Childhood - tragedy

I have been missing a little girl dearly over the past thirty years. I have thought about writing something about that particular day from time to time, but each time the sadness upon her tragedy death stifled any thoughts.

 

Her family was our next-door neighbor, sharing one common wall with my family. Her parents worked in the same factory where my mom worked in the planning office.

 

The apartment building compound, owned by the manufacture, was right behind the rear wall of the factory, surrounded by a line of its own wall to form a yard with its entrance facing a narrow street, which was the path led from the main street to a nearby middle school affiliated with Beijing Institute of Technology. There were some patches of farm fields in the area, and a few pieces of them were right outside the entrance across the street. In the front of the yard was a small, white two-story building, from which a narrow, short road spread down to the back of the yard, flanked by four rows of one-story apartment buildings. The last two one-room houses down the right-hand side of the second row belonged to our families. The yard did not provide enough space for the one hundred and fifty or so children, and therefore naturally the outside fields became part of our playground. During crop growing seasons, we would play hide-and-seek or war games in the protection of the tall, thick corn crop or under the cover of waves of wheat, while during winters the open field became a perfect place for chasing games. Without any river nearby, the farmers had drilled a dry well and installed a water pump on its floor to draw water out from the deep ground and up to water the nearby fields. A small brick shed with a door and a window frame with the size of one square meter was built around the well opening, with the foot of the each wall only a few inches away from the near edge of the well. Some dirt left from digging the well was left outside the shed and piled up to the level of windowsill, which made the locked door useless and served as a dangerous entry. The well was dug so that three ladders were installed sequentially along the path for people to go down and climb up.

 

She was the youngest among the five children of the two families and adored by everyone. She and her older brother, whose brain was not well developed at birth, both inherited the genes of their parents’ good-looking, especially big eyes. She was a little pretty princess until January 23, 1975.

 

It was a nice winter day, sunny and warm, nothing particular besides the weather. In the early afternoon, a group of friends, whose ages ranged from five to fifteen, decided to play hide-and-seek in our community courtyard. At the time, I preferred not to engage the game, rather doing something else with a few older girl friends of my age. After the game started, their high-pitched shouts of excitement were close and clear, and later faded as the game kept going on and the group scattered beyond the yard. She was seven, like other small children, trailing after older kids and getting panic at no place to hide as the seekers were approaching. Around three o’clock, some small kids ran to us, out of breath, gasping for air, yelling out some unclear words about the news of her missing, at which I jumped to my feet and dashed out from the room, unaware of the seriousness it would get in the next three hours. I ran toward the yard entrance and into an older kid in the game. It was reported that she was in the group of hiding and not found missing until it was the time to switch the roles. At the meantime, my sister and brother had already joined the search, running up and down the fields, yelling on top of their lungs. All the possible places we could think of had been scanned for many times by many kids and parents. The daylight was getting dim, then dimmer. The children were becoming tired and confused, and then scared when a few heads of the factory, who were also the residents of the building compound, pressed them for details. A little boy spoke in a low, trembling voice, “I saw her near the shed once.” Desperately for any glimpse of hope, adults and old children went toward the shed and crowded around it. With the slippery, windowsill-high slope of dirt and the narrow flat ground along the inside wall, it was obviously impossible to cross into the shed and peek into the black hole of the uncovered well. Half an hour later, the shed owner was called over. He opened the door, lit the well and descended, followed by two high school boys. With a cry, we heard “She is down here, lying by the pump!” One of the boys, aided by another, carried her up on his back. I remembered her pale face, cold feel of her hand and effortless head drooping on the boy’s shoulder, slightly rolling from side to side along with the boy’s every struggling move. A smell of discharge came out from her, which was a bad sign for a dying person as I was told later. She was rushed to a nearby Air Force hospital and pronounced dead shortly after arrival. A few days later, she was sent away in her brand new school dress she did not a chance to wear while alive, with the new backpack she picked for herself and inside the unsharpened pencils, unused erasers and unmarked notebooks.

 

I was not fourteen years old yet, but thought I was old enough to know the difference between life and death. Somehow, I never thought she had died. Even now, thirty years after the tragedy, having become a mature woman, a mother of a nineteen-year-old, and a daughter who has recently lost her father and is still feeling the stabbing pain caused by the cruel realty, I still think innocently and honestly that she is happily living somewhere on the surface of the Earth with the same small figure, bright smile, big eyes and pretty face. Only I would not have been able to see her and hold her, probably never. But, she is somewhere out there, living her life.