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A Happy Episode of My Life

A Movie Ticket

A Pink Dream- written in Chinese

Five Ladies of GVSU

My First Vacation in America

My Grandfather's Art Pieces

Reminiscences on Moon Cake Festival

This is My Mother

Yunnan- a web project for a class

Moon Cake Festival, also called the Mid-Autumn Festival, falls in the middle Autumn on the Chinese lunar calendar. It is a traditional festival of family reunion. Everyone always tries to go home to enjoy this special occasion with their family members, eating the delicious moon cakes, chatting the happy family things, telling the moon stories to children and appreciating the bright full moon. What a wonderful family! Even the immortals pay more admiration to the human beings.

This is the first Chinese festival since I came to America. I am not able to go home to see the full moon with my family members. Sitting under the moonlight, I stare at the moon. The same moon I remember from China, bright and big, makes me have different feelings. Alone now in a strange country, I feel myself a stranger. On festival occasions I doubly miss my family members.

The happy families are always the same. The unhappy families are absolutely different. There are many families who will have no reunion on this day.

Besides my parents and sisters, I still miss her, a person I keep as one of my own family members in my heart. She was my neighbor. I thought she was a strange lady when I met her the first time so many years ago, her face blackened with burnt lard, her messy unkempt hair coiled up on top of her head, her eyes looked very angry to everyone. The first day when my father and I arrived in the village, she watched us move into our room, standing for hours in front of her room, her eyes never moving away from me. The children in the village called her lunatic Cheng. I was uneasy to have such lady as my neighbor. Her eyes, always staring at me, made me be scared.

The first few days of country life were exciting for me. I hated city life, too much pollution and noise. It was a bleak and desolate village far from the city but the air was clean and the sky clear. The impoverished soil and uncultivated land told me it was a poor and backward area. But the view was so beautiful, especially the river with its crystal water gently flowing behind our room. A small elegant bridge over the river linked my way to school. It seemed that the bridge was the unique decoration of the village. I loved to hear the murmuring stream at night. I often stood on the bridge and looked down into the water. The water was so clear that I used it as a mirror, especially at the time of the full autumn moon.

At first I did not know why my father and I moved to this village. Soon I realized that coming to this village was a punishment when my classmates called me little anti-revolutionary. My father was suspected to be the big anti-revolutionary during that period called the Great Cultural Revolution. I didn’t know what my father had done wrong, but I knew my problem was I have the same surname as my father. So I was forced to come to the village with my father to accept the re-education from the village’s poor peasants.

The life in the village was becoming harder and harder for me. Not long after arriving in the village I had to drop out of school and help my father do a lot of farm work. We needed to do this in order to support ourselves, it was a lot different then life in the city. As a six-year old girl, everyday I was to go to the mountains to collect wood for cooking our food and heating our room. After carrying the wood back I would go to the fields and gather grass for the pigs. Rain or sunshine, summer or winter, even on the weekends I did this work.

One day, my father told me he would go to a far place for one month. He would be burning limestone for iron making and he made me promise me to take care of myself. He left early the next morning before I woke up. When I got up, I was very hungry and ready to cook my breakfast. Woo, what smelled so good? I asked myself as I went to the kitchen. A bowl of warm noodles with eggs was on the table. I thought that my father had cooked for me. I ate quickly and went back to work. When I returned home late in the afternoon I found a bowl of rice with pork and vegetables on the table. In rural China at that time two meals a day were all anyone had. I was always hugury. I ate the different food for one month, unknowing where it was from or who had cooked it.

A few days before the Moon Cake Festival my father came back bringing a big moon cake. It was not as good as the ones I had eaten before, but better than none, anyway. At least my father and I could be reunited on this special day. The moon was bright and big. Looking up at the moon in the sky, I thought of my mother who had to divorce my father for political reasons. Tears on my face, I walked to the small bridge unconsciously. When I looked at myself in the mirror of the water, I was flabbergasted by the reflection of another with an excellent figure in the water mirror. It was a body of proportional build with long black hair as soft as silk, half submerged in the water. A few tears were hanging on her long eyelashes. It seemed like a fairy maiden from a children’s story had came to the earth. To satisfying my curiosity, I walked down to the bridge quietly. It was Mrs. Cheng. She was so different, as if she weren’t the same person I had met so often. At that time, she turned her head and smiled to me. What a charming smile, it drove my scariness away. I never saw her so good-looking before or later. She touched my shoulder softly and told me the story about her husband and herself. Her husband was a musician and she was a dancer. The music composed by her husband had been considered as a melody of capitalism at that time. He was forced to accept the re-education in the village a year before we did. She could stay in the city if she would have drawn a demarcation line with her husband by divorcing him. But she didn’t. Her husband was not strong and suffered severely from both the physical and mental stress of living in the village. He committed suicide by jumping into the river. She became very silent and did not speak, she used the burnt lard to blacken her face, she wore shabby clothes and never washed or combed her hair. From her eyes, I could tell she was not mad. I mentioned the mysterious food, she just nodded her head.

After we met by the river we got along very well. Our two sad hearts were getting closer and closer. She taught me dancing and singing. I brought life’s joys to her too. When Moon Cake Festival came the next year she cooked very delicious moon cakes for me and my father. Two unhappy families had a happy Moon Cake Festival that year. I recall that night every full moon night.

One year later before the Moon Cake Festival came my father’s mishandled case was redressed. We could go back to the city. The day we were leaving, I couldn’t say good-bye to Mrs. Cheng, she wasn’t in her room when I went there.

The tractor took us far away from the village. As we were leaving I looked back, glancing one more time at the village where I had spent two years of my childhood. The bridge caught my eye in the distance, a familiar figure standing on the bridge waved a red scarf to me.

That year we had a real family reunion on Moon Cake Festival. I couldn’t forget Mrs. Cheng. She would be lonely on that day. I kept asking my father if Mrs. Cheng’s case could be redressed. My father told me it could be but needed time. There were many mishandled cases during that period in China, they would be resolved one by one.

Spring came early the next year accompanied not only with fragrant flowers but news of Mrs. Cheng. A local newspaper reported that a piece of music composed by her husband won the National Golden Reward and she would get a large sum of money. Their cases were considered to have been completely wrong. They should not have been banished to the countryside. She would come back to the city, to her home. I was very excited and couldn’t wait to see her. I went to the Song and Dance Ensemble where she worked. The people who went to pick her up had just come back from the village. I didn’t see her. Someone said she had died of sadness. Someone said she disappeared mysteriously and someone said she had gone with the river.

© 1996 Yuxuan Gao