The Good Women Of China

by Xinran

  When, after two and a half days’ jolting in an army jeep, the guide finally announced that we had arrived, we all thought he had made a mistake. We had not seen so much as the shadow of a person, let alone a village in the surrounding landscape. The jeep had been winding its way through bare hills, and had stopped beside a relatively large one. On closer inspection, we realised that cave dwellings had been cut into the side of the hill. The guide introduced this as the place we had wanted to come to – Shouting Hill, a tiny village not on any map – and said that it was his first time here too. I wondered at this and mused over the village’s strange name.

  A few inquisitive villagers had been drawn over by the roar of the jeep. Surrounding the vehicle, they started making all sorts of comments, calling the jeep a ‘horse that drank oil’; they wondered where its black ‘tail’ had disappeared to now that it had stopped moving, and the children among them chattered about how to find it. I wanted to explain to them that the tail was formed by the exhaust, but the village cadres had appeared to welcome us and ushered us into a cave house that served as the village headquarters.

  That first meeting was taken up with exchanges of conventional greetings. We had to concentrate very hard to understand each other because of regional differences in speech and accent, so I was unable to observe the surroundings closely. We were given a welcome banquet: a few pieces of white-flour flatbread, one bowl of very thin wheat-flour gruel and a small saucer of egg fried with chilli. It was only later I discovered that the regional government had asked the guide to bring the eggs along especially for us.

  After we had eaten, we were led to our accommodation by the light of three candles. The two male journalists had a cave house to themselves, the doctor was staying with an old man, and I was to share a cave house with a young girl. I could not make out much of the cave in the candlelight, but the quilt smelled pleasantly sun-bleached. I politely refused the help of the villagers who had escorted me there, and opened my bag. Just as I was about to ask the girl how I could wash, I realised that she had already climbed on to the kang. I remembered what the guide had said on the journey here: this was a place where water was so precious that even an emperor couldn’t wash his face or brush his teeth every day.

  I undressed and got on to the part of the kang that had obviously been left for me. I had wanted to spend a few minutes chatting to the girl, but she was already snoring lightly. She seemed not to feel any novelty at having a guest, but had fallen asleep immediately. I was exhausted, and had also taken travel sickness pills, so I fell quickly into a dazed sleep myself. My ability to sleep in unfamiliar places was a matter of desperate envy for my colleagues, who said I was natural journalist material because of it. As soon as they had acclimatised to a new place, they had to move on somewhere else, where they would suffer insomnia again. For them, a long-distance reporting trip was torture.

  Light filtering into the cave house woke me. I got dressed and walked outside to find the young girl already making breakfast.

  Heaven and earth seemed to have merged. The sun had not yet risen, but its light already spilled from a great distance across this immense canvas, touching the stones on the hills, and gilding the yellow-grey earth gold. I had never seen such a beautiful dawn. I mused over the possibility of tourism helping this area out of poverty. The magnificent sunrise on this loess plateau was a match for those which people climbed Mount Tai or rushed to the sea to see. When I mentioned later that those people ought to come to Shouting Hill instead, a teenage boy dismissed my idea as pure ignorance: Shouting Hill did not even have enough water for the villagers’ most basic daily needs, how could it provide for an influx of visitors?

  The choking fumes from the young girl’s cooking fire brought me back from my reverie. The dried cow dung she used for fuel gave off a pungent odour. The fire had been lit between a few large stones, over which the girl had placed a pot and a flat stone. She made a thin flour gruel in the pot, and toasted a coarse flatbread on the stone. The girl’s name was Niu’er (girl). She told me that dung was their only fuel for heating during the winter. Occasionally, when there was a death or a marriage, or when family or friends visited, they would cook with dung fires as a solemn expression of friendship. Their normal cooking fuel was the roots of cogon grass (a grass found in extremely arid terrain with a large root system and only a few short-lived leaves), with which they heated a mouthful of hot water for gruel. The coarse flatbread, mo, was only baked once a year, on the scorching stones of the hill in summer. It was then stored underground, and was so dry and hard that it would keep for almost a year. I was being honoured by being served the mo. Only men who did farming work had the right to eat it. Women and children survived on the thin wheat gruel – years of struggle had accustomed them to hunger. Niu’er said that the greatest honour and treat in a woman’s life was to have a bowl of egg mixed with water when she had a son. Further into my visit, I remembered this when I heard quarrelling women retort: ‘And how many bowls of egg and water have you eaten?’

  After the special breakfast of gruel and mo on the first day, our group went to work. I explained to the village cadres that I wanted to report on the women of Shouting Hill. The cadres, who could not even write their own names but considered themselves cultured, shook their heads, taken aback. ‘What’s to be said about women?’

  I persisted, so they eventually relented. To them, I was just another woman who understood nothing, but simply followed in the footsteps of men, trying to impress with novelty. Their attitude did not disturb me. Many years’ experience as a journalist had taught me that access to my sources was more important than others’ opinion of me.

  When I had first heard the name ‘Shouting Hill’, I had felt a nameless excitement and a sense that my visit was predestined. The name conjures up a noisy, bustling place bursting with life, quite the opposite of the reality. The hill of yellow earth stands in a landscape of bare earth, sand and stones. There is no sign of flowing water or green plant life. The rare small beetle scuttling away seems to be fleeing the barren land.

  Shouting Hill lies in the belt of land where the desert encroaches on the loess plateau. All through the year, the wind blows tirelessly, as it has for thousands of years. It is often difficult to see more than a few paces in a sandstorm, and villagers labouring on the hill have to shout to communicate. For this reason, the people of Shouting Hill are famous for loud, resonant voices; nobody could confirm if this was how Shouting Hill got its name, but I thought it a likely reason. It is a place entirely shut off from the modern world: between ten and twenty families with only four surnames live in small, low cave dwellings. Women there are valued solely for their utility: as reproductive tools, they are the most precious items of trade in the villagers’ lives. The men do not hesitate to barter two or three girl children for a wife from another village. Marrying a woman from the family into another village and getting a wife for a man in the family in exchange is the most common practice, hence most of the women of Shouting Hill come from outside the village. After they become mothers, they in turn are forced to give up their own daughters. Women in Shouting Hill have no rights of property or inheritance.

  The unusual social practice of one wife being shared by several husbands also occurs in Shouting Hill. In the majority of these cases, brothers from extremely poor families with no females to barter buy a common wife to continue the family line. By day they benefit from the food the woman makes and the household chores she does, by night they enjoy the woman’s body in turn. If the woman has a child, she herself may not even know who the father is. To the child, the brothers are Big Papa, Second Papa, Third Papa, Fourth Papa, and so on. The villagers do not regard this practice as illegal, because it is an established custom passed down from the ancestors, making it more powerful to them than the law. Neither do they mock the children with many fathers, because they have the protection and property of several men. None of them feels compassion for the shared wives; to them, women’s existence is justifi
ed by their utility.

  No matter which village the women come from originally, they very soon enter into the customs that have been passed from generation to generation in Shouting Hill. They lead an extremely hard life. In their one-roomed cave houses, of which half the space is occupied by a kang, their domestic tools consist of a few stone slabs, grass mats and crude clay bowls; an earthenware pitcher is regarded as a luxury item for the ‘wealthy families’. Children’s toys or any household items specifically for the use of women are unthinkable in their society. Because wives are bought with the currency of female blood kin, they have to endure the resentment of family members who miss their own daughters or sisters, and have to labour day and night to see to the food, drink and other daily needs of the whole family.

  It is the women who greet the dawn in Shouting Hill: they have to feed the livestock, sweep the yard and polish and repair the blunt, rusty tools of their husbands. After seeing their men off to work on the land, they have to collect water from an unreliable stream on the far side of a mountain two hours’ walk away, carrying a pair of heavy buckets on their shoulders. When cogon grass is in season, the women also have to climb the hill to dig up the roots for use as cooking fuel. In the afternoon, they take food to their menfolk; when they come back they spin thread, weave cloth, and make clothes, shoes and hats for the family. All through the day, they carry small children almost everywhere with them in their arms or on their backs.

  In Shouting Hill, ‘use’ is the term employed for men wanting to sleep with a woman. When the men return at dusk and want to ‘use’ their wives, they often yell impatiently at them: ‘What are you dawdling for? Are you getting on the kang or what?’ After being ‘used’, the women tidy up and attend to the children while the men lie snoring. Only with nightfall can the women rest, because there is no light to work in. When I tried to experience a very small part of these women’s lives through joining in their daily household tasks for a short while, I found my faith in the value of life severely shaken.

  The only day a woman of Shouting Hill can hold her head high is the day she gives birth to a son. Drenched in sweat after the torment of labour, she hears the words that fill her with pride and satisfaction: ‘Got him!’ This is the highest recognition of achievement she will ever get from her husband, and the material reward is a bowl of egg with sugar and hot water. There is no prejudice against a woman who gives birth to a girl, but she does not enjoy this treat. Shouting Hill has a unique social structure, but it does not differ from the rest of China in valuing sons more than daughters.

  During my first few days at Shouting Hill, I wondered why most of the children who were playing beside or helping the women as they busied themselves about the cave dwellings were boys, and thought this could be another village in which female infanticide was practised. Later, I found out that this was due to a shortage of clothes. When a family got new clothes, once every three to five years, they dressed the boys first, often leaving several sisters to share one set of outer clothing, which had to fit all of them. The sisters would sit on the kang covered by a large sheet and put on the set of clothes in rotation to go outside and help their mother.

  There was a family of eight daughters with only one pair of trousers between them, so covered in patches that the original fabric had been obscured. Their mother was pregnant with their ninth child, but I could see that this family’s kang was no bigger than the ones in families with three or four children. The eight girls sat close together on the kang sewing shoes in a strict division of labour, like an assembly line in a small workshop. They were laughing and chatting as they worked. Whenever I spoke to them, they talked about what they had seen and heard on the day they ‘wore clothes’. Every girl counted the days to her turn to ‘wear clothes’. They chatted happily about which family was having a wedding or funeral or had a new son or daughter, which man beat his wife, or who had called who bad names. They talked most about the males in their village; even the traces on the ground from where a little boy had relieved himself was a matter for discussion and laughter. However, over the two weeks I spent with them, I almost never heard them talk about women. When I deliberately led the conversation round to topics like hairstyles, clothes, figures, make-up or other matters of concern to women in the outside world, the girls would often have no idea what I was talking about. The way women lived in Shouting Hill was the only conceivable way of life to them. I did not dare tell them about the world beyond, or the way women lived there, for I knew that living with the knowledge of what they could never have would be far more tragic than living as they did.

  I noticed a bizarre phenomenon among the female villagers of Shouting Hill: when they reached their teens or thereabouts their gait suddenly became very strange. They began walking with their legs spread wide apart, swaying in an arc with each step. There was no trace of this tendency in the little girls, though. For the first few days I puzzled over this riddle, but did not like to enquire too deeply into it. I hoped to find the answer in my own way.

  It was my habit to make sketches of the scenery I thought typified each place I was reporting on. No colour was necessary to depict Shouting Hill, a few lines were enough to bring out its essential qualities. While I was sketching, I noticed some small piles of stones that I could not recall having seen before. Most of them were in out-of-the-way spots. On closer inspection, I found blackish-red leaves under these stones. Only cogon grass grew in Shouting Hill; where had these leaves come from?

  I examined the leaves carefully: they were mostly about ten centimetres long and five centimetres wide. They had clearly been cut to size, and seemed to have been beaten and rubbed by hand. Some of the leaves were slightly thicker than the others, and were moist to the touch, with a fishy odour. Other leaves were extremely dry from the pressure of the rocks and the burning heat of the sun; these were not brittle but very tough, and they too had the same strong salty smell. I had never seen leaves like this before. I wondered what they were used for and decided to ask the villagers.

  The men said, ‘Those are women’s things!’ and refused to say any more.

  The children shook their heads in bewilderment, saying: ‘I don’t know what they are, Mama and Papa say we’re not to touch them.’

  The women simply lowered their heads silently.

  When Niu’er noticed that I was puzzled about the question of these leaves, she said: ‘You’d best ask my granny, she’ll tell you.’ Niu’er’s grandmother was not so very old, but early marriage and childbearing had made her part of the village’s senior generation.

  Her grandmother slowly explained that the leaves were used by women during their periods. When a girl in Shouting Hill had her first period, or a woman had just married into the village, she would be presented with ten of these leaves by her mother or another woman of the older generation. These leaves were gathered from trees very far away. The older women would teach the girls what to do with the leaves. First, each leaf had to be cut to the right size, so that it could be worn inside trousers. Then small holes had to be pricked into the leaves with an awl, to make them more absorbent. The leaves were relatively elastic and their fibres very thick, so they would thicken and swell as they absorbed the blood. In a region where water was so precious, there was no alternative but to press and dry the leaves after each use. A woman would use her ten leaves for her period month after month, even after childbirth. Her leaves would be her only burial goods.

  I exchanged some sanitary towels I had with me for a leaf from Niu’er’s grandmother. My eyes filled with tears as I touched it: how could this coarse leaf, hard even to the hand’s touch, be put in a woman’s tenderest place? It was only then that I realised why the women of Shouting Hill walked with their legs splayed: their thighs had been repeatedly rubbed raw and scarred by the leaves.

  There was another reason for the strange gait of the women in Shouting Hill, which shocked me even more.

  In written Chinese, the word ‘womb’ is made up of the characters
for ‘palace’ and ‘children’. Almost every woman knows that the womb is one of her key organs. But the women in Shouting Hill do not even know what a womb is.

  The doctor who had come with us told me that one of the villagers had asked him to examine his wife, as she had been pregnant many times but never managed to carry a child to full term. With the villager’s special permission, the doctor examined the woman, and was dumbfounded to find that she had a prolapsed womb. The friction and infection of many years had hardened the part of the womb that was hanging outside to cutin, tough as a callus. The doctor simply could not imagine what had caused this. Surprised by his reaction, the woman told him disapprovingly that all the women in Shouting Hill were like this. The doctor asked me to help him confirm this; several days later I confirmed the truth of that woman’s words after much surreptitious observation of the village women as they relieved themselves. Prolapsed wombs were another reason why the women walked with their legs spreadeagled.