by Xinran Xue
As soon as I came to Urumqi, I went straight to the Shihezi Cotton Factory. My classmate took me all the way through the factory, from where the raw cotton came in to where the cloth was checked at the end. She was in the cloth-checking workshop. "Aiya," I said, "I can't do it, not with all those machines banging and roaring away!" When I left the factory I wanted to throw up, so I didn't work there. Her friends said, "If your job search doesn't work out, find yourself a husband." I said, "No way, I've come to Xinjiang to find work, not a husband! I've come to realise my ambition."
Before I found a job, I spent a few days sponging off my classmate. I must have been a real nuisance. Those were the famine years; food was in short supply and everyone had a fixed monthly food ration, so I had to cadge a bit here and a bit there. I thought I was causing my classmate far too much trouble. Luckily one day I met some people from back home who said, "The best place in the Xinjiang Construction Corps is the Mosuowan Number Two Farm in the Eighth Agricultural Division. It's a breadbasket, and our place is the best in the whole corps. Why don't you come with us?" I didn't know what sort of place it was, or what they did there, but I went along with them anyway. When I got there, I went to the labour resource office for a job. The supervisor took one look at me and said, "How old are you?" I said, "Twenty-five." He said, "You're a school-leaver, aren't you?" I was small and thin in those days – I only weighed forty kilos. I said, "Yes, I've just left school." He said, "Go back, you can't cope here, all our work is hard labour in the fields. The Production and Construction Corps is mainly production, and that means field work. In summer it's thirty or forty degrees centigrade; in winter it's thirty or forty degrees below. You won't be able to keep up." I said, "It doesn't matter, it'll toughen me up. There are plenty of people my age in your corps too – whatever other people can do I can do! Wait and see if I'm really not up to it, at least." He couldn't talk me out of it, so he let me stay. I said, "What work unit are you going to send me to?" He said, "Where do you want to go?" I said, "A friend from Shandong mentioned a duty supervision unit. There are a fair few young people there, and a lot of intellectuals." He said, "All right then, I'll put you in the duty supervision unit." At that time there was only one kindergarten in the whole corps. When the head of this kindergarten heard that a lively high-school graduate who liked dancing had come from Shandong, she wanted me as a teacher, and I agreed. But as anyone who's worked in the Construction Corps knows, everybody had to do a year's probation. You couldn't start your specialised job until after a trial year of labour.
I worked in the big fields. Really, farm work is just incredibly tough. I even had to work in the fields in winter. And what did we have to eat when we came home in the evening? Wowotou, those steamed corn buns, nothing but wowotou. At that time less than 20 per cent was flour or rice – the rest was coarse grains. We used to take a few wowotou to eat in the field. They'd be frozen solid, like ice lollies, and we ate them just as they were. We didn't go home at midday. In the winter I carried sand, I carted fertiliser. I've done everything. Picking cotton, too. The night before my first day picking cotton I was too excited to sleep. I came to the field, and the others taught me how to do it. After a while I could pick forty kilos of cotton in a single day. At that time I was one of the most capable workers in the company – everyone said that I'd make it through the trial period.
***
I couldn't detect any sense of hardship in Teacher Sun's narrative. This is a mark of the fortitude of that generation of Chinese; they regard "the things I've done" and "what others said about me" as far more important than "eating in the wind and sleeping in the dew". Their lives are lived on the spiritual level.
***
SUN: There were a lot of intellectuals in that place, relatively speaking, but I was the only girl who'd finished senior school. Four or five of the men were senior-school graduates, but none of them had been allowed to go on to university because of their class backgrounds, and that was why they had come here to make their way in the world. They were kind to me. They used to sneak rice or steamed buns into the big basket I carried on my back when picking cotton, so that I could snatch a bite to eat while I was changing baskets. I never asked who'd left them. Nothing about those people was straightforward. Nobody dared to get too friendly with anybody else. At that time it was tough, to be sure, and tense too, but the days went by very quickly. We used to go to the fields before dawn, eat our midday meal in the fields, and sometimes supper too. Then once it was too dark to see or pick cotton, we went to the maize fields for stalks. You could cut a good bundle of stems from a few rows of maize, and we carried them on our backs over all the fields we'd broken in for cultivation and back to the road, to be taken to the cow or sheep pens as fodder, or sometimes to the kitchen for cooking fuel. Freshly cut maize stems were very heavy. I really was dead on my feet, sometimes I used to weep from exhaustion. It was true hard labour.
XINRAN: Did you all have the same routines and bear the same heavy burdens, with no difference between men and women?
SUN: Oh yes, we all did the same work! Nearly everyone who came to Xinjiang in search of a future had a bad family background. It seemed that out of all the people around me, I was the only educated youth from a good class background.
XINRAN: So were you able to do a bit less than people from bad family backgrounds?
SUN: I didn't think in that way – we were all people. Besides, do you have any control over your family background? How is making children bear the sins of their parents any different from that old feudal punishment, the one where the whole family was punished for the crimes of one of its members? Aiya, I didn't say this out loud, though I thought it. If people said I worked well, that was good enough for me. I did that job for a year, and they made me a Five-Good Worker and a Progressive Student of Mao Zedong Thought. Because I'd been educated, I was given the job of keeping a record of all the work points in Shihezi [XXX]Regiment. When all the other comrades were fast asleep I had to go to the office to record everything the people in our squad had done – a dozen or more – and then report it to the central Company Work-Point Recorder. I was an Excellent Work-Point Recorder, as well as a Five-Good Worker and a Progressive Student of Mao Zedong Thought.
I was never afraid of hard work, no matter how tough it was. I didn't build roads, dig canals, or break open farmland, but I'm a witness to the history of education in the Construction and Production Corps. In 1963 when we first built a school, there were very few children – only a handful of old comrades who had married after 1956 had school-age children; before that everyone was breaking open the wilderness. There were no houses or anywhere to sleep, who had the time or energy to get married or have children? Even if they had children back home, bringing them to the Gobi was out of the question – there was nothing here for them. Three work units joined together to set up a school, with just the one class. We had to make the schoolhouse ourselves, too. The Regimental Office assigned two comrades and me to make our own sod bricks and build a classroom from sod bricks and mud. Thick wooden sticks with grass stems tied on and topped off with mud went to make up the roof. We made piles of sod bricks, half a metre high, thirty centimetres wide and fifty long, laid sunflower or sesame stalks on top and smeared them with mud. Those were the school desks. The teacher's podium was made in the same way, and we didn't have a teacher's office at all. When there was a Chinese class, out would come the Chinese textbook. I was the teacher. The next class was sums, the children took out their maths textbooks, and I was still the teacher, then it was time for singing and it was me teaching again. After a while they would go out for exercise, and it was still me. I lived in the workers' dormitory, which was just the same: a big building, the beds piles of sod bricks with sesame stalks on top. I'd just turned twenty-six.
XINRAN: Could you bear so much all by yourself?
SUN: At that time there was nothing I couldn't bear. Teaching wasn't difficult. The hardest part was going to the roadside every morning to collect the pu
pils, especially when it rained in summer or snowed in winter. People could get blown away or buried by wind or snow in the Gobi Desert, sometimes. If it snowed or rained too heavily, I used to take the children halfway home, and then their parents would take over. Winter was the worst. I had to go to the schoolhouse before daybreak to light the stove for the students – that was an earth stove built like a kang, you know, with a flue going through it from the stove. The pupils could sit on it while they had their lessons, but not me. I had to keep moving about and checking up on the children, who were all learning different things. When I got tired I sat on an earth stool, with my two long plaits underneath my bottom.
XINRAN: You used your own hair as padding to keep out the cold?
SUN: That's right. I used to have really long plaits, but one day when I was marking homework I forgot to hold my plaits out of the way while I was stoking up the fire. A swish of my plaits, and whoosh – one of them caught fire. Oh, I cried my heart out for a whole day. Another thing that caused me problems was films. It wasn't easy to put on a film in those days – we used to go a very long time between films, and on a film day none of the students wanted to go home. They said: "Teacher, we want to see the film." "Stay and watch it then," I'd say, so they did. They used to bring their own food supplies for lunch, not very much, so I usually had a bit of my own food put by for their supper when there was a film. It was different in those days, not like now, when you can find out where there's a film with just a telephone call, and you don't need to bring food because there are restaurants everywhere. At that time we were eking out a living in the Gobi Desert.
XINRAN: You must have been all by yourself then. Weren't you scared?
SUN: How could I not be scared? But in fact there was proper social order back then. There were no bad people. It's my belief that nobody had the energy to do anything bad – we were all half dead of exhaustion.
XINRAN: So when did you get other teachers for your school?
SUN: They didn't send us another teacher until the third year. Her husband was in the Security Office. He was in charge of the Reform through Labour teams, and he was away from home a lot.
XINRAN: Didn't you say that the social order was good, that there weren't any bad people?
SUN: I said there weren't any bad people in society, but there were lots and lots of Reform through Labour convicts! It was like all the Reform through Labour convicts in the whole country had been sent to Xinjiang. We were assigned a low little house near the school. There was a partition down the middle; she lived on one side, me on the other. It was much better after she came and there were two of us. I'd take PE while she took singing, and then we could swap for a while, or sometimes two classes would have PE or singing together. We taught that way right up to 1979. Before that it was mostly old comrades coming to open farms and things. Later on there started to be more new people, and more and more children. I began teaching middle school in 1984. I took two classes for Chinese, and I did that till 1994, when there was a shake-up in professional education under orders from the central government. Then the school set up a vocational senior high school, and I was transferred there.
XINRAN: You really are a witness to the history of education in the Shihezi Construction Corps!
SUN: Mmm, I watched the children grow up, I watched the school develop from nothing in the Gobi Desert! Still, conditions were much better when I was teaching in the senior school. We even lived in specially built teachers' flats. Two big rooms, only two bedrooms. There was a communal toilet and water room for washing, and the kitchens were cook-stoves built up outside your front door.
XINRAN: And this was in 1994?
SUN: At that time a teacher's wages were only thirty-nine yuan a month.
XINRAN: How much were your wages in 1962?
SUN: Same as all the other teachers: thirty-two yuan wages in the trial period. After a year when you were made permanent you got thirty-six yuan and twelve fen, and after another year when you got on the teachers' pay scale it was thirty-nine, right up to 1995. They didn't give me a pay rise for nearly thirty years. I started work in '62 and got married in '67. And I had four children. But it was the same for everyone back then – nobody thought it was hard. I had to supervise self-study in the classroom every day as well – I couldn't look after my own children. Evening self-study finished at eleven, and then I had to see the boarders safely to bed. I couldn't go home until lights out.
XINRAN: You really didn't think it was hard? Later I want to know your secret. Four children, and overtime on top of that!
SUN: Yes, four children! Coming home every day in the evening, making clothes by lamplight… I made everything myself, I didn't buy shoes, and the children's clothes were old clothes cut down to size. My elder daughter grew fast, so I added a strip to the bottom of her trousers. The next year she'd grown again, and I added another strip. The bottoms of her trousers were like stairs – I'd added three extensions! When she couldn't wear them they were passed on to the next one. I made clothes and shoes for the children every day after work, it felt like I never went to sleep before three o'clock. Anyway, I had a lot of children, I brought it on myself.
XINRAN: You were so eager to excel in your work – why did you have so many children?
SUN: That was eagerness to excel too; whoever had the most was the best. I didn't know that much then, just that I wanted to be better than everybody else!
XINRAN: So you didn't want to lag behind, even in childbearing! But you show no sign of being worn down by the drudgery of four children.
SUN: That's the kind of person I am – I always want to be the best. My work never fell behind, no matter how many children I had or how exhausting the housework was, right up to when I retired in 1995. Just then the Workers' Medical University was opening a branch college. They were running two clinical classes for level-one administrators and directors of rural hospitals aged over thirty-five. These people were the mainstays of village and county hospitals, but because their generation had been sent down to the countryside as school-leavers, they'd missed out on the chance to get a university qualification. It was impossible for them to get promotion, and their pay and conditions were very bad, so as a special consideration, this group were given a chance to do a one-year course leading to a college degree. At that time the college principal was asking around for teachers, and he came to Shihezi. He said he wanted teachers with the best work ethic, who could manage students, so he set his sights on me, begged me. I couldn't hold out against that, so I said I'd sign a year's contract, and at the end of that time both sides could decide. You see if I'm up to it, and I'll see whether I can get used to the job. In the end I worked until 1998. I only stopped when I got a stomach illness.
XINRAN: Could you never slow down a bit? From 1962, when you were twenty-five, to 1998, did you ever slow down?
SUN: I think that after a year of farm work in the corps, no matter how tough things got, it was still a much easier life than that, bending over the yellow earth all day, down to the fields before daybreak and not coming back until dark. To be honest, the year I spent toughening myself up in the corps gave me my work ethic for thirty years of teaching. It made me unusually serious and responsible, so no matter what class I was given, the leaders didn't have to worry. It's all because I have experienced true toil, like the peasants. When I was teaching, no matter how hard or tiring it was, even if I couldn't go home for twenty-four hours at a stretch, you're still inside. Talking to children and teaching schoolchildren doesn't take a lot of strength, does it?
XINRAN: Now can you tell me your secret? And also, how did you meet your husband?
SUN: You ask him, see what he says.
XINRAN: I want to hear what you say. I'm a woman – it's easier for me to listen to a woman telling her stories than a man.
SUN: Really? I sometimes think that way too.
XINRAN: And let's be practical, don't give me all that stuff about "comrades cherishing the same hopes and ideals".
/> SUN: You're really funny! I'll talk if you want to listen. In any case we're old, we don't mind being laughed at. My husband came straight to Xinjiang when he left his old army unit in Nanjing. A whole group of demobilised soldiers were sent over together. He wasn't due to be demobbed, but when he heard that group was going to be sent to Xinjiang on leaving the army, well, he didn't know what it was like in Xinjiang, but he put in a request to go. His arrival coincided with a big army skills competition, and his military skills had been exceptionally good in the army. He used to be in a colour guard that put on displays for visiting senior officers. At the end of that competition he was selected as best in his category. When General He Long came here from the central government they even let him have a photograph taken with him.
XINRAN: Do you still have that photograph?
SUN: No, in the Cultural Revolution they said all sorts of things about He Long. We were afraid, so we threw it away. In 1967 the armed guard units sent him to the school to give military and political training. He visited all the middle and primary schools in turn, and just then he happened to be responsible for primary schools. He was staying in the school office, and that was how we got to know each other.