Katherine Read Free Page A

ourselves that tears were only the pee of naughty monkeys.
    The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was pronounced officially “ended” in 1980. I was now a former revolutionary, a status shared by millions.
    Chairman Mao had described himself as a servant of the people, but he was just another emperor. For twenty-seven years he played with our minds. Our heads were jars of Maoist pork marinating in five-thousand-year-old feudalist soy sauce. The spoiled mixture produced generations of smelly rotten thoughts. The thoughts multiplied like bacteria.
    Since 1976 we had been singing an elegy for Chairman Mao; now we were singing for our own vanished souls. White elegiac couplets were fluttering in the east wind, covering the entire skyof the Middle Kingdom. The tears of sad ghosts rained down and salted the land, desiccating the roots of spring.
    It was at this moment in history, one day in April 1982, that the pink peonies opened their tender lips to kiss the night dew, that grass-green leaves stretched their little hands to touch the soft spring breeze, that she came to us from America.
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    S he was a different animal. Katherine was allowed by the school authorities to behave as she pleased because she was not Chinese. Everyone was watching her. To us she was America. Since 1980 the school had invited a group of foreign scholars to teach, but most of them were old ladies and gentlemen. They didn’t talk to the students outside of the classroom—they knew the rules. But not Katherine. She was a newcomer. I wondered how she even got herself accepted by the Chinese authorities. She wrapped herself in vermilion. Her red lipstick made us uneasy. Like an evening star, she appeared quietly in our lives, in complete harmony, and before we realized it, she was installed above our heads. The curtain of night had descended. The sound of humans faded. Air became soft as silk. Lying in my bed at night, I would think about Katherine and her red lipstick. The auburn-haired, lynx-eyed, snake-bodied, beautiful foreign devil.
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    S he pronounced her name twice for us. Katherine something, Katherine Holy-something. It sounded like “good luck” in Chinese. Katherine Good-luck. It didn’t matter what her last name was—Chinese never bothered with names that exceeded three syllables. We would just try to use the first three syllables: Kan-si-ren.
    Frustrated, she asked the class to translate her name according to how it sounded in Chinese. We smiled in shyness. We wouldn’ttell her. But she wouldn’t give in. Someone said in a small voice that her name sounded like “Kill-a-dead-person.”
    Katherine laughed until tears came to her eyes. Such a laugh. A wholehearted laugh, a burst of laughter. It surprised us. No one laughed this way in China. Our hearts beat with strange excitement.
    She said the problem was that we did not pronounce her name correctly. The “th” sound in her name should not be pronounced “tsi.” We tried hard. Some of my classmates had been studying English for years; they were taught by the same teachers who used to teach Russian. Katherine couldn’t understand what they were saying. Finally someone made her understand that we had no “th” sound in our language. “But you should learn to do it,” she said. “Because I, your teacher, do not like to be called Kill-a-dead-person!”
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    W e could not take our eyes from her face. Foreign features, made in America. We became fond of, needy for, then addicted to her laughter. She asked us to read. “Choose anything you feel comfortable with,” she said.
    I recited a poem from middle school. “Chairman Mao, Oh, Chairman Mao, /You are the red sun in our hearts . . .” I stopped when I heard her laugh. She apologized, saying that she couldn’t help it. She asked me how I learned my English. I replied that I memorized the sounds by their meaning in Chinese. For example, “the red sun in our hearts” sounded like