Wild Ginger by Anchee Min Read Free Book Online Page A

letter as she went to wipe the table—"your father's. Said he's not allowed to return until New Year's."
    I was greatly disappointed. But it was not the first time I'd experienced such disappointment. I tried to remember what my father taught me, to think positively. "So Wild Ginger can stay here then. She can sleep in Father's spot."
    Mother pulled me aside and whispered, "We've run out of food. I have sold everything. I was hoping your father..."
    "Mama, we can just keep eating one meal a day and drinking water when we're hungry. I'll go to the market to search through the garbage bins. I always get lucky on Tuesdays. They have new workers then who prepare the vegetables carelessly. There are a lot of half-rotten leaves thrown away. They are perfectly edible!"
    "I am not sure. Your little brother has a bladder infection. The hospital bill took all my salary this month and the money I had borrowed from your aunt. Your grandmother refuses to come to visit because she sees that we can't afford an extra mouth."
    "How many yuan do we have left?"
    "Six."
    "We've got seven days left in the month. Six divided by ... it's eighty-five cents per day. I will try to manage it. Twenty-four cents for the noodles, twenty cents for rice, fourteen cents for squashes, three cents for vegetables, three cents for beans..."
    "Are you feeding ants?" Mother shook her head.
    I kept going. "One cent for scallions. And Mama, we have about twenty cents left for meat!"
    "Twenty cents for meat!" Mother laughed bitterly. "That will be paper thin."

    The light outside the windows had disappeared. Mother hurried us to go to sleep. We all lay down next to one another. Wild Ginger was sandwiched between me and my younger sister.
    It was close to midnight when Wild Ginger woke me up. "Are you citing the quotations again?" I asked. She didn't answer but continued, "'...To attack the reactionary we must be merciless, we must not think of them as humans but wolves, snakes, and locusts. It is either us or them..."' Her eyes were tightly closed.
    I gently pinched her nose. She stopped reciting. I tried to
go back to sleep. The moonlight bathed the room in blue. Everything was visible. My brother's Mao statue stood on top of the closet. The Mao portrait stared down from the wall. We had Mao stuff in every corner of the house. Portraits, nine of them. Mao's image was printed on book covers, closets, blankets, windows, towels, plates, cups, containers, and bowls. I was getting sick of staring and being stared at by Mao all the time. But I dared not complain. Mother had taught me the ancient wisdom—"Disaster comes with your tongue." It was especially true today. Any neighbor could be a watchdog for the government. If we had no Mao portraits on the wall we would have been considered anti-Maoists. I remembered Mother once hung a colorful picture of children playing in a lotus pond on the wall. It had green leaves and pink flowers. I asked her where the picture was and she wouldn't give me a straight answer.
    My eyes landed on the floor where my father's letter lay. Mother had been reading the letter over and over. I began to imagine what my father was doing at this moment. He would be missing us. He was serving his punishment for being outspoken. He was a teacher in Chinese history. The party secretary in his work unit reported to his superiors that he had views which contradicted Mao's teaching. The next thing we knew he was named a "dangerous thinker." Since he'd been sent to the labor collective, his sixty-nine-yuan salary had been cut down to fifteen yuan. He sent thirteen yuan home every month.
    What would he be eating? Yecai? I imagined my father
thinner now. He was a good father and had a great sense of humor. In his letter he called himself "a phoenix who got his feathers pulled, thus uglier than a hen, but still a phoenix." My mother had the opposite character. She was a worrier. She called herself "a headless fly."
    In her sleep Wild Ginger's hands