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I RETURNED TO Northeast Gaomi Township to compile a family chronicle, focusing on the famousbattle of the banks of the Black Water River that involved my father and ended with the death ofa Jap general. An old woman of ninety- two sang to me, to the accompaniment of bambooclappers: ‘Northeast Gaomi Township, so many men; at Black Water River the battle began;Commander Yu raised his hand, cannon¹ fire to heaven; Jap souls scattered² across the plain, ne’erto rise again; the beautiful champion of women, Dai Fenglian, ordered rakes for a barrier, the Japattack broken?.?.?.’ The wizened³ old woman was as bald as a clay pot; the protruding⁴ tendons onher chapped hands were like strips of melon rind. She had survived the Mid-Autumn Festivalmassacre in ’39 only because her ulcerated legs had made walking impossible, and her husbandhad hidden her in a yam cellar. The heavens had smiled on her. The Dai Fenglian in her clapper-song was my grandma. I listened with barely concealed⁶ excitement, for her tale proved that thestrategy of stopping the Jap convoy⁷ with rakes had sprung from the mind of my own kin⁵, amember of the weaker sex. No wonder my grandma is fêted as a trailblazer of the anti-Japaneseresistance and a national hero.
At the mention of my grandma, the old woman grew expansive. Her narration⁸ was choppy andconfused, like a shower of leaves at the mercy of the wind. She said that my grandma had thesmallest feet of any woman in the village, and that no other distillery had the staying power ofours. The thread of her narrative⁹ evened out as she talked of the Jiao-Ping highway: ‘When thehighway was extended this far?.?.?.

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