The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices (30 page)

‘I don’t know. Neither of us has brought up the subject of how he left me. There are things between us that I think we will never be able to touch.’

‘Do you think that if you were still poor, he would have come back to you?’ I probed.

Her reply was quite definite. ‘No, he wouldn’t.’

I was bewildered. ‘Well, if he were to start a business of his own one day or become financially independent, do you think he would leave you?’

‘Yes, if he had his own career, or if he met another successful woman, he would definitely go.’

I was even more perplexed. ‘What about you then?’

‘Why do I stay with him, you mean?’ she asked defiantly, her eyes filled with tears. I nodded.

‘Because of that first declaration he made me, and the happiness I have had with him; those are my happiest memories.’

To me, Zhou Ting sounded like any other besotted woman who stayed with a man unworthy of her. I hinted at my disapproval again, asking, ‘Are you nurturing your feelings for Wei Hai now with memories?’

‘Yes, you could say that. Women really are that pathetic.’

‘Does Wei Hai know you think all this?’

‘He is over forty. Time ought to have taught him.’ Zhou Ting’s weary reply made my question seem naive. ‘Emotionally, men can never be like women; they will never be able to understand us. Men are like mountains; they only know the ground beneath their feet, and the trees on their slopes. But women are like water.’

I remembered hearing the same analogy from Jingyi, the woman who had waited forty-five years for her lover. ‘Why are women like water?’ I asked.

‘Everybody says women are like water. I think it’s because water is the source of life, and it adapts itself to its environment. Like women, water also gives of itself wherever it goes to nurture life,’ Zhou Ting said in a considered tone. ‘If Wei Hai gets the chance, he won’t stay on in a home where he doesn’t have much power, just for my sake.’

‘Yes, if a man has no occupation, or lives off a woman, the reversal of roles is a recipe for disaster.’

Zhou Ting was silent for a few moments. ‘Did you see the headline “Tough Businesswoman rejects Strategic Marriage to renew Old Flame” or something like that? God knows what people must have thought of me after that piece of news had been worked over a few times. The media has made me into a monstrous figure of a woman: attempted murder, adultery, I’m made out to have done the lot. This has isolated me from other women, and my friends and family keep their distance too. But notoriety has brought me some unexpected benefits.’ Zhou Ting laughed bitterly.

‘Are you saying your business benefited from it?’

‘That’s right. All the gossip about me makes people open to my sales pitch because they are curious about me.’ She spread her hands out, displaying the rings that adorned them.

‘So your personal life has contributed to your professional achievements,’ I mused, unhappy at the thought that this was how women became successful.

‘You could say that. But people do not realise the price I have had to pay.’

I nodded. ‘Some say that women always have to sacrifice emotion to success.’

‘In China, that is almost always the case,’ Zhou Ting said, choosing her words carefully.

‘If a woman asked you for the secret of your success, how would you reply?’ I asked.

‘First, put away the tender emotions of a woman and let the media gasp in amazement about how different you are. Second, cut your heart out and create a good news story. Then use your scars as a business opportunity: exhibit them to the public; tell them your pain. As people exclaim over the wounds you must have suffered, lay out your products on their counters and take away the money.’

‘Oh, Zhou Ting! It can’t really be that way?’

‘Yes, it is. From my understanding of it, it is,’ she said earnestly.

‘Then how do you cope with life?’ I asked, marvelling once again at the courage of women.

‘Do you have a callus on your hand? Or scars on your body? Touch them – do you feel anything?’ Zhou Ting spoke gently, but her words made me despair.

She got up to go. ‘I’m afraid it is six o’clock and I have to go to several big stores to check their stock levels. Thank you for this meeting.’

‘Thank you. I hope the calluses on your heart will be softened by love,’ I said.

Zhou Ting had completely regained her composure. She replied in a hard voice, ‘Thank you, but it’s much better to be numb than to be in pain.’

As I left the hotel, the sun was setting. I thought of how fresh it had been at dawn and how weary it must be after its day’s work. The sun is giving; women love – their experience is the same. Many people believe that successful Chinese women are only interested in money. Few realise how much pain they have suffered to get to where they are today.

In 1995, there was a survey in China which found that, in the more prosperous areas of the country, the four professions that had the shortest life expectancy were chemical-factory workers, long-distance lorry drivers, policemen and journalists. Factory workers and lorry drivers suffered from the lack of proper safety regulations. The lot of Chinese policemen was one of the hardest in the world: under an imperfect judicial system and in a society where political power was all, criminals with influential connections often swaggered off scot-free, and some subsequently took revenge on the police officers involved. The police struggled between what they knew to be right and their orders; the frustration, uncertainty and self-reproach led them to early death. But why did journalists, who in some ways lived such a privileged life, share the same fate?

Journalists in China had witnessed many shocking and upsetting events. However, in a society where the principles of the Party governed the news, it was very difficult for them to report the true face of what they had seen. Often they were forced to say and write things that they disagreed with.

When I interviewed women who were living in emotionless political marriages, when I saw women struggling amid poverty and hardship who could not even get a bowl of soup or an egg to eat after giving birth, or when I heard women on my telephone answering machines who did not dare speak to anyone about how their husbands beat them, I was frequently unable to help them because of broadcasting regulations. I could only weep for them in private.

When China started to open up, it was like a starving child devouring everything within reach indiscriminately. Afterwards, while the world saw a flushed, happy China in new clothes, no longer crying out with hunger, the journalistic community saw a body racked by the pain of indigestion. But it was a body whose brain they could not use, for China’s brain had not yet grown the cells to absorb truth and freedom. The conflict between what they knew and what they were permitted to say created an environment in which their mental and physical health suffered.

It was just such a conflict that made me give up my journalistic career.

In the autumn of 1996, on his return from the Party Conference, Old Chen told me that several poverty-alleviation groups were being sent to north-west China, south-west China and other poor, economically backward areas. There was a shortage of qualified government personnel to undertake such research trips so the government often made use of skilled journalists to gather information. Old Chen said he planned to join a group going to the old military base area in Yan’an to see what the life of ordinary people there was now like. According to Old Chen, this was a corner forgotten by the Revolution.

I saw an excellent opportunity for me to extend my knowledge of Chinese women’s lives and immediately asked to join one of the groups. I was allocated to the ‘north-western’ group, but we were actually travelling to the area west of Xi’an in central China. When most Chinese people speak of the ‘north-west’, they are actually referring to central China since the western deserts of the country do not figure in their mental map.

While packing for the trip, I decided not to include many of the useful items I usually carried on reporting trips. There were two reasons for this. First, there would be a long mountain trek during which we would have to carry our own luggage. I did not want to burden my male fellow journalists with any of my load when they too would be exhausted. The second reason was more important: the loess plateau we were visiting was said to be a very poor place and I thought I would feel awkward with all my handy conveniences in front of the people there. They had never seen anything of the outside world, and perhaps had never had the luxury of being warm and well fed.

We travelled first to Xi’an, where the group split into three. There were four other people in my group – two male journalists, a doctor and a guide from the local government. We set off for our final destination with great zeal; although I do not think ours was the hardest route, the area we saw was probably the most poverty-stricken. There are countless degrees of wealth and poverty, which are manifested in many different ways. During our journey, the scene before us grew simpler and simpler: the tall buildings, hubbub of human voices and bright colours of the city were gradually replaced by low brick houses or mud huts, clouds of dust and peasants wearing uniform greyish clothes. Further into the journey, people and traces of human activity grew scarce. The unbroken yellow earth plateau was scoured by swirling dust storms, through which we could only squint with great difficulty. The motto of our mission had been: ‘Helping the poorest people in the poorest places.’ The extreme implied by the comparative suffix ‘-est’ is hard to define. Every time one encounters an extreme situation, one is never sure whether it is the
most
extreme. However, to this day, I have never witnessed poverty to compare with what I saw on that trip.

When, after two and a half days’ jolting in an army jeep, the guide finally announced that we had arrived, we all thought he had made a mistake. We had not seen so much as the shadow of a person, let alone a village in the surrounding landscape. The jeep had been winding its way through bare hills, and had stopped beside a relatively large one. On closer inspection, we realised that cave dwellings had been cut into the side of the hill. The guide introduced this as the place we had wanted to come to – Shouting Hill, a tiny village not on any map – and said that it was his first time here too. I wondered at this and mused over the village’s strange name.

A few inquisitive villagers had been drawn over by the roar of the jeep. Surrounding the vehicle, they started making all sorts of comments, calling the jeep a ‘horse that drank oil’; they wondered where its black ‘tail’ had disappeared to now that it had stopped moving, and the children among them chattered about how to find it. I wanted to explain to them that the tail was formed by the exhaust, but the village cadres had appeared to welcome us and ushered us into a cave house that served as the village headquarters.

That first meeting was taken up with exchanges of conventional greetings. We had to concentrate very hard to understand each other because of regional differences in speech and accent, so I was unable to observe the surroundings closely. We were given a welcome banquet: a few pieces of white-flour flatbread, one bowl of very thin wheat-flour gruel and a small saucer of egg fried with chilli. It was only later I discovered that the regional government had asked the guide to bring the eggs along especially for us.

After we had eaten, we were led to our accommodation by the light of three candles. The two male journalists had a cave house to themselves, the doctor was staying with an old man, and I was to share a cave house with a young girl. I could not make out much of the cave in the candlelight, but the quilt smelled pleasantly sun-bleached. I politely refused the help of the villagers who had escorted me there, and opened my bag. Just as I was about to ask the girl how I could wash, I realised that she had already climbed on to the
kang
. I remembered what the guide had said on the journey here: this was a place where water was so precious that even an emperor couldn’t wash his face or brush his teeth every day.

I undressed and got on to the part of the
kang
that had obviously been left for me. I had wanted to spend a few minutes chatting to the girl, but she was already snoring lightly. She seemed not to feel any novelty at having a guest, but had fallen asleep immediately. I was exhausted, and had also taken travel sickness pills, so I fell quickly into a dazed sleep myself. My ability to sleep in unfamiliar places was a matter of desperate envy for my colleagues, who said I was natural journalist material because of it. As soon as they had acclimatised to a new place, they had to move on somewhere else, where they would suffer insomnia again. For them, a long-distance reporting trip was torture.

Light filtering into the cave house woke me. I got dressed and walked outside to find the young girl already making breakfast.

Heaven and earth seemed to have merged. The sun had not yet risen, but its light already spilled from a great distance across this immense canvas, touching the stones on the hills, and gilding the yellow-grey earth gold. I had never seen such a beautiful dawn. I mused over the possibility of tourism helping this area out of poverty. The magnificent sunrise on this loess plateau was a match for those which people climbed Mount Tai or rushed to the sea to see. When I mentioned later that those people ought to come to Shouting Hill instead, a teenage boy dismissed my idea as pure ignorance: Shouting Hill did not even have enough water for the villagers’ most basic daily needs, how could it provide for an influx of visitors?

The choking fumes from the young girl’s cooking fire brought me back from my reverie. The dried cow dung she used for fuel gave off a pungent odour. The fire had been lit between a few large stones, over which the girl had placed a pot and a flat stone. She made a thin flour gruel in the pot, and toasted a coarse flatbread on the stone. The girl’s name was Niu’er (girl). She told me that dung was their only fuel for heating during the winter. Occasionally, when there was a death or a marriage, or when family or friends visited, they would cook with dung fires as a solemn expression of friendship. Their normal cooking fuel was the roots of cogon grass (a grass found in extremely arid terrain with a large root system and only a few short-lived leaves), with which they heated a mouthful of hot water for gruel. The coarse flatbread,
mo
, was only baked once a year, on the scorching stones of the hill in summer. It was then stored underground, and was so dry and hard that it would keep for almost a year. I was being honoured by being served the
mo
. Only men who did farming work had the right to eat it. Women and children survived on the thin wheat gruel – years of struggle had accustomed them to hunger. Niu’er said that the greatest honour and treat in a woman’s life was to have a bowl of egg mixed with water when she had a son. Further into my visit, I remembered this when I heard quarrelling women retort: ‘And how many bowls of egg and water have
you
eaten?’