Black Country to Red China by Ying Esther Cheo Ying

Author:Ying, Esther Cheo Ying
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409077831
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2009-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

9

Ming Tombs

From the north of China right down to Peking sweeps the great flat North China plain, denuded of forests, vegetation and water. In the summer Peking suffers six weeks of continuous rain, perhaps the only rainfall of the year. The climate is so dry that even the snow falling in winter comes down like fine yellow dust. A famous local delicacy is called Peking Dust; a powdered chestnut topped with whipped cream. ‘Peking Throat’ is a sore dry inflammation which is alleviated by the old peasant remedy of eating slices of sweet raw turnip. Eyes get itchy, red and sore. The dreaded ‘sar yen’, tracoma, was so common that many caught it in some mild form or another and needed treatment. In the early days, before the Government was established, there used to be a paper boy of about twelve standing at the entrance to the Tung An Bazaar, selling papers all day. I noticed one morning his eyes were pink and runny. The next day he was still there, his eyes more red and he rubbed them frequently. I was curious and asked Wang T’ao: ‘Why doesn’t he get treatment from the doctor?’ He smiled and said: ‘You have a lot to learn. Millions need doctors. That’s why you and I are wearing this uniform.’ He went on with the much-used phrase ‘Yi bu yi bu’ (step by step) and he gave me a long lecture on what the revolution really meant. I was stubborn and argued that this boy was right under our noses. ‘Why can’t we go to the chemist and at least buy some ointment?’ Wang T’ao put on an air of injured superiority: ‘Your bourgeois humanitarianism is coming up to the surface again.’ So every day I passed him still selling newspapers and observed his eyes getting worse. I then went off to land reform and did not return to Peking for several months. I passed him once again. This time, his inner lids had turned outwards in a red raw mess. His eyeballs were turned towards the sky seeing nothing. He was blind and he was still selling newspapers.

The yellow dust penetrated every nook and cranny, drying out the glass panes from unseasoned wood of modern buildings until they fell with a sob of splintering glass.

Peasants walked alongside their donkey carts shovelling up the dust in the lanes enriched by city travel, to take back to the thin soil from whence it came. Dust lodged permanently in the corners of our eyes and nostrils, a sheen of yellow dust on our faces and clothes. We automatically blew the layer of dust away from the surface of the mugs of hot water before we drank and it collected like tidal drifts on the inside of the mug. The sun shone through a yellow haze, drying wet clothes so quickly that they became stiff and hard like cardboard. Rickets was common among undernourished children, despite the continuous sunshine. Li Mei’s children were bow-legged, their arms like little chopsticks with big misshapen heads.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.