by R Yang
With a jerk, the train started to move. Suddenly my heroic heart melted. Tears rushed into my eyes. Around me everybody was crying. On the platform, people ran alongside the train, holding hands. The train gathered speed; hands parted. I wiped the tears from my face. The tears my family and classmates did not see.
(Mother wept at that moment too. Later she confessed this to me in a letter. She would not let anyone see her tears either. "Like mother, like daughter." She was right when she adapted this saying from "like father, like son" to describe us. Mother was a woman who tried to hide her emotions. Me too.)
The train was pulling out of Beijing, my hometown. The gray bungalows receded from my sight, along with willow trees, date trees, ancient tower gates, and city moat ... All were so familiar as if they were parts of my body, parts of my soul. After today, I might never set my eyes on them again. The thought saddened me.
In the future, I knew if I should regret my decision and want to come back, it would be impossible. Like Jing Ke, I had embarked on a journey from which there was no return. The moment I canceled my Beijing hukou (legal residency), I had sealed my fate by giving up the biggest privilege a Chinese could enjoy in those years. Henceforth I would be a rural resident, a peasant. My place was in Hulin county, Heilongjiang province. Years later, after I die, my children and grandchildren would continue to live there. The government saw to it that peasants (over 8o percent of Chinese population) stayed in the countryside so that the state needn't take care of them as it did the urban people.
When I left Beijing, I was aware yet not really aware of the consequences, for I did not think carefully about it. To me as well as to many others, this felt like another free trip that we took at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Singing and laughter soon returned to our carriage. Everyone seemed happy. Only I was a little absent-minded. My thoughts turned back to the conversations I had with my parents the day before.
First, Father called me into his room.
"Rae. Going to the countryside is a revolutionary act. Your mother and I firmly support you!" he said. A declaration of his political stand first of all. Sometimes he does talk like an official.
"In fact, soon we will follow your example and go to the countryside too. We don't know where and when yet. But it has been decided that our college will move to a rural place. It will become a May Seventh Cadre school."
Hearing this, my heart sank. Too bad! In that case I will lose my base in Beijing. In the future I can't even come back for a short home visit. Uprooted! That is what I feel. But of course I can't tell him that.
"Going to May Seventh Cadre school is also a revolutionary act. I firmly support you too."
"Good!" Father said. "So in the future we will all become peasants. So much the better for us! Workers and peasants are honest and frank, unlike scholars who are hypocritical and scheming. Many `have two faces and three knives!' While they flatter you to your face, they stab you in the back. I am fed up with them!" Wait a minute! Father. You and Mother are scholars too. Aren't you? But of course I understand what you mean. You two are different. You are not like them!
"Now listen to me very carefully, Rae," Father continued. "You must remember this: according to my experience in the past, the Party is always correct! Chairman Mao is always correct! You must have faith in the Party and Chairman Mao under all kinds of circumstances. That way you will not make political mistakes. You will not get into trouble ... "
"Yes. Yes. I know, Father. You don't have to tell me that."
But there was something else on his mind. I sensed it. He paused, hesitating. I waited. He looked at the door. It was shut. No one else was home anyway. Yet he lowered his voice as he explained.
"Right now I'm in a lot of trouble. You know. The special-case group is trying very hard to find evidence against me. After you leave, things may get worse. I may get locked up in a cow shed. I may even get arrested. Anything can happen. We ought to prepare for the worst. In the future if someone goes to your farm and tells you your father is a renegade, a spy, or a counterrevolutionary, don't you believe them! I will tell you the truth myself: in my entire history, I was only punished by the Party once. That was when we were in Switzerland, I had an affair with a woman. She was a Chinese. Not a foreigner. I won't tell you her name. It happened around the time Lian was born. A demerit was recorded against me. After that, the woman and I broke up. It was a stain on my history. Only this much was true. Other things people might tell you are all lies. I want you to know and remember this."
Poor Father! In the past he kept up such prestige in front of us three children. Like other fathers in China, he was an authority figure. If he didn't feel danger was imminent, I'm sure he'd never tell me this. Who ever heard of a parent talking about sex with his children? "I had an affair with a woman." How embarrassing! No wonder he chose a time when no one else was home to talk to me. Or did Mother know so she took my brothers out deliberately?
When Mother came back, she talked to me too. That was rare. In my family usually it was Father who did the talking. Mother merely supported him. This time, however, Mother had something of her own to tell me. She came into my room, sat on my bed next to me. First she took off her Swiss watch and gave it to me.
"When you see this watch, it is as if you saw my face. Take good care of it."
"Yes! I promise!" (In 1968, even among students at ioi, few had wristwatches made in China. A Swiss watch for a seventeen-year-old was even more unusual.)
Then Mother said: "I know you have grown up and you have been away from home, but this time it is different. You will be away from us for a very long time. I want you to remember this: in the future if something happens and you don't want to let others know about it, you can tell it to me. You promise me: if you need help you will let me know."
"All right. I promise. But don't you worry. I can take care of myself. Really!"
The talks lingered in my mind for a while. Then they were behind me too. Scattered like the white smoke over the mountains and lakes we had passed. In three days we arrived at the Great Northern Wilderness. At the headquarters of Farm 850, we were picked up by tractors from different production teams. About fifty of us were assigned to the third team. The team was located in a village called Cold Spring, about twenty miles northwest of the farm headquarters.
We set off. It did not take me long to realize that contrary to my expectations there were no mountains and forests in this area. The Great Northern Wilderness was a huge swamp. Part of it had been turned into farmland. From afar the wheat fields were golden; the soybean fields emerald green. The rest was still virgin land, overgrown with grass that was half yellow, half green. The grass was long and slender, up to my waist. It swayed in the wind. Our tractor sailed through it. Wild geese flew up.
Suddenly everybody in the tractor felt like singing. So we all sang at the top of our lungs. Some had nightingale voices. Some had broken gong voices. It doesn't matter. This is the Great Northern Wilderness, not Beijing. No one will laugh at us. No need to be bashful. Our songs rose up to the sky that was so high, so wide. The color of it was almost violet, not light blue. It was very deep and exquisite, and I'd never seen anything like it anywhere else. The sun was shining in the east. A storm hung like a dark curtain in the west. Our new home was so beautiful! I fell in love with it already.
The village we arrived at, however, looked rather drab. No trees. No flowers. No vegetable gardens. Just a number of bungalows spread out like a square battle formation. The dining hall was a bit taller. It stood in the front like a leader. The other bungalows were identical, like a number of foot soldiers. Each bungalow was about eighty feet long, fifteen feet wide. It contained four units. Four doors and four windows opened to the south. No doors or windows on any other sides, because of the severe weather in this region.
Every family in this village got one unit. It made no difference if this was a family of two or a family of six. All were given one unit: a single room and a passageway. The passage
way was narrow and dark, as there was no window in it. It served as the kitchen as well as an intermediate zone between the room and the outside. Coming in from the outside, people had to walk through it to the northern end where another door led to the room.
Unlike the passageway, the room had sunshine from a window. The precious sunshine was made to fall on the kang, a bed made of large earthen bricks, which took up the entire southern half of the room. The kang was actually part of the chimney. When people cooked over the stove in the passageway, the smoke and surplus heat went through the kang first, making it nice and warm to sleep on. In fact, the local families not only slept on the kang, they did almost everything on it. When they had guests, all were cordially invited to sit on the kang to keep warm.
For such an apartment without electricity or running water, a local family paid one yuan and a half for rent each month (the equivalent of U.S.$o.75 at the time). The rent was the same for all families. The income was pretty much the same too. But class struggle continued to exist under socialist conditions. Remembering this teaching from Chairman Mao, the Beijing youths, most of us ex-Red Guards from revolutionary cadres' families, decided that we should inquire into the class struggle situation in the village. Find out who were landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, and other bad elements. These class enemies we must guard against. The poor peasants (that is, people who were poor before land reform), on the other hand, were our teachers. We must learn from them.
I got to know the poor peasants soon. In this village some fifty families belonged to this class. At first, strange to say, they impressed me as quite different from what they should be. My ideas of what they should be came from the newspapers and the few poor peasants who had come to ioi to talk about their hard lives in the old society. They made me believe that poor peasants were very keen on class struggle. Not the poor peasants here! When these people talked to us, they never mentioned "class struggle," "guard against capitalist restoration," "continue the revolution under proletarian dictatorship," "thought reform," and so on. Some occasionally talked about their gratitude to the Party and Chairman Mao, but even that was rare.
Most of the time they were just extraordinarily kind to us. They made sure that our clothes were warm and we had our hats on in the winter. They urged us to sun our bedding frequently so that we would not catch rheumatism, an ailment widespread in this cold and damp region. They taught us to use wula grass to stuff our boots so as to keep our feet warm. They reminded us that we mustn't exert ourselves too much before we got used to farmwork. On things of this nature they talked to us day in and day out.
Above all, I was touched by their generosity. Each time they got something special to eat, mushrooms or dried lilies they had gathered from the plain, noodles and dumplings they made at home, they shared them with us. In those years, the local people hardly had anything good for themselves and their kids to eat. Their chickens and geese had been confiscated in a campaign called Cut the Tails of Capitalism. Their private garden plots had been taken away for the same reason, and the plots soon went to waste.
In winter some villagers went out to hunt. In summer they tried to fish. Most of the time they came back empty-handed. By the late sixties in that area, not much wildlife was left. It was hard for me to imagine that only a decade before people in this area had made the famous ballad:
Nonetheless if the villagers had some luck, got a pheasant or a wild duck, they always sent their kids to fetch some of us from our dormitories. They don't have to do this! Why are they so kind to us? They know as well as we do there's no way we can repay them. When I asked the villagers, they all gave the same answer.
"You Beijing students are used to comfort. You had such good lives in the city. Now you come here, so far away from home, doing this hard labor in the fields. Nothing good to eat. Bitten by those poisonous mosquitoes in the swamp. Aiya! Look at the big swellings on your legs! And the chilblains on your fingers! Your parents' hearts would ache if they should see this! How badly their hearts would ache!"
Such talk I heard over and over again. It made me wonder. Is this the bourgeois fallacy of humanity we've criticized? The one about universal human feelings? If I ran across this kind of talk at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, I wouldn't hesitate to put such a label on it and condemn it because, in my opinion, it overlooked class struggle. And now real peasants, poor peasants, are also talking like this! According to Chairman Mao, they are our teachers. If they feel this way and say such things, then such things must be all right! Who am I to judge them? I am here to learn from them!
Thus thinking I breathed a deep sigh of relief. To tell the truth, I was truly glad that poor peasants here turned out this way rather than being keen on class struggle. Now I could relax and make myself at home on a big, warm kang. Eat whatever people offered me and listen to their stories. Even the stories they told me had a different flavor from the ones I read in newspapers, such as the story that happened right here in this village, about two men, one woman, and a wristwatch.
Back in 1958, a hundred thousand demobilized soldiers came to the Great Northern Wilderness to reclaim the swamp. Among them were two men who were best friends. Both were from Shandong province, where men were famous for their courage and brotherly love. In the past these two veterans had fought side by side in Korea. Now they both worked as tractor drivers at Cold Spring. One man was a few years older. He was married. Soon after he arrived here, his wife joined him from their native village. The younger man was still single.
Then one night while the older man worked on a night shift, an accident happened. His wife died at home from coal gas. Each year in northern China many people die from coal gas fumes. The husband was heartbroken, for he loved his wife very much. He felt especially bad when he thought that in the past his wife had asked him for a wristwatch, not once or twice, but many times. Yet until she died they had not saved enough money to buy one for her. (At the time a good Chinese wristwatch cost over a hundred yuan-a big luxury for a farmworker, whose monthly wages were either thirty-two or thirty-six yuan. Few in the village could afford watches.) Now his wife had died. The man decided to give her a good wristwatch as a parting gift.
So he borrowed money, bought the watch, and put it on the wrist of his dead wife while nobody was watching. Later she was put into a cof fin with a pillow and a quilt. As it was the dead of winter, the ground was frozen solid several feet deep, and people in this region were unable to bury their dead until spring. The co-workers of the husband nailed down the lid of the coffin, carried it to a place called Little Southern Hill about a mile south of the village, and left it there for the time being.
That night the younger man came to console his "older brother" and the two drank baijiu together (strong liquor distilled from fermented wheat or sorghum). After they finished a bottle or two, the older man opened his heart to his best friend. He poured out his grief by tears and by words, and these led eventually to the wristwatch. Afterwards he fell asleep. But the young man could not close his eyes. It turned out that he too wanted a wristwatch but did not have enough money to buy one. So he thought of taking the watch from the coffin. But immediately he blamed himself: his "brother" had trusted him with a secret. Now he was thinking of stealing from him. How could he be so base? ...
Thus for half a night, the young man tossed and turned on the kang. After midnight, he made up his mind. He got up, took a few tools, and went straight to Little Southern Hill. As he worked on the coffin, he pleaded to the dead woman inside.
"Sister-in-law! Please forgive me! You are dead already. What use do you have for a wristwatch? Please let me have it. I really need it. I will burn paper money for you. Lots and lots of it. You might be able to use it in the nether world . . .
Thus saying, he opened up the coffin. There he saw the woman. Her face was as white as a sheet of paper. But her eyes were wide open! Suddenly she sat up in the coffin! She stretched out her arm. In her hand, there was the wristwatch, glistening in th
e cold moonlight.
"Here's the watch. Take it!" she said.
The young man was so frightened that he passed out on the spot. The woman ran back to the village. In fact, she had not really died the day before, as people believed. There was no doctor in the village and she just looked as if she were dead. But the fresh air at Little Southern Hill gradually revived her as she lay in the coffin. Then the young man came. Lucky for her! For otherwise she would have been frozen to death that night. It was forty degrees below zero out there.
When she got home, she woke up her husband and told him what had happened. The husband quickly ran to Little Southern Hill, where he found the "brother" still lying on the ground. He carried him back.
The young man, when he woke up, was terribly ashamed of himself. He apologized to the couple and begged them to forgive him. He called himself all kinds of names. But the couple only thanked him. They insisted that the young man accept the watch as a token of their gratitude. The young man refused flatly, blushing until his neck was the color of pig liver. But in the end, he had to obey his "older brother" and he accepted the watch. Henceforth they continued to be best friends and lived happily ever after.
Although people here loved to tell this story, when I asked them if they had met these people, they said no. "The first group of veterans left after Farm 850 was established. They went out to the frontier to set up new farms." After they left, new people came. They were the brothers, sisters, cousins, fellow villagers of the veterans. They came from all over China, the heavily populated areas in particular, such as Shandong and Sichuan.
When the newcomers arrived, they became farmworkers. That meant they were no longer ordinary peasants but state employees who would earn thirty-two yuan a month no matter what. An iron rice bowl! This made them so happy that they stayed, despite the bitterly cold winters, the fierce mosquitoes, the rheumatism, the fatal local disease called Hulin fever ... The iron rice bowl was more important than all of these put together.