Flowers for Mei-Ling by Lorraine Lachs

Author:Lorraine Lachs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

I am ashamed to say that I soon left my sorrow behind in the busy days of my life. Although I was lonely at home and required to cook the evening meal and clean the house in my grandmother’s absence, at school I won prizes for my poems and high grades in everything I studied. If some of my classmates were jealous of my honors, others were drawn to me as satellites circle a planet.

The son of my father’s associate at the university asked me to walk with him in the park. He was older than I, tall for a Chinese, much taller than my father, and already a prodigy of science. He was determined to be a doctor, one who would combine the best of modern and traditional medicine, one who would bring China to her rightful place in the great world.

Zhang was a very serious boy. He liked to lie silently on the grass with his eyes closed. I would sit nearby and close my eyes too. Sometimes our clothing touched. Sometimes we shared a peach. The juice dripping sweetly from our mouths and down our chins made us both laugh.

Although my parents were always hard at work, they were never too busy to follow my progress in school. They were pleased with my accomplishments. My mother no longer told me I was her “pride and joy,” perhaps because she was afraid I might grow too proud, perhaps because she was just afraid. She may have understood before others did that it would no longer be safe for the intelligent children of intellectual parents in Mao’s China. But she loved my poems and placed each one in a book, carefully noting the date it was written. The book is lost, like everything else from that time.

On my fourteenth birthday my father took me by the shoulders, pressing them hard enough for me to feel pain, and spoke in a solemn voice: “You have a gift for language. I think you have the ability and background to enter the diplomatic service. I see you, my daughter, as a representative abroad of the new China, a woman of the new China. You will do great things in the world. Your work will bring honor to the family and the nation.” I did not know how to respond to such a compliment with words. We embraced. I felt myself a pearl plucked from the many grains of sand, lustrous, a jewel. I began to learn French with the help of a tutor. Great-aunt said my parents were in error encouraging me in things foreign.

My sixteenth and seventeenth years brought storms and winds that swept through every city, every village, every house in China. Loudspeakers blared “The East Is Red” from every corner, a siren song racing through the air, a swelling chorus for marauding bands of youth, first my age, then younger and younger still. We were the Red Guards, “revolutionary path-breakers,” the vanguard of the Cultural Revolution. Yes, I was a Red Guard.

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