Spider Eaters: A Memoir

by R Yang

  But was the iron rice bowl really made of iron? The answer was "not really." Under certain circumstances, the iron rice bowl could be broken, or maybe I should say taken away.

  I say this because in E959 when famine hit China, all female farmworkers in the Great Northern Wilderness were ordered to quit their jobs so as to "alleviate the burden of the country." At that time they were told that as soon as the crisis was over, they would be taken back on the payroll. So they consented. Nobody had a choice anyway, that is, if she was a woman. Next year the famine continued. Then by and by the situation got better, but the women were never taken back. (It turned out that they were considered a burden by the leaders and the famine was just a good opportunity to dump them.) So the women's status eventually changed from state employees to jiashu (dependents). As "dependents" they were hired as temporary workers. They continued to do the same work, but their wages dropped to z8 yuan a month. In addition they lost free health care, paid sick and maternity leave, old age pensions, and any hope for a pay raise. As a result, the women (their number totaled more than a hundred thousand in the region) were very angry at the local leaders when we arrived.

  Aside from the women, another group of people called manghu (unplanned influxes) had status lower than that of a regular farmworker. These were peasants who fled their native places during the famine. When they first came to the Great Northern Wilderness, they were hired as temporary laborers. They earned minimum daily wages that were even lower than the women's. But even so, they were grateful. At least they were not starving. That was enough.

  A couple of years later, the famine was over and the mangliu were able to obtain their hukou from their native places. The male mangliu were taken on as farmworkers and the female ones became "dependents." They too settled down here. About one-third of the families at Cold Spring were originally mangliu.

  Huar, whose name means flower, was from such a family. She was a year younger than me, sixteen when we first met, but was already an excellent farmhand. Strong and dexterous, she bent down to cut wheat with a sharp small sickle. From right to left, from right to left ... The motion was rhythmic and effortless. Like a gust of wind. At first it seemed impossible for any of us to keep up with her.

  In three months, however, I got my body into much better shape. So when it was time to cut soybeans, I clenched my teeth and followed her step after step. In four hours we reached the end of a very long ridge almost at the same time. Huar smiled at me as she straightened her back and wiped the sweat from her forehead. I managed a smile even though my back felt as if it had broken into eighteen pieces. From then on, we worked side by side in the fields. We became good friends.

  As a friend, I visited Huar at home quite frequently. I liked everybody in her family. Her father, Old Ji, was a first-rate farmhand and a skilled stonemason. Her mother, whom I called Ji Daniang, was illiterate but extremely kind. They were both poor peasants in the old society. Her younger brother was just a child at the time.

  Later I heard from the villagers that Old Ji used to be the Party secretary in his native village in Shandong province. I could not believe this! Party membership in 1968 was a great honor. I had dreamed about it many times, but I knew that I was not good enough. As for Party secretary-wow, that was the number-one leader in the village! How could this Old Ji give all that up to be a mangliu in the Great Northern Wilderness? Why would anyone want to do such a thing?

  So I asked Huar. At first, she did not want to answer my questions. But I insisted and since we were friends she told me eventually that during the famine many people in her native village starved to death. These included her grandmother, a little aunt, and her cousins. They died after they had eaten all the seeds for the next spring, and the old dog, and the little cat. They peeled off tree bark and ate it. The trees died. They dug up grass roots and ate them too. After that, those who were still alive fled the area, despite orders from the higher-ups that they should not do so. Party secretary as well as ordinary peasants, anyone who wanted to live had to "flee the famine." So they came to the Great Northern Wilderness where they had things to eat.

  This was even more difficult for me to believe! Actually it made me lose sleep. For up till then I had never doubted what the Party told us in government documents and official newspapers: "During the famine not a single person died of starvation in China. This itself is a great victory . . . " My parents and others who lived in Beijing believed it too. But now I was told that many people starved to death in Huar's native village, including members of her own family! Somebody had to be lying. Was it the Party or Huar? I did not dare press the question any further.

  Yet somehow in my heart of hearts I knew that Huar did not lie to me. Her parents were not landlords, but poor peasants. Chairman Mao said: "Educated youths go to the countryside to receive reeducation from the poor and lower-middle peasants, this is very necessary." So this was what I learned from them: the Party had told us a big lie!

  There was another story Huar did not want to tell me at first. "Don't go to Little Southern Hill by yourself at night. There is a ghost out there," she said to me once.

  "A ghost? How come?"

  "A young man died and was buried there. People say he haunts the place."

  "Really? What does he do?"

  "Oh, forget it! My parents told me never to talk about him."

  I could see she was scared. That made me even more curious. So I begged her to tell me about him.

  "No! I am afraid of the ghost!"

  "Come on! There is no such thing as ghosts! Just tell me who he was."

  "But talking about a ghost is bad luck. It'll come to you because you talked about it."

  "Don't worry. Since it's me who asked you to talk about it, it will come to me. If it ever comes. All right? Now you can tell me about him."

  "Well. He was a criminal. A Rightist or a burglar, I'm not sure which. A few years ago there were many of them in this area. We called them lao gai fan (reform-through-labor criminals). The guards did not let us get close to them."

  "Yes. Yes. Then what?"

  "Well. In the corn field one day in summer, this young man made the guards angry. Talked back to them or did not do the job right, something like that. So they tied him up, hands and feet, and left him to burn in the sun at the far end of the field to punish him. The other lao gai fan had lunch. Then they worked their way back, weeding the field. When they finished the long ridge, the sun set. They came back to the village to have supper. The guards came back too, watching the criminals. They forgot the young man completely.

  "The next morning, the guards remembered him when they counted the criminals and found that he was missing. They went back to where they had left him to check up on him. They found him there all right. But he was dead already. Bitten to death by mosquitoes during the night. He was a mess, they said. No children were allowed to go and look at him. They buried him right away. A couple of years later, they all left. Guards and lao gai fan. Now nobody knows exactly where they buried him. Just somewhere near Little Southern Hill. There he became a ghost and he haunts the place. Some swore they heard him cry at night. So we don't talk about him. Don't let my parents know I told you this."

  A man bitten to death by mosquitoes? To those who have not been to the Great Northern Wilderness, this may sound like tales from the Arabian Nights. But when I heard the story, I had been there a few months. I shuddered at the thought and fell silent.

  The mosquitoes in the Great Northern Wilderness were in my opinion a different species from those gentle and delicate creatures I had known in Beijing. Gigantic. Black. Savage. Bloodthirsty. They were born and bred by the millions in this huge swamp. By daytime, they were less active. But even so they had bitten me through thick blue-jean working clothes and the result was swellings the size of dried apricots that did not go away for at least a week. No wonder the local people said the mosquitoes here were poisonous.

  In summer and fall, occasionally we came back from the fields late. A
fter sunset, running and with both hands free, blue-jean clothes cov ering my body and a nylon scarf wrapped around my head, I still could not defend myself against the assault made by those ferocious creatures. Hundreds of them moved in the air, like patches of black clouds, chasing me. They sounded like the Japanese bombers in World War II movies.

  And this young man, just think, tied hand and foot. Left on the edge of the swamp. After sunset and throughout the night. Alone. Forgotten. At the mercy of those deadly mosquitoes. Though in the past I'd fantasized about torture and painful deaths, such an idea horrifies me!

  What could he do in such a situation? Roll on the ground? That would only make it worse. He'd sweat, and the smell would attract more mosquitoes. Yell? Curse? Plead? Pray? Nothing helped. All human beings had forgotten him. Heaven and earth were deaf and dumb. Perhaps the only thing he could do was to weep. Weep because of the agony. Weep because be knew he was doomed.

  Before he died, perhaps he called out to those he loved? Parents? Wife? Children? Did they hear him in their dreams? Were they awakened by nightmares? Or maybe they too forgot him? Drew a clear line between themselves and a criminal, like Shenshen did to Second Uncle? No one deserves to die like that! Not even a Rightist! Not even a murderer!

  So perhaps the local people are right. This man has become a ghost. Because of the great wrong that was done to him, he could not rest in peace. He continues to weep, to howl, and to haunt the place. Is he looking for a substitute? Is he trying to avenge himself? But on whom? The mosquitoes? The guards? Those who sent him here? The friends who betrayed him? The colleagues who denounced him? The family members who abandoned him? This young man was a criminal, not a hero. But like the hero, he'd embarked on a journey from which he did not return. I feel so sad. I am sorry for him ... Bourgeois fallacy of humanity ... A human being made of flesh and blood ... I'd better not think about it anymore. It seems my thoughts are running out of control. Am I possessed by this ghost?

  17

  In a Village, Think, Feel, and Be a Peasant

  Seventeen years after the campaign of educated youths going to the countryside ended, many are still bitter about it. "A big mistake," they label the campaign that lasted more than a decade and involved twenty million young people. Or they say, "A tremendous waste." I agree with them. Yet I disagree. Lao Tzu, the ancient philosopher, says: "Good fortune breeds disasters. Misfortune ushers in well-being." Sometime after I came to America, my anger toward the campaign died down and I began to feel lucky that I had been to the countryside.

  I don't mean that I have much use for the skills I learned on the farm: castrating piglets, building a good kang or a fire wall, winnowing grains with a wooden spade, cutting soybean with a small sickle ... But knowing that I did all these and did them well somehow gives me a safe feeling at the bottom of my heart. I do not lose sleep over my tenure evaluation, for example, because I know that I am not just a professor. I was a peasant and a worker. Today if I cannot make a living with my brain and my pen, I will support myself and my son with my muscles and bones.

  In addition, the Great Northern Wilderness taught me how to live on a low budget. So nowadays I don't have to spend all my time making that extra money I won't need. This, to some extent, enabled me to do the things I really wanted to do, such as majoring in literature and writing this story. Otherwise the thought that I was alone in a foreign country where there is no iron rice bowl might have driven me to take up projects and careers that do not interest me.

  I could not, of course, foresee all this in 1968. Yet I was grateful to the Great Northern Wilderness. For something else. It cured my insomnia. Two months after I arrived on Farm 850, I could take a nap when there were only five minutes left before the lunch break was over, in a small dormitory room where nine other people were doing all kinds of things: listening to radios, washing clothes, talking, singing, sharpening sickles on whetstones ... In the wink of an eye, I was asleep. It was nothing short of a miracle, and hard physical labor was the only medicine I took. A big dose of it.

  During summer in the Great Northern Wilderness, the day was very long. Daybreak was at three o'clock. Lunch at eleven. (In China, everyone everywhere uses Beijing time. So in the northeast people eat lunch at eleven and in the northwest, depending on where they are, at two or three.) Sunset was after eight. During the wheat harvest, we got up at five o'clock each day, seven days a week. An hour later we were already working in the fields. Lunch break was short. To save time they often carried the food out and we ate at the end of the field. After lunch, we continued to work till shortly before sunset.

  After supper, if some work had piled up on the threshing ground, we would rush it in the evening. First we had to light huge bonfires along the windward edge of the threshing ground and throw wet grass on top of them to produce volumes of thick smoke to drive away the mosquitoes. Then the whole village came out and worked till almost midnight.

  Thanks to such a rigorous schedule, my problem was soon reversed. Falling asleep was easy but getting up in the morning required a great deal of willpower. No complaints from me. Everybody on the farm had a hard time getting up in the morning. I considered myself perfectly normal.

  While I was cured of insomnia, a young woman who slept next to me was captured by a strange illness. One night we found that she was "dream-wandering." At first we did not think it was serious. We were a little alarmed, simply because we had heard a story in which a sleepwalker chops up people's heads in the middle of the night saying, "The watermelons in this field are ripe." That was pretty much all we knew about this disease. Would Cao, this roommate of ours, do this to us? Of course, she did not.

  When Cao was told that she had walked in her sleep, she sat down on our big bed, was silent for a while, then her tears fell. It was sad to see her cry like that. I wished I could do something to help her. Ever since we were assigned to sleep next to each other, she had been very kind to me, like a tolerant older sister. I liked her and I trusted her, partly because she was from the same big yard where I grew up. On top of that, she was from ioi too. But unlike my other schoolmates, she was not aggressive at all. Now I could see that she was scared, more so than all of us.

  On the farm there was no doctor who knew how to deal with this ill ness. So the leaders resorted to an old trick: they transferred her to a production team that was very far from ours. Maybe they wished that in the move she would be able to leave the illness behind like a piece of old clothing? But the idea did not work. By the time the soybean harvest was over, we heard that Cao's condition had worsened. So four of us jumped into a tractor and we drove in the snow for a whole day to see her.

  When we entered Cao's dormitory room, we saw her sitting alone in a dark corner. Her face turned to the wall. We called her. She did not move. We called her again. Eventually she turned round. In less than three months, she had become all skin and bones. Worse still, at first she did not seem to recognize any of us. After a while, she burst out: "I confess! I have opposed Chairman Mao! I am guilty! I deserve to die! I deserve ten thousand deaths! ... "

  What talk is this? What nonsense! She must have lost her mind! Out here, she has no friends, no schoolmates. Everybody is a stranger. She's ill and she's got that kind of illness! Why did the leaders ... Frustrated and frightened, we began to cry. Cao was the only one who did not cry. She stared at us. Her eyes were very large, very strange. They were neither glad nor sad. The next day we left. Then we wrote to her parents. Later we heard that her parents came and took her back to their May Seventh Cadre school in Shandong province. This instance proved that the Great Northern Wilderness was not for everybody. Only those who were strong, mentally and physically, could survive it.

  Cao and those like her who perished here were, in my opinion, a minority. We were the majority. We were the mainstream. As the slogan put it, "Growing healthily in the wide world of the countryside." I knew I was. No doubt about it. Yet I was not so healthy, because of a new problem: in the first three or four months, I
was unable to eat a breakfast large enough to keep me going for a whole morning.

  In my family we had always gone to bed late, gotten up late, and had little or no breakfast. Only after I got to the farm did I realize how important breakfast was. That is, if I did not eat at least two big steamed buns in the morning, by nine o'clock I was very hungry. After ten, I was like a tractor running out of fuel. My hands and feet turned icy cold on a hot summer day. Xuhan (sweat of weakness) soaked my clothes. Sometimes I suddenly felt dizzy and was short of breath. In that case I had to sit down and hold my head between my knees for awhile to keep from fainting.

  I knew and dreaded the consequences, but after I forced myself out of bed at five I had no appetite. The steamed bun went round and round in my mouth. It simply would not go down my throat. In the meantime, others had finished two or three, and some even four big buns. For this I hated my own body, which would not listen to reason! I swore to conquer it. REFORM! I must reform myself into a new being. Just to think and feel like a peasant-that's not enough. I want to BE a real peasant!

  So in the next few months I battled against my own body. Pushed it to the limit and went beyond. When I was exhausted, imagining myself to be a wheelbarrow helped a bit. "As long as the wheelbarrow does not fall apart, push it! Press on!" Which hero said this? It doesn't matter who said it. It makes sense. If my bones haven't fallen apart, if I still have one ounce of strength left in my body, if I'm still breathing, I will keep up with the others. I won't fall behind!

  So I went on working, as fast as I could. All this while a big voice cried out from the bottom of my heart: How I wish I could drop to the ground this very instant! Drop like a sack of wheat! Stay there for ever and ever! Never get up again! Physical labor had indeed purified my mind. It drove all my thoughts away except this one. But this thought is wrong! I mustn't indulge in it! It's bad for the morale.