There was nothing about the older woman that the girl could remember: not her face, not her voice, not her full name. All she remembered was the pain. The pain that came every night, when the woman would wash her backside. Vigorously, the woman would scrub with her soapy hands, until all the girl felt was a white-hot pain. The pain was not a malicious one. Rather, it was a modicum of control in the woman’s life: to make something dirty clean again, to right a wrong. And so she scrubbed, every night, relentlessly.
When the baby girl was born, her parents had hired their neighbor, an older woman, to take care of the girl. The woman lived alone and was rumored to have been the concubine of a wealthy landlord, who fell under one of Mao’s Five Black Categories (地主). After the Communist Party took hold, the landlord was likely killed and the concubine was branded as a “bad element” (坏分子), another Black Category. The woman was forced into a life of public shame. There were times when the Red Guards would enter the woman’s home unannounced, drag her outside, and force her to publicly repent for her wrongdoings. Neighbors would collect outside and add their voices to the cacophony of verbal humiliation. Sometimes people would throw rocks or spit at her, their saliva transforming midair into venom. Afterwards, the woman would be released home, the crowd would disappear back into their homes, and the incident would evaporate into silence.
The girl’s parents paid the woman five dollars a month. They knew the woman would sometimes steal their rice or cloth stamps, but said nothing. While they withheld positive opinions towards her, they viewed her bad standing as a government branding rather than a character fault. In return, the woman took good care of the baby girl. Perhaps it was out of love, or simply out of necessity. Perhaps it was a mixture of both.
There was one night when the woman grew frustrated. She wanted to go home, but could not until the baby was asleep in her crib. The girl was restive and fussy, wailing loudly and endlessly. Exasperated, the woman forcefully set the baby down into the crib. She failed to notice the thimble sitting in the crib from the girl’s earlier playtime. Moments passed, and the cries halted. The woman looked into the crib and found the baby choking. A panic seized her and she plunged her fingers down the baby’s esophagus: desperately, blindly, grasping for the thimble. Eventually, her fingers made contact and she pried it out. The baby girl was completely purple in the face and drew raspy, irregular breathes. But she was alive. The woman sunk to the floor and wept. What would have happened if the baby had choked to death? If the government had found out? A bad element, now the murderer of a working family’s newborn child. She wept, for the baby’s life and for her own.
Three years later, when the baby girl had developed into a toddler and a younger sister had been born, the woman hung herself. No one knew exactly why she committed suicide because no one talked to her. She probably couldn’t take the public humiliations anymore, people would say. Yes, probably, others would reply indifferently.
This was a story about my mother, who was raised for three years by an older woman.
