The Good Women Of China

by Xinran

  Before 1990 or thereabouts, it was common for several generations of a family to live in the same room, with sleeping areas divided by thin curtains or by bunk beds. Sex had to take place in the dark, in silence and with caution; the atmosphere of restraint and suppression inhibited married couples’ relationships and often led to marital strife.

  Hua’er and her husband lived in one room with his family, so they had to make love with the lights off in order for their shadows not to show against the curtain separating their sleeping area. She was terrified of her husband touching her in the dark, his hands seemed to belong to the monsters of her childhood; involuntarily, she screamed in fear. When her husband tried to comfort her and asked her what was wrong, she could not tell him the truth. He loved her very much, but it was difficult for him to cope with her anxiety when they made love, so he suppressed his sexual desire instead.

  Later, Hua’er discovered that her husband had become impotent. She blamed herself for his condition, and suffered dreadfully because she loved him. She did her best to help him recover, but was unable to suppress the fears that gripped her in the dark. In the end, she felt she ought to set him free, to give him the chance to have a normal sexual relationship with another woman, so she requested a divorce. When her husband refused and asked her for her reasons, she made up flimsy excuses. She said that he was not romantic, although he remembered every birthday and anniversary, and put fresh flowers on her desk every week. Everyone around them saw how he cheered her up, but she told him that he was small-minded and could not make her happy. She also said that he did not earn enough, even though her friends all envied the jewellery he gave her.

  Unable to find a good reason for wanting a divorce, Hua’er finally resorted to telling her husband that he could not satisfy her physical needs, knowing that he was the only man who could ever do so. In the face of this, there was nothing Hua’er’s husband could say. Heartbroken, he left for remote Zhuhai, which was still undeveloped at the time.

  Hua’er’s voice rang in my ears as I watched the changing scenery from the jeep taking me home after the few days in West Hunan Women’s Prison.

  ‘My beloved husband left,’ she said. ‘I felt as if my heart had been plucked from my chest . . . I would think: at eleven I could satisfy men, at twenty I could drive them mad, at thirty I could make them lose their souls, and at forty . . . ? Sometimes I wanted to use my body to give a chance to those men who could still say sorry, to help them understand what a sexual relationship with a woman could be; sometimes I wanted to seek out the Red Guards who had tortured me and watch their homes being broken up and their families scattered. I wanted to avenge myself on all men and make them suffer.

  ‘My reputation as a woman has not meant much to me. I have lived with several men, and let them amuse themselves with me. Because of that, I have been sent to two labour re-education camps and been sentenced to prison twice. The political instructor in the camp called me an incorrigible female delinquent, but that didn’t bother me. When people curse me for having no shame, I don’t get angry. All the Chinese care about is “face”, but they don’t understand how their faces are linked to the rest of their bodies.

  ‘My sister Shu understands me best. She knows that I will go to any lengths to put right my memories of sexual terror, that I want a mature sexual relationship to heal my scarred sexual organs. Sometimes I’m just as Shu says; then again, sometimes I’m not.

  ‘My father doesn’t know who I am, neither do I.’

  The day after I got back to the radio station, I made two telephone calls. The first was to a gynaecologist. I told her about Hua’er’s sexual behaviour and asked if there was any kind of treatment for the mental and physical traumas she had been through. The doctor seemed never to have thought about such a question. At that time in China, there was no concept of psychological illness, only physical.

  Next, I called Chief Constable Mei. I told him that Hua’er was Japanese and asked whether she might be transferred to one of the prisons for foreigners where conditions were better.

  He paused, then replied, ‘Xinran, as far as Hua’er being Japanese is concerned, silence is golden. At the moment her crimes are sexual delinquency and illegal cohabitation; she shouldn’t have too much longer to go. If it becomes known that she is foreign, she may be accused of having a political motivation for her actions and it could be much worse for her.’

  Everyone who has lived through the Cultural Revolution remembers how women who committed the ‘crime’ of having foreign clothes or foreign habits were publicly humiliated. Their hair was shorn into all sorts of strange styles for the Red Guards’ amusement; their faces were smeared with a mess of lipstick; high-heeled shoes were strung together and looped around their bodies; broken pieces of all manner of ‘foreign goods’ were dangled from their clothes at odd angles. The women were made to recount over and over again how they had come to possess foreign products. I was seven years old when I first saw what these women went through, paraded through the streets to be jeered at; I remember thinking that if there was a next life, I did not want to be reborn a woman.

  Many of these women had returned with their husbands to the Motherland to devote their lives to the Revolution and the construction of the new China. Back in China, they had to manage the housework with the most basic of appliances, but this was nothing compared to having to suppress the comfortable habits and attitudes they had grown used to abroad. Every word and action was judged in a political context; they had to share their husbands’ persecution as ‘secret agents’ and go through ‘revolution’ after ‘revolution’ for possessing women’s goods from abroad.

  I interviewed many women who had had such experiences. In 1989, a peasant woman in the mountains told me that she had once attended a music academy. Her face was scored with lines and her hands were coarse and callused; I could see no evidence of musical ability in her. It was only when she spoke with the special resonance peculiar to those who have had voice lessons that I began to think she might be telling the truth.

  She showed me photographs that proved my doubts wholly unfounded. She and her family had spent some time in America; when they came back to China, she was not quite ten years old. She had been able to develop her musical gifts in a music college in Beijing, right up to the Cultural Revolution. Her parents’ connection with America cost them their lives and ruined their daughter’s.

  At nineteen, she was sent to a very poor mountainous area and married off to a peasant by the village cadres. She had lived there ever since, in an area so poor that the villagers could not afford to buy any oil to cook with.

  Before I left her, she asked, ‘Are the American soldiers still in Vietnam?’

  My father knew a woman who came back to China after many years in India, when she was over fifty. She was a teacher, and was extremely good to her students – she often used money from her life savings to help students in financial difficulties. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, nobody thought she would be affected, but she was ‘struggled against’ and ‘remoulded’ for two years because of her clothing.

  This teacher had maintained that women ought to wear bright colours, and that the Mao suit was too mannish, so she often wore a sari under her regulation jacket. The Red Guards considered this disloyal to the Motherland, and condemned her for ‘worshipping and having blind faith in foreign things’. Among the Red Guards who struggled against her were students whom she had given money to before. They apologised for their behaviour, but said, ‘If we did not struggle against you, we would get into trouble, and our families with us.’

  The teacher never wore her beloved saris again, but on her deathbed she had muttered, ‘Saris are so beautiful,’ over and over again.

  Another woman teacher told me of her experience during the Cultural Revolution. A distant relative in Indonesia had sent her a lipstick and a pair of high-heeled shoes with an English trademark through a member of a government delegation. Realising that presents from abroad might b
ring with them suspicion of being a secret agent, she had hurriedly thrown them away without unwrapping them. She had not noticed a girl of eleven or twelve playing by the rubbish bin, who reported her ‘crime’ to the authorities. For many months, the teacher was driven through the town on the back of a lorry to be struggled against by the crowds.

  Between 1966 and 1976, the dark years of the Cultural Revolution, there was little in either cut or colour to distinguish Chinese women’s clothing from men’s. Objects specifically for women’s use were rare. Make-up, beautiful clothes and jewellery only existed in banned works of literature. But no matter how revolutionary Chinese people were at that time, not all could resist nature. A person could be ‘revolutionary’ in every other respect, but anyone who succumbed to ‘capitalist’ sexual desires was dragged on stage to be struggled against or put in the dock; some people took their own lives in despair. Others set themselves up as paragons of morality but took advantage of the men and women who were being reformed, making their sexual submission ‘a test of loyalty’. The majority of people who lived through that time endured a barren sexual environment, most of all women. In the prime of their lives, husbands were imprisoned or sent to cadre schools for up to twenty years while their wives endured a living widowhood.

  Now that the harm done to Chinese society by the Cultural Revolution is being weighed up, the damage to natural sexual instincts is a factor that must be counted in. The Chinese say, ‘There is a book in every family that is best not read out loud.’ There are many Chinese families who have not confronted what happened to them during the Cultural Revolution. The chapters of that book have been stuck together with tears and cannot be opened. Future generations or outsiders will only see a blurred title. When people witness the joy of families or friends reunited after years of separation, few dare to ask themselves how those people coped with their desires and pain during those years.

  It was often children, particularly girls, who bore the consequences of frustrated sexual desire. Growing up during the Cultural Revolution as a girl was to be surrounded by ignorance, madness and perversion. Schools and families were unable and forbidden to give them even the most basic sex education. Many mothers and teachers were themselves ignorant in these matters. When their bodies matured, the girls fell prey to indecent assaults or rape, girls like Hongxue, whose only experience of sensual pleasure came from a fly; Hua’er, who was ‘raped’ by the revolution; the woman on the answering machine who was married off by the Party; or Shilin, who will never know that she has grown up. The perpetrators were their teachers, their friends, even their fathers and brothers, who lost control of their animal instincts and behaved in the ugliest and most selfish ways that a man can. The girls’ hopes were destroyed, and their capacity to experience the pleasure of lovemaking damaged for ever. If we could listen to their nightmares, we could spend ten or twenty years hearing the same kinds of story.

  It is too late now to bring back youth and happiness to Hua’er and other women who endured the Cultural Revolution. They drag the great dark shadows of their memories behind them.

  I remember how, one day in the office, Mengxing read out a listener’s request for a particular song and said, ‘I just don’t get it. Why do these old women like moth-eaten old songs so much? Why don’t they look around them to see what the world is like today? They move too slowly for the times.’

  Big Li rapped his desk smartly with a pen and admonished, ‘Too slowly? Remember, these women never had the time to enjoy their youth!’

  14

  A Fashionable Woman

  In the autumn of 1995, I submitted a request to resign as Director of Programme Development and Planning, arguing that I was juggling too many jobs simultaneously and that the workload created by my radio programme – reporting, editing, replying to my postbag, etc. – was constantly increasing. In fact, what I really wanted was space for myself. I had become weary of sifting through mountains of documents full of prohibitions and attending endless meetings. I needed to be able to spend more time getting to know Chinese women.

  My superiors were far from happy with my decision, but they knew me well enough by now: if they forced me to keep my position, I might end up leaving completely. As long as I stayed, they would still be able to make use of my high public profile and extensive social network.

  Once my decision was known, my future became a matter for endless conjecture and debate. Nobody understood why I was abandoning the guarantee of continued success in an official career. Some people said that I was going to join the tide of new entrepreneurs, some presumed that I was going to take a highly paid university lectureship, others thought that I would go to America. Most simply said, ‘Whatever Xinran does, it will be fashionable.’ Although being considered a trendsetter and a fashionable woman might seem like a good thing, I knew how much people had suffered at the hands of ‘fashion’.

  Fashion in China has always been political. In the 1950s, people made a fashion out of pursuing the lifestyle of Soviet Communism. They shouted political slogans like ‘Catch up with America and overtake England in twenty years!’ and followed all Chairman Mao’s latest directives to the letter. During the Cultural Revolution the fashion was to go into the countryside to be ‘reeducated’. Humanity and wisdom were banished to places which did not know there was anywhere in this world where women could say ‘no’ and men could read newspapers.

  In the eighties, after the Reform and Opening Up policy, people started to make a fashion of going into business. In a short while, it said ‘Business Director’ on every business card; there was a saying: ‘Out of one billion people, there were ninety million business people and ten million waiting to set up in business.’

  The Chinese have never followed a trend by choice – they have always been driven into it by politics. In my interviews with Chinese women in particular, I discovered that many so-called ‘fashionable’ or ‘trendsetting’ women had been forced into being so, and then persecuted for the fashion they embodied. Chinese men say that strong women are the fashion these days – but women believe that ‘behind every successful woman, there is a man who causes her pain’.

  I once interviewed a famous businesswoman who lived her life in the public eye. She had always been considered a trendsetter and I had read a lot about her in the newspapers. I was interested to know how she felt about being high-profile, and how she had become so well known.

  Zhou Ting had booked a luxury private room at a four-star hotel for our interview – she told me that it was to ensure that we had privacy. When she arrived, she gave every impression of enjoying being a woman of fashion. She wore expensive, elegant clothes in cashmere and silk, and a lot of jewellery that glittered and jingled as she moved. Her hands were laden with rings. I had been told that she gave extravagant dinners in all the big hotels, and that she changed cars as often as she changed clothes. She was the general manager in charge of health food sales for several large companies in the area. However, after I had interviewed her, I realised that there was a very different woman underneath the fashionable exterior.

  At the start of our interview, Zhou Ting told me several times that she had not talked about her true feelings for a long time. I said that I always asked women about their true stories, because truth is a woman’s lifeblood. She gave me a searching look and replied that the truth was never ‘fashionable’.

  During the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Ting’s mother, a teacher, was forced by the Red Guards to attend political study classes. Her father was allowed to remain at home: he had a tumour on his adrenal gland, and was so ill that he could barely lift a chopstick. One of the Red Guards said later that they had not thought him worth bothering with. Her mother was eventually imprisoned for several years.

  From her first year at primary school, Zhou Ting was bullied because of her family background. Sometimes her classmates beat her black and blue, sometimes they cut her arms viciously, leaving bloody wounds. But the misery of these attacks paled in comparison to th
e terror of being questioned about her mother by the workers, propaganda teams and political groups stationed at the school, who pinched her or hit her over the head when she remained silent. She was so scared of being interrogated that she would start quaking with fear if a shadow fell on the classroom window.

  At the end of the Cultural Revolution, it was declared that Zhou Ting’s mother was innocent, and had been falsely accused of being counter-revolutionary. Mother and daughter had suffered needlessly for ten years. Zhou Ting’s father had not escaped either: later in the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards had surrounded his hospital bed and submitted him to numerous interrogations until he died.

  ‘Even now, I often wake with a start from nightmares of being beaten in my childhood,’ Zhou Ting said.

  ‘Was your experience unusual in your school?’ I asked.

  Sunlight was streaming into the room, and Zhou Ting drew a curtain to shield us from the glare.

  ‘I stood out at school; at least I remember that my classmates always talked excitedly about going to the university to watch my mother being struggled against, or eavesdropping on me being interrogated by the political team.’

  ‘And in your life since, you have stood out for different reasons.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Zhou Ting. ‘First my mother, then the men around me made sure that people were always interested in me.’

  ‘Was that in your professional or your personal life?’

  ‘In my personal life, for the most part,’ she replied.

  ‘Some people say that traditional women cannot have modern feelings, and modern women cannot be chaste or loyal. Which of these paths would you say you have taken?’

  Zhou Ting twisted her rings. I noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.