by Weijian Shan
The empress asked the eunuch, “What am I eating?”
The eunuch said, pointing to some spinach, which was green with red roots, “Old Buddha, this dish is called green parrot with red beak. And that bowl was a soup of pearl, emerald, and white jade.”
The empress was pleased.
When Empress Cixi eventually returned to the imperial palace after the crisis, she asked for the same dishes. But the palace chefs, with all their ingredients and skill, could not reproduce the food to her taste. Hunger made anything appetizing and delicious.
I wrote to my parents about my afternoon bouts of hunger and cold working on the ice. My father sent me a small bag of bitter chocolate. It helped a lot. Just one small piece would keep me from shivering so much. Unfortunately, a small bag did not last long.
Before the Lunar New Year in early February, we had basically cleared the lake of the reeds within our assigned territory. The month-and-a-half long season of cutting reeds was over. We packed up our belongings to return to the company camp. It really felt like going home.
* * *
During the winter of 1970–1971, we lived through the season in Fanshengedan, a cluster of mud huts with holes in the walls and roofs. It was a surprise that this place even had a name. The mud huts were situated on a mound surrounded by sand dunes whose shape and position would change after a sandstorm. The wind blew often. When it did, sand and dust would come in through the numerous cracks and fill the air in the hut. We did our best to patch up the holes.
Fanshengedan was a 20-minute walk from the shore of the lake. We didn’t mind the walk to the work site because it was much better staying on shore than living on the ice. But the huts here could only accommodate our platoon, not the entire company. So for this season, our company was scattered in different locations nearby.
But the greatest improvement from the previous year was that we built a small stove in the hut, out of mud bricks that we made ourselves, with a small chimney going out through the roof. It is an art to building a good mud-brick stove. Bad stoves leak smoke, which can be dangerous. And if a stove burns too efficiently, then most of the heat goes out through the chimney and is wasted. Almost everywhere we camped, we had to build stoves. I became quite skilled at it.
There were of course no beds. We slept on a kang, built with mud bricks. Six or seven of us slept on it. The kang would be heated by the burning stove, and the warmth would stay for a long while after the fire was extinguished. The kang served as our bed as well as a place to sit during the day. We sat on the kang cross-legged, chatting with one another, playing poker or chess. I usually occupied a corner to read.
* * *
In the Gobi, there was little vegetation. Scattered here and there were a few tough short plants growing out of the sand and gravel, making us marvel at the resilience of life. The local people had a few head of cattle and horses, as did our company. These animals grazed on whatever they could find. Cow dung was a valuable resource, and often the only source of fuel for us in the wintertime. Dried cow dung burns well and doesn’t smell so bad.
Collecting cow dung was a major undertaking and we would only do it in winter when the manure cakes were completely dry. The dung was scattered all over across the Gobi. We used either a basket or a sack to hold it. It would take hours to fill even half a sack, so the dung was precious. Dried cow dung burned easily. It only took a piece of newspaper to light it. It would burn for maybe 10 or 15 minutes. We would light the stove just before bedtime, to get the hut warm enough to get into bed. We also used it to boil water, either for drinking or for washing, using the all-purpose washbasin.
I cannot tell you what a luxury it was to be able to sit around a burning fire in the deep winter of the Gobi, especially when the wind howled like a loud whistle outside. It was a wonderfully warm feeling while it lasted. But cow dung was scarce and never lasted long. We spent so much time looking for the patties, and we burned them very carefully and sparingly, only when absolutely necessary.
Years later, when I first arrived in the United States, I was amused to hear the expression people use when strongly disagreeing with someone: “bullshit.” I chuckled and thought: “That stuff used to be dear to me.”
The local people had an ingenious way of catching fish. They used reeds to build an underwater fence in a part of the lake where they knew fish tended to congregate. Without being able to pass through the barrier, the fish would swim along it to a deeper part of the lake. At a certain point, another fence of reeds was erected in parallel with the first fence and the two fences formed a channel in the water. The channel eventually led to a trap encircled by reed fences. The trap, called a fish bag, was built in such a way that fish could go in it but could not back out. This whole thing was like an underwater labyrinth in the lake formed with reeds. It guided fish to swim into the trap. To catch the fish, one only needed to scoop them out of the fish bag with a net. In the summer, you could do this from a boat. But in wintertime, you only needed to stand over the fish bag on the ice.
* * *
The local people owned the fish bags. We lived so close to so much fish, yet we could not touch it, legally. The local people also knew how hungry we—the Construction Army Corps soldiers—were and how capable we were of stealing food. Locals with bird guns, which were shotguns that blew out “iron sand,” or birdshot, would guard some of the bags at night. The shot killed birds, not people. But it could easily scar you or blind you. You didn’t want to get shot in the face, or, of course, anywhere else on your body.
But no risk could deter the starved. The bold ones in our squad would go out at night to steal fish. In 1971, we were issued black denim uniforms. These uniforms were great for stealing at night because they perfectly blended in with the darkness. So dressed, some boys would go out to steal fish. Somehow none of our friends were ever caught or hurt, though sometimes they were shot at. I never participated in the adventures, not because I felt it was a wrong thing to do. Then again, I didn’t feel it was the right thing to do. But I certainly shared the spoils.
Ding Desheng was now the squad leader. He was a 68er and had finished his first year of senior high school. He was tall with crudely cut hair and a straight back. He never ordered people around. But his leadership by example was hard to follow, because he worked like a horse. Most people had no chance keeping up with him. After work, he would be the first one to go to the lake to fetch water for all of us. He would clean and grind reed cutters not only for himself but also for others. For this, he earned the respect of us all, and also a nickname: Dasheng. It means “great saint” and was the name for the all-powerful and capable Monkey King in the Chinese fairy tale, Journey to the West.
Dasheng had his saint-like qualities. But he was too uptight and rigid as a person. He never joined our gossips to complain about the leaders. Although he wouldn’t stop those who went out to steal fish, he wouldn’t touch what they brought back. For this, we also derided him for being “too revolutionary,” a term reserved for someone considered too zealous or naïve, to the point of being oblivious to the harsh and plain reality we lived in. The rest of us had long turned into cynics. It wasn’t a badge of honor to be considered “too revolutionary,” but at least people had some grudging respect for a true believer and hard worker like Dasheng.
One night, a group of adventurers led by Li Baoquan and Liu Xiaotong came back with some stolen fish. We were all awake, anxiously awaiting their triumphant return. It was past midnight. Baoquan pulled a couple of fish from a sack. What a catch. All of us were very happy. We immediately set to work. Someone fetched water and I scraped the scales off and cleaned the fish. Then we put the fish and water in a washbasin and we set it on the stove.
Fortunately, we had enough cow dung to light a fire in the stove. Soon the water was boiling, and the delicious smell of cooked fish began to permeate our hut. All of us were chatting excitedly while waiting for the fish to be cooked. All except Dasheng, who lay on his part of the kang with his head
turned away from us, his eyes closed. We knew he couldn’t be sleeping amid so much noise, commotion, and the smell of the fish being cooked. But nobody bothered to invite him to join the fun, knowing he didn’t approve of what we were doing.
When the fish was finally cooked, we shared it. Everyone was so happy with this great and delicious food in the middle of the night, even though the fish was simply boiled in water. Just then, we heard a sob. Gradually the sob became louder. Then it became uncontrollable. We turned to see that Dasheng was crying. He was so hungry that the feast was tormenting him mentally. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to join us. The pains of hunger had brought him to tears. Nobody asked him to join us, but we all knew that nobody among us needed an invitation. It was up to him. In the end Dasheng didn’t have a bite of the fish. He was a man with strong principles, a saint.
* * *
The new black denim uniforms we had been issued for the winter were much more durable than the flimsy green uniforms we used to have, but they were ugly. You can imagine the sight of all the boys and girls in dark black from neck to shoes.
Working with the sharp reeds tore up our clothes quickly because when bundling the reeds, we needed to hold them with our hands, arms, knees, and the whole body. Each of us was issued a pair of white knitted cotton gloves. It was impossible to work without them because the sharp reeds could easily cut through the skin and flesh of our hands. It was also freezing cold, and while the thin cotton wasn’t enough to keep warm it was better than nothing. We wore these gloves while pushing our reed cutters, and to stack and bundle the reeds. Usually they didn’t last a day or two before holes appeared. Within three to five days, they would become shredded. We usually wore two pairs of gloves if we had them, both to make them last longer and to stay warm for as long as possible.
My mother had been sent to a farm in the northeast. She had a pair of fleece-lined sheepskin gloves made for me, covered in green cloth. I wore them proudly because they were better gloves than anyone else had. The sheepskin was also quite resistant to wear and tear. Even after the green covering totally wore off, the sheepskin would not break. I used them for a number of years, to the envy of my friends. The job on the freezing lake was infinitely more tolerable with this pair of gloves.
* * *
We repeated this routine of battling the reeds and the elements on the frozen lake every winter, year after year. And each year, I dreaded the reed-cutting season and hoped our platoon would be spared the ordeal, if only for once. We were never so lucky.
Chapter 10
The Longest Night
China’s economic policies were modeled after those of the Soviet Union, which was a so-called centrally planned economy—what Western observers derisively called the “command economy”—in contrast with the free market economy of the West. The command economy owed its creation to Joseph Stalin, who institutionalized the state control over industry on a scale hitherto undreamed of.
This was not what Marx or Lenin had envisioned. Karl Marx believed that private ownership of capital goods, or the means of production such as factories and businesses, led to the exploitation of the workers and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the capitalists. But he also believed that socialism was not possible without a society having gone through capitalism first. By his theory, socialism should not happen in agrarian societies such as tsarist Russia or prerevolutionary China, neither of which had gone through the stage of capitalism.
Lenin went further, bringing socialist revolution to Russia and deviating from Marxism by establishing a socialist system in a peasant society. But soon after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin discovered that socialist economic policies did not work; widespread famine ensued. In 1921, he introduced a “New Economic Policy” or “state capitalism,” which allowed some private enterprise and private farming.
Stalin, however, expropriated the private ownership of businesses, collectivized farming, and established an economic model of central planning. Stalin’s Russia was able to rapidly industrialize because the government controlled so much of the nation’s resources.
It was this Stalinist model that China had borrowed in the 1950s. But China was even more of a peasant society in the 1950s than Russia had been in the 1920s, and poorer. Nonetheless, Mao was convinced that socialism was the way to develop the Chinese economy, even if it meant forcing China to modernize faster than many believed possible. Hence programs like mass collectivization and the Great Leap Forward, which even Soviet leaders such as Khrushchev considered insane.
Undaunted by these failures, Mao went further still. The Cultural Revolution removed all the “capitalist tails,” or moderate economic policies instituted by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to stabilize the economy, such as allowing peasants to own a tiny plot of land to grow vegetables or raise a pig for their own family use. Now the government at different levels controlled the production of everything, often with no planning or even a good reason, as long as it was in accordance with “revolutionary” principles. For example, when Mao said, “Grain is the key in agriculture,” many communes cut down their fruit trees and stopped producing cash crops to make way for producing more grain.
The Construction Army Corps was an extreme form of a “command economy,” as the system was literally under military command. There might have been some plans we were following, but if so they were perfunctory; the officers in charge knew practically nothing about planning, nor much about farming. They did not lack for ideas, but most of those ideas were quite stupid.
The Inner Mongolia Construction Army Corps was not alone. By 1971, there were 12 such corps, plus three “agricultural construction divisions,” scattered across the country in remote and poor regions, with more than 2.4 million “troops” enlisted. Like ours, they were all organized like giant military units and engaged in production of one kind or another at the whim of officers who were not held accountable for the economic performance of the units under their command.
* * *
“The curtain of the night fell gradually. Soon, it was completely dark. A bright full moon hung in the sky and shone over the vast land. The work site appeared pale under the moonlight and a mood of misery hung over it. We were still working intensely under the moonlight. I used all my strength to hold up my body, which was about to fall over, as I carried the heavy basket filled with muddy soil running up the bank of the canal. I fell several times but each time I picked myself up and persevered. You should know it was not my physical strength that kept me going. It was only my willpower, which seemed endless.”
The above paragraph was in a letter I wrote to my parents on May 12, 1971, two days after finishing the longest stretch of hard labor I had endured in my life.
“The mood of misery wasn’t caused by the moonlight,” my mother later wrote me, in case I didn’t know, “it was in your mind. Cheer up.”
That was all she could do to help me.
Like all the deserts in the world, the Gobi is a desert due to lack of rainfall. To grow crops, we needed to bring water by canals and ditches from Lake Wuliangsu or the Yellow River. In the spring of 1971, we were dispatched to dig the Yihe Canal, or the “Righteousness and Harmony Canal.” It does rain occasionally in spring and summer, and we were supposed to complete our section of the canal before the rain came. Because of the urgency, we no longer had to walk the 20 kilometers (∼12 miles) to the work site: instead we rode in large hauling wagons hooked up to a tractor. But it still took 45 minutes to an hour to get there.
Before dawn on May 9, as usual, we started out in the tractor-hauled wagons for the canal site. There was no wind. It was an unusually fine day.
The terrain along the way was covered with a thick crust of salt and alkali. Even in the burning heat, its whiteness reminded me of a deep winter snowfall. The wagons stirred up a thick dust of salt and sand that the wind whipped at us. Moments into the journey, we felt as if our bodies were made of salt dust, sandy to the last pore.
We huddled toget
her, our eyes and mouths clenched, submerged in the roar of the engine. The salt burned into our skin relentlessly. It was difficult to breathe. We had learned not to speak, lest our teeth scrape and our lungs fill with grit.
We had by now become experienced with the weather. We knew it would be quite hot toward noon, so, despite the morning chill, most of us left our padded jackets behind. By the time we reached the canal, it was already hot. Our spirits were high, and we set to work immediately.
Although Yihe was to be a large canal, where we were working there was no water for miles. Our task was to dig up the damp red clay, put it into baskets, carry the baskets up the 2-meter-high (∼6 feet) bank, and unload them at the top. Filled, a basket weighed about 100 kilograms (∼200 pounds), twice my weight. The girls loaded the baskets, and two boys carried each end of a shoulder pole with the basket hanging in the middle of the pole by a rope.
We had been told that the project was pressing and important, and we were enthusiastic laborers. Our enthusiasm was boosted by the fact that young people from other companies and even other regiments were sometimes summoned to the site to help us. No one wanted to lose face. There was an implicit challenge to show ourselves to be the most persevering and strong.
Our company leaders came around from time to time to inspect our work. Anyone caught stealing a moment’s rest would receive a reprimand.
I was paired off once again with our “saint” squad leader Dasheng. He had to work hard to set an example for everyone else. That meant I had to work as hard as he did as we carried a basket of earth between us with one single pole on our shoulders.
Instead of just walking with the basket, Dasheng and I ran. We would carry it up the bank and back so quickly that the poor girls assigned to fill our basket were breathless. It wasn’t easy to run into the strong sandy wind carrying such a heavy load of muddy earth. Dasheng seemed never to tire. Even during breaks, when everyone wanted to lie down, Dasheng would go around trying to cheer us up. I was a hard worker, too. It surprised me to find that I could keep pace with Dasheng, for he was a lot stronger than me.