Daughter of Good Fortune: A Twentieth-Century Chinese Peasant Memoir

by Chen Huiqin

  After the first harvest, my husband went for another training course in Jiading Town. He came home and talked to my father about joining the Communist Party. Father supported him. Father said that the Party had been working for the poor and the downtrodden. With Father’s support, my husband joined the Communist Party.

  My husband worked quietly and diligently. He was a fast learner. Everyone in my family supported him and never held him back. He was away from home a lot and usually did not come home until late at night. We were worried about his personal safety walking at night and told him to be careful every time he left for evening meetings.

  In the latter part of that same year, my husband was promoted to head of township (xiangzhang). Before he accepted the position, he again asked my father’s opinion. The xiangzhang position would make him a bantuochan ganbu, one who worked half of his/her time as a cadre and the other half as a peasant, earning a twelve-yuan monthly salary for the non-peasant work. Although the pay was not much and the position was not attractive, my father still gave him a positive answer. Father said, “Let him be a representative for the poor.”

  FIRST CHILD

  Our first child was born in October 1952. It was a boy and the whole family was very happy. On the twelfth day after he was born, we made a lot of red eggs and gave them out to our relatives and neighbors. This was a customary practice. Red eggs were an appreciation of the maternity gifts relatives had presented as well as an announcement of the birth of a new baby to neighbors. Eggs were boiled first and then dyed red. When we boiled the eggs, many broke, which was considered a bad omen.

  The child was growing fast and was healthy. He also seemed very smart. When he was about eight months old, he started to say ma and die.3 One hot summer day, when I came home from the fields, the baby was hungry and my breasts were tight with milk. So I sat down and fed him immediately. The hot milk made him sick. He ran a fever. It was a busy farming season and I continued to go out and work in the fields while my mother was home taking care of the baby. When the baby’s fever became worse, we sent for a doctor. The doctor came and said that it was already too late. The fever had burnt him from the inside. He died soon afterward.

  The first night after I lost my child, I had to spend it away from my own home, according to a local belief. This was to secure the safe rearing of other babies I would have later on. I spent the night at my husband’s native home in North Hamlet. That was the only night I spent there before or since. After I got there in the evening, a Chen family in the hamlet brought their infant daughter to me and said that they wanted me to adopt her. They had had one daughter and they were trying to have a son, so they wanted to give away the second daughter.

  My husband’s family and my family all thought the adoption was a good idea. They said that having a child calling me “mom” would help sow a seed for me and it would be easier to raise my own later on. They even gave me examples of local women who had adopted other people’s babies and now had their own. I breastfed the baby and slept with the baby that night, but I refused to adopt her. When my family tried further to persuade me, I replied, “You go ahead and adopt it; I only want my own.”

  After I returned home, another family asked me to adopt their baby. This baby girl was born out of wedlock in Tang Family Village. The girl’s mother was an unmarried young woman, whose family did not want her to keep the baby, because in those days nobody would want to marry somebody who already had a child. The father’s family had to raise her, but they did not have any milk. In those days, there was no alternative food for infants. At the same time, the new government had a law protecting all babies, girl or boy, born out of wedlock or to a married couple. In this case, if the infant died, her father would have to be jailed for killing the baby. So the father’s family brought the girl to me and begged me to adopt the baby to save her as well as the father. I said I would not adopt the baby, but I agreed to breastfeed her and take care of her. When the infant first came to me, she was thin and sickly. She was with me for many months, until she was able to eat other food and no longer dependent on mother’s milk. She returned home and grew up with her paternal grandparents.

  Later, when the grandparents wanted me to recognize the girl as my goddaughter, I declined. I did not grow up with godparents and did not wish to have godchildren.

  NOTES

  1 Shilinbu literally means shilin fabric. Shilin comes from the English word “indanthrene,” the water-insoluble blue dye.

  2 “Guanyu nongye huzhu hezuo de jueyi (caoan)” [(Draft) Resolution concerning agricultural mutual aid cooperation], Dec. 15, 1951. 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. 2 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe), 510–22.

  3 In the local dialect, the pronunciation of mom is m’ma and that of dad is diedie.

  4

  Rushing into Collective Life

  THESE days, as long as you have money, you can get practically anything you want from a store. Right outside our residential compound, there is a supermarket. Both my husband and I are now retired and have a lot of free time. We go to the supermarket quite often. Many times when I am leisurely browsing aisle after aisle of food items, I am reminded of the life we lived in the 1950s. Life then was hard. I worked long hours and ate rationed and coarse food.

  In 1953, my husband, now head of Zhuqiao Township (xiangzhang), chose South Hamlet to experiment with organizing an initial-stage cooperative (chujishe),1 whose membership was again voluntary. Most families in the hamlet joined it because the mutual aid teams, which had immediately preceded the experimental cooperative, had yielded good harvest in the autumn of 1952. My father supported the experiment and acted as its accountant.

  When we joined the cooperative, we still kept our land titles, but the pieces of land each family owned were now merged together. The merging allowed easier irrigation and eliminated the ditches, footpaths, trees, and tree stumps that served as demarcations of each family’s land holdings.

  By the time of Liberation, land in our area had been chopped into very small pieces. This was due to buying and selling as well as to family divisions. For example, my family owned fifteen mu of land, divided into thirteen distinct pieces which were spread in all directions. The one mu of land at Big Stone Bridge was one of the earliest pieces of land my nuclear family bought. At that time, we were only able to afford one mu. Later we bought more land, including the piece located right in front of our compound. The smallest piece of land we owned at that time was one-twentieth of a mu and it was located on the west bank of the branch river right outside the West Compound. My nuclear family acquired this piece of land from our ancestors. Surrounding that little piece of land were strips owned by my uncle’s family and by my father’s uncle’s family.

  In the winter of 1953, we in the cooperative adopted the method of pulling the roots of harvested rice stalks from fields before we sowed other crops such as wheat. This helped to eliminate crop diseases that caused rotten roots in the next crop. The spring harvest of 1954 for us was a good one, with a per-mu yield that was 20 to 40 percent higher than the yield of land cultivated by individual families.

  The cooperative benefited families with working adults because work hours were rewarded with pay. A good harvest, like the one we had in the spring of 1954, made each work hour worth more. I remember that one woman who had three adult sons and lived in a nearby village said to me, “Meimei,2 we really envy you. I wonder when somebody will help us form a cooperative like the one you belong to.” Before the Land Reform, such families would have hired out labor to those families with lots of land and fewer working adults. Now no families hired extra labor, so that woman welcomed the cooperative as a way to utilize her family resources and earn more income.

  Our cooperative at first did not have a formal name. After it became a success and many more such cooperatives were organized in our neighboring villages, my f
ather came up with a name, Limin, meaning “benefit the people.” When the name was sent up to be registered, we were told that it had been used already by another cooperative in the same district. My father then changed the two Chinese characters, but did not change the sound. Limin now meant “dawn.”3 Father said it was still meaningful, for it indicated that the cooperative was the beginning of a good day.

  In 1953, a popular election for people’s representatives was held in Wangjialong.4 My father was among the elected who represented Wangjialong at Zhuqiao Township. From that group Father was again elected, and he went to Jiading Town, the county seat, for meetings.

  We had a lot of rain in the early summer of 1954. Weeds grew fast in our cotton field. We had to sit on small stools and pull up weeds carefully to avoid hurting young cotton plants. I was big with a baby inside me. A nice old man from our village told me that I should not sit on such a low stool any more because my sitting and bending over was rubbing off the baby’s hair. But I wanted to help. Also, we earned from the hours we worked in the field. I just would not give up any opportunity to earn more income.

  I am just that way. Now that I look back at it, I think I was silly. These days, people are so particular about what you should and should not do during a pregnancy. In those days, nobody talked about such things. I did worry what would happen if that nice old man were right. Furthermore, I even wondered if my sitting and bending over might hurt the baby’s development and make the baby dumb. That, however, did not stop me from going to work in the fields every day.

  In the last month before the baby was born, we were able to use hoes to weed in the cotton fields. I developed a problem known locally as jisuhun, chicken night blindness. After the sun went down, I could not see anything. Candlelight or oil lamps meant nothing to me. Mother had to take care of me after sunset. I learned to return home from the fields right before sunset so that I could walk home on my own and clean myself for bed. I would wait for everyone else in the family to return home from the fields. My mother would get me supper. After that I went to bed.

  I cried a lot. People told me that the problem was related to pregnancy, but I was worried. If the problem did not go away after the child was born, then what would become of me?

  My elder daughter, Shezhen, was born in the summer of 1954. On the day she was born, I woke up feeling heavy in my lower body. Mother said that I should not go to the fields and should rest at home. When they came back for breakfast, Mother asked me how I was feeling. I said it was the same. After breakfast, they went back to the fields again and I took up the crewel embroidery I had been working on. Very soon, I started to feel contractions. I used the chamber pot and my water broke. I immediately emptied the chamber pot and cleaned it at the stone steps behind our house. Then I thought to myself that the chamber pot was deep and might be stifling for the baby, making it mentally slow. So I prepared a wooden basin.

  After that, I went out to the front of our compound to see if anybody was around. Kaiyuan, Big Aunt’s second son, was playing there. He was a schoolboy and this was during his summer vacation. I told him to go to the field and call my parents back. He asked why and I told him, “Just say I want them back and they will know why.”

  Kaiyuan was a teenager and fast with his legs. My mother and grandmother rushed home. Father went straight to North Hamlet and brought back a midwife, Panjia Mama.5 When the midwife arrived, the baby was just about to emerge into the world. Panjia Mama said to me, to my parents, and to my grandmother, “You people take risks. You should have called a midwife much earlier.” The baby was born around nine o’clock in the morning.

  By that time, midwives had received modern midwifery training. Panjia Mama came with sterilized scissors to cut the baby’s umbilical cord. I delivered the baby while lying on my bed and Panjia Mama received the baby with her hands. The baby was not born into the chamber pot or the wooden basin that I had prepared.

  A couple of days after the baby was born, I was able to see the light after sunset. There was a skylight right above my bed. After supper when it had turned dark outside, I saw the skylight. I called Mother and told her that I could see the skylight. A big stone was lifted off me.

  My father came up with the name Shezhen for my daughter. She means cooperative, which Father supported and praised, and zhen means precious. Other families in the village consulted my father for their newborn babies’ names. Names he had given around that time were Shegao, “cooperative high,” Shefa, “cooperative prosperous,” and Shemin, “cooperative people.” Father was open-minded, sincerely supported the new system, and believed that it was good for everyone.

  When Shezhen was big enough, we pierced one of her earlobes and made her wear a gold earring. Wearing a little piece of gold was supposed to protect her from harm. After I had recuperated from childbirth, I went to work in the fields and Mother stayed home to take care of Shezhen.

  Long clothes such as the Chinese traditional dress were no longer in fashion. Long coats and jackets were not very convenient, either, when we had to work in the fields throughout the year. I turned my camel-hair long coat into a short jacket for daily wear. I turned the part I cut from the long coat into a little skirt to keep Shezhen warm during winter. In those days, little children wore split pants, which were open in the middle to make going to the bathroom easier. I also cut short my sheepskin coat and used the cut-off piece as a cushion for Shezhen to sleep or sit on during cold days.

  My father started to teach Shezhen characters when she was still little. Kids usually learned to walk first and then to speak, but Shezhen learned to speak earlier than she was able to walk on her own. Father thought Shezhen was smart. He made Chinese character cards himself and used them to teach her. Shezhen was a good learner and Father was so encouraged. I know he felt bad that I had grown up in difficult times and lost the opportunity for formal education. Now he wanted to do everything possible to give his granddaughter the opportunity.

  My husband (fig. 4.1) was often away from home. Once he went to Nanjing to study. When he left, Shezhen was about twelve months old. When he returned home after seven months, Shezhen was walking. When her father tried to hold her, she ran away to a corner in the kitchen-dining room. We told her that he was her father and asked her to call him father. But she stayed in the corner and replied, “No.” Then her father took out a toy he had bought for her. It was a wind-up jumping frog. He wound the frog up and put it on the kitchen floor. The frog jumped around. Shezhen got so excited that she went to catch the jumping frog. After that she called him diedie. That was the only toy we bought for Shezhen. In fact, it was the only store-bought toy she and her sister and brother, who arrived in this world later on, ever had.

  My parents helped me take care of Shezhen. Father took down one of the wood planks that made the partition between the two bedrooms. At night, Mother would get up and come over into my bedroom to check on me and the baby.

  UNIFIED PURCHASING AND MARKETING

  The government policy of unified purchasing and marketing (tonggou tongxiao) was bad for us.6 We had always lived a frugal life and saved for rainy days. The new policy said that in addition to the public grain (gongliang) we had been selling to the state, the state now wanted to buy planned grain (jihualiang) from us peasants. In addition to public grain and planned grain, the policy encouraged peasants to sell any surplus grain to the state rather than to privately owned stores or private collectors.

  My family grew four mu of rice in 1953 and so had quite a bit of rice in stock. After having fulfilled the quotas for the public and planned grain, we sold the rest of the rice to the state. In those days, selling grain to the state was a glorious event, accompanied by beating drums and striking gongs. If you did not do what the higher-ups encouraged you to do, you were a “backward element.” My father was always conscious of “face” and did not want to be regarded as backward. My husband was an activist and had already become a cadre. He wanted to lead by setting a good example.

  Afte
r selling all the rice, my family, just like all other families in the village, relied on rationed grain for livelihood. In my maternity confinement, I was supposed to get additional rice according to a local government policy, but any additional rice allocation had to be decided by the village cadres. Among them was Yang Ji’an, chairman of the Peasant Association at the time. Yang believed that our family, which was famous for its prosperity and frugality, must still have rice in stock and therefore should not be entitled to additional allocation.

  I had to eat pumpkin and coarse grains such as rye. This led to loose bowel movements that bothered me as a chronic illness for many years to come. Traditional Chinese medicine said that an illness that started in maternity confinement could be cured when one had another baby if great care was given. The only other opportunity for a cure was when one went through menopause. I had a problematic intestinal system until my menopausal years.

  My problem became very bad in late 1954. I had bowel movements more than twenty times a day. What came out was no longer stool; it was blood and pus-like stuff. I went to see a renowned Western medicine doctor, Dr. Ge Chenghui, in Jiading Town. Dr. Ge had gone to school in the United States and was running a private business in her hometown, Jiading, at the time. The Western medicine she prescribed for me stopped the problem, but only temporarily. Once I stopped taking the medicine, the problem came back again.

  I then consulted Wang Zhicheng, a traditional Chinese medicine doctor in Jiading Town. The same thing happened. While I was taking the herbal medicine he prescribed, I was fine. Once I stopped it, the problem returned. After several rounds, Doctor Wang said that his herbal medicine could not get to the root of the illness. He asked me to buy two jin of walnuts and two jin of dried longan and bring them to him. He would then mix walnuts and dried longan with herbal medicines. He believed that only that mixture would cure my illness. My father and husband asked everywhere for walnuts and dried longan. During those days of scarcity in everything, they failed to find them.