The Remote Country of Women
Page 4
would be treated just like a model worker and be asked to give heroic talks everywhere. Besides, just as every American was looking for a chance to become rich and famous,
every Chinese was looking for an opportunity to become a hero by informing on someone. You could definitely benefit from informing activities. If you didn’t become a national 2 5
Bai Hua.book Page 26 Friday, October 26, 2001 2:56 PM
hero, you could at least be liberated from arduous military training and toil. You could even become a grassroots leader or the like, gaining the privilege of issuing orders in a limited area, such as scheduling routine work and distributing daily meals. After all these calculations, I found there was no other way but to dig a tunnel to freedom by my own
strength, in the heroic spirit of the Count of Monte Christo.
I gaze at her window. In the past it was pasted over with black paper; now a cloth curtain with tiny blue flowers hangs there.
2 6
Bai Hua.book Page 27 Friday, October 26, 2001 2:56 PM
3
She was going on thirteen. Oh, beautiful Suna-
mei! Gathering beads of dew were about to flow in a stream.
The majority of the Mosuo put up with the
clampdown pretty well. Men stopped their night visits to women. In the dead of night, Sunamei stole out from her
yimei to watch the work team members parading in the village. They looked dreary, telling yarns one after another. She also groped her way to the huagu of the mature women to eavesdrop, but she couldn’t hear any male breathing. Still, she was told that pairs of axiao had been caught in the huagu and in the woods. The work team forced the captives to
accept marriage certificates and threatened to send the recal-citrant ones to jail for labor reform. Even so, one pair preferred going to jail rather than accepting a marriage
certificate. The work team dragged this stubborn pair into the street for a criticism parade and hung worn-out shoes around their necks to insult them, even though the Mosuo could not grasp the symbolic meaning of those shoes at all.
This was what the work team had accomplished in six
months of bitter struggle along Lake Xienami. In addition, they had built a wall across the open-air hot spring to divide the bathing place into two compartments: the left one for men and the right one for women.
As things turned out, it was the work team who could
not stick around anymore. They hurried through a summary report at the mass meeting, declaring that they had
2 7
Bai Hua.book Page 28 Friday, October 26, 2001 2:56 PM
achieved a complete victory in the struggle to purify the family and marital life and that their victory was comparable to the liberation of Taiwan and the unification of the country. They declared that from now on, the Mosuo kinsmen could march shoulder to shoulder with the whole
nation. The meeting was crowned with an entertaining program: a revolutionary wedding, sponsored by public funds, was held for those captured axiao. Each couple, now legally married, was given a single-door, Han-style hut containing cooking utensils, a quilt and two pillows, and Chairman
Mao’s portrait. The marriage certificate hung in its glass frame by the left side of Mao’s portrait. Old Mosuo put on long faces while the brides and grooms, like marionettes, moved only when pushed by the team members. The children, however, always had fun, for they had never seen
things like that before.
“One, two, three, four…,” counted a group of boys and
girls, all dressed in long shirts that looked like oversized blouses or undersized gowns, squatting beneath a row of
jingfan trees on the hilltop and watching vehicles crawl, one by one, around the bend of the hill like beetles. There were four cars: one black, two blue, and even a red one. In their wake were two buses and three huge trucks. In the trucks sat PLA soldiers, guns in hand and bayonets flashing. It was scary. Luckily, this time all the cars, buses, and trucks were receding with their strange passengers into the distance.
Resting her chin on her little hands, Sunamei tilted her head as she watched the troops disappear into the distance.
She was thinking to herself, “Why did they have to be angry with us? Why do they take everything so seriously? Why do they insist that a man and a woman who come from different communities live together in a small hut? They must
have eaten too much and have nothing to do. They came to interfere with us; we never interfered with them. Whatever they did, we let them alone. No one bothered to ask them anything.” Sunamei sighed like a little adult. Her mood
2 8
Bai Hua.book Page 29 Friday, October 26, 2001 2:56 PM
brightened, like the sky changing from overcast to blue
skies. The clouds and mists were dispersing.
The six-month storm finally passed. Lake Xienami, like a smooth mirror, calmly reflected the sky once again.
The Mosuo were a simple people. They soon consigned
the second political encroachment of the civilized world to oblivion, as if they were forgetting two invasions by mam-moths or hordes of elephants. They healed instantly. No
sooner had the engines of the departing work team started snorting than the axiao embraced each other. Apparently they had forgotten the taboos of heaven. Intoxicated, they embraced in broad daylight, during working hours in the
fields. They believed that their ancestors and the goddess would forgive them because they had been forced to be apart from each other for so long.
Those who had been forced into marriage also started to
walk out of their muddy huts, carrying their bedrolls to their own yishe.
She was going on thirteen. Oh, beautiful Sunamei! The husk of the spring shoot was falling away and the graceful green bamboo was emerging.
Little Sunamei had a point. Why had Gu Shuxian and
her ilk so relentlessly wanted to tear up our yishe? Simply because these people were parts of a car. When cars come, they come; when cars go, they are gone. They all spoke the same words; the cars spoke the same words, too, and wore the same face. They couldn’t understand the Mosuo tongue and the Mosuo didn’t want to talk to them. Who could talk sense with a car, anyway? Cars only make a rumbling noise.
Sunamei understood all this intuitively. Was she right?
Yes, but not quite. Gu Shuxian was indeed a cog in the
political machine. She had to turn and move back and forth with the machine and make the same noise as the other
parts of the machine. Nevertheless, she was made of flesh 2 9
Bai Hua.book Page 30 Friday, October 26, 2001 2:56 PM
and blood, not of iron. When she was traveling in the red car, all the excitement and pride she drew from her power to decide others peoples’ fate and to save the primitives ebbed away, and a strange feeling of sorrow gradually rose, overwhelmed her, and gave her a sense of defeat instead of victory. She had to admit that those silent Mosuo women and men were much more powerful than she because they did
not fight their own bodies and souls. She wanted to cry but held back her tears, aware that her bodyguard, Xiao Wei, was sitting beside her and that her driver, Xiao He, could also watch her in the rearview mirror. She shut her eyes as if she were tired. Indeed, she was exhausted, although not at all sleepy. A desire burned inside her, a desire to be shocked.
She felt dry and hot around her face, her neck, and her whole body. She forced herself to calm down so she could take the time to reflect on her life, as she frequently did.
With the help of a matchmaker she had been married to a
local guerilla commander just before the victory over Japan.
Her husband had married her not out of love but out of
need. Before he found a wife, he had once complained to the county secretary, “I can’t control myself anymore. If you don’t allow me to marry, I’m afraid I’ll commit some sort of sin.”
Three years later, desire had turn
ed to disgust. During
the revolution, Gu Shuxian fully revealed her greed, calculation, vanity, and ambition. While her husband was following the field army marching to the central plains, she had been a student in the school for army dependents. In less than a year she had toppled the dashing political commissar and stepped into his shoes by spying on some women students and exposing their infidelity to their husbands at the front. When she assumed office, she adopted the severest methods to protect women: she dismissed all male staff
members, except for a few aged cooks. She also invented a chain-protection system: anyone who discovered flirtation or adultery and did not report it would be treated the same 3 0
Bai Hua.book Page 31 Friday, October 26, 2001 2:56 PM
as the sinners. Apart from being criticized in public meetings and having her hair torn from her scalp, she would have to carry sacks of grain during the military marches and mill flour all night when the army camped. Because of Gu’s outstanding achievements, the husbands of the women stu-
dents praised her highly as a woman of principle. But the students hated her. With tears in her eyes, the wife of a bri-gade commander complained to her husband about the
tyrannical behavior of this woman political commissar. Her complaints raised Gu Shuxian’s position higher than ever.
Listening to his tender wife’s weeping, the commander
scoffed, “What she has done is for your own good! You can’t go removing a political commissar of her caliber.”
However, there was one man Gu Shuxian failed to win
over: her own husband. He assumed a stony indifference and contempt toward her. When the troops stopped for rest and reorganization, Gu Shuxian would lead the wives of the
higher-ranking officers on a round-the-clock march to the frontline troops. As soon as they stopped in a village close to the headquarters, many horses with leather saddles would arrive, with bodyguards to fetch the officers’ wives. Only Gu Shuxian failed to send someone. That made her feel
great. Why, she herself was a regimental officer and could ride her own horse to her husband’s camp. By that time
their marital relationship was already dwindling into just a name. She did not seem to care. “When I come, willing or not, you’ve got to sleep with me on the same plank, and I will press my naked body to yours, seducing you, terrifying you with the power of flesh. Then I will tell you about all the shameless scandals that happened in our school and
about my investigative talent and my severe punishment of those sinners.” Each time, long before she had finished the tedious account, her husband lay snoring in a deep sleep.
In 1949 her husband was demobilized. Luckily, as a civilian he was promoted to the position of provincial general secretary. He tried to talk her into a divorce, but she refused.
3 1
Bai Hua.book Page 32 Friday, October 26, 2001 2:56 PM
She stuck to him as revenge against his stony indifference and contempt over the past years. Once the provincial general secretary was interned in a hospital for a physical checkup and fell in love with a younger nurse. Gu Shuxian soon discovered their affair, and she immediately collected all the evidence against them. A woman’s jealousy can make her much better than a professional detective. Nevertheless, she did not make a big fuss over it. Instead, she used a most ambiguous gesture to call her husband’s attention to the fact: “I know everything about you. I have all the evidence against you in my hands. And so long as I breathe, you’d better not entertain any dreams of divorce.” For her husband, this meant a complete blockade of his journey from hell to heaven.
Yet in public she always appeared as the most intimate
companion to the general secretary. She loved to show off when her husband was with guests. “The general secretary loves my noodles. What’s to be done? I’d better be his
cook.” “The general secretary does not allow anyone to
touch his desk. What’s to be done? I’d better be his secretary.” “The general secretary does not allow anyone to make his bed. What’s to be done? I’d better be his housekeeper.
Although I’m a cadre with some responsibility myself, I just love to serve him. It’s my whole happiness. I know – no
matter how hard I try I won’t really get anywhere in public affairs. However, I feel satisfied in having a loving husband.
Don’t you agree, darling?”
She knew that in front of the guests, he would have to say yes. She was also sure that in mouthing this yes he was
wishing he could pounce on her in rage. He was forced not only to repress his anger but even to wear a pleasant smile.
When the guests left he and she again became independent crags; they went to their separate bedrooms as if nothing had happened. If she had really cooked a bowl of noodles for him at that moment, he would have smashed the bowl in
her face. Of course she would not even bother to try it. This 3 2
Bai Hua.book Page 33 Friday, October 26, 2001 2:56 PM
so-called happy couple lived like this under the same roof for twenty years. During the Cultural Revolution, the husband was denounced as a capitalist roader and sent to a cadre school; she, having not worked at all in the past dozen years, became spotless and was chosen by the newly established
revolutionary power structure – the provincial revolutionary committee – to be chair of the provincial women’s federation. For the first time, husband and wife were drawn apart to a distance that matched their spiritual estrangement.
Both sides felt not pain but relief. Gu Shuxian even felt better than her husband did because she now looked down on
him from a commanding position. For many years she had
been lower in rank than he. Now at last the tables were
turned.
Her sojourn along the beach of Lake Xienami had
destroyed Gu Shuxian’s hard calmness condensed by years of hatred. She felt a tender sorrow rising from the bottom of her heart. She was disturbed by an emotion she had not
experienced for many years. She was unable to figure out her past and present. She was particularly confused by the
Mosuo life. Although the Mosuo did not live in a civilized way, it was impossible to change them, as if the long history of mankind and the influence of the majority races and their governments had no power over them at all. They, especially their women, were full of self-confidence. According to our social norms, they should have been cursed as shameless
women, yet a queenly pride shone in their eyes. The ancestors of humanity had probably lived as they did. Suddenly, Gu Shuxian found herself admiring them. What she had
heard about the rituals in which a Mosuo woman receives
a man flashed through her consciousness like a movie,
imprinting sharp, sensual images on her mind. She sighed.
Then she warned herself and tried to control the wild horses inside her. She desperately wanted to recite a quotation but could not think of a suitable one. Her mind went blank and 3 3
Bai Hua.book Page 34 Friday, October 26, 2001 2:56 PM
all the quotations blew away with the wind. She was sud-
denly overpowered by a desire she had suppressed for many years.
The driver, Xiao He, noticed in the rearview mirror that the face of the bodyguard, Xiao Wei, had turned ghastly
pale. In spite of his shivering, Xiao Wei dared not move because his hand was held tight by the fleshy hands of the leading cadre, as she pulled it toward her breasts.…
Such strange happenings were beyond the imagination of
Sunamei and her fellow villagers.
She was going on thirteen. Oh, beautiful Sunamei! An obscure little flower, smiling gently with closed lips, was about to reveal her face. She was about to leap from the grassland, shining like a red star in the blue night sky.
3 4
Bai Hua.book Page 35 Friday, October 26, 2001 2:56 PM
4
I gaze at her window. In
the past it was pasted
over with black paper; now a cloth curtain with tiny blue flowers hangs there.
I had always been poor at physical educa-
tion. I still remembered my participation in a race during my high school days. After a hundred-meter sprint to the finish, my heart was beating at twice the normal rate. A doctor’s son once told me that after strenuous exercise your pulse and blood pressure rise steeply. Why not try this
trick? So, I used my intuition to choose a lucky day and secretly reconnoiter the enemy position. Good, there were few patients in the clinic. I ran madly around the straw heap until I could hear my pumping heart. Then I hurried
toward the clinic at a slow run. I could not let my heart rate slow down; on the other hand, the doctor was not supposed to hear my gasping, either.
Lowering my head and frowning, I walked slowly into
the clinic and leaned listlessly against the door frame. Liu Tiemei saw me first and was not hostile, perhaps because I was not a woman. It was impossible for me to be a threat to her power over her husband. You see, gay people in China were practically invisible, even if many of them existed. Gay people did not arouse any suspicion because the common
belief was that people of the same sex repelled one another; people of different sexes attracted each other. Nobody
admitted the existence of such an abnormal phenomenon as 3 5
Bai Hua.book Page 36 Friday, October 26, 2001 2:56 PM
homosexuality. It was all right for men to share beds and for women to be intimate. But communication between a man
and a woman had to be conducted under the strictest supervision.
Liu Tiemei walked up to me and asked gently, “What’s
wrong with you, Liang Rui?”
“My…heart… is…beating wildly.” It was true, my
heartbeat started to accelerate because of my nervousness in front of her. I dared not look into her eyes. She held my wrist, feeling my pulse attentively. At that moment what worried me most was that my heart would resume its normal beat.