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

The Miao -- a mountain tribe who settled in China's southwest in the ninth century -- are a people of song, dance and crafts. Miao women wear long dresses over wide, flowing trousers. Hand-embroidered trims of flowers, birds and beautiful shapes in bright colors breathe life into their costumes, and many of them wear matching headpieces. In the morning, returning from the market, usually in small groups, carrying their goods in baskets on top of their heads, they'd travel up the mountain trails singing. I'd hear their songs long before I'd catch sight of them.

When night fell and the moon was high, young men and women would gather on hilltops on either side of the river, declaring their love and admiration for each other. Singing is the way of courting for Miao people; it was said that the way to a Miao girl's heart was through song. With love songs echoing over the mountains, it seemed to me that life would always be full of romantic tunes.

Unfortunately for my parents life in the labor camp was nothing to romanticize about. The living quarters had been built up on the top of a mountain while the building site was down in the valley. Every morning, my parents would get up early to drop me off at the kindergarten and then walk down the mountain trail to work. The intellectuals either transported bricks from storage sites to the building site or simply laid bricks, day in and day out. The construction site was guarded by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and workers were supervised by army engineers.

After working on the construction site for most of the day, my parents had to attend group study sessions, during which they read and discussed editorials from the People's Daily or passages from Mao's little red book. Like everyone else in these reeducation sessions, my parents had to do self-criticism and pledge their loyalty to the Party and Chairman Mao. Any hesitation or questioning about what they had to read meant severe punishments such as public beatings and prison terms.

As innocent children, my friends and I had no idea of the political oppression that our parents lived under. While our parents labored away on the building site in the valley, we attended kindergarten. My favorite teacher was Mrs. Cai, a soft-spoken, kind lady in her fifties. One day she told us about her homeland, the beautiful island in the South China Sea called Taiwan, and taught us a folk song that her mother used to sing to her when she was our age. I loved the song and could not wait to sing it for my parents that evening. But I was disappointed. My parents were not overjoyed, as they usually were when I showed them something new I had learned from kindergarten.

"Who taught you this?" Mama asked. She immediately said to me, "Don't sing it again. You don't know who might be listening."

I could not understand why my parents were so afraid of my singing the new song. After all, Mrs. Cai had also taught us many revolutionary songs. The next evening, a few parents came to our apartment, all with the same worries. "We are their parents, what they sing or talk about reflects on us," said one of them. "We simply have to do something about it before they cause trouble."

"Life is tough enough without their singing counterrevolutionary songs and talking about Taiwan," joined in another.

Thus the parents decided to report Mrs. Cai to the authorities. A couple of days later, our teacher vanished. No one, including the parents, knew what happened to her. Many years later, my parents still talked about Mrs. Cai and felt guilty for what might have happened to her. But back then they believed that they had no other choice. They needed to protect their family. Such was the extent of fear in the labor camp, as elsewhere in China during that time.

Life in the camp was difficult. Because the living quarters were high up in the mountains, water had to be carried from the river below. It was then poured straight into a large tank in the open air for every family to use. Many people became sick after drinking the water. Food was shared out weekly, allocated by my father's work unit. Meat was scarce: although each family was supposed to have two kilograms of meat a month, some months we only received half that. We had a small coal-burning stove outside the door. Every evening, as soon as my parents came back from the building site, tired, sweaty and thirsty, my mother cooked dinner with the little we were given. At dinnertime, the stairway was always filled with the smell of cooking oil and smoke from the small stoves, while wives and mothers chatted loudly up and down the stairs.

Copyright © 2003 by Wei Liang