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sat down and took out my needles. Raising my foot, I poked through the blisters with a needle. After that I pulled out one of my hairs and routed it through the broken blister, then made a knot on each blister to keep the fluid draining until it dried up by itself. Soon my feet were full of mosquito-like hair knots.
    After the city scene faded, the countryside took over, but we were too exhausted to appreciate the landscape. We walked through the rice paddies, farmhouses, and animal barns longing desperately for the next break.
    The bundles on our shoulders were getting heavier. Hot Pepper tried to strike up a song to lift our spirits, but no one responded except Wild Ginger.
    Wild Ginger was walking behind me. It was the first time we were allowed to participate in a group activity. We were benefiting from Mao's new teaching, "To expand our force, we must unite with people of gray backgrounds, which include the children of the denounced." Wild Ginger was excited. She was singing loudly, "The sky is big but not as big as the power of the Communist party..."
    By evening a break was ordered. The school stopped in a village called Yichun. The peasants were ordered by their local party boss to provide us with rooms to spend the night. Our class got a coffin room. The empty coffin was for the family's great-grandfather. It was considered a blessing for a man to see his coffin made before he died. Hot Pepper was afraid of the coffin. She took the spot at the far
thest end of the room away from the coffin. Wild Ginger laid her stuff right by the coffin, and I took the space next to her. As we finished unpacking we heard a whistle. We were ordered to fetch yecai—leaflike grass—for dinner. Yecai was what the Red Army ate during Mao's Long March in 1934. The point was for us to taste the bitterness in order to deepen our admiration for Mao.

    Wild Ginger and I were assigned as a group to look for yecai. We set out toward the west end of a cornfield. Halfway across the field we were struck by a strange fragrance. As we followed the smell, we entered a leafy enclosure where yecai was growing everywhere. It was a thick-leaved plant with tiny yellow flowers on its top. The sun was setting. There was no one around. We started picking. Quickly we filled up our bags.
    The farmhouses with straw tops were dyed orange by the golden sunbeams. The large oil-bearing plants bent down heavily. The smell of yecai thickened. Wild Ginger and I decided to take a break. We put our bags to the side and sat down to enjoy the fragrance. Within a few minutes the sky turned dark and the stars began to glow.
    "Look at the moon." Wild Ginger pointed at the sky. "Like a guilty face it keeps burying itself behind the drifting clouds."
    "A face? Whose face?"
    "My father's," she giggled.
    "I don't think the face looks guilty," I said. "It looks rather sad to me."
    "Sad? Well, if only the moon could argue."
    "The air is sweet."
    "It's so quiet here."
    "Don't you feel like breaking the silence?"
    "Wanna sing?"
    "I don't have a good voice."
    "Who cares!"
    "I do. I would like to have a nice voice like Wild Ginger."
    "You know what my mother said? 'That French-head had a good voice.'"
    "You mean your father?"
    "My mother told me that he liked to put out the lights and sing in the dark."
    "Did you ever hear your father sing?"
    "I don't remember. My mother says I did. My mother sang me his songs. She wants me to remember him. But who wants to remember a reactionary?"
    "What about your voice?"
    "I sing all right ... Well, I love to sing, in fact."
    "Would you sing me something?"
    "Of course not."
    "You have shown me how your father looked, now if you sing I might get an idea of how he sounded."
    "I have to go, Maple. I have to go to the restroom badly. But there is no such place."
    "Just squat down. Do what the peasants do."
    Wild Ginger wandered around for a while and disappeared from my sight.
    I lay down on my back. The night was broad and wide. I
began to think