The Good Women Of China

by Xinran

  ‘Out of bed!’

  ‘Go to class!’

  ‘Go to the canteen!’

  ‘Study the Quotations of Chairman Mao!’

  ‘Go to sleep!’

  Without any family to protect us, we followed the same mechanical routine day after day, with none of the smiles, games or laughter of childhood. We did the housework ourselves, and the older children helped the younger ones to wash their clothes, faces and feet every day; we only had one shower a week. At night, we all – boys and girls together – slept squeezed together on straw bedding.

  Our one small comfort lay in trips to the canteen. No one chatted or laughed there, but kind people sometimes slipped small parcels of food to us surreptitiously.

  One day, I took my brother, who was not yet three years old, to stand at the end of the canteen queue, which was unusually long. It must have been a day of national celebration, for roast chicken was being sold for the first time, and the delicious smell wafted through the air. Our mouths watered; we had eaten nothing but leftovers for a long time, but we knew there would be no roast chicken for us.

  My brother suddenly burst into tears, shouting that he wanted roast chicken. Afraid that the noise would annoy the Red Guards and that they would turn us out, leaving us with no food at all, I did my best to coax my brother to stop. But he continued crying, getting more and more upset; I was so petrified that I was on the verge of tears myself.

  Just then, a motherly-looking woman walked past. She tore off some of her roast chicken, gave it to my brother and walked off without a word. My brother stopped crying, and was just about to start eating when a Red Guard ran up, snatched the chicken leg from his mouth, threw it on to the ground and trampled it to mush.

  ‘You pups of imperialist running dogs, you’re fit to eat chicken too, are you?’ the Red Guard shouted.

  My brother was too scared to move; he ate nothing that day – and he did not cry or make a fuss over roast chicken or any such luxury for a long time after that. Many years later, I asked my brother if he remembered that incident. I am glad to say that he did not, but I cannot forget it myself.

  My brother and I lived in the home for almost five years. We were lucky compared to other children, some of whom lived there for nearly ten.

  In the home, the children trusted and helped each other. All of us were equal there. But there was no place for us in the outside world. Wherever our little troupe went, people would recoil as if we had the plague. Mature adults would express their sympathy with silence, but children humiliated and insulted us. Our clothes were streaked with gobs of spit or phlegm, but we did not know how to defend ourselves, let alone how to fight back. Instead, self-loathing was branded into our hearts.

  The first person to spit at me was my best friend. She said, ‘My mother says your grandfather helped those horrible English people eat Chinese flesh and drink Chinese blood. He was the very, very worst of all bad people. You’re his grandchild, so you can’t be a good person either.’ She spat at me, walked away and never spoke to me again.

  One day, I was huddled at the back of the classroom, crying after being beaten up by the ‘red’ children. I thought I was alone, and was startled when one of my teachers came to stand behind me and patted my shoulder lightly. Through my tears, it was hard to read the expression on his face in the dim light of the lamps, but I could see that he was gesturing for me to follow him. I trusted him because I knew that he helped poor people outside the school.

  He walked with me to a hut by the side of the playground where the school stored its junk. He opened the lock very quickly and ushered me in. The window was covered with newspapers, so it was very dim inside. The room was piled high with jumbled odds and ends, and smelled of mould and decay. I stiffened in distaste, but the teacher wriggled his way through the junk with the ease of long practice. I fought my way in after him.

  In the inner room, I was amazed to find a neat, well-ordered library. Several hundred books were arranged on broken planks. For the first time, I understood the meaning of a famous line of poetry: ‘In the darkest shadow of the willows, I suddenly came upon the bright flowers of a village.’

  The teacher told me that this library was a secret that he was planning as a gift for future generations. No matter how revolutionary people were, he said, they could not live without books. Without books, we would not understand the world; without books, we could not develop; without books, nature could not serve humanity. The more he spoke, the more excited he became, but the more afraid I grew. I knew that it was these very books which the Cultural Revolution was fighting to destroy. The teacher gave me a key to the hut and told me that I could take refuge and read there at any time.

  The hut was behind the only toilet in the school, so it was easy for me to go there without being noticed when the other children were taking part in activities I was barred from.

  On my first few visits to the hut, I found the smell and the darkness stifling, so I poked a pea-sized hole into the newspapers over the window. I peered out at the children playing, dreaming that one day I might be allowed to join in.

  When the bustle in the playground had made me too sad to go on looking out of the window, I started to read. There were not many elementary readers among the books in the library, so I had great difficulty with the obscure vocabulary. At first, the teacher would answer questions and explain things when he came to check up on me; later he brought me a dictionary, which I used diligently, though I still only understood about half of what I read.

  The books on Chinese and foreign history fascinated me. They taught me about different ways of life: not only about the dramatic stories that everybody knew, but about ordinary people weaving their own history through their daily lives. From these books, I also learned that many questions remained unanswered.

  I learned a great deal from the encyclopaedia, which saved me trouble and expense later in life, for I can now turn my hand to manual work and repairs on everything from bicycles to small electrical appliances. I used to dream of becoming a diplomat, a lawyer, a journalist or a writer. When I had the opportunity to choose a profession, I left my administrative job in the army after twelve years to become a journalist. The passive knowledge I had accumulated in my childhood helped me once again.

  My dream of joining in with the other children in the playground never came true, but I gained comfort from reading about battles and bloodshed in that secret library. The records of war made me feel lucky to be living in peacetime, and helped me to forget the taunts that awaited me outside the hut.

  The first person to show me how to see happiness and beauty in life by observing the people and things around me was Yin Da.

  Yin Da was an orphan. He did not seem to know how he had lost his parents; all he knew was that he had grown up under the care of his neighbours in the village while living in a hut 1.5 metres long by 1.2 metres wide, containing only a bed which took up the whole room. He had eaten the rice of a hundred families and worn the clothes of a hundred households, and called all the villagers Mother and Father.

  I remember Yin Da only having one set of clothes. In winter he simply wore a thick, padded cotton jacket over his summer clothes. Everyone around him was poor, so a padded jacket for the winter was comfort enough.

  Though Yin Da must have been five or six years older than I was, we were in the same class at the army school. During the Cultural Revolution, virtually all institutions of education were frozen; only military schools and colleges were allowed to continue to train young people in matters of national defence. To show support for the peasants and workers from the town occupied by the military base, my school arranged for the local children to be educated alongside army children. Many of them were already fourteen or fifteen when they started primary school.

  If Yin Da was around when I was being beaten up, spat at or called names by the children from ‘Red’ families, he would always stand up for me. Sometimes, when he saw me crying in a corner, he would tell the Red Guard
s that he was taking me to get to know the peasants and would lead me on a tour of the town. He would show me the houses of very poor people, and tell me what made these people happy, even though they earned much less than a hundred yuan a year.

  At break time, Yin Da would take me up the hill behind the school to look at the trees and flowering plants there. There were many trees of the same kind in the world, he said, yet no two leaves were the same. He told me that life was precious and that water gave life by giving of itself.

  He asked me what I liked about the town where the military base was. I said I did not know, there was nothing to like; it was a small, shabby, colourless place, filled only with the choking smoke of cooking fires, and people walking about in torn jackets and ragged shirts. Yin Da taught me to look at and think about each house in the town carefully, even the ones cobbled together from scrap. Who lived in these houses? What did they do inside? What did they do outside? Why was that door ajar? Was the family inside waiting for someone or had they forgotten to close the door? What consequences would their forgetfulness bring?

  I followed Yin Da’s advice to find interest in my surroundings and was no longer so saddened by the spitting and taunts I encountered every day. I would be wrapped up in my own thoughts, imagining the lives of the people in the houses. The contrast between imaginary and real worlds was to become a source of both comfort and sorrow for me.

  At the end of the 1960s, relations between China and the Soviet Union broke down completely, and an armed conflict over China’s northern border took place on Zhenbao island. Every town and city had to dig tunnels as air-raid shelters. In some big cities, the shelters were capable of accommodating the entire population. Simple equipment and food reserves would enable them to survive in the tunnels for several days. Everyone from old to young was set to digging these tunnels; even children as young as seven or eight were not excused.

  The children in our school had to dig tunnels into the side of the hill behind the school. We were split into two groups, one working inside the tunnel and one outside. Though I was assigned to the group inside, I was set to work at the mouth of the tunnel because I was a girl, and relatively weak.

  One day, about half an hour after we had started work, there was a great roaring sound: the tunnel had collapsed. Four boys were buried inside, including Yin Da, who had been the furthest in. By the time they had been dug out, four days after the accident, their bodies could only be told apart by their clothes.

  The children and dependants of ‘Black’ families were not permitted a last look at the four boys, who had been posthumously recognised as heroes. From afar, my last glimpse of Yin Da was of his lifeless arm dangling from a stretcher.

  Yin Da once taught me the theme song from the film A Visitor to Ice Mountain. It had a beautiful melody, and the lyrics remembered a lost friend. Years later, when China had begun to open up and reform, this film was shown again. Memories of Yin Da came flooding back.

  My beautiful homeland lies at the foot of the Mountains of Heaven,

  When I left home, I was like a melon broken from the vine.

  The girl I loved lived under the white poplar trees.

  When I left, she was like a lute, left hanging on the wall.

  The vine is broken, but the melons are still sweet.

  When the lute player returns, the lute will sing again.

  When I parted from my friend,

  He was like a mountain made of snow – in one avalanche, gone forever.

  Ah, my dear friend,

  I will never see your mighty form or your kindly face again.

  Ah, my dear friend,

  You will never hear me play the lute, never hear me sing again.

  I don’t know if Yin Da had sensed his fate in this melancholy song when he sang it to me, but he had left behind a melody for himself, through which I could remember him.

  13

  The Woman Whose Father Does Not Know Her

  During my first night at West Hunan Women’s Prison, I did not dare to close my eyes for fear of my recurring nightmares. Yet even with my eyes open, I could not block out images of my childhood. At dawn, I told myself I had to leave the past behind and find a way to get Hua’er to trust me so that I could share her story with other women. I asked the Warden if I could speak to Hua’er again in the interview room.

  When she came in, the prickliness and defiance of the previous day had melted away, and her face was etched with pain. From her look of surprise, I guessed that I too looked different after a night of being tormented by memories.

  Hua’er started our interview by telling me how her mother had chosen names for her and her sister and brothers. Her mother had said that all things in the natural world struggled for their place, but that trees, mountains and rocks were the strongest, so she had called her first daughter Shu (tree), her elder son Shan (mountain) and her younger son Shi (rock). A flowering tree will bring forth fruit, and flowers on a mountain or a rock beautify it, so Hua’er had been called Hua (flower).

  ‘Everyone said that I was the most beautiful . . . perhaps because I was called Hua.’

  I was struck by the poetry of these names, and thought to myself that Hua’er’s mother must have been a very cultivated woman. I poured Hua’er a glass of hot water from the thermos flask on the table. She gripped it with both hands, staring at the steam rising from it, and muttered in a low tone, ‘My parents are Japanese.’

  I was taken aback by this. There had been no note of it in Hua’er’s criminal record.

  ‘They both taught at university, and we were given special treatment. Other families had to live in one room, but we had two rooms. My parents slept in the small room and we had the big room. My sister Shu often took my elder brother Shan and me to her friends’ homes with her. Their parents were kind to us, they would give us snacks to nibble on, and ask us to speak Japanese for them. I was very young, but my Japanese was very good and I enjoyed teaching the adults little words and phrases. The other children grabbed all the food while I was doing this, but my sister always kept a bit for me. She protected me.’

  Hua’er’s face lit up.

  ‘My father was proud of Shu because she did well in school. He said that she could help him become wiser. My mother also praised my sister for being a good girl because she kept an eye on my elder brother and me, giving my mother time to prepare lessons and look after my younger brother Shi, who was three years old. We were happiest when we were playing with our father. He dressed up as different people to make us laugh. Sometimes he was the Old Man Carrying the Mountain from the Japanese fairy tale, and he carried all four of us on his back. We pressed down on him until he gasped for breath, but he continued carrying us, shouting, “I’m . . . carrying . . . the mountain!”

  ‘Sometimes he wrapped my mother’s scarf round his head to be the Wolf Grandmother from the Chinese fairy story. Whenever he played hide-and-seek with us, I dived under the quilt, and shouted innocently, “Hua’er is not under the quilt!”

  ‘He hid in the most ingenious places. Once he even hid in the large jar where grain was kept. When he came out, he was covered with maize, buckwheat and rice.’ Hua’er laughed at the memory, and I joined in.

  She took a sip of water, savouring it.

  ‘We were very happy. But then, in 1966, the nightmare began.’

  The leaping flames of the bonfire that had marked the end of my happy childhood appeared before my eyes. Hua’er’s voice banished the image.

  ‘One summer afternoon, my parents had gone to work, and I was doing my homework under my sister’s supervision while my little brother sat playing with his toys. Suddenly, we heard the rhythmic shouting of slogans outside. Grown-ups were always shouting and yelling then, so we didn’t think much of it. The noise came closer and closer, until it was right outside our door. A gang of young people stood there shouting, “Down with the Japanese imperialist running dogs! Eliminate the foreign secret agents!”

  ‘My sister behaved like a grown-
up. She opened the door and asked the students, who seemed to be the same age as her, “What are you doing? My parents aren’t at home.”

  ‘A girl at the front of the crowd said, “Listen, you brats, your parents are Japanese imperialist secret agents. They have been placed under the control of the proletariat. You must make a clean break with them, and expose their spying activities!”

  ‘My parents, secret agents! In the films I had seen, secret agents were always wicked. Noticing how frightened I was, my sister quickly shut the door and put her hands on my shoulders. “Don’t be scared. Wait till Mama and Papa come home and we’ll tell them about it,” she said.

  ‘My elder brother had been saying for some time that he wanted to join the Red Guards. Now he said quietly, “If they are secret agents, I’ll go to Beijing to take part in the revolution against them.”

  ‘My sister glared at him and said, “Don’t talk nonsense!”

  ‘It was dark by the time the students stopped shouting outside our door. Later, somebody told me the group had intended to search our house, but couldn’t bring themselves to do it when they saw my sister standing in the doorway protecting the three of us. Apparently, the Red Guard leader had given them a terrible tongue-lashing because of it.

  ‘We did not see my father again for a long time.’ Hua’er’s face froze.

  During the Cultural Revolution, anyone from a rich family, anyone who had received higher education, was an expert or scholar, had overseas connections or had once worked in the pre-1949 government was categorised as a counter-revolutionary. There were so many political criminals of this kind that the prisons could not contain them. Instead, these intellectuals were banished to remote country areas to labour in the fields. Their evenings were occupied with ‘confessing their crimes’ to Red Guards, or else with lessons from the peasants, who had never seen a car or heard of electricity. My parents had endured many such periods of labour and re-education.

  The peasants taught the intellectuals the songs they sang as they planted crops, and how to slaughter pigs. Having grown up in bookish, learned environments, the intellectuals shuddered at the sight of blood, and often astonished the peasants with their lack of practical skills and knowledge.