Free The Cooked Seed by Anchee Min Page B

again.”
    Daylight faded and the room became dark. I sat upright and listened to Takisha. I waited for her to stop. I wanted to ask Takisha if Dr. King had achieved his dream.
    Takisha told me that her ancestors were slaves. I was confused by the tenses of Takisha’s sentences.
    Did the
re
sound in
they’re
mean “are” or “were”?
    While Takisha paused to catch her breath, I interrupted. “Are you a slave?”
    “I am not a slave, but—”
    I waited.
    “Well, it’s too complicated to explain.”
    “Try, Takisha, would you? I want to learn.”
    “I can’t talk to you,” Takisha said. Strangely, her voice sounded tear-filled.
    “I am sorry, I mean no offense, Takisha. Talk to me, and educate me.”
    “You wouldn’t understand.”
    “I shall understand if you talk to me. I’ll write the words down. My dictionary is good. I can comprehend you.”
    “Listen, you’d never understand what it is like to be owned. You were never owned and never will be.”
    I knew what it was like to be owned. In fact, I didn’t know what it was like
not
to be owned. The Communist Party of China and Mao never declared their ownership, yet every person in China knew that one never owned oneself. One was not allowed to do what one liked. Disobeying Mao and the Party meant hell and punishment.
    Takisha was too provoked to come out of her own world. Words flowed out of her mouth like water from a broken pipe. I concluded that Takisha might not be a slave, but her family members in Alabama might be. It would explain the anger Takisha had. She couldn’t bear that I hung out with a white person like Kate. If being friends with Kate hurt Takisha, I was willing to stop. What I couldn’t understand was the fact that Takisha was a medical student at this university.
    Takisha told me that she was granted a “full scholarship” to study to be a doctor. I asked her who offered the scholarship, and she replied, “The government.”
    I asked who ran the government, whites or blacks.
    “People of all colors,” was Takisha’s reply.
    I found myself thinking:
I’d love to be a slave so that I could be given a full scholarship to study to become a medical doctor.
    In tears Takisha described how her ancestors were sold, beaten, hanged, and burned when they tempted to escape. I wondered what that had to do with Kate.
    I interrupted Takisha. I told her that when I was living in China, I was not allowed to see a doctor when sick. I was not allowed to leave the labor camp when my spinal cord was injured. I had no weekends nor holidays. I was not allowed to pursue an education. The price for dating a boy at the labor camp would be humiliation, punishment, and torture.
    “Have you heard of the Chinese saying ‘Killing a hen to shock the monkeys’? It was the tactic the proletarian government adopted to keep us in place.”
    I described to Takisha what it was like to witness the revolution. The poor and lower classes took over the government. It was truly the People’s Democracy. Within weeks, China’s economy shut down completely. Factories, schools, hospitals, and other public service buildings became ghost towns. Even in remote villages, peasants quit farming to join the rebellion.
    Being illiterate became glorious. It was exciting to challenge China’s five-thousand-year-old tradition. Peasants took over hospital operating tables. They believed that anybody could perform a doctor’s job. All one needed was to stock his mind with Mao quotations.
    It didn’t take long for factions to form. Rallies to consolidate greater power were held in stadiums, which often ended in bloody battles. Every day there were funerals in Shanghai. The city’s walls filled up with photos of “new martyrs.”
    “My parents warned us to stay off the streets because people who had access to large trucks were looting weapons from military compounds. We could hear gunshots in the middle of the night.” I told Takisha about the day a group of Red Guards from