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

by Chen Huiqin

  Shezhu and Ah Ming happened to be visiting us then. Ah Ming rushed Shebao to the hospital on the back seat of his bike while Shezhu went along on her own bike. I went to North Hamlet, where my husband was attending a dinner party, and told him the news. He rode his bike, with me sitting on the back seat, and rushed to the hospital. When we got there, Shebao had already been pushed into the operating room. The surgeon said that his appendicitis was “hot” and any further delay would have led to peritonitis. Clearly, Yan Meiying, the barefoot doctor, was far better than the so-called doctor at Zhuqiao Medical Center. I was and am still immensely grateful to her for saving my son’s life.

  Another major sideline was raising long-haired rabbits. In 1981, our neighboring Tanghang Commune developed a hybrid rabbit breed by combining a German rabbit with a local rabbit. The person who successfully developed this breed, Zhou Jinliang, was named a model worker in 1988 by the Shanghai municipal government. In the mid-1980s, the Tanghang rabbit became very popular and almost every family raised a few rabbits for commercial hair. A local ditty tells the high profit this rabbit brought to villagers in Jiading County: “Raise five rabbits, you can buy cooking oil, salt, fuel, rice, and vinegar; raise ten rabbits, the whole family will wear new clothes; raise fifty rabbits, you will become a ten-thousand-yuan family.”4

  These rabbits were fed with wild grass, which did not cost anything except labor. Families raised rabbits in spare spaces of their own houses, which required little investment capital, except for a little money to buy materials to build rabbit cages. Many people built two-story houses and now used their ground floor to grow shiitake mushrooms and to raise rabbits.

  Shezhu and Ah Ming were very good at raising rabbits. Shezhu used her lunchtime at the factory to gather wild grass. She would do so again after she got off work. They grew vegetables on their plot as rabbit feed for rainy days. Ah Ming built cages for rabbits. He would shear rabbit hair once every two months. Rabbit hair sold for a very good price.

  Ah Ming took the process one step further. He raised female rabbits and had them impregnated. He tagged rabbits with the date of impregnation. For one month, which was the standard duration for rabbit pregnancy, he watched the pregnant rabbits carefully day and night. One time, a rabbit had a difficult labor. After the labor, Ah Ming bottlefed the mother rabbit with milk to help nurse it back to health. When rabbits had diarrhea, he fed them anti-diarrhea pills. A pair of baby rabbits sold for fifty yuan in the 1980s. Ah Ming saved a lot of money by having his own rabbits multiply. By the mid-1980s, Ah Ming and Shezhu were raising over twenty rabbits.

  Xianlin, one of my husband’s distant nephews, made the most money in the region by breeding and selling baby rabbits. He and his wife made enough money from this sideline production to build the biggest house in Wangjialong. He became famous because of that.

  My husband introduced another sideline production to our village. Chengdong Commune, where my husband worked, was now called Jianbang Town and had a chick-hatching farm. My husband talked to the people at the farm and arranged for us to sell them fertilized eggs. In order to have fertilized eggs, we had to feed a rooster. At first, I raised a rooster that traveled the whole village. Wherever it went, people would feed him so that he would remember to visit again. The rooster was big, beautiful, and fierce. I remember that one Chinese New Year holiday when Shezhen and Zhou Wei came to visit us, the rooster did not recognize them and attacked them. When we delivered chicken eggs to the farm, they were scrutinized under light to determine if they were fertilized. Each fertilized egg sold for fifty cents. The unfertilized eggs would be returned and eaten.

  Another way of making extra income was to sell produce in the streets of urban Jiading. In 1984, the sweet corn I grew on our family plot produced an abundant harvest. The corn was very glutinous and sweet. I knew that urban people loved sweet corn. So, one afternoon, I filled two large bags with fresh sweet corn, boarded the public bus, and took them to Qinghe Road (Qinghe Lu) in downtown Jiading. I sold my corn easily and took the bus back home.

  I tried everything to increase income. At that time, I did not have to do that. My children were all adults and no longer depended on my support. Yet it had become a habit for me not to lose an opportunity to earn money.

  FACTORY WORK

  After I completed work in the busy autumn of 1984 at Zhuqiao Collection Station, my husband said that he had found a factory for me to work in as a full-time worker. The factory was called Jianbang Chemical Machinery Plant and was one of the factories where my husband, as a leader in the commune, had implemented the piecework reward system in the late 1970s, before the system was widely used. He ran a risk at the time, because giving material incentive to workers and peasants was still considered “taking the capitalist road.” Under the piecework reward system, the factory became a very profitable business, and it was later recognized by the county authorities as a good example.

  My husband had never used his official position to put family members or relatives into factories because working in factories was considered a privilege. When he contacted the office of Jianbang Chemical Machinery Plant in late 1984, he did not hold any official position in Jianbang Town, which had jurisdiction over the plant. Between 1983 and 1987, he worked in Jiading County’s Office to Rectify the Communist Party (Zhengdang Bangongshi).5 When he phoned the office of the plant and asked if they were recruiting more workers, the managers responded that they needed more workers in the packing workshop. He then said that his wife would like to work there.

  So it was decided that I was to begin working in Jianbang Chemical Machinery Plant on January 1, 1985. Jianbang was on the east side of Jiading Town, while Wangjialong was on its north side. Since I did not ride a bike, it would take hours for me to commute to work by public transportation. So my husband rented a place in the urban section of Jiading Town called South Gate (Nanmen), which was right next to the plant.

  We asked a carpenter from our neighboring Pandai Brigade to make a kitchen cabinet and some stools for our new home in South Gate. He came to our Wangjialong house and made the furniture for us. The cabinet was a big one, with two shelves in the upper part and a big space in the lower part. The upper part, with two screened doors, was to hold daily necessities such as cooking oil and soy sauce and to temporarily store leftover food between meals. The lower part, with two solid wooden doors, was for me to store dry food materials such as rice and flour. We did not have the time to have the new furniture painted in Wangjialong. After we moved to South Gate, we found a painter, who came and painted the cabinet and the stools for us.

  In mid-December of 1984, my husband invited a few people from the plant to our house for lunch. This was intended to help them to get to know me and me to get to know them. I cooked several dishes for the lunch. While eating, they asked if we hired a professional chef to cook the dishes. When my husband told them that I cooked the dishes, they said that they liked them, and so they decided to have me work in the plant’s dining room, instead of the packing workshop.

  My husband had also invited a friend who drove a truck to join us at that same lunch. After lunch, this friend helped us move to our rented place in South Gate the modern bed, which was custom-made when Shezhen and Zhou Wei came to visit us right after they got married, a wardrobe, a square table, and a pair of cotton-padded quilts. A couple of weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, I asked the tractor-trailer driver in our village to help move some other things to our South Gate residence. These things included a chamber pot, a couple of wash basins, kitchenware, and the newly-made furniture.

  New Year’s Eve was a cold day with snow flurries. I sat in the trailer, holding onto the kitchen cabinet, which was tall and wobbled in the trailer. Since the tractor-trailer had no covering, my clothes as well as my belongings were wet when we got to my new residence in South Gate. After the driver helped me bring in the cabinet and the other things, I thanked him, and he left for home.

  Our new residence had one room, in which we put the be
d, the wardrobe, and the square table. Outside the room was a narrow passageway where I could hang washed laundry and my husband could park his bike. At the end of the narrow passageway was a small room. Inside that room there was a coal stove. My husband had bought some beehive coal, which was stacked in the room. Cooking was now dependent on that coal stove.

  It was late in the afternoon now and I started to prepare for supper. My husband was working at Jiading County’s Office to Rectify the Communist Party and was coming to the new place after work. Starting the coal stove turned out to be very difficult. The coal was damp and the stove was a simple one, without a chimney. I used old newspapers as kindling, but the damp beehive coal did not catch fire easily. After several trials and with no ventilation, the whole house was filled with smoke. I tried to fan the fire with whatever I could grab, but to no avail. I had not even thought of bringing a fan with me, for it was winter.

  So when my husband came to the new residence after work, I had tears in my eyes. The tears were partially caused by the smoke. I also had cried because when I looked around, I saw this bleak and small place where I could not even start a fire to cook food. I thought to myself that I had a spacious and comfortable home in the village, where I had whatever I wanted. I asked myself, “What am I doing here?”

  My husband comforted me. We got some food from a nearby small eatery. That evening, we went to the Chemical Machinery Plant, which was within walking distance of our house, filled two thermos bottles with hot water for drinking and washing purposes, and went to sleep. After the New Year’s Day of 1985, I started to work in the kitchen of Jianbang Chemical Machinery Plant. I was fifty-five years old that year.

  In time, I learned to maintain a coal stove day and night. We also bought a kerosene stove in case the coal stove died overnight. I used both the coal stove and kerosene stove when Shebao and Shezhu’s family came on weekends. I learned to cook everything on the coal and kerosene stoves.

  In springtime, our place in South Gate became very damp. After a few days of continuous rain, which happened very often during spring in Shanghai, we had water on the dirt floor inside our house. We had to put down bricks or wood planks to keep our feet dry. So one weekend, we bought cement and laid a thick layer of cement mixture in the house. It helped a great deal in reducing the dampness.

  My work schedule was seven in the morning to two or three in the afternoon, six days a week. There were six of us working in the kitchen that served about two hundred people. We took turns serving a meal to those who worked the night shift. Only a small portion of the workforce in the factory worked the night shift. When it was my turn, I worked between three and six in the afternoon. When I did that, I would start the next day at ten in the morning, instead of seven.

  Workers brought their own raw rice in a metal lunch box to the kitchen in the morning. They filled their own lunch box with water and we steam-cooked for them. Every day, the kitchen cooked five or six dishes at lunchtime. When workers broke for lunch, they came and picked up their own lunch box and bought one or two dishes of their choice.

  The kitchen was about a five-minute walk from our South Gate house. Every morning when I got to work, I emptied the stove of coal cinders from the previous day, started the stove, boiled drinking water, and stored the boiled water in big thermal containers for workers to drink during the day.

  We used about two hundred jin of coal for cooking each day. Coal was used for other purposes in the factory and so was not stored near the kitchen. In the morning, two of us had to fetch coal. We used a big willow vat to bring coal to the kitchen. One day right after I started working there, I took the shoulder pole and said, “Let’s go and get some coal.” Master Yuan, one of my coworkers, said, “Oh, no. It is too heavy for you. I will get a man to go with me to get the coal.” I said, “How heavy is it?” He said, “It is about two hundred jin.” I said, “That would be one hundred jin to each of the two carrying the load. I can do that.” My coworkers were all nice and considerate. I was in my fifties and was considered old, and I was also a woman. There was another woman about my age working in the kitchen. She had never volunteered to do that. So when I volunteered, they were surprised.

  One of us did the shopping every day, early in the morning. When the shopper came back with meat, fish, and vegetables for lunch, we all worked together in picking, cleaning, and chopping. Master Zhao was the main cook. Lunch was served at eleven thirty. Only after all the workers had finished eating lunch would we kitchen workers eat our lunch, which was usually after twelve thirty. Some days, when the factory managers entertained visitors and/or business relations, we had to cook and serve a special lunch. If we served a table of visitors for lunch, then our lunchtime would be postponed to one or two o’clock.

  I was overly conscientious about work. I did not think it was right for me to eat my lunch, even when I was really hungry, when it was service time. Nobody would have said anything if I stopped and ate something. In fact, some kitchen workers did that. But I just did not want to do so. I was foolish. Since I ate before seven in the morning, by noon I was really hungry. When it was my time to eat, particularly on those days we had to serve a guest lunch, I no longer had an appetite. Gradually, I developed stomach problems.

  We peasants had always envied urban life. In the 1980s, urban housing continued to be very crowded, while many people in rural areas built spacious two-story houses. Yet this longing for urban life continued, and my family felt the same way. After I moved to South Gate, Shezhu’s family came to our one-room house on Sundays, their day off from work. One Sunday, Shezhu had to go to work. So Ah Ming and Beibei came. After dinner, Beibei said that she did not want to go home and wanted to stay with me and her grandpa in South Gate. But Ah Ming said no and took her home.

  The next Sunday, they came again. Ah Ming told me the following story. The week before he had taken Beibei home on his bike. Beibei tried to slide down several times from the moving bike because she did not want to go home. But Ah Ming was very persistent in taking her home. The struggle went on for quite a distance. Ah Ming said that he got so frustrated that he wished he had a big bag so that he could put Beibei in the bag and carry her home that way.

  I told Ah Ming that he was too stubborn and should have returned and let Beibei stay with us that night. After that, Beibei stayed with us once in a while when Shezhu and Ah Ming returned home after a Sunday visit. Beibei was a very good girl. She never fretted and entertained herself during the day when my husband and I went to work. She watched TV, although there weren’t a lot of TV programs during the day at that time. She cut and folded paper. We told her not to leave the house when we were not around and she listened. I would leave her in the morning when she was still asleep. After I had finished my morning round of work, I would sneak back a bit and get her breakfast. For lunch, I always had my rice steam-cooked in the kitchen, just like everyone else working in the factory. When Beibei stayed with us, I put a little more rice in the lunch box. When it was my lunchtime, I brought back the steamed rice and some vegetables and meat for her. Since lunch was often late, Beibei would be standing on a stool and looking out for me through the window. The window was high and she had to stand on a stool to see outside. Several times when I approached home, I saw her little face pressed against the window glass. From a very young age, Beibei said that she wanted to be a city person.

  NOTES

  1 Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform policies mentioned here refer to a series of government policies issued between 1978 and 1983. These policies shifted away from the Cultural Revolution and stressed economic development by allowing sideline production and contracting land to rural families for farming. The policies which made the most impact are “Quanguo nongcun gongzuo huiyi jiyao” [Minutes of All-China Conference on Agricultural Work], Jan. 1, 1982, and “Dangqian nongcun jingji zhengce de ruogan wenti” [Problems of current rural economic policy], Jan. 2, 1983. In Zhonggong zhongyang shujichu nongcun zhengce yanjiushi ziliaoshi, ed., Shiyijie sanzhon
g quanhui yilai nongcun zhengce wenxian xianbian [Selected documents on rural policies since the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party] (Beijing, Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1985), 24–58.

  2 Rice seedlings are grown in beds. Each bed was about 1.5 meters wide and 15 meters long. A field of wheat was about 2.5 meters wide and 150 meters long.

  3 According to Jiading Xianzhi, in the whole county, the amount of mushrooms sold to the state and collective markets grew from 1,295.8 tons in 1978 to 7,154.5 tons in 1984. Jiading Xianzhi [Annals of Jiading County] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1992), 193. According to Jiading Nongye Juzhi [Annals of Jiading Agricultural Bureau], in the 1980s, Jiading County was the main producer of mushrooms in Shanghai. It was also one of the three main mushroom-growing counties in the country. These three counties were Jiading, Gutian in Fujian, and Liuba in Shaanxi. Jiading Nongye Juzhi (Shanghai: Jiading Nongyeju, 2002), 200.

  4 Jiading Xianzhi [Annals of Jiading County], 202.

  5 This was a comprehensive effort to clean and consolidate the Party after the Cultural Revolution. “Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu zhengdang de jueding” [Resolution of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee concerning consolidation of the Party], Oct. 11, 1983, accessed July 1, 2014, http://news.xinhuanet.com/ziliao/2005-02/07/content_2558439.htm.

  11

  Rural Customs and Urban Life

  ONE day in the fall of 1985, Shebao came to our South Gate house from work at the Shanghai Science and Technology University and told me that he liked a girl at work. He said that the girl was from urban Shanghai. I immediately said that that was not good, for I was a country woman and would not know how to live with a girl from urban Shanghai. Shebao did not insist or protest.