by Chen Huiqin
When I was seven years old, in 1937, the Japanese came again.2 We again went into refuge, this time at a place called Xiemaqiao, Resting Horse Bridge, in Qingpu County. We stayed there almost half a year this time. My family became friends with a local man named Ah Quanlin, who visited us many times afterward.
We went with Chen Jixi’s family from North Hamlet. Chen Jixi owned a boat so we fled in the boat. One foggy morning, when we were rowing on the Baihe River (Baihe Jiang), two Chinese soldiers forced themselves onto our boat and demanded that we take them to a certain place. The adults on the boat were afraid of the soldiers and wanted to get rid of them. So Mother pinched my thighs to make me cry, thinking that the soldiers would be bothered by my crying. At that time, there appeared a boat rowed by a single white-bearded man. The old man offered to take the soldiers on his boat. The soldiers got onto the old man’s boat and our boat turned around and went in the opposite direction. The old man’s boat disappeared into the morning fog. A few minutes later, we heard the explosion of a bomb into the Baihe River. The explosion pushed a big column of water into the air, in the opposite direction not very far from us. My uncle, who was with us on the boat, said that the old man was a fairy sent by our ancestors to save our lives.
At Resting Horse Bridge, I saw women walking around with their breasts totally uncovered. In the evening, men and women took off clothes and bathed in rivers. This place was not very far from our home village, yet their customs and habits were different.
In those days, people did not buy furniture or build pretty houses. There were too many wars and we never knew when we would have to run away. When we ran away, we did not even lock our doors, for there was not much to be stolen. When we had saved money, we bought land, which could not be taken away when we fled. When we came back, we put in seeds and could start a livelihood again in a few months.
After we returned home from Resting Horse Bridge, we lived under Japanese control. The Japanese were always looking for “flower girls.” When I became a teenager, I had to pretend that I was an ugly, dwarfed old lady when I worked in the fields. I smeared ashes from the back of the kitchen wok on my face, wore Mother’s old clothes, which were too big for me, added a worn-out work skirt at my waist, and put on my grandmother’s old headcloth. When Grandmother, Mother, and I worked in the fields, I stood between them. Wherever possible, I stood in ditches or hunched over to pretend that I was dwarfed when Japanese soldiers passed by.
Young women had to hide when the Japanese came into the village. During the Qingxiang Yundong, or Clearing the Villages Movement,3 Japanese soldiers came into our compound several times. Little Aunt and Uncle’s wife were pretty young women at the time. They had to hide on the roof behind a decorative wall above our sky well. One day, the Japanese came to our compound and stayed the whole day, cooking and eating what we had. The two young women stayed on the roof for the whole day. They did not eat or drink the entire time and had to urinate there. When their urine dripped down the eaves into the sky well, they feared that the Japanese would discover them. Fortunately, the Japanese were busy cooking and eating, which helped save them from trouble.
When the Japanese were about to be defeated, they were desperate. They snatched young men to dig trenches for them; they cut down all the trees in our village for wood to support their trenches; they came into homes and slaughtered chickens and ducks and cooked them and ate them; they were very rude people.
When the Japanese were here, the prices of many things went up. The price for matches was one of them. Poor families could not afford to buy matches and so kept foot warmers in summer for the seed of fire. When they needed to start a fire to cook food, they stuck a rolled-up piece of paper into a foot warmer and waited for it to catch fire.
I spent my school-age years under Japanese control. Public security was poor; people had to take care of themselves. Some people owned firearms; robbers, bandits, and hoodlums were everywhere. Father worried that I would be hurt if I walked to school every day. The only school at the time was in Zhuqiao Town, which was about three li from home. Between Zhuqiao and our home were a deserted house that had nothing but tablets for the family’s ancestors, a thick bamboo grove, a temple, and a narrow road with crops growing tall and dense on both sides. These structures and the bamboo and crops provided hiding places for robbers, bandits, and hoodlums. So I never went to school.
Father taught me Chinese characters at home. He used square cards and grouped characters of the same radicals for me. For instance, with the radical of gold, there were the characters of silver, copper, iron, and tin. When I remembered these characters, he presented another group. In my teens, I knew about five hundred characters.
But I did not practice writing characters. I was busy braiding yellow straw, sewing, and embroidering when I was not working in the fields or in a factory. I always wanted to do something to help the family. Since I did not see how reading and writing would benefit the family, I did not go beyond recognizing characters. This is a big regret in my life. Today, when I see people reading newspapers and novels, I am envious. Now that I have so much free time in my retirement, I wish I could read and write.
Although the reason I did not go to a formal school was not my gender, other families treated girls and boys very differently. Girls were expected to learn needlework and spinning and weaving. They were also expected to help tend younger siblings and do other house chores. Not a single girl in Wangjialong went to school for a day in the 1940s, but all families, even those that were not well-to-do, tried to send sons to school. A few boys I grew up with went to school. None of them liked school and all of them quit after a couple of years.
In one of our neighboring villages, there was a widow who risked her life to send her son to school. During the Clearing the Villages Movement, the Japanese built a fence at Penglang Town, a town on the west side of Jiading County. West of Penglang Town was a rice-producing region. Before the fence was built, people from Jiading went there to buy rice. Once people could not cross the fence to buy rice, the price of rice in Jiading went up dramatically. So the widow, a brave and shrewd woman, used a boat to avoid the Japanese-guarded fence. She put on long white mourning clothes, placed a coffin in the boat, and wailed loudly and sadly when she approached the checkpoints, indicating to the Japanese that she was taking her dead husband to a burial site. The Japanese did not want to stop and check a coffin, but the coffin was full of rice. She made a lot of money this way and sent her son to school. Her son happened to be a smart boy and went all the way to college.
The different expectations of girls and boys were based on the conventional belief that only male children were legitimate heirs in a family. So most families tried to send their sons to school. If a son was smart, then, with education, he could bring fame and fortune to the family. On the other hand, a girl was to be married out, so investing limited family resources in her was just a waste from her parents’ point of view. Also, if the parents wanted their daughter to be happy and successful, then they would prepare her with womanly skills so that a good and well-to-do family would choose her as a daughter-in-law.
The Japanese employed local despots and hoodlums to run affairs for them. In Jiading, there were the Ji brothers. They were so famous as hoodlums that nobody dared to offend them. Before this time, the road between Jiading Town and Zhuqiao Town was a footpath, although it was known as Big Road. The Ji brothers demanded that the road be widened so that they could come to visit Zhuqiao in rickshaws. I remember one day a man beat a gong and marched along the road, shouting, “An eight-feet-wide official road will be built between Jiading Town and Zhuqiao Town. Two ditches will be dug to flank the official road.”
This was a big project and many local people participated in it. The bridge spanning the Zhangjing River (Zhangjing He) behind our house used to be made of two stone slabs. During the project, two more stone slabs were used to match the width of the new road. The widened road became known as Big Official Road (Daguanlu).
LIBERATION
In May of 1949, troops marched past Wangjialong. We later learned that these troops were the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). They were marching from the north to the south on the Big Official Road right outside our village. It was around midnight when the army started to pass our village. We did not dare to sleep, nor did we dare to go out. Families living right beside the road came and spent the night with us. We were all afraid of troops. From time to time, we would go to the bamboo grove in front of our compound to watch the marching men. During the night, we could vaguely see columns of troops and sometimes horses carrying things on their backs.
As the PLA troops marched, they announced through hand-held loudspeakers that they were the common people’s army and would not hurt anybody or take anything without payment. After daybreak, some young people ventured out to the road. They came back to report that the marching soldiers had shaken their hands and given them food to eat. After hearing this, those whose houses were along the road returned home. We went to Big Aunt’s house, which was in the front of our compound, and watched the marching troops through its east window. It was around eight or nine o’clock in the morning when the last of the troops marched past our village.
Right after the Communists arrived, my father still worked as head of our hamlet. He helped borrow things such as dry rice straw and wooden doors from various families to support the army. The troops either slept on wooden doors or on the ground cushioned with dry straw. They were on their way to take over Shanghai. They spoke a strange dialect and so only after some time did we begin to understand some of what they said.
Very soon after the Communists arrived, we experienced big changes. A new political structure was established in our area. The three hamlets in Wangjialong were organized as three groups. The old heads of hamlets were replaced by heads of groups (zuzhang). Replacing my father was a tailor, a poor man with little land, from our hamlet. Above the group was the administrative village (xingzhengcun).
Heading the Wangjialong Administrative Village was Chen Yuanxiang, a man from North Hamlet. Chen had a little education and ran a seasonal small business that collected harvested crops to sell for a profit. His family owned a few mu of land and also worked on rented land. He was among the first supporters of the new regime.
In the spring of 1950, the new head of the administrative village invited a few people from outside the village and had a feast in the house of a well-to-do family in Wangjialong. Chen and his followers cooked what was available in that house, drank the wine in the house, and ate to their hearts’ content. Chen was quickly disciplined and was replaced by Lu Weixin, Big Aunt’s husband, who had lost his job in Shanghai and returned to the village. Being poor and having little land, he actively supported the new system.
The Communists initiated a new organization, called the Peasant Association. The first chairman of the Peasant Association in Wangjialong was Chen Pingli, a poor man with a little education who was making a living as a tailor. My family, together with many other families, joined the Peasant Association.
The third element of the local political structure was the militia. The head of the militia in our village was a young man named Chen Xianxi. Chen was from a poor family, had a little education, worked as a carpenter, and showed enthusiasm for the changes. Young people, including me, volunteered to stand guard in a militia hut built along the Big Official Road.
Father was very cautious in accepting the changes. When the Communists first arrived, I went to a meeting for young people held at Yang Family Temple. I brought home an application form to join the Communist Youth League and showed it to Father. He tore it up right in front of me and said, “You can go to meetings, but do not join any political organization.” Father made another rule for me: I could go out and participate in activities during the day, but I should not go out in the evening. Because of this rule, I volunteered to be on duty in the militia hut only during the day.
The militia was necessary because some people did not accept the Communists and were resisting the changes. In Jiading County, the Ji brothers were die-hard anti-Communists. After the Japanese were defeated, one of the Ji brothers became a local gangster chief and the other an officer in an anti-Communist organization. After the Communists arrived in Jiading, the two brothers gathered local supporters and killed Communists and activists and raided grain warehouses. In the spring of 1950, we heard that they had appeared in Penglang Town and raided a grain warehouse. Penglang was west of us. Then we heard that they had killed a Communist official in Loutang Town, which was east of us. They also broke into the town office in Xuhang, which was southeast of Wangjialong, and stole a telephone.4
Related to the Ji brothers’ anti-Communist activities was a murder in Tang Family Village, my mother’s native village. A man named Hang Genquan from the village was a member of a gang associated with the Ji brothers. After raiding grain warehouses, Hang Genquan and his people stored looted grain in the compound occupied by several poor families, all of whom were surnamed Tang. Living in the compound was a child bride, who was about ten years old. The mother of the child bride was a widow who treated the child bride badly, including not giving her enough to eat. The child bride said to the adopted mother, “There is so much grain stored in our house, but you only allow me to eat leftover porridge.” After the child bride threatened to tell people about the grain stored in the house if she continued to be treated badly, the mother decided to get rid of her.
One night, as one neighbor woman stood on guard outside the compound, the adults brutally killed the girl and threw the dead body in the river behind the compound. The next morning, the dead body was discovered by a fishing boat. The mother joined the alarmed public, pretending to be in shock and asking why her child had committed suicide. But the dead body showed violent blows and cuts on the head, clearly indicating that it had not been suicide, but murder.
An investigation was carried out. Seven people were proven to be involved in the murder. The mother of the child bride was sentenced to death. One man was sentenced to jail for life. The woman who stood on guard was sentenced to three years of imprisonment. The others served jail terms between two and seven years.5
Hang Genquan was not involved in the murder, but he was arrested for his involvement with the Ji brothers’ activities. He was released from jail in the 1950s and died of tuberculosis soon after he was released. The Ji brothers were also arrested. There was a public trial in Jiading Town and both brothers were sentenced to death.6
Many Communist cadres in the new structure were from outside areas and spoke with an accent. One of them, a tall Shandong man, became acquainted with my female cousin Lianzhen, Big Aunt’s daughter. Lianzhen had been working in Jiafeng Textile Mill and she went to the night school run by the factory after Liberation and learned enough to read newspapers. She had been living in urban areas and learned to understand different dialects. Lianzhen married this tall Shandong man in the early 1950s, and they established their home in urban Jiading. One day, this man came to visit his in-laws. Villagers went to see the new son-in-law. It was summer and he was offered watermelon. To be polite, he said wobuyaochi, I do not want to eat. After that, villagers referred to him as wobuyaochi; many villagers never knew or remembered his real name, which is Qian Caiqing.
My father supported the new system in his own ways. After some watching, he volunteered as a teacher at the village night school. Only a few young men in the village had received some schooling before Liberation. The night school was free, and many young people, men and wome
n, attended. Father encouraged me to take advantage of the night school to review the Chinese characters he had taught me. I went to the night school diligently and enjoyed learning. When I attended the night school, I always went and returned home with my father.
Chen Jixi, another educated man in the village, was the former head of hamlet in Beicun. His family owned good rice land, a warping shop, and a store in Zhuqiao Town. Like my father, Chen Jixi volunteered as a night school teacher and sent his school-aged daughter, Yunqing, to a formal school inside the Yan Family Temple. From there, Yunqing would go to college and finally become a medical doctor.
Communists did not believe in superstition: Daoist chanting was considered superstitious. My father stopped performing as a Daoist priest, although others still continued the practice. Father worked on our land, taught at the night school, and served as the work-hour recorder and accountant in the mutual aid team7 formed in our hamlet in 1952.
The New Marriage Law of 1950 caused a lot of changes.8 The new law said that marriages should be based on free love between a man and a woman. It also said that arranged marriages were no longer lawful. A young lady from Bai Family Hamlet found her own love and declared that she was going to be married. Her parents protested but she insisted. When she married the man she had found for herself, her parents refused to recognize the union. It was only after many years, when her parents were already old, that they established relations again.
Quite a few married couples obtained divorces because they said that their marriages had been arranged and were loveless. One divorced couple was in our hamlet. I grew up with both the man and the woman, and we were very good friends. This woman was among the girlfriends who pulled me up from the river when I was about ten years old and had been kicked into the river by my little brother while I was soaking yellow straw behind our house.