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

by Chen Huiqin

  We went to visit New York City one weekend. We got up very early, drove to Boston Chinatown, and took a bus. We arrived in New York City before noon and had lunch in a Chinese restaurant in New York City’s Chinatown.

  We visited many places and walked a lot. Shezhen and Zhou Wei pointed out the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers in New York City while we were on a ferryboat to an island. Unfortunately, it was raining at the time, so we only saw the statue and the towers very vaguely.

  After we returned to Jiading, on September 11, I watched the terrorist attacks on TV. My husband told me that the two buildings attacked by the terrorist planes were the Twin Towers we had seen in New York City in the previous month. It was a frightening scene and I felt a big chill inside me.

  Shezhen and Zhou Wei also took us to see the United Nations. I saw a small dark house built with many guns. The gun house looked so frightening that I did not dare to get close to it. Shezhen told me that the guns were collected from all over the world. Behind each gun, there was a story of violence. Outside the building there was a statue of a gun. The barrel of that gun was twisted into a knot. I understood that the house of guns and the gun statue were antiviolence and anti-war demonstrations.

  The night we spent in New York City was unforgettable. My husband started to feel an irregular heartbeat around midnight. He took his medicine and walked inside the small hotel room. He said that walking helped decrease the discomfort the irregular heartbeat created. The medicine failed to calm down the arrhythmia this time. I pretended to be calm, for I did not want to scare Shezhen and Zhou Wei. Inside I was so worried. I had learned to feel my husband’s pulse. That night, as I held his wrist, I was able to tell how weak his heartbeat was and how the heartbeats were in clusters of two with long pauses in between. I thought to myself: my husband is in his seventies, so he is no longer young and has suffered from high blood pressure and irregular heartbeat for a long time. But I could not fathom what would happen if his life came to an end in a hotel room in New York City. I understood his desire to visit Shezhen in the United States and so supported it. Now I said to myself perhaps that was a bad decision. Dawn came and my husband’s cardiac arrhythmia finally calmed down. We took the bus back to Boston and drove home in our own car.

  Before the trip to New York City, my husband had experienced cardiac arrhythmia while at Shezhen’s house. After the trip, the problem occurred more often. Then one day, he realized that he had miscalculated one medicine and that this particular medicine was running out. Shezhen said that she could take her father to see her physician and get the medicine. Her father said that an American doctor who had no knowledge of his medical history would surely put him through all kinds of tests before he could get the medicine. He did not want to go through such a process. After some discussion, my husband and I decided to go back to Shanghai as soon as possible. We had planned to stay for three months, but ended up staying for only forty-seven days.

  Shezhen called the airline and changed our return ticket to the earliest possible date. Since we were to travel home alone, Shezhen requested special help from the airline. The airline people promised that they would make sure that we got Chinese language service on the plane and that they would assist us to the connecting flight at the San Francisco Airport. Shezhen explained to us that at San Francisco Airport, we should get off the plane and wait right there for somebody to come and escort us to the connecting flight. We called Shebao to let him know the arrival flight and time at Shanghai Pudong Airport and asked him to meet us there.

  Shezhen prepared a note in both Chinese and English in case we failed to get help when we landed at San Francisco Airport. The note contained our flight information from San Francisco to Shanghai. We could use the note to ask for help and directions. She made a copy so we carried two copies of the same note.

  We left on August 27 and Shezhen and Zhou Wei saw us off at the Boston airport. In the airport waiting room, I experienced a roller coaster of emotions. I was so proud of what Shezhen had achieved and was very happy to see the comfortable home she and Zhou Wei had established. I also liked the summer weather and the general environment Shezhen now lived in. But I realized how far she lived and worked from us. She is a part of me, yet she is so far from me. I was also worried about my husband’s health during the long flight to Shanghai. If something happened to him, what could we do? I felt I was totally lost. Mixed emotions swirled inside me. I tried to control them but failed. I burst into sobs and could not stop. I knew I was scaring Shezhen, but I just could not help myself.

  When we began to board the plane, Shezhen went up to the counter and asked the staff there to see if arrangements had been made for Chinese language service and assistance to the connecting flight for us. The staff said that the arrangement had been made and it was in the system. They looked at us and assured us that we would get the special help.

  On the plane from Boston to San Francisco, we managed to get the drinks offered on the plane with gestures. There was no Chinese language service for us. When we landed at San Francisco Airport, we stepped off the plane and waited at the exit for assistance to the connecting flight. After about ten minutes of waiting, we saw a staff member getting off the plane. We handed him one of the copies of the note Shezhen had prepared for us. He took it and made a gesture to us. We thought that he said we should wait right there.

  We waited another twenty some minutes, but nobody showed up. We now were worried that if we waited any longer, we could miss the flight to Shanghai. We pulled our bags and walked away from the exit gate. We stopped a man who looked kind enough to us and showed him the other copy Shezhen had prepared for us. This time, we held onto the piece of paper without letting it go, for that was the only thing that would help us get to the connecting flight. The man wrote down on our slip of paper the Arabic number of the gate from which our connecting flight was to take off and pointed us in one direction. We thanked him with a bow and then walked in the direction he showed us. We were able to recognize Arabic numbers written on the gates. The number for our flight to Shanghai was in the nineties. As we walked, we saw the numbers increase. So we knew we were walking in the right direction.

  Then we walked into a waiting area where there were many Chinese people, many of whom even spoke the Shanghai dialect. We checked the number on the gate, and it was the gate from which our flight was to take off. I finally was able to put my heart back into my chest.

  When we arrived in Shanghai, it was late in the afternoon. Shebao and Chen Li came to meet us at Pudong Airport. Chen Li shouted, “Grandpa and Grandma” from a distance as soon as we walked into view. I felt an indescribable feeling, a feeling of family and a feeling of relief. Shezhu was cooking dinner for us at our Xincheng home. There is a local saying, “Gold house or silver house, nothing is better than the doghouse which is home.” That was my feeling when we got home.

  When we were eating dinner, Shezhen called on the phone to check if we had arrived home. When we told her that the airline had failed to deliver on its promise, she was not happy. Later on, she told us that she wrote to the airline and complained about it. The airline replied with an apology. We are glad that that trip to the United States was our first and last.

  The visit to Shezhen’s home gave me a physical sense of her house, workplace, and the larger environment she lived in. Quite often I imagine that Shezhen is driving to work or is driving home from work. When she called and said that she did not go anywhere and worked in her home office the whole day, I could picture her working at the desk upstairs and eating meals downstairs in the bright kitchen. When she sent me a photo of the flowers she grew outside her house, I felt that I could physically see the flowers, because I had been there.

  I am glad that we made the trip and that we returned home safe and sound.

  VILLAGE RELOCATION

  Most rural people in our area hoped that their village or their house would be within the zone of urban expansion or development so that they would be relocated. R
elocation meant getting a new apartment and becoming a salaried worker for the young and getting a retirement pension for the old. Many towns and villages closer to urban Jiading had already experienced relocation. By the early 2000s, rural families without an apartment in urban Jiading could not even find wives for their sons, for most young women wished to be urban dwellers.

  At the end of the 1990s, Little Aunt’s village was relocated when a highway was built through its land. After her house was torn down and before a new house was built, Little Aunt and her family stayed in her granddaughter’s village house. One day, I phoned her granddaughter and told her that I was coming for a visit. I took a city bus from Xincheng, changed to the rural bus, and got to Zhuqiao Town. From there, I walked to the village.

  When I approached the first house of the village, I saw Little Aunt walking out from the guest hall of that house toward me. In rural villages, unlike in cities, people all knew each other and casual visits to another’s house without prior notice was a very common practice. Apparently Little Aunt was eager to see me, for she had walked with difficulty—due to a previous stroke—to that house so that she could meet me as early as possible.

  When I got close to her, I saw tears in her eyes. After the stroke, Little Aunt had difficulty speaking. When she was excited and could not express herself, her eyes welled with tears. I walked with her to her granddaughter’s house. She showed me the room she and her husband stayed in. It was tight, but they had all the necessities for a simple life.

  After Little Aunt and her family moved into the new house built by the relocation authorities, I continued to visit her regularly. The new house was very spacious and had two stories; Aunt and Uncle lived on the first floor. Outside the front door was a paved patio. When I visited her on a sunny and warm day, I would see Little Aunt sitting out on the patio. The houses built for Little Aunt and her fellow villagers were the envy of many rural people. Several times, we people from Wangjialong heard rumors that our houses were also to be relocated.

  In the summer of 2003, I met one of my fellow villagers while doing my daily shopping in Xincheng. He said, “Have you heard that our village will be relocated?” I replied, “I have heard this before, but not recently. Is this real?” Since there had been such rumors before, I did not think too much about it. Two days later, I answered a phone call from our village head. He informed me of a meeting in two days and he said the meeting was about relocation. My husband and I went to the meeting and received all the details about the relocation.

  The relocation was sponsored by Jiading Industrial Sector, which is an administrative unit equivalent to a town. More than three thousand families were to be relocated and Wangjialong was within the relocation zone. Yang Family Village (Yangjiazhai), Ah Ming’s native village, was also within the relocation zone.

  The local authorities were given the task of measuring and appraising our village houses for compensation. We were also compensated for the crops on our family plot. It did not matter what one was growing on the plot or whether one was growing anything at all. We were also compensated for the well we had dug many years earlier, and the trees in front and behind our house. The stone steps to the water that my father had put in before Liberation were also counted for compensation. Altogether, we received 344,310 yuan as compensation.

  The relocation authorities showed us blueprints of the various styles they would build for the relocating families. The largest townhouse had three stories; in the middle was the two-story kind; and then there were apartments in multilevel buildings. My husband and I decided to buy a two-story townhouse, which cost us 289,310 yuan. We had 55,000 yuan left, which was about enough money to have the new house furnished for occupation. This style had a one-car garage, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a bathroom on the first level. On the second level were three bedrooms, another bathroom, and a laundry room.

  Families with four generations were entitled to buy an apartment in the apartment buildings, in addition to a townhouse. I say “entitled” because the houses built particularly for the relocating population were sold at a lower-than-market price. Families with four generations could sell their entitlement for money.

  Ah Ming and Shezhu bought the largest townhouse with the compensation they received from their village house. They had just sold the Xincheng apartment in which I cooked lunches in the 1990s. They used some of that money to buy an entitlement and then used the rest to buy an additional three-bedroom apartment in a multilevel building.

  Before we handed in the keys, we were encouraged to remove anything movable that we wanted to keep. I wished to keep the two traditional beds. One of them was made when my father and mother got married. The other one was made when my husband and I got married. Unfortunately, there was no space in our Xincheng apartment for them, so I had to let them go.

  Shebao went home with me and took pictures of the house before it was torn down (figs. 13.1 and 13.2). People from nearby villages which were not within the relocation zone came to us and asked to take the wood items for firewood. A woman came to me, and I allowed her and her family to take the beds. They dismantled the beds into a big pile of wood and took it away in a truck.

  In Wangjialong, our South Hamlet was the first to hand in our house keys. People in North Hamlet, my husband’s native village, handed in their keys about two weeks later. One day after we handed in our house keys, my husband’s nephews called to invite us to a ceremony at which they were to inform their ancestors about the relocation. We did not perform such a ceremony because I had already transferred the ritual site from our Wangjialong home to our home in Xincheng. On the day we went to the ceremony in North hamlet, I saw the destruction of the houses in South Hamlet.

  Huge bulldozers knocked down the houses built with bricks and mortar. It was very easy for the houses to come down. I saw a bulldozer approach a house, stretch its arm, and knock at the house. The house crumbled like a toy house put together by a child. A column of dust puffed into the air. The house was reduced instantly into a pile of rubble.

  A fellow villager in her eighties stood on the front road of the village and watched the bulldozers knocking down the houses. I happened to be near her when she murmured that she had forgotten to take the bottle of pickles she used at breakfast a while before. Right before the bulldozer came to her house, she walked toward the house, saying that she needed to go inside to get the pickles. Someone stopped her and said that it was already too late.

  The house my husband and I worked hard to build was now gone. The homesite where I was born, grew up, and raised my children became almost unrecognizable. Fortunately, since the relocation authorities kept the river behind our old house, the Zhangjing River (Zhangjing He), and kept the Coal-cinder Road, I can still approximately point to the location of my ancestral home.

  Aside from sentiment, I should say that our village house was really old and no longer structurally sound and safe. Since we did receive compensation for our old house and were able to buy a new one which is less than five hundred meters south of our original house, I consider the new house our ancestral home.

  Before Liberation, we were totally dependent on land for living. We worked hard and lived frugally to buy land. After collectivization, working on the land was the last thing people wanted to do. We tried hard to find a way to make a living away from working the land. When people said, “I am still embroidering the earth,” it indicated frustration and a sense of failure in life.

  In the several years before the relocation, I seldom went back to the village. Even when I went back, I did not go far into the fields. Then one day before the relocation, I went to visit a relative, walked past the cropland, and saw fruit trees growing there. I asked people still living in the village about it and learned that the fruit trees were planted by a man they did not know. This man, who signed a contract with local authorities to work on the land, was very smart. After he planted the trees, he sowed fast-growing vegetables between the trees as he waited for the tree
s to grow up and bear fruit. Older people in our village worked for this man when he needed additional hands to pick vegetables for the local market and earned hourly wages. This man was running a very profitable business on our land.

  After the relocation, all Wangjialong villagers were covered by small-town social security (zhenbao), which provided retirement pensions for men over sixty and women over fifty-five. The relocation authorities also provided stipends to those people who were under those ages until they found employment. Those who had reached retirement age were very happy. Some people said that the retirement pension was like a dream. As peasants, we never thought that we would receive such a pension. One woman said, “In the past, I worked so hard and sweated so much. Yet I never had any cash in my pocket. Now I sit at home doing nothing, but I receive money at the end of every month. I am living in a paradise.”

  Villagers younger than sixty or fifty-five found employment as gate guards, street cleaners, river cleaners, and garbage-can cleaners in the newly established residential communities for the relocated population or in residential communities in urban Jiading. Such jobs required little skill or education and so most people could do them. After the relocation, I ran into several people working such jobs in Xincheng, and they were from the relocated villages.

  Jiading Industrial Sector paid part of the fee we needed to relocate our ancestral graves. Each family received a five-hundred-yuan coupon that could be used only at Green Bamboo Cemetery (Qingzhuyuan) in Waigang. We paid a total of 5,500 yuan for a tomb site for my parents inside that cemetery.

  After having kept my parents’ ash boxes in our village house for several years, I buried them in our own family plot in the early 1980s. Little Aunt came for the burying ceremony and helped me in the burial process. In the late 1980s, a clothes factory was to be built on the land where my parents were buried. Little Aunt came again and helped me move my parents’ remains to the new family plot we were assigned to. When I dug up the ash boxes, they had disintegrated. Since the two boxes had been buried next to each other, the disintegration made it impossible for me to distinguish my father’s ashes from my mother’s ashes. So I gathered them into one earthen jar for the reburial.