Li Cunxin - Mao's Last Dancer

"I was afraid his parents would ask us to pay for his medical bills."

She sighed. "What a silly boy you are! Yes, we are poor! But we can't lose our dignity over this, even if it means we have to borrow money from our relatives." But when my parents offered them our assistance, Yang Ping's family politely refused.

The only real pet I ever had was a bird which I caught myself during that first week of school. In the springtime of each year, groups of beautiful birds would arrive at the small stream south of our house. Sometimes my niang would do her washing there, and my friends and I would splash or skip stones over the surface of the water.

On this particular day, I'd taken an old pot with a lot of holes in the bottom and a piece of my kite string. I tied the string onto a wooden stick, placed the pot on the sandbank by the stream and supported it with the stick on a forty-five degree angle. I left a few dead worms under the pot and hid in a ditch about twenty yards away, holding the other end of the string.

Some birds flew near my pot a few minutes later. One hopped under and began to eat the worms. I pulled the string excitedly, trapping the bird inside. I could not believe how beautiful this bird was. I was convinced it was female because its feathers were too colourful for a male. I named her Beautiful River Treasure. My second brother Cunyuan made me a simple wire cage for her. I didn't want to leave my Beautiful River Treasure. I was obsessed with her. I collected worms for her on the way home from school. I showed her off to my friends. I even promised them a baby bird each, if I could catch a male bird and get her to mate. I thought she was the most beautiful bird in the world. One day she might teach me her language, I thought, or she might learn ours. I imagined her flying above me and landing on my shoulder whenever she wanted to, spotting food, just like the bird in my dia's story.

I told everyone that she was such a happy bird, because she chattered and sang all day and all night. She drove my whole family crazy though. "She isn't singing, she is crying, `Let me out, let me out!`" Cunfar said, acting as though he was the poor bird.

"Don't be silly, she loves me. I'm her saviour. Look at all the food she gets."

But in reality she ate very little. After school one day that week, I rushed home with some worms in my hands and found my Beautiful River Treasure dead in her cage. I sobbed my heart out. I blamed every member of my family for her death. I thought they'd killed her because of her singing. I had lost my first and only pet. My heart was broken. Deep inside I knew I was responsible for her death. Instead of helping her, I had taken her freedom away, and I hated myself for it.

I made a beautiful box as her coffin and took her back to the bank of the stream where I had caught her. I buried her under a large tree where there was good Feng Shui. I knelt in front of her little tomb and apologised for my stupidity and told her that she was the only pet I'd ever owned and loved. I never tried to catch another bird to keep as a pet again.

We spent our first two weeks of school in that stinking temporary classroom until a room became available at the proper school. This consisted of single-storey brick and stone classrooms joined to each other just like commune housing. I knew the local school well because sometimes I had secretly climbed over the walls and played there with some of my friends on Sundays.

But today was different. At eight that morning, the head of the school welcomed us and we were led by Teacher Song to our official classroom. It was a square room with two rice-papered windows on the outside wall, and a window and a door on the inside. There was slightly more natural light here than in the temporary classroom, and the ceiling was high and the air fresh. Pictures of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin were glued on the back wall. On the front wall were large pictures of Chairman Mao and Vice-Chairman Lin Biao, smiling warmly to us from above the blackboard. The blackboard was already filled with the words we were to learn that day. Under the blackboard was a foot-high concrete platform, and we had desks and small benches to sit on. This was luxurious compared to the temporary classroom!

My fourth and fifth brothers were also at the school and this gave me comfort. It was my fourth brother's sixth and final year before he moved to the middle school, and my fifth brother was in his third year.

After the first two weeks of school, I still had no idea what I'd learnt or why I should study. Listening to Teacher Song babbling on just made me sleepy, especially if we had afternoon classes, which went from two until six. The only thing that kept me awake was the thought of playing with my friends during those ten- minute breaks.

After our second class one day, we were told to go out onto the school-ground to have our first fifteen-minute physical education class, with all two hundred and fifty students. The sports teacher stood in front of everyone with a loudspeaker in hand and shouted out the eight exercise routines accompanied by recorded music. They were simple arm and leg stretching exercises which took no more than five minutes. The new students were placed in the last line and we simply followed the older students in front of us.

I found my fourth brother Cunsang as soon as we'd finished. "How is it going?" he asked.

"It's boring! I hate it!" I replied.

"Join the tribe. Why did you think I wanted you to make chaos when my teacher came to our house that time?" He was reminding me of the time we received the broomstick beating from our dia.

"How can you understand the writing? It all looks like grass to me," I said.

He burst into laughter. "That's what I thought the first few weeks. It will get better, I promise."

I didn't believe him. "What's the use of learning words anyway?" I asked.

"I don't know," he replied honestly.

I followed him to my fifth brother's classroom on the opposite side of the school-ground and found Cunfar in the middle of a pile of bodies, wrestling each other onto the ground.

"How was your first lesson, scholar?" he teased breathlessly, as he dusted off the dirt.

"All agony, no fun," I replied.

"The maths is even more fun!" Cunsang gave a wicked smile.

"Can't be worse than Chinese," I said.

"Just wait!" he replied, as the bell rang for the next class.

I had prepared myself for the worst in our maths class, but to my surprise the numbers were more bearable than the grass-like Chinese writing. But even so, numbers represented nothing to me and I still preferred to dream of running wild outside and playing games with my friends.

The journey to and from school was much more interesting than the study itself. Besides stopping at the sandy bank to wrestle and play horse fights, we occasionally detoured to a local butcher shop that only killed pigs. The heart-piercing screams of the pigs were horrible. We would watch as our own pigs, with their legs tied, were carried away to be killed for meat. The pigs always seemed to know what was about to happen to them: they would refuse to eat, even if given better food. I would hear their desperate screams and would press my hands hard against my ears and run away to hide rather than witness this unbearable scene. The thought of our own happy pigs being sliced up by the butcher always made my stomach churn.

I wasn't the best student in my year, but I did earn enough votes among my classmates to become one of the first Little Red Scarf Guards in our class. We wore a triangular red scarf around our necks, and for this honour we had to qualify in Mao's "Three Goods": good study, good work and good health.

I didn't learn much academic stuff at all during my time at school, except the many propaganda phrases and songs, and many of those I didn't even understand. I learnt how to write simplified versions of the Chinese characters and some basic maths equations but I really only lived for the two weekly sports classes. I was good at the sporting stuff. We had rope-hopping, and track-and- field which was mainly running, and by the second half of our second year Teacher Song had selected Yang Ping as the captain of our class and me as the vice-captain.