Out of the Gobi

by Weijian Shan

  Chapter 11

  Unforgettable Movie Night

  Jiang Qing was pretty, charming, and rebellious in her youth. In 1935, she left her native province of Shandong at the age of 21 and became a film actress in Shanghai, the only place where films were made in China. She starred in a number of movies and acquired some fame in entertainment circles, although she was generally considered a second-rate actress. Many years later, as the wife of Mao Zedong, she would consider herself to be the sole authority on arts and culture in China.

  In 1937, Shanghai fell to Japanese invaders. Jiang Qing left the city the next year and fled to Yan’an, the headquarters of the Communist forces. She married Mao at the end of 1938, when she was 24 and he was 45. It was Mao’s third marriage. The union was controversial within the Party’s leadership because of rumors of her checkered past, including previous relationships and marriages. It was said that the central committee approved the marriage with the condition that she not be allowed to participate in the politics of the Party.

  After the founding of the People’s Republic, Jiang Qing kept a low profile. She was made the head of the films section in the Party’s propaganda department, her rank equivalent to a bureau chief in a government agency. But by the time of the Cultural Revolution, her star had risen. She was made the deputy head of the powerful Leading Group for the Cultural Revolution, arguably the highest decision-making body during that period. She was hailed in official media as the standard-bearer of the revolution in cultural affairs, in large part because of her involvement in the creation of the so-called Model Plays.

  Mao had thought that old traditions and culture still dominated the arts in the New China. This, he felt, should not be allowed to continue. One objective of the Cultural Revolution was to replace the old cultural institutions with revolutionary new ones. Operas and plays should sing the praises of revolutionaries and common folk instead of the emperors, generals, and beauties of long-dead dynasties that were common in traditional performances.

  Beginning around 1966, Jiang Qing had helped create what became known as the “Eight Model Plays,” a series of modern Chinese operas with revolutionary themes. These plays were initially supposed to be models for creative artists to emulate and follow, and as such they shared the stage with traditional plays. But the storms of the Cultural Revolution cleansed all forms of entertainment of their feudal or capitalist residue. Nearly all forms of performance art—every film, every play, and every opera—were deemed “poisonous weeds” and were rooted out or banned, except for the Eight Model Plays. Radio stations played them, and nothing but them, incessantly, every day. For a country with more than 800 million people and 4,000 years of recorded history, cultural life became very simple: eight revolutionary model plays.

  * * *

  After a day’s hard work, we usually found some way to entertain ourselves. No matter how tired, some found the energy to play volleyball or basketball. Others would sit on the kang playing poker or chess. Then there were the talented people like Liu Xiaotong, who had taught himself the basics of many musical instruments. He could play harmonica, accordion, violin, and the two-stringed erhu. Wang Dacheng, Cui Xianchao, and Yan Chongjie could also play the erhu. When they played together as a quartet, people would gather around and listen.

  Radios were little help in relieving the monotony of our lives. All stations broadcast only the sound tracks of the six Peking operas and two ballets known as the “Eight Model Plays.” Everything else was regarded a poisonous weed and was banned. We had heard these revolutionary performances so many times that almost everyone knew them by heart. In fact, although I was somewhat tone deaf as a singer and was frequently off-key, even I could sing the part of every character and perform them in full.

  Cui liked to sing. So whenever Xiaotong played the erhu, we would urge him to sing with the music for us. He had a reasonably good voice and it was very loud—a crucial requirement for Peking opera. We all enjoyed his performances, especially the way he stretched his vocal cords, and when his singing was out of tune. We found it hilarious in those moments to see how serious he was, his face contorted with effort.

  The most exciting but extremely rare event of our lives was going to see a movie. The regiment had a movie projection team that made the rounds from barracks to barracks. It was equipped with an eight-millimeter projector and a diesel power generator. In remote places like ours, more than a whole day’s walk from headquarters, we would be extremely lucky if a movie was brought to a place near our barracks. Of course, it was almost always a film showing one of the eight revolutionary model performances.

  One day in early summer we heard that the Tenth Company would show a movie that night. Incredibly, the movie was not one of the eight productions, but rather, Lenin in October, an old Russian film depicting Lenin and his comrades during the October Revolution of 1917. It had been dubbed into Chinese and released in China long before the Cultural Revolution. Somehow, this movie had been “liberated” as a revolutionary piece of art because now the leadership said that Lenin had been betrayed by the Soviet revisionist regime.

  The Tenth Company was about two hours away by foot and there was no direct road. But nobody gave any thought to the distance. After all, we often walked that long each way to work. Two hours were nothing for such a reward.

  The summer night fell late, so it was still light out when we finished our dinner around six and set out. Our whole company of several hundred marched en masse. We figured that if we went south, we should run into the Tenth Company. Since the movie would not start until it was completely dark, we had plenty of time.

  We usually marched in a formation, but since this was free time, the whole crowd just moved along without any order at all. The boys led the way. We maintained a respectable distance from the girls, as usual.

  There was a spirit of happiness in the air. Among the young men, there was chattering and laughter. The young women were much quieter, but we could hear them chatter and giggle as they walked a little distance behind us.

  We were traversing the land crisscrossed with ditches. We had to tread very carefully because this was the irrigation season and water was flowing from the ditches everywhere. It would be very uncomfortable if we got our shoes wet.

  Occasionally we would run into a trail that followed the direction we were headed, and we would speed up. But soon it would curve, and we had to get off the trail to head in what we believed to be the right direction. Nobody was exactly sure where the Tenth Company was, but since we were walking together, we relied on each other to find the direction and just walked south. At this time of the year, the wind blew from the south. We could not be too wrong if we walked against the wind.

  We walked and talked for almost an hour and a half. The compound of the Tenth Company was still not in sight. In fact, other than the vastness of the land, we could see nothing. Soon dusk fell and it became more difficult to find our way, as everything looked the same in every direction.

  “Do we know where we are headed?” someone shouted.

  Nobody answered. It did seem curious that we hadn’t run into the Tenth Company yet. We grew anxious. The starting time for movies was invariably nightfall. That meant that we had half an hour or less. We might miss the first part. We quickened our steps.

  All of a sudden, I stepped into water above my shoes. The grass under my feet was quite tall so it was difficult to see. I swallowed my cry to avoid calling attention to what had just happened. There were at least 20 boys in front of me. They must all have stepped into the water. Yet none had let out a sound either. This was because no one wanted to become a laughingstock by being the only person who was wet—and if he had to be wet, he didn’t want to spare the rest of us. So the first boy just kept silent and must have been chuckling to himself by now, knowing that everyone else behind him had also stepped into water, like lemmings. We all marched across the water silently, everyone secretly laughing. A few dozen of us passed through this swampy area without disclosi
ng our mutual fate.

  We were, however, eagerly waiting to hear what would happen to the young women behind us. Sure enough, we heard a loud shriek. One of them had stepped into the water and screamed. All the boys burst out laughing. We had pulled a trick on the girls. It was interesting that none of us had betrayed the secret, yet the first of them had let it out. I guess we were full of mischief at the time and looking for ways to entertain ourselves.

  After the first cry, the women stopped in their tracks. We kept walking but turned our heads to watch. We could see them only vaguely, as it was already getting dark quickly. Behind us, they were obviously discussing what to do. But we knew they could not do anything but follow us; the road back would be equally long and treacherous. So, just before we could no longer see them, we heard some splashing sounds. As we expected, they were crossing the swampy area and running to try to catch up. They continued to follow us, at a respectable but closer distance. It was now totally dark.

  We walked and walked. Finally, we heard a dog barking. We were all excited to be close to our final destination, or so we thought. But other than barking, there were no other sounds. If this had been the Tenth Company, we all felt we should have heard the sound of a movie.

  To our disappointment, we had come only to a small village with a few houses. We sent two people to ask for directions. They soon came back with the news that we had made a mistake: We had been walking southeast instead of southwest. Now we had to turn west.

  According to the villagers, the best way to reach the Tenth Company was to walk on the bank of a large irrigation ditch winding its way to the Tenth Company’s vegetable fields. If we followed the ditch, we would not get lost again.

  It was a dark night, and the bank was treacherous. Although it was wide enough to allow two people to walk side by side, the surface was by no means smooth, and there were puddles of water everywhere. We picked our way forward, trying to avoid stepping into the water or slipping off the sides.

  There were numerous occasions on which one needed to work and walk at night in the Gobi: irrigating the fields, herding the cattle and horses, and even going from the barracks to the outhouse. It was important to learn how to walk at night, especially now that it was summer, a time when ditches were filled with water. It didn’t take much for the entire landscape to turn into pockets of mud. At that time of year, it was difficult to drive a tractor or a truck even during the day because it could sink into the mud, and so would a horse-drawn wagon.

  I was an experienced night-walker by then, and I knew the basic rules. You should always look far ahead, not down at your feet. Otherwise, you could not walk fast, and it was easy to get lost. You shouldn’t use a flashlight because then you could only concentrate on a short distance and you would lose your sense of direction. But it was good to carry one just in case. While several of us owned flashlights, we couldn’t afford to buy batteries. We carefully conserved our batteries by using the flashlights as little as possible.

  It was important to be able to differentiate between different types of terrain. We created a saying that served as a guide for night walking: “The shining is water, the dark is mud, and the white is solid ground.” Water reflects light best, even very faint light from stars behind thick clouds, so it appears somewhat shiny. Mud does not reflect light at all, so it seems dark. The road looks white, as it is neither as reflective as water nor as absorbent as mud. Human eyes, I found, can easily be trained to see in the dark.

  But there must be no artificial light at all. Even a small light will make it difficult to distinguish water, mud, and solid ground. Whenever there were a few electric bulbs in the distance, I found it difficult to recognize the road under my feet.

  Now we walked briskly, picking our way around puddles of water and mud. I was silently calculating how much of the movie had been shown and how much was still left. I knew that everyone was thinking about the same thing. Having gone so far, nobody wanted to go back without seeing at least part of the movie. We just hoped that we could get there before it ended.

  By then we had walked about three hours. It had been dark for about an hour. That meant that the movie was already half over if it had started when darkness fell. There was still no sound or light ahead.

  Old Cui was walking beside me. He had poor vision, which became worse at night. Even with his glasses on, he could not differentiate between water, mud, and solid ground. I had very good vision. So the two of us walking together made a good pair. As usual, he was telling me stories.

  He was talking about Mr. Ulanhu, the deposed party secretary of Inner Mongolia. Every year in Inner Mongolia to this day there is a big festival called Nadam, at which Mongolians gather to compete in various traditional games and sports, such as archery, wrestling, and horse racing. Horse racing is popular in Inner Mongolia, and at Nadam there are several types of races. In one of them, horses are only allowed to walk, but not to gallop. If the horse gallops, the rider is immediately disqualified. The trick is to let the horse walk at maximum speed without breaking into a gallop. Mr. Ulanhu always participated in the horse-walking event, presumably because he would have no chance to win if competing with the younger folks in such rather wild and dangerous games as “grabbing a lamb.”

  I didn’t know until later in life that English-style riding is much more refined; the rider’s position controls the horse’s gait—how it moves its legs while walking, trotting, cantering, or galloping. British-style riders also synchronize their body rhythms to rise and fall with the leg movements of the horse. Once out of rhythm, riders have to “change diagonal” to get back in sync with the horse. We weren’t that sophisticated, and there was no practical point in being so, either. I suppose what we called “walk” would include what English-style riders call “walk and trot,” and what we called “running” would in English style be considered either cantering or galloping.

  In the Gobi, we rode in the Western style similar to cowboys in the United States, and there wasn’t so much attention to the form and style of riding, probably because our horses were much more suited for real work as beasts of burden than for show or other purposes. Indeed, the Mongolian saddles are much closer in style to Western saddles, as are some other details about how to saddle up and ride a horse.

  Years later, I was astonished to discover that in stables in the United States and in Britain, horses aren’t fed at night. In the Gobi, it would be considered a gross negligence and animal cruelty if the caretaker of a horse did not get up many times a night to add hay to the trough to feed the horses. We even had a saying: “A horse can’t maintain its weight without eating hay at night.” I think we had to feed the horses at night not only because they work during the day with little time for eating, but also because our feed was low in protein, whereas in the riding stables in Europe and America, the horses eat much more grain and plant protein than what we consumed as farm laborers ourselves. Some of our people even stole grain-based feed from the stables to exchange with local villagers for tofu to avoid starving ourselves. It is no exaggeration to say we were literally competing with other animals for food.

  But, getting back to the story, Cui Xianchao told me that many horses for competition at Nadam were trained as walking horses. They did not know how to gallop, but they could walk very briskly. Unlike galloping horses, which would tire out after a rather short distance, a walking horse could walk the whole day. Therefore, as a means of transportation, good walking horses were more valuable than running ones.

  Mr. Ulanhu was a good rider. He had been a cavalry leader in the Red Army and was one of the most senior ethnic Mongolians in the Communist Party. Even though he was already old, he had always won the walking horse race every year. Now, of course, he could no longer participate because he had been deposed.

  “You know how he beat the young riders?” Old Cui asked. Then he told me that every other rider was instructed by the organizers of the game not to outperform Mr. Ulanhu. But he would have been angry if he had realized t
his, or if he had felt he won too easily. So the race had to be close: All the young riders would whip their horses relentlessly, while at the same time holding the reins tight so that their horses would not pass Ulanhu’s. It always appeared that he had won a tough and fair race. And as he was being congratulated for being the best rider of the grasslands, he was the only one who did not know that he had been allowed to win.

  We both laughed, and so did the people within earshot.

  “It would be great,” I said, “if we had a horse. Then for sure we would be there in time to see the movie.”

  “I’m afraid,” Cui said, “that it will be over by the time we get there.”

  “I would be happy if I could see even half an hour of the movie,” someone said with a sigh.

  We did not have much hope. After more than three hours of walking we were tired, and the Tenth Company was still not in sight. Our purpose now seemed simply to reach the Tenth Company, regardless of whether we could see the movie.

  All of a sudden, someone shouted: “Be quiet and listen!”

  We stopped and strained our ears. We heard the faint sound of a loudspeaker coming from a distance. As we walked toward it, it became clearer. It was the movie.

  We excitedly quickened our steps. We were almost there. We could still see no lights, but if they were all watching the movie, and if we could not see the screen, then we would not be able to see any light at all. If we followed the sound, we would find our way.

  About 15 minutes later, we marched into the compound of the Tenth Company. Just as we walked in, a big crowd of happy people walked out. The movie was over.

  We stood in the center of the field where the movie had been shown, not knowing what to do. We were tired, hungry, and thirsty. But that was not important. The only important thing was that we had missed the movie. We could sense the excitement in the crowd that came out of the compound. The movie must have been great.