by Chen Huiqin
The scarcity of food-related materials was unbelievable. When Shezhen was five months old, I stayed in a hospital for twenty-five days to have hemorrhoids removed. The hospital was in Jiading Town. My father borrowed a boat and rowed me to the hospital. I had to take Shezhen with me, for she was still dependent on my breast milk for life. Grandmother came with us to take care of me as well as to help take care of the baby.
Next to the hospital, there was a store that sold freshly made noodles. The store was rationed to make and sell only a certain amount of noodles each day. Every night before going to sleep, Grandmother would go to the noodle store and use a brick or a piece of dry rotten wood to line up in front of the store. She would get up at dawn and go stand in the line. She had to do so because it was first come, first served until the daily amount was sold out. The store only sold one jin to each person who stood in line.
Grandmother brought back to the hospital one jin of noodles every day. She would make the fresh noodles into the shape of a traditional woman’s hairdo and dry them outside the window of my hospital room. When I was discharged from the hospital and returned home, we brought back more than ten jin of dried noodles.
My father again rowed a borrowed boat to the hospital to get us home. When we arrived at the stone steps behind our house, Mother was waiting there. She took the baby and kissed her many times. She said, “The baby has grown quite a bit.” Twenty-five days was a long time for Mother. She must have missed the baby very much.
In 1955, another policy, called “Three Fixes,” came out. The three fixes were fixed production output, fixed purchase, and fixed sales.7 The first two “fixes” affected us peasants. Fixed production output was based on the average per-mu yield of the 1954 harvests. Each family reported the amount of land as well as the quality of the land. Good rice land yielded more than poor, dry land. Each family’s report was verified. From this information, each family’s production output was determined. The second “fix” was really not “purchase” for us peasants, but “retention.” Each family was to retain a fixed amount of grain for the mouth (kouliang) according to the number of persons in the household. In addition to this grain, each family would also retain pig-feed grain and seeds for the next crop. The total of grain for the mouth, pig-feed grain, and seeds was the fixed amount each family could keep from harvests. We sold the rest of our harvest to the state.
The fixed amount of grain for the mouth was pretty generous. It was more than five hundred jin per person, I remember. And the amount was the same for adults as children. In our village at the time, one family did not have any small children and everyone in the family was a working adult. This family did not like the policy of regarding children and adults as the same. The mother of that family said that if anything that had a mouth, eyes, and nose was considered a person, could we put black beans onto a pumpkin as mouth, eyes, and nose and turn it into a person for grain? Very soon after that, the equal treatment ended. Replacing it was a scaled system in which active laborers, children, and older persons who were no longer engaged in field labor were assigned different amounts of grain.
At the same time the “Three Fixes” policy came out, grain coupons were introduced and allotted monthly to those who lived in urban areas and who were non-agricultural workers. My husband was a non-agricultural worker and received such coupons to buy grain-based food. After that, all store goods that contained grain had to be purchased with not only money but also grain coupons. My grandmother could no longer line up in front of a noodle-making store and buy noodles with money.
In the winter of 1955, we decided that it was time for me to stop breastfeeding Shezhen. It was our local traditional practice that the mother went to stay in a relative’s home for a couple of days in order to break the breastfeeding habit. I went to urban Shanghai for the first time and spent two nights at a relative’s home. Meifang, the wife of one of my cousins, went with me. While in urban Shanghai, we visited the Great World Amusement Center. We went into a photo studio and each of us had a photo taken just for fun. In the photo (fig. 4.2) I wore a traditional jacket that buttoned down the side instead of in the middle. When I came home on the third day, Shezhen was no longer interested in my breast milk. My mother had trained her to eat regular foods.
HIGH-STAGE COOPERATIVE (GAOJISHE)
In 1956 we joined a high-stage cooperative and the initial-stage cooperative disappeared. Dawn became the name of our new cooperative.
As members of Dawn High-Stage Cooperative, we gave up our titles to the land and our income became solely dependent on the work we did in the fields. When the high-stage cooperative was first established, landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, and bad elements were not allowed to join. It was an honor to be a member of the cooperative. We knew that we had to give up the land we had worked so hard to earn because it was the right thing to do. In Wangjialong, no eligible family refused to join Dawn Cooperative.
Our land became collective property and our income was determined solely by the work-points we earned in working on the collective land. In my family, I was the only work-point earner. Father was now an accountant in a local soy-sauce factory; as a non-agricultural worker he received a monthly salary and grain coupons. Mother stayed home to take care of Shezhen. My work-points had to pay for the grain and fuel we took from the cooperative. I worked hard throughout the year, never missing any opportunity to earn work-points. At the end of the year, if the work-points I had earned were not enough to cover the cost of the grain and fuel we took from the cooperative, my father, who managed the family finances, paid the difference to the cooperative. If my work-points exceeded the cost, we received a small dividend. My husband gave half of his salary to my father and used the other half to pay for the daily meals he ate at the town headquarters or at meetings. He was also a smoker and had to buy his own cigarettes.
My husband was seldom home. Even when he was not out of town attending training courses or meetings, he was often attending meetings at the town office in the evenings. These meetings would end late in the night and he would just sleep in his office. I prepared bedding for him, including a pillowcase onto which I embroidered a huge red peony with two green leaves, two swallows on the upper left corner, and three Chinese characters, Chen Huiqin, on the upper right corner. I embroidered the pillowcase when I was pregnant with Shezhen.
Families that had adult sons and daughters benefited from the work-point system. The family that had earlier complained about the equal amount of grain for children and adults had five adult persons and all of them were earning work-points. This family, which had been one of the poorest in Wangjialong before Liberation, was now the highest work-point-earning family in the village.
Each family was allotted a small plot of land (ziliudi), whose size was determined by the number of people in the household. Non-agricultural people, such as my husband and my father, were not entitled to such land. I grew things such as bok choy, beans, and sweet potatoes on our family plot. I tended the plot in the early morning before the cooperative work started, during my lunch breaks, and in the evening after the work-point-earning day was over.
In the evenings and on rainy days when we could not work in the fields, I made shoes for the entire family. For shoe making, we saved all the worn-out clothes and bedsheets. I would cut them into pieces and stack the pieces together to about half an inch thick to make soles. Covering the stack of old cloth would be new cloth. The soles had to be tightly stitched line by line and stitch by stitch. It took a whole day, including the evening, to stitch one pair of soles. For shoe tops, I used either homemade cloth or store-bought cloth, cut out the shoe top according to a pattern, and stitched it to the sole. For winter shoes, I padded the top and the sole with cotton before they were sewed together.
I also knitted sweaters. When we didn’t need sweaters, I would undo them, have the yarn washed, and knit it together again. I made aprons for Shezhen and embroidered them with flowers and birds. I wrapped the collars and sleeves
of Shezhen’s cotton-padded clothes with protective covers, which could be taken off and washed very often, because cotton-padded clothes were not easily washable. I also embroidered head coverings that I wore to shield me from the sun while I worked in the fields.
Our grain now included various kinds of grain. Each grain we grew, such as rice and rye, was proportional to the total, so we had no choice what to plant. When we owned our own land, we could decide when to plant rice and how much to grow so that we always had rice to eat. Now, just like every other family in the village, we had a limited amount of rice and had to cook rice mixed with flattened rye. When Mother cooked, she would bring the rice to a boil and then gently add flattened rye at one side in the wok. That way, when the rice and rye finished cooking, one half of the mixture was whiter, with more rice than the other half. Shezhen’s lunch would come from the whiter part while my mother would get her lunch from the darker part.
We made our own condiments. During the rainy and damp season in the spring (huangmei), we made wheat flour dough with green broad beans, shaped the dough into cubes, and steamed them. The cooked cubes were placed in bamboo baskets lined with dry crop straw and covered with wet cloth for fermentation. When the hot summer days arrived, we washed the cubes clean and soaked them in boiled, then cooled, water with salt and ginger. We then put the mixture into a shallow earthen container (fig. 4.3), which rested on a wooden structure outdoors in the sun. The sun would turn the mixture into a salty and tasty paste, into which we put fresh tender cucumbers and squash picked from our family plot. In a few days, we would have fresh pickles (jianggua) to accompany our porridge for breakfast and supper.
The homemade paste produced more pickles than we could eat during the summer. We sun-dried what we could not eat and pressed them into earthen jars or glass bottles. So pickles were available most of the year as a condiment.
Another vegetable we pickled was turnip that we grew in our family plot and harvested in late fall. We cleaned them, cut them into thick slices, put salt on them, and then lay them out on a reed mat to dry. When they were damp dry, we mixed some sugar in and pressed them into earthen jars or glass bottles. Preserved turnips would serve as our year-round condiment at breakfast and supper.
We also made fermented soybeans. Soybeans were cooked until they were soft and tender and then put in bamboo baskets lined with damp rice straw. The soybeans would go through a fermentation process, which turned them totally black. After washing off the mold and drying them in the sun, we prepared a sauce with soy sauce, cooking wine, sugar, and ginger. We soaked the dried beans in the sauce for a week or so, then we had another condiment.
In 1956, I gave birth to a baby boy who lived only one day. This is what happened. There was a local tradition that a newly born baby should get its first milk from a woman who was not the mother. But my family did not follow that tradition when Shezhen was born, nor when my first child was born. This time, one of my cousin’s wives was breastfeeding her own son and so she was asked to give my baby boy his first milk. It was a hot summer day and my cousin’s wife had been working in the fields. She had returned home to have lunch when she came to feed my baby.
Her breasts were swollen with milk. Right after the breastfeeding, my baby was sick, throwing up the milk. Milk came from his mouth and his nose. A doctor was called for immediately. We were told that milk had gone into the baby’s lung. The doctor said that he could not save the baby. So I lost another child. That was the only time we called someone to breastfeed my babies.
From early on, Shezhen was quite a determined child. I remember one time she acted very willfully. She was about three years old. That day, I decided to run some errands in urban Jiading. After breakfast, I changed into some clean, presentable clothes. Shezhen sensed something was up and asked me. I told her that I was going to Jiading Town. She said she wanted to go with me. I told her that it was too far for her to walk, that she was to stay with Grandma, and that I would be home soon. She did not listen to me and started to cry, saying that she wanted to go with me. My mother told me to go and said that Shezhen would calm down soon.
I left. Shezhen struggled away from Grandma’s embrace and ran after me. I quickened my steps, hoping that she would give up. But she ran on her little legs, crying and screaming. Since my mother had bad eyesight, she could not keep up with Shezhen, who kept running on the front road and turned onto the Big Official Road and showed no sign of giving up. I finally turned back, picked her up, and brought her home. I cried, my mother cried, and Shezhen continued crying. I canceled my trip to urban Jiading that day. Shezhen was willful, but I knew I was willful, too.
COLLECTIVE LIFE
In the middle of the 1950s, the “big belly” disease was recognized as the result of a blood-sucking parasite called schistosoma. The government used various ways to cure patients and to eliminate the parasite. Testing stations were established, including one in North Hamlet, inside a confiscated house. We were all required to give stool samples for tests and the station provided us with wax papers to collect samples. Local young people with some education were trained as lab workers for the stations.
Schistosoma lived in tiny snails that inhabited rivers and ponds, so an effort was made to get rid of these snails. Each cooperative contributed young people to work in snail-eliminating teams. They rowed small boats along the banks of rivers and ponds, looking for tiny snails. My cousin Zhongming was thirteen years old in 1957 and worked in a snail-eliminating team during his summer vacation.
Those who tested positive were given free treatment to get rid of the parasite inside their bodies. My mother tested positive and was given the treatment. The medicine was taken orally and daily and was either delivered to the house or the person could go to a local station and take the medicine there. I remember they delivered the medicine to my mother because her poor eyesight made it difficult for her to walk to the station in North Hamlet.
Another way to eliminate the cause of the disease was to stop human feces from going directly onto the land and into the water. The blood-sucking parasite reproduced inside the human body and its eggs came out through human feces. Since we used night soil as a natural fertilizer, the eggs would get into water through land, find housing in tiny snails, and develop into blood-sucking flukes. They would then get into human bodies as people worked in rice paddies, fished, washed, or swam in rivers and ponds.
The cooperative built a night soil collection station. It had a concrete pit to store night soil. This was covered with a lid, and a chemical was put into it to kill the eggs and to make it ferment. After the treatment and fermentation, the night soil was used as fertilizer free of parasite eggs.
Every morning, families put out their chamber pots and able-bodied women took turns collecting all the chamber pots in the village, emptying them, and cleaning them. The pots were no longer cleaned in rivers or ponds; they were cleaned in concrete water tanks that drained into the concrete pit.
These measures were very effective. At first, many people in our village tested positive for schistosomiasis, and all of them were treated. Into the 1960s, there were fewer and fewer people whose test came out positive. In the mid-1970s, it was announced that the disease had been eliminated in our area. After that, we continued to have our chamber pots emptied and cleaned collectively. But the stool testing stations closed down.
Collective life brought about other changes. After I had my first child, I stopped going to the night school. Many people who were about ten years younger than I was went to formal schools. Young people from our village went to a school inside the Yan Family Temple, which had grades from one to four; after that, they went to the school in Zhuqiao Town. The new government encouraged all school-age children to attend school. If children did not attend school, somebody from the government would come and ask why the children were not in school.
My cousins, Kaiyuan, Huijun, and Zhongming, all went to school. They were all good students. Kaiyuan went all the way up to college, became an e
ngineer, and worked in Beijing. Huijun had enough education to be an accountant. Zhongming was good at making things with his hands. He made bamboo baskets and straw sandals when he was very young. He made a Chinese violin (huqin) with bamboo sticks and snake skin. He was enrolled in a school in Shanghai, where he learned to play the Chinese violin, and made a living by playing the violin in urban Shanghai all his professional life.
In the 1950s, local performing troupes were organized and they delivered performances to local communities; men and women went out to see performances in the evenings. People felt safe going out at night because criminal elements were under control. People who were ten or so years younger than I, especially single or childless people, enjoyed these times.
The local performing troupes were made up of amateurs, who rehearsed and performed in their spare time. A number of young men and women from Wangjialong belonged to a performing troupe and put on several plays. One of the plays told the story of He Wenxiu, a kind and honest young man who had a beautiful wife. A despot wanted his wife and so had He Wenxiu put into jail. With help from kind people and with his own effort, He Wenxiu became an official and finally brought the despot to justice. Huijun, my female cousin, played the role of Yang Mama, a courageous and kind woman, in the opera. After that, she was known to people as Yang Mama.
In the old days, people tilled their own land and never left their villages. A matchmaker was necessary to introduce a boy or a girl for possible matrimony. Now, the performing troupes got young people from otherwise disconnected villages together. With the protection of the new marriage law, some of the performers from Wangjialong found their spouses within the troupe. Aibao, who played a flower-selling girl in the story of He Wenxiu, fell in love with Sun Zhongxian, who acted as the main character in the play and was from another village. They got married in 1957. In the same year, Xiaomei, another young woman from our village, married a man from another village. Both Xiaomei and her husband played characters in the play.