Spider Eaters: A Memoir

by R Yang

  At the age of seventeen, I was not so ignorant about politics. I knew that I had been made into an example. Now my fate depended to a large extent on how others would take this. If they would see it the same way as I did, all was not lost yet. Or else, I was doomed.

  Thus thinking I got back to the dormitory. As soon as I came in, I threw myself on our big bed and cried my eyes out. My roommates were alarmed. They asked why and I told them what had happened. They took it very seriously. Soon a small group of Beijing youths gathered in our room. This was the think-tank, so to speak. The assembly concluded that Zhao had launched an offensive. The target was not just me, but all of us. If we let him get an inch, next time he'd take a yard. Lucky for me that my fellow educated youths were not so ignorant about politics either.

  In fact, many of them were especially exasperated when they heard that Zhao was trying to change our family backgrounds by adding the class status of our grandparents. That was the Achilles' heel for many high-ranking officials' children.

  "According to Zhao's theory, Chairman Mao's children would be from a rich peasant's family, and if Premier Zhou Enlai had children, they would be considered children of a capitalist! How absurd! This ingenious invention of Zhao's will get black and white all mixed up!"

  So my fellow Beijing youths took united action. They talked and protested to all leaders in the village, demanding clear-cut answers about the nature of my mistake and a clarification of their stand on our family backgrounds. And if the leaders failed to respond in a timely fashion, the Beijing youths threatened to take the issues to higher authorities.

  In a few days, Zhao backed down. At the next meeting he announced that the mistake I made was a slip of the pen, not intentional. As for our family backgrounds, they would remain unchanged. Aside from our solidarity, what explained the victory was a new political campaign that was gathering force on the horizon at the moment. Under such circumstances, Zhao did not want to make new enemies, knowing that he had gotten enough old ones to deal with in the village.

  So I was lucky. Really lucky! What a narrow escape! Actually I knew it was not luck but my fellow Beijing youths I ought to thank. As for the villagers, throughout the incident they remained silent like a mountain. I was not sure of their stand until a couple of weeks later.

  By that time, the farm headquarters issued a document requiring all its subordinate production teams to choose an activist who studied Chairman Mao's works well. This person would attend a meeting and then talk about his or her success story at various places. Moreover, the document said that the activist must be elected by anonymous votes. Thus the whole village gathered in the dining hall. One person, one vote. Cadres, farmworkers, "dependents," and educated youths, all were the same. The names of several candidates were written on a blackboard. My name was among them.

  In a while, all had cast their votes. Subsequently two people were chosen to "sing" them, while another marked the results on the blackboard. With each vote, he would add a stroke to the Chinese character zheng under the person's name. Zheng is a square character of five strokes, which means upright and aboveboard.

  As soon as this started, I heard my name "sung" again and again. By and by the dining hall grew quiet. Chitchatting subsided. All pricked up their ears. Something was going on. People's eyes began to shine in the dark. I got so many votes! My name echoed in the hall. It was like a gust of spring wind, whispering a secret message. Those who were present got the message, whether they liked it or not. The ice started to melt and the earth began to thaw. Many hearts blossomed. A few drooped. In the end, I had a landslide victory, which was a silent show of force by the villagers against Zhao and his group. His days as the local emperor were numbered.

  Sure enough, during the next campaign, whatever it was, I don't even remember the name, Zhao was dragged down from his throne. Lost his official position and for the next three years it was his turn to labor under surveillance by the revolutionary people. One of his crimes was the persecution of educated youths and another, sabotage to the movement of students going to the countryside.

  While others in the village were struggling against Zhao, I was touring places along the beautiful Wusuli River, talking about my success story and being treated as a hero. Was I glad that things turned out this way? Of course I was! Did I want to be chosen by history or destiny to play such a hero again? Never!

  Actually throughout the incident I knew that I was no hero. The way I saw it, I was a helpless puppet. A puppet has no thoughts and feelings though, while I knew the dangers full well. I was scared to death. If riding a roller coaster is scary, such a political game in China is ten times worse. For on a roller coaster at least I know which way I am heading and chances are I'll get off it safe and sound. In a political struggle, there's no such guarantee. Over the years many people were crushed and their families fell apart. The truth is, by that time I was really tired of political struggles. I vowed that in the future I would try even harder to stay away from them. Always double-check every single word I wrote. Black characters on a white sheet of paper. It was no laughing matter!

  Despite my determination to wash my hands of political struggles, as soon as I returned to Cold Spring village, I realized that I could not quit yet. A revolution half done would be more deadly for the revolutionary people than no revolution at all. This was but commonsense knowledge to all of us. After we overthrew Zhao, we must proceed to reckon with his influence throughout the village. His trusted fellows still remained in key positions, holding on to the power they had seized, waiting for their "boss" to make a comeback and then revenge ... Taking these into consideration, I volunteered to the new political instructor Yan to go to the pig farm.

  The purpose of this was twofold. On the one hand, I wanted to challenge myself with the hardest and dirtiest work in the village. On the other hand, work at the pig farm meant taking on Chen, who had been Zhao's right-hand man all these years. In the short run I knew I had to work under him and learn how to run the pig farm. Then sooner or later we would oust him and give the power back to the people.

  Even with such well-defined plans, I just could not foresee what I would run into. When I went to the pig farm to confront Chen, I had no illusions about him. I knew that he was Zhao's henchman, bound to him by vested interests. Politically he was our enemy. Yet he was also a veteran and a poor peasant. A married man in his forties. The father of three small kids. In my opinion he was snobbish, sly, and sordid. I expected to loathe him just as many villagers did.

  After I had worked on the pig farm for a few weeks, however, I found myself dreaming about him. I mean not just about him, but about the two of us, at night, making love. It happened when I worked on the night shift; sleeping alone in that small room in the middle of the pig farm, I dreamed about him night after night. Here the kang was hot. Chen and I had built it together. It was a very good kang, kept the small room as warm as spring when snowstorms shrouded the world, in the middle of the night.

  Pitch-black all over. The night is fathomless. The dogs do not bark. The pigs do not stir. Without the slightest warning, suddenly the wooden door of the small room opens and there he is. My heart stops beating. I am transfixed. No use crying for help. No one off in the village will hear me.

  The next moment he grabs me. He holds me in his strong arms. He is as hot as fire and I am as soft as water. His body burns around me. My strength has evaporated. I cannot break away. He presses me down onto the kang. His weight is a heavy mountain. His bulging organ rubs me between my legs. He tears away my shirt, pulls off my underwear. I am naked. Waiting for him to come. A prisoner on the execution ground, panting and trembling with painful desire for the fatal blow.

  My little cave is flooding. Twist my body and frantically squeeze my muscles to close the door. Shut out the rapist! Keep my virgin's treasure intact! The rapist forces his way in. Big. Brutal. Blazing hot ... No use, now, to resist him anymore. Let him do whatever he wants with me. I am deflowered. I will kill myself afterwar
ds. But now I am in heaven. Dancing a wild dragon and phoenix dance. Such ecstasies! My body and soul are consumed. I don't care what happens to me beyond this moment ...

  If Chen had had any inkling of such dreams, he might have tried to rape me instead of Laomizi. Had he really come, what would have happened? Most likely I would have used the pair of scissors I kept hidden. Spilled either his blood or my own right there on the kang. But who knows? I might have lost my mind and then what happened to Laomizi would have happened to me.

  In fact I suspected that Chen might not be totally ignorant of what was going on in my mind. It might be part of his scheme. A trap he laid for me as well as for the other educated youths working on the pig farm. Or maybe I overestimated him. It was not his scheme, just the nature of our jobs that worked on our minds and bodies.

  On the pig farm what kinds of jobs did we do? Day after day we watched out for sows in heat, made sure the sows and boars copulated properly and the sows all got pregnant. Then in due time we delivered the piglets, found teats for all of them, and watched them suck ...

  This job was a big eye-opener for me! By watching the pigs, suddenly I understood everything about men and women. The topic of sex was taboo in China in the years when I grew up. No adult was willing to talk about it with a minor. Mother never told me anything about it. (She did not even tell me that women have menstruation. As a result, when I first had it, I was scared to death.) Nor did Aunty, Nainai, or any of my teachers-including the one who had taught us physiology and hygiene-give me any clues. The books I read and the movies I saw were of no help either. They were perfectly clean. Completely sterilized.

  Yet looking back with my new insight, I realized there were clues, lots of them, in classical literature and folk songs. Such as "the clouds and rain of the river gorge," "the mast on a sailboat," "the bee tickling the flower to make honey," "two people galloping together," "the hungry horse feeding at a trough," "the dew falling into the heart of a peony" . . . The adults who knew about sex understood these metaphors. I just took them as cliches and wondered why they were so oddly irrelevant.

  Then there was the question all children ask: "Where do babies come from?" In my case, later the question became "What makes a woman pregnant?" This was not just curiosity. It really worried me! What if I got pregnant because I made a stupid mistake? Ate the wrong food, stood at a wrong place, or slept on a wrong bed. For didn't one story I had read say that once upon a time a virgin girl ate a plum and that made her pregnant? Later she had a baby boy whom she named Plum Son. In another story a young woman stepped on the toe of a god's footprint. She felt a stir in her heart and at that instant she was with child. Then there was this friend of mine at ioi, who told me that girls got pregnant because they let boys kiss them on the lips. Another disagreed, saying it was not a kiss but a nap in the same room that would make a girl pregnant.

  Now suddenly I realized how stupid we had been. Of course each of us had our own bedroom as we grew up. In China, this was a luxury most families could not afford-a fact I became aware of only after I got to the farm. But even boys or girls less naive about sex would be affected by the jobs we did, I think. It was like watching pornographic movies day in and day out. In fact, we were not only watching, Chen made us participate in them.

  From time to time he assigned us to help the breeding boars mate with the sows. As Chen was still the head of the pig farm and all jobs here were revolutionary ones, I could not say no to him. I would not say no either. That way I would have betrayed myself and given him evidence of my vulnerability. Otherwise he might try to guess what was going on in my mind, but he would never find out the answer.

  So I went to do the job, and Chen often watched me from behind. I hated him for doing this to me. Yet I could not protest. He would simply say that he was supervising to make sure that the job was done properly. A trace of smile would flicker on his face. Of course it could mean a lot of different things.

  The pigs got together. The boar and the sow were wild with desire. Chen and I were on guard against each other. The boar jumped onto the back of the sow. With my hand I guided its quivering and foaming genitals into the sow's vagina. I must keep my breathing under control. I mustn't blush. These things I could manage. But I could not suppress the itch I felt deep down. I could not put out the fire that suddenly shot up in my heart. I was not a rock. Nor a piece of wood. I was a healthy, strong, seventeen-year-old young woman, made of flesh and blood. In spite of my pride, in spite of my reason and the so-called good upbringing, I felt a crazy urge to mate just like the pigs, right there and then, shamelessly, with whatever man ... But Chen is watching me right now, ever so closely. Can he read my mind and see through my body? I mustn't let him guess the hell I am going through!

  The truth is, I never quite figured Chen out, and I doubt if he was ever sure about me. Sometimes I was almost certain he was harboring ill intentions toward us. Then the next moment I was not so sure. Sometimes I even felt he had a special esteem for me and my friend Yuan, who was also a young woman from Beijing. We were somehow his favorites, and the two of us learned a great deal from him. Aside from raising pigs, Chen trained us to be veterinarians, brick masons, and carpenters. He himself was good at all these. To be fair to him, I had to admit that he was quite bright and diligent.

  Soon after we came to the pig farm, Chen began to teach us about medicines, when and how they should be used. Next he made us give shots to the pigs. That was not easy. We had to puncture the pig's thick skin with a syringe and inject the medicine in a split second, before the pig felt the pain and jumped off. But after awhile we became pretty good at it. Then he made us do small operations, such as treating pustules and hernias and castrating piglets. Among these, castrating female piglets was the most difficult. With a sharp scalpel, we had to cut through the belly of a screaming and struggling piglet at exactly the right spot. The cut could not be too deep, nor too shallow; so when we put pressure around the cut, the ovary and oviducts would pop out. These we would remove completely amid copious blood; then we had to sew up the wound stitch by stitch. Throughout the process, no anesthetic was applied.

  Mistakes could be fatal. I found this out the very first time I tried my hand on this operation. Either I cut too deep or the position was a little off: as soon as my knife went down, huge amounts of blood gushed out. In a minute or two, a plump, jumping, and kicking little piglet died in my hands. Badly shaken and utterly discouraged, I told Chen I'd rather quit. But he said such accidents had happened to all vets when they first started to learn the trade. "Don't be afraid. Try another one!"

  With trembling hands I took up the scalpel again. Chen stood behind me and put his right hand over mine; his hand was firm and precise. Thus he guided me through the operation. Yuan, in the meantime, was holding the piglet down with all her might. This time the operation ended in a success. We straightened up and I smiled at Chen in spite of myself. The three of us were a funny sight: we were all drenched in sweat. Three smiling faces. Bright eyes. From our hands blood dripped down as if we had just murdered someone.

  Then it was Yuan's turn to learn it. Another piglet's ordeal. Gradually, however, we gained experience and our confidence grew. The operations we did became almost as neat as those done by Chen himself. With this skill alone, I heard later, I could make a decent living in a village anywhere in China.

  During the next years more educated youths came from Shanghai, Tianjin, Hangzhou, Harbin, and Qiqihar. In 11969 there were more than two hundred in the village. Of these, eight or nine worked on the pig f farm constantly along with several local girls. If Chen likes to show off his skills and teach young people, why hasn't he ever tried to teach others? Why only Yuan and me? He should know we belong to a different political camp and we are here to oust him. Can he like us in spite of such knowledge, and vice versa? Is he really scheming against us? What tricks is he up to? A person is a mystery. Sometimes class analysis is not omnipotent and knowing someone's political stand does not throw much lig
ht on his or her behavior. Should I hate Chen or be grateful to him? What is the nature of our relationship?

  19

  Death of a Hero: Nainai's Last Story

  On the pig farm each of us was responsible for a group of pigs. These hundred pigs, I took care of them from the moment they were born. When spring came I let them out to graze. In summer I got up before four o'clock everyday. By four thirty my pigs were out on the grassland.

  The morning breeze was cool and faintly fragrant. In June the Great Northern Wilderness was an ocean of wild flowers. Gold lilies were delicate and sweet. Red lilies looked waxy and sturdy. Irises purple and blue grew around shallow ponds of water. Wild peonies in full bloom were the size of small basins. In this swamp where the soil was black and water never in short supply, everything grew to a gigantic size. The scenery was so beautiful that even now I dream colorful dreams of it.

  Herding a hundred pigs on this swamp was no easy job though. Unlike sheep, the pigs were headstrong and did not like to stay with the group. They constantly drifted away, disappeared into the tall grass. To keep them together, I had to run around them, four to five hours at a stretch. The morning dew soaked my pants and made them stick to my legs, hindering my movement. A chill entered my bones. My sneakers squeaked under my feet. Even cold, wet sneakers were better than dry rubber boots. Better than any extra weight on my feet when I had so many miles to run each day.

  When I was not racing the pigs, I was singing. Folk songs, foreign songs, revolutionary operas ... Others were doing the same. I could hear them from a distance. Why did we do this? I cannot speak for others. In my case, I felt that when I started to sing, the pigs stopped running and fighting. They grew calm. They listened, swinging their tails back and forth as if they were beating time for me. This convinced me that pigs were intelligent and they could enjoy music.