The Remote Country of Women

by Hua Bai

  had I ever done? Aside from those endless troubles imposed on me, had I ever accomplished anything of my own accord?

  Was there a small space or a shred of time I could call my own? What should I even think about all this? Thinking

  always leads to a political judgment about right or wrong or to self-reproach, regret, shock, and depression. With a sudden turn of my body, I dropped my face on the soft, dry

  straw and fell asleep.

  The public-address system of the farm was calling for

  “great unity, a great confederation of factions.” Now my experience revealed its disguised message: now both the

  central leadership and the grassroots units were being torn by serious differences of opinion. Following Lin Biao’s death in a plane crash, the entire nation had launched a campaign to criticize him. The propagandists, racking their brains, dug out all sorts of evidence to prove Lin Biao’s long-hidden, wolfish ambitions, as though they had predicted both his plot to seize power and his death. Then criticizing Lin Biao alone became too monotonous, so they dragged Confucius in to play the role of Lin’s henchman. It seemed odd that Confucius, who had lived over two thousand years ago, could be involved in Lin Biao’s treason. But it was said that, after Lin Biao’s plane crashed, many scrolls with the words Restrain oneself in expectation of the restoration were discovered hanging in his residence. It seemed that through his whole life Confucius had said only one unpardonable sentence:

  “Restrain oneself in expectation of the restoration,” and that he had said it for the sole purpose of teaching Lin Biao how to seize power. Hence, Confucius became the chief schemer in the abortive coup d’état that had occurred in China

  between summer and autumn of 1971. Facing wave on wave

  of such filthy noise, I could only sleep to shut off my thinking. Fortunately, the coup d’état was a court intrigue that had no need of us monkeys to make havoc in the heavenly

  palaces. Right at this moment of my spiritual nadir, a beau-1 7

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  tiful girl was coming toward me with an empty knitted bag in her hand. For fear that she was a mere phantom, I rubbed my eyes: no, she was real.

  Our first meeting was like a scene out of a pastoral

  romance. I, a cowherd of about thirty, had chanced on some good luck. Whether my courage came from long sexual

  starvation or was simply given to me by fate, I was bold enough to sit up on my grassy bed and call out to her, “Hi there. Come and sit by me for a while.”

  She narrowed her eyes and smiled sweetly, looking even

  lovelier with her nose wrinkled. Her pair of liberation shoes turned to point at me. Then she sat down beside me, as

  though she were my sister. It was the first time in my life that I had sat so close to a member of the opposite sex

  (except as a toddler, of course). I felt a bit uneasy. I pulled myself up in order to improve my appearance and posture; my bones, it seemed, had collapsed two years before.

  Noticing my efforts, she tweaked my nose with her fin-

  gers. “Quit showing off!”

  What? Such a fresh vocabulary. To a dropout from the

  political arena like me, her words sounded particularly

  human. It had been a long time since I had heard so human a phrase. I came alive again. The many meanings of her

  words left me with a feeling of infinite sweetness. And the smoothness with which she had tweaked my nose lingered

  for a long time.

  From our chat I learned that she was no country girl but the “Thousand Pieces of Gold” daughter of the former deputy mayor Fang. Her father had been seized as a capitalist roader in 1966. After repeated criticisms, he had been sent to a cadre school for reform. His cadre school adjoined my farm. Each month the daughter, Fang Yunqian, came to see her father, a deputy mayor in the past but a good-for-nothing today. She brought him only some poor cigarettes and coarse cookies because anything good would be forfeited. A dog never changes its nature; how could a capitalist roader 1 8

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  be allowed to enjoy comfort? Her mother had died when

  Fang Yunqian was five. Her stepmother was very young,

  and at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution she had

  declared herself a rebel and abandoned her family. At the criticism meeting she had mercilessly exposed the counterrevolutionary words and deeds of her husband and

  impressed the city as a woman warrior with a firm proletarian stand.

  Strange – why hadn’t I met her until today, when there

  had been scores of chances over the past twenty months?

  The field path, serpentine and long, had brought her to me at last.

  She had been living on her own since she was thirteen.

  Although she had a brother, he had been sent to faraway

  Xinjiang. She was the only one left to guard their barracks –

  a three-room apartment, allotted housing for Deputy Mayor Fang after he had been driven out of the exclusive villa for senior officials. She went neither to school nor to work. No rebel organization would bother to take her on, and she

  didn’t want to depend on any rebel organizations, nor on the official leadership. So she hid in the apartment like a mouse and went out shopping only before daybreak. She not only had learned how to cook for herself but had also assembled a private collection of classical novels, model operas, cooking recipes, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and even a copy of The Art of Healthy Sex, which had been a rare book even before the Cultural Revolution. According to her, she had picked up all these books from outside the walls of the academic authorities like a scavenging mouse at night. Some of them had tumbled into the ditches and escaped their fate of being burned.

  She told me of her treasure at our very first meeting. I don’t know what gave me the charm to make her trust me at first sight. Her language and logic were entirely different from mine. Her mind was barren of any political concep-tions. Her kind of thinking was utterly impossible to find 1 9

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  in China at that time. She seemed to have been living in another world, where she had found the freedom of an insect in a cocoon – a freedom millions of other Chinese, along with myself, were unable to enjoy. I adored her. Once I had been a revolutionary hero who believed, “If we do not run the affairs of the world, who else can run them?” Today I not only admired her insect’s freedom but was anxious to gain it myself. The radical change in me could be described by the poetic line, “The reversal of heaven and earth creates great elation.” When I told her eagerly that I wanted to retreat into her cocoon, she laughed and gave no answer.

  She looked at me as if I were a water buffalo covered with mud. Her eyes slowly grew larger; in them I saw something wrong with myself, and I started breathing faster. I wanted to escape from this strained situation, yet my limbs refused to obey me. Giggling aloud, she covered her mouth and

  jumped with mirth. I sank back onto the straw, feeling

  awkward and disappointed. What a shame. I felt like a thief caught in the act.

  “Bye bye.” Waving her bag at me, she left. When she got

  near the highway, she cupped her palms into a trumpet and shouted, “Will we meet again?”

  Only now did God restore my strength. Cracking my

  whip, I shouted with the strength of a baby sucking its

  mother’s milk, “Wait – for – me!”

  Luckily I had memorized her address – street and number

  – while we chatted. Thank God! The moment the word God slipped from my mouth – from the mouth of a former Red

  Guard, mind you – my cerebral machinery started running.

  I had to think of a way to leave the farm and see her in the city. Zhuge Liang had passed away in a.d. 234. Had he been my grandfather, he would still be just as usele
ss to me now.

  A man’s imagination soars in such hopeless situations.

  Ancient Chinese in desperate straits always produced beautiful poetry and prose. Modern Chinese – take me, for example – have not a shred of literary talent. Pragmatically I 2 0

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  thought of Zhuge Liang of more than seventeen hundred

  years ago, hoping he could give me wise counsel. But soon I reined in the blind galloping horses of my brain and the flames of romance died out.

  What could I do? Ask for a furlough on account of a fam-

  ily emergency? Pity I hadn’t enough material to weave even one lie. My family in the far north had perished in both name and reality. In the first year of the Cultural Revolution, while I was swelling infinitely between heaven and earth, my parents had shut the windows, turned on the gas and killed themselves. On hearing of their deaths, not only did I feel no sorrow, but I made an extremely fashionable wisecrack: their death weighed as light as a feather on me. A pair of bookworms, who knew nothing but how to bore into a heap of musty papers, had drowned in the rolling currents of revolution. My witty remarks won thunderous applause

  from the Red Guards.

  Several years after their deaths, qualms of conscience

  arose with my disappointment. A belated but ever-deepen-

  ing grief tortured me, like the hairshirt of an ascetic monk.

  Late at night I would crawl out onto the frozen lake to punish my heartlessness. Now, even if I viewed things from a purely pragmatic angle, I could use a family. Only then

  could I receive phony telegrams with messages such as

  “Father dying.” If only they had survived and not died

  together, if they had still been alive, then they could die one at a time, so that I could use their deaths as an excuse to crawl out of this hell not just once, but twice.

  In the little notebooks of the PLA representative on the farm, my name was surrounded by a cluster of question

  marks. Although I had made many sarcastic political

  remarks, they were clever net grazers and could not really be nailed down as counterrevolutionary. However, I had not

  performed any good deeds, such as informing on somebody, confessing the simmering slanders hidden in my heart

  against a certain political VIP or disclosing his secret 2 1

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  crimes. Of course, there were other ways to build a good record. For example, you might have a heroic diary written beforehand. After setting a civilian house on fire, you could shout at the top of your lungs, “Long live Chairman Mao!”

  and jump into the flames to save the house. Or in the dead of night, jumping naked out of your warm quilt, you might cry hysterically, “Stop the class enemy!” and dash out of the room. Then you might use a spade to hurt yourself and produce a horrifying wound. You would then fall to the ground as if dying. When the rescuers came, you would groan in

  pain, “Don’t worry about me. Go catch the enemy first!”

  All these ploys were above my abilities. I was no actor.

  Even if threatened with death, I could not walk from the backstage area, where a normal person could still adapt

  himself, to the glaring lights of center stage. Moreover, I was terribly afraid of pain.

  If I tried to ask for a leave, my request would be abso-

  lutely refused. “I want to buy some daily necessities in town.” “Okay, write a shopping list, and we’ll ask somebody to get them for you.” “I need to have my watch repaired.”

  “Whoever’s going downtown on business can take it to the repair shop.” “I want to have a look around town.” “What?

  You are unwilling to devote all of yourself to labor reform?”

  Whatever reasons I fabricated would be refuted. They

  might even accuse me of “establishing counterrevolutionary connections.”

  Let’s back up: Supposing they permitted me to go to the

  city, they would definitely send a good student to watch me, and this would not be much different from being followed by the KGB. The good student would record every word I

  said and every subtle expression of my face minutely in his secret book and then produce a profound analysis associat-ing my behavior with the current situation of class struggle in society. His report to the leadership would doom me for certain. My remaining days on the farm would become even more productive. No. I must get rid of all these romantic 2 2

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  illusions. What I needed was solid scientific experimentation. Right, I should ask for sick leave! I selected the farm clinic as my target, although I knew it was a tough stronghold.

  There were two doctors in our clinic, one male and one

  female. The male doctor, a worldly-wise old hand in Chinese medicine, was surnamed Yu and called Shouchen. He was

  once a country charlatan, living on folk prescriptions and herbal pharmacy. More recently, because he had gained a

  secret prescription for gynecological diseases, he was

  retained as family doctor by an important bureaucrat. After liberation he had practiced traditional Chinese medicine in district hospitals. Since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he had been repeatedly criticized, the thin hair on his head had been completely plucked out by Red Guards,

  and he had cursed himself as worse than a pig or a dog. As a reward for such ruthless self-treatment, he was permitted to reform himself in the clinic. Every time he gained a generous amnesty like this, he kowtowed with extravagant words and tears. If in the past hunger and poverty had reduced him to the level of a dog, now fear was turning him into a wolf. He was on guard against every patient coming to see him. He put his hand around your wrist not to feel your

  pulse but to try to figure out what tricks you were playing in order to escape criticism and labor reform. When you

  stuck out your tongue, he did not even look at its coating but fastened his eyes on yours to gauge your mental disease, so that he could prescribe accordingly.

  Nevertheless, I doubted Yu Shouchen had been born

  mean. A seed blossoms or grows thorny according to its spe-cific environment. Perfect men, who are neither corrupted by luxury nor yield to power nor collapse under poverty, are a rarity. Take my case, for example: I was no perfect man.

  Pretending to be sick is cheating, isn’t it? I admit I was cheating, but I couldn’t feel ashamed of it. I was merely a pitiful, helpless being who was driven to cheat, and my

  2 3

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  cheating inflicted no harm on anybody; Lin Biao’s cheating was spurred by his ambition – he was a snake trying to swallow an elephant – and his cheating had drawn thousands of people with him down into the abyss. Compared with Lin

  Biao’s, my cheating was really nothing. This comparison

  cleared my conscience, and I started to play my tricks in a well-planned strategy.

  Now let’s turn to the female doctor: she was nearly forty.

  The fact that her husband had made her bear three daugh-

  ters without loving her was enough to account for her neu-rosis. She considered every young and pretty female to be her enemy. In order to nip evil in the bud she would label any female a threat who gave her husband a lingering glance (that is, one that violated the three-second rule in basketball) and would punish her. She would even concoct evi-

  dence against her and report her to the PLA representative as a class enemy. She could not rest until her potential rival was punished with either political or physical death. Her husband was a manager in charge of the students’ daily

  necessities on the farm. Each month, when he distributed sanitary napkins to the female students, she would volunteer to give him a hand. Her tigress stares sent chills down everyone’s spine.

  She u
nderstood perfectly well that her despotism over her husband was made possible by China’s current political situation. She had collected both the examples of her husband’s transgressions and the words to be used as evidence against him, and she herself would be a round-the-clock witness

  to his crimes. Even without such evidence, a wife who appeared in court (but at that time there was no official court, and the office of anyone in power could be used as a court-room) against a political criminal played the multiple role of prosecutor, star witness, evidence, and lawyer.

  This powerful lady was known as Liu Tiemei (Iron

  Plum). In her clinic, besides two doctors, there were two nurses, both selected from the countryside. The two nurses 2 4

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  were descended from decent roots. Their ancestral line consisted of three generations of poor peasants, and none of their blood or non-blood relatives were in the ranks of the Five Bad Elements – landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, criminals, or rightists. And, being illiterate, they were certainly purer and more dependable than those girl students. On the walls of their simple and crude clinic were nothing but color portraits of Chairman Mao with various facial expressions, in various uniforms, and in various revolutionary periods. On the wall immediately behind

  Doctor Yu Shouchen’s chair there hung an eye-catching slogan: Medical treatment should serve the needs of class struggle.

  The slogan seemed to say that, once you were denounced

  as a class enemy, medical art would not try to save you from death; it might even help you toward it. The slogan made any patient shudder.

  This was the type of stronghold I was going to conquer. I had been a student of fine arts. Although I knew nothing about medicine, I seemed destined to study anatomy. Nevertheless, the day after I got my textbook on anatomy, the central party committee issued the document of May 16 to launch the great Cultural Revolution, and all my books

  were sacrificed to the fire god. Now I wished I had some knowledge of medicine. We had a genius on our farm –

  whenever he fainted, pretending to be sick, no one could detect the truth. But I dared not ask him for help. If I did, it would be not be much different from turning myself in. In fact, turning oneself in was less horrible than that. If you turned yourself in at the right moment, you could easily become a model confessor and receive clemency. Then you