by Ting-Xing Ye
The buses ahead of us began to peel off onto narrow dirt roads to the left and right. Mine rumbled across a wooden bridge and pulled up in the midst of a cluster of wattle buildings thatched with rice straw. Everyone fell silent, staring. Around the buildings, desolation: flat, dry, empty fields. I told myself that this must be just a temporary stop.
When the door flapped open, letting in the chilly wind, a middle-aged man stepped up into the bus. “Hello, revolutionary comrades!” he greeted us in a Su Bei accent, using a term that had been out of date since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. “Welcome to the Number One Brigade of Xia Ming Sub-farm of Da Feng Labour Camp … er, Da Feng Farm,” he corrected himself hastily. “Xia Ming is one of five sub-farms; each has six brigades. My name is Chang Wen, and I am the leader of this brigade.”
Reluctantly I stepped down from the bus with the others. The welcoming team consisted of Lao Chang’s assistant, Lao Deng—a short old man whose mouth and eye-corners pointed up, even when he wasn’t smiling; their wives; the doctor; and the accountant. The latter, a tall skinny man, shook hands with each of us, bowing deeply as he did so and smiling, showing his cigarette-stained teeth. Shaking hands was a novel experience for me, as it suggested I was now an adult.
I looked around, searching for some sign of scar-faced criminals, high walls or stout buildings with barred windows, but saw nothing out of the ordinary, just a tiny village with dirt roads and pathways. Dr. Wang, the youngest of the greeting party, whose sharp, bright eyes reminded me of my grandfather, asked the male students to follow him to their dormitory. Lao Bai, Lao Chang’s wife, a chubby middle-aged woman with a piercing voice, called for the females.
“Is this where we’re going to stay?” someone shouted from the men’s dorm.
Our dorm was, like all the buildings, single-story, made of wattle—woven sticks and straw plastered with clay and mud—with a thatched roof and dirt floor. It was on the south side of the village, separated from the men’s dorm by a pathway and from the empty fields by a ditch.
“Come on,” Lao Bai said. “Pay no attention to him. Come in and have a look.”
We filed through the narrow door. My first impression was of heavy odours of dampness, lime, smoke and rotten rice straw. The building was like an oversized train coach, about fifteen metres long but only six wide. Though it was mid-afternoon, three naked bulbs fought to dispel the gloom. There was a door at each end and three small windows on each side. The dirt floor had been packed hard by many feet; the walls were newly whitewashed, but brown clay was already oozing through. Along each wall ran a low platform of undressed boards supported by sharpened tree branches driven into the dirt and covered with malodorous straw. This was our bed.
As if she had seen into my mind, Lao Bai said cheerfully, “It won’t look so bad when you’ve all spread out your bedding. You city girls are good at decorating, aren’t you? Soon this place will look like home.”
After a short but determined tussle during which many angled to be with their schoolmates or near the windows and everybody fought to stay away from the doors, territory was marked out by the small canvas shoulder bags we all carried. Lao Bai then led us to the canteen on the north edge of the village for a late lunch. Before entering, I looked around for a tap to wash my hands. I spied half a dozen water jars outside a small building, each one as high as my chest and as wide as my outstretched arms. Every one of them was filled with clean water, though it smelled of mud. This shack must be a pump house, I thought, and wondered how I could wash my hands without contaminating the whole jar.
A white-haired man appeared from behind a hut, where he had evidently been working, for his hands were black.
“Can I help you, young miss?”
I explained my predicament.
“Come with me,” he said quietly, and led me through the door of the shack. On the floor was a basin with soap and a towel beside it. He motioned me to use them, then left me alone. Outside again, I scooped a basin full of water from one of the jars, thinking that this must be the village’s fresh water supply.
Once inside the canteen I was asked by several students how I had managed to wash, since none of our luggage had arrived. I told them, adding that the basin, towel and soap could be used by them too, for the old uncle seemed kind enough.
“Young lady, be careful of what you are saying,” Lao Bai cut in, scowling. “You should call no one here uncle or aunt, nor go to their places and use their things. Only those who greeted you on the bus today should be addressed. You must have no contact with anyone else.” She lowered her voice dramatically. “You wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that ‘old uncle’ if you knew what he had done before Liberation.”
Her words sent a bolt of fear through me. Had I been speaking to one of the criminals? Was he a murderer?
“You, all of you,” Lao Bai went on, “stay away from them. You are all young girls. You never know what those curs are up to. If you have to, just call them Wei, nothing else.”
Wei means “Hey, you!” in Chinese, or “Hello” while talking on the telephone. We had been taught all our lives to call a man Uncle or Old Uncle, depending on his age; a woman was Auntie or Old Auntie. To address anyone older than you, even a stranger, by saying only “Wei” was disrespectful.
Lao Bai’s warning had destroyed my appetite. I repeatedly stole glances at the men standing behind the counter, the ones who had served up our food. No wonder they stood there like blocks of wood, expressionless. No wonder they had said nothing to us and avoided eye contact. But if they were as dangerous and untrustworthy as Lao Bai said, why should we trust the food they prepared?
At a meeting that evening Lao Chang cautioned us never to use the public toilet at night. He didn’t specify whether he was afraid we would be molested by prisoners or fall into the open manure pit beside the unlit latrine. His warning didn’t help my attempts to fall asleep. Around me the other girls talked, sobbed or cried out in their sleep. I was utterly discouraged. I felt as if we were all little lambs in the jungle, waiting to be slaughtered.
When I awoke I found myself encroaching on my bed-neighbour’s space. It would take us a while, I thought, to get used to sleeping together on the long bench. Her name was Liu Lan-lan—Orchid—a senior-high graduate of Xiang Yang middle school in the same district as my school. From her puffed eyes I gathered that her night’s sleep had been no better than mine. As soon as we were out of bed she began to clean and tidy her spot, her long thin body a bundle of nervous energy as she tried in vain to arrange her sheet neatly on the straw.
My neighbour to my right turned out to be one of my schoolmates, although I didn’t know her well. Jia-ying was a pretty nineteen-year-old with big dark eyes and a pale oval face, her hair trimmed stylishly. When she introduced me to my other three schoolmates in her soft voice, she sounded like an organizer at a social event. In fact, organization was not her strong suit: there were unwashed bowls under her bed, jumbled clothing piled on her open luggage. A little later she asked shyly if I would hold up a sheet so that she could huddle behind it to change her clothes.
Standing on her bed with the sheet in my hands, I had a good view of the long narrow dorm, filled with young women—all of them at least two years older than me—walking to and fro in their underwear while others squatted on the spittoons that were used for chamber pots, a scene I knew would be repeated endlessly in the weeks, months and years to come.
The opening of the day was a parade to the latrine, with many carrying their chamber pots amid giggles and sarcastic remarks from the male students and the prisoners. When I saw the women’s latrine I repeated to myself the overpraised expression “Everything is hard at the beginning,” but suspected that in this case the difficulty would never diminish. Reed mats formed the walls. The thatched roof was obviously not waterproof. The dirt floor was slotted by a series of ditches, over which we would squat, one foot on each side. An inside wall, no more than three metres high, separated our latrine from the me
n’s, from which laughter and the smell of cigarettes came clearly.
I had grown up in an environment in which emphasizing personal needs was criticized as bourgeois garbage; nevertheless, I had always tried to keep personal matters to myself.13 Although this was not my first experience of relieving myself in such an open and exposed way—the Beijing trip had given me a startling awakening—I found it hard to cope. I walked gingerly to a corner ditch, farthest from the men’s side, amazed at how casual some of the women were, chatting to one another from a squatting position, calling out to new arrivals, saying goodbye to those departing.
Before breakfast I stole off by myself and inspected the village. It didn’t take long. The camp was made up of four rows of buildings: the first two were residences and dorms, the rest, on the north side of the central road, housed the clinic, administration offices, canteens and pump houses, and the warehouse for storing tools and farm equipment. The perimeter on three sides was a wide ditch, partly filled with sluggish water and littered with garbage, which connected to a river on the fourth side. It was a desolate and featureless place.
I got to the canteen just in time to hear Lao Chang’s first lecture, arms behind his back, to the new arrivals. He had stuffed himself into a faded army uniform, complete with a cap, and made every effort to sound official and important. My eyes were drawn to the strained stitches on his shoulders and the five buttons of his jacket, which were making a valiant effort to hold the coat together.
Lao Chang was a “Thirty-eighter,” one of those who had joined the Communist Party in 1938 and taken part in the war against the Japanese invaders. Being a Thirty-eighter meant high status and prestige. There were other honourifics, such as Long Marcher (one who endured the famous 12,500-kilometre trek with Mao Ze-dong in 1934); White Area Underground Activist (a Communist undercover agent in a Guomindang-controlled area), and Soviet-area Worker (one who worked in the Communist bases established during the Second Revolutionary Civil War against the Guomindang from 1927 to 1937). In my understanding, these designations were like expensive liquor: the earlier bottled, the better.
Lao Chang opened his speech with good news. Each of us would earn eighteen yuan per month—double my welfare allowance. I was ecstatic. Finally, after nearly a lifetime of poverty and humiliation as a welfare recipient, I would be supporting myself, earning a real wage! I would be able to send money to help my family.
Next, with his hands still clasped behind him, rocking as he spoke, Lao Chang told us about the prisoners. There were eighty-seven of them in the brigade, all males, all from Shanghai.
“Where are the female prisoners?” one young woman interrupted.
“Does that mean they can go back home to Shanghai when they have served their time?” a young man asked. “Why can’t we go home, then?”
Lao Chang made no attempt to hide his annoyance at having his speech pushed off the rails. “All the female prisoners are at the Chuan Dong Sub-farm,” he said sternly. “So far as I am concerned, mixing males and females spells one word: trouble.”
Years later I learned that Lao Chang’s bitterness about women came from experience. He had been punished for having an affair with a married woman in his work unit and banished to the farm for his “rotten lifestyle.” His wife and family had accompanied him, and his “assignment” was indefinite.
“As for you, young man,” he continued, “I will not reply to your ill-mannered interruption.” His voice became shrill. “When I was your age I was laying my life on the line for our motherland so that you could live the easy life you have now. Don’t take your own good fortune for granted.”
He then stood aside for Lao Deng, who informed us in his quavering voice that this farm had been reclaimed from the Yellow Sea, and that every winter there was a massive labour campaign to repair and strengthen the dikes along the seashore. The farm’s soil, he went on to say, was so alkaline that, after a summer shower the heat would form salt rocks around the village. As a matter of fact, the closest town, about forty-five kilometres to the northwest, was called Yan Cheng—Salt City. Because of the quality of the soil, the main crops of the area had been cotton and peanuts, along with some vegetables. Since the inception of the National Program for Agricultural Development, great efforts had been made in the last few years to grow rice, but without much success. Nevertheless, he said ominously, these efforts would continue.
Most of his words went in one ear and out the other. I was a city girl. Surely one crop was the same as another. Soon I would learn the hard way how wrong I was.
Lao Deng finally left off speaking and we lined up to get our breakfast. Afterwards we had to run a gauntlet of prisoners who had been standing outside the canteen waiting for their turn. Most were shabbily dressed, their coats held closed by the braided rice-straw belts. All wore padded hats with earflaps. They banged their enamel bowls and yelled and laughed at us, making rude remarks to some of the female students.
“First you steal our house and now our food!” one of them hollered above the racket.
Apparently the dorms we had moved into the night before had been theirs and they had been forced to live in even less-inviting quarters. I didn’t blame them for their anger; but they still frightened me as I hurried past holding my two bowls.
That first day I and my new farm-mates, who were almost all “non-red” students, began our field labour. It soon became evident that Mrs. Yan’s mistake about the name of the farm—calling it Big Wind instead of Big Harvest—was grimly appropriate, for all day and night an icy-cold wind swept out of the northwest. A local rhyme described it: on odd days the wind rolled up the land like a rug; on even days it unrolled it again. Although the water in the river and the jars outside the pump house seldom froze, our proximity to the sea ensured that the almost-freezing air was heavy and damp.
The first thing I learned was to pick cotton—not to harvest the puffy white balls, for the prisoners had picked them more than a month before, in October, but rather to go from bush to bush and strip the unripened pods from the bare branches. The pods had to be torn open by hand so that the sticky black substance inside could be collected and later shipped to a mill to be pressed for cooking oil. Before long my hands were raw and red from cold and the abrasive pods. When that job was complete, we had to pull the cotton plants from the ground, a backbreaking task. Lao Deng was determined that rice would be planted there the next season.
One night several weeks after we had begun working in the fields, I found Jia-ying weeping silently in bed.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She showed me her swollen fingers, her raw and scratched skin. “How can I ever play the piano again with hands like these?”
I picked up my pillow cover, a small towel, and wrapped it around her hands. “They will heal, Jia-ying. Don’t worry. Our work in the cotton fields will be over soon.”
“Over?” she scoffed. “It will never be over.” She threw the towel at me and crawled under her quilt.
Even though I believed in the healing of wounds, I doubted that our invisible wounds would ever be remedied.
Our long days in the cold, desolate fields did not earn us any free time. Between dinner and lights-out we had political study in the dorm. Usually one of the two Laos would join us to lead the obligatory readings and discussions of government policies and campaigns as we sat on the end of our trestle bed and went through the motions. Tired and aching all over, I would try in vain to find a comfortable position. On those occasions when the Laos failed to appear, the study session was run by our team leader. We would climb into bed and wrap ourselves in our cotton-ticked quilts and soon our discussions would go off topic. At these times, driven by cold and boredom, I was prone to make jokes and kid around.
My sense of humour was honed by hardship. I always seemed keenly aware of ironies, and the Cultural Revolution provided an endless supply. The hated little red book, linked in my mind to suffering, nevertheless reminded me of the world I knew back home. Yet, eve
n while the thought of spending my life on the farm plunged me into depression, letters from home made me realize how peaceful it was here, a forgotten corner in a crazy world, free of the strife, the endless campaigns, the fighting in factory and street.
And so, in silence and loneliness, the new year arrived.
13. “Bourgeois” was a critical term meaning “opposed to Party policies” or “anti-revolutionary.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
To celebrate the New Year, Lao Chang ordered the cooks to slaughter a pig, which put broad smiles on our faces. For many weeks we had had nothing to eat with our rice but preserved vegetables and dried fish so loaded with salt that it reminded me of stories of the Red Army, half-starved on the Long March, having to lick salt blocks for strength.
All of us arrived at the canteen half an hour early. As I waited in line with the others, anticipating the savoury odour and rich taste of pork, I recalled the many times when Mrs. Yan would wake me up at four in the morning so we could go to the market to queue up for a piece of pork fat. The fat required fewer coupons than meat, and Great-Aunt found it valuable as a flavouring for freshly cooked rice, with a bit of salt or soybean sauce. My hunger also reminded me of the day a few weeks before when I discovered Jia-ying had brought a can of chicken fat from home and I tried not to show my jealousy.
When our meal began, I chewed my one thin piece of pork, cooked in soybean sauce and edged with fat and skin, as slowly as possible, relishing every bite. It was heavenly.
After dinner, while I was rinsing my dishes at the pump station with Jia-ying, several gaunt and bedraggled prisoners began to yell at us. For the first time at New Year they had been denied meat; instead, they had been fed bones, intestines and nameless organs.
