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by themselves. Suddenly I saw a familiar figure moving with a broom.
    I don't remember how long I stood by the window. My body hung halfway over the sill. The day was slowly dawning. I heard the steps of the soldiers of the Shanghai Garrison Group jogging. Their barracks were about a mile down
the street. The sound was crisp, like hard brushes scrubbing woks.
    I didn't realize that Mother had been standing behind me until she softly asked me what got me up so early.
    "Wild Ginger is sweeping the lane for her mother."
    Mother came behind me and looked. She sighed deeply.
    I closed the window and went to put on my clothes and shoes.
    "Where are you going?" Mother asked.
    "Mama, may I take the broom with me?"
    "It is the work for ... enemies," Mother warned. "Don't get yourself in trouble."

    She was wearing a cloth surgical mask and her mother's indigo canvas jacket with worn corners. She had two sleeve cases on each arm and was in her own army boots. I approached her quietly. She collected the garbage, swept it into a bag, and then carried it to a bin. Lifting the lid, she deposited the trash. She then laid her broom on the ground and went to an old well and looked in.
    "Wild Ginger," I called.
    She turned around. Her eyes asked, What are you doing here? When she saw that I was holding a broom she understood. She took her mask off. "This is none of your business, Maple."
    "You won't be able to cover the lanes all by yourself before school."
    "Go home, please."
    "What are you doing sticking your head in the well?"
    "I'm trying to fetch a dead cat."
    "Dead what?"
    "Cat, a cat."
    "It drowned?"
    "It's some activist's trick to give my mother a hard time. They want to be able to say that she loafed on the job, on the cleaning, so they can torture her more."
    "What if you just leave it there?"
    "It will rot and smell."
    "It's not your fault."
    "Like I said, my mother is in no position to defend herself."
    With two brooms working like a pair of giant chopsticks, we got the dead cat out of the well. After we deposited it in the garbage bin Wild Ginger went on to finish sweeping the rest of the lane. I went to the other end. I swept quickly. All my joints participated in a race against the breaking daylight. Soon my arms were sore and blisters were forming on my palms. My shoes were wet from dew. Finally, Wild Ginger and I met in the middle. It was six-thirty. The sun was up.
    "See you at school," I said.
    She nodded and turned her face away.

    Each dawn I came out. We met in the darkest moment of the day. Wild Ginger no longer rejected my help. In school we stuck together like one person and her shadow. In Hot
Pepper's eyes, we had become a two-member gang. She had stopped attacking me and Wild Ginger. It was hard to believe that Hot Pepper didn't call her wolfy brothers. I guessed that, after all, her brothers couldn't come to the school to fight every day. Hot Pepper had learned that Wild Ginger was a desperado who would risk her life to win a moment.

6
    The news of the Americans' invasion of Vietnam was on everyone's lips. Taking it as a threat to China, Mao called for "an entire nation in arms; every citizen a soldier!" Within a week our school was turned into a war camp. Every class became a military training program with soldiers from the People's Liberation Army as instructors. We learned wrestling and bayonet stabbing. To build up our strength, the school set out on a month-long hiking trip called "the New Long March." It was an eight-hour-a-day, weight-carrying trip around Shanghai's suburbs. We would pass places like Xinzhuang, Pingzhuang, Lihu, Minghang, then take the ferry across the Huangpu River and travel into the Fengxian agricultural area.
    Our bags were thirty-pound bundles stuffed with blankets and necessities for the month. By the time we reached Xinzhuang, many of us had blisters on our feet and shoulders, and severe back and neck aches. The army instructor
taught us how to fix our blisters. At every break, I