Daughter of Good Fortune: A Twentieth-Century Chinese Peasant Memoir

by Chen Huiqin

  In 1946, when I was sixteen, I worked in a factory in Zhuqiao Town, about three li north of home, making yellow-straw mats. I walked to work every day and brought my own lunch. We sewed yellow-straw braids together into one-square-foot pieces. At the end of the day, the foreman would come, examine the quality, and count the pieces. If the quality was not good, you would be fined. I was a good worker and earned about three jin of rice per day.

  After I worked there for about a year, the business closed. I then worked at a factory that spun a kind of hair. I do not know what hair it was, but it felt like human hair that had been processed. This factory was at Eight Letter Bridge (baziqiao), which was about three li south of home. I again walked to work every day and brought lunch with me.

  Several of us young girls in the village went to work together. We would leave home at sunrise and come home before it got dark. I still have the bamboo basket that I used to carry my lunch (fig.1.1), which usually consisted of a bowl of rice and a little something salty. The factories heated lunches for us workers.

  In the late 1940s, I learned the warping skill from Big Aunt, who acquired the skill when she lived in her husband’s village. Warping was the necessary step between spinning the yarn and weaving the cloth (figs. 1.2 and 1.3). Although individual families spun and wove at home, warping was more complicated and required tools that most families did not own. People took starched yarn, which had been wound onto bamboo bobbins, to the warping shop. There, bobbins were put on thin bamboo sticks and warp threads were drawn from them and then reeled onto a weaving beam. The process established the lengthwise threads for weaving with the shed for the heddle. People paid a small fee for the warping service. After Big Aunt moved to our village, she set up her own warping shop in a thatched house and had her elder daughter working with her. When her daughter went to work in Jiafeng Textile Mill, I became the helper in the shop.

  Our family lived a frugal life, but we always had enough to eat. Around Chinese New Year, Father would buy malt sugar and we would make sweets with peanuts and sesame seeds we grew. We roasted peanuts and sesame seeds in a wok and mixed in melted malt sugar. When the mixture was cool enough to handle, Mother would knead it and press it into flat pieces. When it was completely cold, Father would cut the pieces into small squares. We would have this candy for most of the spring.

  I got along very well with my parents. I remember when I was little, Father bought me a silver hair pin with about twenty-five inlaid pearls in the shape of a flying butterfly. It was beautiful and I treasured it. I put it on my left-side parted hair, but the butterfly was upside down. I tried to part my hair on the right side, and the butterfly hair pin was perfect. I got used to parting my hair on the right side and wore my hair that way for many decades. After I moved to the apartment we bought in Xincheng in urban Jiading, I got to know a hairdresser very well and went to her every time I needed a haircut. Every time she finished cutting my hair, she would blow-dry it and part it on the left side, for most people part their hair that way. She would realize it was a mistake and do it again. She jokingly complained about it, and I decided to part my hair on the left side and have been combing my hair that way since then.

  My mother was the most loving and caring person on this earth. She never scolded me or beat me. Whether we worked in fields or at home, we talked to each other softly. Other mothers and daughters in our village quarreled or argued or cursed each other. We never did any of that.

  Mother suffered from severe headaches, which affected her eyesight. When Father took Mother to see an eye doctor at West Gate about the headaches, I went with them. The doctor was a big and tall Indian. He spoke Chinese and had a local woman as his assistant. He was very expensive, but my mother’s headaches were not cured. The headaches ultimately led to the total loss of vision in her right eye.

  Mother was good at weaving and spinning but was not very good at sewing. When her right eye lost vision, sewing became an impossible task. As a teenager, I took over the responsibility of sewing clothes and making shoes for the family. I sewed all the family clothes, including my father’s long gown and his cotton-padded long gown.

  Most tradesmen in Wangjialong were from poor families. Chen Qixiang was a carpenter from North Hamlet. His family owned less than one mu of land. Chen’s wife worked as a day laborer for a rich family. The couple had two sons. When the boys were little, they followed their mother to work during the day and got food from the rich family. When the boys became teenagers, their father took them along and trained them as carpenters. Tradesmen such as carpenters, brick masons, tailors, and bamboo craftsmen all worked in customers’ houses and were given lunch and dinner.

  There were several kinds of jobs that few local people wanted and so people from poorer places came to do them. One of these jobs was to redo cotton quilts. After some use, quilts became so pressed that they were no longer soft and warm. They needed to be dismantled and napped into quilts again. In Wangjialong, there was one man who napped new cotton into quilts, but he would not redo old ones. The dismantling of the old quilts that had been pressed flat produced dust. It was very unhealthy work that caused choking. He would charge a lot if he accepted the job.

  Every year, after the fall harvesting and planting season was over, a tall, thin man would come to our village from Huizhou in Anhui. He was willing to redo cotton quilts without charging too much. He brought with him his own tools, including a brush-like implement that he used to dismantle old cotton quilts, a bow-like tool he used to make cotton fluffy, and a plate-shaped wooden piece he used to press the fluffed cotton into shape. He brought with him his own bedding. Every day, he was provided with food by the family for whom he worked. At night, he usually unrolled his bedding and slept in a corner of that family’s guest hall. Not all families allowed him to sleep in the guest hall. In some cases, families did not have a guest hall. So sometimes, he ended up sleeping outside, under the eaves of a house.

  My father invited him to sleep inside our guest hall. Father said that it was wintertime, sleeping in the open must be cold, and there was some open space in our guest hall. So this Huizhou man came and slept in our house. In the morning, he would roll up his bedding, leave it in a corner, and go to work. In the evening, he would come back to our guest hall and sleep.

  One evening, my mother cooked taros and asked me to take one to the Huizhou man. Each taro plant produced one huge taro and many small ones. The one Mother asked me to bring to the Huizhou man was a huge taro. The Huizhou man peeled it with a smile on his face. He opened his mouth so wide in order to bite into the taro that he dislocated his jaw.

  The Huizhou man came year after year and slept in our guest hall. He became a friend. When I gave birth to my first child in 1952, he presented me with a maternity gift (she’m’geng).

  Another job that was done by people from poorer areas was scraping river silt. Young men or men in their prime rowed their own boats to our area and were willing to work for low pay. They were hired by land-owning rich families to gather river silt as fertilizer. They slept on their own boats at night and got food from the family for whom they worked. Our rich, land-owning neighbor hired such men. I remember seeing each of them eat three big bowls of staple food, which consisted of rice and flattened rye.

  Poor people from Jiangsu and Anhui also worked as peddlers. In the old days, women seldom went to town to buy things such as needles and thread, so peddlers brought such things to them. The peddlers used a cluster of shells and metal pieces to make a sound, announcing their visits. As a child, I would go out to see the little things the peddlers carried. There were also candy peddlers, who played a flute to announce their visits. We children loved candy peddlers. We would take old and worn-out clothes, old shoes, and other sellable scraps to the candy peddler and exchange them for candy. I was told that such peddlers lived in improvised huts along the river that circled the town of Jiading.

  LAND

  Mother and Father worked hard and saved to buy two mu of dry land when
I was little. Dry land was much cheaper than rice or irrigable land. We grew cotton on the dry land. Cotton needed a lot of care. Mother worked hard, and I started to help by weeding and picking cotton when I was very young. After cotton was dried, it was packed and stored in the attic of our bedroom.

  In the 1940s, you would need four bales (250 kilograms) of cotton or 10 shi (780 kilograms) of rice to acquire one mu of rice land. I remember that when I was about eleven years old, my parents dug up an earthen jar full of silver dollars at night. The silver dollars were darkened a bit. My parents had buried the jar under the threshold between our bedroom and our kitchen-dining room. They had to dig at night and pour the silver dollars out into a bag slowly and carefully so that they did not make a lot of noise. They were worried that if somebody heard the noise, they would be robbed. We bought four mu of land with that money.

  One mu of the land was located right in front of our residential compound. Father was a reasonable man and was well aware of local traditions and customs regarding family inheritance. He said that he would give the house he inherited from his father to the eldest son of his brother. Now he used the money he, Mother, and I earned through our labor to purchase land, which he said he would keep for me. Father said further that he, Mother, and I would now work hard to earn more money so that we could build a house on that piece of land right in front of our original home. He added that when I grew up, he wanted me to take in a husband and raise a family in that house.

  Although Mother continued to protest Father’s suggestion of having me marry matrilocally, she and I gathered broken bricks and tiles in our spare time and piled them up for a building site. We would bring a bamboo basket and go to riverbanks for broken bricks and tiles. People would dump such things on a riverside after building a house. Water washed them downriver and when the river water receded, they would be exposed and we could pick them up.

  Besides broken bricks and tiles, we needed more dirt to build a raised site for our future house. Father used bamboo baskets and a shoulder pole to bring dirt from the other pieces of land we owned. He always did this in wintertime. He did not take dirt randomly. He dug up dirt only at places where a ditch was needed for drainage. That way, he prepared the land for crops while getting the dirt we needed for our potential building site.

  At that time, land changed hands for various reasons. The man from whom we bought the four-mu land was the only son in a well-to-do family. He gambled and ate the “white powder” (heroin). He sold land to pay for his gambling and drug addictions and totally neglected his family, which included his wife, a daughter who was my age, and his mother. His wife was so starved that she walked away from home, taking the daughter with her. This man’s mother, who worked for other families for food, asked my grandmother, who was a well-connected and outgoing person, to keep an eye open for her granddaughter. The mother said that she had given up all hope for her useless son and that the little girl was the only grandchild she would ever have. My grandmother asked around and finally found the runaway woman and the little girl. The woman had begged her way south and married a poor man about twenty-five li from our village. This was about five years after she had left our village. She and her new husband already had two children. Grandmother persuaded the mother to allow her to take the girl back to her grandmother.

  Some families sold land because of unfortunate events at home. A Yan family owned four mu of rice land. In 1942, the family decided to grow rice on three mu of their land and cotton on the other mu. Yan’s wife was a diligent woman, while Yan liked drinking and was a slacker. People who grew rice hoped that it would be a wet year, for rice demanded a lot of water, and those who planted cotton hoped for a dry year, because too much rain would allow weeds to grow too fast, overwhelming cotton plants. The year 1942 was a dry one. Yan’s wife had to pedal a waterwheel day and night to bring enough water to their rice field. She developed a little bump under her nose. She was too busy and poor to see a doctor. When the bump grew large quickly, the family realized that it was a deadly illness called ding. Ding was curable if it was treated in time. But when she went to see a doctor, the ding had broken and the virus had gotten into her blood. It was no longer curable. She died of it, leaving behind her five-month-old daughter.

  Yan’s mother “borrowed milk” in the village to raise the girl. Yan grieved over his wife’s death and was depressed. He escaped from life’s reality by drinking excessively. The family’s rice land dried up and was taken over by tall weeds. People from near and far came and gathered weeds from Yan’s land that fall. When the cotton produced fiber balls, he picked three or four jin every day and sold it at the local market to get the money for his alcohol addiction. He sold the land that winter. Father bought two mu from the Yan family and his brother, my uncle, bought the other two mu.

  Uncle and Father were not the only ones buying land in the 1940s. Yan Shoufu was another one. He inherited a little land. When he had some money, he bought an ox and a plow. He plowed land for other families, and the families he worked for paid him a fee for the service. In our area, we only had two planting seasons in which plowing service was needed. But on the outskirts of urban Shanghai, people grew vegetables for the big city. Vegetables had much shorter growing seasons and land had to be plowed for each new crop. Therefore, when it was not a busy planting season in our area, Yan Shoufu brought homemade snacks and walked about sixty li with his ox and plow to villages near urban Shanghai and plowed land for families who needed his help. The families provided him with room and board and paid him for his labor.

  He bought not only more land with the money he earned but also a boat. He planted garlic on his land. After the garlic was planted, he rowed his boat far and near to get wild water plants, which he placed on the rows of garlic before the garlic plants sprouted through the soil. Then he rowed out to gather river silt. He spread river silt between the rows of garlic. When the silt was dry, he pounded it into small pieces. Both water plants and river silt were very good fertilizers for garlic. The garlic from Jiading was exportable, thus making it a very profitable cash product. While others would harvest 100 or 200 jin of garlic from one mu, Yan would harvest 1,000 jin from the same amount of land. With the money he gained from selling garlic, he bought more land.

  By the late 1940s, Father was a respected man in the village. He was educated and wrote beautiful calligraphy. Villagers consulted him on matters of ritual and ceremony and asked him to write couplets for special occasions. People addressed him politely as Mr. Chen. He was made head (jiazhang) of South Hamlet. In that position, Father executed orders from the higher-ups, known as baozhang.5 Such orders included collecting money or grain from each family to support various local projects and activities. For instance, when a young man from the area enlisted in the military service, Father would go to every house in the hamlet to collect “soldier rice,” which was for the soldier’s family to make up for the loss of the young man’s labor. Father would hand over the rice he collected to the higher-ups for distribution.

  I remember Father would take a container to families to collect grain. A lot of times, he would return home and add our own grain to what he had collected to bring it up to the quota set by the higher-ups. He had to do so because some poor families just could not afford to give grain. Father would say that so long as we could afford it, we would do the good deed.

  NOTES

  1 In Wangjialong, as soon as a baby is born, it is considered one year old. This method of calculating age is used throughout the narrative.

  2 One mu is about one-sixth of an acre. Grandmother owned approximately one-twentieth of an acre.

  3 One jin is about half of a kilogram, or one pound. Ten jin is the equivalent of about five kilograms, or ten pounds.

  4 One li is about half of a kilometer, or three-tenths of a mile. Nine li is approximately four and a half kilometers.

  5 Jiazhang and baozhang were heads of the most basic administrative units, known as jia and bao, in China before 1950. Altho
ugh theoretically a jia contained ten families and a bao contained ten jia, in some cases, such as in Wangjialong, a natural village became a jia and several natural villages formed a bao.

  2

  War and Revolution

  I HAVE lived a long life and experienced changes that turned the world upside down. In my youth, I witnessed Japanese invasion and then Communist revolution. When I was three months old, in early 1932, the Japanese attacked Shanghai.1 Mother said that she took me and fled to Grandmother’s village, which was west of Wangjialong. The Japanese were bombing from the east. Our own house was too close to the Big Road (Dalu), where troops were marching. Mother said that when bombing and shooting came close, she took me into the bamboo grove near Grandmother’s house, put me on the ground, and covered me with her body arched above me. That way, if a bullet came, it would hit her body so that I would be saved, Mother said. When Mother told me this story, she admitted that it was a foolish action, because if she was killed by a bullet, I would not have her milk any more and would starve to death. Mother loved me and would die for me.

  A couple of months later, the Japanese occupied Jiading. My family ran away and took refuge in Qingpu County, which is in the west. Mother told me that we were given three meals of porridge every day in the refugee camp. Earlier, when my mother gave birth to me, our relatives presented meat as maternity gifts. My family could not eat all the meat within a short period of time, so my parents salted some to preserve it. The adults took the salted meat with them when they fled. At the refugee camp, Mother went out to gather dry straw and leaves during the day. Mother said that I was a good baby and people in the camp played with me when she was away. The adults dug a hole in the ground and cooked the meat in a wok with fire fed by the straw and leaves Mother gathered. Mother always worked the hardest in the extended family.