The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices (20 page)

Their reluctance to let each other go was evident in their letters, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to arrange a meeting. ‘Duty to the Party’ led to countless postponements of planned meetings, and often interrupted their correspondence. In the chaos of political movements in the late 1950s, Jingyi was interrogated because of problems in her family background, and sent to rural Shaanxi for ‘training and reform’. At that time, even the important task of building the national defence was considered secondary to the class struggle. She lost all personal freedom and was unable to communicate or come and go as she pleased. She nearly lost her mind missing Gu Da, but the peasants responsible for overseeing her reform refused to help her. They could not defy Chairman Mao’s orders by allowing Jingyi to leave: she might become a spy or have contact with counter-revolutionaries. Later, an honest cadre suggested a way out for her: she could change her status and gain her freedom by marrying a peasant. Still deeply in love with Gu Da, Jingyi found this thought intolerable.

Jingyi spent nine years labouring in the village in Shaanxi. The village stream was both its lifeline and an unofficial meeting place, where village gossip and news from further afield were exchanged. Jingyi saw the stream as her sole means of communication with Gu Da. Almost every night, she would sit by the stream and silently express her longing for him, hoping that the fast-flowing water would carry her feelings to where he was. But the stream brought Jingyi no news of the world beyond.

Over the years, the villagers gradually forgot there was anything special about Jingyi; she had grown to look like a typical peasant woman. Only one quality distinguished her: she was the only woman of her age still unmarried.

In the late 1960s, a county official came to the village to give Jingyi government orders to prepare for a transfer. Orders were to ‘grasp revolution and press on with production’. The anti-Soviet campaign had begun.

As soon as Jingyi returned to her military base, she set out to accomplish two things. First, she had to prove that she was essentially unchanged. Her years labouring in the fields had aged her and altered her appearance greatly. Her colleagues did not dare to acknowledge her at first, and could not believe that she still possessed her former skills. They gave her tests and experiments, made her analyse problems and describe past events. After a week, they concluded that her mental brilliance was undiminished.

Second, but more important to Jingyi personally, she had to get in touch with Gu Da again. Her colleagues were moved by her devotion to him, and each of them made their own enquiries to help her. After three months of searching, all they had found out was that Gu Da had been imprisoned at the start of the Cultural Revolution as a reactionary and a suspected secret agent of the Guomindang. Enquiries at all the possible prisons he might have been sent to drew unsatisfactory replies: Gu Da seemed to have passed through all of them, but nobody knew where he had gone next. Jingyi was despairing, but not resigned. As long as there was no news of Gu Da’s death, there was hope, which gave her life meaning.

In the ensuing years of the Cultural Revolution, Jingyi was more fortunate than most of her colleagues and former classmates. She was given special protection because of her skills; the military base leaders skilfully hid her from the Red Guards many times. She understood the great danger the leaders faced in protecting her and contributed several major scientific achievements to repay her debt to them.

Jingyi never stopped searching for Gu Da. She visited every village and town he might have been in, and even went to Lake Taihu, which they had dreamed about. With the help of friends, she took two weeks to travel the circumference of the lake looking for Gu Da, but there was no trace of him.

In the 1980s, after the Reform and Opening Up policy, the people had finally woken from the endless nightmare of political and social chaos, and were putting to rights everything that had been thrown into confusion. Jingyi was one of countless other people searching for lost family or friends through letters, telephone calls and personal enquiries. The passion of her search often went unappreciated by others: Gu Da was Jingyi’s lover, not theirs. The Cultural Revolution had numbed the feelings of many, who had been taught by bitter experience to put basic physical needs and political safety before empathy or emotion.

When Jingyi received a copy of the list of the people who would attend the Qinghua anniversary celebration in 1994, she searched it eagerly for Gu Da’s name, but it was not there. When she travelled to Beijing for the event, she brought with her dozens of form letters requesting help, to distribute among her old classmates.

On the first day of the celebration, people from all over China assembled on the Qinghua campus. The younger people greeted each other excitedly: time had not changed them greatly yet. The older ones seemed more hesitant; for most of them, it was not until they had walked into the room designated for their year and class that they could identify old classmates with any certainty.

Nobody had recognised Jingyi in the initial mêlée, and she too had been unable to identify anyone at first. A university attendant directed her to the room assigned to her year and class. As she walked in, she immediately saw a man with his back to her, a man whose form would never be unfamiliar to her, no matter how the hardships of life had changed it – Gu Da. Jingyi was overcome; she began trembling, her pulse raced and she grew faint. The young attendant supported her by the arm and asked with concern what the matter was; did she have a history of heart disease? She was unable to speak – she waved her hand to signal that she was fine, pointing at Gu Da at the same time.

She forced herself to walk towards him, but her heart was so full she felt she could hardly move. Just as she was about to call out to him, she heard him say, ‘This is my wife Lin Zhen, my eldest daughter Nianhua, my second daughter Jinghua and my third daughter Yihua. Yes, yes, we’ve just arrived . . .’

Jingyi froze.

Gu Da turned around just then, and was paralysed by the sight of Jingyi. He gaped foolishly. Concerned, his wife asked him what was wrong. He replied in a trembling voice: ‘This . . . this is Jingyi.’

‘Jingyi? She can’t be . . .’ His wife had heard the name.

The three elderly people were overcome, and remained silent for a few moments as they grappled with their feelings. With tears in her eyes, Gu Da’s wife finally told Jingyi that he had only married when he heard that she was dead. Then she made to get up and leave Jingyi and Gu Da alone, but Jingyi held her back.

‘Please . . . please don’t go. What we had was in the past, when we were young, but you have a complete family in the present. Please do not hurt this family; knowing Gu Da is happy will be a much greater comfort.’

Jingyi did not truly mean what she said, but she spoke with sincerity.

When the youngest daughter heard who Jingyi was, she said, ‘The initial characters of my and my sisters’ names form the sentence “Nian Jing Yi” – in remembrance of Jingyi. My parents say it’s to remember you by. The Cultural Revolution threw so many people’s lives into chaos. Please find it in yourself to forgive my parents.’

Jingyi suddenly felt calmer, and found the strength to stand up and shake Gu Da’s wife’s hand, saying, ‘Thank you for remembering me, thank you for giving him such a happy family. From today I will be happier, because I have one less worry. Come, let’s go in to the meeting together.’

Everyone took their cue from Jingyi, and walked towards the auditorium. Once they were seated in their assigned places, Jingyi slipped out and returned to her hotel, where she burned the letters asking for help that she had brought with her. Along with the paper, her long-cherished hopes and her momentary calm melted away.

Several days later, she pulled herself together to call her work unit and request a few more days’ leave. Her colleague told her that there was a telegram for her from someone called Gu Jian, asking her to get in touch as soon as possible. Jingyi realised that, for reasons unknown to her, Gu Da had changed his name to Gu Jian – that was why her enquiries had been unsuccessful.

Jingyi took a train south to Lake Taihu, planning to find a house for herself like the one she and Gu Da once dreamed of. She had neither sufficient strength nor money to accomplish this, so she moved into the hotel by the lake instead. She did not want to see anyone, and survived on instant noodles soaked in hot water as she spent the days and nights thinking.

Jingyi had nearly finished telling her tale. She raised a hand weakly and drew a circle in the air.

‘Forty-five years of constant yearning for him had made my tears form a pool of longing. Every day I waited by that pool with confidence and love. I believed that my lover would step out of the pool and take me in his arms – but when he did finally step out, another woman was at his side. Their footsteps disturbed the clear surface of my pool. The ripples destroyed the reflections of the sun and moon – and my hope was gone.

‘To continue living, I needed to wash Gu Da and my feelings away. I had hoped Lake Taihu would help me, but forty-five years are too difficult to get rid of.’

I listened to the emptiness in Jingyi’s voice, anguished and helpless. No empathy could be sufficient.

I had to get back to PanPan and my work, but did not want to leave Jingyi alone, so I telephoned my father that evening to ask if he and my mother could come to Wuxi to keep Jingyi company for a few days. They arrived the next day. As she was seeing me off from the hospital, my mother said, ‘Jingyi really must have been very pretty when she was young.’

One week later, my parents returned to Nanjing. My father told me that, with Jingyi’s permission, he had contacted her work unit. They had been looking for her, and immediately sent someone to Wuxi to nurse Jingyi when they heard the news. My father said that, unknown to Jingyi, he had given her colleague a sketchy account of her story over the telephone. The gruff man had broken down, and said, sobbing, ‘We all know how much Jingyi suffered looking for her love, but nobody can describe the depth of her feelings.’

My father had found out why Gu Da had changed his name, and told Jingyi what he knew. The leader of the Red Guards in the second prison Gu Da was sent to had exactly the same name, so Gu Da was forced to take a new name. The Red Guards changed his name to Gu Jian on all his documents without any authority. Gu Jian had fought with the local authorities to change his name back, but they had merely said, ‘So many wrongs were committed in the Cultural Revolution – who can put them all right?’ Later, someone told Gu Da that Jingyi, for whom he had searched for years, had died over twenty years previously in a car crash, so he decided to let the name Gu Da die as well.

Jingyi said that women were like water and men like mountains – was this a valid comparison? I put this question to my listeners, and received almost two hundred replies in a week. Of these, more than ten came from my colleagues. Big Li wrote: ‘Chinese men need women in order to form a picture of themselves – as mountains are reflected in streams. But streams flow from the mountains. Where then is the true picture?’

The subjects discussed on my programme sometimes provoked enormous debate among my listeners and, to my surprise, I often found that my colleagues would want to continue the discussion the next day. The morning after I had presented a programme on the subject of disability, which had elicited particularly varied opinions, I found myself in the lift with Old Wu, the head of Administration. As the lift creaked and juddered to the sixteenth floor, he took the opportunity to talk to me about the previous night’s programme. He was a regular listener of mine, and was eager to share his views and ideas with me. I was touched by his interest. Politics had dulled so much enthusiasm for life in China that it was rare to find middle-aged men like Old Wu who were still curious about things. It was also unusual for people who worked in the Chinese media to watch, listen to or read the medium they worked in: they knew it was merely the mouthpiece of the Party.

‘I thought what you discussed on your programme last night was very interesting,’ Old Wu said. ‘Your callers all agreed that we should have compassion and understanding for the disabled. Compassion is easy enough, but I think understanding is not so easy. How many people can break away from their able-bodied mindset and understand disabled people on their own terms? And the experiences of people who are born with a disability must be distinguished from those of people who become disabled later in life. Of course . . . hey, what’s up? Is the red light on?’

The lift had jerked to a halt and the alarm light was on, but nobody panicked – breakdowns were an everyday occurrence. Luckily, the lift had stopped at one of the floors rather than in between, and the repairman (one of the most popular people in the building) soon opened the door. As Old Wu got out of the lift he said one last thing to me, almost as if he were issuing an order: ‘Xinran, find some time to have a chat with me soon. Don’t just think about your listeners. Did you hear that?’

‘Yes, I heard that,’ I replied loudly as Old Wu walked away.

‘So you’ve heard, Xinran?’ A programme supervisor stopped me in the corridor.

‘Heard what? I was talking to Director Wu,’ I said.

‘I thought you’d heard about the argument the editorial department had yesterday about your programme.’

Knowing how sharp my colleagues’ tongues could be, I was defensive. ‘What were they arguing about? The topic? Something the callers said? Was it something I said?’

‘They were arguing over whether it was sadder to be born disabled or to become disabled later,’ the programme supervisor replied airily as he walked off without a backward glance.

That morning, the editorial department seemed to have renewed the previous evening’s argument. As I walked into the office, seven or eight people were engaged in a heated discussion; two of the technicians had joined in. They all felt strongly about the topic: some of them were flushed with excitement, others were gesticulating or drumming their desks with pencils.