Chapter 1 Her Growth Path

On August 29, 1958, in the heat of summer, a maternity hospital on Sandao Street in Manzhouli witnessed the birth of a baby girl. Manzhouli, a small town in northeast Inner Mongolia, built in 1901, is located in an area bordering China, Russia, and Mongolia. Star watchers predicted that 1958 would be a year of peace and fair weather. In reality, though, it was not all peace. On March 23, artillery warfare over the island of Jinmen (known in the West as the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis) occurred. This was the final significant fight between the KMT and the CPC that involved land, air, and maritime troops. This event, seemingly unrelated to this baby girl, was a harbinger of the turmoil and suffering China would go through.

Kong Ning's grandfather went to Taiwan alone when her mother was only 12. The next year, her mother joined the communist revolution and became a Communist Party member. At age 16, Kong Ning's mother went to school at the Northeastern Military and Political University (known as the Chinese Anti-Japan Military and Political University during WWII) and won the trust and favor of the new government. After graduation, she was assigned to work at the headquarters of the CPC's Northeast Bureau in Shenyang. Soon thereafter, due to hard-nosed political movements, her mother's fate suffered a bad turn during which she found herself battered and bruised.

Kong Ning's father was a handsome army officer. He joined the People's Liberation Army (PLA) at age 13 and became a cavalry man in the Inner Mongolia Military Region. He was very athletic and won five all-around champion titles in PLA sports meets. In the early 1950s, he went to school at Renmin University of China in Beijing. After graduating, he became a cultural chief of staff for a certain military region. Later, he quit his stable army job and returned to Hulunbuir Banner to stay with his paralyzed stepmother who had raised him.

Fate would soon have him meet Kong Ning's mother, a“celestial being” in his eyes. The melancholy and cool pride on her face immediately attracted him. He fell desperately in love with her and poured out his life to her. The happy but politically incorrect marriage got the bridegroom demoted and cost him all chance of ever being promoted again.

The big-minded man followed the logic of his heart: If his loved one was the daughter of an upper-class capitalist, then she deserved being treated like a princess. He wanted to give her the best he could, and he did so. He collected all kinds of good items and laid them in front of her. Her Russian wardrobe included a wide variety of beautiful woolen dresses of dark gray, green, deep blue, etc. He custom-made these dresses with high-grade fabrics at Beijing's finest tailor shop. The Beijing Hongdu Group, founded in 1950, used to be Beijing's most celebrated and high-end clothing company. Kong Ning's parents had a photo taken in Beijing's Beihai Park in the 1950s, in which they each donned chic coats. Her mother's coat with big lapel might have come from a master tailor of Hongdu. She was smiling in the photo, but the smile was a little bitter and reluctant because her eyes looked elsewhere. By contrast, her father smiled happily and affectionately.

Kong Ning's Parents

After a lot of political infighting and ordeal, her mother seemed to have relaxed her requirements for Kong Ning. “Ning, you are a child from a street fair in Heaven. You'll be fine as long as you know how to earn your crust, ” her mother said to her when she was seven. It seemed that her mother did not bother how she performed in school or whether she would go to college at all. Being well-educated herself, her mother led a decent, privileged life for a little while. However, this did not last long. During those days of endless political movements, she witnessed a lot of suffering, just like many other intellectuals. Kong Ning recalled later that she had little interest in school and more interest in reading the sky. “I seemed to have learned nothing from school and didn't know how to do math at all, ” she said. However, Kong Ning did have a pair of heavenly eyes through which she could feel and see things her peers could not. As a child, she saw the magnificence of temples and palaces, squalor and darkness of low-end lanes, and experienced the cruelty and warmth of human nature.

At 3 p.m. on October 16, 1964, a huge fireball and mushroom cloud rose over the Gobi Desert in Lop Nur, Xinjiang: China had just successfully detonated its first atomic bomb. That day, a Xinhua news commentator said: “China has finally entered the atomic age…The somersault of the dragon has shaken the entire arena.” When Kong Ning heard this news, she was terrified. At the image of the soaring mushroom cloud, the six-year-old thought only of death. She walked outdoors and went straight to the river in suburban Manzhouli. Fear gripped her as she sat numbly beside it. “If one day someone launched an atomic bomb, all of us would die. Even trees, birds, and animals would perish with us, ” she said to herself.

Atomic Explosion

It was dark when her father finally found her. When asked why she was there, Kong Ning said nothing and quietly followed him home. In 1965, she knew from the media that African children were starving and she felt bad for them. She felt sorry because she had so much more food. Thus, she returned to the river and told herself to quit eating. “How can I keep eating when they are starving? ” she murmured.

When she grew up, Kong Ning followed a simple, daily meal plan consisting mostly of potatoes, vermicelli, eggs, rice, and scant meat. She asks, “Humanity's plunder of nature is going way too far! The more humans consume, the more rubbish they produce. Would not the amount of plastics and other rubbish dumped on the earth cause it a lot of pain? ” By eating more vegetables than meat, she hopes to reduce her harmful impact on the earth.

The sensitive and vulnerable Kong Ning did not realize that a greater, more direct horror would strike her and haunt her for life. One day, she learned that people in the city government compound had posted large-character posters attacking her father. Angry, afraid, and not daring to ask what was going on, she naively thought her father would be safe if the posters were gone. So she begged her brother to go to the compound with her under the cover of darkness, where they poked hard at the condemning words with long brooms before the posters came off the wall, one-by-one, and started drifting in the wind. In those tempestuous days, a bad turn of fortune in a family was nothing more than a heartbreaking detail in a colossal social upheaval, and any trouble of her family kept in the dark could hardly escape the sensitive and observant eyes of Kong Ning.

Kong Ning kept to herself her feelings of panic, loneliness, and attachment to her parents. Having a closed heart meant she would be eternally alone in facing panic, indifference, betrayal, and countless hardships to come. To avoid the rebels, Kong Ning's father had to hide in the cellar of the house and would not emerge to dine with his family until dark. Fearing rebels might rush in and take him any time, they dared not turn on the lights, talk loudly, or make any noise while eating.

That fear turned out to be true. On a cold winter night, a few tall and fierce people broke in and arrested Kong Ning's father in the cellar as he wore only a vest. They bound and dragged him to a courtyard full of ice and snow before throwing him onto a large truck. Trying to save her father, Kong Ning crazily ran after the men, grabbed one of them by the hand and sank her teeth into it. The man kicked her in the chest and sent her crawling on the snow several feet away like a helpless cloth doll. Her father was taken away to a place where no one could find him.

Manzhouli was a war alert area from the late 1960s to the late 1980s because of deteriorated relations between China and the Soviet Union.

On December 27, 1968, Soviet border troops crossed the Sino-Soviet border and invaded Zhenbao Island on the Wusuli River, wounding eight Chinese border guards. On January 4, 1969, over 30 Soviet troops invaded the island again, forcing China's border patrol to leave. On the 6th, Soviet troops came again and seized two Chinese fishermen. On the 23rd, 76 Soviet troops, in four military vehicles under cover of helicopters, launched a sudden attack on Zhenbao Island, resulting in more than 20 casualties. This series of events plunged the two countries into quasi-war. China began to prepare for a full-scale conflict.

In 1969, there came warnings of war again. Every household tried to find ways to protect itself, such as digging air-raid shelters, affixing paper strips on windows to prevent broken glass from flying, and turning off lights to avoid being targeted. Fear of war by adults directly affected children. Eleven-year-old Kong Ning was particularly frightened of two things: The A-bomb whose mushroom cloud she saw in a documentary movie and Soviet soldiers who were said to be rapists.

In the cellar of Kong Ning's home, there was a huge safe as tall as an average adult. She kept pondering how her family could become small enough to fit into it. If the Soviet army started bombing, they could then easily sink with the city into a deep spot where no one could discover them. In a state of emergency, even the sound of a water kettle boiling could cause Kong Ning to panic. During her bleak, frightening childhood, Kong Ning's elder brother Xiaoyu, who was four years older, became her only confidant and greatest emotional support. As much as she wanted to be around her parents, they were unavailable most of the time because they had to flee or hide from one political storm after another. The only adult in the family was her grandmother, who was permanently paralyzed and bedridden. So, 14-year-old Xiaoyu was the only “man” she could depend on. Though sensitive and quiet, Xiaoyu looked fearless and self-assured, ready to shield and defend her against all harm.

Kong Ning and elder brother Xiaoyu

One day, Xiaoyu sold a European chandelier from the house and used the money to buy a chunk of pork to make dumplings. Elated, Kong Ning grabbed a kitchen knife to help her brother cut the meat, but the knife reminded her of scenes of horror, causing her to cut a finger that bled onto the chopping board. Her brother was so scared that he clenched her blood-sprayed fingers and cried, his face deathly pale. He usually fainted at the sight of blood, but now he gritted his teeth and stood firm to comfort his sister. Xiaoyu cut up the rest of the meat and made dumplings.

Forty-four years later, in 2010, Kong Ning painted Youth Who Warded Off Pain.The four distressed young women yelling straight at the audience must have seen, or be experiencing, something. The woman in red on the left, in the back row, has fear and pain written on her face, and her lips are tightly closed. This woman is very much like Kong Ning. The small and skinny juvenile, with his arms wide open and his back facing the audience, was trying to stop the spread of fear and pain about to devour the girl in front of him. This brave young man, presumably a prototype of Xiaoyu, manifests a youthful heroic spirit as he confronts a dangerous situation for the sake of the one he loves. Strokes in the painting are a little rough, even immature, but consistent with the rough and cold tone of Kong Ning's childhood.

Kong Ning's mother, missing for two years, suddenly showed up at home one evening in the early spring of 1970. Kong Ning and Xiaoyu, who were playing army chess, showed neither joy nor sadness. They did not even greet her, as if accustomed to her sudden comings and goings. Their mother seemed accustomed to such silent meetings as well. She looked exceedingly pale in her black overcoat, as her two beautiful braids hung limp on her shoulders. Kong Ning was certainly excited, but didn't know how to express herself. Consequently, she simply looked at her mother innocuously, lest she disappeared again in the blink of an eye. Her mother smiled bitterly and apologetically before fetching a basin of hot water to wash her hands.

“Her hands were so soft as they gently touched mine. Such loving fondling never happened to me again, ” she later recalled.

Youth Who Warded Off Pain

Her mother had been blacklisted and under investigation for“problems” in her history. Meek but unyielding, she determined to die in protest and had already self-inflicted injures several times before stealthily returning home to see her children for the last time. Before she could leave home, however, she suddenly fell ill, likely due to repeated suicide attempts, which caused severe kidney damage and massive bleeding. Her deteriorated physical condition resulted in an official decision to send her to Huashan Hospital in Shanghai for emergency treatment. Kong Ning was permitted to go with, and care for, her.

Escorted by three investigators (a man and two women), they arrived in Shanghai after a 4,000km train ride. The investigators left Shanghai that same day. Before leaving, the male investigator handed Kong Ning a wad of crumpled money to cover her and her mom's living expenses in Shanghai. One of the women patted Kong Ning on the shoulder and coldly said: “If she cannot make it, cremate her in Shanghai! ”

As it turned out, the attending physician was very nice and professional and his assistant very helpful. The head nurse was a 50-year-old skinny woman with a face as tight as a nun, but a warm, smiling heart.

Kong Ning told the head nurse she would do anything as long as she could stay with her mother in the hospital. “How old are you? ” The head nurse asked after sizing her up. “Thirteen, ”Kong Ning said. “How can that be? ” The head nurse was puzzled because Kong Ning actually looked taller than her. She kept Kong Ning as her assistant anyway because she thought she was eighteen.

Kong Ning started work at 6 a.m. every day. Her main task was mopping the floor and the 2.5-meter wide corridor of the ward looked as long as an average street in Manzhouli. Due to her hard work, the freshly-cleaned corridor lit up as the morning sun shone on it. The dancing light seemed to give a breath of life to the crowded hospital. Sweat dropped from her forehead to her neck, but she did not bother to wipe it off.

Kong Ning believed the doctors would be happy walking back and forth through the clean corridor. If she worked harder, they would treat her mother with greater care. After finishing the corridor, she cleaned the toilets and meticulously emptied patient bedpans, making sure everything was done properly lest hospital authorities would fire her and keep her from her mother.

“I had to smell all kinds of stench - disinfectants, blood, feces, urine, discarded gauze...you name it! ” Kong Ning recalled. One day, a country woman threw her six- or seven-month-old baby on a doctor's desk and wept sadly outside the door. The baby died of an unknown disease. The head nurse asked Kong Ning to remove the dead baby as if sleeping in a brown fabric.