people I meet whether they know about their mothers' lives. Most of them don't know their mothers' or their grandmothers' stories. I want to write them down, for later generations to read. I don't want everything your generation suffered to be forgotten. If our children don't know how their grandparents suffered, they won't know how lucky they are. Tell me why you seem so different from everyone else on this street, why you look so happy and calm.'
She shook her head. 'I've suffered much more than anyone else round here.'
She told me she had been born seventy-nine years ago in Hunan. As her mother had died when she was four and the family was very poor, her father gave her and five of her brothers and sisters away to other people. She went to a travelling medicinal herb seller, to whom she was later apprenticed, and who also had a foster son, five years older than her, who could play the huqin, a kind of two-stringed Chinese violin. Because she was quick-witted, a fast learner, her adopted family took a liking to her. At the time, itinerant physicians used music and acrobatics to attract custom to their roadside stalls, and she quickly mastered various gymnastic tricks for the purpose – such as handstands, headstands, spinning jars on the soles of her feet. At the same time, the medicine man began passing on to his children some of his knowledge about herbal prescriptions. At the start of the 1940s, with the country torn apart by war, he decided to move the family over the mountains from Hunan to Yunnan, to escape the fighting. As they were too poor to travel by train, they walked and begged lifts wherever they could, on carts, railway repair wagons, and so on. Worried that, as an unmarried girl, his adopted daughter might be abused by passing soldiers, the father quickly married off his two children. After wandering about the mountains of Guizhou for a few years from 1946, in 1950 they arrived in Xingyi, which at that time had just been liberated by the Communists. The municipal government persuaded them to settle there, and helped them to open a Chinese medicine clinic for the local population, which had almost no access to medical treatment. Barely twenty years old at the time, the Medicine Woman looked after her growing family and sold prescriptions from home, while her father went out on domiciliary visits and her husband ran the clinic.
'Life was hard in those years,' Yao Popo remembered, 'with seven young children. Every day I worried about what we'd eat the next. Luckily, everyone listened to what Chairman Mao said, about it being good to have lots of children, and the government and the neighbours helped out when things got difficult. It's not like now, when no one trusts anyone else, no one helps anyone. Back then, officials never took advantage of you. Or ever forced us to pass any medical certificate.' At the same time, she was gaining a reputation for her medical skills; some people even thought her prescriptions better than her husband's.
'You probably don't believe me, but I can tell what's wrong with a person from the look in his eyes, or the colour of his face – even from the smell of his farts or burps. I'm best at curing headaches, stomach aches and joint aches.'
The idea was extraordinary: that she could see straight into you, like an X-ray machine. The fierce certainty on her face made me believe her though.
I very much wanted to know why she thought life back then was so different from China today. 'What happened afterwards?' I asked instead.
'When? The sixties and seventies? I made a lot of money!' Yao Popo's eyes glinted mischievously.
'You made money during the Cultural Revolution?' I thought I must have misheard. For so long, I had heard nothing but anger, grief and loss in recollections of this period. I had encountered so many victims that I sometimes wondered where all the perpetrators of this misery – the millions of violent, even murderous Red Guards – could have disappeared off to.
Seeing my incomprehension, she smiled. 'I'm telling the truth: I really did! With everyone arguing and fighting and making revolution, the hospitals and medical schools had all shut down. But the revolution wasn't curing their sickness; it was making it worse. So more and more people came to me for medicine. I was revolutionary too; I helped a lot of people who couldn't afford medicine, for free. I made my money from the rebels, from the Red Guards. Because if they'd just taken my medicine, if they'd not paid me for it, they would have been no better than capitalists. Though I didn't actually want too much of their money. I was worried that if they became poor, they'd make even more revolution. Yes, I made a lot of money in the Cultural Revolution, but I also saw terrible things: people forced to confess things they hadn't done, punished for crimes they hadn't committed; everyone was terrified the whole time. The money didn't make me happy.'
Those bright eyes dulled. I changed the subject. 'Now that your children have grown up, do they help you out with money?'
She threw her head back. 'I don't want their money, I'm richer than they are. Last week, when my great-grandson got married, I gave him 5,000 yuan!' [1] Thinking of her family again cheered her up.
'How many of your children and grandchildren have studied Chinese medicine like you?' I pictured her lecturing a classroom full of her descendants.
'None of them!'
'Why?'
I could hear no regret in Yao Popo's voice. 'They say it's not a proper job, there's no money in it, or respect.'
I supposed that their scorn was directed at her acrobatic past. Traditionally, it was thought that athletes and dancers were physically strong because they were mentally weak. Although the Chinese have always liked entertainment, they don't respect entertainers. I was surprised to discover the prejudice had survived into the twenty-first century.
'But you earn more money than them. And you've led such an exceptional life. Everyone knows you, respects you round here.'
She bent over to whisper into my ear: 'They don't know anything about my past, about the money I've earned; I've never told them. They don't think I know anything; they think I'm just an odd-job woman. Whenever I give them money, they always think it's from my husband, or my father. But I've earned a lot more money than them over the years. Men only know how to treat old illnesses, they can't adapt to new ones. They're no good at business, either. They're too proud to work on a stall.'
'What do you mean by old and new illnesses?'
'Old illnesses are the ones everyone's known about for hundreds and thousands of years – the symptoms tell you straight away what they are. Every family used to have a grandfather or a grandmother who had a bit of medical know-how in the old illnesses: for example, if a person's stomach was sore, they'd best not take any medicine or eat anything. Just drink warm water, rest the stomach and it would soon get better. Stomach problems are at the bottom of most things: headaches, backaches, sleeping problems. Settle the stomach, and everything else will right itself. But these days, I see more and more new illnesses: sore eyes and back from sitting in front of the computer, or in an office, acne from eating too much McDonald's, stomach upsets from too much travelling, earache from too much karaoke, exhaustion from too much driving…'
Looking down at my watch and seeing that Toby had been waiting almost an hour, I decided to interrupt Yao Popo's list of modern complaints. 'After working hard for so many years, are you planning to retire?' My bottom was numb from sitting on that small wooden stool. I could barely imagine how she could have sat there for seven or eight hours every day for most of her working life.
'Why would I do that? My foster-father's well over ninety and he's still treating patients; his eyes and ears are still good – he's probably healthier than I am. My husband and I are rushed off our feet with the business – we now stock four hundred different herbs. Every day we sell at least thirty or forty different varieties, sometimes over a hundred. That's tens of thousands every year… Is he taking a photograph of us?' On discovering Toby aiming his camera at us, Yao Popo suddenly drew herself up and sat facing forward, rigidly straight-backed on her stool, hands folded neatly on her knees. 'Has he finished yet?' she whispered to me as she posed. 'Has he finished?'
When I told her Toby was done, she relaxed back into her usual posture. While she was clearly in good health, her shoulders had the inevitable hunch of old age.
'Tell your husband to photograph me straight-on. I broke my nose when I slipped doing acrobatics in my youth. My children never got to see how pretty I once was.'
Her vanity took me by surprise. The Chinese prize modesty above all other virtues. If we work with other people, we're always trying to pass the credit for successes and achievements onto them; if we do a thing on our own, we'll say we did it badly. A mother will say at her own daughter's wedding how ugly her child is, or how much less clever than other people's children. Her regret for her lost beauty was the first time I had encountered such
