Katherine Read online

  “Striking and rich.”

  —The Denver Post

  “In Katherine the story charges forward with its own energy. But with Min, there is a second reward—her eloquent, passionate writing.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Many moments in this story are bound to amaze. . . . Katherine is a story of what happens when careless enthusiasm triggers a surge of emotion in hearts that are officially forbidden to feel anything. . . . It’s wrenching, melodramatic . . . yet real enough for both sparkling entertainment and deep, dark tragedy. Min’s simple recitation of events is made believable and entrancing by a poetic energy that always finds its mark.”

  —The Village Voice

  “Compelling . . . a powerful lesson in survival.”

  —Vogue

  “Searing, uncompromising prose . . . a tale of passion and betrayal.”

  —Harper’s Bazaar

  “We Americans talk about and value freedom, but readers who take up Anchee Min’s Katherine will surely understand it a little better. . . . Min does a fine, sensitive job of plumbing the chasm between cultures.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Superb writing . . . Katherine explores the complex hungers of the human soul caught up in the whirlwind of epic-making events.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

  “Lyrical prose with a distinct Chinese flavor makes Min’s first novel—and its times—even more poignant and resonant.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Fascinating.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Passion and emotion fill Min’s prose from start to finish.”

  —Yolk

  “Lyrical . . . a little dewdrop of a work [that] echoes the voice of a young woman painfully finding her way out of a terrible historical experiment.”

  —Library Journal

  PRAISE FOR

  Red Azalea . . .

  “Achingly beautiful . . . Min has created a powerful sense of life in China during that country’s most heartbreaking time.”

  —People

  “The first half feels like a coming-of-age story in the tradition of Anne Frank, unpretentious, observing, and ever so vulnerable. By the second half, we’ve descended into a Kafkaesque world, the ultimate in ‘political correctness,’ in which passions and loyalty are distorted into obsessions and vengeance. . . . Anchee Min shows us how easily one can become inhuman, yet how difficult it is to extinguish the human spirit. She relates with unflinching detail the small moments of a life gone mad and how she both grasps for love and betrays those who love her.”

  —Amy Tan

  “Stirringly operatic . . . a moving, powerful book.”

  —USA Today

  “Min’s writing flows as naturally as water . . . the most stunningly beautiful prose you could hope to read.”

  —The London Sunday Times

  “This is Min’s first book, but few seasoned writers can convey the uneven terrain of the human heart as well as she has. . . . A book of deep honesty and morality . . . [a] remarkable story.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Compelling.”

  —Glamour

  “Brave and heartbreaking.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “Vast, incredible . . . her amazing prose pulses like a heartbeat through every page . . . grim and surreal: A.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Harrowing tales of life under totalitarianism have been published before, but Anchee Min’s Red Azalea—the story of a young girl coming of age in thrall to Maoism—ranks as one of the most memorable.”

  —Newsweek

  “Part of it reads like raw testimony, part of it reads like epic drama, and part of it reads like poetic incantation.”

  —The New York Times

  “Imagine not having any choice in where you live or the work you do. Imagine that your future depended upon your political performance, and your actions and words were recorded and reported to the state. Imagine further, you couldn’t read anything but state-approved materials. You couldn’t marry or even acknowledge feelings of love. Anchee Min doesn’t have to imagine; she lived it . . . .”

  —Willamette Week

  “Moving . . . remarkable . . . a complex, superbly structured coming-of-age story . . . suspenseful, beautifully crafted, and deeply human.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Unparalleled depth . . . a major contribution to the subject of coming of age during China’s cultural revolution.”

  —Library Journal

  “Unique . . . it promises to be a classic.”

  —Catharine Stimpson

  “Gripping.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  “Powerful, moving, erotic, and absolutely outstanding.”

  —Mark Salzman, author of Iron and Silk

  “A distinct and moving voice speaking out of a cauldron of history.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “A very good writer—from the very first description. Min has such a good eye, and an ear for strong dialogue. Above all, she is to be commended for her honesty and frankness, however painful.”

  —Peter Matthiessen

  “A valuable piece of social history.”

  —Elle

  “A marvelous story.”

  —New York

  “No Chinese, much less a Chinese woman, has written more honestly and poignantly than Anchee Min about the desert of solitude and human alienation at the center of the Chinese Communist revolution . . . truly universal relevance and appeal.”

  —Vogue

  Also by Anchee Min

  RED AZALEA

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 1995 by Anchee Min

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN: 9781101666203

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Min, Anchee, date.

  Katherine / Anchee Min.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-66620-3

  1. Teacher-student relationships—Fiction. 2. Americans—China—Fiction. 3. English teachers—Fiction. 4. Young women—Fiction. 5. China—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3563.I4614 K37 2001

  813’.54—dc21

  00-065126

  Riverhead hardcover edition, May 1995

  Berkley mass-market edition, May 1996

  Berkley trade paperback edition, March 2001

  Book design by Tiffany Kukec.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Version_1

  To Michele Dremmer

  THANK YOU

  Julie Grau, my editor, I am so lucky, just so lucky to have you.

  Sandra Dijkstra, my agent, without you there would be no

  Katherine or Red Azalea.

  Min Naishi and Dai Dinyun, my father and mother, for giving me this mind, body, and soul. I love you very, very much.

  Table of Contents

  Katherine

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  About the Author

  Katherine

  She said that her name was Katherine, Kan-si-ren, sounds in Chinese like “Kill-a-dead-person.” Kill-a-dead-person was how I memorized her name.

  Names are important to the Chinese because we believe a good name leads to a good life. I liked Katherine’s name, because it sounded so strange, so bold, and so ridiculous. My classmates liked her name too. Deep inside us we all wanted to be someone we were not. Katherine represented that to us, starting with her unusual name. Through her we saw a chance to rebel, to be anything other than Chinese. Our lips worked on pronouncing her name, Kill-a-dead-person, Kan-si-ren, Katherine, and the sound brought us satisfaction. It was not a hard name to pronounce, but we had to stretch our mouths into a yawning shape to get the sound right. Katherine, Kill-a-dead-person. It was stimulating. Katherine. We enjoyed saying it. We liked to think that her name smelled of hot blood. We liked to imagine everything that came with the name. A story of the western world.

  Katherine said the first thing she would like to know about us was what it was like to grow up during the Cultural Revolution. She said the words emotionally. It made us feel strange because we were taught to despise emotion. We were taught
only to say, “I love you, Chairman Mao.” Not “I love you, Mama.” Never “I love you, Papa.” The word “passion” in our dictionary meant devotion and loyalty toward Communism. Emotion was considered poisonous. Since we lost our faith in mankind, our minds had become deserts.

  How were we to tell our western teacher that we refused to face what we had done? How could we make her understand that we’d been trying to forget that we had denounced others, fought, and murdered? We said, “It was not our fault.” We said that phrase in one voice. We shouted, “Not guilty.” The Party said that it was not Mao’s fault either, it was someone else’s, some lowlife, some whore like Madam Mao, Jiang Ching. She had made our lives miserable. Now that she had been sentenced to death, we would be untangled from her web. We were on our way to great happiness again. How could we explain this nonsense to Katherine?

  We could feel the sickness course through our paralyzed bodies. Yet we had to continue to breathe. The Communist struggle was breaking down. Bin-bai-ru-shan-dao—Our defeated troops collapsed like a mountain in an earthquake. We tried to build a new life, but all we knew of the world was Russia, Albania, and North Korea, countries that were once our comrades-in-arms. We used to think that we existed only to eliminate them, but all of a sudden we were to be partners with the capitalists. On TV our new leaders wore western suits instead of Mao jackets. The events on TV looked like cartoons, but no one wanted to go to jail, so no one asked questions.

  Our newspapers still proclaimed that the globe would not spin without China. “Another good example of a starving person who slaps his face until it swells to pass himself off as well fed,” my father would say as he sat on the chamber pot trying to take a hard shit. “The fact is either China opens its doors or the imperialists will push their way in. Period.”

  “Shut your trap!” my mother said, chopping long beans in the kitchen.

  Lying on my bed, I thought about Katherine, the foreigner, one of those imperialists I was taught to shoot.

  * * *

  The East Sea Foreign Language Institute was on the west side of Shanghai, a forty-five-minute bicycle ride from where I lived. The school, established in the great socialist style, was to serve the working class. The Party’s Central Bureau required that a portion of the student body be actual workers, peasants, and soldiers.

  I was twenty-nine years old in 1982, enrolled in a special work-study English program. Odd days I went to school; even days I worked on the assembly line at the Victory Road Electronics Factory. I earned forty yuan—about five American dollars—a month. The factory employed five hundred workers. We had to wear surgical masks because the air was so polluted. We worked with a toxic chemical solution called “banana water.” The government gave us milk coupons as compensation.

  * * *

  I was living again in Shanghai, my hometown, yet I felt homeless. My parents, my brother, and I shared a two-room apartment on Forest Road in the center of the city. We didn’t have much to say to each other. We left the house in the morning and returned in the evening like ghosts.

  My mother would prepare dinner for us. She would try to cook with as little peanut oil as possible, but still we would run out by the middle of the month. She and my father would fight about how to use peanut oil economically.

  My father called himself an ex–shop clerk. In fact, he was an ex-convict. It took the government twenty years to declare him innocent. He didn’t get along with anyone and was sick of everything these days. He would either pretend to be blind or deaf, or he would throw a temper tantrum. When he was angry, he would throw cups or shoes at me and my brother. “Go ahead, hit your children!” my mother would yell as she dragged us away from my father. “Kill them—save the government a couple of bullets!”

  Sometimes at dinner my mother would try to get my brother to talk and would ask him what had happened on the road that day. My brother was a thirty-four-year-old bus driver. “I wish I had the courage to commit suicide,” he’d reply. Or, “I wish I’d run over that fat-assed policeman this morning.” Mother would say, “Oh, thank you, Buddha of the Southern Mountain, for another damn good day!” Our father would hiss, “Animals!” Mostly, though, we watched the tips of our chopsticks as we ate.

  I pitied my father. He had intestinal cancer. Half his guts had been removed and replaced with plastic tubes. The radiation made him bald. I had a hard time living with him; still, I could not imagine life without him.

  My brother and I would wash the dishes and then quickly find an excuse to leave. Once out the door, we would go our separate ways. I never knew where he went and never asked because I didn’t want to tell him where I was going. Actually I never knew where I would go. I usually wandered around the streets aimlessly. I would watch people move around the city, feeling numb and purposeless.

  Shanghai had a population of fourteen million, a monstrous boiling pot of human dumplings. The streets were crowded every hour of the day. Many were people like me with no room of their own. But others were people who came from faraway villages to look for work to raise enough money to buy fake city residency papers. When they ran out of money, they might be forced to sell blood or children or themselves to survive. Shanghai was a place where desperate people came to risk their lives.

  The sweaty smell of a crowd, this is the smell of Shanghai. Walking on the main streets, we had no choice but to rub against each other. This Shanghai was Mao’s creation. It represented his ideal China—“power in numbers.” Our parents responded to Mao’s call to make China invincible and so we were conceived. Because of my mother’s poor health, her third and fourth babies didn’t make it. My mother was guilty of not being a “pregnant activist.”

  Since kindergarten I understood that I was one drop in the ocean; I was one of the billions. I grew up learning to walk like a weasel, zigzagging through the forest of thighs on the streets. I wouldn’t apologize if I hit others accidentally with the spikes of my umbrella on rainy days; if I had to say “Pardon me” each time, I wouldn’t be able to get through the streets at all. Besides, no one ever apologized. People were used to this.

  * * *

  Nineteen eighty-two was a year depression swam through the veins of the nation. “Like a strong arrow at the end of its strength” is how my mother described the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. “Can’t change feng-shui, the course of fate.” I sensed that she said it with some relief. She called herself a veteran of the war of living. She said she was ready to surrender. I looked at her and thought that giving up was probably a good idea. What else was there for her to do? She was fifty-four years old and had the face of a bitter melon, deeply wrinkled and drawn. My father too. They looked very, very tired.

  The roads were jammed with buses and bicycle riders, waves of pedestrians and traffic police. Everyone yelling like so many dogs barking. After a while I wouldn’t hear a thing. The crowd would flow past my eyes like a silent film. Then I would flow with them, feeling weightless, in a washed-out light.

  I would stay out until the deepest dark of night, my shoes covered in dust. Thinking about the future depressed me. I was a member of the “stuck” generation: made old by our past, yet too young to surrender to fatalism. After years of devotion to Communism, I am left only with these facts: my home is still as small as a pig shed, the bamboo beds still creak, the chamber pot still stinks, the lines at the markets are still long. Yesterday’s reactionaries are still alive; some of them live right next door. They smile at me now—I who used to shout that they should be fried alive and eaten crispy when I was a child wearing a Little Red Guard’s armband. Their wrinkled lips whisper in one vicious voice, “Teeth that take root in the land of bitter hearts will grow up to bite the enemy to death.” I fear them now.

  The map of the East used to be covered with red dots, but now it looks like the webbed, bloody spit of a TB patient. Our old man, the great Chairman Mao, laid out like an ancient mummy in the memorial hall, hiding forever under a crystal tube, took every explanation with him. It was still called the Communist Party and Mao’s portrait still hung on the front wall of the Heavenly Peace Gate at Tiananmen Square. But what happened?

  “Zebra Wong—Mao’s Good Child” was written on the award certificate I won in grade school. I was seven years old and so proud. Tears came to my eyes every morning when I prayed for a long, long life to Chairman Mao.