Frog

Sensei, I could talk about my great-uncle for three days and nights and never exhaust the subject. We’ll continue this some other day, but I must tell you about how he died. Gugu said he was gassed while performing surgery in the underground hospital. That is how his death is listed in historical documents prepared by the county consultative congress, but a private source claimed that he rode his mule into Pingdu with eight hand grenades on his belt, determined to single-handedly rescue his wife, his daughter and his ageing mother, but unfortunately struck a land mine placed by the Zhao Family Trench militiamen. The source of this account was Xiao Shangchun (Upper Lip), a stretcher-bearer for the Xihai Hospital. A quirky individual, Xiao served as the commune granary watchman after 1949, where he invented a pesticide that was a potent rat poison, for which he was extolled in the local newspaper, which changed his name from the chun that meant ‘lip’ to the one that meant ‘purity’. Later it was discovered that the main ingredient of his rat poison was a banned highly toxic pesticide. He and Gugu were bitter enemies, which makes his account highly unreliable. He once said to me that my great-uncle disobeyed orders by neglecting his patients in favour of playing the hero, and that he’d fortified himself before setting out by drinking two jin of potato liquor, winding up so drunk that he stumbled on one of their own land mines. A gloating Xiao Shangchun flashed a yellow-toothed grin as he continued: Your great-uncle and the mule he was riding were blown to bits, both carried back to the hospital in boxes, bones and hooves all mixed up, and dumped into a coffin. Not a bad coffin, though, one confiscated from a wealthy family in Lan Village.

When I repeated his story to Gugu, her eyes grew wide and she gnashed her silver teeth. One of these days, she said, I’m going to cut that bastard’s balls off!

Boy, she said staunchly, you can forget about everything else, but the one thing you must believe is that your great-uncle was a hero of the resistance and a revolutionary martyr! His body rests in a mausoleum on Martyrs Hill, his scalpel and leather shoes are part of the display in Martyrs Hall. They are English shoes, bequeathed to him by Norman Bethune on his deathbed.

3

Sensei, I rushed through the story of my great-uncle so I could take my time telling Gugu’s story.

She was born on 13 June 1937, the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, which is Duanyang, the day of the Dragon Boat Festival. They called her Duanyang until she started school, and was then called Wan Xin (Heart). Great-Uncle named her, showing respect for local tradition while investing her name with a message. Not long after Great-Uncle’s death, his mother died of natural causes in Chengdu. Members of the Shandong military district launched a large-scale rescue mission to free Gugu and her mother from their captivity, and once they were in the liberated zone, Gugu was enrolled in the Resistance elementary school and her mother was sent to a factory to make soles for cloth shoes. After Liberation, the future for descendants of martyrs like Gugu could not have been brighter, but her mother hated the idea of leaving her hometown and Gugu hated the idea of leaving her. Officials at the county level asked her what she would like to do; when she said she’d like to carry on her father’s work, she was admitted to the prefectural medical school. She graduated at the age of sixteen and was assigned to the township health centre, where she undertook a training course for modern birthing methods organised by the county health bureau. Gugu forged an unbreakable bond with the sacred work of obstetrics. According to her calculations, from the fourth day of the fourth month of 1953, when she attended her first birth, till the spring of last year, she delivered around ten thousand babies, counting two as one when working with someone else. She told you this in person. I assumed she’d inflated the number somewhat, but there had to have been seven or eight thousand at least. She had seven interns, one of whom she called ‘Little Lion’, a young woman whose hair was never combed, who had a flat nose, a square mouth, and a face full of zits. She was so devoted to Gugu that if she’d been told to kill someone, she’d have picked up a knife and done it without asking why.