Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (73 page)

I was scared.  Later I was told by some women that the villagers blamed the sagging noodles on me.  They said I must have used the bowl to wash when I was menstruating.

The women told me I was lucky to be a 'city youth."  If it had been one of them, their menfolk would have given them 'a really good hiding."

On another occasion, a group of young men passing through our village carrying baskets of sweet potatoes were taking a break on a narrow road.  Their shoulder poles were lying on the ground, blocking the way. I stepped over one of them.  All of a sudden, one of the young men jumped to his feet, picked up his pole, and stood in front of me, with fiery eyes.  He looked as though he was going to strike me.  From the other peasants, I learned that he believed he would develop shoulder sores if a woman stepped over his pole.  I was made to cross back over it 'to undo the poison."

During the whole time I was in the countryside, I never saw any attempt to tackle such warped thinking in fact, it was never even mentioned.

The most educated person in my production team was the former landlord. I had been conditioned to regard landlords as evil, and now, to my initial uneasiness, I found that I got on best with this family.  They bore no resemblance to the stereotypes that had been drilled into my mind.  The husband did not have cruel, vicious eyes, and his wife did not wiggle her bottom, or make her voice sugary, to appear seductive.

Sometimes, when we were alone, he would talk about his grievances.

"Chang Jung," he once said, "I know you are a kind person.  You must be a reasonable person as well, since you have read books.  You can judge whether this is fair."  Then he told me why he had been classified as a landlord.  He had been a waiter in Chengdu in 1948, and had saved up some money by watching every penny.  At the time, some farsighted landlords were selling their land cheap, as they could see land reform coming if the Communists reached Sichuan.  The waiter was not politically astute, and bought some land, thinking he had got a bargain.  He not only soon lost most of it in the land reform, but became a class enemy to boot.

"Alas," he said, with resignation, quoting a classic line, 'one single slip has caused a thousand years of sorrow."

The villagers seemed to feel no hostility toward the landlord and his family, although they kept their distance.  But, like all 'class enemies," they were always given the jobs no one else wanted.  And the two sons got one work point less than other men, in spite of the fact that they were the hardest-working men in the village.  They seemed to me to be highly intelligent, and also the most refined young men around.  Their gentleness and gracefulness set them apart, and I found that I felt closer to them than to any other young people in the village.  However, in spite of their qualities, no girls wanted to marry them.  Their mother told me how much money she had spent buying presents for the few gifts whom the go-betweens had introduced.  The gifts would accept the clothes and money and then walk off.  Other peasants could have demanded the presents back, but a landlord's family could do nothing.  She would sigh long and loud about the fact that her sons had little prospect of decent marriages.  But, she told me, they bore their misfortune lightly: after each disappointment, they would try to cheer her up.  They would offer to work on market days to earn back the cost of her lost presents.

All these misfortunes were told to me without much drama or emotion. Here it seemed that even shocking deaths were like a stone being dropped into a pond where the splash and the ripple closed over into stillness in no time.

In the placidity of the village, in the hushed depth of the nights in my damp home, I did a lot of reading and thinking.  When I first came to Deyang, Jin-ming gave me several big cases of his black-market books, which he had been able to accumulate because the house raiders had now mostly been packed off to the 'cadres' school' at Miyi, together with my father. All day while I was out in the fields, I itched to get back to them.

I devoured what had survived the burning of my father's library.  There were the complete works of Lu Xun, the great Chinese writer of the 1920s and 1930s.

Because he died in 1936, before the Communists came to power, he escaped being persecuted by Mao, and even became a great hero of his whereas Lu Xun's favorite pupil and closest associate, Hu Feng, was personally named by Mao as a counter revolutionary, and was imprisoned for decades.  It was the persecution of Hu Feng that led to the witch-hunt in which my mother was detained in 1955.

Lu Xun had been my father's great favorite.  When I was a child, he often read us essays by Lu.  I had not understood them at the time, even with my father's explanations, but now I was engrossed.  I found that their satirical edge could be applied to the Communists as well as to the Kuomintang.  Lu Xun had no ideology, only enlightened humanitarianism.  His skeptical genius challenged all assumptions.

He was another whose free intelligence helped liberate me from my indoctrination.

My father's collection of Marxist classics was also useful to me.  I read randomly, following the obscure words with my finger, and wondering what on earth those nineteenth century German controversies had to do with Mao's China.  But I was attracted by something I had rarely come across in China the logic that ran through an argument.

Reading Marx helped me to think rationally and analytically.

I enjoyed these new ways of organizing my thoughts.  At other times I would let my mind slip into more nebulous moods and wrote poetry, in classical styles.  While I was working in the fields I was often absorbed in composing poems, which made working bearable, at times even agree able.  Because of this, I preferred solitude, and positively discouraged conversation.

One day I had been working all morning, cutting cane with a sickle and eating the juiciest parts near the roots.

The cane went to the commune sugar factory, in exchange for sugar.  We had to fill a quota in quantity, but not in quality, so we ate the best parts.  When lunch break came, and someone had to stay in the field to keep watch for thieves, I offered my services so I would have some time alone.  I would go for my lunch when the peasants came back and so have even more time to myself.

I lay on my back on a stack of canes, a straw hat partly shading my face.  Through the hat I could see the vast turquoise sky.  A leaf protruded from the stack above my head, looking disproportionately enormous against the sky.

I half-closed my eyes, feeling soothed by the cool greenness.

The leaf reminded me of the swaying leaves of a grove of bamboo on a similar hot summer afternoon many years before.  Sitting in its shade fishing, my father had written a forlorn poem.  In the same ge-lu pattern of tones, rhymes, and types of words as his poem, I began to compose one of my own.  The universe seemed to be standing still, apart from the light rustle of the refreshing breeze in the cane leaves. Life felt beautiful to me at that moment.

In this period, I snatched at the chance for solitude, and ostentatiously showed that I wanted nothing to do with the world around me, which must have made me seem rather arrogant.  And because the peasants were the model I was meant to emulate, I reacted by concentrating on their negative qualities.  I did not try to get to know them, or to get on with them.

I was not very popular in the village, although the peasants largely left me alone.  They disapproved of me for failing to work as hard as they thought I should.  Work was their whole life, and the major criterion by which they judged anyone.  Their eye for hard work was both uncompromising and fair, and it was clear to them that I hated physical labor and took every opportunity to stay at home and read my books. The stomach trouble and skin rash I had suffered in Ningnan hit me again as soon as I came to Deyang.  Virtually every day I had some sort of diarrhea, and my legs broke out in infected sores.  I constantly felt weak and dizzy, but it was no good complaining to the peasants; their harsh life had made them regard all non fatal illnesses as trivial.

The thing that made me most unpopular, though, was that I was often away.  I spent about two-thirds of the time that I should have been in Deyang visiting my parents in their camps, or looking after Aunt Jun-ying in Yibin.  Each trip lasted several months, and there was no law forbidding it.  But although I did not work nearly enough to earn my keep, I still took food from the village.  The peasants were stuck with their egalitarian distribution system, and they were stuck with me they could not throw me out.  Naturally, they blamed me, and I felt sorry for them.  But I was stuck with them, too.  I could not get out.

In spite of their resentment, my production team allowed me to come and go as I liked, which was partly because I had kept my distance from them.  I learned that the best way to get by was to be regarded as an unobtrusively aloof outsider.  Once you became 'one of the masses," you immediately let yourself in for intrusion and control.

Meanwhile, my sister Xiao-hong was doing well in the neighboring village.  Although, like me, she was perpetually bitten by He as and poisoned by manure so that her legs were sometimes so swollen she got fever, she continued to work hard, and was awarded eight work points a day.  Specs often came from Chengdu to help her.  His factory, like most others, was at a virtual standstill.  The management had been 'smashed," and the new Revolutionary Committee was only concerned with getting the workers to take part in the revolution rather than in production, and most just came and went as they pleased.  Sometimes Specs worked in the fields in my sister's place to give her a break.

At other times, he worked with her, which delighted the villagers, who said: "This is a bargain.  We took in one young girl, but we've ended up with two pairs of hands!"

Nana, my sister, and I used to go to the country market together on market day, which was once a week.  I loved the boisterous alleys lined with baskets and shoulder poles.

The peasants would walk for hours to sell a single chicken or a dozen eggs, or a bundle of bamboo.  Most moneymaking activities, such as growing cash crops, making baskets, or raising pigs for sale, were banned for individual households, on the grounds that they were 'capitalist."  As a result, peasants had very little to exchange for cash.  Without money, it was impossible for them to travel to cities, and market day was almost their only source of entertainment.  They would meet up with their relatives and friends, the men squatting on the muddy pavements puffing on their pipes.

In spring 1970 my sister and Specs were married.  There was no ceremony.  In the atmosphere of the day, it did not cross their minds to have one.  They just collected their marriage certificate from the commune headquarters and then went back to my sister's village with sweets and cigarettes with which to entertain the villagers.  The peasants were thrilled: they could rarely afford these precious treats.

For the peasants, a wedding was a big thing.  As soon as the news broke, they crowded into my sister's thatched cottage to offer their congratulations.  They brought presents like a handful of dried noodles, a pound of soybeans, and a few eggs, wrapped carefully in red straw paper and fled with straw in a fancy knot.  These were no ordinary gifts.  The peasants had deprived themselves of valuable items.  My sister and Specs were very touched.  When Nana and I went to see the new couple, they were teaching the village children how to do 'loyalty dances' for fun.

Marriage did not get my sister out of the countryside, as couples were not automatically granted residence together.  Of course, if Specs had been willing to relinquish his city registration, he could easily have set fled with my sister, but she could not move to Chengdu with him because she had a country registration.  Like tens of millions of couples in China, they lived separately, entitled by regulation to twelve days a year together.  Luckily for them, Specs's factory was not working normally, so he could spend a lot of time in Deyang.

After a year in Deyang there was a change in my life: I entered the medical profession.  The production brigade to which my team belonged ran a clinic which dealt with simple illnesses.  It was funded by all the production teams under the brigade, and treatment was free, but very limited.

There were two doctors.  One of them, a young man with a fine, intelligent face, had graduated from the medical school of Deyang County in the fifties, and had come back to work in his native village. The other was middle-aged with a goatee.  He had started out as an apprentice to an old country doctor practicing Chinese medicine, and in 1964 he had been sent by the commune to attend a crash course in Western medicine.

At the beginning of 1971, the commune authorities ordered the clinic to take on a 'barefoot doctor."  The name came about because the 'doctor' was supposed to live like the peasants, who treasured their shoes too much to wear them in the muddy fields.  At the time, there was a big propaganda campaign hailing barefoot doctors as an invention of the Cultural Revolution.  My production team jumped at this opportunity to get rid of me: if I worked in the clinic, the brigade, rather than my team, would be responsible for my food and other income.

I had always wanted to be a doctor.  The illnesses in my family, particularly the death of my grandmother, had driven home to me how important doctors were.  Before I went to Deyang, I had started learning acupuncture from a friend, and I had been studying a book called A Barefoot Doctor's Manual, one of the few printed items allowed in those days.

The propaganda about barefoot doctors was one of Mao's political maneuvers.  He had condemned the pre Cultural Revolution Health Ministry for not looking after peasants and concerning itself only with city dwellers, especially Party officials.  He also condemned doctors for not wanting to work in the countryside, particularly in the remote areas.  But Mao took no responsibility as head of the regime, nor did he order any practical steps to remedy the situation, such as giving instructions to build more hospitals or train more proper doctors, and during the Cultural Revolution the medical situation got worse.  The propaganda line about peasants having no doctors was really intended to generate hatred against the pre-Cultural Revolution Party system, and against intellectuals (this category included doctors and nurses).