Frog

The remaining ox-ghosts and snake-demons were herded over to a large poplar tree, where they were guarded by a security team armed with rifles. The detainees sat on the ground, heads lowered, unmoving as clay statues. Huang Qiuya’s head was resting against a brick wall, half of it shaved to make her not only ugly, but terrifyingly so. I’d been told that during the early days of the movement, Gugu had been one of the founders of the Norman Bethune Combat Brigade in the local health system. Like a fanatic, she’d shown no kindness to the director who had once been her protector, and she had treated Huang Qiuya with unprecedented cruelty. I knew this had been a survival measure, like a night traveller whistling past a graveyard out of fear. The old director, a decent man who’d found the bullying and humiliation intolerable, had killed himself by jumping down a well. Huang Qiuya, on the other hand, had responded to the imprecations of her antagonist by producing evidence of Gugu’s concealed relationship with the turncoat Wang Xiaoti, revealing that she had often cried out his name in her sleep at night, and divulging that when she came off duty one night, she discovered that her colleague, Wan Xin, was not in the dormitory; she wondered where an unmarried young woman could be that late. As she was weighing the possibilities, she saw three red signal flares soar up out of a grove of willow trees on the bank of the Jiao River and heard the roar of an aeroplane engine high overhead. Not long after that, a figure slinked back into the dormitory, and she recognised who it was — Wan Xin. Huang said she reported the incident to the director, but the capitalist roader was in cahoots with Wan Xin and suppressed her report. There was no doubt, she said, that Wan Xin was a secret agent for the Kuomintang, and this incident was serious enough to cost her her life. But she wasn’t finished. She also said that Gugu had engaged in trysts with the capitalist roader Yang Lin in the county seat, resulting in a pregnancy that Huang herself had aborted. The masses were a repository of rich creativity, but also a repository of evil imagination. Huang Qiuya’s revelation of Gugu’s two major crimes easily satisfied the people’s emotional needs; Gugu’s refusal to admit to any of it and her steadfast defiance further guaranteed fireworks at every denouncement session, and constituted a monstrous episode in the history of Northeast Township.

I gazed down from my rooftop perch at Huang Qiuya’s weird half-bald head and my loathing was tempered by sympathy, confusion, fear and grief. I picked up a shard of tile and took aim at that head. I could have hit it with ease. But I hesitated, and in the end did not throw it. Years later I told Gugu what I’d thought of doing. I’m glad you didn’t, she said. That would have made things even worse for me. In her later years Gugu believed she’d been guilty of terrible, unforgiveable things. I thought she was being too hard on herself, convinced that she was no worse than anyone who lived during those times. You don’t understand… The note of sorrow in her voice was palpable.

Yang Lin was dragged up onto the stage. The man whose foot was on my aunt’s back moved away so they could pick her up and stand her next to Yang, where their heads were pushed down, they were forced to crouch, and their arms were yanked behind them, a contrived position to resemble the wings on Wang Xiaoti’s Jian-5 aircraft. I looked down at Yang Lin’s exposed scalp. Six months earlier, he had been the next thing to a god, someone who had reached unparalleled heights, and we had entertained hopes that he and Gugu might marry someday, even though he was more than twenty years older, and even though she would be a replacement for his recently deceased first wife. But he was the Party secretary, a high-ranking cadre with a monthly income of over a hundred yuan, a big shot who visited the villages in a green Jeep, accompanied by an assistant and bodyguards.

I only met him once, Gugu said years afterward. I found his big belly — easily the size of a pregnant woman in her eighth month — repulsive and was turned off by his foul garlic breath — he was as rustic as they come — but I’d have married him. For all of you, for the family, I’d have married him. The day after she met Yang in the county seat, she said, the commune Party secretary, Qin Shan, made an inspection tour of the health centre and, in the company of the director, came to the obstetrics ward, all smiles and honeyed words, a living, breathing slave. In the past, she said, Qin Shan had strutted around, high and mighty, but he had abruptly turned into the man she was looking at now, and she didn’t know what to make of that. I’d have married the man to spite all those petty people, if not for the Cultural Revolution.