Daughter of Good Fortune

by Chen Huiqin

  Mother and Father brought me what I needed early the following morning. At that time, my husband spent most of his days and nights in Waigang Town, the headquarters of the commune. He came home one day and found out that his second daughter had been born. He came to the maternity ward and the midwife showed him the new baby. The midwife referred to the new baby as a “thousand pieces of gold.” My husband took a look, smiled, and left again for his work.

  My father gave a name to the new baby and it was Shezhu. The first character, she, is the same as Shezhen’s and zhu means pearl, another way to say that the child is precious.

  During my stay at the maternity ward, eating in the dining room was free, but this lasted only a few days. While lying in bed, I heard loud and chaotic noises from the big dining room, which was inside the guest hall of a house right next to the maternity ward. I heard people breaking a bamboo fence outside the maternity ward to create a shortcut to the dining room.

  I stayed in the maternity ward for five days. Besides the ten jin of rice we obtained from the dining room, I received coupons for one jin of sugar and one jin of cooking oil. These were special coupons for women in maternity confinement. My father bought the sugar and oil and brought it to the ward. Every day, the new mothers ate rice and preserved vegetables (meigancai) cooked with the sugar and oil bought with the special coupons.

  When I returned home, the free dining experience ended. We still were not allowed to cook at home, but got our food from a kitchen inside our neighboring East Compound. People did not eat there but took the rationed portions according to the number of people in the household and ate the food at home.

  The cook in our village kitchen was a kind old man. Every day, he would call out through the rear window to my mother before official mealtime so that Mother could get the food while it was hot. Also, that way, Mother did not have to stand in a queue. Mother would take our own food containers and get the food through the rear window. The cook would say to Mother: “Linshe is in confinement and should not eat cold food.”

  The new baby was assigned a food ration of six jin of rice per month. When she was big enough, we used the pestle and mortar in the Fortune Gate Room of the East Compound and pounded the rice into powder to make a baby paste. Sugar was very difficult to find at the time and my husband and father tried their best to get it. Once, they brought home a box of cube sugar, which we had never seen before. I continued to breastfeed her, but the rice-powder paste, sweetened, was an important element in a healthy baby diet. We again had to cook the paste on the makeshift kerosene stove because we had no other cooking facility.

  Food rationing and the lack of fat in the diet led to hunger. Villagers planted sweet potatoes and beans in unaccounted-for pieces of land or along roads and footpaths and the kitchen cooked them. But only those who were engaged in field labor had access to the supplemental food. After twenty-six days of staying home following the birth, I decided to return to work in the fields. Mother was not happy because she thought it was too early for me to be engaged in field labor. But I insisted because I was hungry and wanted to have access to the supplemental food.

  Before Shezhu was born, Shezhen slept with me and her father in the same bed. After the birth of Shezhu, Shezhen slept with my mother. My father moved to sleep in the thatched house behind our main house. The thatched house was divided into two sections. The western section had been a pigsty; however, at that time, no individual families were allowed to raise pigs. The eastern section was used to store crop stalks for cooking fuel. We moved the crop stalks to the western section and cleared the eastern section and turned it into my father’s bedroom.

  The thatched house had bamboo-laced walls. We made mats of dry rice straw and hung them over the bamboo laces to shield the house from rain, snow, and wind. When father moved to sleep there, he cut a hole in the east-facing wall of the house and put a piece of plastic sheet over the hole. After he did that, he called me to see the plastic opening. He said, with a smile on his face, that he now had a window in his bedroom. Father loved me deeply. It had been his decision to keep me at home. He had to sleep in the pig-raising hut, yet he never complained or regretted.

  My mother’s health was poor. Every time she menstruated, she lost a lot of blood and was in pain. Around the time of Shezhu’s birth, my mother went through menopause. When Shezhu was several months old, mother became weak and had to lie in bed due to heavy bleeding. When mother was bedridden, I put Shezhu in a cradle. The cradle was placed right in front of my mother’s bed. A piece of brick was put under one of the legs of the cradle so that it would rock. A bamboo stick was attached to the side of the cradle that faced mother’s bed. When the baby cried, mother would use the stick to push and rock the cradle.

  One day, I returned home from the fields around three o’clock in the afternoon to find Shezhu crying in the cradle while my mother was sobbing in bed. Mother said she wanted to get up and hold the baby, but she was too dizzy to get up. I helped her get up to use the chamber pot. Blood came out in big chunks and would not stop. I was scared and went out to call for help. Neighbors came and suggested various folkways to stop the bleeding. My father went to Loutang Town and called for a doctor, who came on a bike. Father took the doctor’s prescription to a pharmacy in Zhuqiao Town and got the herbs. We immediately brewed the herbs. Mother took the liquid of the brewed herbal mixture and gradually the bleeding stopped.

  In the summer of 1959, before Shezhu reached her first birthday, she got chicken pox that spread quickly from her face to the rest of her head. I took her to Loutang Town to see a special doctor, who made an herbal paste for her and told me to put it on the affected area when I got home. On my way home, I had the urgent need to pee. But there was no bathroom on the road and my little baby could not stand on her own feet. The need became so bad that I had to find a way to relieve myself. I went into a corn field beside the road, put the cloth bag I was carrying down on the ground, and then put the baby on the bag. I relieved myself right there in the field.

  The herbal paste worked wonders. Each time I applied it, the chicken pox dried a little. I was worried that the festering chicken pox would leave scars or marks, but the medicine was so good that it not only cured the problem, it also produced fresh, smooth skin. When the bark-like crusts fell off, my little girl’s face was as smooth as a hardboiled egg with its shell off.

  When Shezhu had chicken pox, the kitchen in the East Compound had closed down and we had to go across the Zhangjing River (Zhangjing He) to North Hamlet to fetch food. Normally, I would fetch supper after I finished work in the fields, or my father would do so after he returned home from work. A few times, when I had to work in the fields late and father had to work in the evening, my mother sent Shezhen to fetch supper from the kitchen.

  Shezhen was about six years old. One late afternoon, Mother sent her on that errand. Father had tied a rope onto the two ears of the pot so that Shezhen could carry the pot in one hand. As it grew dark, Shezhen was probably looking elsewhere when she stumbled at the head of the bridge spanning the Zhangjing River and spilled most of the supper, which was rice porridge, onto the ground. When I got home from the field, Shezhen, Mother, and the little baby Shezhu were all crying. There was only a little porridge left in the pot. Mother and I told Shezhen it was not her fault and tried to persuade her to eat some of the porridge. She refused to eat any, saying that it was all her fault. Mother refused to eat it, because she reasoned that she stayed home all day and was not hungry. Finally, the four of us shared what was left in the pot. That was our supper for that day.

  The collective kitchens were again re-arranged sometime after Shezhen’s accident. For South Hamlet, the kitchen was now in one of the side rooms of the East Compound. I became one of the two cooks working in the kitchen. The other cook was Xingying. We found a way to increase the portion of the rationed food by adding turnips and carrots, which were grown mainly as animal feed and were not considered grain, so we were not required to sell them to the stat
e.

  We experimented a number of times and finally came up with a recipe to cook carrot rice or turnip rice. Every morning, Xingying and I would wash and chop eighty jin of carrots or turnips, used on alternate days. We greased the big wok with a little cooking oil and put the eighty jin of carrots/turnips into the wok, put in some salt, cooked and stirred them for a few minutes to get some water out of them, and then put in the rationed amount of rice on top of them. Our hamlet had around thirty households and about one hundred people at that time. For lunch, the amount of rice for the entire hamlet was around twenty jin. Without any additional water, the liquid from the carrots/turnips moistened and cooked the rice.

  In normal cooking, one jin of raw rice, with water added, produced two jin of cooked rice. With carrots or turnips, one jin of raw rice produced four jin of cooked rice. It doubled the amount of food for the hungry people. Everybody in the hamlet was happy. Cooks from other villages came and watched us cook and went home and copied our method.

  At this time, each month, families were given coupons to get food from the kitchen. It was up to each family to decide how much food it would take from the kitchen at each meal. Every evening, each family would tell the hamlet accountant how much food it would take from the kitchen the next day. The accountant would then write on a blackboard the names of the heads of households and how much food each household was to take at each meal the next day. At mealtimes, each family would send one person to fetch the food from the kitchen.

  I was able to recognize all the names and would use chalk to cross out the amount written on the board as food was served out to each household. Although Shezhen was not yet going to school, she had learned quite a few characters from her grandpa, my father. So I gave her the task of crossing out the amount on the board as each family took its food. She was so happy to help and took the task very seriously. She stood beside the board and crossed out each amount until all families had claimed their food.

  I was pregnant again in the latter part of 1960. Unlike today, women then did not talk about pregnancies. Only when a woman’s body became abnormally big would villagers find out that she was pregnant. After I realized that I was pregnant, I continued to go into the fields. It was the beginning of a cotton-picking season. One day, like everyone else, I fastened a bamboo basket to my waist and went into the fields. The cotton balls we picked that day were at the bottom of the cotton plant and did not get enough sunshine and were not expected to open up naturally. We collected them and put them out in the sun for drying. That way, the cotton inside them could be saved. If we did not collect such balls, they would rot away.

  A basket full of such cotton balls weighed about twenty jin. This weight hung at my waist, pressing against my body. When I returned home from the field that day, I told my mother that I felt pain in my lower body. Both my mother and I realized something was wrong. I had a miscarriage.

  RETURN TO NORMAL LIFE

  The huge communes lasted only a few months and were soon replaced by smaller communes. Wangjialong now belonged to Zhuqiao Commune, with its headquarters in Zhuqiao Town. My husband now worked as a cadre in Zhuqiao Commune. Below the commune was an administrative unit called a brigade and below the brigade was the production team. The name Liming was retained, so we now belonged to Liming Brigade, which contained eleven production teams. Wangjialong was divided into three production teams, with South Hamlet as Production Team One.

  In 1961, we had the family plots back.1 One spring day, my husband brought home four jin of little taro. I was very happy and planted them in our family plot and had a good harvest of taro that autumn.

  Individual families were also again encouraged to raise pigs. My father moved out of the thatched house and slept in our guest hall. My husband bought a piglet and we raised it in our thatched house. A pig had to be 100 jin in weight for it to be sellable to the government-run collection station in Zhuqiao Town. After several months of feeding the pig, I used the pull-trailer, which was collective property belonging to the production team, and took the pig to the station. But it weighed less than 100 jin and I had to take it back. It was very disappointing and I realized how inexperienced I was. Fortunately, that was the only time that I had to take back a pig from the collection station.

  We were now encouraged to raise pigs and given incentives to do so. When we sold a pig, we received special coupons, which could be used to buy candies, sugar, meat, and other foodstuff beyond the rationed amount. We also received industrial coupons, which were for things such as socks, towels, cotton cloth, and other clothing materials beyond the rationed amount, and toiletries such as soap. In those days, practically everything required coupons for purchase.

  Another incentive given to us for raising pigs was 0.2 mu of land for growing pig feed. This was in addition to the family plot allotted to us according to the number of people in the household. One year I grew Chinese cabbage on the 0.2 mu of land allotted to us because we raised a pig. I took good care of the cabbage and it yielded a very good harvest. At the time, male peasants regularly rowed boats to urban Shanghai to fetch urban kitchen waste, which was used as fertilizer on the collective land. Families could use the outbound empty boats to sell surplus produce in urban Shanghai.

  I loaded the cabbage onto the empty boat before I went to bed one night and went with four men to urban Shanghai in the wee hours the next day. I sold several hundred jin of cabbage in the city at a wholesale market, earning seven yuan. This was a lot of money, for my husband’s monthly salary was only forty-eight yuan. After I sold the cabbage, I thanked the men who rowed the boat by buying each of them a steamed bun (baozi) with meat fillings, which were half a yuan each.

  While in urban Shanghai, I went to a public bathroom near the wholesale market. In the public bathroom, a woman asked me if I had grain coupons to sell. The woman added, “You people in the countryside must be doing better because you can find various substitutes for food. But we city people cannot grow anything on cement.” This was right after the disastrous Great Leap Forward and there was still a severe shortage of food. I did have grain coupons with me. Both my husband and father received grain coupons as their food rations and I always carried some just as I carried some money. But I did not want to sell them. I was also afraid of being robbed and cheated in the city. In fact, I was scared and so replied that I did not have any and rushed out of the bathroom.

  Several other women also went with the boat and sold vegetables in Shanghai. After we returned home, one of the women proposed that we should celebrate the result of our hard labor by going to urban Jiading for a dinner together in a restaurant. We did go, but when we found out how expensive restaurant food was, we each ate a steamed bun instead as our way of celebration.

  The work-point reward system continued under the commune-brigade-team structure.2 We elected a production team leader, usually a skilled farmhand, who decided what to do each day and rang the bell to call every working adult into the fields. The bell was fixed high on a tall wooden pole in the center of the village so that every household could hear the ringing.

  On most days, there was division of labor. The team leader assigned various tasks. Some tasks, such as carrying wheat or rice on stalks to the threshing ground in harvest seasons or carrying bundled rice seedlings to the prepared rice fields in planting seasons, required more physical strength and were thus usually assigned to men in their prime. We women threshed wheat or rice, weeded rice paddies, picked cotton, and did the tasks that required less physical strength. Men and women joined together in cutting wheat or rice with sickles and transplanting rice seedlings. Older people were assigned even lighter tasks such as weeding cotton fields and separating chaff from grain on the threshing ground.

  Different people doing different jobs were rewarded differently. Physically strong men earned the most, women in their prime came second, and old people earned the least. For example, ten hours of work done by a strong man was worth twelve work-points and the same number of hours by a strong wo
man earned ten work-points, while the same hours by an old person or a teenager learning to farm was only worth eight work-points.

  Work-points were determined through a process called “self-appraisal and mutual assessment.” The team leader would choose a day or an evening to call a meeting of all working adults for the purpose of assigning work-points to the recorded work hours. Such a meeting usually took place at the end of a season, so we had to evaluate if we worked in the past season as a strong laborer or a not-so-strong laborer. People who were sick or were getting old and did not work with the strong men or women would self-appraise themselves as belonging to a less worthy category. After the self-appraisal, there was the mutual assessment. In most cases, there was no difference between the self-and mutual assessment. In very rare cases, somebody would say that a certain person had been avoiding demanding tasks and therefore half a point or a point should be deducted from the self-appraised category. This would result in tension, so people usually tried to avoid such a situation. Self-appraisals therefore were usually well-considered and appropriate.

  At the end of each calendar year, the team accountant would put up two posters, one to show how many work-points each person had earned, and the other to show how much money the production team had earned from selling grain, cotton, oil-bearing products, and cash products such as garlic, and from sideline production such as pigs raised collectively. We would keep 5 to 8 percent of the total income as collective funds. The remaining income would be divided by the total work-points to reveal its monetary value. Better collective income naturally resulted in a higher value for each work-point.