by Ting-Xing Ye
“You useless city brats have ripped the food from our mouths,” they snarled. We ran off with our dirty dishes, followed by their curses.
Two days later they got their revenge. Although we had been repeatedly warned not to move around on our own, not even during the day, I insisted on going to the latrine by myself, for I had my period and did not want to change my napkins with others around. Everyone else had gone to the rice-threshing ground to fetch new straw for our beds. I was gratified to find the latrine empty.
A few moments later I heard rustling. Thinking there must be a bat in the thatched roof—a fairly common occurrence—I covered my ears, for I had been told that bats like to crawl into people’s heads. At the same time I closed my eyes and bent my head between my knees, hoping no one would come in and see me in such a ridiculous position, pants around my ankles, squatting over the trench.
“How are you, my dear?”
Startled, I opened my eyes and saw a man’s hand waving at me over the top of the partition.
“Why don’t you come over here, young lady? From what I can see, we’ll be friends in no time.”
I opened my mouth to scream but no sound came out. I jumped up, pulled up my pants, and ran all the way to the dorm, which was, luckily, unlocked that day because two girls were in bed with the flu.
Shaking with fear, I told them what had happened. Later, I wished I had never opened my mouth. An investigation started. I was interviewed twice by Lao Chang and each time I had to repeat my embarrassing tale. I was questioned by the two wives, the doctor and the accountant. When they returned from their work, my dorm-mates badgered me for details. Soon everyone, even the men, knew about the incident, including the fact that I had made a mess on my clothes in my hasty exit. Why is it, I wondered, that I should be the one made to feel like a fool?
My relatively peaceful but lonely life was disturbed one bitterly cold day in mid-January when I got a letter from Number 2. Number 3 had finally been assigned a job, he wrote, but not in Shanghai. She had been sent to a factory in Songjiang County that made small electronic meter parts. It was near the commune where I had spent two weeks working with the peasants before the Cultural Revolution began. Despite my sacrifice in volunteering to go to the countryside so that my elder sister could remain in Shanghai and look after our little sister, Number 3 had had to move outside the city anyway, and could go home only on weekends.
“Number 3 did not protest,” my brother wrote. “She knew it would be pointless.”
And it was a good thing she didn’t, he went on. Just one week after Number 3’s assignment, in late December, Mao Ze-dong issued a new call, ordering all city middle-school graduates to the countryside, including kids from “red” families, who had been exempt when I was “sent down.” Mao described rural work assignments as “a vast world where much can be accomplished; a boundless field for youngsters to use their talents.” If Number 3 hadn’t accepted the job, she too would have been sent to the countryside.
“The whole city,” wrote Number 2, “is like a funeral home for the living. Instead of catching fish one by one, as in your case, Ah Si, Mao has cast a wider net.”
Obviously, letters received by others spread the same news, for the result was vengeful laughter and grim satisfaction. Usually the arrival of the mail brought tears of homesickness, but not this time. All of us had been banished to this remote farm rather than to the much more civilized farms on Chong Ming Island because of our “bad class background;” now those who had harassed and humiliated us at school and on the streets would suffer the same fate. Lan-lan told me that two of her classmates who had shaved her mother’s head during a Red Guard raid on their house were being sent to Heilongjiang Province, far to the north, near the Russian border, a place where, according to legend, black bears would knock at your door and your breath turned to icicles.
“It serves them right!” she said bitterly. “I hope their noses and ears turn to ice and fall off!”
The next morning at a mass meeting in the warehouse Lao Chang briefed us on some new government documents. Lao Chang, I had noticed, loved these gatherings because in his eyes his prestige among his colleagues and their families, as well as the prisoners, was enhanced when he was addressing more than sixty middle-school graduates. He had held meetings on everything from the importance of cotton plants to making straw mattresses and ropes.
In order to respond to Chairman Mao’s call to make rice the key crop and to ensure year-round planting to build China’s self-reliance, we would be converting most of the cotton fields to rice paddies, he announced pompously. This was hardly news. We had been yanking the cotton plants out of the unyielding ground for ages and most of us had the bandaged hands to prove it. Our accountant, Lao Shi, stood up and assured us that as long as we could harvest rice once a year we would have a surplus, and he shook his abacus to confirm his calculations. With the others, I applauded this announcement, thinking that any crop must be easier than cotton.
“More city kids are coming!” Lao Chang crowed excitedly when he regained the floor. “We must build new houses for them. They’ll be here in four weeks.”
All the male labourers, including the prisoners, were to go to the dike to cut reeds and haul them back to the village on wagons drawn by water buffalo. We females would make bundles of reeds for walls and roofs.
I was less enthusiastic than Lao Chang about the arrival of more students. They would be politically correct “reds,” not like us, and that meant only one thing—conflict and persecution, attacks and humiliation, with people like me on the receiving end.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In March, fifty-six wide-eyed youths stepped down from the decrepit buses to the beating of gongs and drums. They did not seem as cowed as we had been when we first set foot on the alkaline soil of the prison farm.
Awaiting them were two brand-new dorms, still smelling of fresh reeds and the lime coating on the inner walls. We had hoped we might move into the new dorms ourselves: the early spring rains and subsequent dampness had covered our walls with green mould. So many evenings I had awakened to damp bedding and the plink-plunk of rain dropping through the roof into the rice bowls and washbasins we had scattered around. More often, I was startled by sudden screams when someone discovered unrecognized creatures crawling inside their bedding. But Lao Chang said no; we were “veterans” now and should yield the new dorms to the novices.
These fresh arrivals were not the scared and compliant beings we had been—and still were. Within a week Lao Chang was confronted by a newly formed committee of students and informed that he was no longer in charge of the welfare of the school youngsters. His connection to us from that day on was only as a production consultant. The self-appointed committee consisted of two women and three men. At the first meeting, each stood up and claimed to be san-dai-hong—three generations red—working-class as far back as their grandfathers. Their leadership of the brigade was thus legitimized and changes began immediately, from the reappointment of canteen staff to the reorganization of our living arrangements. Half of my original dorm-mates were replaced by red students, so as to “break up the stiff soil by mixing it with sand.” It seemed that the reform of those with bad class backgrounds was to continue.
Each regrouped dorm was to be called a platoon, comprised of three squads. My squad leader, Yu Hua, a pretty young eighteen-year-old, was, of course, one of the newcomers. She told us proudly that one of her sisters was a veteran in the air force in Guangzhou Province. Since Liberation, joining the PLA had brought high status. The armed forces were even more prestigious now. For those who had political connections and didn’t want their children to go to the countryside, joining the PLA had been the only way out. The “glory and honour” part was propaganda to justify the end-run around Mao’s call.
From the time they put on their uniforms, these people looked forward to the day three years later when they would be demobilized and return home with the promise of a lifetime career and a high s
alary.
The new committee had plans for numerous meetings, political study and the assignment of self-reports and self-criticism.14 Immediately, the committee’s program met its first obstacle: physical exhaustion.
Converting cotton fields to rice paddies was a tremendous undertaking and the process was slow and laborious. First, the land was divided into paddies by building low dikes to hold the water that would be pumped in. Each paddy was then flushed two or three times to wash away as much of the alkaline salt as possible. The next stage was to enrich the soil by ploughing vegetation and composted night soil into it. The vegetation consisted of grass and any other green plants that could be found in the vicinity, cut down and carried by shoulder-pole to the paddies. The first problem was that, even though the lunar calendar said spring had arrived, it was anything but spring on our farm and there wasn’t much new vegetation around yet. “The cleverest housewife cannot make a meal without rice,” the old saying puts it, but the red students claimed that man could and would conquer nature.
For weeks, each morning saw us leaving the village with shoulder-poles and straw-rope net bags, searching for anything green except reeds, for they would not decompose quickly enough. Each of us had a daily quota, which rose as the weather warmed. No matter how hard I worked, yanking and ripping weeds, grass and even some leaves with my bare hands, I couldn’t get my name off the “failure” list posted in the canteen every day, accompanied by a red minus sign.
One night when I was washing my blistered feet and complaining worriedly to Jia-ying about my predicament, she laughed. “Isn’t it about time you grew up and understood this world better, Xiao Ye? Do you really think we are working harder than you? The answer is no, but we know how to play with the rules.”
Her common sense and humour reminded me of Number 3, and I felt the pang of loss that visited me every day, sometimes when I least expected it. I missed my family and Purple Sunshine Lane, the sounds of neighbours calling their kids home, and the aromas of their cooking.
“We not only bring back the green stuff,” Jia-ying went on, “but dirt besides.” She smiled sweetly, showing her dimples. “If the dirt is good for growing grass, it must be good for rice too!”
From that day on I met my quota.
But I overdid it. Typical, Great-Aunt would have said. I not only made sure the vegetation I harvested had clumps of dirt on the roots, I soaked the load with water. The mushy bottoms were glued to the ground and I could hardly lift the mess up.
One day at the end of April we were called back from the fields and ordered to gather around the loudspeaker mounted on a pole in the central road. In my utter physical exhaustion and mental dullness I welcomed the command and sprawled on the dirt with the others to listen to the radio broadcast. At the Ninth Party Congress under way in Beijing, the “biggest political event in everyone’s life,” as the announcer intoned, there were more than fifteen hundred delegates, “elected” by ordinary citizens. Not for thirteen years had a congress like this been held. Sitting there, my shoulders and back aching, my skinny thigh muscles burning from the weight of my burden, I couldn’t have cared less.
As the congress wore on I was spared the increasingly futile search for greens and the strain of toting them back, because listening to speeches over the loudspeaker was thought to be more important than tending our crops. At night I listened to committee members read documents and news bulletins, participated (on orders) in discussions, made personal “statements of belief.”
The report on Lin Biao’s speech opened my wounds. Any hope I had harboured that the Cultural Revolution might begin to wind down was smashed by his testimony that “its merits are the greatest while its losses are the smallest.” His words forecast more political commotion, more violence and misery. The Congress “accepted” Mao’s recommendation—they had to; he was the leader—and appointed Lin Biao as his successor. This fact further enhanced the PLA’s status in the Cultural Revolution and laid the foundation for the army to take over almost all key structures across the country—the police, the courts, institutions of higher learning, even the jails and prison farms.
The list of newly elected members of the Central Committee was shocking because of those names not mentioned, including President Liu Shao-qi. But among those elected was Mao’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing.
To everyone’s surprise we were organized for a celebration on the closing day of the Congress. Trucks rolled into the compound before supper, bringing red cloth banners, paper flags and boxes of firecrackers of all sizes. In spite of myself I found the diversion exciting. We marched four abreast to the sub-farm nearly eight kilometres away under a starless April sky, guided by diesel-fuel torches. It was the most enjoyable night I had passed since my arrival at the farm.
When the shouting of slogans and singing of propaganda songs died down we filled the darkness with talking and laughing, shrieking delightedly with the detonation of every firecracker. Great-Aunt had once told me that firecrackers were traditionally used to drive devils away. For centuries they had been a part of New Year’s celebrations. That night, with every cracker that exploded in the sky, I wished hard for good luck.
The next morning the figurative worship of Mao Ze-dong became literal. Each dorm was issued two plaster statues, along with pieces of red cloth and yellow paper hearts with the character zhong—loyalty—embossed on them, the same word Number 2 had cleverly selected as his new name. We were ordered to set up a zhong-zhi-tai—loyalty shrine—at each doorway. Every morning after that we stood before the shrine and held our little red books to our hearts, requesting instruction and greeting Chairman Mao with rehearsed shouts, wishing him life “forever and ever” and his successor Lin Biao, “our beloved vice-chairman, good health, always, always.” We could not even fully dress or wash ourselves first, because, we were told, the adoration exercise was the first and most important political matter in our daily life.
As I stood there on the dirt floor or on my unmade bed, surrounded by waving arms, my thoughts went back to my childhood when my siblings and I accompanied Grandfather to our ancestral hall in Qingyang. Never in my life had I seen or heard of people erecting a shrine for someone still alive. Even I knew that worshipping the living guaranteed bad luck. Less than half an hour later we repeated the same words in the canteen while we waited in line for breakfast.
One day the female students were ordered to the rice-threshing ground and taught the “loyalty dance” by professionals sent out by the Shanghai city government. While we struggled to learn the steps, we sang, “Our beloved Chairman Mao, you are the sun which will never set and we are sunflowers always swirling around you …” Our dancing won us the title “Flowers on the Cow Shit” among the prisoners, who had watched us dancing during a work-break from spreading cow dung to dry before it was hauled to the paddies.
My genuine effort to meet my daily vegetation quota touched my squad leader, Yu Hua, who offered to pair up with me to help me out. At that time I was only about four-foot-three and weighed no more than eighty pounds, and I needed all the help I could get. Yu Hua was a strong, sturdy woman of eighteen, with short hair and a no-nonsense manner. Her kindness moved me deeply. It was the beginning of the first real friendship of my life.
We worked together well. I was quick with my sickle; she toted cuttings to the weigh station. We met our quota regularly. But the newly formed paddies were hungry monsters, eating up everything we cut. The vegetation near the farm had long since been stripped away and we had to go farther and farther afield.
One day Yu Hua and I packed a lunch of steamed buns and pickled vegetables and left right after breakfast to search for vegetation. Our shoulder-poles bounced with each step as we headed north along the main road, gathering weeds and grass as we went. After a few hours’ work we spied a swampy pit in which new shoots had sprung up where the reeds had been cut. We made our way over the spongy ground to relieve ourselves. A moment later Yu Hua called out to me. She had come upon a pathway leading ove
r a bank into a stand of plane trees. I followed her, curious to see where the path led.
Yu Hua stopped. “Look, Xiao Ye!”
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Among the trees, newly in leaf, tall grass grew, uncut and undisturbed.
“We will be able to meet our quota for weeks,” I said, “if we keep this secret.”
We fell to work immediately and by noon two of our mesh bags were stuffed full. After our lunch break, Yu Hua shuffled off under the weight of her shoulder-pole, leaving me busy with my sickle.
After months of living day and night in a crowd of students and amongst the circus of Mao worship and dancing, I found myself alone. I worked steadily, enjoying the solitude. The breeze stirred the grass and whispered in the branches of the surrounding trees. After a while I sat down to rest, leaning against a tree, and closed my eyes. Strangely, the isolation began to make me uneasy. Why had Yu Hua been gone so long? I decided it would be better to get back to work than to think of bad things that could happen to a girl left alone. Gathering my cuttings into piles, I bent to pick up a bundle of grass and found myself staring into the empty eye sockets of a human skull.
I screamed and dropped my burden. Stumbling down the embankment into the reeds, running and falling over the soggy ground, feet and arms torn by the brittle reed stubble, I finally gained the road. Blood ran down my legs and arms. Heart pounding, chest heaving, I ran toward the village.
When I met Yu Hua I burst into tears, breathlessly describing the horror of the skull. Only after she had calmed me down did I realize that I had left my sickle and shoulder-pole behind and would not be able to meet the day’s quota.
“Never mind that for now,” Yu Hua said, examining the slashes on my arms and legs. “You need a doctor.”
The doctor dressed my wounds, tut-tutting and wondering under his breath how such a slight young woman could have done such damage to herself. Then Lao Deng came into the clinic with Yu Hua. I braced myself for criticism for losing my tools and for the usual remarks that we spoiled bourgeois youngsters were lazy and incapable of hard work.
