女兒語錄(13）Quote of My Daughter(13)

曾铮

When my daughter was seven and a half, I was sent to a forced labor camp for practicing Falun Gong. My daughter came to visit me a few months later. The moment she saw me she started talking intently, “Mom, I've learned to play the clarinet. We now have a ‘little twinkle bell' in our house.”
She kept on chattering about the fun she had with the “little twinkle bell”, though by the end of her twenty-minute visit I still had no idea whether it was a toy, a pet or a person. At least I was relieved to hear her talking like that. I thought to myself, “Thankfully, a young child doesn't know the harsh taste of sorrow. It seems that she is happy and untroubled by her mother not being around.”
More than a year later I learned that her grandma had strictly forbidden her to tell others about my detention in a forced labor camp, where only criminals are supposed to be held. No matter how unjust it was, detention is considered shameful and demeans a family's reputation.
Being young, however, she was unable to restrain herself. She confided her secret to her teacher in an essay. Perhaps, subconsciously, she thought of her homeroom teacher as the mother she was missing. Grandma scolded her for that, because she wished to avoid any discrimination against her granddaughter. To avoid this, her father had to transfer her to a new school.
女兒七歲半時，我因煉法輪功而被送進了勞教所。幾個月後她到勞教所來看我時，一見面就急切地告訴我，媽媽，我學吹黑管了；媽媽，家裡來了一個小叮當，然後咭咭呱呱說了一大堆小叮當的趣事。雖然二十分鐘的會面結束時我都沒有搞清楚小叮當到底是個玩具、動物，還是一個人，但在心裡還是很欣慰：到底是少年不知愁滋味，女兒看起來生活得很快樂，沒有因失去了母親而難過。
一年多後我才知道，雖然奶奶嚴密地禁止她將我被勞教的「不光彩」之事告訴任何人，但她終於忍不住，在寫作文時將心底的秘密告訴了她的班主任。也許她在潛意識里對她的老師產生了對母親一般的感情。為此她受到了奶奶的責罵。為使她免於受歧視，她父親不得不安排給她轉了學。