Detaching - Chapter 5

As he starts to examine his life more carefully, he realizes that his selfhood did not really take shape until he was around eight years of age when he got himself almost drowned as a result of his curiosity, for all his memories of previous life experiences are either void or vague. It was a searing afternoon in the summer of 1966. As a foster child living with his step-grandpa’s poor and huge family in an isolated village called Lotus Flower, he was doing some gleaning for the family in a rice field with a neighbor boy named Six-Lives when he spotted a strange-looking farming tool across a deep pool.
           “Ha-ha, you dummy! Don’t you know that? It’s a machine, called fuel pump, used to water the paddy fields!” the proud elder boy apparently knew more about it. 
            “Fuel pump? Can we go take a close look?” proposed Ming. As this was the first machine he had ever seen in this world, he didn’t want to miss this opportunity to open his eyes.
            “Sure, we can take a short cut by swimming across the ditch.
            “But I don’t know how to swim!”
            “Easy-peasy!”
            “How’s that?”
            “Just like this…”
            No sooner had Six-Lives finished his sentence than he asked Ming to take off his shorts. Then, the elder boy put it together with his own on his forehead and transported both of them dry and clean by treading water to the other side of the pool, which was about five to six meters wide. When he came back, he grabbed Ming’s left hand and told him to make strokes with his right arm and keep kicking his two legs backwards the moment they stepped down into the water. 
            “Paddle hard just like a crazy duck, or a dog, remember!”                     
            But the instant his feet left the solid ground, Ming was falling down straight like a dumb rock. It was not long before he began to feel as if drifting around like a thick cloud in a blue space. Then, from somewhere above, he could clearly see how his own naked body was floating gracefully in the heart of a pool full of light-like water or water-like light. He kept telling himself to keep walking steadily in one direction until he could touch the ground. A few moments later, he caught something feeling like a solid tree root, and tried desperately to climb up by grasping the root tightly until he could get out of the water, but only to feel the root broken off before he lost his consciousness. Without knowing how long it had taken, he heard some faint human voices coming closer and louder, “Whose boy’s this? Isn’t he from the Lius living on the dike?”
          Later on, his step-uncles told him that he had been saved by an old woman with a clothing bamboo pole, which he had wrongly perceived as a tree root in the water. Probably resulting from this near-death experience, he has since dreamed of moon walking hundreds of times, and never liked to drink water, as it has a lingering taste of death for him, though he well remembers Confucius’s teaching that “The wise find pleasure in water; the virtuous do so among hills.”
          “So, I was fated to be more virtuous than wise,” Ming told himself afterwards. No matter what, he often wished he hadn’t been saved by anyone in the first place, since he was to strive hard all his life merely to prove that he was mediocre in every sense, talentless, unprivileged and invisible, like billions of other humans that have lived and died as pure food-processors or manure-makers on this planet. For a small potato like him, death might be worthier than an unworthy life. What he felt most strongly about in those miserable years was the total deprivation of love. While he saw his parents only a couple of times every year and thus felt little emotional attachment to either of them, his relatives either ignored him completely or disliked him much for being “a bit too lazy.”
          Worse still, when he moved to live with his mother’s elder sister’s family, he began to suffer from physical as well as emotional abuse. On the one hand, his aunt treated him like a true child slave, demanding him to do everything for the household every day, including gathering cooking wood, gleaning wheat or rice ears, cutting plants for the pig, cleaning the pig pen, collecting chicken manure, preparing meals, washing clothes, taking care of the vegetable garden, sweeping the whole house and, most hatefully, transporting water with two big wooden buckets on his shoulders from the river about half a mile away. One the other hand, she never rewarded him with a single smile as a detectable sign of appreciation, much less showed him any concern, even if it was only a fake or pretentious expression. No matter how hard he worked, she would always wear a long face, reproaching him with harsh words from time to time, and even refusing to leave enough food to him on the table. But each time his parent came to see him, his aunt would put up a nice and charming show, making his parent believe that he had been taken good care of all the time. Once he gathered enough courage to tell the truth to his mother, but seeing how his mother loved and was grateful to her sister, he held himself back, not wanting to cast a bone between the two sisters. On such occasions, he felt painfully sad and self-pitiful, thinking that his parents were not his bio-parents at all. 
          Back then, he certainly had no idea that he would have to spend his whole lifetime to heal all the wounds left by his unhappy childhood; nor was he aware of how all his basic personality traits were being formed in those decisive years, not to mention how those traits would in turn determine who he would be and what kind of life he was to live when he grew up. Even the concept about “child abuse” would remain unknown to him for several more decades. What he was sure about then was the way he saw himself, and was often seen by others, as an orphan of some kind, as evidenced by the fact that nobody within his extended family paid heed to him or bothered to look after him emotionally or physically. When his best friend’s mother once gave him some snacks and made a sympathetic comment, he felt so deeply touched as to burst into tears.
          He remembers that the only occasion that he did receive some serious attention was the Chinese New Year’s eve when he was in grade five. While all the adults in his step grandpa’s big family were busy preparing the grand reunion dinner on two door panels put together as a make-do table, he and his cousins could not wait to eat all kinds of meat dishes and fried snacks that had never appeared since exactly one year before. In a quiet corner, he was anticipating the call for the dinner when his father popped up with his school report in the hand.
          “On you kneels!” ordered his father sternly and loudly.
          So did Ming obediently, knowing that his father must have been more than disappointed with what was written on the report this time.
          “How dare you! You have only a passing grade for almost every subject. Listen up, here’s your teacher’s general evaluation: ‘This pupil tends to be an undisciplined trouble maker in the classroom.’ How dare you! You’ve really pissed me off!”
          Before finishing what he had to say, his enraged father began to slap his face forcefully, pinched his ears hard, punched and kicked him until he was too tired to continue.
          “Don’t move! Just think about your school performance!” His father yelled at him, then turned around and left the room. 
          “A living Buddha outside, but a true tyrant at home!” protested Ming in his mind. As a semi-abandoned child, he never really liked his father; rather, he always looked down upon him, because he had found his old man too nice to others, too weak inside, and too ordinary in every way. Usually, he could see him only once a year, but every time he was alone with his father, he had to endure his short temper and physical abuse. This time, he had been beaten black and blue that he decided to flee from home. So, the moment his father left his aunt’s house for his step-grandpa’s, he jumped up and made a dash for the wildness beyond the crop fields in front of the houses. About five minutes later, he was slowing down to catch his breath when he heard one of his step uncles shouting aloud not far behind him, “Stop! Stop running! Come back!”
          But he would not stop; instead, he sped up again to avoid being caught up with by his uncles. Realizing that his second-hand coat, which had become whitish after too much washing, might betray him as a clearly visible target at twilight, he took it off while running without stop. A few more minutes later, he managed to shake off all his pursuers. Since his relatives knew who his best friend was and where his house was located, he asked Zhuying to relocate him in a neighbor boy’s home. When Ming heard his uncles coming to check with Zhuying about his whereabouts, he was playing cards smugly with his pals just a house away in the back. However, he was eventually outwitted by his uncles, who returned at midnight to catch him in Zhuying’s house, where he felt safe enough to have returned after they had left earlier.  
          “We had a talk with your dad before coming here again. He agreed not to beat you any more as long as you follow us home!” said one of his uncles, smiling half good-naturedly and half slyly. “That won’t happen, mark my words!” said the other.
          Taking their reassurances for granted, Ming returned home and had an undisturbed dream, in which he found the dinner dishes in Zhuying’s home much fewer but way more tempting than what he had seen in his own home.
          “How dare you! Where did you learn to shake off your uncles? Like an evil special agent! Just where?” asked his father at the top of his voice, waking him up by pinching his ear early next morning.
          Ming was angry because neither his father nor his uncles had kept their promises, yet he could do nothing about it except feeling all the more sad for himself. 
 
 
Every summer, his eyes would ache so persistently that he couldn’t open them for a whole week. While he was still too young to know this was a bad infection resulting from eating too much zhahujiao, the only dish for the poor to go along with meals every day, which was just rice flour fried repeatedly with salted hot pepper, no one in his big family ever thought of taking him to a local clinic, not even to the herbal doctor in the village. During this difficult period, he had to live like a real blind person, depending on other family members for necessary daily movements. Inevitably, this made them dislike him all the more; to avoid bothering others like a big nuisance and spare himself their contempt and impatience, he had to cope with the situation on his own. In so doing, he gradually learned to enjoy his temporary blindness, for he did not have to do so much housework as usual; instead, he could lie down comfortably at home most of the time, indulging in as much daydreaming for as long as he liked without exposing himself to the hell-like sweltering heat outdoors. As he constantly imagined leaving the country and becoming a city dweller one day in the future, he developed a strong fear about the permanent loss of his vision. “Am I going to become really blind?” he asked himself again and again. “When will that happen?”
          If eye infection was the most unforgettable summer experience, gathering cooking wood was the hardest thing to do throughout winter every year. Though it seldom snowed, the clothes he wore, which were all made of leftovers from elders, could never really keep him warm. Every day, after school, he was sent out with a big bamboo basket on his shoulder to gather enough wood-like stuffs from wherever he could to fill it up before returning home for supper.
          One late afternoon, it was so windy he felt as if a thousand needles were darting through his clothing besides a big piece of metal cold-ironing his face. He combed the riverside with his frostbitten fingers, picking up every blade of withered grass or reed leaf. When he got a cut and began to bleed, he thought of going home right away, but his grandma’s harsh remarks kept ringing in his ears, “You two left feet! Each time you do a bit work for the household, you must get yourself hurt somehow!” Not wanting to see her sullen face, he went on with wood-gathering as soon as the bleeding stopped in the freezing weather. When he finally got ready to return home, he suddenly felt a wave of self-pity surging in his heart, so much so he dropped to his knees and started to cry in agony. He missed his mother, the only person supposed to love him in this world, but soon he became even more self-pitiful at the idea that she probably loved her relatives more than her own son. Her assumption that her son had been taken good care of by her mother and sister was so strong she never bothered to ask how he had actually been doing there.
          Despite his miserable experience at home, Ming had some fun in school. As “the Great Cultural Revolution” initiated by the great communist leader Chairman Mao gained more momentum nationwide, many new things cropped up in the village. For example, like the Red Guards in every town and city in the country, students in the village school also began to write “big posters” with brush pens as part of the movement called “big mass criticism.” One day, to go along with the revolutionary trend, Mr. Zhou, the best and oldest Chinese teacher the village had ever had, required his class to write a take-home composition to criticize the local anti-revolutionary elements. Returning to the classroom the following week, Teacher Zhou sample-read several well written compositions in high spirits and lavished praise on their authors. Then he selected a paragraph from the most poorly written one and read it in a high-pitched voice: “Every anti-revolutionary in our village is like a thin but stinking pile of cow pats…”
          Hardly had the teacher finished reading this smelly sentence than the whole class rocked with laughter. Looking close down at the first row and found Ming chuckling louder and longer than everyone else, Mr. Zhou couldn’t help shivering with anger. Pointing his long dead-twig-like forefinger straight toward Ming, the teacher yelled at him, “You should be the last one to laugh!”
          “Why me, Sir?”
          “Because you are the one who makes this most vulgar analogy in this lousiest composition!” 
          After the class was dismissed, Mr. Zhou said to Ming in front of a group of other students, “I taught your mother when she was your age, but she was far smarter, and better at writing!”
          “Yay!” Ming shouted, feeling proud of his mother, rather than ashamed of himself as the teacher had expected.
 
Possibly because he showed himself to be a quite silly but good-natured boy, Ming often received more attention from teachers than he should otherwise have deserved. By the time the first term ended, he was chosen by the music teacher to play the part of Commander Hu, the harlequin in the nationally famous Peking opera adapted from the revolutionary novel Shajia Bang by Comrade Jiang Qing [China’s first lady then]. Ming never knew the true reason why he was chosen among so many village boys of his age and physique. “Perhaps because I have a lower voice,” he assumed. 
          No matter what, Ming played this dramatic role so impressively well during the revolutionary performing tours he became a local celebrity as a seventh grader. Wherever he showed up, he would be greeted with a smiling face, “Where’re your troops hidden, Commander Hu?” Even in neighboring villages, people could readily recognize him as the funny antagonist in the play, and some would go out of their way to offer him cigarettes and ask him to smoke exactly as he did on the stage. One afternoon, a girl classmate gave a long admiring letter to one of his younger cousins after school and asked him to pass it on to Ming, but when he learned it was not from someone he really liked, he handed it over to the head teacher the next morning without opening it beforehand.
          A couple of months later, he had his first experience of spermatorrhea. Ignorant as he was, he thought that he had wetted his bed unexpectedly. Feeling so ashamed of himself, he kept the incident as a dark secret throughout junior high school. Since no one taught him anything about puberty, he remained as sexually innocent as ever, though he did begin to enjoy looking at pretty girls. It was then that someone grew on him. Her name was Zhou yeqiong, a classmate whose family lived in the same part of the village. Slim, fair-skinned, with a conspicuous tear birthmark, about half a head taller than himself, Zhou had good looks as well as a quiet character. He remembered nothing about how it all had started and ended, but whenever he felt the need for intimacy, he would sing a particular line from the Peking opera repeatedly in a loud voice to signal his request “Be there or be square.” According to their pre-arrangement, Zhou would go and wait on the river bank until Ming joined her for the twilight tryst. Then he would snuggle in her arms for as long as they both liked. Each time they stayed together like this, neither would say a single word, nor would they do anything more than hold each other tightly. The most memorable act they did perform together was to watch stars appearing in the sky as it was getting darker minute by minute. When there were thick clouds hanging above their heads, they would just listen to the reeds swinging against the wind, like a horde of angels trying to protect their peace and privacy. A couple of years older than him, the girl might well have had some sexual whims, but she never yielded to them if any at all, while it never crossed his mind to touch her face or any other parts of her body with his hands, let alone trying to kiss her on the lips or make love with her in wildness. Just as his young body is not ready for sex yet, his heart still remained as innocent as a child. What he yearned for most was some tangible tenderness from a female he really liked, something which he found not only physically attractive, but psychologically soul-soothing.