My Name is Number 4

by Ting-Xing Ye

  “Now, Xiao Ye,” he began. “Let’s hear your report.”

  When I told him where Yu Hua and I had been cutting grass and what I had seen, his reaction surprised and confused me. He seemed amused.

  “You two are quite the detectives, aren’t you?” he said. Then, suddenly serious, he demanded, “How did you find that graveyard? What—”

  “Graveyard?” I interrupted him. “Is that what I found? Why is it unmarked, and where are the burial mounds? The skull was just lying on the ground.”

  “Listen, girl, that’s Wu Mao Yu—Number Five Unmarked Burial Ground, an execution site. You’d better keep your discovery and all your questions to yourself. That’s an order. And don’t ever go back there again!”

  For the first time since I had come to Da Feng Prison Farm, I eagerly embraced a command.

  Before Lao Deng left, he wrote out a chit for a new sickle and shoulder-pole and sent me away.

  14. In a self-criticism you were required to examine your actions and thoughts and to report, verbally and in writing, your “errors”—anything you thought or did that was not approved by the Party. Saying you had done nothing wrong only aroused more suspicion.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  From the time I arrived on the farm I was aware of the prisoners’ resentment of us “spoiled” city kids. We lived in dorms meant for them, they claimed bitterly, and we took rice from their mouths while they ate substandard food. Sometimes there were shortages of food and cooking oil which caused fights with their canteen staff. And it was true that there was a double standard in work assignments. While we foraged for vegetation, the prisoners had the more difficult task of tilling the paddies with plows drawn behind water buffalo. They also constructed the rice seedbeds, a laborious and exacting job, since the mud had to be smoothed by hand before the seeds were sown.

  With the coming of the busy season at the beginning of June, when the emerald seedlings were ready to be transplanted to the flooded paddies, a compromise was reached under which we students had to work the same hours, with the same quotas, as the prisoners. If we didn’t succeed, Lao Chang warned us, there would be ugly consequences.

  Each day, when dawn broke, we were whistled awake and, after our Mao worship, we gulped down our breakfast and headed to the fields. We carefully pulled the rice shoots from the seedbeds, shook them to free the roots of soil, bundled them in straw, and carried them to the paddies, on each of which a grid had been laid out with straw ropes pegged into the dikes. Wading up to our knees between the parallel ropes, we transplanted the seedlings. It was an arduous, precise job, six seedlings across making a straight column, about four inches separating the rows. Such precision, Lao Chang instructed us, made for the most efficient weeding and harvesting. He waved a ruler, warning us that any deviation from the measurements would lead to punishment.

  Our daily quota was seven twenty-five-metre columns a day. It was a backbreaking job, bending down constantly, even for someone like me, so small, the others said, that I didn’t have a waist. The only relief came with the short walk from the seedbeds to the paddy and back. By the time the day ended, I could hardly straighten my back. Before long I had worn my elbows raw from resting them on my knees as I worked. My hands swelled and developed cysts from pulling out the seedlings and plunging them into the cold water. Leeches were a frightening menace. They crawled up and hung on to my legs, and I had to slap the skin hard to make them let go. Thin streams of blood flowed from the wounds. The disgusting creatures startled me so much that I often fell back onto my bottom in the cold, muddy water.

  Lao Chang said timing was the key to growing rice and no delay could be tolerated. Swollen hands and feet met with no sympathy. He even went so far as to have his wife check the girls who claimed to have their periods, because, according to the rules, they were allowed two days of dry land work at such times. For the first time in my life I welcomed my period, wishing it would come weekly rather than once a month.

  I lost count of the times I slept in my clothes after returning from the fields, too exhausted to clean up first, my mud-covered calves poking out from under the mosquito net. Yu Hua continued to look out for me, particularly after I told her I had no parents. “I will be your Jie-Jie—elder sister,” she said. Although I was conscious of my daily mounting unpaid debt to her, I often thought how true was Teacher Chen’s advice that a friend was a treasure beyond price.

  When the summer arrived, one wave of suffocating heat followed another, bringing thick clouds of mosquitoes, which made sitting outside at night impossible. The living conditions inside the ovenlike dorm were unbearable. We propped the windows open but, afraid of the prisoners, we locked the doors when we were sleeping, so there was little air circulation. Although we had managed to persuade the committee to allow us to break up the long trestle bed into separate doubles so that we could more easily hang our separate mosquito nets, nothing relieved the heat. Almost everyone was covered with heat rash as well as skin afflictions caused by the fertilizers we spread by hand in the paddies.

  There was no bath- or shower-house, but I was able to wash in the nearby river. Not everyone was so lucky; the others feared the river because they couldn’t swim. Bathing in the warm river water reminded me of the day when the news came to Shanghai that seventy-three-year-old Chairman Mao had swum in the Yangtze. The city government had organized the citizens on numerous occasions to emulate Mao by swimming in the polluted Huangpu River. I had joined Number 2 and his factory team, but suffered severe diarrhea after swallowing a couple of mouthfuls of polluted water. On the farm, I was more careful.

  As a reward for their work in rice transplanting, Lao Chang had always allowed the prisoners to catch fish by blocking off a section of the river. So in early August, they built dikes to partition the river; then, with wooden barrels, they bailed the water out of the temporary pond. It was a round-the-clock operation for a day or so until the water was shallow enough to wade in and grab the fish. This year, instead of handing the catch over to the canteen immediately, they secretly stored the fish in barrels until it began to rot.

  Then, to our surprise, one day our canteen was presented with a load of cleaned fish covered with salt. The salt was to keep the fish fresh, the prisoners explained. Inexperienced and ignorant, the staff washed off the salt and sent out the news that we were to receive a treat that night. We were delighted. Fish is always a delicacy; to us, living as we did on boring and often inadequate food, it was a gift from the gods. There was a long lineup before the canteen opened.

  By midnight the doctor and his assistant were run ragged making trips from dorm to dorm, cleaning up vomit and caring for those who rolled on the floor clutching their abdomens. Everyone was on the move, either to or from the latrines or helping out the doctors and patients. When the morning arrived, hardly a student was able to get out of bed.

  I was hit hard. After a night of violent cramps, vomiting and running to the latrine, my whole body felt like a cotton ball, totally without energy. I craved water but was afraid to drink. By noon the sub-farm medical team had arrived, bringing large quantities of antibiotics. But they were too late. The latrines soon contaminated our water supply, and before we had recovered from the food poisoning, we were in deeper trouble with severe diarrhea. On the fifth day I and three other girls were so dehydrated that we were taken to the farm hospital more than fifteen kilometres away in a flatbed wagon pulled by a water buffalo. Because I passed out, I remember nothing of the trip. My condition worsened. My body was wracked with pain and I was continuously voiding bloody feces.

  Diagnosed with amoebic dysentery by a mobile medical team from Shanghai Number 1 People’s Hospital, I was rushed by jeep to the ship, then to Shanghai dock, and from there directly to hospital. I was told my life was in danger unless I received proper medical treatment immediately. After two days in hospital the doctor said, “You have escaped Death’s hand, but barely. Your disease will likely recur.” For the next week I continued my frequent visit
s to the toilet, but could not eat. Instead I received glucose injections. When I was released, I weighed less than seventy pounds.

  I had ached to see Purple Sunshine Lane and my family, so much so that I was almost grateful for my illness, despite its severity. Great-Aunt and Number 2 came to take me home in a taxi, an unheard-of luxury and the first such experience of my life. I had every reason to be cheerful, considering that I was still alive, but I found myself pensive and sad. In the nine months since I had left, the city had become a huge construction site, with clouds of dust in the air and piles of dirt along every road. As the taxi passed through the streets, my brother told me that after the military clashes with the Soviet Union over Zhenbao—Treasure—Island in the Heilongjiang River which separated the two countries, the whole nation was gearing up for war. Every work unit and neighbourhood committee was responsible for its own air-raid shelters. Mao’s call had been for “deep digging [shelters], massive saving [of grain] and no dealings with the superpowers [since the U.S. and Russia were both against us].” While the young continued to be sent out to the countryside, tens of thousands of government employees were “evacuated” to rural areas and remote provinces to decentralize industry so that it would not all be destroyed if the cities were hit with air raids.

  Following Mao’s new policy, both Number 1 and Number 5 had been forced to leave the city in July, and I hadn’t been allowed to go home to see them off. Number 5, after spending less than a year at middle school, left as a “graduate” and was sent to an army reclamation farm in Jiangxi Province, southeast of Shanghai. My eldest brother, a student of motor vehicle engineering, was assigned to a tool-repair shop in a small town in Guizhou Province, one of the poorest and most backward areas of the country. His letters confirmed the frequent rumour that “some people in Guizhou are so destitute that the whole family shares one pair of pants.”

  Thinking about Number 5 and Number 1 added to my depression. Our family was scattered now, their intelligence and abilities wasted. When I thought of my mother’s anguish at having to decide which one of her sons would get a university education, my heart was heavy. Number 1 had gone to university only to be banished to a wasteland.

  As if that was not enough, when we had a chance to talk alone Number 2 informed me that Number 3 had not been home from Songjiang for months.

  “I have to explain this to you before you ask after her,” he began. “For the past months Great-Aunt’s resentment toward Number 3 for letting you go to the countryside has made Great-Aunt hostile and abusive. She accused Number 3 of being a coward and the worst kind of elder sister. Ah Si, we all are aware that you made a huge sacrifice for the family, but Number 3 has not had an easy time since you left. She could hardly keep a dry eye whenever you were mentioned and the tremendous burden will go with her for the rest of her life, even without Great-Aunt’s blame. What a time!” he sighed. “You have a home that you are not free to visit, and Number 3 has one that she is afraid to visit!”

  How could Great-Aunt say things like that to someone who had spent her entire first month’s salary to buy me a fashionable polyester shirt, much prized in China at that time? But my resentment toward Great-Aunt—whom I had missed greatly—was, as usual, tinged with guilt. I understood why she treated my sister badly. I wished she could treat all of us equally, but it was not in her nature.

  Lying in the darkness on my first night at home after almost a year, I was torn apart with conflicting loyalties, and my tears ran down onto the pillow. After living in pretense for the past ten months mouthing political slogans, now I had to hide my feelings at home too.

  Number 3 came home to Purple Sunshine Lane a few days later. She burst into tears when I opened the door, skinny and wasted from my illness and all the hard work. “Great-Aunt was right,” she exclaimed. “This is my fault!” She asked me a thousand questions and I tried my best to answer them without including the grim details. I turned the food poisoning into a humorous episode; the dysentery I reported as a character-building life-experience. Telling the truth would do no one any good.

  I tried to reconcile Number 3 and Great-Aunt but the effort was in vain. Great-Aunt ignored my sister but doted on me, doing my laundry, cooking my favourite dishes, offering me money to see a movie or go shopping. But she never sat and talked with me. She kept herself busy all the time, playing her part in the massive earth-digging campaign during the day, distributing mosquito pesticide on behalf of the neighbourhood committee at night. “The worst year for mosquitoes I have ever experienced,” she said.

  After four weeks, during which I spent most of my time alone in our apartment, the doctor stopped my sick leave and Great-Aunt took to her flour roasting again. How I wished that time could stop, or at least slow down. With every revolution of Great Aunt’s spoon as she stirred the flour, my sense of helplessness and despair increased. Before me the endless days of labour and loneliness waited north of the Yangtze River.

  But, too soon, the last morning dawned. Number 2 and Number 3 saw me off at the dock, and I was on my way to the Da Feng Prison Farm once more.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I returned to the farm early in October to find that the People’s Liberation Army had taken over—specifically, the air force, which was loyal to Chairman Mao’s right-hand man, Vice Chairman Lin Biao, and his son, Lin Li-guo, who had been named deputy commander. The PLA representatives had established themselves at leading levels of the farm, sub-farm and brigade.

  Our brigade’s two reps made an interesting team. They were both officers, but there the similarity ended. Cui was in his thirties, slim, average height, appearing reasonable and well-spoken. Zhao was in his forties, chunky and strong. Everything about him was short, from his arms and legs to his almost invisible neck. After only a few days I concluded that the big head that sat on that neck was hollow.

  If Cui had earned his four officer’s pockets by his charm and elementary-school education, the unschooled and illiterate Zhao had acquired his by sweating, and even shedding blood, for twenty years. The two of them reminded me of the “red face” and “white face” characters in classical plays, such as the traditional Beijing Opera, in which a red-painted face represents a good person while the white denotes its opposite, though quite often they worked together. From the beginning Cui and Zhao worked that way.

  Zhao described himself to us as lao-da-cu—old, big and inelegant. Unlike us, he pointed out, who had drunk a few bottles of ink so that we had more twists in our minds than in our guts, making us hard to deal with, he was simple and direct. Red-face Cui would then take over, saying that he himself had a mind no different from ours, so we would get along just fine. Zhao liked to yell and shout to emphasize his remarks; Cui spoke in a low voice and sometimes joked around while conveying the same message.

  Some of us felt they were a two-man comedy show, but their routine filled me with unease. Why did they act that way instead of being straightforward?

  At that time I and others held the PLA in the highest possible esteem. They were the heroic “uncles” who had brought Liberation: self-sacrificing men and women who loved China and Chairman Mao. Even the Cultural Revolution had not smeared them. Their rigid “Three Main Rules and Eight Points of Attention” were well known to every schoolchild. (Obey orders in all actions; take not even a single needle or piece of thread from the citizens; turn in everything captured—these were the three rules. Speak politely; pay fairly for what you buy; return everything you borrow; compensate for anything you damage; swear at or hit no one; damage no crops; take no liberties with women; mistreat no captives—these were the eight points.) Mao had recently called upon the whole nation to learn from the revered PLA. In the days to come I would have a hard time relating what I had been taught at school to what I saw with my own eyes.

  A brick house was under construction on the south side of our village to house Cui and Zhao and their office. No wattle and thatch for them. We female labourers were divided into teams of four, given a cart and sen
t to the sub-farm for bricks. The long flatbed cart with projecting handles and a straw pull-rope bounced easily over the deep ruts left by the typhoons. But once loaded with bricks it became as difficult to handle as an angry water buffalo. With one person on each handle, one shouldering the pull-rope and the last one pushing from the rear, we were barely able to move the cart and wept with frustration when the two lost control of the handles and the rear of the cart slammed to the ground, throwing the bricks into the road. When we finally reached our destination we were mocked by the bricklayers for bringing hardly enough bricks to make a thin pillar.

  The very day that our PLA reps moved into their eyecatching new house, Lao Chang rushed us back to the paddies, where the rice stalks had turned golden yellow. Although our paddies were nothing like the “rolling waves of golden ears” described in songs, we were excited because we knew that every single plant had been touched by our hands, from gently tugging the seedlings from their beds, to planting them in straight rows, to endless weedings and applications of fertilizer. Now the rice would be cut down, by hand.

  The paddies had been drained and harvesting could begin; once again Lao Chang reminded us that timing was everything. For two weeks we worked from dawn until dark. Our lunches were brought to the fields so that we would lose no time. Wearing boots (the paddies were still muddy) and a long-sleeved shirt to protect my forearms from the rough stalks, I wielded my sickle, bent at the waist, hour after hour, chopping the plants off at ground level and piling them carefully so that they could be bundled up and hauled away to the threshing ground.