by Chen Huiqin
We had no disposable diapers when the children were growing up. We cut worn-out bedsheets into small pieces and sewed several pieces together as diapers. Such a diaper had to be washed every time it was wet. When it rained three days in a row, our guest hall, or our corridor after the extension was built in 1962, would be full of washed diapers and we would be out of dry ones. Mother would use the foot warmer to dry the washed diapers piece by piece. When the sun came out after several days of sustained rain, we would get all the washed diapers out to dry in the sun. At the end of the day, Mother would happily say, “Now we have enough dry diapers to last another few rainy days.”
From time to time, my father would buy fruits and sweets. If it was an orange, he would ask the children to peel it and then divide it into several portions for everyone in the family to share. For an apple, he would peel it, cut it into pieces, and again ask the children to divide and share. They were also asked to divide sweets into equal portions for sharing. Every time, after dividing and handing a portion to every member in the family, Mother and Father would give their shares to the children as a reward for a well-done job.
Father prepared brand new money for the children at Chinese New Year. These were ten-cent bills. Each child got one yuan, or ten ten-cent bills. The ten bills were numerically connected. He was able to make them connected because he was an accountant and dealt with the bank. These bills were so new and pretty that the children would keep them as souvenirs, not as money. In summer, when a store clerk brought popsicles on a bike to sell in the village, we asked them to use the money to buy popsicles for themselves. But they would not use their bills because they were too pretty to surrender.
After the Movement to Learn from Dazhai started, we planted three crops each year, instead of the two traditional crops.4 The additional crop was the early rice, with seeds sowed in April, seedlings transplanted in early June, and ripened rice harvested in August. We started late rice seedlings in July and transplanted them right after the early rice was harvested. Late rice would be harvested in late October.
Every year, between April and late October, I was busy, just like everyone else, either working in the fields or on the warehouse grounds. At harvest times, so long as there was grain on the warehouse grounds, I could not take the lunch break everyone else took. My mother asked my children to deliver food to me, or sometimes the children came and stayed on the grounds so that I could run home and eat a quick meal.
Both Shezhen and Shezhu wore braids. In the morning, after they got up, they would bring a comb and come to the warehouse grounds so that I would do the braids for them. They did not want to have Grandmother do it because Grandmother was too old fashioned. I had too much to do at the warehouse and could barely find the time for them. I tried to persuade them to have their braids cut off, but they refused. I finally made the decision and cut their braids off. They were both upset. Shezhu accepted the situation better than Shezhen, who was so upset that she cried and screamed, stomping her feet on the ground.
In the summer when I got home from the fields, I had to wash all the clothes for the family. In those days, there were no mosquito-repelling measures. My legs would be covered with mosquito bites when I was done with the washing. I would ask my children to scratch for me. They would work so hard that the skin of my legs would be scratched white.
In slack farming seasons, I was still busy, working in the warping shop. When business was good, people would come before daybreak for service. Many customers returned year after year and so knew where I lived. They would come and knock on our bedroom window to let me know that they had arrived and were already waiting. I would get up and start right away. Mother sent the children to the warping shop to call me back to eat. When customers begged me to finish the job for them before I took a break, I usually told my children to tell Grandma that I would come home later.
My children lost patience a number of times while encountering persistent customers. One morning before dawn, a customer knocked at the window and Shezhen was awakened. She responded rudely, saying, “It is not even dawn. My mother has just gone to sleep. You are so unreasonable.” The customer responded, “Meimei, I am not asking your mother to get up. I am only letting her know that I have arrived.”
One day, Shezhen came to the shop to call me home for lunch. A customer begged me to finish the job before I took a lunch break. I agreed. Shezhen went into a rage. She grabbed one of the essential tools in the shop and threw it into the nearby rapeseed field. I took the break. The waiting customers went into the field and retrieved the tool.
Customers were even more afraid of Shebao. When he was little, he found a way to stop my work instantly. He would come, get inside the wheel, and sit there. The wheel had to have the right amount of weight as pressure as I combed and reeled the warp threads onto the weaving beam. When Shebao got into the wheel, he added extra weight so the wheel was no longer workable. I had to stop right there.
BEGINNING OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
In the latter part of 1966, there came another movement, the Cultural Revolution. Red Guards, made up of young, daring people, came into our houses and dismantled family altars and took away our ancestral tablets. They came into our bedroom and scraped off the various figurines carved onto the front wooden board of our beds. They also took down the balls of baby hair hanging from the bed frame. They said the figurines represented feudal ideas and that hanging balls of baby hair was an old custom. They said that anything that was feudal or old was bad and had to be destroyed.
Tablets and altars from every household were piled up on the production team’s threshing ground and a fire was set to burn them all. Shezhen went to see the burning and stepped onto a very rusty nail from an altar. The nail went deep into the sole of her foot. A barefoot doctor said that the nail could be hundreds of years old and the rust could cause tetanus. I asked somebody to take Shezhen on a bike to the commune medical center and there she received a tetanus shot. Red Guards knocked down bodhisattvas and gods and goddesses from Yang Family Temple and Yan Family Temple.
All schools were closed, so Shezhen started to learn farm work and earned about eight hundred work-points that year. Now that our family was bigger, with three children, and we took more grain from the production team, my work-points were barely enough to cover our expenses. If they were not covered, my father would pay the balance to the team accountant. At the end of 1967, the work-points Shezhen earned brought us out of the red and we received about eighty yuan of dividends. I used part of the money to buy Shezhen one jin of wool yarn and she knitted a sweater for herself.
Shezhen had learned to knit sweaters when she was very young. She not only helped me with the knitting work, she also helped neighbors knit. One of my cousins living in the West Compound had two boys and no girl, so Shezhen knitted a sweater for this family and my cousin bought Shezhen a pair of nylon socks. One of my distant cousins was a bachelor and his mother was old-fashioned and never learned to knit. Shezhen knitted for him and his mother spun cotton into yarn for us in return.
Shezhen learned to appreciate things early. In summer, the production team grew sweet melons and watermelons. They were allotted to families according to the number of people in each family. At the time of the allotment, the accountant would be there, recording the amount each family actually took. Since this was usually done on the warehouse grounds, I helped to load and weigh melons for each family. At the end of the allotment, there were usually some melons left. Families competed to get more and children begged their parents to get more. But Shezhen was the opposite. Sometimes I wanted to get some, but she would stop me from getting them, saying that they would put us in the red.
Schools opened again after about one year. Shezhen did not go back to the Central Elementary School. A school was established in North Hamlet for kids in the vicinity. Shezhen told me she did not like this school. Students from two different grades were combined in one room. The teacher would teach one grade at a time and then assign on
e grade some work to do. Then the teacher would teach the other grade in the same room. Local people who had less than a middle-school education were recruited to teach at such schools. They were known as peasant teachers (minban laoshi). They kept their peasant status and taught in local elementary schools. It was right at that time that Shezhu started school. She went to the school in North Hamlet with Shezhen every day.
Red Guards and rebels attacked cadres and school principals, calling them “authorities taking the capitalist road.” One day, my husband came home and said that he wanted to use our home to temporarily store important records and files from the commune. I was afraid and at first did not agree. My husband said it was an urgent decision made by the leaders in the commune and the archival materials would arrive at our house around midnight that same day. He added that rebels had completely taken over. If the archival materials were not taken away from the commune office, they would either be destroyed or used for the wrong purposes. He further said that it was his responsibility to protect the archival materials.
I accepted the reality. That night, we did not sleep. We turned our lights off as we waited, for we were afraid that someone might become suspicious of us if we had lights on after the usual bedtime. We waited in the dark. Around midnight, there was a knock on our window. Three men came with more than ten boxes of material on a boat. They moved the material up from the stone steps behind our house and stored it in the attic of our main living quarter. I shivered with fear and wondered what would happen to us if somebody saw this. I cooked some rice and some egg soup for them. They ate the food sitting on the footboards in front of our beds.
Later, the government issued a policy to specifically protect government records and files. The men rowed a boat to our house again one night and took the material back to the commune office in secret. Only then was I able to take a deep breath.
The rebels accused my husband of being one of the “authorities taking the capitalist road.” The rebels found out about the storing of archival material in our house and accused him of obstructing the Cultural Revolution and of distrusting revolutionary rebels. This was one of his “crimes.” Another crime was the names we gave to our children. They said that using the characters of “Precious, Pearl, and Treasure” in the names showed that my husband harbored bourgeois ideology. But they did not say anything about the fact that the other character in our children’s names was in praise of the cooperative. My father quickly changed the names to Shedong for Shebao, Shefang for Shezhu, and Shehong for Shezhen. The three characters behind she, which were dong fang hong, meant “The East Is Red,” the title of a popular song in praise of Chairman Mao.
My husband was later “united into” the Revolutionary Committee at the commune. He was considered a “reformable capitalist roader.”
We peasants now had to “ask for directions” in the morning when we started the working day, “evaluate our behavior” at noon, and “report our performance” at the end of the working day. We learned to dance the “loyalty dance” and were instructed to remember Chairman Mao’s quotations. Since most people of my generation or older were illiterate, the production team leader would call a meeting when a new quotation from Chairman Mao was issued. At the meeting, an educated person would read the newest quotation and ask us to repeat it and remember it. We pinned Chairman Mao’s badges onto our clothes every day. My father wrote one of Chairman Mao’s quotations onto the east-facing wall outside our main living quarter with red paint and a Chinese brush.
NOTES
1 This was the same policy that gave back family plots to peasants. See the previous chapter for more information about this policy.
2 “Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu muqian nongcun gongzuo zhong ruogan wenti de jueding (caoan)” [Draft resolution of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee on some problems in current rural work], May 20, 1963. In Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi, ed., Jianguo yilai zhongyao wenxian xuanbian [Selected important documents since the founding of the People’s Republic of China], vol. 16 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1997), 310–29.
3 Local defensive corps were organized in the 1940s by the government to stop the spread of Communist influence.
4 The movement began with a news report titled “Dazhai zhilu” [Dazhai road] and an editorial titled “Yong geming jingshen jianshe shanqu de haobangyang” [A good example in using revolutionary spirit to develop mountainous regions] in the official newspaper Renmin Ribao [People’s daily]. See Renmin Ribao, Feb. 10, 1964.
7
Years of Ordeal
THE Chinese New Year’s Day of 1968 was at the end of January. In preparation for the most important festival, we made six big rice cakes. Making rice cakes was a traditional family activity. It involved all family members and had a festive atmosphere. We chose a Sunday, a day off work for my father. The day before, I washed and prepared ninety jin of rice. On Sunday morning, my father took the washed rice to the brigade processing plant and had it ground into flour. I took the afternoon off from the warping shop and helped my father make rice cakes.
We mixed the rice flour with sugar water. When sugar water was poured into the flour, many balls were formed. We used our hands to break the balls. Shezhen, Shezhu, and Shebao all joined in breaking the balls. We had told the children not to talk about the balls, for if the cake fairy heard us talking about them, she would prevent the steam from penetrating the cake. I sifted the mixed flour into the cake steamer and my father placed the steamer onto the brick stove. My mother fed the stove with firewood. We watched the steam gradually penetrate the cake mix. The cake was done when steam had penetrated the entire surface. My father lifted the heavy steamer and poured the cake out onto the prepared rice straw.
When all six cakes were made, my mother roasted peanuts in the shell over the remaining embers in the stove. Embers provided the most balanced fire for roasting peanuts. We grew peanuts on our family plot, and roasted peanuts were our typical New Year’s treat. So that day, mother was behind the brick stove, feeding it for more than three hours.
By evening, when the cakes were cooled enough, Father cut off big pieces and gave one to each of our neighboring families to share. Sharing special foods with neighbors was a customary practice. When neighbors made special foods, they also shared some with us.
The next morning, I got up early and went to work in the warping shop. Father was in the guest hall cutting the cakes into pieces. Mother prepared some soybeans and asked Shezhen to exchange them for tofu at the brigade tofu shop. Shezhen took the soybeans and a cooking pot and brought the tofu back in the pot. When Shezhen got home, her grandma was in her bedroom using the chamber pot. Grandma called Shezhen in and told her to fetch Grandpa, because she was feeling dizzy. Shezhen went quickly to the guest hall and brought in Grandpa. Grandpa helped Grandma to bed and asked Shezhen to run and bring me home. Shezhen ran fast, and I got home immediately.
My mother was still conscious. She grabbed my hand and said, “My dear, I will now become a burden to you.” Then she became unconscious. White foam appeared around her mouth. Before I arrived, she had told my father that she felt numbness in one of her hands. My husband’s father had suffered from a hemorrhage of the brain more than ten years earlier and had to be helped with everything in life after that. My mother realized that she too had suffered a brain hemorrhage. At a time like this, she did not think of herself, but of me. I held her hands and said, “M’ma, don’t say such a thing. You will be all right.”
I went outside and called for help. This was the traditional day to send off the Kitchen God. The Cultural Revolution, however, had condemned this practice as “feudal superstition.” We no longer had a portrait of the Kitchen God on our brick stove, nor was there any place to buy candles or incense for the ritual. Besides, no sensible person wished to get into trouble by performing the ritual. But we were peasants and this was the least busy season of the year. The production team leader had not rung the bell to call people into the fields
that day. So when I cried out for help, my cousins and neighbors were all home and rushed to help immediately.
My cousin Hanming went quickly to the brigade office, the only place nearby that had a telephone. There he called Jiading People’s Hospital for emergency help. He also called the Lixin Brigade office, where my husband was stationed at the time, to ask them to let him know the emergency situation at home. An ambulance came quickly and took Mother to the hospital. My father and I went in the ambulance to the hospital. My husband arrived at the hospital later on bike.
Doctors at the hospital told us that Mother had a massive hemorrhage of the brain. She was put on oxygen and measures were taken to restore her. By noon, the doctors told us that Mother’s heart had stopped beating.
This was a thunderbolt out of blue skies. Darkness fell over me and I passed out. I could not imagine how I could live my life without my mother. Mother had been taking care of everything for me at home. I did not even know where rice was stored. I was able to earn work-points to cover the family expenses only because Mother took care of the children. At the time, my youngest, Shebao, was only seven years old and needed my mother’s care. Whenever I was not feeling well, menstruating, pregnant, or nursing, Mother took care of me. She would cook something, sometimes just a bowl of sugar water, and ask one of my children to take it into the fields for me. I worked hard outside, but when I returned home, I could relax in a loving atmosphere.
Mother lived a hard life. When I was little, she worked during the day as a hired hand and spun or wove into the night to help provide for the family. She suffered severe headaches, which finally made her eyesight poor. After I was born, her menstruation was always painful and heavy. Several times, she lost so much blood that she passed out. Her poor eyesight limited her mobility and slowed her movements. But she managed to do household chores for me. During the days of scarcity, she starved herself to save every little bit of food for me and for my children. She refused to accept any new clothes, insisting that whatever she had was enough. She would say, “I am not going anywhere and so do not need new clothes.”