by Ma Huai-rong (马怀荣
Preface
On a purple and dying evening in the autumn of 1976
Just on the day previous to the death of Mao Tse-tung
In a refugee camp of Tangshan quake survivors
In the close suburb of the resort city of Qingdao
A white-haired old man, wailing and weeping,
Was telling his own story:
Sixty years ago my family ruined in a quake
Except that I myself escaped
When I was a little boy around nine
And now my family ruined again in the quake
And only I myself survived, around sixty-nine
Old and ailing, like a candle butt
Guttering in a wild wind
Chapter one
That was at the end of the Great Cultural Revolution
A red and hot and blazing time
An era full of festival and of fiery and of fever
The louder speakers on the electric poles
Or the trees of different species and in varied areas
Pronounced at the same time and the same pitch
Through every city and every village
Across a territory of 9,600,000 square kilo meters
Conveying the voice and the instructions from Peking
The heart of the People’s Republic of China
Of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the greatest leader
And also the grandest king in China’s history
In the year of the earthquake
I was going up to twenty years old
With my comrades I was in a state of serfdom
Working and toiling and growing in the fields
For more than three years
Of a People’s Commune in Shandong Peninsular
It was a hard time for a young man with ambition
My dream of college had been shattered by the Revolution
On my way home after my graduation from middle school
I wept and sobbed and I cried
For books, for teachers and for further study
My tears did not move God if there would be one
Since I was a peasant boy bound to the earth
To work the earth out was surely my lot and duty
I had made up my mind to study by myself
I was good at mathematics and used to get full marks
So I went to buy a mathematics textbook
To my surprise, I could not make clear even the examples
I got to realize that I must try another way
Liberal arts are easy for self study
Why didn’t I take up the subjects in the curriculum?
So with the shabby money earned by the whole family
For eight months from wheat planting to wheat harvesting
I bought a radio and began my broadcasting English course
Study itself for me was indeed a pleasure
But I had to endure and suffer
At that time VOA was a confirmed enemy radio station
And to learn English somehow meant high treason
I was crazy for reading and learning
Everything from newspaper, pamphlets and the classics
Everything in printed form I came across
I was lucky to have a nice neighbor
That owned a small-sized family library
One of whose hostess was Mrs. Song
Once my primary school teacher
In the year when Tangshan earthquake came
I and my generation were called educated youth
Chairman Mao said: It was quite necessary
For you educated young men
To go to the rural areas in the countryside
And receive the reeducation
From the poor and lower middle peasants
I was among them and began to see
the life and the world with my own eyes
on the day when the quake came
I was in a sound sleep in small hours
In a little rural village thousands of miles
Beyond the centre of the quake
My family and the neighbors were awakened and shocked
We felt the horror aroused between the shakes
Men and women, old and young
Stirred from their sleeping, driven, scattered
(of course, those who met death in dreamland in Tangshan
Went on sleep peacefully forever without disturbance
And were fear and pain and daytime worries and troubles
And free from the endless meetings of political struggles)
Hurriedly fled outside of the flats and the houses
Shouting, crying, howling, weeping and chatting
I thought the war broke out with the Soviet Union
I was dreaming of an atomic bomb exploding at the yard
I was about to throw a grenade to the enemy
Suddenly somebody pushed me down to the abyss
I stood on one hand of the clock and it turned with my eyes
I grabbed with me something not my son but a pillow
I cursed my husband in dream, mistaken
Because he was so aggressive that he always troubled
And wakened me in my dreams…
It was about daybreak
When some lady found herself naked all of a sudden
She began shrilling and covered her breasts with both hands
And she got even more embarrassed that more covering was impossible
All the dwellers in the neighborhood at once realized
That they had been all naked and gone back to the primitive times
It was the worst natural disaster in the twentieth century
In the history of the People’s Republic of China
With 240000 deaths and 150000 injured
Tangshan, the northern industrial city was in a few minutes
Leveled completely to the ground
Oh, Tangshan, the poor capital of a mineral---coal
Had died and was to wait for a would-be reborn
Earth stumbled there
Time curved there
Space deformed there
And wonders and marvels were to mushroom there
Of life and death
Between ruin and resurrection
The quake stirred the residents and brought them together
In a distant seaside village across the Bohai Bay
Rains were pouring down night and day
We pitched up shacks and tents covering with plastic bags
For more than two weeks we missed the faces
Of the familiar sun and the moon
Terrors ran through from village to village
Rumors flew like bats from window to window
The goatherd reported with a terror
That his rams and ewes refused to mate
The half blind accountant of the people commune
Measured the depth of water in a well
And he chanced to get a hint from the Mother Earth
He predicted that such strangeness and misfortune
Occurred only when a dynasty was to go to its end
And the old monarch was about to take departure
Without any bulletin on wall
And he was taken away on the very day
A few days later he returned to the village
With lips broken and teeth missing
The village head was a good and honest man
Wearing his straw hat and a plastic bag as raincoat
Knocking from door to door conveyed the recent news:
A new quake is coming and is sure to come
Tonight, tonight and it was tonight
Just at midnight and around the courtyard
In my next door tent was a lady, Mrs. Song , lying awake
Whom I called sister-in-law after she married my street
I had very good senses and can perceive and discern
The faintest noise when a beetle rustled through the leaves
And I could guess right and picture
How she was turning left and right
Gently beside her two daughters
Her parents were snobs and she married fame and fortune
Her husband had an excellent mother
Mrs. Song was now worrying about her husband
Who quitted his class and took a train to Tianjin
From where to walk on foot to Tangshan to look for
If his elder sister Huaiyi was still alive
A cadre from Tangshan Agricultural Research Academy
And his mother Xu Wenxuan,
A retired middle school math teacher
Huaiyi, not for fashion, married late in her life
She had just given birth to a boy, her second child
And Xu Wenxuan waited on her during the first month
Mrs. Song expected her mother-in-law an early return
She would rather Xu Wenxuan care for her own daughters
Xu had got a letter from Song as an ultimatum
She dared not delay or make any postponement
Immediately she bought the ship ticket back to Longkou
And began planning her return trip
Out of gratitude
Huaiyi urged her mother to stay a few days
And she went to refund the ship ticket
Thing often happened by coincidence
With the ticket refunded, came along the earthquake
Beyond my tent and inside another mosquito net
I could hear her gentle sighs
If my arms were long enough
I could touch her finger tips and stroked her back
I had been familiar with the smell of her body
The fine odors of her tender skin were giving out
Through the peaceful wind and the quiet rain
Sniffing such familiar fragrance had been once my childhood joy
And it wavered my heart and stirred my imaginations
By and by, in the state of a trance
The school days in my boyhood loomed in my brains
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