Daughter of the River is a memoir of China unlike any other. Born during the Great Famine of the early 1960s and raised in the slums of Chongqing, Hong Ying was constantly aware of hunger and the sacrifices required to survive. As she neared her eighteenth birthday, she became determined to unravel the secrets that left her an outsider in her own family. At the same time, a history teacher at her school began to awaken her sense of justice and her emerging womanhood. Hong Ying's wrenching coming-of-age would teach her the price of taking a stand and show her the toll of totalitarianism, poverty, and estrangement on her family. With raw intensity and fearless honesty, Daughter of the River follows China's trajectory through one woman's life, from the Great Famine through the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square.

Daughter of the River

An AutobiographyBy Hong Ying

Grove Press

Copyright © 2000 Hong Ying
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780802136602

Chapter One

1

I never bring up the subject of my birthday, not with myfamily and not with my closest friends. At first an intentionalomission, eventually I truly forgot. No one remembered mybirthday for my first eighteen years, and after that I simplyavoided the issue. No mistake about it, it all happened in myeighteenth year.

The potholed street outside the school gate sloped to one side.As I crossed the street a shiver ran down my spine; someonewas staring at me again, I could feel it.

    Not daring to turn around, I glanced to the left and right,but saw nothing out of the ordinary. I forced myself to keepwalking until I was standing next to an old lady who sold icelollies, then took a quick look behind me, just as a Liberation-modeltruck whizzed past, splattering mud in its wake. Acouple of youngsters buying ice lollies stamped their feet andhurled curses at the speeding truck for muddying their shortsand bare legs. The old lady dragged her box of ice lollies overto the base of the wall. Who the hell drives like that? shegrumbled. Scurvy people like you would be turned away bythe Four-Mile Crematorium.

    Once the disturbance was past, quiet returned, and I stoodin the middle of the muddy, rutted street wondering if I wasimagining things because I'd talked so much today.

    At some point as I was growing up, these shivers became aregular occurrence in my life, always caused by a pair ofstaring eyes. More than once I nearly spotted whoever wasbehind those eyes, but only for a fleeting moment. The manwith nondescript features and messy hair never came closeenough for me to get a good look at him, which was probablyhow he planned it. He only appeared near the schoolyardbefore and after school, and never actually followed me, as ifhe knew where I'd be from one minute to the next. All he hadto do was wait.

    We heard all sorts of frightening rumours about rapes, but Iwas never afraid that was what the man had in mind.

    I never told my father or mother. What was there to tell?They might think I'd done something shameful and give mehell. So I kept this a secret for years, until eventually my fearsvanished and there was no more mystery. Perhaps being staredat is a normal part of life that everyone experiences at sometime or other, and shouldn't be seen as frightening orloathsome. It would be difficult to get through life withoutever suffering irksome looks, and I could easily have pretendedI wasn't bothered by them, particularly since so fewpeople back then were willing even to look my way.

    Every time I tried to capture that stare, it escaped somehow,and so, to prove to myself I wasn't imagining things, Imoved as cautiously as if I were stalking a bright greendragonfly. But sometimes, when one strains to bring somethinghazy into focus, success only invites disaster.

    But I tried not to think about this, since that was the yearmy world turned upside-down. So much happened to methat I felt tied up in knots, like the green moss hanging fromthe stone wall beside the street, which resembled tangled locksof devil's hair.

2

My house was on the southern bank of the Yangtze.

    The South Bank District of Chongqing consists of lowrolling hills that form a series of gullies. In the event of athousand-year flood, should the entire city be swallowed up,our hillside would stand stubbornly, the last island to gounder. From early childhood, this was a strangely comfortingthought for me.

    If you ferried over from the Dock on the opposite bank,Heaven's Gate, you could reach either of the two landingsnearest my house: Alley Cat Stream and Slingshot Pellet. Bothrequired a climb up the bank and a twenty-minute walk alonga rutted street to reach my house halfway up the hill.

    By standing on the ridge in front of my house, I could seewhere the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers merge at Heaven'sGate, the gateway to the city. The peninsula created by thetwo rivers is the heart of Chongqing. A motley assortment ofbuildings on the surrounding hills looks like a jumble ofchildren's building blocks. Pontoon quays dot the riverbanks,steamships tie up beside the quays, and cable cars, drippingrust, crawl slowly up and down the slopes. Dark cloudsblanket the rivers at dawn, raising scaly red ripples; atdusk, when the sun's rays slant down on the water beforesettling behind the hills to the north, a few bursts of sunlightemerge from the dark mist. That is when lamps lighting up thehills are reflected on the surface of the water, pushing thedarkness along. And when sheets of fine rain cover the rivers,you can hear riverboat horns wail like grieving widows; thecity, caught day and night between two fast-flowing rivers,with its myriad scenic changes, is always sad and enigmatic.

The hills in South Bank teem with simple wooden thatchedsheds made of asphalt felt and asbestos board. Rickety anddarkened by weather, they have something sinister aboutthem. When you enter the dark, misshapen courtyards offtwisting little lanes, it is all but impossible to find your wayback out; these are home to millions of people engaged incoolie labour. Along the meandering lanes of South Bankthere are hardly any sewers or garbage-collecting facilities, sothe accumulated filth spills out into roadside ditches and runsdown the hills. The ground is invariably littered with refuse,to be carried into the Yangtze by the next rainfall or turnedinto rotting mud under the blazing sun.

    The garbage piles up, with fresh layers covering theirfetid predecessors to produce an astonishing mixture ofstrange odours. A ten-minute walk on any mountain pathin South Bank treats you to hundreds of different smells, auniverse of olfactory creations. I've walked the streets ofmany cities with garbage heaps, but I've never beensurrounded by so many smells. I sometimes wonder whythe people of South Bank, living amid all that stench andwalking among such filth, are punished by having noses ontheir faces.

    People said that unexploded Japanese bombs from WorldWar II lay buried in gullies on the hills, and that before theKuomintang forces abandoned the city by the end of 1949,they buried thousands of tons of explosives. They also leftbehind, it was reported, over a hundred thousand undergroundagents — that is to say, every adult in the city was apotential spy, and even after the grand suppression movementsand the mass executions of the Communist purges ofthe early 1950s, plenty of spies could have slipped through thenet. That could even have included people who joined theParty after Liberation, but were plants who came out at nightto do their dirty work — murder, arson, rape, you name it.You wouldn't find them among the tall buildings or wideavenues on the opposite bank, for they preferred to operatesecretly amid the eternal foul odours of South Bank. A spotlike this, so alien to the socialist image, is a perfect place foranti-socialist elements to come and go in secret.

    If you walk out the compound gate, hugging the damp walland listening carefully, you can hear the echoes of formernight watchmen in the darkness. That cobweb-covereddoorway might reveal quite mysteriously an old-style red-velvetembroidered shoe; that man disappearing around thecorner, with a felt hat pulled down over his forehead, mighthave a knife hidden in his trouserleg. On dark, rainy days,every person walking on the narrow slope, where filthy waterflows, looks like a secret agent. And on any given sliver ofland, by digging down a couple of feet, you can unearth anunexploded bomb or some hidden explosives, or a secret codebook with all sorts of strange symbols, or `restorationaccounts' of items confiscated from landlords and recordedby them with writing brushes.

    The other side of the river is as different as night from day.The centre of the city might as well be in another world, withred flags everywhere you look and rousing political songsfilling the air. The people's lives are `getting better every day',with youngsters reading revolutionary books to preparethemselves for the life of a revolutionary cadre. SouthBank, on the other hand, is the city's garbage dump, anunsalvageable slum; a curtain of mist above the river hides thisdark corner, this rotting urban appendix, from sight.

After negotiating the wobbly gangplank of the river ferry andwalking for ten or twenty minutes across cobblestones andgarbage, you looked up and saw tiers of crumbling houses onstilts, wooden shacks and mud huts, a mind-boggling maze ofindescribably ugly buildings. I alone could pick out oneparticular grey brick house with black roof tiles on a cragmidway up the hill, stretching out over the river. The localsreferred to this spot, located in one of Alley Cat Stream's sidelanes, as Compound Eight Beak. Alley Cat Stream Street was asteep, hilly path paved roughly with stones and bordered onboth sides by chinaberry trees, malus trees, some bushes thatsometimes stank and sometimes smelled sweet, and someteetering, rickety shacks that should have crumbled longago. The walls and gate of Compound Eight Beak werepitch black, with some random red and green bricks thatadded a bit of colour, which owed its existence to a lightningstrike that had knocked half of the bricks to the ground; duringrepairs, the broken bricks were insufficient to complete the job,so red bricks gleaned from somewhere were added.

    But this wasn't my house. To find that, you had to lookfurther up, past an expanse of identical grey rooftops. I lived inCompound Six, uphill from the other two relatively decent,parallel compounds, a spot where moss and mildew stainedthe walls and rooftops. It had a small courtyard in the centre, acommunal kitchen on each side — one large, one small — andfour attics. A tiny passageway connected the larger kitchen tothe back yard. There was also a dark, dank staircase that led tothree rooms and two rear doors on the down slope.

    I know it sounds like a landlord's home, and to tell thetruth, I can't say what sort of family once lived there. Butwhen the Communists came in the winter of 1949, theowners were smart enough to take off and cover theirtracks. Their furniture and some locally made looms wereconfiscated. The families of sailors living in South Bankwooden shacks quickly moved in, some with a formalpermit, others without. Terms like hall, corridor, backyard, side room, and attic were retained only for the sakeof convenience. The hall led to six small rooms belonging tofour families, and thus was shared by them all.

    Thirteen families moved into a compound that had oncebeen home to only one; each one or two rooms housed aseparate family, most comprising three generations. Withrelatives or neighbours from back home visiting on a regularbasis, I never did work out just how many people lived there — Iwould get lost in my counting after one hundred.

3

Our family room occupied about a hundred square feet ofspace, equipped with a small wood-framed southern windowwith six bars, like a prison cell. But of course burglars wouldnever honour a family like mine with a visit. We only closedthe window when it was raining or on cold winter nights.Besides, our neighbour's mud wall, which was only a footaway, was a very tall and very imposing barrier. Since openingthe window didn't brighten up the room at all, we had tokeep a light on even in the daytime. If I stuck my head out thewindow and looked up over the wall, I could see the forkedbranches of a malus tree. A creek that flowed down from theplayground on High School Avenue veered downhill at aprecipice in front of the tree and emptied into the river. Thegurgle turned into a roar in the night stillness, more like aheated argument or mortal combat than the screech of an alleycat.

    Fortunately for us, we also had an attic, much less than ahundred feet square and barely waist-high at the lowest point.A skylight facing south opened on to a grey sky. If I got up inthe middle of the night and wasn't careful, I'd bump my headon the ceiling and jangle the roof tiles.

    My parents, three sisters, two brothers and I crowded intothose two rooms. Our quarters were so small and theoccupants so numerous that all six kids had to sleep ontwo slat beds my father had made for the attic. He and mymother slept downstairs on a coir-frame bed. The remainingspace of the main room was filled by a five-drawer bureau, anold wicker chair, plus a dining table and stools.

    Once we kids had grown out of childhood, we had totake down the table in my parents' room at night to put up acot for my brothers. In the daytime it was taken down andthe table restored to its proper place so we could eat. Thenwhen it was bathtime, down came the table and the stools. Iknow it sounds complicated, but it was easy once we gotused to it.

    By 1980, my family had lived in this compound for twenty-nineyears. On the 1st of February 1951, my parents movedhere from north of the river with my two older sisters. In the1950s Mao Zedong was urging everyone to have more andmore children. With more people the country was morepowerful, things got done more easily, and if a nuclear warwiped out half the world's population, China would dominatethe planet. So in the space of a few years, China'spopulation increased by 150 per cent, reaching a billion in the1980s.

    With my birth, our family numbered eight people. At first itdidn't feel all that crowded, since my brothers and sisters, whohad been sent down to the countryside, seldom came home. Butonce the Cultural Revolution ended and the young urbanitesstarted returning to town, my brothers and sisters came home tostay. By 1980, our little two-room place, more crowded than apigsty, was bursting at the seams; there was hardly room to stand.Needless to say, in the summer of that year, with familymembers stepping all over each other, tempers flared.

Mother said there was a letter from Big Sister, who would behome in a couple of days.

    Big Sister was in the first group of youngsters sent down tothe countryside, which meant she'd have the hardest timereturning to the city. She had divorced twice, and had threekids, the oldest a mere six years younger than me. Herchildren were no sooner born than she sent them to myparents to care for, so she could head back to her next divorceor next marriage. `Damned trouble-maker!' The mere mentionof Big Sister drew curses from Mother. `How could Ihave given birth to a viper like her?'

    Whenever Big Sister came home, in no time she andMother were at each other's throats, screaming and bangingfurniture. The things they said made my head swim. Sooneror later, Big Sister would reduce Mother to tears, then walkoff triumphantly.

    So why, I wondered, did Mother speak so fondly of herwhen she wasn't around? As soon as she heard that her eldestdaughter was coming home, she got so fidgety she couldhardly contain herself as she waited in eager anticipation. Icould never shake off the feeling that they shared somethingthe rest of us children could not fathom, and even if we could,it would have been some arcane confidence that had nothingto do with us.

    A number of things happened that summer that got methinking that this confidence involved me, somehow. Andsince Big Sister was the only member of the family out ofwhom I could pry anything I, like Mother, eagerly anticipatedher return.

    I knew I was special to Mother. Of her eight pregnancies,two of the children had died. I was number six. I always felt Ioccupied a special place in her heart, and not just because Iwas the baby. I can't find the words to describe her attitudetowards me. She never spoiled me or winked at my shortcomings,always keeping a tight and cautious rein on me. Itwas as if I were someone else's child under her care, and shedidn't want to do anything that would make her appearnegligent.

    Father treated me differently, too, but not the same way asMother. A man of few words, he had, if anything, even less tosay to me. His reticence was intimidating: if he was angry, hepicked up a stick or a bamboo switch and lashed out furiouslyat the disobedient child. While Mother was quick to overlookmy brothers' and sisters' faults, Father was less forgiving. Buthe never lost his temper with me, and never scolded me.

    Sometimes I could feel the anxiety that filled Father's eyeswhen he looked at me; Mother stared daggers at me. I sensedthat I was their great disappointment, something that shouldnot have appeared in this world, a puzzle they couldn't solve.

4

Father was sitting on a stool in the hall rolling tobacco spreadatop another, slightly taller stool, whose red paint had peeledaway until only a few flecks remained here and there. Fourinlaid tiles around a red flower decorated the seat, and I had noidea where such a fancy stool could have come from. Heskilfully rolled the tobacco leaves despite the faint light, sincehe didn't need to see what he was doing. His eyebrows, whilenot particularly dark, were long; his cheekbones wereprominent, and his eyes bright in spite of his failing vision.After the sun went down he couldn't see a thing. He seldomsmiled, and I don't recall ever hearing him laugh, or cry. Notuntil I was grown-up did I understand that his temperamentwas formed by countless life experiences. Great at keepingsecrets, he was the member of my family I understood least.

    I had come home from school to find our door latched. Iheard sounds of bathing inside.

    `Your mother's home,' Father said, his Zhejiang accentthick as always. `Are you hungry?' he turned to ask.

    `No,' I said.

    I hung my schoolbag on a peg on the wall.

    `Eat a little something now if you are.'

    `I'll wait till Fourth Sister and Fifth Brother come home,' Isaid. The sounds of bathing inside suddenly put me ill at ease.

    Mother spent her days as an hourly labourer, strugglingwith a carrying pole and two lengths of rope to earn enoughto help support the family. Oxygen tanks that required theeffort of four porters had to be carried down a gangplank byonly two. She had fought to get this job, and once, when herfoot slipped and she tumbled into the river, she held on to themetal tank for dear life. The first thing she said after she wasdragged out of the water was, `I can keep carrying them.'

    It's not that she had hopes of becoming a `model worker',but that she was afraid of losing her job — labourers like hercould be let go at any time. She carried baskets of sand, tiles,and cement. Before I was born, right after the local pharmaceuticalfactory was built, Mother volunteered to carry firebricks for the furnace. This was at the start of the famine, andshe was already skin and bones. Four bulky fire bricks wereloaded into the baskets at each end of the carrying pole, thencarried from the riverbank up the hill, a trip that required fiftyminutes even without a load. The wages were less than twoyuan a day. Two other female labourers carried only twobricks in each basket, yet were still so exhausted and hungrythat the job was too much for them. Thinking no one waslooking, they simply dumped their bricks into a pondalongside the path. But someone saw them, and they werefired on the spot.

    Somewhere along the line, Mother offended the head ofthe Residents' Committee and lost her work permit. Her onlyoption was to look for work in another neighbourhooddistrict.

    The head of the second Residents' Committee, a kindlysoul, said to her: I've got a porters' group made up of`elements'. Would that be a problem? Mother quickly saidit wouldn't. And so she began working alongside a group ofindividuals under `surveillance by the masses', people who hadhistorical or current political problems, workers who took thejobs other people refused.

    Mother followed the porters' group to a far-off shipyard inWhite Sand Bay, where she laboured hard, sweated hard, andchanted hard, just like the men; she matched them step forstep, carrying stone blocks for the foundation and steel plate forthe ships. Once again she fell into the river, and this time itnearly killed her; they performed resuscitation until a stomachfulof filthy river water came spewing out of her mouth.

    Decades of coolie labour had left Mother with heartproblems, anaemia that eventually developed into high bloodpressure, rheumatism, a damaged hip, and aches and pains allover. It wasn't until I entered middle school that she managedto find different work: stoking a boiler in the shipyard. Thisnew job — keeping the boiler going all day long — wasconsidered light work. The fire was secured in the middleof the night, and opened at four in the morning, when theashes were removed and new coal added so that, by fiveo'clock, when the morning shift arrived, boiling water wouldbe ready.

    She lived in the factory-women's dormitory, coming homeonly at the weekends, where she normally went to bed rightafter dinner. Even if I tried to boost her spirits by bringingwater for her to wash with, all I got were scowls and growls.

    I wiped down her back after rolling up her shirt; hershoulders, calloused from all those heavy loads, looked like acamel's back — a hump where the heavy carrying pole rested.Then I wiped the front, where her shrivelled breasts hung likeempty sacks, useless, superfluous skin that lay against her belly.By the time I'd wrung out the cloth and turned back to wipeher down again, she was fast asleep, her arm hanging over theside of the bed, her legs spread inelegantly. Snores — piglikegrunts — reverberated throughout the house and slobberdribbled from her mouth. When I put her arm back on tothe bed, I looked away in disgust.

    While Mother was working, all the household duties fell tomy father, who was on disability retirement. After the sunwent down, even though he couldn't see a thing, he could stillmanage the laundry and cooking by groping his way along.He raised me virtually single-handedly from the time I was ababy.

    On Saturdays, Fourth Sister and I rose at the crack of dawnto queue up at the butcher stall, where, by combining all ourcoupons, we could buy about half a catty's worth of pork.We'd cook a fragrant pot of meat, then stare at it greedily,waiting for night to fall and for Mother to come home. Butinstead of showing her appreciation, she'd wield her chopsticksdismissively, managing to pick all around the meat. Onenight Father had had enough; he pounded the table and threwdown his ricebowl and chopsticks. Then they chased us kidsoutside and had one hell of an argument; the more it heatedup, the softer their voices grew, to keep us from hearing whatthey were saying. I figured Mother was using Father to ventsome spleen, which made me angry with her.

    Mother hardly ever took us out, either to shop or to visitrelatives. And her moods got more bizarre as the years passed,as we could tell from the vile language that emerged from hermouth. I got used to hearing people in the compound or inthe streets hurling at each other filthy words, gutter talk, andgenital-laden epithets aimed at their ancestors. But she was mymother, after all, and all those curses and dirty words made mevery uncomfortable.

    I found fault with nearly everything she did: she bangedthings too loudly when she did housework, she made a habitof spilling pickling-vat liquid on the floor, she slammed thedownstairs door so hard that the attic rattled, and whenevershe spoke she yelled. It was more than I could take. I hatedcalling her Mother, to her face or behind her back, and wehardly ever smiled at each other.

    I couldn't help but wonder: eighteen years earlier, whenshe began raising me — nineteen, actually, when she gotpregnant — what kind of mother was she then?

I don't remember ever seeing my mother when she was good-looking,even presentable, for that matter.

    Or might I have conveniently erased any memory of herthat was at all attractive? I watched as, little by little, she turnedinto a sickly woman with rotting and repaired teeth, that is,what few teeth she had left. Her eyelids were puffy, dull andlifeless; squinting till her eyes were mere slits, she could hardlyrecognize a soul. Even if she'd tried, she couldn't have madeher strawlike hair look good; it kept falling out and turningwhiter by the day. The tattered straw hat she wore most of thetime helped a little. And she kept getting shorter, as if beingpressed down by a heavy weight; her bent back made her lookeven shorter and puffier than she really was, slightly top-heavy.She shuffled when she walked, as if the soles of hershoes were made of lead; her legs grew thicker and stumpierfrom all that back-breaking labour, and her toes were splayed.Her feet didn't bleed even when she stepped on a sharp stone.Since they were steeped in mud the year round, athlete's footcaused her a great deal of suffering.

    Once, and only once, I woke up early to the sound ofMother's wooden sandals banging against the stone steps, asurprisingly pleasant sound. Carrying a paper umbrella, shewas walking out of the compound in the drizzling rain, and Iwas struck by the thought that she once had, she must havehad, silky-smooth skin and a young, supple face.

    Gradually I came to realize why Mother didn't like mirrors.She complained once to my sisters that there wasn't a decentmirror in the house. They held their tongues, apparentlyknowing instinctively that it was her way of saying she hatedthe things.

    Age created a wall between Mother and me, above whichgrass and shrubs grew, taller and taller, until neither of usknew what to do about it. Actually, it was a slight, brittle wailthat we could have toppled if we'd wanted to, except that itnever occurred to us, at least not to me, to try. I saw warmthin Mother's eyes no more than once or twice, occasions whenI felt that maybe I wasn't superfluous after all. It seemed to methen that all I had to do was reach out to touch her heart;sadly, the look vanished before I had a chance.

    Not until my eighteenth year was I finally able to look backand get a clear picture of the past.

5

The door opened and Mother emerged, fresh from her bath.`Bring the pail, Little Six,' she said. She was wearing ahomemade sleeveless, collarless shirt, knee-length shorts,and a pair of worn wooden sandals.

    Together we picked up the tub to dump the dirty waterinto the pail. Mother said Big Sister would be home tonight,tomorrow at the latest.

    `You can wait as long as you want,' I said with studiedcruelty. `She's just setting you up for a fall.'

    `No, she isn't,' Mother said decisively. `If she wrote to sayshe's coming home, then she is.'

    Her face softened with the mere mention of my eldestsister, and as I looked up, I lost track of what I was doing,spilling water on the cement floor. `Pay attention,' shegrowled. `Can't you do anything right?'

    I picked up the full pail and carried it over the threshold.`Don't dump that. Save it to mop the attic floor,' Mother said,louder than she needed to.

    Water was a valued commodity, not just because it was soexpensive, but because it could be cut off at any time. Severalhundred families shared a single tap behind High SchoolAvenue. Queuing up was only part of the problem, for oncethe water came, it was usually a dirty yellow; but if we wentdown to the river to fetch water, a hard, sweaty job at best, wehad to treat it with alum or bleach to make it fit for drinkingor cooking, and it left a metallic taste. Except for times whenthe running water was off, we fetched water from the riveronly for laundry or to mop the floors.

    Each family had so little living space that the water had to bestored in small vats in the communal kitchen, and that wasnever enough for anyone. The men and boys normally bathedin the river, unless they were too lazy to go down themountain; then they'd wash on the courtyard steps, using abasin of water, dressed only in underpants. Why not, since theywent around in the summer wearing nothing more than thatanyway? Some of the more bashful men bathed at night, butthey were in short supply, so open-air bathing was the norm.They'd use a basin of water to wash down, top and bottom,and with their underpants soaked, you could see everythingthey had. Even as a little girl, I knew exactly what men hadhanging between their legs — that ugly, shameful thing — andwhen I went to the kitchen for something or out into thecourtyard to dump dirty water in the ditch, I'd confront a lineof men in the courtyard, young and old, standing shoulder toshoulder, virtually naked, all but blocking my way. Theythought nothing even of pissing into the drain hole in public.

    Over the long, drawn-out summers, a month could go bywithout a drop of rain. Then when the Yangtze began to rise,the water flowed slowly and inexorably from the upperreaches, and hundreds of metres of riverbank would beswallowed up overnight when the flood season arrived.

    Anyone who has never suffered through the heat of thiscity cannot possibly understand how it burns its way out fromyour heart and clogs up every pore on your body, to lie therebaking your skin. Normally there is no wind, but when thereis, it's like adding coal to a fire, like being caged in a steameruntil you think you're overcooked.

    When we females bathed, the males had to hang aroundoutside until we had finished and they could come home,sullen and grumbling. First we'd fill the wooden tub, adding afew drops of boiling water to warm it up a bit, then latch thedoor, strip naked, and take a fast bath, nervous as cats. We'dwet ourselves down, quickly rub a sliver of soap over ourbodies, and rinse off; that was our bath.

    With five females in the family, sometimes there wasn'tenough time for us all to bath individually, so we sisters wouldcrowd into the room together. Since I couldn't stand lettingother people see me naked, even my mother and sisters, Inormally waited around to be the last, taking a basin of coldwater inside and latching the door behind me so I could take aquick sponge bath. Everyone thought I was being eccentric,keeping a family room all to myself, and they weren't happyabout it.

    That was in the summer. Once the weather cooled off, theinconvenience of bathing increased. Hot water was particularlyscarce; but since we couldn't afford to go to the publicbaths, we simply took fewer baths or no baths at all. Labourerscarried the stench of sweat with them wherever they went,adding yet another powerful odour to the pervasive medley ofsmells.

    The winter cold was as oppressive as the summer heat. Ourhouses weren't heated, and heating materials were virtuallynon-existent, so we warmed our hands by wrapping themaround a hot-water bottle, and huddled around the stove tokeep the cold at bay. Sometimes we simply cocoonedourselves in quilts and lay in bed. At night we bundled upin as many clothes as we could wear and climbed into bed,suffering until morning with freezing hands and feet. I don'tthink there was a winter in my childhood when my handsweren't covered with chilblains that made my fingers looklike carrots.

I jammed the mop into the bucket, holding it in my righthand and cradling the handle in the crook of my arm, thengingerly carried my load over to the foot of the stairs, listing toone side. Shifting the bucket to my left hand, I grabbed thecreaky banister with my right hand and prepared myself forthe climb to the attic.

    `Don't worry about mopping the floor now,' Mothershouted crankily. `There's still hot water in the kettle. Takeyour bath first. It'll be cold if you put it off.'

    She was always ordering me about like that. So I put downthe bucket and stood at the foot of the stairs, lookingunhappy.

    After mopping up the bath water that had splashed on tothe floor, she carried the mop over to a dry corner, whichquickly absorbed some of the dripping water.

    Father looked up and gave me a sign to do as Mother said.

    Not wanting to disobey him, I picked up the basin andwent into the kitchen for some hot water. Then I closed thedoor and took off my clothes to wash. The sight of my ownsweaty, naked body and the smell of underarm sweat sickenedme.

Continues...

Excerpted from Daughter of the Riverby Hong Ying Copyright © 2000 by Hong Ying. Excerpted by permission.
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