Under Red Skies

During the summer of 1988, the cicadas in the willow tree beside the main village road never stopped crying. On one particular day, my mother, Shumin, returned home early from work in the family's rice field. She lay in bed, deeply worried, knowing that her father-in-law would be angry that she had come home early, but that it would be nothing compared to how he would react when he discovered the secret she had kept from him for more than a month: she was pregnant with a second child. It was the only crime she had ever committed in her thirty-two years.

As she lay contemplating her next move, she could see from her window the banners painted in looming red characters on the white walls of her neighbor's home:

The ridiculous signs were tokens of China's One-Child Policy. But my mother was doubtful of the banner's promise: She had only one child, her family worked very hard, yet still they did not have money or happiness.

Mom and my baba, Chengtai, led a typical Chinese lifestyle. They lived with his parents and his three unmarried siblings. In the eighties, most young couples lived with their relatives. Their home was also typical: a three-room brick house, facing the south, and a small hut in the yard. At that time, burnt-red bricks were new, fashionable, and a sign of wealth. Previously, homes were built using handmade adobe—a mixture of mud and straw that dried into bricks in the sun—which was much cheaper, but not as strong. My grandmother, or Nainai, Baba's mother, had encircled the yard with bamboo poles to fence off her vegetable garden. Chickens and rabbits roamed under the two willow trees. Once a month, Nainai would sell the eggs and rabbits at the farmers' market.

That is how they lived. And everything about it was…ordinary.

My mother had not told anyone, except Baba, about the pregnancy. She couldn't; there was already too much tension at home with her in-laws. If Mom didn't wake early enough to work, Nainai would pull a long face and tell the neighbors she was lazy. "Young married women today are nothing like what we used to be," Nainai would complain.

Their village, Chaoyang, was a fairly new community in Ninghe County. It was rebuilt after the great Tangshan earthquake in 1976, which resulted in 240,000 deaths. After the earthquake, survivors built Chaoyang, which means "facing the sun," in hopes of a brighter future.

It is not known when people started to settle in Ninghe County—records were not kept. The old men, with their long, white goatees, said our ancestors had settled during the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) to escape a famine. I always loved listening to the old men talk about the village's history, their eyes closed and one hand stroking their beards. For hours, they'd squat in the shadows, chatting. They were the modern griots and storytellers.

My mom was raised in a different village but adapted easily to Chaoyang. Like her own hometown, it was small and everyone knew each other. Every woman in the village was from another place—this was the way of it—and it was the men whom we relied on for the best stories of our village.

In such a small place, rumors couldn't be tamed for more than a day, and this also worried my mom that morning. There were about five hundred people in Chaoyang, and on only three streets; one paved with asphalt and the other two with red bricks. Folks living in the houses along the asphalt road were considered fortunate. It was the smoother, more modern-looking street, and on rainy days, it didn't have little water pits like those that collected in the cobbled roads. The village chief had an asphalt road in front of his office, which spoke volumes about it as a symbol of status. Those with homes like ours, on the brick road, would build their houses taller and grander, as though to make up for an inferior feeling.

My family, the Kans, worked together on more than ten mu—over 1.6 acres—of farmland. In those days, the climate was wet enough to encourage the villagers to plant rice. Ninghe was famous for its rice, reeds, and fish. In the beginning of the twentieth century, when my grandparents were young, everyone in Ninghe depended on those resources to make a living. Before the first bridge in Ninghe was built, villagers would cross the river using wooden dinghies. A screen of tall reeds on the riverbank stretched like waves in a green sea. But when I was a child in the mid-1990s, Ninghe started to suffer from drought, and the fish died from water pollution. Soon, corn and cotton—which required less irrigation—replaced the lush rice.

It took a lot of work from the entire family to run the farm. They'd set out to work in the early morning, when the water in the paddy field was still cold. In their farmers' clothes—wide-legged pants and loose gray shirts—they were like uniformed ants.

Mom was a pretty woman by Chinese standards, with big, smoky eyes and a small nose. She would tie up her long mane in a scarf and let it hang to hide her neck from the sun. She was lighter skinned than most women in the village, and had a few freckles. Women with freckles were said to have a wild spirit. She was also a strong farmer. Mom would walk barefoot in the field for hours, row by row. She was small but sturdy, focused, and fast. While other women rested at the field ridge to drink water, Mom would continue treading the fields.

But to the dismay of her in-laws, she worked in the field on the weekends only. During the week, she went to a job she loved, a place where she could wear her floral printed shirts and dresses made from soft polyester fabric. She was a teacher at the primary school in her parents' village, Caiyuan. She did this even in early summer—a crucial farming time—and so she was labeled as stubborn.

The family had to work fast and hard if they wished to bring in a good harvest, and it was difficult to satisfy my paternal grandfather, Wengui. At the time, farmers did not have access to many machines, and there were only a few horses, so labor was mostly by hand.

In 1982, China embarked on significant land reform. Whereas in the past a village would have worked the land together—communally—this new system rented land to individual family units. So, the more time a farmer spent on his land, the better the harvest would likely be in the autumn and the more income his family might accumulate. This notion made Grandfather Wengui the family's drill sergeant—he needed everyone to be swift and available—and he had a big problem with my mom's choice to divert her time elsewhere.

The land reform led to the collapse of the People's Commune, an agricultural cooperative initiated in 1960 during the Great Leap Forward, a campaign led by Chairman Mao that set unattainable production goals with the sheer objective of overtaking Western countries within a few years. The government decreed that the production of steel in 1959 should be four times the volume of 1957, and the production of grain should double within two years. Their mission was clear.

Mom was a little girl then, and told me that one day the village chief had gone to her house and announced that, henceforth, they would be able to eat beef and potatoes every day. Everyone was amazed; it was the best food the villagers could imagine having access to. They didn't care that they'd have to share it. Her mother made the best meat dishes. She and her brothers were ecstatic, but one day she came home to find her mother quietly weeping. Local officials had arrived to take away the family's dining table and their only iron wok—a prized possession in most Chinese households. "You don't need these anymore," the village chief had said sternly. "Everyone will eat together in the public canteen." He removed a notebook from the chest pocket of his blue Mao uniform—a dark two-piece suit with baggy pants and a four-pocket collarless blazer. He made note of the items he had confiscated. "It's time to say goodbye to the old way of living, in which you care only for yourself and your own family. In the People's Commune, we will support each other."

But the meals at the canteen were short lived. The first month, there was beef and potatoes, the second month only rice and boiled vegetables. In the last month, the cooks didn't have enough grain to supply three meals a day. Within three years, although the villagers had continued to work communally on the farmland, the canteens were closed. The government later announced that the public canteens were a "great proletarian revolutionary experiment" and the villagers were allowed to return to their own kitchens. They had been reduced to rats in a lab.

Though productivity was low, village officials around China would report grain production several times more than what they obtained in order to impress the higher-ups. When the exaggerated figures were registered, the central government had collected a disproportionate amount of grain, leaving tiny amounts for the localities. This contributed to the Great Famine, which lasted from 1959 to 1961, when tens of millions of people died from starvation. My mom vividly remembers walking with her father to the graves of our family's ancestors, where bitter wild grass tended to grow and which they would pick for dinner. She was four years old, and it was all they had to eat.

The Communists hoped the land reform of the 1980s, which allowed farmers to work on land owned by their families, would rekindle people's belief in socialism. However, villagers like Grandfather Wengui were doubtful. If there was anything he had learned from the war with Japan, the civil war, and the Cultural Revolution, it was to grab whatever fortune you could scrounge during peacetime, before chaos returned and things like food started to disappear again. Like the other villagers, Grandfather Wengui stopped complaining and started to invest all his time into the land he had.

Mom knew my grandparents would try to force her to have an abortion. They needed her to work, and a second child was illegal. If she had the baby, she would face a hefty government fine. But she wanted another child, and she vowed to Buddha that she'd walk to the Dule Temple one hundred miles away to thank him if he helped her. She and my father hoped they would be able to borrow money for the fine, and that she'd keep working throughout the pregnancy to save up.

Wengui didn't understand why Mom cared so much about teaching other people's children and not staying at home with her own. "How could you be so selfish? You leave your son for the whole day. What kind of mother are you?" Wengui said one afternoon when he and Mom were sitting on the floor of their front room, weaving a reed mat.

"I don't make much, but it helps that I can feed myself," she answered without raising her eyes from the mat.

Wengui roughly threw aside the hammer he had been using to tamp down the mat edge. "Feed yourself? The Kan family will feed you as long as you are still our daughter-in-law. Why do you need to go around like a woman who pāotóulòumiàn?" Wengui stressed pāotóulòumiàn, which means "go out to be seen in public" and is usually used to refer to women in a negative light.

Women were traditionally required to stay home and avoid contact with men other than close family members. Pāotóulòumiàn was common after Mao's revolution, when women were widely encouraged to work outside the home. But still, the traditional concept remained.

Wengui believed in those old values, that a wife was the property of her husband and his family. And Baba was not helpful. He was an obedient first son. A thin, hairy man, Baba had eyes that always looked at the ground when he spoke to his father—a sign of respect and meek, filial piety. He was afraid of Grandfather Wengui, but also cared too much about what people thought of him. Speaking up for his wife—or showing affection toward his wife or child—could damage a man's reputation, and he did not want to be a laughingstock.

Baba had a very good memory and did well in school. He had been accepted by a prestigious medical university to major in surgical science in 1977, but Wengui refused to let his son go, saying he could do better than being a doctor, who was no better than a patient's servant in Wengui's eyes. So he turned down the offer and took the exam again the following year. But even though he passed a second time, the local education bureau disqualified him from applying to university, scolding him for "wasting the education resources the previous year." In desperation and pain, Baba returned to the farm and followed in his father's footsteps.

But in private, Baba listened to my mother more than his family knew. It was Mom's idea for him to buy a tractor so that he could haul bricks from a factory in a neighboring province at a lower price, then sell them to nearby villages. It brought in additional income for the family.

Born in the village, Baba had automatically received a rural hukou, not an urban one. Hukou