her to the Gods’ attention, I felt — if there even were Gods. At that time we were taught that there were not. In fact at certain times it was dangerous to even say such things aloud, but we were in a warehouse at that moment, out in the countryside. No one was near. So I let her talk.
After the famine passed her health declined. She had grown very thin, like all of us, but when we rebounded, she did not. It was another five years or so until she went away. In those last years she was small, sharp-edged, but still clear. Mother dressed her bound feet every day, and her long linen dressings hung in looped rows at the end of her bed, their peculiar fragrance dusting the air around them even when they’d just been washed. She did not so much walk as plant one foot in front of the other, and when she went outdoors she usually had one of us at each elbow. In her walk there was a delicate pathos, graceful even in her advanced age. I can say that now. Back then, when I was young and saw her as a feudal old lady with little more left in her than a whiff of dry breath, she infuriated me. She was the past. She was everything we hated. I thanked the heavens I was born in my own time, so I could serve my country in free, natural health.
Up to the end, though, once or twice a week, she cooked. She made the dishes she loved from her childhood, fried tomatoes and tofu, hot and sour cabbage, soup noodles with pickles. Once she made a rich soup of tilapia with matchsticks of daikon. To buy a live tilapia at that time was sufficiently extravagant to attract attention. Once was all right; it could be explained as a family celebration. But she could not cook it again.
My mother sat down with Nainai and explained why. “The idea now is that everybody eats simply. You know, cu cha dan fan.” Crude tea and bland rice. “We should eat only the most basic foods. To cook anything else is not wise, even if we had the money, which we do not.” She was gentle and clear. Nainai may have nodded submissively, but she was already deciding not to listen. She may not have called for tilapia again, but within her constraints she cooked what she wanted.
In August of that year the railways and hostels were thrown open to youth, free of charge. We could ride anywhere we wanted in China, mix with laobaixing, or old hundred names — the masses. Our job was to talk with people and in this way advance revolution.
I had to go. I was compelled by my age, by the times, by the depth of my beliefs. People don’t like to say it now, but those times, though they were bad, also had some good. We were living for something. Between people there was a kind of ren qing, human kindness, which I don’t feel anymore.
It was a flame I was, at that age, unable to resist. My little bag was packed in minutes. My mother begged me not to leave. She said it was dangerous. She wrapped her arms around me as if she could keep me. I lifted her hands off. “Do you think this is something for me and my friends? We are supposed to exchange revolutionary ideas. Besides, I am seventeen. I’m a grown woman.”
I could see how this drained both my mother’s and my father’s faces. They were children of the modern era; they had gone against their own parents, insisting, for example, on choosing their own marriage partners and careers. Of this they’d always been proud. That it was my turn made them less happy. They were silent.
Nainai did not say anything either. Most likely she did not hear anything. She was cooking with her back to us. A friend of hers had visited her earlier with some foodstuffs from the south, and with this she was preparing a meal. I shouldered my little pack and went to say goodbye to her. Despite how old she was I never thought this was the last time I’d see her.
“Deng yixia,” she said when she saw I was leaving, Wait a moment. “Let Nainai prepare you a box to take.” Before I could even answer she had taken a tin box and begun to arrange food in it.
“I