Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos by Wu Emily & Engelmann Larry

Author:Wu, Emily & Engelmann, Larry [Wu, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307484727
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-01-19T23:00:00+00:00

34

After school each day the children immediately went to work. Their principal task was collecting animal droppings for fertilizer. I learned how to do this and soon was working beside them. This was my first real job. I wanted to be like the other children. I carried a small basket and a rake and prowled the edge of the village looking for animal droppings. For every ten kilograms I delivered to the production team’s sewage pool, the accountant recorded one work point for me, which was worth two fen.

The first time I joined in the work I wore a pair of “liberation sneakers.” The other children saw me and pointed and laughed. “Look at the city girl,” they said, “collecting shit with shoes on.” I went home and put my shoes away. As long as we lived in the village, I went barefoot most of the time. It hurt at first. But soon the soles of my feet hardened with calluses and I could go anywhere painlessly. I was even able to walk across hot stones in the summer or climb on sharp-edged rocks.

Some afternoons I was accompanied on my searches by a neighbor girl named Little Rabbit. She was only five but very intelligent for her age. She had a baby brother who was bound to her back every morning. Carrying him, she trudged along beside me as I did my work. I began to spend most of my spare time with Little Rabbit. Slowly she took the place in my life that Xiaolan once filled.

She reminded me of myself when I was five, doing the household chores and caring for a younger brother. I taught her some of the games I’d played when I was her age. I made a length of rope from straw and tied one end to a post and turned the other and taught her how to jump rope. She was delighted. I also showed her how to make bird nests out of grass roots.

Little Rabbit taught me how to catch fish in the irrigation ditch. The water ran swiftly from the pond to the rice fields when the dikes were open. She knelt at the water’s edge, leaned down and blocked a section of the ditch with a bamboo basket to snag fish. Within minutes she pulled up half a dozen fish. We called them can tiao, little white fish. They were only about three inches long. We cleaned them and cooked them and made a feast for ourselves.

Little Rabbit was not healthy. She tired easily. On our shopping trips to the brigade store, she often had to stop and rest and complained that she had a headache. Sometimes I tried to help her and had her transfer her baby brother to my back. She behaved like an old woman rather than a child. I did everything I could to cheer her up. I remembered how I had become ill and my energy had drained away. But I’d eventually been taken to the hospital.

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