Excerpt from Lake with No Name by Diane Wei Liang, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

For my parents, the possibility of living together in Shanghai after the camp gave them strength to endure the hardship. Certain promises were given to my mother before she came to the camp that if she could show the Party her willingness to "swallow bitterness and endure hard work," she might be able to gain the necessary approval and be allowed to move to Shanghai. Coming to the camp, however, had been particularly hard for my mother. A few months earlier, on 3 September 1969, my little sister, Xiao Jie, was born. Guessing the probable conditions at the camp, my parents decided that it would be better to leave my sister in Shanghai with my paralyzed grandmother and a nanny.

The situation was made worse for my mother by the fact that she was not allowed to go to Shanghai to see her child. There were two reasons. First, my sister's Hukou was not in Shanghai although she was born there. Her Hukou had to be with my mother's, which was in Beijing. Second, because my father had now "moved away" from Shanghai, mother had no official connection with the city any longer.

Mother missed Xiao Jie terribly. In the night, after a long day's hard work moving and laying bricks, Mother would lie on the bed, talking to my father of her second daughter, counting the months since her birth, wondering whether she had cut new teeth and imagining how she might look now. As the rain beat down on summer leaves outside, she would weep while remembering the day she last saw her newborn child.

A few months after my parents and I arrived at the labor camp, my father made his first trip to Shanghai to visit his mother and more important to check on my sister. He took a long-distance bus for two days to Chongqing, a city at the other end of Sichuan province and a port on the Yangtze River. There, he caught a messenger boat going down the majestic Yangtze to Shanghai. The boat journey took another four days. When he came back, he brought with him the most beautiful things I had ever seen: candies in colorful wrapping paper, and cookies with a heavenly smell.

"Listen now, Wei, these candies and cookies need to last for a long time...until the next time I go to Shanghai. Every week you will get your share, but no more." Baba put the candies and cookies in two aluminium tins and locked them up in the cabinet beneath the desk drawer.

For the next weeks, my biggest joy was to receive candies and cookies from my parents, until one day when I made an amazing discovery. I found that if I took out the drawer on top of the locked cabinet, I could reach down for the tins. I ate as much and as quickly as I could. My parents finally discovered what I'd been up to when they found the tins empty. I still remember the way my mother and father looked at me, sighing. I realized then that I'd made them sad, because they were not able to give me more for many months to come.

When winter came again, Baba made another trip to Shanghai. My parents and I walked down the mountain trail, on a clear and fresh morning, to send Baba to the bus stop. Like local Miao children, I carried my tiny backpack-style basket on my shoulders. I had saved up four tangerines, allocated by the work unit, for my father to take on his journey. My heart was filled with expectation and anticipation of what he might bring back this time.

One day, what felt like months after Baba had left for Shanghai, I returned home from kindergarten to find the rooms we lived in crowded with people. There were loud voices and laughter. I walked into the crowd rather curious and was happy to see my father standing in the center of the room. It turned out that he had just come back from Shanghai.

"Come over, Wei," a loud and large neighbor said, almost in my face. "Come and see your little sister."

Although I knew I had a sister, I searched hard through my memory but could not remember anything about her. Only later on in the evening, after much prompting from my parents, did I vaguely remember leaning out of a window and seeing my mother come home with a new baby.

Copyright © 2003 by Wei Liang