It was the sound of a radio-someone was tuning through the channels.

Like an old monkey, I climbed the rope ladder. My legs were shaking and I was out of breath. I lost my balance and my shoulder hit the storage door.

The radio stopped.

After a long moment of silence, the door opened.

Holding a candle, Bumpkin Emperor stuck his head out. “What are you doing here?”

“I am looking for Papa.”

“He is not here.”