by Chen Huiqin
Mother lived a hard life. When I was little, she worked during the day as a hired hand and spun or wove into the night to help provide for the family. She suffered severe headaches, which finally made her eyesight poor. After I was born, her menstruation was always painful and heavy. Several times, she lost so much blood that she passed out. Her poor eyesight limited her mobility and slowed her movements. But she managed to do household chores for me. During the days of scarcity, she starved herself to save every little bit of food for me and for my children. She refused to accept any new clothes, insisting that whatever she had was enough. She would say, “I am not going anywhere and so do not need new clothes.”
The bond between my mother and me was strong. Mother had been willing to shield me from possible bullets with her body during the war years. I was the only “flesh and bone” for my mother. But she disagreed with my father about keeping me at home, for she did not want me to live my life in clan controversies. When she realized that she had had a stroke, she did not think of herself. Her last words showed her concern that she would become a burden to me. Mother loved me selflessly.
I lived my thirty-seven years of life with my mother. We never quarreled, not even once. She only complained about my willfulness, but even then she did it in a loving way. I was not only practically dependent on Mother because she took care of the house for me. I was emotionally dependent on Mother, too. I confided everything to Mother. Mother was my strength. Without concrete words, Mother cheered me on. I wished that Mother had survived the hemorrhage so that I would at least have had an opportunity to carry out my filial duty by taking care of her. That would also have helped to prepare me for the breaking of the bond.
Mother passed away during the crazy period of the Cultural Revolution. All dead bodies had to be cremated and all traditional funeral practices were forbidden. Mother’s body was shipped directly to West Gate Cremation Station from the hospital. I do not remember how I got home.
At home, Father wept. He said that he had been to many places and met all kinds of people, yet he had never seen anybody like my mother. Father said that Mother lived her life thinking of others only, never of herself. Despite all the knowledge of traditional funeral practices, Father could not do anything for Mother. He sobbed, shaking his head. Little Aunt came and wailed. She was eleven years younger than Mother. When Mother married into the Chen family, Little Aunt was still a little girl. Mother combed Little Aunt’s hair and made braids for her. When Little Aunt got into trouble while working at Jiafeng Textile Mill (Jiafeng Fangzhi Chang), Mother supported Father in asking her to quit the job. Whenever Little Aunt needed to confide in somebody, she came to talk to Mother.
We wept and remembered Mother during the night, without a memorial table or Mother’s remains with us. The next morning, Father decided to create a memorial table. We placed a table in our guest hall, made a bamboo arch over it, and hung white cloth over the arch. Incense was considered superstitious material so there was no place to buy it. We lit two white candles, which were made for lighting purposes and so were still available. It was a simple memorial table, but at least it was a symbol that allowed us to express our grief.
Father gave money to my cousins who did the shopping and cooked lunch for our relatives and neighbors. One of my cousins rode a bicycle to the cremation station and carried clean clothes with him, including a blue-colored (shilinbu) long gown, and the staff at the station put the clean clothes on for Mother. When Mother had been rushed to the hospital, she was wearing very old clothes. The long gown we sent was relatively new. Because cremation had been arranged for that afternoon, we did not have time to make Mother any new clothes. After lunch, our neighbors and relatives who had bicycles went to the cremation station. Each rider took another person on the rear seat.
Before we left for the cremation station, we kowtowed to the memorial table. At the station, Mother was pushed out on a flat cart into the room where we had gathered. Since she passed away so suddenly she looked as if she were just asleep, wearing the long blue gown. When the station staff pushed Mother into the crematorium, I wanted to go with her. Many people pulled me back. I remember seeing the crematorium door close. After that, I passed out. I do not remember what happened next.
I carried the box of my mother’s ashes back home, riding on the rear seat of my husband’s bike. I placed Mother’s box in our extension house. There was no incense or paper money to burn for Mother. I wept before Mother’s box many times. I remembered Mother every seventh day for seven weeks. This was a traditional practice that should involve food, candles, incense, and paper money. However, in that political atmosphere, I was only able to offer Mother simple food, without incense or paper money.
For many months after Mother passed away, when I returned home from work, I would have an illusion that my mother was coming out from the pigsty with a pig-feed bucket in her hand and walking toward me with a smile on her face. When Mother lived, she made sure that she had cooked the meal for the family and fed the pigs before I returned home. That way, I could sit down and eat right away.
A THEFT
About three weeks after Mother passed away, during the Lantern Festival, an old man who lived in the East Compound died. This man only had one child, a daughter who had been married out. Under the New Marriage Law of 1950, his daughter had the right to inherit the family house and one of her sons had moved to live in the old man’s house. But the boy was still young, so the old man’s daughter came and sponsored a simple funeral ceremony in the guest hall of the East Compound. We neighbors helped.
In the evening of the funeral day, while we were all in the guest hall of the East Compound, my husband came home. He had been to urban Shanghai to see an agricultural exhibition during the day. He had never suffered from motion sickness before, but that day he did. He said that while sitting on the bus from Shanghai to Jiading, he had been so sick that he had to vomit. He stood up, rolled down a bus window, and put his head out to vomit. Shortly thereafter, he realized that his wallet, which had been in his pants’ rear pocket, was gone. In his wallet were his entire month’s salary and all the coupons for the month: on that particular morning, before he left for Shanghai, he had received his salary and all the coupons.
My husband was very depressed when he came to the East Compound and told me the bad news in a low voice. I went home and wept. We now had to dig into our savings to cover the losses. It seemed to me that we were having an unlucky year.
A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE
I had not been feeling well the whole spring of 1968. In May, my husband finally persuaded me to see a doctor in Jiading People’s Hospital. The doctor said that my bad health was caused by hookworms inside me and prescribed medicine to kill the worms. I took the medicine and had a bad reaction that almost killed me. I passed out at home and was rushed to the emergency room of Jiading People’s Hospital in an ambulance. Doctors there did not know what to do with me other than give me an IV drip. Dr. Chen Long, who had been president of the hospital, was sweeping the floor in the emergency room because Cultural Revolutionary rebels accused him of being one of the “academic authorities of the bourgeois class.” My husband had met Dr. Chen at meetings before and they were acquaintances. When my husband told the floor-sweeping Dr. Chen about my sickness, he was very alarmed and immediately wrote a note and told my husband to give it to the doctors as quickly as possible. Having realized what was wrong with me, the doctors in the hospital consulted with Dr. Chen, brought in an expert from a Shanghai hospital, and took measures that finally saved my life.
We learned that Jiading People’s Hospital had seen a few cases of bad reactions to the hookworm medicine before me and that none of those patients had survived. I believe that without Dr. Chen Long’s timely intervention, I would not have survived, so I am very grateful to him. Not long ago, my husband read in the newspaper that Dr. Chen had died. He lived to be ninety-some years old and totally deserved it, because he was a good man. I wished that I could go to hi
s funeral and kowtow to him.
ANOTHER DEATH
My father-in-law had suffered a brain hemorrhage when I was still breastfeeding Shezhen. My husband’s biological mother, a very hard-working woman, died in the 1940s. My father-in-law got married again, to a woman who was very nice but not very capable. He worked as a carpenter during the day. After he returned home, he had to take care of the crops on their own land. One spring in the mid-1950s, while working on their own land, he felt dizzy and fell to the ground. We took him to a hospital where traditional Chinese medicine was prescribed for him. His wife brewed the herbal medicine for him, and he recovered. Then he went into the fields again. This time, he was putting down sweet potato plants. He had to bend over to do this, and he suffered another, more severe, brain hemorrhage. He fell down and was unconscious. He was hurried to the People’s Hospital in Jiading. He survived, but lost the ability to speak and to use his right hand and right leg.
His wife was very good to him and took meticulous care of him. At mealtimes, she put food on his spoon so that he could use his left hand to get food into his mouth. She helped to clean him. From time to time, after a busy planting or harvesting season, she would ask me to go to their house and make sugar or scallion pancakes for him. Such pancakes, kept in a bamboo basket hung in a drafty place inside the house, could be kept for at least two weeks without going bad. My father-in-law liked this snack very much.
He lived with his partial paralysis for more than ten years. His health gradually deteriorated and he became bedridden. In July 1968, he passed away. Again, there was no traditional funeral service for him. A very simple service, with white candles, was held at home. He was taken to West Gate Cremation Station. My husband’s elder brother took the ash box home with him.
ACCUSATIONS
By the latter part of 1968, the Cultural Revolution had entered a phase called “cleansing of the class ranks.” In early September, I went to a meeting at Zhuqiao Commune headquarters. In the evening when I returned home, I saw my husband was already home. Also at my home was a Cultural Revolutionary rebel chief. He was there to take my husband away to a “study course” (xuexiban). In those days, entering a study course meant political trouble.
My husband had come home by himself earlier that afternoon. He had to get bedding and clothes, for he would not be allowed to return home during the study course. He promised the rebel chief that he would return to the commune headquarters as soon as possible. He got the bedding and clothes and was waiting for me to return home so that he could inform me about the study course. This delayed return caused the rebel chief to come to our house.
My husband was accused of being part of a counterrevolutionary organization. My husband firmly assured me that he had never belonged to any counterrevolutionary organization and that the facts would help to clear him of the accusation. With me, my father, and our children watching, my husband pushed his bike out through the dark alley that connected the West Compound with the East Compound and rode away. On his bike were his bedding and clothes. The rebel chief followed my husband on his own bike. My husband’s departure that evening was the beginning of an ordeal that lasted twenty-two months.
The so-called counterrevolutionary organization was known as Jifei Agent Organization. Jifei refers to the Ji brothers, the famous local despots and anti-Communists.1 The Ji brothers had been arrested and sentenced at the time of the Land Reform. Their followers had also been arrested and prosecuted. Now, in the Movement to Cleanse Class Ranks, the rebels claimed that more local people were members of the organization and had been “hidden class enemies.” Many uneducated peasants, including some in Wangjialong, had been accused and most of them “confessed.” For many of those who confessed, the evidence for membership in this organization was that they received free rice from somebody around the time of Liberation. At the time, they said, they did not know where the rice was coming from. Now they realized that it was the rice the Ji brothers and their followers had obtained by robbing grain warehouses.
The rebels at the brigade and the commune were very happy about the “discovery” of this counterrevolutionary organization. For them, this was a major achievement in “finding class enemies.” It showed that they had worked hard and that they had been highly vigilant in guarding against enemies of the revolutionary cause. As the slogan went at the time, “class struggle has to be talked about every year, every month, every day.” The discovery proved the correctness of the slogan.
Yet finding enemies among peasants was not significant enough for the rebels, who were interested in power. Therefore, they pressured those who had “confessed” to expose Jifei agents among cadres. My husband was the “biggest class enemy” they found.
The study course for my husband was first held at Zhuqiao Commune headquarters. My husband refused to admit or confess. He said that the Ji brothers’ organization had been thoroughly investigated and those who had participated were dealt with in the early 1950s. He added that the uneducated peasants who had “confessed” confused relief grains from the new government with the grains the Ji brothers and their followers stole from grain warehouses and distributed among themselves.
The rebels would not accept my husband’s argument. They continued to hunt for more Jifei agents. One day, after my husband had been taken away to the study course, I heard that they had found another “big fish.” This time, it was the head of Liming Brigade.
One midnight, about ten days after my husband was taken away, I heard a knock on the door. I went to open the door and found my husband. I shivered when I saw him. He said that he had put a pair of shoes outside the mosquito net of his bed and slipped out when everybody was asleep. Unless somebody actually looked inside his bed, he or she would think that my husband was sleeping there. While working as a commune leader, he had visited many places and so was very familiar with the landscape. He did not walk the major roads; instead, he took the narrow paths in crop fields to avoid running into people who would recognize him. Because the study course had been moved from the commune headquarters to Dengta Middle School, it took him an hour to walk to our house.
He came home to tell me to dispose of a pack of bullets inside our house. In the mid-1950s, my husband had worked in the public security department of Waigang District. He had been equipped with a pistol and bullets for his patrol duties. Later on, when he stopped working in the public security department, he handed in the pistol and most of the bullets but kept a few as souvenirs. After more than a week of the study course, my husband realized that the rebels were determined to bring him down and condemn him as a counterrevolutionary. He was afraid that they might search our house. If they did, they would find the bullets. Since private families were not supposed to keep weapons and ammunition, the discovery of the bullets would get him and his entire family into big trouble.
Thus, my husband had to come home and tell me to dispose of them. He also reaffirmed that he had never participated in any counterrevolutionary activities. He firmly believed that he would be cleared of the baseless accusations. Then he left. I did not sleep at all that night. Early the next morning, I got up, took up a hoe and a bamboo bucket, and went to our family plot. I had put the bullets in the bamboo bucket. When I got to our family plot, I threw the bullets into the river. I worked in the plot a bit to cover the purpose of my trip and then returned home.
After the October 1 National Day of 1968, the rebels proclaimed that they had “solid evidence” to prove my husband was a Jifei agent. The so-called solid evidence came from my husband’s elder brother, who worked as a carpenter in Nanjing. Three rebels journeyed there and ran a special “study course” for the brother. The course lasted seven days, during which the rebels pressured my husband’s brother to admit that he had joined the Jifei organization and had introduced his younger brother to it. His brother at first denied the accusation, but finally he succumbed to the pressure and put his fingerprint on the so-called confession notes.
With the “confession notes�
� in hand, the rebels declared my husband a counterrevolutionary. They came to our house and painted the big slogans, “Down with Jifei agent Chen Xianxi” and “Down with counterrevolutionary Chen Xianxi” onto our east-facing wall with black ink. They took my husband to more than forty mass meetings where he was denounced as an enemy of the people.
One of those mass meetings was held on the grounds of the Liming Brigade office. They raised a platform. There, my husband stood with his hands tied behind him. Two rebels stood beside him. They were responsible for pushing down my husband’s head. I also stood on the platform as my husband’s companion. My husband’s brother’s son-in-law was one of the rebel leaders of Liming Brigade. He led the shouting of “Down with Jifei agent Chen Xianxi; Down with counterrevolutionary Chen Xianxi” and the crowd on the grounds followed. Another rebel read aloud my husband’s alleged crimes.
Before the rebels took my husband to Liming Brigade, they had talked with me, trying to persuade me to “stand out and expose” him. But I refused. I said that he told me that he had never participated in any counterrevolutionary activities, and I believed in him. My refusal made me “a stubborn woman and a dependent of a counterrevolutionary.” That is why I had to stand beside him on the raised platform.
After my brother-in-law’s confession, I wondered if my husband had told me the truth. But how could I find out? Many people in Wangjialong said that he had participated in the Jifei organization. In North Hamlet, one man who was two or three years older than my husband refused to say that Chen Xianxi was a Jifei agent. I was afraid to visit him openly because in those days anybody who was in contact with me might get into trouble.
So I decided to visit this man at night. One night, after most people had gone to bed, I went to his house and knocked on his bedroom window. He and his wife quickly ushered me into the bedroom. I begged him to tell me the truth. He said that Chen Xianxi was a good, honest man. He said the two of them grew up together and he told me firmly that he had never participated in any Jifei organization, nor had Chen Xianxi. He believed that those who accused my husband either had some grudges or were ignorant people. His words were very reassuring to me in those days. He was a man of integrity and honesty. I will be grateful to this man forever.
