The hot wind of July 1968 blew the smell of blood across Chongqing. After a brief break, the factional warfare escalated to a new height. With all the schools closed, Mother, an elementary school principal, spent most of her time at home. Worried by the armed fights, Mother sent my two other sisters to hide in Grandma’s home village more than four hundred kilometres down the Yangtze, and prohibited me from wandering the streets. She was, however, at a loss as to how to protect her oldest daughter, Ruo-Dan, a Red Guard in the Third Middle School.
When Ruo-Dan returned home one Saturday night in mid-July, I was overjoyed. She hadn’t been home for several weeks. All day Sunday I shadowed her, while she avoided being alone with Mother. She showed me a sword dance she had recently learned. She showed me how to jump up onto a table while keeping both feet together. When night fell and she was about to leave again, I asked her:
“Are you going to be back next Saturday”
“I’ll see...Oh yes! I have pictures to show you! I just took an entire roll last week but it will not be developed until Monday.”
My eyes widened. How did she take an entire roll of pictures I knew only a single way pictures could be taken, one at a time—by sitting on a bench in a photo studio.
“My troop has a 135 camera now and I got to play with it,” she added proudly. I was going to ask if she could bring the new toy home next week when Mother interrupted, calling Ruo-Dan by her baby name:
“Little Jia, with all this shooting going on, perhaps you should stay home...”
Ruo-Dan cut Mother short: “Ma, don’t worry. I’m not in the armed fighting group. Besides, didn’t you urge me to be active in the movement”
I walked with Ruo-Dan to the Number 2 bus line. I waved to her as the bus pulled out and told myself a week isn’t that hard to pass.
Two days later was July 16, the second anniversary of Chairman Mao’s famous swim, but I did not remember that. Those days I was exchanging paper-cut patterns with the neighbourhood kids and going to stationery stores to buy different colours of cheap waxed paper. Kids could always find entertainment, even in such a revolutionary storm, where practically everything was regarded as one of the “four olds—”old thought, old culture, old tradition, old habits—and had to be denounced. With the same fanaticism with which we had collected Chairman Mao’s photo buttons a year before, we now made, collected, and traded paper cut-outs of revolutionary heroes, flowers, animals, and landscapes. We would use a pencil to trace patterns on the back of pieces of waxed paper, then place the pattern on a wooden board and carefully cut along the lines with a woodcutting knife. We would show off our collections to each other. The one who collected the most patterns got the greatest admiration, regardless of which faction his or her parents belonged to.
