Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  Hsin-fa’s newly shaven head reflected the light from the lamp almost as brightly as did the arm of the chair.

  “Yu Pu-ho,” he announced in as stern a voice as he could muster, “you have been classed as a rich peasant. You have the right to appeal. If you lose the appeal, your things must be given up. We have come to register them. If you speak honestly, all will go well with you.”

  He took a brush, an ink plate, and a long piece of paper out of his pocket. As the party secretary rubbed the black ink stick over the plate, Yu Pu-ho said, “I won’t appeal. I know I am a rich peasant.”

  “Very well,” said Hsin-fa. “We’ll start with the grain.”

  “There’s no corn left. I have one bag of millet and three bags of wheat,” said the widow in a tone of finality as if she were bargaining at the market place.

  “Only three bags?”

  “That’s all. I used the corn to pay the hired laborer. As for the wheat, we’ve eaten a bag and a half already. We have only three bags left.”

  Hsin-fa recorded this, then spoke to Militiaman Ta-hung: “Now for the furniture and the clothes.”

  Ta-hung rummaged through the west wing. The butt of his rifle thumped on the brick floor as he called out the various articles that he saw. From a box in the corner he took out a bundle of clothes and untied it.

  “A pair of silk pants, a padded coat, several dirty tunics.”

  He threw them down on top of the chest with a gesture of disgust. Everyone knew the widow owned better things than these.

  Hsin-fa wrote each item in large clumsy characters.

  “Those clothes belong to Pu-ch’ao,” said the widow.

  “How about the pants?”

  “They belong to Pu-ch’ao also.”

  “Now see here,” said Hsin-fa, putting down his brush and looking straight into the widow’s face. “You are a rich peasant. You have lived off the blood and sweat of the people long enough. We know you have a great many things. Where are they? If you are not honest with us, you can imagine what will happen to you.”

  The widow laughed a nervous little laugh but still maintained her cordial manner. Even at 40 she had an attractive face. It was not wrinkled and worn like the faces of most peasant women once they passed their third decade. Her plump hands spread out in a gesture of helplessness as she explained in a torrent of words how the Japanese had ruined her. “They took everything. That’s how the devils were. When they saw something they liked, it went.

  “I know I must pay my debt to the masses,” she continued after a slight pause for breath. “I should have paid it long ago. Today is my day to ask pardon. But really I have nothing. I would like to give up everything, but since I have nothing I can’t help you.”

  “You’d better be honest.”

  “I am honest. What I have I have. What I haven’t got I haven’t got.”

  “How many things have you hidden away? How many things have you stored in other peoples’ homes? You’d better remember and tell us.”

  “There’s nothing. How could I overlook a thing like that?” Tears of sincerity came to her eyes as she said it.

  “How many jars have you?”

  “Only one. The other broke when the shed fell down.”

  At this everyone laughed.

  “How can that be?” asked Hsin-fa, cutting short his own involuntary guffaw. “No matter how poor, every family has jars for its grain.”

  “We keep ours in a tun” (a container made of fiber that wealthy families sometimes used).

  Hsin-fa, having lost a round, said no more. He proceeded with his list.

  The door swung open. Hu Hsueh-chen and her group filed in in silence. The daughter-in-law, pale and frightened, followed. She had not been able to tell them anything. She did not know whether or not property had been hidden. She rarely stayed with the widow if she could help it, for she was treated worse than a servant in her husband’s house.

  Cheng-k’uan’s group stomped in next. By the time they had all crowded into the house there was hardly room enough inside for anyone to move around. The new arrivals were angry and showed it. They had searched Wang-er’s house and yard in vain. Man-hsi, the man of action, his gun slung rakishly over one shoulder, his great muscles bulging under his coat, strode up and down the floor like a caged tiger. As he walked he muttered to himself, “The bastards! They have hidden everything! They ought to be whipped! The bastards!”

  Man-hsi’s face was contorted into a black scowl and it was only by an extreme effort that he kept his hands at his sides instead of using them to rough up the widow.

  When Yu Pu-ho stood up to uncover a box that Ta-hung had overlooked, Man-hsi’s hands betrayed him. He ordered the widow to stand back. When she didn’t move quickly enough to suit him he gave her a push that sent her reeling against the k’ang. Ch’i Yun looked at him in astonishment. Man-hsi reddened and pulled back. Then, overcome with frustration and unwilling to listen further to the stream of words that poured from the widow’s mouth, he suddenly disappeared into the night. He returned a few minutes later with a rope which he waved in front of the plump rich peasant’s face.

  “Tell the truth now, where is the grain? Don’t tell me you have only three bags left!”

  “That’s all,” she said, ignoring the rope. “There isn’t anything else.”

  With a shrug, Man-hsi dropped the rope.

  Cheng-k’uan, accepting the inevitable, took the writing brush from Hsin-fa and started listing the farm tools that his crew reported from the fallen shed in the yard—a plow, two hoes, a rake, a broken sifter screen—really, there was nothing worth while in the whole establishment.

  Hsin-fa, temporarily relieved of his duties as clerk, led Pu-ch’ao, the daughter, outside. He wanted to question her in private. He had once carried on an affair with this girl. He more than anyone else was responsible for the fact that accounts had never been settled with her mother. Perhaps she would tell him things she would not reveal to others.

  The attempt was vain. Pu-ch’ao backed up her mother’s every word. Neither of them, she said, had hidden anything that the village could claim.

  As Pu-ch’ao reassured Hsin-fa, Militiaman T’ien-hsi strode past them with a bundle of clothes under his arm.

  “Old Wang finally broke down. He gave me this. They belong to the old bitch,” he said, triumphant.

  He kicked the front door open with his foot. It flew back with a loud crash. Hsin-fa and Pu-ch’ao followed him into the house.

  The bundle found by T’ien-hsi contained a few fine silk garments and a lot of worn cottons. Not in the least embarrassed by the appearance of articles which she had just sworn did not exist, Pu-ch’ao spoke up.

  Defiant in the dim light, she looked more attractive than I had ever seen her. She stood like some mystic creation from a cave painting, but her eyes blazed with hatred and her mouth was tight, like the mouth of a fox spirit in a legend of old.

  “The clothes are mine,” she said. “If you don’t believe me, see if they fit me or not!”

  This then was the trick! Mother and daughter had altered all the fine clothes so that Pu-ch’ao alone could claim them. Even the work team cadres were angered. They began to wish, along with Man-hsi and T’ien-hsi, that the no-beating policy could be suspended for at least this one night. Then Pu-ch’ao would never dare to challenge them as she was doing.

  “Don’t think that because you are classed a poor peasant that you can commit a crime and oppose the Agrarian Law,” warned Ch’i Yun. “I think you can well remember what happened to ‘air raid shelters’ who protected landlords in the past. If the masses get angry with you, no one can guarantee your safety.”

  But Pu-ch’ao was as impervious to threats as to earnest persuasion. She continued to lie, complain, and remonstrate just as her mother had taught her.

  ***********

  One by one the cadres and the members of the Congress Committee drifted out the widow’s door. They left behind only one armed man to watch the “st
ruggle objects.” The rest of the raiding party gathered by the edge of the village pond. There they consulted, broke up, and consulted once again. Now this one left to investigate some hitherto forgotten cranny; now that one went to rouse a neighbor and seek an answer to some hitherto unthought of query. But always the group reconvened. The frustration that oppressed all spirits was as thick as the damp black night itself.

  “They won’t talk, that’s plain,” said Hsin-fa. “And we can’t beat them. They know that. That’s why they talk back so sharply. It’s no use trying to bluff them either.”

  “That’s right,” said K’uan-hsin, a militiaman almost as well known for physical prowess as Man-hsi. “But if we hung them both up and gave them a good thrashing we’d find plenty of wealth soon enough.”

  “It was because we fought so fiercely that we got our nicknames in the past,” said Man-hsi. “But if we hadn’t been tough, we never would have won.”

  “That’s true,” said Hsin-fa. “And the people still expect us to bring out the goods. Where property is at stake Man-hsi suddenly becomes a hero again.”

  “But we’re not allowed to beat people, so what’s the use of talking about it?” said Ch’i Yun.

  “We aren’t allowed to beat her; very well then, tie her up and throw her in the pond,” said Man-hsi. “Let her drink some good ditch water. Then everything will spill out. We are just wasting our time this way. If this were the year of Liberation, ten rich peasant bastards would have been beaten to death by this time.”

  Hu Hsueh-chen backed Man-hsi up. So did An-feng. Neither of these two rough-hewn women could stand the sight of the widow or her daughter.

  Thus encouraged, Man-hsi started for the house. Two or three militiamen made ready to follow. Just in time, Hsin-fa took the men aside and told them bluntly that under the new code drowning was no more acceptable than beating.

  “Then we’re beaten,” said Hu Hsueh-chen, and as she said it she choked back tears.

  The group leaders finally decided that the widow, her lover, and her daughter must find guarantors to vouch for their behavior until the investigation into the extent of their property had been completed. In spite of the lateness of the hour, neighbors were roused and individuals found who agreed to keep an eye on all three. The women’s reluctant guarantor undertook to keep the daughter in the house if the mother went out and vice versa. He also undertook to see that neither of them left the village.

  With this matter settled, Hsin-fa and Cheng-k’uan returned to the widow’s cavernous home. They sealed everything that had been registered. They pasted strips of paper across every box and jar and wrote in black ink down the middle of the strips, “Sealed, by order of the People’s Congress, July 25, 1948.” They left open only one bag of millet.

  “That ought to keep the family until we decide what else is due them,” said Hsin-fa.

  The placing of the seals completed the night’s work. The raiders slipped quietly off to bed, very much aware that they had met with a resounding defeat.

  Only Ch’i Yun seemed happy. As we made our way back to the district compound in the semi-darkness before dawn she said to Hsieh and me:

  “That was a good night’s work.”

  “How come?” I asked. “I thought everybody felt cheated.”

  “They did, but they stuck to the policy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t you notice Man-hsi? He was aching to beat them both.”

  “That’s true.”

  “But he didn’t beat anyone, did he?”

  “No,” I said. “He didn’t.”

  “So,” said Ch’i, triumphantly, “our work hasn’t been in vain.”

  63

  Hsueh-chen Dissents

  A Communist best expresses his spirit of discipline precisely when he is in danger or when there are serious differences between him and the Party over matters of principle or personal matters. It is only when he unconditionally carries out organizational principles even when he is in a minority that he can be considered a highly disciplined and principled Party member who is mindful of the whole situation and understands subordination of partial interests to those of the whole, subordination of a small truth to a big truth and the need to submit differences over secondary principles and personal matters to the principle of Party unity and Party discipline.

  Liu Shao-ch’i, 1945

  THAT THE first decisive act of the new Congress should have been the expropriation of a rich peasant may seem to be an extraordinary perversion of policy. Had not the County Conference and the final classification made clear that all of Long Bow’s most serious current problems stemmed from the excessive attacks and confiscations of the past? Was not the crucial question of 1948 the repayment and resettlement of families who had been wronged?

  Yes. All this was certainly true, but just because it was so true, the campaign against Yu Pu-ho took on extra significance, both subjectively and objectively. Subjectively, the discovery of one piece of unfinished business, one genuine rich peasant still in possession of surplus wealth, leant added meaning to the whole classification process and justified, at least to some extent, the travail that they had all been through.

  Objectively there were also compelling reasons for settling with Long Bow’s untouched rich peasant. Considering all the “holes” that needed “filling,” it was clear that the Congress would need all the property that it could legitimately get together. Now every bowl, every basket counted. The surplus goods found in the widow’s house and yard, when added to the land and housing that could rightly be taken from her, were enough to set several poor families on their feet, and this in spite of the fact that the canny woman had hidden the greater part of her possessions and altered her garments to fit her daughter.

  Necessary as this struggle was both psychologically and economically the expropriation of Yu Pu-ho inevitably developed into a headache for the Congress and caused its Standing Committee no end of trouble. On the morning after the raid, proof that Yu Pu-ho had indeed tried to cheat the people came to light from several sources. Ts’ai-yuan, the storekeeper, first came to the office to report that through intermediaries more than a hundredweight of grain had been placed in his granary for safekeeping. The widow and her daughter had not eaten all their wheat after all. Next Hsueh-chen and An-feng found a sack filled with clothes, cotton cloth, and rags. It had been hidden under an old chest in Wang-er’s back shed. While they were displaying the contents of this sack to Hsin-fa, word came that Pu-ch’ao had violated her guarantee and slipped out of the village. When she finally showed up at supper time, she admitted she had been to her sister’s home in Yellow Mill to check some clothes she kept there in a box. Everyone suspected she had done more than that.

  That night the Congress delegates, in formal meeting assembled, confronted Pu-ch’ao with the evidence and demanded that she choose, once and for all, whether she wanted to stay with her mother and be treated as a rich peasant “struggle object,” or divide the family, set up housekeeping on her own, and be treated as a poor peasant, a class status to which she was entitled by marriage.

  It was a strange confrontation. Hsin-fa, with loud “ho ho’s” and “Ai ya’s,” questioned Pu-ch’ao like a father interrogating a wayward daughter. Pu-ch’ao herself, having been exposed as a liar, stood meek and diffident before her former lover. It was an attitude that enhanced her beauty more than the defiance of the previous evening. But now all beauty seemed lost on Hsin-fa. He was hard as a cloisonné bowl.

  As Hsin-fa talked, K’uan-hsin and T’ien-hsi sat on the rectory steps, dismantling their rifles piece by piece and cleaning them. In this they were aided by the light of a full, round moon. Old Lady Wang and Ch’ung-lai’s wife half stood, half leaned on the stout staves they had brought with them to fend off wolves. The news that day was that a wolf had attacked and killed a 12-year-old girl in Li Village Gulch. Hence no one dared leave home unarmed.

  In the end the young woman chose to set up a home of her o
wn. The Congress then allocated to her two sections of housing, an acre and three quarters of land and an acre of her mother’s corn crop. It also undertook to provide her with all the household necessities possessed by the average middle peasant. Thereafter Pu-ch’ao came several times every day to Village Head Chun-hsi and asked for the cooking pots, fuel, grain, implements, and everything else she needed to live an independent life. Chun-hsi spent hours rummaging through the village stores to find the jars required for storing Pu-ch’ao’s grain. He no sooner delivered them to her door than she demanded covers for the jars. Soon other peasants began to complain. Why should the village head take such good care of a rich peasant’s daughter? Let her fend for herself like everyone else!

  If Pu-ch’ao gave Ch’un-hsi little peace, the widow, her mother, gave him even less. Yu Pu-ho quarrelled bitterly with her son’s wife, locked up all her remaining millet, and systematically set out to starve the girl. When the young woman tried to return to her mother’s home Yu Pu-ho attacked her at the courtyard gate, tore her jacket from her hands, and threw it onto the roof of the house. To Ch’un-hsi fell the task of climbing onto the roof to get the jacket down. And to Ch’un-hsi also fell the task of admonishing Yu Pu-ho to behave herself or face arrest.

  To settle the affairs of Widow Yu Pu-ho it became necessary for the Congress to meet and make final disposition of her property, even though much of it was still missing. On August 1st the following list was officially drawn up and declared confiscated: