Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  Your cousin,

  Julia

  The Philadelphia cousins wrote about getting honors on their last report cards. Terri, meanwhile, hadn’t been to formal classes at her middle school since the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. She was a captive in her own home, passing the days by reading and rereading the few books that Red Guards hadn’t confiscated in earlier attacks on the family home.

  But that was about to change.

  On December 22, 1968, the People’s Daily, the most influential newspaper in the country, ran an editorial with a pronouncement from Chairman Mao, who said: “The intellectual youth must go to the country, and will be educated from living in rural poverty.”

  Even Mao could not ignore the fact that the Cultural Revolution was spinning out of control. He needed to do something with the Red Guards to move them out of cities and on to other things. When Mao spoke, people listened. With the mere utterance of those words in the People’s Daily, he launched a mass migration of millions of teenagers and young adults, who left their homes in cities to live and work among peasants in the countryside.

  Julia and the other musicians from her class at the conservatory were assigned to a reeducation camp for intellectuals in the farming district of Feng-xian, just south of Shanghai. But Terri and her former classmates from middle school would be sent farther away. They could choose between relocating to the impoverished South or frigid North.

  The thought of living among peasants so far from home terrified some classmates. But the idea thrilled Terri, who picked the place farthest from Jiaozhou Road.

  At last, Terri had a way to escape her attic.

  • 17 •

  Barefoot Doctor

  Jilin Province, 1969

  Terri scanned the faces in the schoolyard, hoping to see her mother’s tiny frame breaking through the crowd at any moment. Her sister Julia had come to see her off at the Xinzha Middle School, but Martha had to work the overnight shift at the hospital and was running late.

  Hundreds of students lingered over good-byes with their parents. Girls wept in the arms of their mothers, while boys tried hard not to show emotion. A dozen military trucks idled on the basketball courts, waiting to shuttle students to a transport ship to take them to the northern port of Dalian.

  Julia did not try to hold back her tears. It was damp and chilly on this March morning in Shanghai, but where Terri was going, the weather was still frostbite cold. Just the thought of it made Julia fret for her younger sister.

  “Don’t worry,” Terri reassured. “I’ll be okay.”

  There would be no crying for Terri. She could have gone to a commune in Anhui Province, about two hundred miles to the west of Shanghai, but instead chose a more remote option, relocating with other classmates to Jilin Province in the icy heart of northeastern China.

  The idea of starting anew and living among strangers exhilarated Terri. She was only sixteen and for the first time in years felt in control of her life. Shanghai represented her past and all that was wrong with her family. But in a new place among new people, she believed she had a shot at defining a different future.

  Terri had a plan. Her whole life, she had expected to grow up to be a doctor just like her mother. Of the sisters, Julia was always “the musical one,” while Terri was “the scientific one.” At school, she excelled in classes like biology and chemistry. In her attic bedroom, she read an anatomy textbook with as much concentration and enjoyment as her novels. With her move to the countryside, Terri was determined to rewrite the script of her life. She made up her mind that she would become a rural medical worker, a “barefoot doctor,” a chijiao yisheng.

  She first heard the term in an editorial in the People’s Daily on September 15, 1968, which advocated for barefoot doctors to bring basic health care to more people. Mao attacked the health-care profession, with its many Western-trained experts, for skewing services to urban residents while ignoring the needs of peasants. The vast majority of people had nothing. To change that, Mao wanted to train a new class of rural medics who would be “half farmers, half doctors.” They would receive a few months of training and then return to village clinics to bring basic health care to peasants.

  Terri found the idea exhilarating. She wanted to become this new model worker, who could stand shoeless in a field one moment and then wield a syringe in a clinic the next.

  Many students shared the same ambition. To accommodate them, a clinic in Shanghai held a four-week crash course before the students were dispatched to the countryside. Terri learned the basics of first aid, such as how to suture a cut, how to treat a kitchen burn, and how to care for a cold.

  Her obstetrician mother also had arranged for her to get further training in delivering babies. For two weeks, Terri was allowed to shadow a team of doctors, nurses, and midwives at Xinhua Hospital, observing them in the labor room as they handled as many as ten deliveries at a time. They showed Terri how to coach a mother through her first contractions to the final push. Only once did Terri flinch; she nearly fainted the first time she saw a doctor use a scalpel to make an incision to prevent tearing during childbirth.

  An eager and focused student, Terri felt pressured to learn as much as she could, as fast as she could. Sleep would have to wait. For two weeks, she didn’t go home and allowed herself only a few hours a day to nap at the hospital.

  Martha arrived at the Xinzha schoolyard just in time to say good-bye. She came alone. Her husband was still being detained by Red Guards, who had locked him up after the piano episode at Third Uncle’s house a year earlier.

  After a busy night in the delivery room, Martha looked exhausted yet calm. She knew that this move, however difficult it would be for everyone, was the best thing for her daughter.

  Workers strained to lift Terri’s two big leather trunks onto a flatbed truck. It was heavier than others. In between wool scarves and socks, Martha had tucked stainless steel medical instruments, including clamps, a scalpel, and scissors, as well as acupuncture needles, alcohol, and several doses of penicillin. Some mothers sent their children off with stashes of dried fruit or nuts, hidden like surprise gifts in the folds of their luggage. Martha tucked into Terri’s trunks her textbook on obstetrics and gynecology, plus another manual on common medical ailments and basic procedures.

  The students, pressing shoulder to shoulder, held onto the side of the truck. Terri locked her eyes on her mother’s reassuring face. She had no idea when she would see her parents again.

  Daughter and mother exchanged small waves as the truck lurched into gear and pulled away.

  The young passengers trudged up the gangplank of a commercial ship like cattle through a chute. They descended into a dark cargo hold improvised to handle passengers. Terri took a place among rows of blankets laid side by side on the steel floor. Everyone clambered to the top deck to watch the Shanghai skyline fade away as the ship sailed down the Huangpu River.

  For most of the city teenagers, this was their first time on a seafaring vessel. The rocking motion of the ship on the open ocean lulled Terri into a deep sleep. Some of the girls around her were not as lucky. Seasick, they had a hard time holding down their dinners.

  After three days at sea in the dark, cold, and increasingly smelly cargo hold, all the passengers were anxious to disembark in the port of Dalian. Their legs were still wobbly from ocean travel when they were immediately transported to waiting trains. So many students packed into the railcars that Terri had to stand most of the time. Students took shifts sitting on hard seats or the floor. Some unfortunate travelers could find spare space only in the toilet compartment.

  The teenagers looked at the wintry landscape racing past their windows with silent disbelief. It was much worse than Terri had imagined. She and her classmates came from a city with granite skyscrapers, streetlights, and lush parks. All they saw now were flat, brown fields. Occasionally, swirls of yellow dust would spi
n like tops in the sky.

  Dry, cold winds from Siberia constantly raked across this part of China, the ancient homeland of the Manchu people, the last imperial rulers, whose Qing dynasty ended in 1911. Outsiders called the northeastern region Manchuria—a name not used by the Manchu themselves—and coveted its bountiful farmland as well as its rich deposits of oil, coal, and iron ore. Czarist Russia pushed into Manchuria, establishing a naval base on the coast in the late nineteenth century, while Japan made a grab for the whole region. In 1932, Japanese invaders installed the last emperor, Puyi, as the puppet ruler of the Nippon state of Manchukuo in Jilin’s capital of Changchun. In Mao’s China, there was no more Manchukuo or Manchuria, only Dongbei, its proper Mandarin name, meaning “East-north.”

  After a day and night on the train, the students arrived at a rail station on the outskirts of Changchun, the vital industrial center of Dongbei. In 1958, the city’s First Automobile Works manufactured China’s first domestic passenger car, the Red Flag or Hongqi. The luxury sedan, with its black-lacquer finish and grinning steel grill, was reserved for special passengers like high-ranking communist cadres or visiting dignitaries. The pride of socialist China, the Red Flag could trace its lineage to capitalist Detroit: its engine was modeled after a Cadillac, and its chassis looked like that of a 1955 Chrysler.

  Terri put on the mustard yellow quilted jacket that each of the students had been given when they left Shanghai. Herded onto trucks for another leg of the journey, the Shanghai transplants got their first taste of Dongbei’s notorious weather. Unforgiving winds slapped their faces, making it hard to breathe. On the back of the flatbed truck, they pressed closer together for warmth.

  “I picked this place because I thought I’d be in the wilderness among wolves and tigers,” joked one city boy named Liyu as the truck rumbled over dirt roads.

  But there were no forests, no mountains, nothing, in fact, surprising or random about the landscape. Barren fields unfolded like bolts of brown corduroy. Rows of tall poplars, planted as a defense against wind erosion, stood ramrod straight along the roadside. Streets were empty except for the occasional truck hauling mounds of muddy beets to sugar mills.

  Pulling into the town of Yihe, the mood of the teens sank even lower. Men with wooden carts pulled by mules were waiting for them. The Shanghai students were a thousand miles from home, and their journey still wasn’t over. They had even farther to travel into the cold night.

  A single oil lamp illuminated the thatched-roof home of a peasant. Old men and women, packed into a room, ogled their young guests.

  Terri and five other girls sat awkwardly and stiffly on the edge of an eight-by-eight-foot brick platform called a kang. It was so high that their legs didn’t touch the ground. The room had no furniture, an unfamiliar concept for the modern Shanghai girls. In this part of rural China, life revolved around the kang, which was warmed from inside by a fire. The girls were told that this was where they would eat, sleep, and lounge.

  No one spoke as each side sized up the other. Farmers wearing hats with earflaps lined with dog fur envied the hard leather shoes of the city girls and silently wondered how long soles like that would last in the fields. The Shanghai teens, staring at the leathery skin of old farmwives, had the urge to reach out with their smooth fingertips to see what it felt like.

  “You children must eat,” urged an older man named Gao, ladling soup from a big wok into six bowls. He was a widower with a grown son. He told the girls that he was assigned to look after the twelve “educated youth” from Shanghai, dubbed zhishi qingnian, who would be staying in the village.

  Terri (kneeling in the center of the second row) photographed with other Shanghai students who were sent to a village in the frigid Northeast to “learn from peasants.” She worked as a “barefoot doctor” and delivered her first baby at the age of sixteen. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.

  Their new home was less of a town than a cluster of houses near a bend in the dirt road. Gao explained that he and his neighbors—150 people spread among 25 families—were part of a household collective, and he was the top cadre.

  “If you have problems, you come to me,” he instructed.

  The girls wrapped their numb fingers around the warm soup bowls, slurping steaming broth and devouring thin slices of potato. No one took off her quilted jacket or wool hat. Even though they sat indoors, they could still see their breath.

  More than five days after leaving Shanghai, the sent-down youth were finally at their destination. The reality of it terrified them. Mao’s abstract command to “learn from peasants” had now come into sharp focus: a drafty house with no furniture, no electricity, no running water. From now on, a hot shower would be a luxury they enjoyed once a year if they were willing to travel to a public bathhouse ten miles away. Families read by oil lamps and used cornstalks to fuel fires for cooking or heating kangs. Wood was far too precious to waste.

  Sleeping that first night under a heavy quilt, side by side with the other girls, Terri could hear them crying themselves to sleep. Shanghai with its streetcars and bustle was now something relegated to their nighttime dreams.

  Terri ignored them. Instead, her mind raced. All she could think about was getting started.

  Birth

  Gao rapped his knuckles on the window of the house.

  “Get up, get up,” he shouted.

  The sky was just starting to lighten, though it was well after seven. Dawn came late in the Far North.

  Gao introduced the teens to a middle-aged woman who was missing a few teeth and wore a dark blue scarf around her head. Everyone called her Auntie, or Da Niang, and she was going to give the students their first life lesson: how to cook Jilin style.

  Pouring a few precious drops of oil into a wok, she fanned the fire under the black cauldron. She measured out cornmeal, added some flour and hot water, and poured the mixture into small pancakes in the wok. This was da bingzi. Forget rice. At this time of year, it was all anyone ate. There were no greens, no pork, no chicken. The only winter vegetable was last year’s garlic preserved in salt. Meat was a luxury enjoyed only once a year. Families killed a fattened hog for their New Year’s celebration and literally ate until they got sick. With the holiday just passed, it would be another eleven months before the students would see pork in their bowls.

  Next on the agenda was a lesson outside. The city students bundled up with mittens, hats, scarves, and coats and followed Gao into the fields. He handed everyone a small hoe.

  “Watch me,” the old cadre explained.

  Bending over, he dug up the stump of a corn stalk from the hard ground and gave the roots a few swipes with the hand hoe to knock off dirt. He filled in the hole, patted it smooth, and moved on to the next.

  Terri tried to imitate Gao. She followed each step. Her big mittens made it too hard to hold the stalk and hoe, so she took them off for a better grip. But the next time she came down with the hand tool, she swiped her finger with the blade.

  Blood dripped down her hand. She winced from the pain and squeezed the deep gash to make it stop bleeding. Mortified, she looked around, hoping no one noticed that on her first day, she was her first patient.

  Terri didn’t waste any time telling Gao or anyone else who would listen about her plan to become a barefoot doctor. Her collective was part of the bigger town of Yihe, located a short distance away. She traveled to the clinic there to volunteer her services. Expecting a warm welcome, she got the opposite. The clinic workers were unwilling to add any of the “sent-down” youth from Shanghai to the staff. These were prime jobs, which kept them indoors and not laboring in the fields during winter months. Many of the women were the wives of commune leaders. They closed ranks.

  Undeterred, Terri looked for pregnant women on her own.

  She found one living not far from her house. Emboldened by the moxie of youth, she went right up to the woman and asked whether s
he could help her with her pregnancy.

  “I’ve trained at a top hospital in Shanghai,” Terri told her neighbor, trying hard to impress her. “I know what to do. I brought equipment with me, too, the best you can use for a delivery.”

  The pregnant mother seemed receptive to letting this young stranger help her. Even a teenager with only a little practical experience was better than no help at all. In the countryside, death was part of the birth experience. It wasn’t unusual for a mother to lose one infant, often more, to infection or complications.

  But when the time came, the pregnant woman opted to call an elderly neighbor to help her instead of sending for Terri. The old woman approached the birth of a child as she would the birth of a calf. She severed the umbilical cord by cinching it off with a piece of sorghum rope and then using a shard of glass to cut it. Nothing was sterilized.

  Horrified by such methods, Terri knew enough to realize that this could cause an infection like tetanus.

  Which was exactly what happened.

  The newborn girl lived for two days. The family buried her tiny corpse in a shallow grave in a nearby field. Soon after, Terri saw wild dogs dig up the body and rip it apart with their fangs.

  Terri resolved to establish herself as someone who could be trusted to help with childbirth, even though, at sixteen, she was still a child herself.

  Another woman in the village was due to have her fourth child in June and agreed to let Terri help. As soon as this mother went into labor, Terri hurried to her house. She brought her scissors and clamps and a metal box for sterilizing the instruments in boiling water. Martha had also given her strips of white wool fabric to use as bandages.

  The thirty-year-old woman lay on her kang with her knees up. Taking a deep breath, Terri tried to remember everything she had learned at her mother’s hospital.