Xiao Ning

Andrea Rix '22

YOUNG BREEZE, KATELYN WANG '23

Xiao Ning

Andrea Rix '22

Rice seeds hurricane around her shins as her little feet drag through the muddy water. Tidy braids hanging, she balances on a soggy berm with her woven basket full of seeds, traveling along the perimeter of the field until she nears the next planter. Wincing as the hem of her pants soak, she lowers herself into the dusty brown water and wobbles over to him, placing a handful of seeds in his outstretched hand. Gazing up, she recognizes his stern face before he hunches over again to force the new seeds down into the soil. Perhaps he came from the same building in Beijing where she and her father had lived. Perhaps their beds sit near each other in the same corner of the communal straw hut where they now live. Either way, his severe eyebrows and protruding cheekbones remind her that she is not at home.

In the east, the sun’s warmth begins to poke out above the terraced hills and brush her porcelain cheeks. She pulls herself out of the water, avoiding the thick-bodied leeches that wait to plant themselves on her thin legs, and starts the one hour trek to school. She has walked this route alone in silence an immeasurable number of times: through the dense patch of tilted, wet trees with drooping, oval-shaped leaves; past the small village of Cao Peng peasants’ huts and the one tattered old lady who sits each morning at the corner of two paths, eyes stiff and face splashed with dirt; over the stone bridge that hovers above rapids of gurgling, brown floodwater. Toes sore and stomach jabbing, she arrives at the thin wooden schoolhouse – the only room with a non-dirt floor in the entire village – before the sun has climbed too far over the trees. An orderly man at the front of the schoolroom clamors on about the teachings of Chairman Mao as droplets of cold water threaten to leak through the damp ceiling.

The clouds have been plotting all day and by the time she leaves the classroom, huge droplets of water pound the thick mud and splatter over her back. Her boots, far too wide for her little feet, cling to the wet earth. The other children, all six- or seven-years-old with the same battered quietness as the old lady at the village corner, diffuse across different dirt paths until she is alone again, accompanied only by the click of her boot’s suction in the mud.

At night, the wind and rain thump on the loose straw ceiling, leaking cold drops of water on her cotton cover and shiny black hair. She hasn’t seen her father in nineteen days, and she closes her eyes to imagine that she lays once again in the warm bottom bunk of her bed in Beijing, enveloped in brown by its strong wooden frame. Today is her sixth birthday. She has been here a year.

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They called my mother Xiao Ning, “xiao” meaning small in Mandarin. Her pants always draped past her small feet and the curvature of her small hands never fit quite right into her father’s rough ones. On May 7, 1966, Chairman Mao declared that “the intellectuals should be sent to the countryside to get ‘re-educated,’” and at once, the air above Peking University had begun to howl. Three cold nights after these words, her father, a well-known professor of Southeast Asian History, arrived at the University daycare with a backpack and dragged her little hand outside toward a long train packed with the warmth of hundreds of other families. For a full day and night, the grumbling train lugged them towards Jiang Xi province, and when they arrived, she saw only a wet, green landscape with an outhouse, two battered dirt paths, and a half-built straw hut. Their destination seemed more empty rolling hills than forced labor camp, but still her mind danced with the thought of returning home to the cobblestone streets of Beijing. Instead, the officials sent her father to labor on the other side of the town, and she would remain there for two years– there alone in cold straw huts, dirty outhouses, perimeters of rice paddies, muddy trails to school.

By the time they boarded the growling train back home, her father, already 55 years old, ached with the pain of carrying heavy stones for the last two years. Her mother had left long before the labor camp at Li Yu Zhou, so Xiao Ning returned home to a father now embittered for life, a bookish old father who spewed hot remarks from trenches he harbored in his throat, a battered-down father with a bad temper, a violent father who’d strike the only child his crusted heart ever loved.

Twenty years later my mother found herself sitting on a public bus in Lincoln, Nebraska, an undergraduate student studying biochemistry. Her father had passed a few months before, tearing at a piece of her heart she had long considered defective. Now, a smiling woman in her fifties glanced at her from two seats away, reeking of American apple pie and cheap holiday cranberry perfume. Partially due to the shock of my mother’s pitch black hair on the bus full of light-headed Nebraskans, the woman was impelled to prod at my mother’s silence, questioning her about her major, her “origin,” her goals, her life.

“Who is your family, dear?” asked the white-haired woman. My mother paused for a moment. “I don’t have any.”

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My mother told me all of this one autumn night when I was twelve years old– the labor camp, the bitter father, the public bus. The next day, I came home from school teary-eyed and red-faced. My best friend had made a point of sitting away from me at lunch because I had a forty-second conversation with her crush the day before. I wanted to bolt to my mother’s room, to crawl into bed with her and feel her warm hands on my cheeks, to hear her smooth voice brush against my childish cries. But as I turned the corner to her bedroom, I pictured her frost-nipped cheeks at six years old through the Jiang Xi winter snow, the way her black braids soaked when she leaned down to fill her basket with water from the river, the helplessness in her little black eyes as they took her father from her. My feet swiveled and I turned back to my room, eyes like wet sponges and throat all aflame.

Months later, I lay staring at the stained ceiling of a stuffy dorm at camp. I felt lonely– the kind of lonely where I could laugh around a circle with my friends, lay beside them in a cramped room at night, and still feel like the sole human on campus. I longed for home. But was my mother not homesick walking along rice fields, traveling on noisy trains, or wandering alone in America? Was she not lonely staring at the ceiling of that dripping straw hut, little shoulders shivering in the cold? I turned over my phone, her contact still open but now dimmer, and closed my eyes.

For years, I wiped my tears before I came through the garage door, turned on the bathroom fan to muffle my guilty cries, and swallowed down the hot coals in my throat. The lump of embers swelled with the flames of a mean glance in a school hallway, a single point off on a math test, a lackluster birthday, a summer spent buried in my room, an island of alienation halfway between China and America, a growing dislike toward the girl I saw in the mirror – all the sparks I shoved down because I couldn’t bear to tell my mother, whose struggle would laugh at the sight of mine. But now, on a warm summer night on the creaky porch of a vacation rental cabin in Big Bear, the fiery lump in my throat is threatening to kill me.

My mother sits on a plastic chair opposite me, under the open night sky. Between us, some dead ram’s horns mounted between the sliding glass doors jab out at the dry air at unsettling angles, just beneath the yellow porch light summoning moths out of the black sky. In the reflection of the flickering light off her glossy, dark eyes, I see the silhouette of a little girl, her fragile arms dangling around a woven seed basket, leeches circling her legs like sharks. I want to reach into those black eyes and grab the girl by her shoulders, tell her that she will see her father again, that she will sleep in a room with a floor and ceiling, that one day she will have a family of her own and never feel lonely again. Instead, the fire in my throat pulses and burns until one of the flames strikes the roof of my mouth.

“Mom,” I say. She flicks her eyes towards me, just as startled as I am at this sudden tear in the silence.

“Yes, An?”

“Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I feel like I am looking at somebody else.” We sit in the stunning silence of this declaration for ten seconds before the fire in my throat flares out again and suddenly I am vomiting up words.

“Like when I look in the mirror, I just see a mess of limp hair, pale skin, tiny eyes, the bags below them, the scar on my chest. And I don’t even know what I look like anymore because again and again I cut myself up into all these tiny, demented pieces that clash and scrape against one another. And I just want to remember how I looked at myself when I was a child, how I loved my little brown eyes and skinny arms, how I always wanted to smile at the sight of me.” At once, the words stop. In the stillness of the air, I can hear my mouth buzzing. My eyes, stunned wide open, cling themselves to a crooked tree on the other side of the mountain. A moth lands on the arm of my chair. As I finally drag my dripping eyes back up to my mother’s, I expect to find the silhouette of Xiao Ning in their darkness. But instead, the reflection of the little girl vanishes from her eyes. And behind her irises, decades of pain disappear: the chilled nights spent under wet blankets in Jiang Xi, the mud in her shoes at Li Yu Zhou, her father’s harsh words and the bruises on her arms at Peking. It all bubbles away and now she is only looking at me.

“I love you. I love your eyes and your bags and your scar. And I promise that you will too one day. I promise that you will become a child again.”

Her eyes get glossier and glossier until a tear drops from the inner corner, rolling down between the frame of her black hair, still just as black as the day her father taught her to cook around an open coal fire. She stretches out her frail arm towards me, as if to drop rice seeds in my cupped hands, and I squeeze it tightly as we remain in silence under the dry air.