by Chen Huiqin
In July 1978, Shebao took the entrance exams. He did well in the exams and was enrolled by Shanghai University of Science and Technology to major in electrical engineering. At the time, the university was expanding by incorporating Shanghai Technical College, which was also located in Jiading Town. Shebao was informed that the start of his college classes would be delayed until the merge of the two schools was complete.
In October 1978, the Yunzaobang River–digging project, sponsored by Jiading County, was recruiting workers. The production team leader tried to recruit Shebao because he needed one more person to fulfill the quota given to the team by the county. I said that my boy had not done much manual labor. The team leader said that was not a problem. So Shebao went and worked on the river-digging project.
They were on the project site for about a month. The workers brought their own cook to the site. After the project was completed and they came back home, the cook told me the following story.
All participants put in the same amount of grain and money for his or her daily meals. The three meals were offered at fixed times and there was no food otherwise. The cook said that Shebao would only eat a little at mealtimes. In the evening, he would ask the cook if there was anything to eat because he was hungry. The cook told me that he felt bad for Shebao, that he thought that he was a silly boy, but could not help him. All he could do was tell Shebao to eat more when the next mealtime came along. I guess Shebao went to bed hungry many times during that month.
He was an innocent boy. In the days when food was rationed, people learned to eat as much as they could whenever they had an opportunity. Shebao was born in 1962, which was after the years of the Great Leap Forward, and did not experience the severe hunger. At home, although we were not any richer than other peasant households, he never experienced a shortage of food. I am glad that this collective project was the only one he had to work at.
Shebao finally received the notice to start his college career after the Chinese New Year in 1979. He became the second college student in our family. He worked hard and lifted himself out of the fate of being a peasant.
MOVING BEYOND THE ANCESTRAL COMPOUND
In 1968, my cousin Zhongming, my uncle’s elder son, got married. Zhongming was working as a Chinese violinist in the Beijing Opera Troupe in Shanghai. His wedding involved new practices such as distributing “wedding candies.” Both the bride’s and groom’s families gave candies to each person present at the banquet. Candies were also given to all households in the village and to colleagues and friends of the bride and groom. In fact, beginning in this period, when asking somebody when he or she was getting married, the question became “When will I eat your candy?” Since the sedan chair had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution as an “old thing,” the bride now got to the groom’s house either on a bike or on a “sedan chair with a tail,” which was a boat, whose propelling oar looked like a tail.
Zhongming’s wedding continued the tradition of having unmarried girls as maids accompanying a bride. Shezhen served as one of the bridesmaids. The practice of giving gifts to the bride continued, too. Elder relatives presented meeting-ritual money at a ceremony where the bride was introduced to the groom’s relatives. After the wedding ceremony, the bride presented appreciation gifts, which were face towels at that time, to the groom’s relatives who had given her money gifts.
The wedding also retained the tradition of having a party in the bridal bedroom. At the party, people counted pieces of homemade cloth, pieces of clothing, and pairs of handmade shoes inside the furniture the bride brought with her. Zhongming’s bride, Ah Juan, did exquisite needlework. Neighbors and relatives admired the shoes she made and sang her praises.
When Zhongming got married, his family’s bedroom, which was in the southwest quarter of the West Compound, was partitioned into two rooms, one as the bridal bedroom and the other as the bedroom for Zhongming’s mother and younger sister. His younger brother and father slept in the side room attached to the East Compound. That room had been my grandmother’s living quarter. Grandmother now slept in the guest hall right outside our main living quarter.
By the early 1970s, my uncle’s second son, Hanming, had started to date a girl and needed his own space. The family applied for a homesite and was granted one right in front of our West Compound. A three-room house was built. One of the three rooms was used as the bridal bedroom, the middle one as guest hall, and the other one as kitchen. Hanming got married and established a home in the new house.
Around the same time, the elder son of Ah Bing, who occupied the northwest quarter of our compound, was also old enough to get married. Ah Bing’s family of five people—he, his wife, two adult sons, and a teenage daughter—all slept in one bedroom. The crowded living conditions made it very difficult for the sons to find wives. To make the situation even worse, Ah Bing’s family had been categorized as “landlord” in the Land Reform. During the Cultural Revolution, landlords were regarded as “class enemies” and children of such families had difficulty finding spouses.
In 1974, Ah Bing applied for a homesite and was granted one away from our compound, on the west side of the production team’s warehouse. At that time, it was a piece of cropland. About ten years later, that piece of cropland would be filled with new houses. There had been very little house building before the 1970s, so housing conditions had become very crowded for most families.
Ah Bing tore down the northwest quarter of the West Compound to get the building materials for the new house. Ah Bing shared the ownership of the guest hall with us, and this was also torn down. The guest hall had seven beams. According to tradition, beams should not be cut in half, for that would hurt posterity. Ah Bing’s wife asked me if they could take four beams, while we took three. Her reason was that their class classification made it very difficult for them to get building materials, which were in shortage at the time, and that it might be easier for us to get them. I agreed. So they took four beams. Using the same reasoning, they asked for the wooden plaque that carried the Dun Hou Tang inscription. I also agreed to let them have that. The plaque was made of very good wood and was big enough to be turned into window frames.
Ah Bing built a seven-beam house that had three sections. The middle section was the guest hall and the two sections on the sides were partitioned into kitchen-dining rooms and bedrooms. The house would allow his sons to marry and establish families in the two sections while sharing the guest hall.
The new and bigger house helped Ah Bing’s elder son to find a wife, a woman from Jiangsu. At that time, living standards in the Shanghai area were higher than in other places such as Jiangsu. Young women from poorer places tried to move into Shanghai through marriage and were willing to lower their criteria, which included tolerating the landlord class label.
After the guest hall was torn down in 1974, our main living quarter was very exposed on the west side. Since that wall was not meant to be an outside one, it was not as thick and solid. Northwest winds in winter made us very cold inside and heavy rain pounded the exposed wall and brought dampness into the house. When strong winds blew, we felt the wall shaking, as if it were going to fall down.
In the autumn of 1975, my husband and I built a two-story house on the site of our original guest hall. Since we only had one son, our old homesite was supposed to be enough, so we could not get any more land to build on, nor could we apply to move to a new homesite. We built a two-story house because living in the back of the compound all our lives had made us long for some living space that offered more sunshine in winter and more breeze in summer. We used the upstairs room as our bedroom and the one on the ground floor as our guest hall. We removed the partition in the extension and turned it into our kitchen and dining room. My grandmother started to sleep in our original living quarter, which was now between the two-story house and the extension.
In 1979, the side room, which stretched southward from our main quarter, was torn down. Kaiyuan, Big Aunt’s second son, had returned fro
m Beijing and now worked as an engineer in urban Jiading. He and his wife had two children, so the side room was no longer big enough for the family. He got a new homesite, tore down the side room for its building materials, and had a new house built at the east end of the village, near the Coal-cinder Road.
After the side room was taken down, it created an open space on our south side. We put in a window on that wall, which finally allowed sunshine to come into our old living quarter. Our compound had been torn apart. The remaining southeast and southwest quarters and the west side room would be torn down in the 1980s.
NOTES
1 The 104 Document is titled “Guowuyuan guanyu gongren tuixiu, tuizhi de zanxing banfa” [Provisional regulations of the State Council on retirement and resignation of workers], May 24, 1978. In Sun Wanzhong et al., eds., Zhonghua renmin gonghegou ling: 1949 nian shiyue-2001 nian siyue [Directives of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China: October 1949–April 2001], vol. 1 (Changchun, Jilin: Jilin renmin chubanshe, 2001), 842–44.
2 See the front-page article titled “Gaodeng xuexiao zhaosheng jinxing zhongda gaige” [Important reforms for recruiting students into institutions of higher learning] and the editorial titled “Gaohao daxue zhaosheng shi quanguo renmin de xiwang” [To do a good job in college recruitment is the hope of the whole nation] in Renmin Ribao [People’s daily], Oct. 21, 1977.
9
Changes in the Family
MY grandmother passed away in 1979. She was eighty-nine years old.
When Grandmother was young, she was a very active woman. She had walked all the way to urban Shanghai. She was also a curious person and would go long distances to visit places and attend temple fairs. When Chairman Mao died in 1976, there was a funeral meeting on the grounds of the brigade headquarters. We were told that the brigade had a TV set from which we could watch the funeral ceremony in Beijing. I asked Grandmother if she was strong enough to go with me to watch the funeral on television. She said that she would not be able to walk the distance, which was about one li away from our house and would take a normal person less than ten minutes.
I went to the funeral meeting. When I came back, Grandmother asked me how we could see an event happening in such a faraway place as Beijing through a “land pool.” She referred to television as a “land pool” because the pronunciation of television in our local dialect is tian, which means “land,” and chi, which means “pond” or “pool.” I explained, “Television is a wired box with a screen. Just like a movie screen, which you have seen, the television screen shows moving pictures of the event in Beijing.” After listening to my explanation, Grandmother nodded.
Grandmother did not get out of bed much during her last two winters. She complained about cold and preferred to stay in bed. When the weather was warm, in spring, summer, and autumn, she lived a normal healthy life, getting up with us in the morning and going to bed at night. She took turns eating her meals with us or with my cousins, Zhongming and Hanming. In winter when she stayed in bed, Zhongming and his wife brought her food one day; Hanming and his wife brought her food another day; and I brought her food for two days. Every two weeks or so in the last two winters, Little Aunt would come to help shampoo Grandmother’s hair, clean her and change her clothes, and cut her nails in the warm sun. We would offer to help Grandmother do those things, but she would say, “No. Wenlin [Little Aunt] should be coming.” Little Aunt was a filial daughter, and Grandmother was never disappointed.
Grandmother had outlived her two sons. My father died in 1972 and my uncle died in 1975. Her elder daughter, Big Aunt, was sick with stomach cancer at the time and left this world soon afterward.
Grandmother was a strong, bold, and decisive woman. She was widowed in her thirties, but she did not get remarried and leave. Instead, she ignored the conventions that limited many women in that society by openly taking in a bachelor man. Together with that man, Grandpa Bai, she maintained the family and raised her four children. Grandmother lived a full life. She worked in the fields until she was in her seventies. She lived independently until she moved to our guest hall to make room when Zhongming got married. After that, she had to depend on me and on my cousins for food because she no longer had her own stove. She never had any major illness. In the last few days of her life, she ate very little and became very weak. She died like the flame of a lamp that had exhausted the oil in it.
When Shezhen left for Beijing after having spent the Chinese New Year of 1979 at home, Grandmother said to her, “Shezhen, I now say farewell to you. When you come back next time, I will not be around.” Shezhen said, “Taitai, don’t say such a thing. I will be back around next Chinese New Year to see you.” Grandmother was right. In June of the same year, she passed away.
This was after the Cultural Revolution, so incense, ceremonial candles, and paper money were available again on the market, and some traditional practices had been restored. Grandmother’s body was moved from our main quarter to our guest hall. A memorial table was set with incense and candles right next to her remains. Grandmother had her “longevity” clothes made when she was still strong. We cleaned her body and put the clothes on her.
Grandmother’s body rested in our guest hall for two days. My cousins and our neighbors, who offered to help, rode bikes to various places to inform Grandmother’s relatives of her passing away. As Grandmother’s children, we stayed up the whole night. The women wailed, narrating Grandmother’s life stories. Every time one of us wailed, paper money was burnt. Male relatives stayed up and played cards to kill time.
We mourned Grandmother by wearing a long piece of white cloth at the waist and a black armband. Great-grandchildren of Grandmother’s, such as my children, wore black armbands with a piece of red cloth stitched to it. The red cloth was to show that Grandmother was very lucky, for she had a fourth generation to mourn her. The second day was the formal funeral service. Many relatives came to offer condolences. My cousins and I hired two professional chefs and sponsored a funeral banquet for all the relatives and neighbors.
Grandmother’s body was cremated at the West Gate Cremation Station. I took back the ash box and put it in our extension, where my mother’s and father’s ash boxes were. I represented my father, who was Grandmother’s eldest son. Grandmother lived her last years with us and died in our house. I did my share in taking care of Grandmother. I always remembered what my father had said to Grandmother before he passed away and I carried out the promise my father had made to his mother.
DAUGHTERS’ ENGAGEMENTS
In 1979, both my daughters were engaged. My husband and I had confidence in both of them and did not try too hard to interfere with their spousal selection. When Shezhen was going to college in Shanghai, one of the teachers at Liming School expressed a desire to pair her with his son. The teacher asked Ah Juan, Zhongming’s wife, to talk to me about it. I knew the teacher, a fine and kind man, and had heard that his wife was also a teacher in a school in urban Jiading. I also learned that their son was in military service at the time and afterward would be working as a salaried worker. At that time, a salary-earning person was much better off than a peasant, who earned work-points. So I talked to Shezhen about this. Since she did not outright reject it, she and I, accompanied by Ah Juan, went to visit the teacher’s home in urban Jiading one evening.
We met the teacher’s son, who was on a home visit from the army. He was a very quiet and reserved young man. After that, Shezhen and he wrote a couple of letters to each other. Then, one weekend, Shezhen came home from college and said that she was still young and had decided not to pursue the relationship any further. I was fine with that. I told Ah Juan to tell the teacher’s family about Shezhen’s decision.
This teacher really liked Shezhen. After that, every time my husband or I ran into him, he would inquire about how Shezhen was doing. He admired young people who pursued scholarly endeavors and praised Shezhen when he heard that she had become a university professor in Beijing and later on when she went to the United
States for graduate work. When his younger son passed the college entrance exams and became a college student, he told me the news with pride in his eyes.
Sometime after Shezhen started working in Beijing, we could tell from her letters that a married couple, both of whom were teachers at her school, were very kind to her. She went to their home to watch TV. They invited her to their house for dinners on holidays. Later on, we learned that she was helping their daughter and son with their English lessons. I told my husband that the couple in Beijing had taken a particular interest in our daughter.
When Shezhen came home for the Chinese New Year in early 1979, I asked her about this particular family. She took out a photo and showed it to me. She said that the young man in the photo was Zhou Wei, and he was the elder son of this family she had mentioned in her letters. She told me that when she was planning her trip home, Zhou Wei went to a photo studio and had a photo taken for her to bring home and show us. She added that when he went to get it, he realized that the photo, only one inch in size, was too small for me and my husband, so he asked the studio to make a two-inch print. Listening to her explanation and holding the photo in my hand, I thought, “He is a thoughtful young man.”
The following fall, my husband found a way to go to Beijing. At that time, he was one of the main cadres in Chengdong Commune and had some decision-making power. He had learned that Beijing Agricultural Exhibition Hall was having an important exhibition, and he decided to visit it. Part of the reason he wanted to go was to meet Zhou Wei in person.
