by Chen Huiqin
I mixed the roasted rice powder and sesame together and bought one jin of white sugar. Shezhen brought the mixture and the sugar to school. She could either eat the rice-sesame mixture directly, with some sugar added to it, or she could use some hot water to make a hot snack out of the mixture and sugar. She liked it very much and told me that she shared it with her roommates.
In those days, there was a saying about people who went from the countryside to the city. The saying went like this: “The first year, you are ‘earth-bound’; the second year, you are foreign; and the third year, you refuse to recognize your father or mother.” But this did not happen to Shezhen. She continued to wear clothes she made out of homespun cloth and homemade shoes. Her father and I wanted to clothe her with store-bought materials, for we did not want her to look so “earth-bound,” but she said that she did not mind. She was good at learning the English language, which she said was more important than one’s looks. When she returned home, she still spoke the village dialect. During her summer vacations, she returned home and went to work in the fields. Although she earned no work-points, she volunteered to help with farm work.
Shezhen graduated from Shanghai Foreign Languages Institute in the summer of 1977 and was assigned a job in Beijing. The job was to teach English. She was told that if she did not accept the Beijing assignment, she could get a job in Shanghai. Shezhen and her father thought that the job in Beijing meant honor and a brighter future. I really wanted her to stay closer, but her father persuaded me, saying that as parents, we should think of our children’s future more than anything else.
My husband and I accompanied Shezhen to urban Jiading and bought her a pair of leather shoes, the first pair of leather shoes in her life. We bought cloth from the department store in Jiading Town, and she made shirts, jackets, and pants for herself. We also bought wool yarn and she knitted herself a new sweater. Her tailor master helped her make a new cotton-padded jacket.
I dug up a handful of second-layer soil from our production team’s farmland, wrapped it in paper, and put the packet in Shezhen’s traveling bag. I asked her to put it into the first cup of boiled water she would drink in Beijing, wait until the dirt sank to the bottom, and then drink the water. That would help her more easily adapt to the new “water and soil” environment.
On the day Shezhen left Shanghai for Beijing by train, her father again asked a driver from his commune to take her to the train station. This time, Shezhu, Shebao, my husband, and I went together to see Shezhen off at the station. We all rode in a pickup truck. We put benches in the truck for us to sit on. We went onto the platform. When the train pulled away from the platform, Shezhu burst into tears. She sobbed all the way home on the truck.
It took more than a week for Shezhen’s first letter to reach us. I was really worried. My heart hung in the air. In those days, there was no other way to get in touch. It was that long-awaited letter that finally allowed me to put my heart back in the place where it belonged.
SHEZHU
Just like Shezhen, Shezhu was helpful around the house very early. When Shebao started school at the end of the 1960s, Shezhu looked after her little brother when the two of them went to school together. She learned to knit and do needlework. Both Shezhen and Shezhu learned the simple aspects of the warping trade and were able to replace me when I went home to cook during busy business seasons.
During school vacations, I would prepare raw rice for lunch in the morning before I went into the fields. Shezhu would cook the rice. When I returned from the fields for lunch, I would quickly stir-fry a simple dish and that would be our lunch.
This was the time that the two city girls came to our village. They lived in the side room right next to our house. The ownership of the side room was in dispute during the first few years of the Cultural Revolution. Big Aunt’s family said that during the Land Reform the side room was allotted to them. But the rebel leaders in the brigade did not agree. While the matter was being investigated, the side room was considered collective property. The city girls also prepared raw rice before going into the fields and Shezhu helped to cook the rice for them during her school vacations.
Eventually, the investigation found that the side room had been allotted to Big Aunt’s family in the records. When her second son got married in the early 1970s, the family took back the room, so the two urban girls moved to another house, which used to belong to a man on “five protections” welfare (wubaohu). This gave old people or children who did not have family support help from the collective with food, fuel, clothes, education, and burials. After such a person died, their house became collective property.
The two young people kept each other company. Neither of them dared to sleep in that house alone, because they said that it was haunted. Whenever one went back to her home in urban Jiading, Shezhen or Shezhu would spend the night there with the girl who was left behind. One night, Shezhen went to sleep in that house. When we had all gone to bed, Shezhen and the city girl knocked on our door. I opened the door and they rushed inside, with pale faces. They said that they had heard a knock on the door. They asked who it was, but got no answer. They were so frightened that they ran to our house. That night, the city girl, Shezhen, and Shezhu squeezed into one bed in our house.
When Shezhu finished middle school, she attended high school, which had become available again. During her high school vacations, she learned to do farm work and worked on public projects, one of which was to dig a new canal, the Dianpu Canal (Dianpu He), to connect Dianshan Lake (Dianshan Hu) with Huangpu River. The section she worked on was in Meilong Town in Shanghai County, which was more than eighty li away from home. The project lasted about a month and Shezhu and other workers stayed there for the duration.
After the project was completed, Shezhu came home and told me the following story. The section of the project she had worked on was a very sandy place. The project had begun in the coldest month of the year in Shanghai. When it rained, the ground froze at night. In the morning the sun came up and melted the frozen ground. The sandy soil combined with melted ice was difficult to walk on. Bamboo platforms were put down on the mushy ground. But the platforms were limited, so they were only for the trip with full baskets. When they carried empty baskets, they had to walk on the mushy ground. Workers had to wear high-top rain shoes due to the dampness. After ten or so hours carrying heavy loads of earth and having to walk in sticky soil with heavy, boot-like shoes, Shezhu’s feet were covered by many blisters.
One day after supper, Shezhu took off her shoes to get ready for bed in a collective bedroom. She looked at her blisters with many people around her. Somebody said, “Shezhu is going to cry.” With her eyes already full of tears, she burst into real sobs. She was only eighteen years old at that time, still young and tender. My heart ached when I heard the story. Peasant life was too harsh.
Those were the years that we grew three crops each year. In the heat of the summer, we harvested the early rice and put down the late rice and worked from about four o’clock in the morning until ten or eleven at night. We pulled up late rice seedlings in the early morning hours, cut early rice and moved it to the threshing grounds before lunch, prepared rice paddies in early afternoon, put down rice seedlings in late afternoon, and threshed early rice on the warehouse grounds in the evening under very powerful electrical lights called “sun lights.” All of this was backbreaking and heavy labor. At the end of the day, having spent many hours in water, our hands and feet looked as if they were parts of floating dead bodies. Blades of rice seedlings were usually tough and coarse, like files. The skin on our palms was rubbed off as we pulled the seedlings from beds and transplanted them in paddies. At the end of this busy season, nobody had much skin left on their hands.
Even worse than the field labor in the harvesting-planting season was the work of unloading urban kitchen waste from a boat in summer heat. We regularly sent our boat to urban Shanghai to fetch kitchen waste that we used as fertilizer in our farmland. During the harvesting-pl
anting season, urban areas had to hold their waste, for we did not have spare labor to fetch it.
As soon as the busy season came to an end, Shanghai municipality would send us the kitchen waste that had been accumulated. The waste came in big vessels and each production team got one. When the big boat arrived, we had to unload it and pile up the waste on our land for further decomposition before it could be used as fertilizer. The untreated waste, which contained rotten vegetables and meats, produced a lot of heat, which was in addition to the summer temperature of thirty-eight or thirty-nine degrees Celsius. The freight compartment in the vessel held about fifty tons of waste and was deeper than the height of a man. As we unloaded the packed waste shovel by shovel, a terrible rotten smell steamed out.
It took several hours to unload a boatful of waste. Everyone working at the task would be totally soaked by sweat; no part of our clothes would be dry. We would smell like decomposing waste ourselves at the end of the task. It would take several washings for our clothes to be totally clean from that smell.
By the latter part of the 1970s, in addition to the clothes factory, a number of commune-run factories had been established. After Shezhu graduated from high school, she was recruited into the Zhuqiao Farm Machine Plant, which made and repaired farm machines. She was apprenticed to a female master, who had formal training and was an experienced lathe operator, and learned to work on a lathe. Workers in commune-run factories were still peasants. In busy farming seasons, she came back and worked in the fields. In winter, she participated in more river-digging or river-widening projects.
Dining-room food at public projects was usually not very good. One time when Shezhu left for a public project, I prepared some condiments for her. I washed and cut pickled turnips into small pieces and stir-fried them. I put them in a jar with a lid for easy carrying and storage. I knew this would add a little home flavor to her dining-room food. Another time while she was working at a public project, I heard that somebody from the project had come back to the village to fetch something. I quickly made some glutinous rice cakes and asked that person to take them to Shezhu.
Life was hard. I tried as much as I could to help lessen the harshness.
SHEBAO
When Shebao was growing up, he liked to play outdoors and do boys’ things. When the long school summer vacation arrived, I worried about his safety. There were rivers, ponds, and uncovered irrigation canals that boys, including Shebao, loved to play in on hot summer days. When we first had the electrical pump station, our irrigation canals were uncovered. Later on, some irrigation canals were turned into covered ones, which were huge prefabricated concrete pipes buried underground. On top of the pipes were packed dirt roads for pedestrians to walk on or for bikes and farm machines to ride on. Irrigation water passed through the concrete pipes to rice fields. At the junction of an open canal and a covered one was a deep well of water. We called this a “hidden well” because it was at the bottom of the open canal and was submerged when the open canal had water. The hidden well was a vertically installed prefabricated concrete pipe.
Like other village boys, Shebao liked to catch crabs and fish. One time, Shebao and two of his little friends went into an open irrigation canal to catch crabs and fish. Shebao was almost drowned that day. He was about ten years old at the time. He told me the following story only after he had become an adult.
This was late in the rice-growing season and the irrigation station had already stopped pumping water. There was still calf-deep water in the canals and thus fish and crabs continued to live there. Shebao and his little friends got down into one of the open canals, looking for fish and crabs.
The boys saw some fish and tried to catch them. As the fish swam away, the boys quickened their steps, chasing after the fish. Shebao was ahead of his friends. As he bent over chasing the fish, he did not realize that he was approaching the junction between an open canal and a covered canal. All of a sudden, he stepped into a hidden well. The water in the hidden well more than submerged him. He had not yet learned how to swim. But he somehow struggled to the surface of the water and managed to grab the rim of the concrete pipe with his little hands. But he was not strong enough to lift himself out of the water. As he struggled, he fell into the deep well again and again he emerged above the surface of the water, his hands grabbing the rim of the concrete pipe. His life was at stake.
One of his little friends was so frightened that he ran away. The other one, who was two years older, stayed with Shebao. He realized that Shebao had fallen into a hidden well. He lay flat on the ground right at the edge of the irrigation canal, stretched out his hand, and grabbed Shebao’s hair. As he pulled the hair, Shebao tried again to lift himself up. With the extra help of his friend, Shebao finally got out of the water. The two boys realized that they had just been involved in a life-threatening incident and decided not to tell their parents about it. They took off their clothes and dried them in the sun. When the clothes were dry, they put them on and returned home, pretending that nothing had happened.
After Shebao was married, he told his wife about this incident. One day, many years after we had moved to urban Jiading, our whole family went to a wedding banquet in Wangjialong. At the banquet, Shebao introduced a person to his wife, saying, “This is the man who saved my life.” When I heard this, I asked Shebao about it. Only then did he tell me the above story. I am very grateful to this man. His name is Sun Yongqiu. He saved my son’s life.
A few times during summer vacations, Shebao went with his father to Chengdong Commune and spent a few days there. His father said that Shebao was very good. He was quiet and played by himself most of the time. He visited the broadcast station when it was not on the air. He would touch the switches and buttons and ask the station master what they were used for.
On his father’s office desk, there was a cute little clock, a gift from a Japanese delegation. Shebao loved it and asked his father if he could take it home. His father said no. Shebao came home and told me about the clock. He asked me why his father would not allow him to take the clock home. I talked to his father. I said, “The Japanese presented the clock to you as a gift. Why can’t you take it home?” His father said, “Because it was a gift to me as a commune leader. So it belongs to the commune, not to me.”
Another time, Shebao’s father told me the following story about a different visit to Chengdong.
One day my husband went down to a brigade for a meeting. Shebao went with him, riding on the back seat of his father’s bike. After the morning meeting, his father was invited by a local peasant family to have lunch with them. His father accepted the invitation and took Shebao along. Shebao said that he wanted to go back to the commune canteen for lunch. His father explained it was too far and he had other business to take care of in that brigade after lunch, so they had to eat lunch with that family. Shebao refused to eat. The host family offered everything they could think of, but he refused. His father explained to the family that his son refused to eat not because what they cooked did not meet his appetite, but because he was being willful.
After lunch, the host family cut a watermelon and offered a slice to Shebao. He took it, threw it onto the ground, and smashed the melon slice with his feet. His father was so enraged that he spanked Shebao, the first and only time he did so to any of our children.
Both Shezhen and Shebao carried a streak of willfulness. After Shebao was married, Xiao Xie, his wife, one day asked me, “Where did Chen Shedong get his stubbornness?” I replied, “From me.”
Another time that Shebao went with his father to Chengdong, they came home with a bag of Chinese plums (pipa), a very expensive fruit, and some other fruit. I asked my husband, “Why did you buy such fruits today?” My husband replied, “Our son did a good deed.” He explained:
Shebao went out to play while his father attended to his business. Across the street from the commune headquarters was the commune auditorium. Outside the auditorium, there was a square where an open-air movie had been shown the
night before. While playing on the square, Shebao saw a wallet. He picked it up and handed it in to the office of the commune. When the owner got his wallet back, he was very grateful. He said that the wallet contained quite a bit of money and grain coupons. To express his gratitude, he bought the pipa and the other fruit and gave them to Shebao as a reward.
My husband was very proud of what Shebao had done. When we asked Shebao why he handed in the wallet, he said, “because it was not ours.”
Shebao graduated from high school in 1978. Exactly at the time he was finishing high school, the government issued the 104 Document, which said that one unmarried child in each family could replace a salary-earning father or mother when he or she retired.1 Fathers and mothers could retire before they reached their retirement age if they had health problems. Some salary-earning fathers and mothers took advantage of the new policy, took early retirement, and gave their position to a son or a daughter. In our village, a bamboo craftsman worked in a bamboo crafts shop in urban Jiading. His son was already married when the document came out and could no longer take the opportunity. The bamboo craftsman retired and gave the position to his daughter. She became a shop assistant in urban Jiading.
I talked to Shebao about using the opportunity, but he did not like the idea. After Shezhen went to work in Beijing, she wrote letters home. In almost every letter, she encouraged her little brother to study hard in order to go to college. Around the same time, colleges restored the practice of recruiting students by administering entrance exams.2 I believe both Shezhen’s letters and the opportunity to compete for college enrollment significantly impacted Shebao. In his senior year, he became a serious student and was one of the famous three high-score achievers at his school. This encouraged him further.
His father bought him a complete set of study guides, ten books altogether, for the entrance exams. In the last half-year before he took the college entrance exams, Shebao worked day and night, studying hard. At night, I would urge him to go to sleep. He would say, “Mom, you go to sleep. I will go when I am sleepy.” I would cook something and leave it there for him to eat as a midnight snack. I would sleep and wake up, finding him still at it. Every night, he worked beyond midnight. When summer came, Shebao put on high-top rain shoes and wore heavy pants and a long-sleeve shirt to protect him from mosquitoes while he studied. At the time, our windows did not have any screens. Only our beds were screened by mosquito nets.