Frog

Sweet potatoes are wonderful, truly wonderful. It was not only a bumper crop in terms of quantity, but the potatoes were rich in starches, they cooked up with a perfect texture, and they tasted a bit like chestnuts, delicious with high nutritional value. Sweet potatoes were piled in every family’s yard, wire was strung along every wall to hang slices of drying sweet potatoes. We had enough to eat, finally enough to eat. No more days of eating grass or the bark of trees; the days when people starved to death were gone, never to return. Before long our legs stopped suffering from oedema; the skin around our middle thickened, and our bellies flattened out. A layer of fat began forming under our skin, light returned to our eyes, and our legs no longer ached when we walked; we started to grow, to really grow. At the same time, women’s breasts swelled and their periods returned to normal. Men’s torsos straightened, whiskers reappeared above their lips, their sex drive was reawakened. After two months of eating their fill of sweet potatoes, all the young women in the village were pregnant it seemed. In the early winter of 1963, Northeast Gaomi Township experienced the first baby boom in the history of the People’s Republic. Two thousand eight hundred sixty-eight babies were born that year in the fifty-two villages incorporated in our commune alone. According to Gugu, this crop of babies was known as the ‘sweet potato kids’.

The health centre director had a good heart. He came to see Gugu after she returned home to recuperate from her failed suicide attempt. As the nephew of my maternal grandmother on her husband’s side, he was a shirt-tail relative, what we call ‘melon-vine kin’. He criticised Gugu for being foolish and hoped she could lay down her ideological baggage and return to work. The Party and the people are blessed with bright-seeing eyes, he told her. Under no circumstance would they treat a good person unjustly or make allowances for a bad one. He urged her to trust the organisation and prove her unsullied record through positive actions in order to be reinstated into the Party as quickly as possible. You’re different from Huang Qiuya, he said privately. Her character is essentially bad, while your roots are red and your limbs are straight. Though you have made missteps, if you work hard you can have a bright future.

The director’s words made Gugu cry bitterly once more.

His words made me cry bitterly as well.

Gugu regained her footing in a pool of blood and threw herself into her work as if on fire. At the time, even though every village was equipped with trained midwives, many women chose to have their babies in a health centre. Gugu put aside her resentment and worked closely with Huang Qiuya, in the capacity of both a doctor and a nurse. She might not shut her eyes once for days at a time, caught up in the business of pulling birthing mothers back from the gates of Hell. Over a period of five months, they delivered eight hundred and eighty babies, eighteen by caesarian section, at a time when the procedure was extremely complicated, and the fact that a small commune health centre obstetrics ward dared to even attempt it caused a sensation. Even someone as ambitious and proud as Gugu had to admire Huang Qiuya’s surgical skill. She was in debt to that one-time enemy for her fame in Northeast Gaomi Township as an obstetrician with both local and foreign skills.

Huang Qiuya was what was known as an old maid. She’d likely never tasted romance, which might explain why she had such an odd disposition. In her later years, Gugu often spoke to us of her old adversary. For the daughter of a Shanghai capitalist and the graduate of a top university to be sent down to Northeast Gaomi Township to work was a case of ‘a fallen phoenix is not the equal of a common chicken’. And who was the chicken? In a tone of self-ridicule, Gugu answered her own question. That would be me. A chicken that pecked at a phoenix. A chicken that beat a phoenix into submission. She shuddered when she saw me, Gugu said emotionally, like a lizard that’s swallowed a hunk of tar. Everyone was crazy in those days. It was a nightmare. Huang Qiuya was a magnificent obstetrician. She could be beaten bloody in the morning and show up in surgery in the afternoon, so focused and composed that not even an opera being performed right outside the window would have had an effect on her. What a pair of hands she had! Gugu said. With them she could create a flower on a pregnant woman’s abdomen… Gugu always enjoyed a hearty laugh at this point; she’d laugh till tears spilled from her eyes.

13

Gugu’s marital situation had become a family obsession. The grown-ups weren’t the only ones who worried about her; even teenagers like me were deeply concerned. But we didn’t dare broach the subject with Gugu since that made her unhappy.