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

by Chen Huiqin

  When I set up the warping shop, I ran into a problem. Our guest hall was two feet short of the required length of the warping frame. It was Ah Ming who helped me solve the problem. He made one end of the warping frame movable. During the day when I had business, I would move that end of the frame beyond the threshold of the guest hall so that I could have the perfect length. At night, I would move that end inside and close the door for safety.

  Warping business had declined significantly. After Jinshan Petroleum Plant was established, synthetic clothing material was cheap to buy. Peasants were making more money by working in factories and engaging in sideline productions. The warping business was now reduced to making cloth for bedsheets and for simple work clothes. More and more young people could now afford not to wear homemade cloth, avoiding its association with earthiness and poverty. The warping business was becoming out-of-date.

  My warping shop was just one of the many ways we used to increase family income. All of these were made possible by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform policies.1

  PIECEWORK REWARD SYSTEM

  Around 1980, the Dazhai system of recording work hours and appointing values to the work hours gave way to a piecework reward system, under which we earned work-points according to the pieces of work we completed. For instance, pulling up one bed of rice seedlings earned five work-points. Or cutting down a field of wheat earned ten work-points.2 The calculation of work-points assigned to each task was based on the average number of hours taken to finish the job before the piecework reward system. Five work-points meant half a day’s work. When the piecework reward system was implemented, it took less than half a day to complete either of those two jobs. People now had incentive to finish a job as soon as possible because the hours they spent on the job were no longer recorded or counted.

  The piecework reward system turned out to be highly efficient. There was no more idling in the fields. People worked early mornings and late evenings. One day during the spring wheat-harvesting season of 1982, I delivered something to Shezhu’s house early in the morning. I returned home, ate breakfast, and went into the fields right away. When I got there, some of the wheat had already been cut down. I went to the fields with wheat still standing. But at the beginning of every wheat field, a little bit of wheat had been cut down and a piece of clothing was put on the downed wheat. That meant that the field had been claimed by somebody. A total of sixty mu of wheat was cut down before noon that day. Before the piecework reward system, it would take a whole day and all the able-bodied workforce in the production team to finish the job. Some people earned twenty work-points that day.

  I always wanted to earn more work-points whenever possible. One summer day, I was running a little fever, my whole body ached, and my legs were heavy. The production team leader was recruiting people to get manure from the brigade duck farm. The eleven production teams in the brigade took turns getting the manure as fertilizer. That afternoon, it was our turn. I said that I had a little fever and my legs were heavy. The team leader said that if I wanted to go, I could stay inside the duck farm and do the loading job. That way, I did not have to walk. I said I would go. I worked inside the duck farm, which was humid and hot, for the whole afternoon. I perspired so much that my clothes were dripping with sweat. My fever broke and disappeared while I earned work-points.

  The piecework reward system also applied to sideline production, which was run collectively at first. Here is an example of how it worked. The production team built thatched huts and grew mushrooms in them. Mushrooms needed to be covered by clay soil from our farmland. Every one thousand jin of clay soil that had been dug up, broken into two-centimeter diameter cubes, and brought to the mushroom huts earned ten work points.

  Mushrooms raised in Jiading County had a good reputation and were sold to urban Shanghai and many other places.3 Many production teams grew mushrooms to increase collective income. The more collective income the production team earned, the bigger the unit price for each work-point. With that understanding, most people supported collective sideline production and did not mind working hard.

  Mushroom growth required warm temperatures. Since we did not use heating or cooling mechanisms, we grew mushrooms only seasonally. After the completion of the busy harvesting and planting season in late August, we prepared the basic material for growing mushrooms, which consisted of pigsty manure and chopped dry rice straw. The cement threshing ground was used to mix the chopped rice straw with the manure. The mixture was covered by a big tarp and left under the scorching summer sun for fermentation. Every other day or two, we lifted the tarp and stirred up the mixture to give it air and to facilitate the fermentation process.

  When the basic material was fermented enough, we packed it on bamboo shelves inside the huts, and then spread over the packed mixture mushroom spores bought from Zhuqiao Mushroom Spore Cultivation Farm. Onto the mushroom mixture we spread an inch-thick layer of clay soil dug up from our farmland. The clay soil had to be carefully broken into nuggets two centimeters in diameter.

  One summer day in the early 1980s, I was digging clay soil when Shebao came home from school and offered to help me since this was a piecework job. I loaded the buckets with clay nuggets and he carried them to the huts. The nuggets were weighed there and the amount was recorded for reward under my name. Two full buckets of clay nuggets weighed about one hundred jin. As I watched Shebao carrying two buckets on a shoulder pole, I could tell that he was no longer a peasant boy. He walked with an effort. When I asked him if I should carry and he should help me break the soil into nuggets, he said no, adding that he was doing fine.

  We worked until dark that day. The next morning, when Shebao got up, he said that he had sore shoulders. I took a look and saw two swollen shoulders, shiny and red. His skin was too tender for the shoulder pole. He did not complain about it, but my heart ached. I was glad that he did not have to do this for a living.

  During the mushroom-growing season, we spread water every day and picked mushrooms whenever they were big enough. When it became too cold, we stopped spraying water and let the mixture dry up. When spring came and the temperature rose, we sprayed water over the dried-up mixture and mushrooms came up again. They grew until the temperature became too hot in the summer season. Then the mixture was thrown away. In the next season, new materials would be mixed and a new cycle begun.

  At that time, Ah Bing’s family had the most able-bodied farmworkers in our village. He and his wife were still in their prime, their three children were all adults, the elder son had taken in a wife, who was an additional work-point earner, and they were still living as one big family. Unlike some families, which had one person working in a local factory earning a separate income, everybody in Ah Bing’s family earned work-points in the production team. Working in a factory was still considered a privilege. Although the landlord label had been officially eliminated, the lingering stigma was still there, keeping them away from such opportunities.

  In 1982, Ah Bing’s family received more than one thousand yuan as annual dividends, the most dividends earned by a family in Liming Brigade. This was such big news that people from other villages asked me how Ah Bing counted the more than one thousand yuan. At the time, there was no hundred-yuan bill. Although there was the ten-yuan bill, the commonly circulating bills were five-yuan and two-yuan. Ah Bing brought with him a flat bamboo basket to the village meeting place where dividends were handed out, and he counted the money in the flat basket right in front of the cashier.

  One thousand yuan was a lot of money at the time and it was net income because it was in addition to the grain and fuel as well as the monthly cash credit the family had taken from the team throughout the year. To understand how great this annual net income was, here are some facts. It cost us 1,500 yuan to build the two-story house in 1975. There was very little change in the value of the yuan between 1975 and the early 1980s. One jin of brown sugar cost sixty-three cents and one jin of pork cost about seventy cents in the 1970s, and they were s
till the same prices in the early 1980s.

  FAMILY RESPONSIBILITY SYSTEM

  In 1983, the collective farmland in our production team was contracted out to individual families. Each person in the team was entitled to 0.65 mu of grain land (kouliangtian). Each adult was to contract about five mu of responsibility land (zerentian) to work on. Every family took its share of grain land, for that was the main source of staple food for us peasants, and most families contracted responsibility land.

  For responsibility land, the state issued fixed quotas of harvested crops from each mu of land. These quotas were determined according to the average yields of the previous three years. They were rather generous and not hard to achieve. We now planted, cared for, and harvested crops in family units and then sold harvested and dried crops to the state to fulfill the quotas. Once the quotas were met, families could sell the surplus on the free market, or they could sell the surplus to the state. In the first few years of the contract system, families with able-bodied hands, such as Ah Bing’s, wanted to contract more responsibility land because the state purchasing prices for agricultural products were high. Such families also chose to sell their harvests beyond the quotas to the state because they did not have to worry about marketing their crops on the free market.

  I was among the very few adult persons who decided not to take any responsibility land. My husband said that I was fifty-three years old in 1983 and no longer a young person. He also said that it would be difficult for me to plant and harvest about six mu of land alone. For instance, it would be a waste of electricity for a single person to thresh rice or wheat on an electric-powered machine, which usually accommodated three or four working persons. If I contracted responsibility land, I would inevitably incur “debt” when my cousins and neighbors came to help. I agreed with my husband. In addition, he and I did not want Shezhu and Ah Ming, who had a small baby and their own land to take care of, and Shebao to feel the pressure of coming home to help me at planting and harvesting times. When I told the production team leader about my decision not to take any responsibility land, he told me that several families had already expressed the desire to contract more responsibility land than their share.

  After the land was contracted out to families, the warehouse was no longer needed, for it was the individual family’s responsibility to dry and take care of harvested crops until they sold to the state and on the free market. Tools in the warehouse, such as brooms, shovels, rakes, willow vats, bamboo containers, and long bamboo sheets, were all up for grabs. Since I was the warehouse keeper at the time, I unlocked the doors to the warehouse. People rushed in to pick what they wanted while I stood by and watched. When somebody asked me why I did not take any, I replied that since everyone competed to get a share, I preferred to avoid such a competition. If I took anything, people would say that as the warehouse keeper, I had the privilege of taking what was the most valuable. Therefore I decided not to take anything.

  The family contract system was quite popular. People now had the incentive not only to work hard but also to find ways to increase the yield from their contracted land. Dry land and rice land, good land and bad land were divided equally. Each family therefore was cultivating pieces of land at various places. No sign poles or paths were established between contracted pieces of lands. An outsider would not be able to tell where one family’s land ended and where another family’s land began, but we all knew exactly where our land was.

  In planting and harvesting seasons, families volunteered to work together. For instance, Ah Juan, Hanming, and his wife would help Meifang thresh the rice Meifang and her sons had already brought onto the threshing ground. If this was done between one and four o’clock in the afternoon, then from four to eight o’clock, Meifang and her sons helped Ah Juan and Hanming thresh rice. Overall, people were reasonable and took turns using the only threshing ground to harvest their crops. The threshing ground was kept busy day and night during harvest seasons.

  I grew rice, rapeseed to be squeezed into cooking oil, sweet corn, and vegetables on my grain land, which was 0.65 mu, and on our family plot, which was 0.3 mu at the time. Family plots were reassigned every several years as the number of people in families changed over time due to deaths, births, and marriages. The last time family plots were assigned was before Shezhu was married. Each person was entitled to 0.15 mu of land. We had 0.3 mu, which was Shezhu’s share and mine.

  After the Family Responsibility System was implemented, sideline production became privatized. In 1983 and 1984, I worked at the Zhuqiao Collection Station and personally witnessed the enthusiasm people had for growing and selling mushrooms and garlic, the two major products collected by the station. Garlic was harvested in May and by September it had been dried naturally for the market. After cutting off the dried stems and beard-like roots and peeling off soiled outer layers of the skin, families sold heads of garlic to the station.

  From October to early December, the station collected mushrooms. Families utilized spare spaces in their houses or built makeshift sheds to grow this popular product. Some families had a small amount to sell, five or ten jin every few days. Others brought mushrooms to sell twice a day. A few families sold one hundred jin each day during the peak of the growing season. The station paid one yuan and five cents for each jin of mushroom. Those large mushroom-growing families made more than one hundred yuan each day during the busy season.

  My husband’s niece, Aidi, was one of the large mushroom growers in Zhuqiao Commune. She had received special training in mushroom growing and worked on Zhuqiao Mushroom Spore Cultivation Farm. Once families were allowed to engage in sideline production, she and her husband made so much money that they were the first ones to buy apartments in urban Jiading.

  The buyer of the mushrooms we collected was Shanghai Yimin Food Company. The company sent many plastic buckets to the collection station, each of which would hold fifty jin of mushrooms. After mushrooms were collected, we put them into a big concrete sink and washed them. After they were washed, we used strainers to get them out of water and then put them into the plastic buckets. The filled buckets were weighed on a scale. The company sent over its own people to watch the scale, making sure that each bucket contained fifty jin of cleaned mushrooms. The bucket was then filled with clean tap water.

  The filled buckets were loaded onto trucks. When a truck was full, it was driven immediately and directly to Yimin’s processing plant in urban Shanghai, where fresh mushrooms were canned or bottled. During the peak season, no matter how late it was at night, the washed mushrooms had to be delivered immediately to the processing plant. We were told that the processing plant canned fresh mushrooms as soon as they arrived, no matter what hour of the day it was.

  In addition to the white mushrooms, Aidi and other technicians at Zhuqiao Mushroom Spore Cultivation Farm developed a variety of other mushrooms, such as shiitake mushrooms, straw mushrooms, and oyster mushrooms. Although growing shiitake mushrooms was more complicated, they could be grown inside confined spaces, where the temperature was more easily controlled. Besides, shiitake mushrooms were tastier and more popular; they could be sold for up to four yuan per jin at a local farmer’s market around the Chinese New Year holidays.

  Shiitake mushrooms grew on a mixture that was made of sawdust, whole wheat grains ground to grits, and brown sugar. The mixture was packed into plastic bags and had to be steamed for twelve hours for total sterilization. After the steaming, we put mushroom spores into the mixture in a sterile environment, wearing gloves and working under a glass cover. When the spores spread throughout the bag, we cut open the bag, poured out the mixture, and pressed it firmly into wood frames.

  The first batch of mushrooms emerged from the mixture sometime in October. Some families, such as Aidi’s, would keep a coal stove in the room to keep the room temperature up so that they could still have fresh shiitake mushrooms around Chinese New Year’s day, which is usually in the coldest month of January or February.

  In the 1980s, most
families in our area grew some shiitake mushrooms. But not every family went through the whole process I have just described. Some families pooled money together to run one furnace to steam the mixture. Or they paid somebody to steam the mixture. Some families, like mine, cut the process short by purchasing the steamed mixture from those families that ran a sterilizing furnace. Aidi’s family was one of those that had such a furnace.

  Mushroom growing generally involved the whole family. One autumn Saturday in 1984, Shebao, who lived in his university dorms in urban Jiading, came home in the afternoon. I had bought some shiitake mushroom mixture, and it was ready to be pressed into wood frames. Shebao helped me and we worked late into the night. I cooked a sweet soup with red beans as a nighttime snack. He ate some and went to bed.

  The next morning, Shebao got up and complained about an acute stomachache. His father was also home for that weekend and so took Shebao to the medical center in Zhuqiao on his bicycle. When the doctor asked Shebao what he had eaten the night before, he replied that he had eaten a sweet soup of red beans. The doctor said that the stomachache was the result of eating “bad food.” He prescribed two painkilling shots. One was administered immediately and the other was given to Shebao to take home. The doctor said that if the pain came back again by midafternoon, he should ask a local barefoot doctor to administer the injection.

  The painkilling shot reduced the pain for Shebao, but he was not feeling well at all. By late afternoon, when the pain was back, I called Yan Meiying, the barefoot doctor, to administer the second shot.

  When Meiying asked what had happened and examined Shebao, she immediately said that Shebao was suffering from acute appendicitis and needed to be rushed to the People’s Hospital right away.