"Don't write about it. It was past." Guo Guilan said. She came to the phone and interrupted Zhang Qingping when I asked about it in the Facetime interview. "It's dangerous."
"Hi grandma," I said, "don't worry. I won't get myself into trouble."
"We are very happy now. Now that's all that matters." she said. "What did you have for dinner?"
"Pork chop rice plate at a delicious restaurant around the campus." I said. "If I skip the ten years, I'll be writing about your marriage next. I remember that you two married with a whole bunch of people trying to stop you, right? And you two were the first free love couple of your village?"
"Yes." She said. "Father stared at me coldly and I knelt at him and took only a pair of shoes from that home." —I froze a little before realizing that she was telling a moment so vivid that she was sucked back into memories right as I asked about it. "I was so afraid I cried all night. I was scared of breaking up with my family because if we couldn't get married I would have nowhere to go. We had no place to sleep that night and begged for a relative to let me stay just one night. I had nightmares and woke. The moonlight was so bright I thought it was daytime. We decided to get the marriage license as soon as possible. In the morning. As soon as the Bureau was open."
"Did grandpa build your wedding house?" I asked.
"Yes-"
And she froze.
And she cried.
I pinched myself and panicked a little. It's 2023, it's been decades, but did I-
"I'm sorry," I said, "if you-"
"-We were so poor-" she suddenly yelled, "it was so exhausting-there was no place we could live-I'm so afraid-I'm so afraid we couldn't get a marriage license-we were both kids of black five categories. We didn't have a place to live-we begged for a waste house, there were coal wastes everywhere in the room it took days to clean. We lived there for months before the house we built was good to use-there was still a big hole when we moved in. We didn't have windows until your mother was born-we used poplar branches with newspapers instead. There were pits on our ground-when I gave birth the midwife was freaked out-all pits were filled with blood."
She calmed down a little more with every teary word spat out like a big round pearl. Buried decades ago. Buried like bullet shreds.
"I'm very satisfied with my life now, so I don't want to think of these things." She said.
"I'm sorry," I said, "thank you."
"I'm good my dear. Don't worry." She said. "Don't write about those years. It's dangerous."
"I won't get myself into trouble," I said, "but you are a miracle. I want to record it. I'm just writing for an assignment." I guess.
"Assignment is fine, but don't publish it. Politics are dangerous." She said.
"I will keep myself safe. I won't write about politics too much." I said. "I just want to record your lives. It's just…History is always haunted by politics. Your stories are always compiled with history."
"Don't follow your dad's example too much. It's very dangerous."
"Okay." I said. My dad was a journalist in China who now has quitted and become a lawyer when he found more and more of his journalist friends went to jail. But I am my dad's daughter. My dad is his father's son. His father, Shen Boai, is a miracle, a counterrevolutionary and rightist who survived and wrote a memoir of his experience in the Cultural Revolution. Cuo Tuo Po Jiu Shi. "Cuo Tuo" means "wasted years" and "Jiu Shi" means old tales. Old tales in those wasted years, he wrote.