Spider Eaters: A Memoir

by R Yang

  The first group of pigs I raised, I gave them names. One of them looked cute. He had drooping ears and a very big belly. I named him Capitalist. Another was tall and stately; his name was Prince. Natasha was named after the girl in War and Peace. She was pretty and frivo lous. Lin Meimei was once very sick. Like the heroine in the Chinese novel Dream of the Red Mansion, she walked with weeping-willow steps. Her moist eyes were almost human when she lifted her head up to look at me. So I took pity on her. After Chen condemned her, I kept her in the hope that someday she would somehow overcome her nameless illness.

  Believe it or not, my pigs knew their names. When I called Lin Meimei, she would come, knowing that I had something special for her. By and by I hid the medicine I thought might help her in the treat and she took it all. Chen and others on the pig farm were amazed by this. Encouraged, I tried different medicines on her. One of them workedI wasn't sure which. Lin Meimei was cured, while her fictional counterpart died of consumption and a broken heart.

  In the Great Northern Wilderness, it rained often. Sometimes the rain lasted for days and weeks. When this happened, the pigs had to stay home. They were cold, hungry, and miserable. Their feet turned the sties into huge pots of mud porridge well seasoned with pig urine, pig shit, and worms. The mud was a foot deep.

  Feeding pigs under such circumstances was tough. The moment I stepped into a sty, my feet got stuck and I was surrounded by a hundred pigs. Each tried to snatch feed from the two big buckets I was carrying. I fought the pigs off with the buckets and pressed on. The yard was over a hundred feet each way. The troughs were placed in the middle of it. Struggling, I lurched across the yard like a leaky boat on a raging ocean. Sometimes I would make it to the little island. Sometimes I capsized and turned into a "mud monkey."

  The mud could be washed off afterwards. Worse still was to step onto a nail sticking up in the mud from a board that had fallen from the fence. When the sows were in heat, they often knocked the boards down. Later when the boards sank, there was a 50 percent chance that the nails would point up rather than down.

  Such invisible nails were a nightmare for all of us who worked on the pig farm. Once in a while we got a taste of them. No way to predict where and when, all of a sudden, a sharp nail pierced the sole of my rubber boot and plunged into the arch of my foot. Cold sweat broke out. I struggled to lift the foot from the mud; but the weight of the buckets hanging from a carrying pole on my shoulder continued to press me down. The impatient pigs added pressure by sticking their big snouts into the buckets ...

  Afterwards, others would help me squeeze the puncture wound and wash it clean. But such a wound always hurt a lot and took days to heal. Next day my foot would be swollen because of the rust on the nail and the germs in the mud. Sometimes I had to stay in bed for a few days, which was a shame for all of us in those days. Yet after half a dozen of such accidents on the pig farm, I did not get tetanus. So who can say that I was not lucky?

  In October 1969 the first group of pigs I had raised were grown. One day a truck came from a city called Jiamusi. The time had come for my pigs to make their contribution to the world revolution. On that day, it had rained earlier and the pigsty was muddy. The workers who came from the cannery tried to catch my pigs. My pigs were alarmed. They ran around the yard at top speed, squealing, jumping, and kicking up mud. The workers chased them. After a while they were out of breath. Their hands and clothes were coated with mud. Cursing aloud, they came to a stop.

  Seeing this, I told them to stay out of the sty. Then I called my pigs by their names. My pigs stopped running. They watched me with frightened eyes. For a moment, they hesitated. Perhaps their instinct was telling them that danger was imminent and they should not trust a human being. Then they came to me anyway. They followed me onto the planks. They walked into the truck. Lin Meimei, Natasha, Prince, Capitalist ... all my pigs were there. The workers applauded. They thanked me. Next they shut the door and the truck drove off.

  The pigsty was empty now. Somehow my heart was empty too. With an empty heart and a full stomach, I went straight to bed.

  "What's the matter? Are you sick?"

  "No, I'm all right."

  "Is something wrong?"

  "Not really."

  Tell others I love my pigs and my heart is bleeding for them right now? Nobody will understand. It can only turn me into a laughingstock. How can I change people's minds, convince them that pigs aren't lazy and stupid? They're intelligent! They've got feelings! They trusted me at a critical moment, and I betrayed them! I became an accomplice in their murder! Now I regret what I did. I hate myself.

  I wonder where my pigs are right now. Perhaps they are being driven into a slaughterhouse? They are screaming for me to come and rescue them. Save them from the terrible machines, which are about to strip them of their skins, cut their flesh off their bones, chop them into a thousand pieces, turn them into cans of pork ... Contribution to the world revolution? That doesn't help! Not at all!

  Try a different approach. Since you are born as pigs, your fate is to be raised, killed, and eaten by people. Sooner or later, this will happen. See, nowadays in our village even the breeding boars and sows are killed and eaten when they grow old. So perhaps it's a good thing that you die early. You'll be reincarnated sooner. In your next life, be a bird, a fish, even a worm, or an ant. Just don't be a pig! Anything is better than a pig! Where did I get these ideas: fate and reincarnation? From the villagers, of course. I know it is superstition. But I already feel much better.

  After that I continued to take good care of the pigs. But I would not call them "my pigs" and give them names anymore. It was stupid of me to let them get close to my heart. These pigs were not pets. We raised them for the pork, the liver, the hearts, the stomachs, the ears, the tongues, the trotters, the blood, the bones, the skin . . . Other people were wise to believe that pigs were lazy and stupid. It was not to my advantage that I knew better.

  If my first year on the pig farm seemed exciting and eventful, in the years that followed there was hardly anything new. In the fall the sows got pregnant. In winter piglets were born. Throughout spring and summer we raised the piglets. In the fall they were taken away by trucks, and the sows got pregnant again.

  Caught in this ancient cycle, we tried to make a difference nonetheless. We experimented with saccharified pig feed as soon as we read about it in the newspapers. We constructed wooden floors for the pigs to sleep on so they were less likely to catch cold at night. With relentless effort we wiped out a contagious disease called zhufeiyi (pig lung plague) that had killed hundreds of pigs each time it broke out. We made sure that our pigs had plenty of exercise and a balanced diet. From morning till night we watched out for the slightest sign of any problems ... In short, we took such meticulous care of the pigs that one day I suddenly felt sad, for it occurred to me that no one cared half as much about us as we did about the pigs. But of course this thought was ridiculous. I drove it out of my mind in no time.

  Aside from saccharified pig feed, we also made tofu. The residue went to the pigs. Tofu came to us, day after day. Sometimes the tofu reminded me of Buddhist monks and nuns in the olden days, who ate it out of religious conviction. Today we ate it out of necessity. By the end of Oc tober we ran out of cabbages and onions. A month later, no more turnips and potatoes. From December to June, tofu was all we had: boiled tofu, stir-fried tofu, deep fried tofu, salted tofu, fermented tofu, smoked tofu, dried tofu, steamed buns stuffed with tofu filling, tofu flower soup ... Tofu three meals a day, seven days a week. The educated youths who worked at the dining hall tried their best to change the menu. But as the saying goes, "A clever wife cannot cook a meal without rice"; they could not cook a meal without tofu. Eventually we all got so sick of it that the mere mention of the word tofu would give us heartburn.

  In addition to the tofu diet, we had hard physical labor, little sleep, few holidays, no money, and no sex. (Having a boyfriend or girlfriend was strongly discouraged before 1971.) If that was not
enough to qualify us as ascetic monks and nuns, we also experienced days and nights with no fire in the winter. This happened when we ran out of coal. Our room became an icebox. At night, everybody was wearing a fur hat in bed. Next morning the front part of it was white with frost. Put our sheepskin coats on top of three quilts, still we shivered all night and got cramps. Meanwhile the water vat in our room froze over and the wet towels on the line became stiff, hanging there like a bunch of frozen fish. The attempt to take them down often broke them.

  Looking back on it, I think Cold Spring was like a mountain cave in which we tried to cultivate ourselves. Tormented our bodies to purify our minds. Encouraged ourselves with a splendid prospect of a paradise on earth. A day was as long as a year; a year was as prosaic as a day. For three years I persisted. If I had continued like Master Dharma who sat with his face to the wall for nine years, seeing nothing and hearing nothing from the outside world, maybe I too would have achieved something. Tao or nirvana. Madness. Who knows? But in my case, in 197 r suddenly we were told that we were up for a twenty-four-day home leave. So I was back in Beijing in August.

  Aunty was the first person I wanted to see. Before I heard about the home leave, I did not realize how much I had missed her. It was like a dream come true when I rushed into her arms. At that moment, I realized how big and strong I had grown over the years, while Aunty had shrunk into a small old lady. Yet she was holding me in her arms as if I were still that helpless baby girl left in her care at Nainai's house twenty years before. It made me feel strange and awkward. It also made me feel very good.

  "Aiya! My own, dear daughter has come back!" She uttered a cry on seeing me. The phrase she used, wode qin nuer, could mean "my own daughter" or "my dear daughter," and it could mean both. Then her tears fell. The tears melted my hero's mask. For three years I had been wearing it, day and night. Now I am back home. I can be as soft and ridiculous as I want. No one will criticize me. No one will laugh at me. It's a wonderful feeling! Nonetheless, I did not feel like crying with Aunty. Instead I wanted to coax a big smile from her, as she used to do with me when I was little.

  So I opened the sacks I had brought back. One was filled with soybeans. Another had red and green beans, a keg of soybean oil, a bag of giant-sized potatoes, dried lilies, wild mushrooms ... Aunty watched me with amazement, as if I were a magician. Her face started to beam. For in those days such things had all but disappeared from the shops in Beijing, along with many daily necessities such as matches, soaps, detergent, and feminine napkins.

  Aunty was smiling now. When I looked at her, I could not help noticing that she was getting on in years. At the age of sixty-seven, she was looking after Lian and Yue all by herself. (If she hadn't taken them to live with her when my parents left Beijing for the countryside in 1969, my brothers would have had to go too, losing their Beijing hukou and ending up in some dead-end schools like the one we had at Cold Spring.) In 1971 Lian was still a teenager and Yue was eleven. They were a lot of work and endless worries for her. Aunty was exhausted. I could see it. Now she needs me to help her. I want to help her! I promised her I'd take care of her when she grew old. But how can I do so?

  These three years, in fact, she had been taking care of me too. Before each festival, she would send me a parcel filled with goodies: chocolates, cookies, nuts, moon cakes, dried fruits ... Each time I received the parcel, I wrote her a letter telling her that she should not do so. Yet when the next festival drew near, I looked forward to another one, and sure enough another parcel arrived, before May Day, Dragon Boat Festival, National Day, Moon Festival, my birthday, New Year, and Spring Festival, which was traditional Chinese New Year.

  Before Spring Festival, almost all educated youths in our village received parcels from home. I always got two. The other was sent by my parents. Hundreds of parcels came from all over the country to the post office ten miles away. The postmaster could not possibly carry all of them. So the village dispatched horse-drawn carts to pick them up, day after day.

  Aside from parcels, Aunty had sent me many letters, telling me what she did and how much she had missed me. Yet in letters there were things she could not discuss. Black characters on a white sheet of paper. It might cause trouble for both of us. On the night I came back, after Lian and Yue went to sleep, Aunty told me what was on her mind.

  Recently, she said, a new campaign had started in Beijing. It was called We Also Have Two Hands: We Won't Lead Idle Lives in Cities. A housewife started it by making the above statement while she volunteered to go to the northwest. Now the leaders were using her to pressure other city dwellers who either had never worked outside their homes or had only temporary jobs to "volunteer" to go to the northwest.

  Aunty was upset. I was upset too when I heard this, knowing that at her age if she were sent to the northwest, she would not be able to survive the hardship. They might as well kill her, and also the old men and women who were her neighbors. Many of them, Aunty told me, were crying at night because the prospect scared them. If she and her neighbors had to die, much better die in Beijing where their families had lived for generations. Aunty had cried too, after Lian and Yue were asleep. She was very glad that I was back so she could talk to me about this.

  "But what can I do?" When I heard this, frustration almost choked me. "Nothing!" In my family of six, the three adults have already gone to the countryside, of our own accord. But this doesn't seem to be enough. Now they want to sweep Aunty and my two brothers out of Beijing as well. So they can move in, settle down, and take over. Become permanent residents of this beautiful city-our hometown! That's going a bit too far!

  By "they" I meant the army representatives who came to Beijing by the thousands at the time. Once they got here, they used their power to move their entire families and relatives from the countryside into the city. "Seven big aunts on the father's side and eight big aunts on the mother's side," as the Beijing people put it sarcastically. As a result, I was surprised to find that by 1971 more people were living in Beijing than three years before, and among them few were the talented kids of the poor peasants we had meant to make room for.

  This fact irked me, and the way I was treated here irked me even more. On buses, in stores, and in the street, people gave me white eyes and cold shoulders, as if I were a stupid country bumpkin. They made me acutely aware that my clothes were out of fashion, my face was black, my shoes were old ... But I refused to be ashamed of myself.

  Shit! If we hadn't volunteered to leave the city, how could you people have gotten in? If we don't work our tails off growing crops and raising pigs on the farm, what will you feed on except northwest wind from Siberia? How could these people be so ungrateful? But wait! In the past we students of for were just like them. Such arrogance. Such stupidity. Look at those ugly faces, they make me see myself in a mirror.

  Aunty's old neighbors, on the other hand, were as courteous as they had always been and full of goodwill. Yet their conversation made me equally uncomfortable.

  "Have you found a `door' yet?" they would ask mein earnest as soon as we exchanged greetings, "To get yourself transferred back, you know. The Zhangs have just gotten their son back through `family difficulty return.' The old couple said they needed a child to live with them so he could take care of them. The Wangs are trying to get their daughter back through `sick return.' You should hurry! Ask your parents if they know someone who can help. Or ask your Third Aunt. She is a doctor, isn't she? Maybe she can get you a certificate ... "

  Hearing this time and again, it dawned on me that while we toiled in the village, the trend in Beijing had changed. Now going to the countryside was no longer an honor. It was a shame, which showed that the family lacked power and guanxi (connections), so their children had no other choice. For those who had power and guanxi, they could transfer their children back. No wonder I was held in contempt by those haughty newcomers. They considered us failures.

  This discovery made me lose some sleep. If these old Beijing residents are right, then too b
ad. I am trapped. My parents have no power, no guanxi. Moreover, they are in the countryside themselves so they can't even get me back through "family difficulty return. " But maybe these old men and women are wrong? After all, they are "the petty citydwellers" we despised because they have no vision. Perhaps I shouldn't put too much importance on what they said. I ought to discuss this with my parents.

  A few days later I went to see my parents and we talked. What they said was reassuring, even though there was hardly anything new and original in it. It sounded like the newspaper editorials. "Stick to it. There is a great future for you in the countryside." "Do not hesitate. The road is tortuous, but the prospects are bright." This was, and yet it was not, what I wanted to hear.

  At the time my parents were living in a small village in Raoyang county, Hebei province. It seemed to me that they too were living in a mountain cave. On the map, the place was not far from Beijing. But to get there I first had a jolting ride in an old bus for seven hours. After I got off at the county seat, I had to hire a man and ride behind him on a bike for another hour. This means of transportation was called "second-rate," a term I'd never heard before.

  When I arrived at the village, I found that my parents had both changed literally beyond recognition. Father looked like an old peasant who had worked in the fields all his life. A deep tan. A bony body. Crew-cut hair. Furrows in his forehead. A white T-shirt that was not white anymore, shorts, and black cloth shoes. Definitely this was not the father I remembered, who was a diplomat and a scholar! However, he was not a real peasant either. For although he was doing farmwork just as the peasants did, the government was still paying him nearly two hundred yuan a month. The real peasants in the area were making eight cents a day, that is, less than two and a half yuan a month, even if they worked thirty-one days a month. Thus at the time the peasants all owed considerable amounts of money to the production team.