by Ting-Xing Ye
By this time I was like a zombie. A lost night of sleep was debilitating enough, but the fear and tension had drained all my energy. Once again I found myself the object of criticism and ridicule. I remembered Great-Aunt’s expression: “We escaped the bitter sea only to fall into the mouth of a tiger.” I worked alongside Yu Hua, building paddy dikes with a long heavy rake in the chilly late-March rain as our watchers sat chatting under umbrellas. We were not allowed to work with others, nor could we talk to each other. I was worried about Yu Hua. She was withdrawn, her eyes were puffy, and she seemed to have aged overnight. I wondered if I looked as bad.
That night yet another struggle meeting was held in the warehouse. When I walked in, trailed by Fatty, no one spoke to me. People looked away when I passed them. As soon as I sat down in the front row, someone yelled from the back, “Bring up the counterrevolutionaries!” Only then did I notice two cells made of bamboo poles and reed mats newly installed at each end of the warehouse. Yu Hua emerged from behind one of them. Xiao Jian, Xiao Qian and Xiao Zhu were led to sit behind me.
The same voice at the back began to chant slogans, and the crowd joined in. “Down with the counterrevolutionaries! Down with anyone who dares to oppose the PLA! Those who oppose the PLA are against the Communist Party!” With each deafening shout, my shoulders hunched a little more, as if the bitter words were being piled on my head. I glanced at my friends, who looked miserable and terrified. The whole scene brought back memories of Red Guards bellowing in the street outside our house in Purple Sunshine Lane.
The next stage of the struggle meeting was an open invitation for people to stand up and report on “crimes” committed by the five of us. One by one my friends were accused of betraying their class and of setting up a secret counterrevolutionary group.
When it came my turn, from behind me I heard, “Ye Ting-xing has no respect for the motherland! She makes fun of everything!”
“Ye Ting-xing looks down on the PLA,” a second woman blurted out, referring to my mimicking of Zhao’s Sichuan accent in the dorm at night. My joke about the new road, charged another, proved that my “hatred of our beloved PLA was rooted in my bad blood, which had been growing since the day I was born.”
“Her parents were capitalists who sucked the blood of the working class,” screamed a fourth.
The slanders, curses and insults went on and on, and my humiliation deepened with every lie or false accusation. How could all of them hate me so? I had never felt so alone. These were the women with whom I worked, ate and shared a dorm. If I could have, I would have ended my life there and then.
Finally Zhao stood up. The five of us had held secret meetings in Xiao Jian’s tiny accounting office, he claimed. “You all know the size of that room,” he sneered. “Just imagine how closely the five of them would have been jammed together. Do you really believe that they were just eating supper and talking?” He smirked, then pointing at Yu Hua and me. “And you two! You are constantly seen sharing the same bedding at night.” He turned to the audience. “I wonder if staying warm was the only reason!”
His remark brought an uproar of laughter. From the corner of my eye I saw that Yu Hua had begun to cry. I knew nothing about lesbians, but Zhao’s remark was clearly meant to be low and obscene, and I felt I would never hold up my head again.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Two days later I was put under house arrest. Zhao had not been satisfied with my one-sentence confession. Loaf shoved me into the same room, pushed me behind the same desk and ordered me once again to confess all my crimes and report on the counterrevolutionary thoughts, words and actions of my four friends.
I didn’t care any more. For the past two days I had not been shadowed because, as Cui put it, I was “under surveillance of the mobilized masses.” The prisoners mocked me, the students lowered their eyes when I passed or openly criticized me. I felt like a leper.
There were two beds in the room, I noticed, one for me and one for Loaf. The first night was a repetition of my initial interrogation, shouting, punching, slapping whenever fatigue seemed to remove all the strength from my neck muscles. Fatty, Leggy and Loaf took turns: when one grew tired of the attack, another took over.
I wrote a few more sentences. I admitted to going over the heads of our PLA reps and criticized myself for doing so. At midnight I was allowed to lie down on the bed, fully clothed. Only minutes later, it seemed, I was shaken awake and dragged back to the desk.
“Not good enough,” Loaf asserted. “Stop stalling. The reps say you’re holding back. You must give a full confession.”
“But I did nothing wrong,” I repeated so often that it became a litany. “My friends did nothing wrong. We’re not counterrevolutionaries!”
Shouting, stinging slaps on the face, criticism, insults. Back to bed. Shaken awake again. Pulled to the desk. More yelling, more demands.
Each morning I dragged myself to the paddies. Every evening there was another struggle meeting to vilify me and the other four “counterrevolutionaries” before I was hauled back to the room. Exhausted, disoriented and deprived of sleep, I finally wrote a full self-criticism, telling how I went to the sub-farm and what I said to Representative Huang about my tan-qin. I filled several pages, writing as much as I could to satisfy them. Anything to be allowed to sleep.
It wasn’t enough. I was kicked awake again. By now I could no longer tell how long I had been allowed to doze. Was it four hours or four minutes? I lost track of how many days had passed since the interrogation had begun. Loaf hauled me back to my desk. Then Zhao came in, his military coat unbuttoned, his plastic slippers dragging. He sat beside me, very close, and ran his hand down the back of my head. I could smell green tea and cigarettes on his breath.
“Your hair needs a wash,” he observed. Speaking softly, almost politely, in complete contrast to my watchers’ aggressive abuse, he explained that my confession was a good start, very good indeed—but it didn’t go far enough.
“You’ve told us what you did. But you must examine your thinking. What motivated you? What were you really attempting to do? Not simply talk about your home leave, surely? Wasn’t there more to it? Think about it.”
He left, closing the door quietly. I stared at the sheet of paper, struggling to keep my eyes open. The slam of a hand on the wood beside my ear startled me.
“Wake up, parentless bitch! Who gave you permission to sleep?”
“Leave me alone!” I shouted.
Loaf slapped me across the face. My cheek burned with pain and tears of mortification ran down my cheeks.
“Your dead capitalist parents can’t help you now.”
“Leave my parents out of it,” I said, earning another stinging blow.
It took them fourteen days to break me: two weeks of labouring ten hours a day, tilling corners of the paddy missed by the ploughs, two weeks of struggle meetings, two weeks of night-long interrogation sessions in which Loaf’s angry shouts blended with Zhao’s soft inducements. Two weeks without rest. I was not allowed to wash or change my clothes. My body stank; my hair was matted with mud; my pant legs rotted off from the alkaline water that soaked into them in the paddies. Sometimes I was so disoriented I didn’t know which room I was in, or what time it was.
When I was older I learned that I had been subjected to the kind of sleep-deprivation torture used by many countries in espionage and war. It was frequently practised by interrogators during the Cultural Revolution.
Finally, one night, Zhao spoke again. “Wouldn’t you like to sleep, Xiao Ye? Wouldn’t you like this to be over?”
“Tell me what you want me to write,” I said, “and I’ll do it.”
To my everlasting shame, I filled two pages with untruths and exaggerations. I wrote that Representative Huang had criticized Cui and Zhao, which was true. I said that my friends and I had held meetings and criticized the PLA, which was false. My pages were sent back and forth to Cui and Zhao that night. They crossed things out, wrote comments in the margin, and I wou
ld rewrite the confession according to their “suggestions.” Then, when it seemed I would finally be able to lie down, Cui insisted that I report everything that Yu Hua’s sister, who was in the air force, had said to her about life in the military. Yu Hua had told me her sister frequently complained about the poor quality of the newly enlisted men and women and said that Lin Biao’s son was a womanizer. At dawn they ordered me to sign the papers.
Even today I have never forgiven myself for informing on the only four people on the farm who treated me as a friend. We were singled out so that Cui and Zhao could prove that they had found and rooted out a counterrevolutionary conspiracy in their midst. Why had they chosen us over others? I had no way of knowing what I learned later—that my visit with Yu Hua to the sub-farm provided a means for Cui and Zhao, who were in the air force loyal to Lin Biao, to undermine the Shanghai Garrison by finding fault with Representative Huang.
After my confession was signed, my friends were released. But we were kept apart. Cui and Zhao told me they had sent their recommendation for punishment to higher authorities. We would certainly go to prison, they said. A real prison, not a labour camp. Only the length of the sentence remained to be decided.
I was no longer shadowed by Loaf or anyone else; however, every morning I was forced to bow my head before a life-sized statue of Chairman Mao set up in the middle of the compound at the crossroads. Although I kept telling myself not to take it too hard, I was always in tears when I finished. Until my house arrest and interrogation I had regarded myself as an old hand at dealing with humiliation, after the years of wearing my brothers’ cast-off clothes and Number 2’s unfitted glasses, after the begging trips with Mother, after living on welfare and enduring the insults of Red Guards. But nothing matched the inhuman treatment by Cui, Zhao and those they corrupted to do their work.
One very hot night in July, several days after my eighteenth birthday, I passed hour after hour of sleeplessness and depression. Finally, I pushed aside the mosquito netting, rose quietly from my bed and stole out of the dorm. I crept through the humid darkness as if in a trance, and reached the Sanlong River. I scrambled down the bank and waded in.
The river was deep, its surface like an ink stone, smooth and black. Between my toes, the cool bottom mud squashed, and the strong current tugged at my knees. I stood, taking in the silence and the heavy odour of water and earth from the paddies.
I only need to push off into the current, I thought, immerse my head, and suck the water deep into my lungs. It would be over quickly. I waded deeper.
I was up to my waist when I heard disembodied voices floating toward me. The hot night must have driven others out into the open air. As I prepared to take the plunge, a memory came to me. Several years before I had seen a drowned body pulled from Suzhou Creek near my home, so bloated that the shirt had split up the back and the trouser legs had parted at the seams.
I imagined my corpse lying like a piece of driftwood on the riverbank, limbs puffed like sausages, my face doughy. Strangers would manhandle my ugly, deformed body and throw me into a wagon for disposal.
I turned and fought the current to the riverbank, convinced that life was a prison, and that even death offered no escape.
If at the beginning of my interrogation the prisoners had been mean and cruel to me, some of them now tried to make things right. They looked at me with sympathy. Whenever I was washing or doing laundry, the stooped, white-haired old uncle who worked at the pump house would give me a rubber hose connected directly to the pump so that I didn’t have to fetch water from the jars. I thanked him each time, but never learned his name. When I was too late to get my vacuum bottle filled with boiled water at the supply hut, a prisoner would take it over and have it filled in their hut. He always refused my penny. “You are one of us now,” he would say. Though I appreciated his kindness, I often cried to think that I was on the same level as a criminal.
The busy rice-planting season was over and still no word came down about my jail sentence. No one seemed to care too much. Some students were friendly enough, but distant. I hadn’t talked to Yu Hua since we had been arrested, not even when we bumped into one another. We were forbidden to speak to one another, but we could have got around that if we had wanted to. But things had changed between us. Our friendship had become a casualty of the purge. I wanted more than anything to tell her what I had done and to ask her forgiveness.
So I became even more withdrawn. When I was not working in the paddies, I kept to my bed, isolated under my mosquito netting. In early August, just when our workload lessened somewhat and I could breathe a little easier, I came down with malaria, a disease as common as colds in winter, but much more severe. Jia-ying added her blanket to mine, but the chill crept into my bones and I lay curled up in a ball until the tide of the disease turned and sweat soaked my clothes. In the breaks between attacks I lay feeble and exhausted, waiting for another onslaught. So many of us fell ill that a medical team was sent to the farm from Shanghai before the malaria got out of hand, and we were all urged to kill every mosquito under our nets before going to sleep.
The summer dragged on. In the fall, Cui and Zhao called a meeting to announce the sentences meted out to us “counterrevolutionary conspirators.” We got two years each. We should consider ourselves lucky, Cui said, because he and Zhao had recommended five years. The sentencing was “semifinal,” awaiting approval by the Shanghai Labour Reform Bureau, then under the Number Four Air Force Command.
That same night, while I was writing home to tell Great-Aunt and Number 2 the news that their Ah Si was going to jail, the girls in the dorm were all chattering about a greater tragedy. Xiao Jian, one of the three young men also sentenced, was the son of a man who had participated in the legendary Long March. When he learned that his son had been branded a counterrevolutionary, he told everyone in the family to cut off all relations with him. It was Xiao Jian who had “blinded his left eye,” he claimed, referring to an injury he had sustained in the March. In her grief and shame, Xiao Jian’s mother hanged herself in a closet.
Soon after, I learned how my “crimes” had affected my family. Number 2 had spent two years trying to join the Communist Party. He was grateful to the Party because of their help during the factional battles among the workers in Shanghai, when he had barely escaped hanging. His application had been at long last accepted; finally, he thought, he would get away from the shadow of our bad class background. But when it was discovered that he had a counterrevolutionary sister, his bubble of hope burst. The Party rejected him. He was furious with me, and said so in his letter.
“I warned you to stay out of trouble,” he wrote. “Obviously you didn’t listen, and I must pay for your errors.” If my own brother and adviser could blame me in that way, believing my accusers instead of me, what would my “revolutionary” Great-Aunt say? I felt abandoned by my own family.
My tan-qin was cancelled that February because I was still awaiting final word on my sentence. “It’s a pity Representative Huang can’t help you this time,” Cui sneered as I left his office.
I dreaded the idea of going to prison, and kept the news away from Number 1 and Number 5. Until my arrival at the farm, I had never seen a real convict. In my childhood I had pictured criminals as green-faced, long-toothed monsters. How could I tell my eldest brother and my baby sister, who had their own problems, that I would soon be behind bars?
CHAPTER TWENTY
That spring I was strangely at peace. To people like Loaf, Leggy and Fatty I was now a non-person and they left me alone. To others I was invisible. To many more I was an example, a reminder of the rule, “Obey or be destroyed.”
A whisper began to circulate around the farm. Three female students from our brigade, well-groomed and well-dressed, were swept away in a military jeep. Pretending to recruit talented young women for song and dance troupes, the air force was rounding up attractive young women to be mistresses for Lin Li-guo, Lin Biao’s only son. Like an emperor and, as I learned many year
s later, like Mao himself, Lin Li-guo liked to surround himself with young virgins—who didn’t remain virgins for long.
It was like a beauty contest. The candidates from each brigade were selected by the PLA reps, after their political backgrounds had been investigated. Political purity was the first criterion; next came beauty. The three women from our brigade returned the next afternoon, downcast. They had been turned down, and would have to stay on the farm.
That evening, as soon as political study had been concluded, the women in my dorm swirled around one of them, Xiao Hong, like a flock of sparrows. Where had the soldiers taken her? What had happened? Had she actually seen Lin Li-guo?
There had been a panel of seven judges to examine her. “All in uniform,” she said. “They told me I was too big and tall, and that my feet were too long and wide! How can they expect us to have small feet when they know we work barefoot in the paddies for over six months a year?” she whined. “Why do they prefer small feet, anyway? Isn’t that a feudal idea that was condemned a long time ago? Look at the women in the posters everywhere. Aren’t they all big and strong?”
Xiao Hong went on to confirm the rumour that the recruitment had nothing to do with singing and dancing. “How could our leaders be lining up mistresses?” the women around her whispered. “How could the glorious PLA allow itself to be used in this manner?”
I overheard this conversation as I lay in bed. At one time I too would have been shocked to learn that the PLA would involve itself in such seamy practices, but Cui and Zhao had taught me otherwise. But China’s leaders? That was a blow to what little idealism I had left. If the leaders were so corrupt, so hypocritical, how could anyone be safe?