My Name is Number 4 Read online

  ALSO BY TING-XING YE

  Throwaway Daughter

  White Lily

  A Leaf in the Bitter Wind

  Share the Sky

  Weighing the Elephant

  Three Monks, No Water

  for my brothers

  Ye Zheng-xing

  Ye Zhong-xing

  and my sisters

  Ye Shen-xing

  Ye Feng-xing

  A NOTE ON CHINESE PRONUNCIATION

  I have used the han yu pin yin system of romanization. A few names such as Yangtze and Chiang Kai-shek have been left in the older spelling because pin yin forms might be unfamiliar. English-speaking readers will find that most letters in pin yin are pronounced more or less the same as those in English. Some exceptions are:

  c = ts, as in pets

  q = ch, as in church

  x = hss

  z = dz, as in adze

  zh = j, as in juice

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The words Lao (Old, Venerable) and Xiao (Young) when used with a surname are common terms of respect in China. Thus, I was usually addressed as Xiao Ye by persons outside my family.

  With the exception of public figures and members of my family, I have disguised the names of all Chinese persons in this book.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I want to thank my publisher, Maya Mavjee, for supporting this project; my editor, Amy Black, for believing in this book and for helpful suggestions and encouragement; William Bell, as always, for everything.

  PART ONE

  INTO THE BITTER SEA

  PROLOGUE

  The morning of my exile to the prison farm arrived, a characteristic November day in Shanghai, damp and chilly with an overcast sky. My two older brothers silently wrapped my wooden boxes and bedroll with thick straw ropes against the long rough journey. For lunch Great-Aunt made my favourite meal: pork chops Shanghai-style, with green onions. I ate hardly a mouthful, nor did my brothers and sisters. After the dishes were cleaned up, Great-Aunt told us she was going to her regular newspaper-reading meeting and, without saying goodbye or wishing me a safe journey, without looking at me, she left and closed the door behind her.

  An hour later, I left my home, wondering if I would ever again walk in those three rooms, sleep in Great-Aunt’s bed or stand in the sky-well and look up at the room where my parents had lived and died. My sisters and brothers and I trudged down Purple Sunshine Lane, where I had played and chased sparrows, where I had walked white-clad in two funeral processions. We passed my old temple school and the market where I had lined up many times to buy rice and pork bones. On the way to the bus stop we had to pass the building where Great-Aunt had her meeting. I saw her sitting in the doorway, weeping. I stopped and tried to speak. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her, but she looked away.

  When we arrived at the district sports centre, where all the exiles had been ordered to assemble, my brothers set down my luggage. They and my two sisters stood awkwardly, at a loss for words. My younger sister, Number 5, was crying; Number 3 stared at the damp sidewalk. The guards told me that only those going to the farm could enter the building. My final moment with my family had come. I let out a loud cry.

  “Why can’t they stay with me until I have to leave?” I begged.

  It was no use.

  At that moment someone shouted my name and through my tears I saw Teacher Chen running toward me. She had come to see me off. She assured my brothers and sisters that she would stay with me. I said a solemn goodbye to each of them, picked up my luggage and walked to the stadium door.

  Teacher Chen persuaded the guard to let her accompany me inside, saying she represented the school. There were more than three hundred unhappy teenagers gathered inside, with bundles tightly packed and tied. Four other students from my school were also being sent away, Teacher Chen told me, but I didn’t know them.

  We sat down to wait. My teacher gave me some bread she had brought for me, but it stayed untouched. “Be proud of yourself, Xiao Ye,” she said, trying to cheer me up. “You may only be 16, but you are not a coward.”

  I didn’t feel brave at all.

  It was getting dark when the loudspeakers called us to the waiting buses. As I was about to board, Teacher Chen held my hands in hers, in front of her chest. “Xiao Ye,” she whispered, “remember the old saying, ‘When at home, depend on your parents; when away from home, rely on your friends.’ Make friends on the farm. They will help you.”

  I knew that in repeating this familiar old saying she was taking a risk, because most of the old proverbs had been denounced and she might be overheard. Everything is against me, I thought, even this proverb. I had no parents at home, and the Cultural Revolution, which encouraged friends to inform on one another, had destroyed friendship. There seemed nothing left to depend on, not even my shadow.

  When I got on my bus, the fifth in line, there were no seats left. After stowing my luggage in the overhead racks, I stood in the aisle, wiping my eyes with my sleeve, as others were doing, and stared out the window. The bus passed through the gate into a street thronged with families and relatives who had been waiting for hours. Horns from passing vehicles honked. Bicycle bells rang out. People ran alongside the buses, shouting names and crying. When the buses came to a halt, dozens of hands were thrust into the windows, clutching the hands of loved ones. I searched the crowd for my sisters and brothers.

  The bus lurched and began to move forward again. The hands at the windows gradually fell away. Then I heard desperate shouting. “Ah Si! Ah Si! Where are you?”

  I pushed and squeezed my way to a window, ignoring the protests of those in the seats.

  “Here! Here!” I yelled.

  Then I saw Number 1 checking the buses ahead of me, waving and calling out my name as each one passed him.

  “Number 1, I’m here!” I cried out.

  The bus sped up. My brother ran alongside, stretching his hand to the window. More than anything I wanted that one last touch. I reached out the window as far as I could, opening and closing my hand, but Number 1 fell back and I felt only cold air.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was born in Shanghai, late on a hot June afternoon in 1952, so I was called Ah Si, Number 4.

  My father decided four kids were enough, but rather than rely on birth control, which was officially discouraged at that time, he put his faith in the power of words. Choosing a formal name for a child was no small matter: it required the weighing of tradition and precedent.

  My surname, Ye, means Leaf. My generation name, Xing—Capable—had been decreed by my paternal grandfather after casting bamboo fortune telling sticks in the family ancestral hall, so all Father’s children were called Xing. My three older siblings Father had named after characteristics he admired; my brothers were Upright and Steadfast, my sister Diligent. For me he chose Ting, a homonym that means Graceful in writing but sounds like Stop when heard.

  The word magic didn’t work. A year and a half later my sister Maple was born, Mother’s fifth and last child.

  Normally, June was the beginning of the rainy season, a time of year hated by most people in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. There was usually a solid month of drizzle and extreme humidity. Green mould grew on walls and floors; dampness seeped into people’s bones. On the rare days when the sun appeared, courtyards and sidewalks were festooned with clothing, bedding and furniture. Everyone dreamt of living in a “zipper-roofed building.”

  As Great-Aunt never tired of telling anyone who would listen, my coming into the world was unlucky, a girl born in the year of the dragon.1 She also said I was destined to lead a hard and unpredictable life, since June 1952 was uncharacteristically hot and dry, a sure sign of the King Dragon’s disapproval, for he was the
God of Rain. King Dragon, she said, dwelt in a crystal palace at the bottom of the Eastern Sea, where he was surrounded by crab generals and an army of shrimps, all of them male. I was often tempted to ask who did the household chores if there were no females like Grandmother, Mother and Great-Aunt herself around. But I had learned at an early age that there were two topics I should never question: the gods and the government.

  (Left) My paternal grandfather, Ye You-quan, who was severely beaten by Red Guards because he once owned land and a business.

  (Right) My great-aunt, Chen Feng-mei, given to my family as a housemaid by her mother after two arranged marriages didn’t work out.

  A week after my birth, Mother brought me home from the Red House Hospital, so named because red paint covered its brick walls, wooden window-frames and doors, to my family’s three-room apartment in the centre of the city. Shaded by plane trees, Wuding (Valiant Tranquillity) Road ran east and west through the former International Settlement and many long-tang—lanes, some as wide as two cars side by side, some only shoulder width—connected with it, forming a densely populated yet quiet neighbourhood. Shanghai itself, only ten miles wide and ten miles long, was inhabited by about six million people. We lived in Zi Yang Li—Purple Sunshine Lane.

  The main street of the town of Qingyang, where my father was born and raised.

  Our two-story brick building was a traditional Shanghai-style house, built in a square U-shape around a courtyard or “sky-well” that served as the front entrance. Two black-lacquer doors, heavy and tall, with brass door-knockers shaped like dragon heads with rings through their noses, guarded the courtyard. Residents used the back door, however, reserving the front for occasions such as weddings and funerals.

  In all, eight families lived in six apartments, three at each level. Two water taps in the tiny corridor at the back served all the families, and their use was strictly regulated and policed by our neighbour, Granny Ningbo. The upper tap, with its brick sink, could be used only to wash food, clothing and dishes. The lower one was for cleaning chamber pots and rinsing mops. On each floor, one small kitchen served four families. From the roof terrace I could see the chimney of the Zheng Tai Rubber Shoe Factory, which my father owned.

  Where Purple Sunshine Lane intersected with Wuding Road was the cai chang—food market. Its rough plank stalls stretched about thirty yards along both sides of the shady street. The centre of our neighbourhood, it opened at six o’clock in the morning, but lineups for popular food like pork bones and fat, which were cheaper and required fewer ration coupons, began to form hours earlier. Some residents would get out of bed early, take up spots near the front of the line, then sell them for a few cents. By early afternoon the market was closed, and the residents used the empty stalls to make quilts on or to air their bedding.

  (Left) The “stone arched” house in Purple Sunshine Lane, downtown Shanghai, where I was born and raised.

  (Right) My four siblings and I in 1956. Back row, left to right: second eldest brother, Number 2; eldest brother, Number 1. Front row, left to right: me; younger sister, Number 5; elder sister, Number 3.

  (Left) Number 3 and I, autumn 1957.

  (Right) Purple Sunshine Lane, showing laundry drying on bamboo poles overhead.

  For several years the sky-well, the lane and the busy market were my world.

  One day when I was four years old, my father came home from the factory with a big red silk flower pinned to the lapel of his Western-style jacket. Even at that age I knew that wearing a red flower, real or not, meant praise and honour. But Father didn’t look happy about his prize. He limped past me, tossing the flower on the dinner table, and closed the bedroom door behind him. I stared longingly at the red blossom. From inside the bedroom, I heard Father and Mother talking. Only then did I realize that Father had come home early. All my older siblings were still in school and two-year-old Number 5 was having a nap.

  Mother came out of the room and saw me eyeing the flower. She said I could have it so long as I kept quiet. She helped me pin it to my jacket and I rushed joyfully downstairs to the sky-well, sporting my colourful reward. I didn’t know that Father had been given the flower for surrendering his factory—the enterprise his grandfather had established and he had operated for almost twenty years—to the government. In return, he was to receive a ridiculously meagre compensation of cash and bonds, paid in installments over seven years.2

  Father was kept on as “private representative” to run the factory he used to own. But when he insisted on claiming his compensation, he was labelled a “hard-minded capitalist” who, the government said, could be reformed only through hard physical labour. Thus, before I turned five, my father had fallen from a respected and prosperous business owner to a labourer.

  Even though I was too young to understand the momentous changes that worried Mother, Father and Great-Aunt, I was old enough to notice certain changes. Father no longer wore his Western-style jacket and tie. Instead he put on a dark blue or black worker’s jacket buttoned up to the neck. Despite his physical disability—a childhood attack of meningitis had crippled him in one leg and he had to walk with a cane—he was assigned to one of the most menial jobs in the factory, pushing a heavy wooden cart loaded with rubber shoe uppers between workshops. It was the humiliation and deep wound to his pride that led him to make a decision that turned to tragedy.

  One morning in April 1959, Father left home to go to work as usual. It was the last time I saw him walk. Later that day, Mother was called to a district hospital, where she learned that without telling anyone in the family Father had undergone surgery to cure his limp. The operation had been botched and Father was paralyzed from the waist down. Mother was horrified to see Father’s entire torso wrapped in bandages that hid a wide scar from the base of his neck to his pelvis. After three years of suffering, confined to his bed, he passed away at the age of forty-one. I was nine.

  Left with five kids and no job, my mother took me time after time on her visits to the factory, where she begged the officials to cash some of the bonds Father had been given when the factory was expropriated. The family had no income now, she argued, and her children were hungry. Her pleas and my tears had no effect. The bonds could not be redeemed for many years, Mother was reminded.

  In order to feed her family, Mother had to face the fact that one of my brothers, seventeen and fifteen at the time, would have to quit school and find a job. One day in May 1963, a year after Father’s death, Mother once again took me with her to the factory. She asked the director to take one of her sons on as an apprentice to help ease her burden and support the family. If there was any way she could have avoided coming to him for help, she said, weeping harder, she wouldn’t be sitting there begging him. An hour later, we were sent away without an answer.

  For weeks the atmosphere at home was so tense that I could almost touch it with my fingertips: tense because my brothers were forced to make a decision neither of them wanted; tense because the factory director might turn down Mother’s pleas. Finally the answer came: the Rubber Industry Department would take Number 1 on, not in Father’s factory, but in one that specialized in melting and refining raw rubber.

  Mother was relieved but worried. She had wanted her son to work in Father’s former factory because it was nearby. Most of the workers there knew our family and she hoped that they would look after her son. An added complication was that, although the director had specified a position for my eldest brother, Number 1 and Number 2 had decided differently. None of us knew how they had come to the conclusion that Number 2 was to be the one to quit school so that Number 1, who was one year short of qualifying to sit for university exams, could continue his education. My father had always wanted both of his sons to go to university. Since no one in the new factory knew my family, Number 2 pretended to be Number 1, and by the time the director found out, Number 2 had turned sixteen and was already a skillful worker.

  So by the time I was twelve, my family had been on welfare for years. Wh
ere I had once sported a silk coat covered with a cotton smock, I now wore my brother’s hand-me-downs. And when I passed up and down our lane, the residents, in particular the members of the neighbourhood committee,3 suspicious that my “capitalist” mother had secret income, would stop me and lift up my jacket to make sure I wasn’t wearing good clothing hidden underneath. When I became nearsighted, Mother ignored my pleas for prescription glasses because she couldn’t afford to buy me a pair. Instead she gave me a pair Number 2 had outgrown. They caused me constant headaches, and I put them on only when necessary.

  However, my personality had grown far from the modest and passive Chinese female praised by tradition. In defending myself and my family’s name and, at times, fighting against my bullying neighbours over my mother, I became combative and argumentative. This often saddened Mother. The degradation of poverty and social discrimination had left deep scars.

  Our household, meanwhile, struggled to return to normal. In August 1964, I was accepted by an all-girl middle school named Ai Guo—Love Your Country—which had been run by foreign missionaries before the communist government came to power.4 My sister, Number 3, was enrolled in a new middle school closer to home. Number 1, after scoring extremely high on his entrance exams, won a place at the coveted Jiao Tong University in Shanghai. In five years, he would be an automotive engineer. Mother was especially happy to see Number 2 spending more time at Father’s desk. He had been admitted to a workers’ night school and was taking courses to complete his senior middle school education.

  But throughout the fall of 1964, Mother continuously lost weight. She insisted that everything was fine but I frequently saw her holding a hot-water bottle to her stomach. Then one day, her pain drove her to the hospital. The diagnosis was final and devastating: cancer. Two-thirds of Mother’s stomach was removed. We should hope for the best, the doctor said to the five of us.