There were no savings banks; there was little commerce and less industry. The only thing left to invest in was land. Land was safe, but the returns were small when compared with those from usury because scarcity drove land prices ever upward.* The amount of good land on the market in Long Bow and the surrounding villages was never large while prospective buyers were numerous. Improving the land was out of the question. Irrigation would have doubled yields but the water table was too low for the donkey-powered bucket pumps so common on the plains of Hopei a hundred miles to the east. In order to bring water, a canal several miles long was required—a project that was beyond the power of any one landlord or even of the whole village. For such a project county-wide cooperation and support was necessary, but the bureaucrats of the Yamen (county government) were not interested. So the land remained dry while the waters that drained from the ranges to the East flowed untapped to the North China plain.
Money could have been spent on indigenous fertilizers, better seed, and improved implements, but there was no guarantee of any immediate return. A dry year could make fertilizer useless. Should the yield by chance go up, taxes claimed the increase. Under such conditions no one developed fertilizers, seeds, or implements. The landlord’s surplus grain was converted instead into coinage and buried in the ground.
The loans that were made to the peasants went mainly to cover emergency expenses such as funerals, illnesses, weddings, and the food consumed during the “spring hunger,” rather than for productive improvements such as wells, plows, or stock. Once the money was spent, neither the borrower nor the economy had anything to show for it.
Money spent on land likewise added nothing to the productive forces. It only gave the purchaser the right to demand whatever share of the tenant’s meager crop current social relations allowed. It in no way increased that crop.
Hoarding the remainder of the surplus only deepened and perpetuated the stagnation. A community in desperate need of development could not use the only capital at hand. While a fortune in gold and silver lay in secret caches underground, peasants for whom an ox or a plow might mean prosperity were condemned to starvation; at least half the population sat idle five months of the year because they lacked the resources for handicraft production, for small local industries, even for the mules and carts with which to do transport work once the crops were harvested in the fall. The iron ore in the hill south of Long Bow and the coal in the mountain north of Lucheng were never mined for lack of funds, while thousands of people in the villages between roughed it through the winter like cattle, doing nothing, and eating as little as possible in order to make their grain last until spring.
Unused resources, wasted manpower, declining production—these were the fruits of a system that in the long run could only bring disaster on its victims and beneficiaries alike.
3
Eating Bitterness
In spring seeds are sown and for each grain planted
Many are harvested; no land is left uncultivated,
Yet still do many peasants die of hunger.
Working with their hoes under the hottest sun,
Their sweat drips down and mingles with the earth.
Who will understand that the food we eat
Has been paid for with such bitter toil?
Li Shen
THE GENTRY of Long Bow—the landlords, the rich peasants, the clan elders, the overseers of temple property and the managers of religious societies—would not have been considered well off in any Western land. Their lives were luxurious only in contrast to the absolute poverty and near starvation of the great mass of the people. They did not live in palaces. They enjoyed none of the conveniences of modern life. In most cases, the only difference between their homes and those of the rest of the population was in the construction materials used. The prosperous built with brick, the poor with adobe. Both materials came from the earth underfoot and the interior plan and conveniences of a brick home differed little from those of a house built of adobe.
What made the lives of the gentry so enviable to the working peasants was the security they enjoyed from hunger and cold. They at least had a roof over their heads. They had warm clothes to wear. They had some silk finery for feast days, wedding celebrations, and funerals. They had quilts to sleep under. They even had fuel for their stoves and for their k’angs.* They had a little variety in their diet. They could eat wheat often and even meat once in a while. The true landlords among them did no manual labor either in the field or in the home. Hired laborers or tenants tilled the fields, servant girls and domestic slaves cooked the meals, sewed, washed and swept up.* The menfolk of these families busied themselves with managerial affairs, money lending, and religious and clan functions. They amused themselves with women, opium smoking, and gambling.
Education was another great advantage which the gentry enjoyed. They often hired special tutors to live in the home and had set up a village school for their progeny. When their young people grew older, they were sent on to middle school (high school) at the county seat, and even to college in Taiyuan or Peking. As college graduates they had a chance to move into the higher bureaucracy, the officer corps of the army, or one of the larger commercial or banking establishments in the provincial capital.
This world of security, relative comfort, influence, position, and leisure was maintained amidst a sea of the most dismal and frightening poverty and hunger—a poverty and hunger which at all times threatened to engulf any family which relaxed its vigilance, took pity on its poor neighbors, failed to extract the last copper of rent and interest, or ceased for an instant the incessant accumulation of grain and money. Those who did not go up went down, and those who went down often went to their deaths or at least to the dissolution and dispersal of their families.
The extremes to which never-ending vigilance had to be carried was demonstrated most clearly when the crops began to ripen. Then every family, whether landlord, middle peasant, or tenant, had to maintain guards in the fields day and night. Toothless old grandmothers and children in split pants hardly big enough to carry a stick stood eternal watch against thieves. To protect these pitiful sentries from the sun at noon and the dew before dawn little shelters of kaoliang stalks or mud bricks mushroomed suddenly on every plot and strip. For weeks at a time almost half the population of every community lodged overnight in the fields, each family keeping an eye on all the rest. Thus both prosperous and poor peasants were forced to expend their often exhausted energies on a guard duty that was sheer waste from the point of view of society, but that meant the difference between life and death to every cropper. Any strip left unwatched was almost sure to be looted by some half-starved family trying to stay alive just a few more days until its own poor crops matured.
To have no crops at all was the worst fate that any peasant could imagine; yet six percent of the population was in exactly such straits. Here is the story told to me by Shen Fa-liang, the boy indentured to Sheng Ching-ho for seven years in order to pay off his father’s $4 debt:
When I first went to work for Sheng Ching-ho I was only 14. All the same I had to do chores around the house. I was too small to carry full buckets, but I had to carry water from the well. I filled the buckets half full and brought them in that way. All the years I worked for Ching-ho I never had a full stomach. I was hungry all the time. Every day he ate solid enough food but he gave me only a little soup with millet in it. You could count the grains that were floating around in the water. Twice I got sick—worn out with work. And I was always cold. I never had food or clothes enough to keep warm. When 1 got sick I couldn’t work. Then the landlord was very angry. He got two men to carry me home so that he wouldn’t have to feed me while I was sick. And he made my father pay for the laborer that took my place. My sickness cost him nothing. My own family had to bear the entire burden.
No matter how hard I worked I couldn’t begin to pay off that debt. By the time I had been there several years we owed him $15 instead of $4. I told him, “It’s n
o use working for you. No matter what I do the debts get bigger. I want to leave.” But he wouldn’t let me. The contract said seven years, and he held us to it. By that time I had grown up. I could do a man’s work. He finally promised to pay me $10 a year instead of $8. I said I wouldn’t ask for more money and he said he wouldn’t jump the interest on the debt. But even so, it was no use. Whenever I broke anything he made me pay a high price for it. Once there was a long drought. The soil was very hard. He pushed us to finish the hoeing quickly. In my hurry I cracked the handle of the hoe. When he saw it, he was very angry. He knocked several dollars off my year’s wages—enough to buy two new handles—even though that one could still be used. In fact, I did use the hoe for a long time after that. At the end of the year I didn’t get enough wages to buy a pair of pants.
Any small mistake and he blew up. 1 had to carry water through the gate. There was a threshold there and a sharp turn. If I spilled some water on the ground, he cursed me for messing up the courtyard. Once I tore the horse’s collar. He cursed me and my ancestors.. I didn’t dare answer back. I think that was worse than the food and the filthy quarters—not being able to talk back. In those days the landlords’ word was law. They had their way. When it was really hot and they said it was not, we dared not say it was hot; when it really was cold and they said it wasn’t, we dared not say it was cold. Whatever happened we had to listen to them. You could never finish telling of the abuse the landlords gave us.
At the end of each year Ching-ho subtracted all the things he claimed I broke, the time I was sick, and such things. What was left was never enough to pay off the interest on the money, so he kept everything. I got no wage at all. When the seven years were up, I had to tear down two sections of my house, sell the wood and the bricks, and only then was I able to pay Ching-ho off.
Then I went to work for Wang Lai-hsun. I took it for granted that perhaps some other family treated people better but I soon found out that all the crows in the world are black. Lai-hsun’s household was no better. In the famine year I had to sell the rest of my house to live at all. I sold it to Sheng Ching-ho, but the money came too late to save my wife. She was so sick with hunger that she died a few days later. The money did no good at all. I used some of it to bury her. We bought millet with the rest of it. But the millet wasn’t enough to live on, and we had to go out in the hills to dig herbs—wild herbs. Before the year was up all we had left to eat was herbs and weeds and the leaves off the trees.
Even so, the worst days of my life were when I was a child. I often had nothing to eat. In the winter I had no padded clothes to wear. One suit of padded clothes had to last for many years. It was patched over and over again. It wore so thin that it was no better than a summer jacket. How then could I pass the winter? I can’t imagine how we got through. I can’t even remember. When we didn’t have any millet, we drank hot water. If we had any money we bought coal, but most of the time we had none.
What was the happiest day of my life? I haven’t passed any happy days. But if you want to compare, the days since Liberation have been good.
Another story that demonstrates with painful clarity what had to be endured by families of landless peasants is that of Wang Ch’ung-lai’s wife. Wang Ch’ung-lai was the brother by adoption of Wang Lai-hsun, the second-largest landholder in Long Bow. Lai-hsun inherited the Wang family land and wealth but never prospered because he was a hopeless drug addict. In fact, neither he nor his brother, Ch’ung-lai, were true sons of old man Wang. Both were bought as children by the landlord and raised in his home as sons because he had no progeny. When the old man died, his shrewd wife did not fancy dividing the property between two heirs, neither of whom had a legitimate claim. One son was enough to carry out the duties of ancestor worship and produce a new generation. She therefore treated one boy, Lai-hsun, as a son, and the other, Ch’ung-lai, as a servant and hired laborer.
To ensure help in the house the old lady bought Ch’ung-lai a wife. The girl was nine years old at the time, cost the family nine strings of cash, and lived in the home as a servant for six years before she was actually wed to Ch’ung-lai.*
“Being a child wife I was often beaten and cursed by everyone in the family,” she said when telling her life story years later.
At the beginning, since I was only nine, I took care of some sheep and pigs. Every day I went out on the hill to watch the sheep, and when I came back I fed the pigs. At that time Lai-hsun’s first wife was alive and she cooked for the family. The first wife was not so bad, and besides I was out all day. Still, I was beaten by the old lady. It was for no reason except that she thought I didn’t work hard.
I was married at 15. After that it was worse, much worse. That was because Lai-hsun married again and the second wife was most terrible. She never beat me herself; she just complained to the old lady and let her beat me. I was beaten too many times to remember. I was beaten almost every day so it is hard to remember anything special about it.
They ate mien (noodles). I cooked for them but I was not allowed to eat even the leftover noodles. Ch’ung-lai and I ate millet, broth made of screenings, and ground corn.
At that time I thought to myself, “Because I have no parents and these people are so terrible, there is no way out for me.” I often wandered beside the well, but no one wants to jump into the well, so finally I thought it was better to lead a beggar’s life than to kill oneself by one’s own hand, so my hope was to go out and work for others.
One day the mother-in-law broke my arm. The water in the pot was boiling. I asked her what I should cook and how much millet was in the pot. She did not answer. So I asked her again. Then she got angry and beat me. She said I annoyed her and was too stupid. That was the way it usually was. But that time she took up an iron poker and broke my arm with it. My arm hurt so I lay on the k’ang for a fortnight and couldn’t work or even move.
Then Lai-hsun took a knife and threatened us. He said that unless we left he would kill us both. I wanted to go away and find work somewhere else but Ch’ung-lai was afraid. He feared death from hunger, for once we left the family we would never get a thing. But in the end we were driven out anyway; they drove us out barehanded.
Ch’ung-lai went to Taiyuan to pull a rickshaw. He sent back money when he could. I myself cooked for a landlord in Fu-t’sun. Life there was better than at home. Anyway I got enough to eat, and when I asked them what to cook they answered me. Sometimes they even gave me old clothes or rags to wear, and I earned about $1 a month.
After six years we saved enough to buy an acre of land. Then’ came the famine year. Ch’ung-lai had to come home from Taiyuan but he was sick. From the land we got two bags of grain. After paying the tax there was nothing left. Hunger made Ch’ung-lai sicker. By that time I had two children, a boy and a girl. We three went out to beg. Sometimes we had to go very far away and couldn’t get back at night. So often we slept in temples and often we couldn’t find a temple to stay in and had to sleep outdoors. Once I asked the children, “Are you frightened?” They said, “We are not afraid as long as we can find something to eat.”
But because it was a famine year it was very hard to find food. We had to sell the land. We got six bushels of millet and lived a whole year on it. We added whatever we could find to go with it. But it was hard to find anything. There weren’t even any leaves left on the trees.
We went back to Long Bow to beg from Wang Lai-hsun. His whole family still ate well. We knelt down before them and begged for something to eat. We asked pity for the children. “We do not ask things from you. We know there is no hope for us, but we wish you would have some pity on the children for they are your own grandson and granddaughter.”
But they took sticks and beat the children. We stayed there past noon but could not even get a bowl of water from them. So we took the children to other villages and got something. Strangers treated us better than our own relatives.
After the famine year there was a good summer harvest but then we had no land. Ch’ung-l
ai went to work as a hired laborer, and I cooked out for others as before. We had to leave the children at home alone. Every few days I returned home and gave them a little millet or corn. They themselves went out to beg. At the end of the year I saw that every family had prepared noodles and other good things to eat. I asked the mistress to give me a little corn to take to the children so that they too could pass the New Year. But she only cursed and drove me out.
So I had no job and returned home with a little corn flour that I bought with my wages. When the chidren saw me they wept. We three wept the whole day. My children said to me, “We will beg together and die together rather than live apart.” So we went out to beg again.
After the summer harvest we all went out to glean wheat in the fields. One day I looked up. There was a wolf. He just stood and stared at me. I was frightened. I dared not move. I stared right back at him. My daughter saw the wolf and ran, but the wolf chased her and caught her. I couldn’t move. I only stood there and watched the wolf open his great mouth and bite my daughter. My son cried, “See how big the mouth is and the terrible red tongue!”
At this moment a cart passed on the road. The men in the cart jumped out and began to beat the wolf. Still I stood frozen to the spot. The men drove the wolf away. They called me. My daughter was still alive. When I went up to her, I saw that the wolf had bitten a big piece of flesh from her leg and slashed her cheeks but her eyes were clear and stared at me. I clasped her to my breast and tried to carry her home, but after a little while she died. Still I held her dead body. Then I fainted and the carters put me in the cart with the boy. They left her little body in the field and carried me home. When I recovered consciousness, I was in a stupor. Every day I just sat behind closed doors and said, “The wolf is coming! The wolf is coming!” The neighbors pitied me and sent a little food.
Fanshen Page 7
