Chu Ju's House Read Online Free

a silent one. Neither Ma Ma nor I could eat. Ba Ba kept his head down. Even Nai Nai held her tongue. When dinner was over and I had washed the bowls and scrubbed the wok, I took Hua out into the fields.
    The spring evening was as pleasant as the house had been bitter. The summer sky still held the light of day. The ripe guavas hung on the trees likeunlit lanterns. There was a light wind that made the scarecrow’s shirtsleeves and trousers flutter. For a moment I feared it was moving toward me.
    I clung more tightly to Hua. I had heard stories in the village of babies being carried off and never seen again. In any village there will be stories to make a little excitement and send tongues wagging. I had thought such stories were only meant to scare us in a delicious way.
    Now I knew the stories of the babies being carried away were true. I looked down at Hua. She was asleep. Her long black eyelashes were a dark fringe on her cheeks. Her round pink mouth was a little open. Hua would be sent away so that the authorities would think our family had no more than one child. One day Ma Ma might have a son to please my nai nai and my ba ba.
    If my ma ma could not stop Hua from being sent away, how could I? I wished I could disappear so that there would be only one daughter. The word disappear sounded in my head like the tiny insects you hear but cannot see. Disappear, disappear , they buzzed. Then there will be just one child, Hua.
    But I was not a magician. I could not make myself disappear. Think of the map, the tiny insects buzzed. The map had stretched all the way across the wall of our schoolroom. The whole wall was China. At the bottom of the map was a scale that told how many kilometers the millimeters stood for. The length of my little finger was many kilometers on the map. You could travel thousands of kilometers and still be in China.
    Â 
    When I was little, to escape my nai nai’s scolding I had hidden in the branches of a nearby banyan tree. If I tucked my legs under me and kept still, she could not find me. If I could hide so close to our house, why couldn’t I hide somewhere in the great map?
    At first I was pleased with the idea of disappearing. I thought of the excitement of starting outon such a journey. I thought of the wonders of China we had studied in school—the great wall in the north and the huge cities where many of the houses had a dian-shi and around every corner was a cinema.
    There were factories in the cities. Perhaps I could get a job, for I knew how to make silk flowers. In our village school our teacher had handed out silk petals to the children along with strands of wire and green tape. All week we worked at making silk flowers, arranging the petals, fastening them with a bit of glue and sticking them on the wire we had wrapped with the green tape. We made blue flowers and pink flowers and red flowers, flowers such as I had never seen. The teacher said such flowers would be sold in distant countries, and the money they brought would help our school.
    When he heard of the flower making, my ba ba complained that instead of studying, our time inclass was taken up in making flowers for the school to sell; but the people at the school said such money was needed, for the school didn’t have enough desks and there was no blackboard, only the wall that had been covered with thick black paint. Some whispered that we were lucky. In one school the children had made fireworks. There was a dreadful explosion and the whole school blew up with many children killed. There could be no explosion with silk flowers.
    Why could I not disappear in a city, where I could make silk flowers and have a dian-shi , wear jeans, and go to the cinema? I thought again of the map and how far away such cities were. I remembered young men from our village who had gone to those cities and been sent to jail, for they went with no government permission and no proper government papers. I had heard stories—told in