Nests With No Birds
A starkly vivid memoir of life in Mao’s China
Emily Wu grew up in Maoist China, a place where lives were steered by the political winds. But in her vivid new memoir, “Feather in the Storm” (336 pages. Pantheon Books), she gives those forces names and faces, hands and voices. It’s the difference between knowing that 38 million people died during the four years of Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, and knowing that one night a starving little boy was slowly fed, as candy, a small squirt of toothpaste by his older sister.
At the start of Wu’s tale, her father–a professor of English who had studied in America–has just been released from prison, where he had been held as an “anti-revolutionary intellectual.” Three-year-old Wu, who had been living with her grandmother, is spirited back to Hefei to join her mother and brothers. The family has been labeled “black” for their “rightist or anti-revolutionary leanings.” Unable to join the Communist Party, they are subject to suspicion, random humiliation and even torture. When the student Red Guards seize power, they revel in tormenting former teachers and landowners as part of their “ideological cleansing.” Wu’s parents have little choice but to express a sincere desire to be reformed and to keep as low a profile as possible. Education degenerates to the rote memorization of quotations from Mao’s Little Red Book; works considered bourgeois, such as “Gulliver’s Travels” and “David Copperfield,” are burned or used as toilet paper.
Throughout the narrative, co-written with Larry Engelmann, the simple yet exquisite details of Wu’s life create a layered, broad picture of Mao’s China: an 8-year-old Wu and her friend weave a bird’s nest out of grass, imagining the birds that will come and lay their eggs in it. But in reality, Wu writes, “There were almost no birds in the city. Eight years earlier, a fanatical campaign had succeeded in exterminating wild birds in the cities and countryside because Chairman Mao believed they were pests that ate crops that might otherwise be consumed by people.” And then comes another twist: when a final exuberant toss lands the nest on one of the meanest Red bullies in the school, it provokes months of vengeance by the bully’s family against the girls.
Wu’s family is repeatedly separated and united, often in different combinations. Her father is allowed to teach, then censored and imprisoned or sent off to do manual labor. But they survive through improvisation, luck and strength. The years spent in the remote village of Gao may be the worst, for it’s here we encounter a particularly despicable character named Old Crab, the alcoholic Party leader who constantly waves a copy of the Party rules–though he cannot read them–and reminds the villagers, “I can have you shot.”
The book ends in 1976, when Mao dies and Wu is finally given a chance to break free of the remote mountain villages where she’d been sent to work in rice fields and then teach. She can even attend Anhui Teachers University, where her father once taught. Throughout this compelling work, her voice is quiet and steady, underscoring the violent capriciousness of Wu’s childhood under Mao. By the end, we’re more than readers; we’ve become her witnesses.
Copyright 2006 Newsweek: not for distribution outside of Newsweek Inc.
