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

by Chen Huiqin

  Each team had its own warehouse. I became the warehouse keeper in Production Team One. I took care of harvested crops of grain and cotton. On sunny days, early in the morning, I would get a few hands to help get the grain outside onto the cement ground and the cotton onto the reed mats for drying. After sunset, I would have people help me get the grain and cotton back into the warehouse. We did this until the moisture in the harvested crops dropped to the level stipulated by the state collection stations. We used boats to deliver them to the grain warehouse and cotton collection station in Zhuqiao Town. The payment we received was our collective income.

  The grain we ate every day came from our own harvested crops. Each family also got an amount of crop stalks determined by the size of the family as cooking fuel. Each person was allotted one and a half jin of ginned cotton and we made cloth out of the cotton for our everyday wear.

  The warping shop Big Aunt and I ran was closed in the early 1950s. When sideline production was allowed again, one man in our hamlet proposed that Big Aunt and I open a warping business to make money for the team. The team leaders consulted with us and we agreed to do it. The team paid a family to use its guest hall as our warping shop. The family house was right beside the Big Official Road so it was easy for customers to find us.

  We charged a fee for the warping service, which we handed over to the production team, and gained work-points. In winter, when there was not much to be done in fields, the warping business was good. We worked fifteen or sixteen hours a day and earned between seven and eight yuan each day. For every two yuan we handed to the production team, we earned ten work-points. Eight yuan would be worth forty work-points, twenty for Big Aunt and twenty for me. The average monetary value of each work-point, determined by the total annual income of our team, was less than ten cents. Thus, Big Aunt and I received back less than half of the eight yuan per day we gave to the team. The rest of the warping shop service fee became collective income and was shared by everyone in the team.

  After we started to run the shop, I worked day and night throughout the year. I worked together with everyone in the fields or on the warehouse grounds in the busy farming seasons. I worked in the warping shop in slack farming seasons when other people stayed home and relaxed.

  It was around this time that Shezhen reached school age. She loved the idea of going to school. In the summer of 1961, her father took her to Zhuqiao Central Elementary School to register for school. In those days, children went to school when they were eight years old if they were born in the early part of the year or nine years old if they were born in the latter half of the year. While at the registration, when the teacher found out that Shezhen was eight years old, she asked if Shezhen was born in the early half of the year. Her father answered “yes,” but Shezhen quickly corrected her father by saying that she had been born in July. The teacher smiled and said that Shezhen was too young for school and would have to wait until the next year. Shezhen was so disappointed that she cried.

  MODERNIZATION

  In the fall of 1959, construction of an electrical pump station, located at the west end of South Hamlet, began.3 A woman from North Hamlet cooked lunches for the construction workers and technicians and used our village kitchen for the cooking. When the pump station was completed, it was powered by the electricity transformation station established in Zhuqiao in 1958.4 Just as we went to help dig an irrigation canal in Malu in 1958, people from other villages came and helped us dig our first irrigation canal. The canal and electrical pump delivered water to our rice fields and the traditional waterwheel was now useless.

  The two technicians working at the pump station married two young women from Wangjialong. One of these girls was Meiying, who had received medical training and was working as a midwife. Meiying’s house was at the west end of South Hamlet, next to the irrigation station. Meiying had gotten to know the two technicians and fallen in love with one of them.

  The other technician, surnamed Chen, married Hongying from our village a couple of years later. Chen was from a very poor family. When he wanted to marry Hongying, Hongying’s father refused him because the Chen family was too poor. Chen did not give up easily. Adult villagers who knew Chen talked to Hongying’s father, pointing out that Chen was a capable and caring young man whose love for Hongying was serious and committed. Chen’s persistence finally won. Hongying’s father agreed to the marriage.

  In the early 1960s, tractors came to plow land for us. We would take our crops away from the land before we went to sleep. Throughout the night, we would hear the pong-pong-pong as we slept. When we got up the next morning, our harvested land was all turned over.

  The tractor drivers were young men and women selected from among peasants. From Wangjialong, Taiying, a young woman about twenty years old with education, was selected to be a tractor driver. That both young men and young women were trained as tractor drivers provided another dating opportunity. Taiying’s husband was a fellow tractor driver. She not only found her own husband that way, she introduced another male tractor driver to my female cousin Huijun. Both Taiying and Huijun married their chosen men in the early 1960s.

  I do not remember that any of these young people were married with any formal wedding ceremony. There was still a food shortage so putting on a wedding banquet was difficult. These young people just obtained marriage certificates at the commune headquarters and moved in together as husband and wife. After my cousin Huijun was married and moved in with her husband, her parents did not know how to get to her home. When Huijun gave birth to her first child, we relatives went to present her with maternity gifts. All of us, including her parents, had to ask for directions several times along the way.

  During the Great Leap Forward, Wangjialong hosted three “sent-down” cadres (xiafang ganbu),5 young salaried workers from urban Shanghai. At the time, the difference between the rural and urban areas was huge. Urban workers and government employees received secured salaries and lived with modern conveniences such as electricity, while people in the countryside were totally exposed to natural elements and made a living with back-breaking labor. We rural people thus envied urban people.

  Consequently, three mothers in Wangjialong found many opportunities to invite the three bachelors to their houses for meals and showed motherly care to these young men who were away from home. Gradually, the daughters got to know the sent-down cadres from Shanghai, and eventually they became three married couples. Instead of the traditional practice of moving to the husband’s house, these three married couples established their homes and raised their children in Wangjialong. But unlike matrilocal marriages, in which children took the mother’s surname, the children from these three families all took their fathers’ surnames.

  Tradition was also broken in burial matters. During the Great Leap Forward, even our family plots were taken away from us. For Liming Brigade, there was a piece of land, next to the Big Stone Bridge, reserved as a collective burial ground. My maternal grandmother, who died in this period, was buried in that collective burial ground.

  Also in this period, the Big Official Road between Jiading Town and Zhuqiao Town was widened and paved with coal cinder. The bridge over the Zhangjing River was rebuilt and widened to match the new road. People from other villages came to help us with the project. Some of them slept in our guest hall. The new road, known as Coal-cinder Road, made it possible for people to ride bicycles to Jiading or Zhuqiao regardless of weather conditions. I never learned to ride a bike, but it was much easier to walk on the coal-cinder surface during or after a rainfall.

  Modern roads and modern facilities saved lives. In the early 1960s, my uncle’s second son, who was a teenager at the time, complained about bellyaches. When the traditional ways did not stop the pain, he was rushed to Jiading People’s Hospital in an ambulance. He had appendicitis and underwent immediate surgery. The surgeon said that the appendix was about to rupture and the surrounding area had been infected. The surgeon not only cut out the appendix, he also cut off th
e infected area and put in about two inches of goat intestine as a repair.

  We also had mechanical threshing machines. In the past, we had threshed wheat and rice on threshing beds made of wooden frames with bamboo sticks as ribs. We used our muscles and beat wheat or rice stalks against the ribbed beds to loosen grain from stalks. Now we had threshing machines powered by foot pedals. The threshing machines were far more efficient than the threshing beds.

  There was a famous ditty describing modern life at the time: Pong-pong-pong (motorized boats) in rivers, chimneys (tractors) in fields, downstairs and upstairs (modern buildings), and electrical lighting and telephone (in the home). The ditty summarized the aspirations of us peasants.

  Life had been hard, but it seemed to be turning for the better.

  NOTES

  1 On November 3, 1960, the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee issued “Guanyu nongcun renmin gongshe dangqian zhengce wenti de jingji zhishi” [Urgent directive on problems in current policies concerning rural people’s communes]. The directive said that family plots should be given back to peasants. The document can be found 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. 13 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1996), 660–76.

  2 “Nongcun renmin gongshe gongzuo tiaoli xiuzheng caoan” [Revised draft of regulations on the work of rural people’s communes], Sept. 27, 1962. 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. 15 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1997), 615–47.

  3 Sixty-six electrical pump stations were built in the county between 1959 and 1960. Jiading Xianzhi [Annals of Jiading County] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1992), 227.

  4 Jiading Jianshezhi [Jiading construction annals] (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexue chubanshe, 2002), 622.

  5 “Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu xiafang ganbu jingxing laodong duanlian de zhishi” [Directive of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party concerning sending down cadres to do physical labor], Feb. 28, 1958. 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. 11 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1996), 193–200.

  6

  “No Time for Meals All Year Round”

  WAR and revolution prevented us from building new houses. The new house my father wanted to build for me never materialized. The land on which the homesite was prepared became collective land when we joined the high-stage cooperative. By 1962, my family had outgrown our living space in the West Compound and my father had been sleeping in the guest hall. In the spring of 1962 when I became pregnant again, Shezhen and Shezhu (fig. 6.1) crowded my mother’s bed every night. To prepare for the arrival of my third child, Father decided to build an extension to our existing living quarter.

  The extension would be built on the land right outside our east-facing door. The land used to be our neighbor’s ox pen before Liberation. During the Land Reform, that piece of land was taken away from our neighbor and became collective land. Surrounded by houses and a bamboo grove, the land was not cultivable or used for any other purpose.

  In front of our West Compound there was a bamboo grove and we owned a piece of it. The piece was a little bigger than the piece of land outside our living quarter. My father applied to Liming Brigade to exchange our piece of the bamboo grove for the piece outside our own living quarter to build an extension. The brigade authorities came and carried out an on-the-spot investigation. They approved the application and told my father that the exchange was not necessary, since the land outside our house was practically wasteland.

  Father, however, insisted that it be an exchange. Just as he did not allow me to buy any confiscated furniture during the Land Reform, he would not take the land without an exchange. So we gave up the bamboo grove and prepared the wasteland for house building.

  House-building materials were very difficult to obtain at that time. We obtained building materials in an interesting way. Four years earlier, in 1958, during the “communist wind” period, a two-room brick-and-tile house belonging to my husband’s native family was torn down and the building materials were taken to be used in building a collective pig farm. My husband’s family received some token money for the building materials. In 1960, a new policy came out,1 saying that private property taken away during the “communist wind” period should be returned. We redeemed the building materials from the brigade with some payment and used them to build the extension.

  The extension was built in a traditional way. The walls were built with bricks. Five wooden beams were horizontally placed, that is, in the east-west direction. Rafters were nailed onto the five beams. Ceiling tiles were whitewashed first and then put over the rafters. Roof tiles were then put on top of the ceiling tiles.

  Shezhen was nine years old at the time and wanted to help when we built the house. We gave her a small stack of ceiling tiles and showed her how to brush white liquid onto the tiles. She sat on a little stool and worked enthusiastically at it.

  The extension stretched out directly from our main living quarter. The width and depth of the new house were determined by the sizes of the used beams and rafters. We divided the extension into a closed-in room and an open corridor. My father said that our neighbors had been using the stone steps to access the water behind our house and that our extension should not block their way to the steps. The corridor was thus our neighbors’ passageway to the stone steps.

  We hired a local carpenter and a couple of brickmasons. Neighbors and relatives helped in building the house. We offered simple food to the carpenter, the brickmasons, and those who helped. The house was built quietly with no traditional or celebratory ceremonies such as holding a banquet on the day we raised the roof beam.

  After the extension was built, my family used the corridor to air our laundry in rainy weather. Before the extension was built, we had to air our laundry in our guest hall. The corridor provided more moving air and so our laundry dried more quickly. That was an improvement in our life. The closed-in room was divided into two sections with a wood partition. One section was for a bed and a desk and the other section was to store our annual allotment of grain. My parents moved to sleep in the extension. The wood partition in the bedroom inside our main quarters was removed and the two beds were now in one room. Shezhen and Shezhu slept in one bed, and my husband and I slept in the other bed.

  CHILDREN AND FAMILY PLANNING

  During my pregnancy in 1962, I went to see a movie that featured Monkey King and White Bone Demon. The movie was in the evening and I went with several women in the village. When I realized what the movie was about, I regretted having gone to it, yet I did not dare to go home alone in the darkness. I closed my eyes most of the time, trying not to look at the screen.

  I regretted going to the movie because I had heard a story from my uncle’s wife about somebody who gave birth to a baby without ears. This was in the 1940s when she worked in a shoe factory in urban Shanghai. A woman from her native village was working with her at the same factory. They went to see a play about the road to hell, where people had their ears, hands, and feet cut off. It was believed that her seeing the play caused the baby to be born without ears.

  I did not completely believe in such a thing, but I was a little worried throughout my pregnancy. I feared that my baby could be born missing something now that I had gone to a movie with monkey-like human beings and scary demons.

  I again worked until the day the baby was born. It was in September and the weather was still warm. This time, my husband happened to be home. Panjia Mama was called in when I gave birth. Right after the baby came out, I asked the midwife to check and see if the baby was missing any parts. She replied that not only was the baby not missing any part, it had an extra on
e, which was the penis. She said to my husband, “This time you are lucky.” She told us that the previous night, a family in North Hamlet had given birth to a baby girl. The family already had two daughters and wanted a boy, so they were disappointed. The baby girl was later adopted by another family. Two years later, the couple had another baby and it was a boy. Many families preferred boys to girls. I agreed with my father that both girls and boys were precious.

  My father named the baby boy Shebao. The first character was the same as the first character in Shezhen and Shezhu’s names. Bao means “treasure.” The three children were now named “Precious,” “Pearl,” and “Treasure.”

  After Shebao was born, we were encouraged to take contraceptive measures and the most common one was for the woman to wear an intrauterine device. That was what I did. Soon after that, my husband had a vasectomy. He was one of the first men in the village to do so. Because he was a member of the Communist Party and worked as a cadre in the commune, he needed to take the lead in such a matter. Gradually, more and more men of my generation in Wangjialong had vasectomies.

  My family did not celebrate the birth of Shezhen, Shezhu, or Shebao in any way. They were all born in times of food rationing. Father loved all my children dearly, but he did not like the idea of holding a banquet and asking relatives to bring their own food. He preferred to do things within his means.

  Some families, however, held celebratory ceremonies. West River Aunt’s daughter and her husband held a banquet to celebrate the first birthday of their first child and invited us. I went and brought one jin of rice in a bag. Some people brought a coupon for one jin of grain to the banquet. At the banquet, instead of the usual white rice, we ate carrot-rice, the kind we cooked in our village kitchen during the Great Leap Forward.