Paper Moon and Ivory Tower | Chapter One: Rusted Sickles and Broken Bowls
Written by MoonTing Li
When the pair of three-inch golden lilies was bound tight in the dying afterglow of the Qing dynasty, great-grandmother Ho could not have known that her deformed feet — arches crushed and layered with cloth until bone yielded to will — would cross four eras, pressing uneven prints of blood and sweat into the saline mud of the southern fields.
In 1927, the monsoon winds of eastern Fujian scattered burnt paper offerings across the ancestral hall. At twenty-six, she became a widow. Her husband died abruptly, leaving behind a single son, Yiqiao — six years old, no taller than the wooden bow used for fluffing cotton.
In an age when even shadows seemed thin enough to be washed away with a basin of water, she sat in the dim hall, saying little. She twisted hemp rope between her fingers, the dirt packed permanently beneath her nails. Land was her only faith. She did not understand the origins of class or the choreography of power. She knew only that sweet potatoes must be planted, and rice as well, if her children were to live.
The children who survived were tougher than custom itself.
When a boy was born, the midwives reached into the kitchen for a sickle — rusted, always rusted, the thicker the rust, the better. With a swift metallic snap, they severed the umbilical cord, so that the boy might inherit iron’s hardness. If the child was a girl, she was given only the shard of a broken porcelain bowl. Tetanus sometimes clenched newborn jaws into rigid silence, foam gathering at their lips, carrying off many sons despite the iron ritual. Still, the faith in rust endured. And even the girls who survived the bowl’s jagged edge were not guaranteed life; some were quietly drowned before they could form memory.
More than twenty years later, red flags of land reform were planted on the very hills where dead infants had once been buried. Poor peasants were granted fields. She watched as land once owned by gentry was remeasured, redistributed. For a brief moment, the air carried the scent of crushed grass and something like hope.
The women were gathered in the ancestral hall to learn their letters. She sat in the last row and, beneath the yellow tremor of an oil lamp, wrote her name for the first time — crooked, determined strokes that seemed capable of holding up half the sky. Next door, teachers who had trained in the Republican era remained in the village school, their speech still refined, their manner touched with scholarship. They planted the orthodox seeds of knowledge in soil that had known little but hunger. For more than a decade, basic education reached even the remotest hills, as though each village were ore repeatedly washed, waiting for gold.
Yet the warmth of landownership barely had time to settle before grain was demanded “without compensation,” surplus sold at artificially low prices. Mutual-aid teams became cooperatives. A second grandson, Ho Jianguo, was born.
When the winds of 1958 swept across the fields, they brought People’s Communes and carried away both rice and dignity. The carnival later called the Great Leap Forward carved a deep wound into the land they had briefly possessed. Pots and pans, anything that glinted with metal, were confiscated for backyard furnaces. The earth slipped from peasant hands like sand.
In the three years that followed, everyone starved to fill quotas that had never existed except on paper. In the commune canteen, the bottoms of the cauldrons grew thinner each day. On her bound feet, she moved countless times between field and ditch, searching for anything edible: sweet-potato leaves, wild grasses, even “Guanyin clay” — earth mixed with sawdust and rice husk to trick the stomach into silence.
The winter of 1961 came with a wind like steel needles piercing worn cotton jackets. Yiqiao fluffed cotton under a dim kerosene lamp, the wooden bow sounding thrum — thrum in the hollow echo of his empty stomach. He and his wife, Chen, twisted straw rope with bleeding fingers that cracked and reopened in the cold.
From communal dining to malnutrition, Chen’s legs swelled translucent, like pale radishes soaked in water. Each evening, the family of six divided a ration scarcely enough to notice. The eldest daughter, seven years old, glanced at the thin layer of white rice in her bowl and quietly poured it into her mother’s. She then claimed she was going to cut grass, and instead searched the heap of discarded fruit at the village entrance. She scraped away mold with her fingernails and swallowed the bitter-sour flesh, letting its burn in her throat distract from the deeper burn in her gut.
She and her younger sister never returned to school. Girls were paste, meant to seal the cracks in a household. They were labor, so that brothers might study.
A year after surviving the famine, the eldest son, Ho Jianye, waited anxiously for his university entrance results. A letter of admission — still fragrant with fresh ink — arrived at the village brigade. It was locked in a drawer, like a crane with broken wings. The explanation was simple enough: Yiqiao had once sold thread, chicks, ducklings to survive. These acts were now evidence of his “capitalist tail.”
Excellence without backing was the most glaring offense of all.
The entire family knelt before the commune secretary, foreheads striking the stone floor in unison. Mercy came — conditional. The university seat could be kept, but only upon payment of a fine.
Six hundred yuan.
In a time when a farmer might earn only a few yuan a year, it was a century of hunger.
Yiqiao sold the ancestral house, sold every chicken and duck, even piglets not yet grown. He borrowed from every relative and acquaintance. At last, his eldest son entered Shanghai — into hope — becoming a university student who received forty-eight yuan a month from the state.
Behind him, the family moved into ruins at the edge of the village. Broken walls, sheets of transparent plastic stretched overhead. Moonlight filtered through in an eerie blue-gray hue. When wind struck, the plastic rattled like restless bones. On rainy days, droplets drummed against it like marionettes cut loose from their strings.
In that blue-gray light, eleven-year-old Ho Jianguo sat over his textbook and wrote two characters again and again: robbery. The strokes were heavy, cutting through the paper as if they could tear open the night.
When the storm of the Cultural Revolution arrived, that word became evidence. A classmate reported him. He was labeled “red on the outside, white at heart” — outwardly a poor peasant, inwardly a counterrevolutionary. He was barred from regular middle school and sent to an agricultural school for the children of the “black categories.” In a former temple converted into classrooms, he learned to repair farm tools, yet could not extinguish his hunger for knowledge.
Why had his admired brother remained silent? A university graduate was a state cadre, someone with standing. Why had he never spoken for him? Was it fear of another crushing fine? Or had the instinct of self-preservation, the quiet calculation of the educated elite, settled into him alongside knowledge?
Then I will study on my own, Jianguo decided. Study what? Mathematics seemed the highest science he had known.
“Math is difficult,” his brother in university said. “You won’t manage.”
Psychology, then?
“There are no textbooks. It’s useless.”
Yet Jianye mailed him blueprints for vehicle models. Precision structures. Interlocking gears. In the darkness of ruin, they became light. By kerosene lamp, Jianguo carved wood scraps and hammered salvaged metal into shapes that resembled departure.
When his automobile models evolved into naval vessels, schools reopened. Though the system was truncated — six years of primary school, two each for middle and high — fewer students meant opportunity. At sixteen, Jianguo left the agricultural school and returned to formal education. His father muttered, “We already have a university student. If you study too, we lose another pair of hands.” Jianguo promised to rise two hours earlier each morning to twist hemp rope before school.
He twisted rope and assembled models for years. Upon graduation, his electric torpedo-boat model earned him a navy uniform during the PLA expansion. He boarded a southbound train to Humen Shajiao, joining the South Sea Fleet as a technical instructor specializing in fast-boat engines.
The first time he stepped onto a real torpedo boat, the models of his ruin years seemed to awaken. He did not need manuals. He could hear the language of the engine, feel the pulse of pressure within each cylinder.
Sometimes he carried with him the erhu from home and played The Moon Reflected on Second Spring in the cave where Lin Zexu had once stored cannons. Outside, the sea rolled in dark currents. Salt wind entered the cave mouth. Moss clung to the stone walls. Waves struck rock with muffled thunder. The erhu’s thin voice threaded through the damp air.
For the first time, Ho Jianguo did not feel like the poor boy from the ruins, nor the exiled son of a black category. He was helmsman of a new sea.