Spider Eaters: A Memoir

by R Yang

  "But did you say Nainai was out of her mind? Are you sure of it?"

  "Well, you heard the stories she told. What do you think? They are weird!"

  "Did she tell you a story about a sword?"

  "What sword?"

  "A sword called Drink Green."

  "Never heard of it."

  "What about a well?"

  "Never heard of a well either."

  Hearing this, I was relieved. And very glad. The story Nainai told me, she had not told anyone else. Not even Third Aunt. So it was a secret shared by the two of us. The story might be weird. But I loved it! It touched me in a strange way as no other story could. For that reason I really felt there was something in it. But I could not explain. Not to Third Aunt, who was a medical doctor. She believed in things she could see under a microscope: virus, bacteria, tissues, and cells. Things such as destiny, previous lives, heaven, even qi, she'd call them superstition. So I dropped the topic.

  After I left Beijing, Nainai died in September. She died in the storeroom. No chance to see Father and Second Uncle before her eyes closed for good. Yet maybe she did see them, as she said? Maybe she saw them with her wisdom eye all the time, and she saw me too?

  20

  Remorse

  When I returned from Beijing, somehow I had a feeling that nothing was the same at Cold Spring, as if suddenly I looked out of another pair of eyes. Or maybe the place had indeed changed in my absence, like a change of season? One morning I woke up, summer was gone and autumn had its signature on everything. Flowers had vanished from the fields. Leaves were falling. The wind carried sharp blades and the insects' chirping had a sorrowful note as if they knew the end was near.

  The first news that welcomed me back was of rape and Laomizi's transfer to a remote village. Chen lost his position. Henceforth he avoided me. Maybe he was ashamed of what he had done?

  Then I was appointed the head of the pig farm. I set myself and others to work. I stopped dreaming about Chen. After all, I was not in love with him. Soon I forgot him. But I could not forget Laomizi so easily. Sometimes I wondered, if I had not volunteered to work on the night shift, would she have been all right? Now her future was in jeopardy, even though nobody had thought of blaming me. Should I hold myself responsible in certain ways?

  If the Laomizi incident had caused me some small disquiet, another, known as the September i3th Incident, brought on a violent storm in my mind. Looking back on it, I believe it was a turning point in the lives of many of us.

  The September z 3th Incident refers to the attempt made by "our most revered vice-commander in chief Lin Biao" to assassinate "our most beloved great leader Chairman Mao." It ended in Lin Biao's death in Mongolia on September 13, 1971. This incident shocked me and made me question the nature of the Cultural Revolution. Was it really an unprecedented revolution in human history led by a group of men (and a few women) with vision and exemplary moral integrity, as I had believed? Or was it a power struggle that started at the top and later permeated the whole country? If the Cultural Revolution was just a power struggle, it meant that we were deceived and used by a bunch of dis honest politicians. Lin Biao was a typical example. Who would have thought that the successor of Chairman Mao, handpicked by the great leader himself, his position guaranteed by the Party constitution, was such a scheming and murderous opportunist? If he was like that, what about others just like him who had seized power during the revolution?

  As for the theories and slogans invented by such politicians-words I had taken so seriously, and followed-perhaps these were merely tools for them to gain power and defeat their political enemies. Thus Lin Biao and his followers declared, "Educated youths going to the countryside is labor reform [of criminals] in disguise." The other side who remained in power insisted: "Educated youths must go to the countryside. They have a great future there. These general guidelines will never be reversed."

  After Lin Biao died, the news media continued to tell educated youths to take root in the countryside. But at Cold Spring our subscriptions to newspapers and magazines dropped to an all-time low-from nearly two hundred in 1969 to barely above ten in 1972. Yan, the political instructor, did not like this. So he held meetings and talked about the importance of subscribing to newspapers and magazines. But as long as he was not paying for them, we just kept our silence and ignored him. Who would want to waste our blood-sweat money on such empty talk and hateful lies since we could recite it all from end to beginning anyway?

  One of the lies the newspapers told people was that all educated youths went to the countryside voluntarily. In fact, many hadn't. A girl who worked on the pig farm confessed this to me. She was an educated youth from Harbin, the capital city of Heilongjiang province.

  In 1969 she came to Cold Spring at the age of fifteen. Because she was so thin, so small, people nicknamed her Little Monkey. Two years later she replaced Laomizi on the pig farm. When the next Chinese New Year came round, I noticed that unlike others, Little Monkey got no parcels from home. On New Year's Eve, she looked very sad. So I quietly called her aside and gave her some of the goodies I had received. This brought a trace of sad smile onto her thin face. Later that night she explained why she never received anything from home.

  "There are six of us in our family. My father is a factory worker. My mother is a housewife. She is ill. Mentally ill. You know. So she can't work.

  "I am the oldest child. Ever since elementary school, I've done all the housework: grocery shopping, cooking, washing and mending clothes, buying coal, taking care of my two younger brothers and a little sister. My father made some seventy yuan a month. He could not afford to hire a nanny.

  "In 1969 I was going to graduate from junior middle school. My father went to our school to talk to the leaders. He explained our difficulties. He begged the leaders to let me stay. But the leaders replied that on this issue there was a nationwide policy: all older sons and daughters must go to the countryside. Only the youngest child, male or female, was allowed to stay. Period. This policy had a name. It was called Red All Over the Country's Mountains and Rivers.

  "So my father came back, told me about this. We were both worried, about my mother. We feared that the news might upset her and cause a relapse. We did not tell her until the last night.

  "When my mother heard the news, she was calm. She said she'd make tea-leaf eggs for me to eat on the train. Hearing this, my father and I were both relieved. The next morning, however, my mother was crazy again. Weeping and laughing and talking nonsense. Of course there were no tea-leaf eggs. And my father could not even go to the train station to see me off. So I took my bedroll and went away by myself.

  "Later my father told me in his letters that when my mother recovered somewhat, she remembered her promise. She felt very sorry that she had lost her mind on the day I left home. From then on, my father said, whenever she had a relapse, she made tea-leaf eggs, using all the eggs we had at home. Then she took them to the train station and gave them to strangers who were girls of my age ... "

  At this point, Little Monkey burst into tears. It was such a sad story. It made me cry too. What's the use of trying to be heroic? Why pretend that I stand higher than her and have a vision? Now we are all the same, the educated youths who volunteered to come and those who did not. We are trapped in this swamp! Judging from the propaganda, I can tell that some leaders in Beijing have bet their political future on this campaign being a great success, no matter what price we'll have to pay. We have become their bargaining chips in a political game. They cannot back out of it without being attacked by their opponents. Thus the policy will not be changed.

  But this is so cruel! Now I think about it, what is at stake here is the future of millions of young people in China, and our fate touches the hearts of tens of millions of parents and relatives. Who knows how many people are shedding tears like us on this New Year's Eve? But the politicians do not care, as long as their positions are safe and secure.

  By this time, the farms in the Great Northe
rn Wilderness had become Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps. Farm 85o became Regiment 36. Army officers came. They settled down at the farm headquarters where there were electricity, houses with central heating, a hospital, a general store, an auditorium that also served as a movie theater, and a train station. Only occasionally would they come down to the village to lead a campaign.

  Once an officer came to our village (which had become Company Three) to supervise the wheat harvest. For a couple of months, he made us get up at four o'clock and run around the threshing ground until we almost fainted. After that we went out to the fields to work, while he disappeared into the village. What he did there, we had no idea. As soldiers, we were not supposed to question an officer. All we knew was that he never worked side by side with us.

  Another officer came in winter. Seeing that we had not finished the corn harvest, he ordered us to "storm" the corn fields at night. The attack began at twelve o'clock sharp. By then the temperature had dropped to well below zero, but the moon did not come out. Carrying heavy rattan baskets on our backs, we tried to wipe out the "enemies" in the dark. For several hours, we trudged in the snow, slipped, and fell numerous times. Finally it was dawn. When we looked back, we knew that the attack had been a miserable failure. So many "enemy sentries" were still standing on the stalks behind us. We had to do the job all over again.

  Frustration and indignation were what I felt toward our "beloved kinsfolk," the People's Liberation Army officers. They knew nothing about running farms. Yet since they had the power, all had to obey them. Under their "leadership," the farms in the Great Northern Wilderness got into debt. Hundreds of millions of yuan each year that Premier Zhou had to cancel out himself. To add insult to injury, the officers were extremely arrogant. They really treated us like dirt. Compared with them, Zhao, our former political instructor, was a "small witch." Yet this time nobody dared complain. Attacking "the Great Wall," "the pillar of proletarian dictatorship"? That would qualify anyone to be an active counterrevolutionary. "Dare to be angry. Do not dare to speak." But we did speak out even though just once.

  In the early spring of 1972 an accident happened on the pig farm. Li, who was a local youth, was running the fodder grinder. This machine was dangerous, I knew it. When it ran at top speed, we had to feed corn or soybean stalks continuously into an opening that had no safety devices around it. It was the mouth of a tiger. Anything that went beyond it was bitten off and chewed up in a matter of seconds. Yet as this was the only fodder grinder we had and the pigs had to be fed, we continued to use it. In fact, on our farm, many machines were just as dangerous.

  On that day, somehow Li's knit glove got tangled among soybean stalks. Before he realized it, his glove passed through the opening and so did his right hand. When he felt the pain and pulled his arm out, a split second before the machine caught the sleeve of his cotton-padded jacket, all he saw was a bare wrist with a white bone sticking out. His hand was gone! Blood gushed out from the wound.

  Everybody on the pig farm was horrified by the sight. With hearts beating like drums, we rushed Li to the barefoot doctor. The doctor was visibly shaken by the sight as well. Yet she managed to bind up Li's wound and said we must rush him to the hospital. The hospital was twenty miles away at the farm headquarters. And in the village we had no cars or trucks. All we had were tractors.

  The tractor drivers quickly hooked a cart to a tractor. Some twenty of us got in with Li. Educated and local workers alike. Male and female. We threw in a few quilts and coats. Then the tractor drove off.

  Once outside the village, the wind became very cold. It cut our faces like so many small knives. We huddled around the wounded man, trying to use our bodies to shield him. It didn't help much. Li was shivering all over. From time to time, he groaned and tears rolled down his ashen face. The tractor crawled like a snail on a dirt road covered by ice and snow. At this speed it would take us more than three hours to get to the hospital. Probably we couldn't make it before sunset. What if after dark the tractor strayed off the road and got stuck in a snow pit?

  Just as we were worried to death, someone spotted a jeep on the horizon. It was coming toward us. "Heaven has eyes!" A jeep could run so much faster and it was much warmer inside! So we all jumped out of the cart and stood in the middle of the road to intercept the jeep.

  When the jeep stopped, we saw our regiment commander sitting in it. A stout man in his forties. He looked very displeased. So we explained to him that this was a real emergency: a soldier's hand had been cut off in an accident and he must be rushed to the hospital. We begged the commander to please take our tractor and let the wounded man go to the hospital in his jeep.

  The regiment commander frowned deeply when he heard this. He was silent for a moment. Fearing that he might not understand the seriousness of the situation, we implored him to come out and take a look at Li's wound. I was sure that once he saw Li's agony with his own eyes, he would immediately give up his jeep for him. No doubt about it!

  The regiment commander finally got out of the jeep at our repeated entreaty and looked at Li's wound. After that, however, he climbed back into the jeep and said impatiently to us: "Just take him to the hospital in the tractor. I have some urgent business. I have to go. Speak no more! Do what I said!" Then he told his driver to step on it.

  The jeep sped away. We stood there in utter disbelief, in the snow thrown up in its wake. He saw Li's wound. He saw the pain. He saw everything with his own eyes! How could he refuse our request and leave a soldier behind in such a condition? Is his heart made of iron and stone? Does he have a heart at all? "Urgent business." Humph! He cannot fool us with such an excuse! We know he has no urgent business in this part of the country. He just does not want to ride in the slow and bumpy tractor when it's so cold. And this man is our regiment commander! A "beloved kinsman!" A stranger would not be so cold-blooded!

  In a moment our rage boiled over. The rest of the journey with tears in our eyes we cursed the commander, up to eighteen generations of his ancestors and down to all his descendants.

  "He is not a human being!"

  "He isn't! That's for sure! He only has human skin! Deep down he has animal offal!"

  "Someday heaven will strike him with five thunders!"

  "When he has a son, the baby will he born without an asshole!"

  All the traditional, local, and modern curses we could think of, we threw on him. The next day when we returned to the village, we were still extremely angry. So we told the other educated youths about this. But gradually my anger cooled down and I began to reflect on the incident. It brought home to me some basic facts about our situation.

  Call us "corps soldiers" or "educated youths, " the truth is we've been turned into peasants. Peasants are never in short supply in China. In r96o, who knows how many peasants starved to death. Millions, perhaps. Yet there were still hundreds of millions more. As peasants, our limbs are worth nothing. Our lives are worth nothing. We are "ant peo ple. " Our lives are "ant lives. " Whoever created these phrases in ancient China understood the essence of the matter.

  Now what about you yourself? You hate to be treated like an ant. No respect. No sympathy. No value. But when you volunteered to go to the countryside, didn't you say you were willing to give up your privileges? You wrote in your diary, copying a hero's words, "I am willing to be a green leaf, setting off red flowers. I am willing to be a stone in the foundation, supporting the great edifice." Have you changed your mind?

  Come to think of it, I'm still willing to be a green leaf Let others get the spotlight. I don't mind living in obscurity. At least a green leaf has a patch of blue sky over it. It sees the sunshine and the moonlight. It feels the wind and the rain. This is enough for me. But I do not want to be a stone in the foundation! To be buried alive and trampled on. Carrying the dead weight of a huge building on top of me for as long as I live. No hope to get out. Darkness day and night. Silenced and petrified. This is no life! This is worse than death!

  Willing
or not willing, I no longer have a choice. Once I moved my hukou here, I was at the mercy of the local leaders. Equality? The word still sounds good. But if they don't care to grant it to us, what then? We and our posterity will be "people who are governed," and they "people who govern." They can treat us like dirt under their feet or like beasts. Since we are losers, we have to swallow the bitter fruit.

  How stupid I was to dive into this quagmire and be so proud of what I did! Idealism, ignorance, and vanity. These cost me dearly! Next time I should look before I jump. But in my case, will there be a next time?

  "One blunder leads to eternal remorse."

  This traditional expression describes a woman who lost her chastity. Nothing, not even her suicide, could redeem her in the eyes of society. In 1972, somehow I was seized by the same emotion, which was as profound as an ocean. It lumped at the back of my stomach during the day; the saying cried out from the bottom of my heart when I woke up at night.

  By this time I could only guess how other educated youths felt about our situation. All had said they were willing to take roots in the Great Northern Wilderness. They had said so because they had to. Anyone who did not say this would be criticized. Yet soon after the September 13th Incident, seven out of "the eight happy big flies" flew away. Wen was the only male student from ioi left behind.