2why did chen bi have a big nose that was so different from everyone else’s? probably only hismother can answer that question.

his father, chen e (forehead), with the style name tianting (middle of the forehead), was theonly man in the village with two wives. a well-educated man, he came from a family that had farmeda hundred acres of prime land, run a distillery, and owned a business in harbin before theestablishment of the people’s republic. chen’s first wife, a local, had borne him four daughters. hefled north just before liberation, but was brought back from the northeast in the custody of yuanlian and a pair of militiamen around 1951. he had fled alone, leaving his wife and daughters at homein the village, but brought another woman back with him. this woman, who had brown hair and blueeyes and looked to be in her early thirties, was called ailian. she carried in her arms a spotted dog,and since she and chen e had married before liberation, it was perfectly legal for him to have twowives. poor, unmarried village men were upset that chen had two wives and half jokingly asked himif they could share one of them. chen could only grin in response, a look somewhere betweenlaughing and crying. the two chen wives lived in the same house at first, but since they fought likecats and dogs, chen received permission to put his junior wife up in two rooms next to the school,given that the school buildings had once housed his family’s distillery, which meant that the tworooms counted as his property. he reached an agreement with the women that he’d divide his timebetween them. the dog the light-haired woman had brought with her was tormented to death byvillage mongrels, and not long after ailian buried it she gave birth to chen bi. people liked to saythat he was a reincarnation of the spotted dog, which might explain his ultra keen sense of smell. bythat time, my aunt had returned from the county seat, where she’d gone to learn the newest methodsof midwifery. she became the first professional midwife in the entire township. that was in 1953.

in 1953, villagers were adamantly opposed to new midwifery methods, thanks to rumours spreadby old midwives, who said that children born through these methods were prone to be arthritic. whywould they spread such rumours? because once the new methods caught on, they’d be out of work.

delivering a baby at the mother’s home meant a free meal, a pair of towels, and a dozen eggs.

whenever these women entered the conversation, my aunt – gugu – ground her teeth in anger. shecould not begin to calculate how many infants and pregnant women had died at those old witches’

hands. her descriptions of their methods were chilling: they grew long fingernails, their eyes emittedgreen will-o’-the-wisp-like glimmers, and their breath stank. she said they pressed down on themother’s belly with rolling pins and stuffed rags in their mouths to keep the foetuses from coming outthere. they knew nothing about anatomy and were totally ignorant of a woman’s biological make-up.

when they encountered a difficult birth, according to gugu, they crammed their hands up the birthcanal and pulled with all their might, sometimes actually wrenching the womb out along with thefoetus. for the longest time, if i’d been asked to compile a list of people most deserving to be linedup and shot, i’d unhesitatingly say: the old midwives. gradually i came to understand why gugu wasso prejudiced against them. crude, ignorant old midwives certainly did exist, but experienced oldmidwives who, through their own experience, had a keen grasp of the secrets of a woman’s body,existed as well. truth be told, my grandmother was one of those midwives, one who advocated apolicy of interfering as little as possible into the process. her approach could be characterised as ‘themelon will fall when it is ripe’. in her view, the best midwives simply offered encouragement as theywaited for the foetus to emerge, then cut the umbilical cord, sprinkled on some lime, wrapped thechild, and that was that. but she was not a popular old midwife, considered by some to be lazy. thosepeople seemed to prefer women whose hands were constantly busy, who kept running in and out ofthe room, shouting and carrying on; those old midwives perspired as much as the woman in labour.

my aunt was the daughter of my great-uncle, who had served as a doctor in the eighth routearmy. he’d entered the army as a specialist in traditional chinese medicine, but then had been taughtwestern medicine by the canadian norman bethune, whose subsequent death from blood poisoninghit him so hard he fell desperately ill. he told his superior he wanted to see his mother before he died,a request that was granted so he could recuperate. gugu’s grandmother was still alive at the time, andthe minute he walked through the door he was greeted by the familiar smell of mung bean soup. hismother had washed the pot and started a fire to make the soup, and when her daughter-in-law cameup to help, she pushed her away with her cane. my great-uncle sat in the doorway waitingimpatiently. gugu said she was old enough then to remember such things, and when she was told togreet her father, she ran behind her mother to peek at him from there. she’d often heard her motherand grandmother talk about her father, whom she was now meeting for the first time, and to her hewas a stranger. she told us how he sat in the doorway, sallow-faced, his hair long, fleas crawling uphis neck, tufts of cotton wadding peeking out through tears in his tattered lined coat. gugu’sgrandmother – my great-grandmother – was in tears as she worked at the stove. when the soup wasfinally ready, great-uncle eagerly picked up a bowl and began slurping, despite the mouth-burningheat. son, his mother said, slow down. there’s more in the pot. gugu said his hands were shaking.

he ate a second bowl, and his hands stopped shaking. sweat ran down the sides of his face. signs oflife showed in his eyes as the colour returned to his face. gugu said she could hear his stomachrumble, the sound of a millstone turning. an hour or two later, gugu said, her father went to theouthouse, where he emptied his bowels, almost taking his intestines along with the loose mixture.

that’s when his recovery began, and within two months he was his old, vigorous self again.

i told gugu i’d read something like that in the scholars. the what? she asked. i told her it was afamous classical novel. she glared at me. if things like that happen even in classical novels, thatproves it was true.

now that he was fully recovered, my great-uncle made preparations to rejoin his troops on mounttaihang. son, his mother said, i can’t live much longer. wait to go till after my funeral. and therewas another matter his wife found hard to bring up, that was left to gugu. father, she said, motherdoesn’t mind if you go, but she’d like you to leave me a little brother before you do.

soldiers from the eastern shandong military district of the eighth route army showed up at great-uncle’s house to recruit him, as a follower of norman bethune, reminding him of his fine reputation.

i already belong to the shanxi-chaha’er-hebei arm, he said. but we’re communists, just like theyare, the shandong representative said. it doesn’t matter where you work. we really need someonelike you, old wan, and we’ll do whatever is necessary to keep you here. commander xu said if aneight-man sedan chair won’t do the trick, he’d hogtie him and take him under escort to a banquet inhis honour. that is how great-uncle wound up staying home in shandong, where he founded thexihai underground hospital.

the hospital had underground passages that linked the wards and other rooms, including asterilisation room, a treatment room, an operating theatre, and a recovery room, all of which remainin zhu family village, which is part of yutong township in the laizhou municipal area, and are stillwell maintained. an old woman of eighty-eight, wang xiulan by name, who was great-uncle’snurse back then, is still alive and well. several of the recovery rooms lead directly to a well. one dayback then, a young woman went to the well for water, and was surprised when her bucket stoppedbefore reaching the bottom. she looked down, and there in a hollow in a wall, a young, woundedeighth route soldier looked up and made a face at her.

talk of great-uncle’s superb medical skills quickly made the rounds. it was he who removed theshrapnel lodged near commander xu’s scapula. he also managed to save both political commissarli’s wife and her child during a difficult birth. word had even spread to pingdu city, which wasunder the command of an officer named sugitani, whose warhorse had stepped on a land mine duringa mop-up operation. he had taken off on foot, leaving the horse behind. great-uncle performedsurgery on the horse, and after it recovered it became the mount for regimental commander xia. butbefore long, the horse was so homesick it bit through its tether and ran back to pingdu. sugitani wasso happy to see his horse again, with its wounds healed, he told his chinese collaborators to find outwhat had happened. he learned that the eighth route army had established a hospital right under hisnose, and that the medical skills of its director, wan liufu, were responsible for saving the life of hishorse. commander sugitani, who himself had received medical training, was impressed by great-uncle’s skills and summoned him to surrender. to do so, sugitani adopted a scheme from theclassical novel three kingdoms, which was to secretly infiltrate our hometown to kidnap my great-grandmother, my great-aunt, and my aunt, and take them back to pingdu, where he sent a letter togreat-uncle, telling him they were being held hostage.

after reading sugitani’s letter, my great-uncle, a dedicated communist, wadded it up and threw itaway. the hospital commissar retrieved the letter and delivered it to district headquarters.

commander xu and commissar li wrote a joint letter to sugitani, denouncing him as a petty manand threatening to throw the entire weight of the shandong eighth route army against him if heharmed a hair of any of the three members of wan liufu’s family.

gugu said that she and her mother and grandmother were well treated during the three months theyspent in pingdu. according to her, sugitani was a fair-skinned young man who wore white-framedglasses and had a moustache. quiet and bookish, he spoke fluent chinese. he called my great-grandmother aunt, called my grandmother sister-in-law, and called gugu niece. she did not have abad opinion of him. of course, she only said that privately to members of the family. to others shesaid that all three were victims of japanese brutality, subjected to coercion and bribery, though theyremained steadfast.

sensei, i could talk about my great-uncle for three days and nights and never exhaust the subject.

we’ll continue this some other day, but i must tell you about how he died. gugu said he was gassedwhile performing surgery in the underground hospital. that is how his death is listed in historicaldocuments prepared by the county consultative congress, but a private source claimed that he rode hismule into pingdu with eight hand grenades on his belt, determined to single-handedly rescue his wife,his daughter and his ageing mother, but unfortunately struck a land mine placed by the zhao familytrench militiamen. the source of this account was xiao shangchun (upper lip), a stretcher-bearerfor the xihai hospital. a quirky individual, xiao served as the commune granary watchman after1949, where he invented a pesticide that was a potent rat poison, for which he was extolled in thelocal newspaper, which changed his name from the chun that meant ‘lip’ to the one that meant‘purity’. later it was discovered that the main ingredient of his rat poison was a banned highly toxicpesticide. he and gugu were bitter enemies, which makes his account highly unreliable. he once saidto me that my great-uncle disobeyed orders by neglecting his patients in favour of playing the hero,and that he’d fortified himself before setting out by drinking two jin of potato liquor, winding up sodrunk that he stumbled on one of their own land mines. a gloating xiao shangchun flashed a yellow-toothed grin as he continued: your great-uncle and the mule he was riding were blown to bits, bothcarried back to the hospital in boxes, bones and hooves all mixed up, and dumped into a coffin. not abad coffin, though, one confiscated from a wealthy family in lan village.

when i repeated his story to gugu, her eyes grew wide and she gnashed her silver teeth. one ofthese days, she said, i’m going to cut that bastard’s balls off!

boy, she said staunchly, you can forget about everything else, but the one thing you must believe isthat your great-uncle was a hero of the resistance and a revolutionary martyr! his body rests in amausoleum on martyrs hill, his scalpel and leather shoes are part of the display in martyrs hall.

they are english shoes, bequeathed to him by norman bethune on his deathbed.