Not So Long Ago 4

When Zhang Qingping swam in the Yellow River, his father was working on the farm as an accountant of a cigarette factory. He was wronged, accused of corruption, and was put to jail again in 1960. He was released one year later with a terrible physical state and an incredibly stable mental state. The mental state was somewhere between desperation and indifference. A petrified desperation, I would say, with not a single flare of expectations. Expectations are the source of pain. A man with no expectations could not be harmed the same way a dead man could not be killed.

On page 20 of the God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy writes, "He didn't know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough."

So it goes. 

In 1961, they left Ningxia because Zhang Xinshu wanted to die in his hometown. Zhang Qingping's sister stayed. They packed at midnight because Ningxia wouldn't let them go. Most luggage was carried by the 12-year-old Zhang Qingping because Zhang Xinshu was skeleton thin and coughed a lot. His younger brother, the five-year-old Zhang Yu, had only his quilt to carry. They left quietly from the hut and walked along the Baotou-Lanzhou railway track. They walked all night.

"It wasn't that long," my grandfather said on the phone. When I called to interview him, he didn't pick up. When he called back, he called Facetime and was holding the phone so near his face I could only see his forehead and left eye in the camera. "About sixteen or eighteen miles, I guess?"

"Did you walk all the way to Henan?"

"No, we took the train to Baotou first. When we were walking, your grandpa Yu dropped his quilt and said it was too heavy. He just dropped it on the road without saying anything! I looked back and found his hands empty. I asked, 'where's your quilt?' and he replied, 'I dropped it.'"

So Zhang Qingping and his family walked along the railway track all night from Ningxia to an unknown train station where my grand-grandma, Guo Xueshu, lied to the conductor and got tickets from their pity. They then took the train to Baotou and bought the tickets to Henan, Huixian from there. When they were silently walking, the five-year-old Zhang Yu often fell behind, and the family would stop to wait for him to catch up from time to time. They might have gotten too exhausted to turn around and look at him clearly, so none of them was sure when exactly he lost his quilt. 

"Wait my grand grandma walked, too?" I asked, "didn't she have foot binding?"

"Of course she did," my grandpa said, in the same voice he told the tales of the drowning and the frogs. "She was a small-feet-old-granny. She had lotus feet."

"How am I supposed to translate this," I said. Foot binding is an old, disgusting Chinese tradition to break young girls' feet and bind them tight with cloth so that the feet would stay small as they grew up. Because small feet were thought beautiful. "Lotus feet". The tradition had been discarded around 1949, so there are no young girls with such small feet anymore. There are only small-feet-old-grannies, a collection of the last generation of girls ruined by this tradition. Guo Xueshu, born in 1914, walked eighteen miles with a pair of feet that were smaller than palms.