The Magic of a Bowl of Meat

# The Magic of a Bowl of Meat

It was in the early 1970s, during the Cultural Revolution. Meat was very rare at that time; everyone had only half a kilogram of meat ration each month. Even if you had the ration ticket, there was no guarantee that there was meat to buy with it.

My father worked as a labourer in a steel factory. At lunchtime one day, the factory's canteen offered a bowl of 'twice-cooked pork' (huiguorou) to each worker — extra meat without need for a ration ticket. My father didn't eat it. He kept it in a round metal bowl. In the afternoon when he finished work, he brought it home to share with the whole family — my mother, me and two younger sisters.

For many years, I have wondered how my father brought that bowl of meat back home on his bicycle — a bicycle so old that it was hard to decipher its trademark. It was five kilometres from the factory to his home, on bumpy roads. He had neither plastic bag nor food box, only a round metal bowl without a lid. He clamped the bowl to the rear bike rack with a cheap clamp. But he managed to ride home without losing a single piece of pork.

I have always wondered how.

***

In 1962, just a few months after he married my mother, my father was sacked by the state-owned railway company where he worked. The terrible economic conditions during the Great Leap Forward meant there were no new railways to build, and the authorities sacked many workers. Some cried and pleaded for the company to keep them on. But my father simply packed his bags and left. He was tired of carrying the heavy cross of his class status within the company, and was not sad to go.

The communist authorities had divided everyone into different classes based on what they or their parents did before the new government came to power in 1949. My father's class status was classified as 'landlord', an enemy of communism, because his grandmother used to be a landlord. He was discriminated against because of it, but he worked quietly and his silence helped him avoid any serious persecution.

When he was sacked, though, he tore up all the landlord class status documents that the company had given him.

These documents were necessary to register for a residence card wherever he went. In Communist China during the Mao years, everyone was required to get a residence card from their local neighbourhood committee and local police station. Without it a person could not get food rations or apply for jobs in the district, and would eventually be driven away by the police.

My father didn't live with my mother, as his work had been wherever the railway was being built. After a journey of hundreds of kilometres, he arrived back in Zhaojia Town, Sichuan province, to join his wife. The first thing he did was try to register for his residence card. The head of the neighbourhood committee, Xu, refused.

'Where are your class status documents?' Xu asked.

'I lost them along the way,' my father answered.

'I can't register you without your documents.'

In fact, Xu believed that my father had been given severance pay by his company, and wanted a portion of the payment.

'You must have been paid good money after you were sacked,' Xu said. 'Can you lend me some money?'

My father was willing to give him some if it meant he could get his registration. But Xu wanted two hundred yuan. The total severance was just one hundred, and my father didn't have the money.

Later, my father heard that Xu had left the neighbourhood committee and been replaced. So he went to try again. The new head was less greedy than Xu and only asked my father to 'lend' him twenty yuan. My father gave the money over and finally got his residence registration.

At the local police station, an official called Niu was writing out the residence card. Birth date, birth place, class status — all had to be filled in.

'What is your class status?' Niu asked.

'I was a worker at a railway company,' my father answered.

Niu did not ask what he or his parents did before 1949. He just wrote 'worker'.

That single word changed everything. Workers were regarded as allies of the Communists. With one stroke of Niu's pen, my father was no longer a class enemy.

Xu was furious when he found out. He always suspected that my father's class status must have been landlord.

***

Although my father was registered, he still could not find a job in town. He decided to try the countryside, where he might find work as a farmer. A farmer's life was hard, but at least they would earn an income. He contacted several villagers, but none of them offered him work.

On the road one day, he saw a man repairing a millstone. He thought he could do that — he had done some stone repair work on the railway. So he bought some second-hand chisels, sharpened them, and in 1963 my father started work repairing millstones for farmers.

My family rented a room in an old house — fifteen square metres with shabby bamboo walls and a leaking tile roof. Every morning, at about 5:30, my father would get up and make breakfast for the whole family. By the time the rest of us were up, he was already out walking between the villages with his box of tools, calling out his daily chant: 'Millstone repairing, millstone repairing...'

Sometimes it was easy to find work, at other times difficult. When he repaired a millstone in a farmer's home he would have lunch with the farmer, but sometimes he couldn't find a job in the morning and had to go without lunch. Sometimes he had to walk twenty kilometres before he found work. Often he stayed in a farmer's home overnight and returned to us after several days.

Most of the time the farmers didn't have rice to eat, only mixed grains and vegetables. They rarely had cash, so they paid my father in grain, usually corn. Without this corn our family would not have had enough to eat.

My father had to be satisfied with this life. It was hard, but at least he could use his hands to earn a living. He dared not have any extravagant hopes. Although he was educated, he dared not admit it — educated people were persecuted. It was better to pretend to be illiterate, as long as the family could survive. So he would do strange things like hold a newspaper upside down, as if he were an illiterate peasant trying to show that he was educated.

Sometimes, though, he couldn't help himself.

Once the house owner's wife, Mrs Jiang, came to our home holding a sheet of paper. 'Could you help me write a letter to my brother?' she asked.

'No problem.' My father stopped what he was doing, cleared the mess from the small table, and reached under the bed. He brought out his writing brush and his glasses — both hidden there, as if they were contraband. He preferred the brush over the pen. If he was going to break his cover, he might as well show off his calligraphy.

'What beautiful handwriting you have!' Mrs Jiang said.

My father allowed himself a moment of pride. Then his smile faded.

'Don't tell anyone,' he said. 'Remember, I'm illiterate.'

Mrs Jiang winked. No one else in town knew. The Jiangs' friendship was important — it wasn't easy to find a room to rent.

Since his status was 'worker', my father didn't have to keep reporting to the Neighbourhood Committee, nor was he ordered to do volunteer work like other people with a bad class background. But the good times did not last long. In 1966, the Cultural Revolution began.

***

In those early years, rebel organisations formed among factory workers and staff at government offices, each calling themselves revolutionaries in the name of Chairman Mao. They fought each other with guns in the countryside, and my father tried to avoid them when he walked out to work. One day, he was captured by a rebel organisation. They said he must be a spy. He had to ask farmers to vouch that he had been working as a millstone repairman for years and was not a spy. Finally, they freed him.

The violence became ever fiercer. My father had no choice but to stay at home. He bought a second-hand bicycle and planned to ride it to look for work when the violence ended. At that time, a bicycle had to be registered by the authorities and the name transferred when it was sold.

Some of the rebel organisations had become the local authorities, and they often went into people's homes to check their residence cards in the middle of the night. If they found anybody whose name was not on a family's residence card, they would take them to the nearest police station.

The day my father bought his bicycle, they came in the night. As soon as they saw the bicycle, they asked my father to show the registration card for it. He explained that he had just bought it and hadn't had time to register it. The head of the group, a man named Zhao who used to be a cook, refused to hear his explanation and took the bicycle away.

After a couple of days getting the bicycle registered, my father eventually got it back.

One day, a 'big character poster' appeared on a public wall near my grandmother's home. It said that all those who worked on their own were regarded as capitalists and must report to the authorities. Over the evening meal at my grandmother's place, my parents and grandmother discussed the meaning.

'It shouldn't be a problem,' my father said. 'I'm just working to earn a living. I asked them to give me a job before but they didn't.'

'But the poster says clearly that if you are working on your own, that makes you a capitalist,' my mother said.

The next day, my father and other private workers went to the office to report. Zhao, the cook who had confiscated my father's bicycle, was in charge. It was an interrogation — sometimes involving torture. My father explained to Zhao that he used to be a railway worker but was dismissed.

'Is that true?' Zhao asked.

This question made my father nervous. If he asked the railway company to confirm that he had been a worker there, they might discover his old landlord class status. But if he didn't, nothing could prove he used to be a railway worker. Zhao changed the topic.

'What are you doing?' Zhao shouted. 'It's many years since you left the railway company but you're still working on your own!'

'No one offered me a job,' said my father.

'You're a speculator!' shouted the cook, his voice getting louder. Speculators were regarded as capitalists.

When my grandmother told me that some people said my father was a speculator, I was four years old and I didn't know what a speculator was. In Chinese the word for speculator, touji, sounds like 'stealing a chicken'. I thought some people must have accused my father of stealing a chicken.

From that time, my father and others who worked by themselves had to go to the office every day for re-education. Fortunately, because my father's class status was 'worker', they didn't torture him. One day a shoe repairman and some others burst into Zhao's office.

'What's wrong with us?' they asked. 'We just want to earn a living.'

At the end of the programme, Zhao declared that all private workers must go to the countryside to work as farmers, to prevent them from becoming capitalists.

My father knew how hard the farmer's life was. He thought his family wouldn't survive. So he refused to go. When Zhao asked him to hand over his residence card, he always made excuses.

In the end, a steel factory was built just outside town and needed casual labourers. The authorities organised for the remaining private workers to work at the factory.

It was this factory's canteen that, years later, would serve my father a bowl of twice-cooked pork. And it was on the bicycle — the same second-hand bicycle that Zhao had once confiscated — that my father would ride five kilometres home on bumpy roads, holding a lidless metal bowl steady with a cheap clamp, without losing a single piece of meat.

I still don't know how he did it. But I think by then he had a lot of practice at holding things together.