Day after day, weeks went by. I was getting depressed and sullen from my long imprisonment. I wished I could get some news about my daughter, I was thinking about her so much and worrying about her all the time. Whenever my chest was tight, my breath would feel suffocated. Several times, a piece of something bulged in the pit of my stomach, making it difficult to even swallow.
Outside the prison walls, the cultural revolution seemed to be advancing deeper and deeper. The tannoy of a nearby high school blared all day long, either playing revolutionary songs or denouncing the crimes of the city’s senior leaders and prominent scholars. When the wind blew toward our side of the prison, I concentrated on catching these broadcasts intently, hoping to hear any drips of news. In the gloomy cell, I spent several hours a day reading Mao’s Selected Works. From morning to night, until the dim light made it impossible for me to read the words on the book anymore.
One late afternoon, I was diving into my reading again until my eyes felt blurred and I couldn’t make out the words in the book, so I looked out the window. At that moment, a small spider crawled up from the rusty window bar. The insect was so small, the size of a pea, that I would not have been able to see it if the wooden panel at the bottom of the window had not been painted black to block my view. It slowly climbed to the top of the bars. This is a long way for such a small creature. At the top of the railing, it followed the end of its own body spitting out a wand floating down, then it bounced a wiggle, the end of the wand, tethered to another iron bar. Then, it followed the quivering wire back to the original starting point. Then, in the same way, to the other end of a swimmer, and then it wiggled and slowly crawled over. The engineering of this little creature almost fascinated me. It seemed very familiar with its work, and every movement it made was without hesitation, steady and unhurried. It is very sure of what it is doing, very confident. When it was built around the frame, it began to weave the net. The net was beautifully knitted, really beautiful, and the arrangement between the threads was evenly relative. When its knotting work was completed, it climbed to the center and settled down.
It was as if I was witnessing an artist of great skill carrying out an architectural process, and it made me think a lot. Who taught the spider to weave its web in such a step-by-step manner? Did this skill come about through evolution? Or did God create the spider and endow it with the instinct to weave webs so that it could feed and survive from generation to generation? What is the size of the brain of this small creature? Is its web-making skill just an instinct, or is it an experience gained through learning and training? Perhaps one day I will have to consult an entomologist, but for the moment I will just take this as an extremely beautiful and exciting phenomenon that I can witness in the flesh. Whether God created the spider or not, I thank God for allowing me to witness the activity of the spider just now as a testimony to the miracle of life. It helped me to “see” that God is in control of everything in heaven and earth. I didn’t feel so horrible about the rebels anymore, and I had renewed hope and faith.
My cell faced southwest, and only for a brief moment before the sun sank in the west could the beams of the slanting sun cast on the newly knotted cobwebs, reflecting rays of colorful light. I didn’t dare go near the window for fear of scaring the little spider away. I watched it from a distance, and soon I realized that it was not just sitting there waiting for the little flying insects to come to the door for a snack, but it was always on high alert. Whenever a corner of the spider web was torn by the breeze, it immediately went over and fixed it. Sometimes the whole web has to be re-knitted.
After witnessing what the spider did and getting to know its habits, I became attached to it. Every day, first thing in the morning and last thing at night before I went to bed, I had to check on the little spider. When I saw that it was still safe and sound in its place, I felt very safe inside. That little spider became my little friend. It was so tiny and could not give anything back to my feelings, but the addition of a small living thing around me gave a touch of comfort to my sullen and gloomy mind after being isolated.
November was fast approaching, the northwest wind was blowing, and with the sight of rain, the temperature was dropping. In order not to alarm the spider, I did not dare to close the window, afraid that this would push it out of the window. It continued to mend the webs destroyed by the wind, and patiently wove several new webs. But one morning when I got up, I found it was gone. The net it had left behind had also been torn up. I felt very sad, but I still left the window open, hoping it would come back again. Then I happened to look up and saw my little friend, Atsuko, hiding in a newly formed net in a corner of the ceiling. I immediately closed the window and was happy. Because my little friend hadn’t abandoned me.
One early morning in late November, I woke up with a chill and a headache, and sneezed several times in quick succession, feeling very uncomfortable. I sat on the edge of the bed and wondered if I could ask them for some pills. In the morning, I ate all the rice they brought me, hoping it would warm me up. But by noon, I couldn’t eat the rice and vegetables. I returned the food to them unchanged. Throughout the afternoon, the guards on duty kept peeking at me through the peephole in the door, but didn’t ask about anything. Until the evening, when suddenly the small window on the door “popped” open and she said to me, “You’re crying!”
“Oh, no,” I said, “I have a cold.”
“You’re crying. You’re crying because you’re not used to the life here. You find it hard to be here, don’t you? We’ve been watching you closely, and you want to do what you can to improve your living conditions. You are also crying because you are thinking about your daughter and want to know how she is doing.” The guard said.
“No, really, no. I just have a cold. Can you give me an aspirin?”
“Aspirin doesn’t work for you, it’s your own head that’s playing tricks on you. Think about the situation you’re in, or get your attitude right and repent completely.” She said.
Throughout the night, I sat with my face to the door, trying to restrain from sneezing and wiping my eyes, and I ate only a little of my dinner, pouring the rest down the toilet. Even so, the guards stressed that I was crying because I couldn’t live with the hardship of prison. They also seized on this as a breakthrough in my thinking, and the next day, the interrogation of me began.
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