by Chen Huiqin
My girlfriend was raised by the man’s parents as a child bride. By the time they were old enough to be married, the family was extremely poor and the father had passed away. So the young man and the woman were joined together as husband and wife without a formal ceremony a couple of years before Liberation.
After the marriage, the young man and woman were given their own bedroom. Although they slept in the same bed, they were not having any children. There was a local theory that if a married couple did not produce a child after marriage, then an adoption would help them conceive. It was believed that when a child called the married woman “Mom,” her body would react to the calling and produce its own baby. Therefore, the family adopted a baby girl for the couple.
But the child’s calling did not produce a pregnancy. There were signs of problems between the man and woman, although they remained very polite to each other. One day, when the man was visiting at our house, Father, who liked this young man very much, asked him to be good and to not let his widowed mother down. The man answered, “I am being good. But my ‘little guy’ is not being good.” We learned later that he did not like his wife and could not get excited about her. But the couple continued to live as husband and wife, and they raised the adopted child together.
Under the New Marriage Law the couple divorced each other. The man married a woman who was the only child in her family and thus the marriage was a matrilocal one. He left our village and soon became a father. The woman also married again soon and produced five children with her new husband. After both the man and woman left the house, the little girl grew up with the grandmother who had made the decision to adopt her.
Here is another example. A man in North Hamlet was supposed to marry the child bride the family had raised for him. He told his parents that he did not like the girl, but his parents went ahead and held a wedding ceremony for them before Liberation. As the man was told to kneel down to Heaven and Earth in the matrimony ceremony, he ran out of the house and went into a nearby river. He said he would rather die than marry the chosen bride. This was shocking news and people in Wangjialong talked about it for days. But the ceremony was still considered valid. When the man and woman did not produce a child, the parents also adopted a daughter for them. When the New Marriage Law was proclaimed, this marriage also ended. The woman got married and left the house, taking the little girl with her. The man married a wife of his own choice and had three children with her.
Others, who were still traditional in thinking, remained married to the husband or wife their parents had arranged for them. One man in South Hamlet told me when he was in his seventies that he had lived a loveless life. His parents raised a child bride for him and he was married at the end of the 1940s. When the New Marriage Law came out, he and his wife already had a son. He did not love his wife, but he did not ask for a divorce because he did not want to hurt his parents or his young son. He said he was too filial as a son and too responsible as a father. One day, I heard that he was sick, so I went to visit him. He slept in a one-person bed. In the same bedroom, there was a big bed that his wife slept in.
East River Aunt was divorced by her husband after the New Marriage Law came out. My mother advised her sister to find a husband for herself. But East River Aunt did not take the advice. She said that she was the lawful daughter-in-law in the Song family and would not give up her position for the woman her husband had married. She did not win this fight, because she only raised a daughter, who was married out. The son of the Song family and his second wife had a son, who carried on the family name. My aunt lived her entire life a single woman and died at the age of eighty. In her old age, she lived with her daughter’s family.
Under the protection of the new law, all the child brides in Wangjialong, about ten of them, were treated as daughters and were married out when they reached marriage age. The sons of these families found suitable spouses one way or another.
LAND REFORM
The Land Reform Movement in our area was carried out during 1950 and the first half of 1951.9 We received our new land titles in July 1951.
The movement went through several stages. First, meetings were held to publicize the Land Reform policies. We learned a song entitled “Who Provided Livelihood for Whom?” The song proclaimed that the poor labored and the rich enjoyed the profits of the labor. This changed the old thinking, which was that poor people should be grateful for the opportunity to earn a livelihood by working on land rented from the rich or by working as laborers for the rich. Now we realized that those who worked the land provided the livelihood for the rich. It was the opposite of the old thinking and it made sense.
A Land Reform team was formed in Wangjialong. The team members included the head of the village militia, the head of the village Peasant Association, and other activists from poor families. They went through some training regarding the Land Reform policies. The team encouraged poor peasants to speak up against the rich. Pan Guanghua, one of the very poor, was the most active at these speaking-bitterness meetings. He exposed Pan Shouwen, a rich man and baozhang, for exploiting poor people like him and for using his position to oppress villagers. Pan Guanghua, in fact, was from the same lineage as Pan Shouwen.
Each family had to report to the Land Reform team how many mu of land it owned, how many mu were rented out or cultivated by hired labor, and how many mu of rented land the family worked on. The team investigated to verify the information. The investigation included physically measuring land and talking to hired hands and families who rented land from rich families. The collected information was displayed in public and all adult villagers gathered at meetings to discuss which class category each family should belong to.
There were five class categories. The first category was landlord, for people who used hired labor to work on their land and/or rented land out to other families. We learned that this class of people exploited others for a living. My father’s uncle’s family belonged to this category. The family owned about fifty mu of land. My father’s uncle was in his sixties. Both of his sons had died. His grandsons were not yet experienced farmers, so the family used hired labor to work the land.
The second category was rich peasant. There was no rich peasant family in our hamlet, but several families in North Hamlet belonged to this category. One family owned thirty-some mu of land. The family included some strong and capable farmhands and thus did not use hired labor to work the land.
The third was middle peasant. My family owned fifteen mu of land and my uncle’s family owned fourteen mu; both were categorized as middle peasants. We worked the land ourselves and were self-sufficient families. Quite a few families in Wangjialong belonged to this self-sufficient category.
The fourth was poor peasant, whose own land was too little to support the mouths in a household. Such families worked on rented land and/or worked as hired labor for others. Therefore, they suffered exploitation. Many families in Wangjialong belonged to this category.
The fifth was hired laborer, a person who had little or no land and mainly depended on selling his labor to make a living. My grandmother’s family in Tang Family Village belonged to this category. The only land Grandmother and Uncle owned was a small piece where the family’s ancestors were buried. Uncle worked as a year-long hired hand.
The landlord families also experienced the Land Reform team’s counting of the number of rooms they owned and pieces of furniture they had. Houses and furniture were considered the result of exploiting other people’s labor. My father’s uncle’s family experienced that.
When the Communists first arrived, my father’s uncle was nervous. One day, he asked my father if it was true that Communists would kill people. Father told him not to believe in such rumors. Although nobody physically bothered him, the process of reporting and verifying the land he owned made him more nervous. At the speaking-bitterness meetings, people who had worked for his family complained about ill-treatment they had received. That added to the stress he lived under.
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p; My father’s uncle had been complaining about pains caused by his inguinal hernia. His pains became worse as he lived under pressure and fear. With both of his sons dead and his grandsons not knowing what to do, my father stepped in to help. Father borrowed a boat and, together with the old man’s son-in-law, rowed him to a hospital in West Gate of Jiading Town. He quickly underwent surgery, but it was already too late. He died in the hospital. According to a local tradition, a dead body could not enter a house, so the body rested in the open air outside the compound while a simple funeral service was performed. The old man died before the Land Reform ended, so he did not see the confiscation of some of his family’s property.
As a result of the Land Reform, my father’s uncle’s family, now with Ah Bing, the old man’s elder grandson, as head of the household, retained only thirteen of their fifty mu of land. In addition, the family lost the ownership of the southeast quarter and the east side room of the West Compound. Those rooms were given to Big Aunt’s family, which belonged to the poor peasant category. Ah Bing’s family was reduced to the northwest quarter and the west side room. Some of the family’s furniture was also confiscated.
Ah Bing’s wife, who married into the family just before Liberation, wailed at the memorial table of her husband’s grandfather, complaining that she was the victim. She said that it was not fair for her furniture to be confiscated, for it was part of the dowry her parents gave her. She further complained about the grandfather’s refusal for his second son to take a concubine, which led to the son’s death from lovesickness. After the son died, the son’s baby boy also died. After that, the son’s wife married another man and left. If the second son had been allowed to take in a concubine, he would not have died and would have established his own family. His family would have provided the labor so that no hired labor would have been necessary. The fifty mu of land would have been divided and shared by two families. The family would thus have avoided the fate of belonging to the landlord category and suffering the loss of land, house, and furniture.
My family and my uncle’s family did not lose any land, house, or furniture; nor did we gain any. Father said that he should thank his father for having gambled away the family fortune.
In North Hamlet, there were a landlord family surnamed Chen and another one surnamed Pan. The Chen family’s memorial hall (citang) was confiscated. After the coffins were removed by the family, the several rooms that used to be the memorial hall were used for village meetings. The new village leadership was headquartered in the rooms confiscated from the landlord named Pan.
The Land Reform turned the old society upside down. The impact on West River Aunt’s family was severe. The family had inherited seven-eighths of its ancestral property while her cousin’s family got the remaining one-eighth. Aunt and Uncle were good farmers and managers, so the family wealth grew under their care. By 1950, their family was rich.
During the Land Reform, my aunt’s family was categorized in the landlord class while the cousin’s family belonged to the poor peasant category. The poor cousin acted unjustly toward my aunt and uncle. The former accused the latter of cruel treatment of laborers before Liberation. The accusation of cruelty ultimately served as the reason to send Uncle to jail as a “tyrant landlord.”10
Although Uncle was released from jail in a few years, he was labeled a member of the four categories of class enemies (sileifenzi), and he worked and lived under surveillance until 1979, when the labels were lifted.11 His cousin was an activist in local politics. The two never spoke again. When Uncle died in the early 2000s, the cousin finally came over and kowtowed to the dead man. One of his children had persuaded him to make the gesture of reconciliation.
After the Land Reform, some confiscated pieces of furniture such as desks with drawers, moon tables, and chairs were put up for sale. This was precisely the time I was getting ready for my wedding. In the bridal bedroom, we needed a desk with drawers. I saw such a desk at the sale and talked to my father about buying it. Father flatly refused. He said that it was not good to buy things that had been confiscated from other families.
The following spring, when I was already married, my father and I went to a temple fair in Waigang Town on March 28 of the lunar calendar. This was a traditional day for local people to gather for festive activities such as the local opera performance and to sell or buy things. At the fair, we visited an exhibition of new furniture and saw desks with drawers for sale. We bought one for twelve yuan. We had to come home to get a rope and a pole. My father and I carried the desk home on our shoulders from Waigang, which was about nine li from our village.
NOTES
1 This is known as either the Song-Hu War or the Shanghai War of 1932. For detailed information about the war, see Donald Jordan, China’s Trial by Fire: The Shanghai War of 1932 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).
2 Japanese and Chinese armies were engaged in heavy fighting in Shanghai from August to October 1937. The fighting ended when the Chinese army was defeated and Shanghai fell under Japanese control for the duration of WWII. Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 422–23.
3 Qingxiang Yundong, which started in mid-1941 and was part of Japan’s “rural pacification” program, was an effort to work with Chinese collaborators to control rural people and prevent them from organizing resistance activities. Yung-fa Chen, Making Revolution: The Communist Movement in Eastern and Central China, 1937–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 81–84.
4 Jiading Xianzhi describes the two brothers and their gangster and anti-Communist activities in detail. Jiading Xianzhi [Annals of Jiading County] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1992), 713.
5 This event is briefly mentioned in “Zhujiaqiao Zhi: Dashiji” [Annals of Zhujiaqiao: chronology of events] (unpublished manuscript, no date, in Shehong Chen’s possession), 15.
6 Jiading Xianzhi, 27.
7 See chapter 3 for more information on the mutual aid team.
8 “Zhonghua renmin gongheguo hunyinfa” [Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China], Renmin Ribao [People’s daily], Apr. 16, 1950, accessed Mar. 5, 2014, http://www.china.com.cn/guoqing/2012–09/04/content_26746185.htm.
9 “Zhonghua renmin gongheguo tudi gaigefa” [Land Reform Law of the People’s Republic of China], June 28, 1950. In Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi, ed., Jianguo yilai zhongyao wenxian xuanbian [Selected important documents since the founding of the People’s Republic of China], vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1992), 336–45.
10 According to the Land Reform Law, only someone who committed crimes against the implementation of the Land Reform Law would be charged as an “unlawful landlord.” Someone who killed laborers, raped them, or used unlawful agents or organizations to bully and harass people who were too poor to pay rent or debt would be charged as a “tyrant landlord.” Both categories had to involve criminal activities. There was no clear criminal activity involved in this case. But during the Land Reform there were excessive cases, and this is one of them.
11 The four categories are landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, and bad elements. For details of surveillance and control, see “Guanzhi fangeming fenzi zanxing banfa” [Provisional methods to control counterrevolutionaries], June 27, 1952. In Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi, ed., Jianguo yilai zhongyao wenxian xuanbian [Selected important documents since the founding of the People’s Republic of China], vol. 3 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1992), 244–46. For lifting of the labels, see “Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu dizhu funong fenzi zhaimao wenti he difu zinu chengfen wenti de jueding” [Chinese Communist Party Central Committee’s decision on lifting of labels on landlords and rich peasants and class categories for sons and daughters of landlords and rich peasants], Jan. 11, 1979. In Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi, ed., Sanzhong quanhui yilai zhongyao wenxian huibian [Collection of important documents since the Third Plenary Session], vol. 1 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1982), 76
–77.
3
Benefiting from the New Marriage Law
WHEN I was about nine or ten years old, a fortune-teller told my parents that I would bring good fortune wherever I went. Father had always wanted to keep me home despite his understanding of traditional practices regarding family inheritance. The fortune-teller’s words made him even more determined to keep me home. Whenever Mother said that keeping me at home would lead to controversies within the extended family, which would in turn hurt me, Father would say, “She is too precious to be married out.” He would then turn to me and ask, “You are not to be married out; you will stay home, right?” I would always answer, “Right, I will not marry out. I will always be with mom and dad.” Father would then say to Mother, “See, our child wants to stay home.”
My mother’s worry was well-grounded. Before Liberation, no family in Wangjialong had attempted to have a daughter marry matrilocally, although quite a few families only had a daughter or daughters. They bent to the conventional practice and gave their property to their nephews. Some of these people lived miserable lives in their old age because their nephews, having no flesh-and-bone connections, took the properties but neglected the old folks’ needs. A married-out daughter could come for a visit and bring gifts to the parents, but she had her own family to care for.
One man in our hamlet married his only daughter out and his nephews expected to inherit his property. After marriage, the daughter and her husband, who could mend wool clothes, emigrated to Singapore. My father used to read aloud letters the parents received from Singapore and wrote letters on behalf of the parents to the daughter and her husband. In the late 1940s, when the old man became sick and was on his deathbed, he decided to give the property to his daughter and called her home. The daughter obeyed and brought her family back to Wangjialong.
