by Weijian Shan
None of us knew what to do. Then I noticed some people unloading trunks and suitcases, and I went over to help. Several people inside the cargo compartment would drag a wooden trunk to the door and throw it to the platform some two meters below. Many cracked open upon impact, spilling the contents across the platform. I sadly remembered how carefully my mother had packed my wooden case and how my father had bundled it tightly with straw ropes.
Someone directed us to carry the baggage toward a row of sturdy, open-backed Jiefang (“Liberation”) trucks parked nearby. There was a steep slope from the train platform to the trucks, and it was hard to carry the heavy trunks downhill. Soon people started tossing the luggage cases here, too. Now more of them splintered open and their contents spilled out.
We were all summoned to an open space to hear our assignments. Each of us was given a regiment and a company. I was assigned to the Nineteenth Regiment, Fifth Company. To my dismay, my friends Yuanbo and Zhiqiang were assigned to Fourth Company. Only Cheng Yulin, my neighbor, was assigned to the same company as me.
A representative from the Fifth Company took charge of my group. He introduced himself as Liu Fengliang, a platoon leader, and directed us to find our baggage. After a long search in the dark, I found mine. By some miracle, my father’s ropes had held. After we had loaded our belongings onto one of the trucks, we climbed on top. We had to help one another on, and it was difficult to find a secure seat amid the mountain of wooden cases and bags. I found a place toward the front, where I could hold on tight to a rope.
With a great shudder and squeal, the truck started to move. There were a few trucks ahead of us. In the glare of the headlights, I could see columns of dust rising behind them. The dust engulfed us. Now the trucks in the front were hardly visible. The road was so bumpy that a few times I felt I was surely going to be thrown off.
My thin body turned into an icicle on top of that truck. The truck jerked from one side to another, and I soon became nauseous. My grip on the rope grew weak. I feared that if I were thrown off, nobody would notice in the darkness. We rode for what felt like an eternity. One by one, the trucks in front turned in different directions and disappeared. Finally, ours was the only truck driving in the complete darkness. There was no sign of life other than the roar of the engine.
After four hours, just when I felt that I could not stand it any longer, the truck jerked to a stop. Opening my eyes, I saw some people coming toward us. Platoon Leader Liu emerged from the driver’s cabin to announce that we were home.
We were in front of a long row of shacks with a door every few yards. A small kerosene lamp burned in each door. Cheng Yulin and I were assigned to the same room. It was about 4 meters (∼12 feet) wide and 10 meters (∼30 feet) deep. A neat pile of straw ran across the length of the room, and some boys appeared already to be asleep in it. This was to be the bed for seven of us.
Soon our squad leader, a man named Wang Lianfa, carried in a steaming bucket of noodle soup. Yulin and I dug out our tin bowls and helped ourselves. The soup tasted nice after the cold and bumpy journey. As we ate, we chatted with our new roommates to find out about each other.
Wang Lianfa was very warm to us, urging us to have more soup until we were full. We met Liu Xiaotong, who was also from Beijing. He and Wang had arrived a month or two earlier. Liu wanted to know if there was any news. He told me that here it was next to impossible to hear anything about the rest of the country, let alone the world.
Seeing that we could not finish the soup, the boys in bed got up to help themselves to the leftovers. We soon learned this “new arrivals soup” was rare to come by. They promised us the only reason we ate so little was that we still had “oil” in our stomachs.
We spread our quilts and blankets next to each other on the row of straw. Each of us had a territory less than half of a meter (∼1.5 feet) wide and 3 meters (∼9 feet) in length. Squad Leader Wang brought in a bucket of cold water, and Yulin and I poured some into our basins. The dirt on my sooty, coal-streaked face soon turned the water black. I asked where I could get more, but Wang said that it was now too dark to go to the pond. We went to bed. Someone blew out the kerosene lamp.
Although I was exhausted, I could not sleep. I could not avoid leaning up against the boys on either side of me. Trying to keep some space to myself, I lay on my side with my legs out straight. Soon, my neighbor rolled over and occupied some of my territory. I tried to push him back without waking him. No sooner had I succeeded than he rolled over again. After several hours of this, I finally fell asleep.
The next morning, I awoke to find that we were in the middle of a sandy wasteland. Our shacks had apparently been built in great haste. The front wall was made of unbaked bricks. The rafters were rough-chopped tree branches, and the roof was a layer of straw covered by a thick layer of mud. The back wall was made of woven dried reeds, with mud that had caked off in many places.
There was no bathroom nearby, so people just did their business behind the shacks. One could smell the human waste from quite a distance. Behind our shelters was a small pond. My excitement at seeing water soon evaporated when I found it was stagnant and dirty. Other than a few reeds, it held no sign of life.
I learned that our shelters had indeed been recently put together because there was not enough housing to accommodate so many newcomers. There was another row of temporary housing adjacent to ours, intended for a girls’ platoon. The Construction Army Corps was said to be building some better housing in the company compound so that we could move in before winter.
Our platoon leader, Liu Fengliang, had just retired from the army, where he had served four years without being promoted. He had been recruited from a village in the countryside somewhere in Hebei Province. Since he was from a peasant family, he knew quite a lot about farming. He was about 24 years old, well built and of medium height. He looked serious but friendly. He constantly smoked cigarettes that he rolled himself. When Platoon Leader Liu gave a whistle, we lined up in formation and marched toward the company compound. Soon, our whole column started to trot as the marching orders grew more rapid. I trotted along, maintaining my position in the column. I felt quite pleased with myself for being able to do that. When we reached the compound, I saw several columns like ours standing in front of a building. Some were boys and some were girls. As we ran up, they examined us curiously. We still looked like big-city students, with our white cotton shirts and pale skin. They looked more seasoned, tanned, and wiry; their clothes were all well patched.
After a brief announcement and a welcome speech by the company’s political instructor, Zhang Songsen, and our commander, Zhang Yinghan, breakfast was served. Or rather, we served ourselves. Each column had a bucket and a washbasin. Two people from each column went up to a small window in the wall to collect the food, and they then ladled the food into our bowls. The meal consisted of porridge and steamed corn flour bread. There were also some salted vegetables. The porridge was made with some grain that looked like millet but had no taste. Later I learned that it was called mizi. It was to be the main staple for us for many years to come. It was such a coarse grain that we referred to it as “fake millet.”
Breakfast was followed by a political study session. For several hours, Political Instructor Zhang droned on. He was telling us, as if we had not heard it hundreds of times, that Vice Commander-in-Chief Lin Biao (defense minister and Mao’s designated successor after Liu Shaoqi was purged) had suggested forming the Inner Mongolia Construction Army Corps, and that the Great Leader himself had approved it. The significance of educated youth going to the countryside could not be overemphasized. It was the single most important measure to prevent the emergence of new revisionists and to prepare the next generation of revolutionary successors. We should be ready to “take root in the countryside.”
I was shocked to hear someone muttering behind me, “A place that birds don’t care to shit. Even trees don’t take root here.”
I looked back. It was Li Baoquan of our squad, a boy from Tianjin.
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His words aroused laughter and the political instructor stopped. “What is it?” he demanded. Li Baoquan rose to report. “Someone just said that this is a place where birds don’t care to shit and trees don’t take root,” he said.
Upon his words, there was another roar of laughter. His face was serious and his eyes were trained innocently toward the political instructor.
The political instructor praised Li Baoquan for “revealing a bad deed,” and went on talking about how we would take root in the countryside. I began to wish someone would tell us more about the history of our farm, what we were going to do, and what kind of future there was for us. But I knew that political education had priority over practical matters. I felt tired and started to fidget on the small folding stool that I had brought from Beijing. Most of the others sat quietly on the cold ground with their legs crossed.
A deputy chief of staff of the Nineteenth Regiment was also there to deliver a war mobilization speech. He told us about the tense situation along the Sino-Mongolian border. A war with the Soviet “revisionist social-imperialists” was possible at any time. We should welcome war: The Soviet Union, the first socialist country, though it had changed color now, had been born after World War I. World War II brought the triumph of socialism in China, North Korea, and Eastern Europe. Another world war could easily turn the entire world socialist.
* * *
So, I now belonged to the Eleventh Squad of the Third Platoon of the Fifth Company of the Nineteenth Regiment of the Second Division of the Inner Mongolia Construction Army Corps. We were in a place called Wulate, a state farm. As I would soon learn, to call it a “farm” was a vast exaggeration. We were some 15 kilometers (∼9 miles), from Lake Wuliangsu (Ulan su in Mongolian). Only four years earlier, I was told, this land we were on had been the bottom of the lake.
Our company was about 300 people strong, half boys and half girls. Most were students from big cities, like me. There were also a dozen or so adults, mostly old farmers who had founded the farm. Because of their “complicated” backgrounds, we were warned to watch out for them.
Most of the rest of the adults were veterans from the army, like Platoon Leader Liu. The company had six regular platoons and one logistics platoon, which included a cooking squad, a pig-raising squad, and a horse-drawn-cart squad. There was also a headquarters, with a support staff of messengers, medical personnel, and secretaries.
The army retirees held positions as platoon leaders or deputy platoon leaders for the male platoons. Because there were few women soldiers in the military, and none had retired to our farm, the leaders of the female platoons were appointed by the company leaders from among the girls themselves. The company leaders were army officers in active service. There were four of them. These were Company Commander Zhang Yinghan, Political Instructor Zhang Songsen, Deputy Company Commander Duan Dingshan (whom we called Lao Duan, or “Old Duan”), and Dr. Yu, the military doctor.
Of the six regular platoons, three were boys’ platoons and three were girls’. Each platoon was divided into three squads, mostly led by students. The majority of those in our squad were from Beijing. A few, including Li Baoquan, were from Tianjin, an almost equally sophisticated northern port city close to Beijing.
The ages of the Army Corps “soldiers” in our company ranged from 15 to 21, with the average being 16 or 17. My group was referred to as 69ers, meaning that we would have graduated from junior high school in 1969 had it not been for the Cultural Revolution. There were also a few 66ers and senior 68ers. The senior 68ers were actually the oldest group, so named because they would have graduated from senior high school in 1968, not junior high, and would have been on their way to factories or universities. They were at least four years older than I was, and there were probably only three or four of them in the entire company. The 66ers and the senior 68ers were regarded as the most educated groups, because they had attended three years of junior high and one year of senior high, respectively, before the Cultural Revolution erupted. We 69ers had only completed elementary school.
Our regiment, the nineteenth, consisted of 10 companies scattered around Lake Wuliangsu, a big lake fed by the Yellow River when the rain was plentiful. In years of drought, the flow of water from the river to the lake was blocked off. Since there had been more drought than rain recently, the lake had shrunk. The lake was known for its carp and for the many square kilometers of high reeds growing in its shallow waters. Regiment headquarters was on the bank of the lake at a place called Batou.
Unfortunately, our company was not one of the lucky “fishing companies” and we would not have much opportunity to eat fish. As a farming company, we were to deal only with the land. Other companies included the tractor company and the construction company.
Regiments reported to a division. There were 20-odd regiments in the Second Division. Its headquarters was located in Urat Qianqi, the town on the rail line. The regiments were scattered across thousands of square kilometers of desert; the companies were stationed dozens of kilometers apart from each other and the regiments even more distant.
Army Corps headquarters was in Hohhot. I never found out how many divisions there were in the entire Army Corps. They occupied a territory that stretched all across the vastness of Inner Mongolia, a province that is twice the size of France and three times the size of Germany. Inner Mongolia represents about an eighth of China’s total landmass, but only 2 percent of its population. Our regiment, with its 10 companies, was more than 3,000 people strong. The Second Division had more than 25,000 men and women. The entire Army Corps had a force of as many as 170,000 “soldiers.”
Prior to our arrival, our farm had been called Wurat Farm, managed by just the dozen or so farmers who had founded it. The farm had been an effort by the government to provide these people with jobs and a living. They were managing quite well, producing enough to feed themselves and a substantial surplus to sell to the government. But the Cultural Revolution destroyed the old farm leadership when the Construction Army Corps arrived with us, the educated youth.
Much of the land around our company’s compound was not cultivable, and stretched, quite barren, all the way to the distant Yin Mountains.
Because the land did not have much to offer, it was sparsely populated. The emptiness struck me when I walked a mile or two to a place where I could no longer see the company compound. Other than the mountains on the horizon, there was nothing to be seen anywhere. I could not help thinking that if I died in the middle of this wasteland, my body would rot and decompose for years without anyone finding it.
Where the ground was not covered by sand, one could see some hardy vegetation that was resistant to the soil’s high saline and alkaline content and to the dry weather. It seemed unbelievable that they existed at all. There were some wild animals, too, though not many. The farmers had a saying that even rabbits did not care to pee or shit there, although you did see them once in a while. I had heard there were foxes, too, although they were rare.
Before I arrived, I had expected to see herds of cattle, sheep, and horses grazing on vast grasslands. I had an image of Inner Mongolia familiar to every Chinese elementary school child from an ancient Chinese poem: “The wind bends the grass low; cattle and sheep show.” I was therefore quite disappointed. But wherever a few blades of grass could be found, there were also cattle and horses. The poem about Inner Mongolia was far more pastoral and romantic than the land itself. Around us, it was just the Gobi Desert.
In addition to us Han Chinese, there were, of course, some Mongolians. They had their own culture and language and belonged to the same ethnic group as the people in the country of Mongolia, which had broken off from China in the 1940s. Since the break in relations between China and the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, China’s relations with Mongolia, a Soviet satellite, had become hostile as well. The Russians had about a million troops stationed along the Mongolia-China border.
The native Mongolians were nomads, following their herds across the gr
assland and living in yurts made of animal wool. They lived mostly to the north where there was more grass, so we rarely saw them.
Although the border was sealed and heavily patrolled, at least one kind of cross-border traffic got through, but only during the winter. When the harsh north wind blows down from Siberia, across Mongolia and China’s Loess Plateau, it tosses up dust, sand, and snow. One can hardly see one’s whereabouts in the middle of a sand- or snowstorm and can easily get lost and perish. The worst was a blinding “white-haired blizzard,” a snow- and sandstorm combined. You could not venture to the outhouse for fear that you would not find your way back. But whenever the white-haired blizzard blew, herds of Mongolian horses and cattle would wander across the border into Inner Mongolia, driven by the wind. Traditionally, the horses were returned. Now that relations between the two countries were hostile, the horses were ours to keep.
As a farming company, our responsibilities were to grow crops on the several thousand hectares (1 hectare = ∼2.5 acres) of land we had been assigned. Our main crops included wheat, potatoes, pumpkins, sorghum, and corn. The major portion of our work would be to “transform” the wasteland. It was a continuous job of digging irrigation canals and ditches. We also needed to collect manure to fertilize the fields and to stock as winter fuel. Then we had to transport sand to the fields to change the soil conditions. The high proportion of clay in the soil facilitated the seeping up of saline and alkaline to the surface, suffocating the crops. The sand was intended to change the soil composition.
It became very clear to us a few days after arriving that we would have none of the things that Army Corps representatives had promised us in Beijing. There was no white (wheat flour) bread. The major means of transportation was not a helicopter, but our legs. There was no plan to build a road as wide and straight as Chang’an Boulevard. Our monthly stipend would be five yuan, enough for two tin cans of pork. At that time, it cost 120 yuan, or my two-years’ stipend, to buy a domestic-made Shanghai-brand watch.