Li himself came before the Provisional League clad in garments faded and frayed from much washing. He said he thought he was a middle peasant. He might have convinced the majority of this, but someone asked him about his brother. Was it not true that his brother had lived with him and worked for two years as an unpaid hand on his land and that his brother’s wife had done all the work in their home?
Li did not deny that his brother, Li Lao-szu, had lived with him, but his view of the relationship between him and Lao-szu was just the opposite of that suggested by his questioner.
“I saved Lao-szu from starvation,” he said. “I gave him and his whole family a home when they had no place to go. Many times I suggested that they leave, but they were dependent upon me and were afraid to move out. Of course,” he added with an embarrassed laugh, “It was nothing. Who wouldn’t help a brother?”
Lao-szu, when called, had a very different story to relate. His long sorrowful face well suited the tale he had to tell. “When I came from Linhsien with my family, I gave my brother everything I had. I even gave him one of my sons, for he had none of his own. But he treated us like slaves. We worked day and night in the fields and in his house but we got nothing, absolutely nothing for it. When I tried to leave, Pao-yu swore at me. Told me I was ungrateful. I finally ran away without telling him. I reclaimed some land on the Western Mountain and came back for my family afterwards.”
After hearing this side of the story some of the poor peasants called Pao-yu a rich peasant; others said he was certainly a landlord. Pao-yu went home pale and shaking with fear. He was afraid to tell his wife what had happened. When she nagged him he lost his temper. “It’s your fault,” he shouted. “You couldn’t even treat my own brother decently and now look at the mess you’ve landed us in!”
“What mess?”
“They’re calling us landlords,” he screamed. “That’s the mess.”
But Pao-yu’s wife did not panic. She remembered that Lao-szu had left their home the year after their adopted son was married. The base period had not even begun at the time. Lao-szu’s labor, whether exploited or not, could hardly count.
The next day Pao-yu appeared before the Provisional League again. Confident and cocky he announced the discrepancy in dates. But the announcement did not have the effect foreseen. Most of the peasants were ready to accept his argument, but Little Li, the work team cadre, suddenly arose and passionately denounced him as an exploiter so mean that he lived off his own brother’s labor and then tried to wriggle out of it on a technicality.
“Not only did they labor for you, they even gave you a son! Where is your conscience? Are you so afraid of your wife that you forget the feelings of a brother?” Little Li trembled as he spoke.
“Why did you give your brother a whole acre after liberation? Was that not a crumb to stop his mouth? If I were you I would weep for shame!”
Li’s appeal put Pao-yu in a worse position than before. Clutching at any straw that might relieve the pressure, Pao-yu pleaded with them concerning his fruit trees.
“They’re really worthless,” he said. “Last year I got only BRC 10,000 from the lot.”
“Perhaps we had better ask the man who planted them about that,” said Shen Ch’uan-te, the Catholic.
This was no problem. Old Hou, the man who had sold the courtyard to Pao-yu, was sitting with the group. “When you shake those trees the money falls down,” he said. “What fine trees they are! I planted them myself, but I had nothing to live on. When my son died of starvation, I sold the court to Pao-yu.”
“What can I say if no one believes me?” Pao-yu protested, more to the walls than to his audience. Tears were already starting in his eyes.
The next day Ch’i Yun and I ate in Pao-yu’s home. The courtyard did not look very prosperous. The ex-merchant and his notorious wife lived in a low adobe shed built along the north wall. The west wall had crumbled in the middle and a neighbor’s pig had scaled it. The pig was rooting among the controversial trees. They were thorn dates. Some of them were already dead. Others carried as many dead branches as live ones. It seemed to me that if anyone shook them, dry twigs instead of money would fall down.
In order to impress us with her poverty, Pao-yu’s wife fed us the leanest corn dumplings we had ever eaten. Her son, the boy given her by Lao-szu, looked as if he had never had anything else to eat. He was stunted, almost dwarfed, with a head that seemed to sit on his chest. At 12 he had been married to a girl of 20 so that Pao-yu’s wife might have a servant to replace the sister-in-law who had run away. Early marriage had certainly done him no good.
The lady of the house was dressed in the plainest of tunics. Her black hair was drawn straight back from her forehead and tied in a severe knot behind. Wrinkles showed around her eyes and mouth. It was hard to imagine that she had once been a successful courtesan. With tears in her eyes she told us of the sacrifices she had made to keep her brother-in-law happy, to give him the best of everything.
“Now I can’t think it through. In my family there are only two. This child is theirs. After we die who will inherit the property? We save and work, not for our own sakes, but for the son of another. But he says we have ill-treated him! It is so painful.”
That afternoon Pao-yu came once more before the meeting. Cadre Li, having thought better of his outburst of the day before, apologized for having intervened. He read from the book that passage which told how to differentiate a well-to-do middle peasant from a rich peasant. The main point was not the existence of exploitation but the extent of it. In the gross income of a rich peasant, at least 15 percent had to come from rent, interest, or profit on hired labor. On that basis, Pao-yu was clearly no rich peasant.
“Yesterday,” said Old Lady Wang, “you got angry and interrupted us. Then we got angry and called you a landlord. But really you are not.”
“I was so frightened,” said Pao-yu. “How could I suddenly have become a landlord? When I went home I dared not tell my wife. I did not sleep all night. Even well-to-do middle peasant seemed too high. But now I think that is right. Everyone else seems to think so. What can I do? I have thought it through.”
Since his words carried no ring of conviction, Cadre Li tried to reassure him. “We don’t mind spending time. If you still disagree you can wait until after the mass meeting. Even after that you can appeal to the higher authorities.”
But Li had apparently decided that he could not do better.
“I’m a well-to-do middle peasant,” he said.
As the meeting broke up someone whispered, “His wife ought to be called to the meeting. Maybe she could learn something.”
“She! Never!” came the whispered reply.
***********
Between classification meetings Ch’i Yun and I often went out to visit individual peasants, especially those whom Ch’i Yun thought should be admitted to the Provisional League.
One day we were talking to Old Kao, a demobilized army veteran who lived in the foreign-style house expropriated from Chief-of-Staff Hsu. Suddenly, Li Hsin-ai, the girl who had eloped with her cousin from central Hopei, burst into the room.
“Oh!” she said when she saw Ch’i Yun and myself. “I thought Comrade Liang was here.”
“Why Comrade Liang?”
“I need help. My chimney just fell down. All my pots and bowls are smashed to powder. The roof is ready to follow the chimney down. What will happen to my child? When I asked the carpenters to repair it for me they said, ‘Where will you get all that money? It will take several days’ work.’ With my husband off in the army I have to do everything myself. This morning I went out to find fuel; then I had to carry water. Now I have left my baby on the k’ang, but I am afraid. The mutual aid group gives me some help, but I have to do so many things by myself and the baby takes so much time that I can only spin an ounce a day in exchange for the help.”
Here she broke down weeping, but wiped away her tears and went on between sobs, “I don’t want to move. I have many friends i
n my courtyard, but I don’t know what to do.”
She was a very beautiful girl, not the delicate willow-wand type, but full-bodied, almost voluptuous, especially with her breasts distended and ready to nurse. Concealment of the upper body was not a part of modesty in Long Bow, and the girl stood before us now with her tunic unfastened so that both her breasts and her soft stomach were exposed to view.
Kao, overcome by her presence, gallantly offered her the pick of the rooms in his “foreign house.”
“You can have this section. I’ll move on down a few doors if you like.”
When the young mother hestitated, Ch’i Yun told her not to worry. Something would surely be done to resettle her. After all, her man was in the army. Li Hsin-ai left us smiling. Only two streaks of dirt down her cheeks indicated that she had been weeping desolately a few moments before.
When we took leave of Kao we decided to have a look at the house where the chimney had fallen down. Ch’i Yun wanted to get better acquainted with its occupant, the unusual young woman who had defied convention and threats of death to marry the man she loved. In Long Bow men made fun of Li Hsin-ai. The middle peasant Chin-hung, a former puppet soldier himself, was fond of telling the story of her “rascal affair” to anyone who would listen. Then he laughed as if it would kill him. Young women took a different attitude. None of them said it aloud, but in their hearts they admired and even envied the girl for her courage. The older women, on the other hand, tended to side with the men. It was their veto that blocked Li Hsin-ai from membership in the Provisional Poor Peasants’ League.
We found Li sitting on her k’ang nursing her handsome baby. One whole corner of the adobe building had collapsed to form a heap of rubble at her feet. As she had already made up her mind to move, the house no longer weighed on her mind. What she wanted to talk about was Chin-hung and his ridicule.
“He should not laugh at me like that,” she said, pouting. “My parents would not agree to our marriage so we had to run away. But as for the child, it is my husband’s. Chin-hung laughs as if his pot were clean, but everyone knows about his doings. He ought to speak out in the village meeting if he has so many opinions. Let’s hear what the others have to say. Just because my husband is away in the army he oppresses me.” With that she broke down and began to weep again.
Ch’i-Yun asked about her husband and his life in the army. Immediately she brightened up once more. She had recently been invited to stay at the army camp where her husband was stationed. She had lived with him there nine days. “The life of the soldiers is very good,” she said. “They live much better than we do here in the village. They eat noodles and meat. Now he has gone across the Yellow River and I don’t know where he is. I want to make a pair of shoes for him but I don’t know where to send them. When the reactionaries are beaten down, then he will return and. we can lead a peaceful life together.”
Remembering the bargain which Fu-yuan, the former village head, had struck with her husband when the latter’s Hopei relatives came to take him away, we asked her if he really wanted to join the army and if she herself really wanted him to go.
She said, “Sure I wanted him to go. If no one went, how could the reactionaries be defeated?”
But later she complained that the cadres gave him no choice. He left her with nothing to live on, no house, no tools, nothing. The cadres promised to help her with everything so she did not object, but her husband worried about her and their child. How could he help it?
Thus she vacillated between pride in her soldier husband and pity for herself, a mother still in her teens, left behind in a community that mocked her, in a home where she had no family or childhood friends.
33
A Curved Road
The purity of the leadership of the peasants’ associations at all levels should be safeguarded. The masses should be mobilized to re-elect the leadership where there is impurity. Here, the term ‘purity’ does not mean the adoption of a closed-door attitude toward such farm laborers, poor peasants or middle peasants who have committed certain errors. Nor does it mean their exclusion from the peasants’ associations. On the contrary, they should be welcomed into the associations, educated and brought into unity. The term ‘purity’ here means to prevent landlords, rich peasants, and their agents from joining the peasants’ associations and, still more important, from holding leading positions in the peasants’ associations.
Liu Shao-ch’i
BY THE END of March all the families in the village had been classified. Many difficult cases had come up, and with each case a story—a traitor who had been expropriated even though he was bare poor; a nine-year-old orphan who held twice the average landholding in the village but had nothing else to his name, not even a bowl or a pair of chopsticks; a spendthrift who had sold all his land before the liberation to buy food, had squandered his share of the fruits since, and then contracted a debt that already amounted to three hundredweight of millet and several silver dollars; a cook who made so much money that he bought up land in the famine year and married a landlord’s widow; a professional castrator of pigs who had so prospered on high fees that he was able to hire others to work his land; a Long Bow-born laborer who, returning home penniless after 30 years employment in another county, arrived after everything had been divided and received nothing; an old man who had given his share of the family land to a brother and then gone to live with and work for a neighboring widow. Now his brother wanted him to demand back wages from the widow and share the bonanza with him, but the old man refused to break with his benefactress.
An almost endless succession of tragedies, incidents full of pathos, greed, rollicking humor, cruelty, and kindness unfolded as the people reported their condition. But what the peasants were really looking for didn’t turn up. There just did not seem to be any landlords or rich peasants left in the village and that meant that there would be very little to distribute when all was said and done. As the peasants themselves admitted, they could find no more “oil.”
The only family still in possession of any surplus property which might make them rich peasants was that of the lusty old widow, Yu Pu-ho, mistress to poor peasant Wang and mother of the exquisite Pu-ch’ao. Because her status was still obscure, she was called before the Provisional League several times.
Everybody had to admit that the widow was clever. She had always carefully observed which way the wind was blowing and tacked accordingly. When the puppet troops held power in the county, she married her daughter off to a squad leader in the headquarters battalion. Although a poor peasant by birth, this soldier’s rank was exalted enough to provide his relatives with some protection against looting and rape. The widow also persuaded her son to enlist. Later, when the puppet troops surrendered to the Eighth Route Army, she persuaded both men to volunteer for service with the revolutionary forces and brought her daughter home to Long Bow as “cadre bait.” Thus she shifted course without getting hurt, won the right to aid as a soldier’s dependent, and even received her share of the “fruits.” So intimate did her daughter become with the village cadres that she bore one of them a son. No one knew who the father was, but he apparently had influence, for the fact remained that no attack was ever launched against the widow.
The publication of the Draft Agrarian Law and the arrival of the work team plunged Pu-ho into renewed danger. This time it looked as if she would not be able to find a way out. Nevertheless she was determined not to give up without a fight. When she appeared to answer questions she wore several layers of thickly padded clothing.
“Up to her old tricks again,” confided Old Lady Wang to Ch’i Yun in a loud whisper. “When the struggle movement first began she put on all the padding she could find. She thought she wouldn’t feel so much pain when we beat her. But she was never even attacked. Her daughter saw to that.”
The widow reviewed her sources of income with a slight nervous stutter. She listed five people, eight acres, eight sections of house, a donkey, a cart, all necessary implements. S
he said that her husband had died long ago. Since then, because her son was young, she had employed hired labor. What she forgot to mention was the fact that while her husband lived he never worked, and after her sons grew up they never worked either. They had always employed hired hands while they themselves followed the “Five Don’t Go Policy”: don’t go to work if it rains, don’t go if it is cold; don’t go if the wind blows; don’t go if the sun is hot; don’t go if you are tired. After Liberation the widow held onto all her land but sold her donkey and her cart.
“How come you no longer have the cart and donkey?” she was asked.
“One day my son took a trip and sold them.”
“But why?”
“How should I know? He sold them without asking me.”
This seemed very unlikely. The peasants did not believe a word of it. They felt sure the donkey had been sold to avoid confiscation.
“In any case, she later bought another donkey,” said one.
Fanshen Page 40
