Spider Eaters: A Memoir

by R Yang

  Just as we were saying this, a rainbow appeared ahead of us like a miracle. It has to be a good omen! This seven-colored bridge in heaven. Where will you lead us? Even if we won't have a future, are you trying to tell me some kind of joy is still possible? Just think. If I have forty more years to live-twenty home visits? that's four hundred eighty days-well, at least for nearly a year and a half I will be truly alive even though the rest of my life will be a toilsome living death. Not too bad! Besides, there's the rainbow and here are my friends. Such a life might still be worth living. Who knows?

  Little Southern Hill was ahead of us. It reminded me of a lecture given to us by an officer a few months earlier. He set his jaw and said: "Don't you educated youths dream of leaving the Great Northern Wilderness. You can't! When you are alive, you belong to Company Three. When you die, you will be buried at Little Southern Hill! You will never go back to the cities! Mark my words!" This was like putting salt on our wounds. He seemed to hate us so much. Why? Thinking of what he said, I decided that I would not let his prediction come true in my case. I would not commit suicide yet, for I did not want to be buried at Little Southern Hill!

  Old Song and I became bosom friends literally overnight under unusual circumstances. One night after midnight, while I was working alone on the pig farm, Song came to see me. I was surprised, for in the past we had hardly spoken to each other. Although she was from Beijing also, her home was in Mentougou district, a far suburb known for its coal mines. She was from a worker's family. While still gasping for breath, she burst out.

  "Hey! Yang Rae! Your diary is marvelous! I love it! I love it! Every single word in it comes from the bottom of my heart! Only I did not know how to express my feelings. You did it for me! You did it beautifully! That's great!"

  I was shocked by her words.

  "What? My diary? What are you talking about?"

  Then it was Song's turn to be surprised.

  "You don't mean you don't know yet? Come on! At least fifty people in the village have read your diary. The rest will read it tomorrow or the day after tomorrow."

  "But that's impossible! My diary is under my pillow. I saw it there last night!"

  "Hey! You're really naive! Let me tell you this: Yan, the political instructor, has another copy of it. As a matter of fact, right now he is mobilizing educated youths to criticize you. There'll be a rally. You'd better be prepared."

  Later I found out that Old Song was one of the educated youths Yan was trying to mobilize. Thus she heard Yan read my diary the day before. I guess it did pollute her mind. Anyway, she told me everything she knew about my diary.

  I'd never have thought that Gao, a girl who grew up in the same big yard, went to the same elementary and middle schools, would read my diary while I was working on the pig farm. And she reported me to the political instructor, so Yan read it too. After he read it, he asked Gao to copy parts of it. These parts Yan read to all the platoon and squad leaders, who were mostly educated youths. Old Song was among them. According to her, at that meeting after Yan finished reading my diary, there was a deep, long silence. Many looked as if they were lost in thought. As for Old Song, she said that my diary put her mind in turmoil for a whole afternoon. That night she couldn't sleep. After midnight, she jumped out of bed and came to talk to me.

  After I heard this, my mind was in turmoil too. Of course I was alarmed, knowing that I was in trouble again. Meanwhile, I was awfully grateful to Old Song. I was glad to find a true friend when things were at their worst for me. Then I was very angry. I hated myself for being such a fool. Look at all the things others did behind my back, things I was totally unaware of. Someday, someone might cut off my head from behind and I'd have no clue who did it and why.

  But I was even angrier at Gao. Not only did she read my diary with out my permission, she sold me out to look good in the eyes of the political instructor! How could she be so base? Stab me in the back. Why? As far as I know, I never offended her ... And Yan, the political instructor, how could he encourage an educated youth to do such a thing? And now, mobilize people to criticize me! He should have criticized Gao! Given her a big lecture on honesty and propriety. But now that he's judged me guilty because of the cursed diary, I can't protest. I can't defend myself. I must admit my guilt and criticize myself. Heaven and earth have been turned upside down. In this world there is no justice! No right and wrong!

  After Old Song left, I thought the whole thing over. I just couldn't understand why Gao would want to report me. There was nothing really counterrevolutionary in my diary. In fact, it started as a revolutionary hero's diary and toward the end all I said was I felt there was no future for us here and I wished I could leave. Even these feelings I did not spell out-I used a bunch of metaphors to suggest them. The truth was, out of the numerous unorthodox thoughts that swarmed my head and demanded expression from me in those days, about io percent of the least dangerous were ones I picked to deal with in my diary.

  The only possibility was that Gao planned to eliminate a rival for going to college. She knew I was popular with the poor peasants here. If this was true, I ought to pity her, not hate her. For she was even more foolish than me. She should have tried to attack Yuan, who was popular with Zhao's trusted fellows. Whether that would help her, of course, was another matter. How could she fail to see that nowadays the poor peasants here had turned into "clay Buddhas crossing a river who could not even save themselves"?

  Only a few months before, a "gigantic counterrevolutionary incident" broke out in Hulin county. Overnight, almost every house in the region was searched and who knows how many poor peasants were implicated. In our village, some fifteen were arrested. My friend Huar and her mother, Ji Daniang, were among them. Their crime was sticking needles into Chairman Mao's face and body. In fact, they did this unintentionally, for in those days Chairman Mao's pictures were all over the newspapers the villagers had always used for wallpaper. So after the women sewed, if they stuck the needles in the wall at the wrong places, poor peasants became active counterrevolutionaries and were shut up in the cow shed for months.

  After Huar's arrest, occasionally I saw her from a distance. Neither of us dared speak to the other. Eyeing me, she was on the verge of tears. The poor girl! "Three-tenths like a person, seven-tenths like a ghost." Her face, hands, and clothes were extremely dirty and her hair was a big pancake, filled with lice. As a punishment, the "criminals" were not allowed to wash themselves or comb their hair when they were detained.

  Now it seemed my turn had come. Cow shed, interrogation, lice ... Of course I was worried. Proletarian dictatorship was not something one would want to meddle with. Even a three-year-old kid knew this. But the truth was, this time I was not half as afraid as last time when I made a slip of the pen and that mistake was seized by Zhao.

  Yan! What can you do to me? Make me a counterrevolutionary and have me executed? So what? Save me the trouble of committing suicide! "A dead pig is not afraid of boiling water. " This saying has a lot of truth in it. Besides, you haven't cornered me yet. It may not be as easy as you think. I promise you I'll play the eel and the fox, the hedgehog and the skunk. After I play all the tricks, what have I got to lose anyway? Nothing! But you've got something to lose in this game. I'll make you lose face in a village where you are the number-one leader. And Gao, she'll have to stand trial in the eyes of everybody. It won't be comfortable! Just wait and see.

  Could Yan guess what I was thinking? Or did he worry that my diary might pollute the minds of other educated youths as it did Old Song's? I did not know. All I knew was that he planned the mass rally to criticize me; then he postponed it. Then he made more preparations; then he postponed it again. Finally after nearly a month he called me to his home and told me that because my thinking had serious problems, I was no longer fit to be the head of the pig farm. Therefore the leaders had decided: I should turn the pig farm over to Fang and begin to work with a tractor crew. In the future I should try harder to learn from the poor peasants and reform
myself.

  So that was it! All he did was strip me of a position that was so insignificant it wasn't even official. Looking back on it, I am convinced that this mishap was really a blessing in disguise. For suddenly I realized I had "enemies" who were trying to destroy me, and my instinctive reaction was to defend myself. While I tried to predict what my opponents might do next so I could outmaneuver them, I forgot I'd wanted to kill myself. Suicide was out of the question under such circumstances. I did not want people to think I was afraid or felt guilty. In fact, I felt I was wronged and that took my mind off the terrible thought of wronging others at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. I felt better being attacked than attacking myself, as long as the damage they did to me was yet controllable.

  The incident shook me up. It damaged me and unnerved me. No doubt about it. As a result, I did not dare write down a single word in that book ever after. My diary stopped on the day before Old Song's visit: April 30, 1971. Henceforth, whenever I had an unexpected visitor or someone called my name, my heart would skip a beat and the muscles of my scalp would tighten. I always expected the worst. I was constantly on the lookout for sudden blows and disasters. The last thing I wanted was to be caught off-guard again. Of course, I lost sleep and had nightmares.

  Aside from my diary, letters could be incriminating too, if they fell into the wrong hands. So I made sure to burn all of them on the very day I received them. That was what my parents told me to do. I didn't feel funny about it then, but I do feel funny now. Their letters were so impeccably revolutionary that even with a magnifying glass, one could not find anything wrong in them. Yet at the end of each letter, they would write in big characters and underline them: AFTER YOU READ THIS LETTER, BURN IT IMMEDIATELY! VERY IMPORTANT!

  The letters I burned in the passageway outside our room. Sometimes when I was doing this, I had company. Other educated youths burned their letters too. On such occasions, we never talked to one another. Just pretended that others did not exist. Each person turned her face to a corner where a small fire was burning. Added paper to it one piece at a time. Stirred the ashes with an iron poker to make sure no trace of any characters was left behind. The scene often made me think we were burning paper money in front of graves. Solemn faces, ghostly fires. And gray butterflies danced in a small whirlwind. Who were the dead? Why did we offer sacrifices to them? I did not know.

  22

  My First Love, a Big Mistake?

  After I turned over all the keys and account books to Fang, I heaved a sigh of relief. For four years I had worked so hard on the pig farm trying to reform the world and reform myself. In the end I reaped the same punishment Chen got-Chen, a man I had originally come to combat. What an irony! But now I was glad all this was behind me.

  I reported for duty to tractor number ten. Old Sui was the head of its crew. Li and Zhou were shifu (master workers). Xiang and I were assistants.

  Old Sui was a veteran who had fought in the Korean War. To me, he did not look like a hero at all. He was a short and thin man in his late thirties. When he was at work, he seemed listless. Then I heard others say that he had a reputation of falling asleep as soon as his hands touched the operating levers. When his assistants woke him up, he would let them take over, find a place at the end of the field, and sleep there for hours.

  Li and Zhou had both been Old Sui's assistants. Then they became shifu. They were both very kind to Xiang and me. Li was the one who knew our tractor thoroughly. Actually he knew the tractor much better than Old Sui. If there was a problem and we could not figure out what it was, we would go and find him. Sometimes he could tell us what was wrong by merely listening to it. It was a pleasure working with him. He was smart and dexterous. I always learned a lot from him. Yet sometimes I felt uncomfortable when I was with him. He was extremely cautious. Personal things, he bottled up completely. Other things, he did not want to talk about either. But all this was understandable. Although he was of the same age as us, he was not an educated youth. He was a mangliu-part of the unplanned influx of workers-who came from Sichuan province during the famine. Moreover, people said that his father was a landlord.

  Zhou, our other shi fu, was an educated youth from Beijing. In 1968 he had played Xiao Jiye. At that time, we chose him because he im pressed us as warmhearted and enthusiastic, just like the hero himself. After that, the young people from the cities gradually ran out of songs and dances to perform and no one was in the mood to stage a new play. We all went our separate ways. I became so involved with the pig farm, I hardly ever thought of him.

  Now we met again. Plenty of time to talk. Throughout summer, our job was to cultivate the soybean and corn fields. Each day was long. The sun was bright. Under white canvas awnings, the wind was nice and cool. Our tractor drove through the young crops. Black soil turned up. Weeds went down. I had the illusion of sailing on a boundless green ocean, endless waves rolling up in the wake of our boat.

  Secretly I was rather curious about Zhou. I wanted to know, for example, why people said that his father had rather serious historical problems. But that question was too sensitive. I could not bring it up. In the meantime I suspected that since Zhou had read my diary he was curious about me too. But the diary, of course, he could not bring that up either. So we talked about other things.

  I don't remember exactly what I told him about myself in that summer. Probably it had something to do with Aunty, Switzerland, and the big yard. In return he told me that there were six of them in his family. His father worked in a crane factory. His mother was a housewife. He was the oldest child. His three sisters were much younger and still in elementary and middle schools.

  From our chat, I also found out that before he left Beijing, his family of six had only one room that was not very big. It was assigned to them by his father's work unit in the fifties. At that time, Zhou was the only child and he was small. So it was all right. Later when more children were born, the room became very crowded. So they built a small shack in front of it. The shack took away the yard and the sunshine in the room, but it gave them more space. Their neighbors did the same. Henceforth, by day the shack was their kitchen and at night it was Zhou's bedroom, until he left Beijing.

  Zhou's father was a fourth-grade worker. He made fifty-four yuan a month. Of course the money was not enough to support a family of six. Thus the entire family spent numerous evenings making matchboxes for a nearby factory. (In China, a matchbox consisted of the box holding the matches, and its two-sided case.) First Zhou's family had to paste each part up separately, let them dry, then insert the box into the case. Everything was done by hand. And that was only one matchbox made.

  Later when I visited his family in Beijing, I tried this myself. For an entire evening, all we made were some two hundred matchboxes. For each one hundred, the factory would pay them eight cents. So for an entire evening, all we made was less than twenty cents. In the end I was so frustrated that I thought I'd rather starve to death than do this. Even so, Zhou said, sometimes the factory had no work for them. Many other workers' families were equally poor. They also needed the money.

  Hearing this, I did not know what to say. Suddenly I remembered that when I was small, in summer each day Mother would give me five cents to buy popsicles. I took this for granted. I thought it was no big deal. My classmates had money to buy popsicles too. Only after I talked to Zhou did I realize what a luxury it was. For Zhou's family, five cents meant sixty-three matchboxes. A soda that cost fifteen cents was equal to almost two hundred matchboxes. Zhou and I, we grew up in the same city. Yet it seemed that we had lived in two different worlds.

  Perhaps Zhou became sympathetic with me too, after he heard what my childhood was like. Or maybe he was just good-natured and it wasn't just me he was willing to help? Later as the weather grew colder, we had to work in two twelve-hour shifts to plow the land before it froze, to get it ready for spring sowing. This meant we had to eat our meals in the fields. Sometimes the food carried to us was not enough. When this happened, he
let Xiang and me eat first. Sometimes the weather suddenly changed and we did not bring enough clothes, so he always gave up his jacket for us. He also had a good sense of humor. Seeing that we were exhausted, he would crack a joke or two to cheer us up. When we worked on the night shift, which was especially hard, he sometimes sent us back after midnight while he worked alone until dawn.

  I really enjoyed working with Zhou. After all, he was so handsome. Since he played Xiao Jiye, he had grown leaner and yet stronger. At the age of twenty-four, he looked wonderful even in that bulky black jeans uniform. In those years, tractor drivers were called "greasy rats." Zhou was a greasy rat too. Yet somehow he was different from others. He was only slightly taller than an average man and his thick, black hair just a tiny bit longer. Under it, his eyebrows were black and straight. When he frowned, his eyes were still smiling and sparkling at you. I couldn't take my eyes off him, that is, of course, when nobody was watching me. Each time our eyes met, my heartbeat quickened.

  Then it was November. One afternoon Zhou and I were assigned to plow a corn field that had just been harvested. Later the wind grew bone-piercing cold and freezing rain began to fall. The ground turned into mud. Mixed with stalks and roots, the mud clogged our plows. Whenever this happened, Zhou grabbed a poker and his greasy cotton-padded jacket and jumped out to prize the mud chunks off the plows. The job he gave me, in the meantime, was to raise, lower, and turn the plows from the cabin. After a while his jacket was wet through and his slacks and shoes were soaked. Seeing that his lips had lost color and his teeth were chattering, I argued with him, saying we ought to take turns to do this. But Zhou said I should do what he said since he was shifu, besides "Two drowned rats are no better than one." Thus saying he smiled and we continued to plow the corn field. But the next day, he was sick.