Out of the Gobi

by Weijian Shan

  The process involved several stages. First, we needed to prepare the clay. This was probably the most crucial part because it would directly affect the quality of bricks. It was very much like making dough, only on a much larger scale. The trick was in mixing just the right proportion of sand, clay, and water so the brick would hold together and not crack when fired.

  To get clay, we dug it out of the Gobi floor and then mixed it with sand. Then we poured water fetched from a nearby ditch onto the mound of sandy clay to thoroughly moisten it. As one of us poured on water, another person used a shovel to turn the pile rapidly to make sure that the water, sand, and clay were thoroughly mixed. This process demanded hours of hard labor.

  The wet clay needed to sit overnight so the water would seep through evenly, leaving it smooth and free of any chunks of unmoistened clay that might cause imperfections. The next morning, the clay had to be stirred and mixed again until smooth and soft. The more it felt like flour dough, the better quality the bricks would be.

  For the second stage, we formed bricks with a mold. This was like making cupcakes, but, again, on a much larger scale. Each mold made two bricks. The mold looked like two rectangular wood boxes joined together and positioned side by side. After dusting the mold with a light layer of sand to make sure the clay would not stick, we’d each put our mold flat on the ground. We would squat down, grab a piece of clay with both hands, lift the clay up to almost eye level while standing up halfway, and then throw the clay into the mold with all our might. It was crucial to use as much strength as possible. If the force was not strong enough, the clay could not fill every corner of the mold with one throw. Filling it in would affect the quality of the brick, as the brick would not look like one piece.

  In one continuous motion after throwing down with the clay, we’d use our right hand to sweep across the opening of the mold to remove the excess. Then with a piece of wood resembling a large ruler, we would swipe across the opening again, to make the surface as smooth as possible.

  Next, we’d carry our mold some 20 meters (∼65 feet) away to where the newly made bricks were left to dry and very swiftly turn over and empty the mold. If the brick was not perfect, it was destroyed right away.

  The newly molded brick would be left for about a day until it was half-dried. Then we would touch it up with a flat wooden board by ever so slightly tapping the edges to make them sharp. Finally, when the bricks had completely dried in the sun, we would stack them up and clear the ground for the next batch.

  Unfired bricks could also be used in construction, but houses built with them would not last very long. Our bricks would be baked in the kiln nearby. The kiln could fire some 40,000 bricks at a time. Although there were about 30 people in our platoon, we had about 20 hands on a regular day because many did not come to work for one reason or another. If we averaged about 200 bricks per person a day, 10 days’ labor would be required to make enough bricks to fill the kiln, a process we would have to repeat between seven and eight times to make the quota of 300,000 bricks that the leadership had set for us.

  * * *

  Preparing clay was a very dirty job. We were covered with mud from head to toe by the end of the day. As we worked, we were soaked in sweat. Since it would be troublesome, if not impossible, to wash our clothes every day we usually wore only a pair of underpants. At the end of the day, we would go to the ditch, fetch some water with a bucket, and pour the water over our heads to clean off the mud. When the weather was warm we jumped into a nearby pond. This waterhole, however, was used not only for washing ourselves, but also for drinking water. Cattle drank and bathed in it, too. The water became so dirty we were concerned we would get sick from drinking it; so later we used a horse-drawn cart to carry a large metal container of water drawn from the well at the company camp some distance away for drinking water.

  We soon learned that making bricks with a mold was much more tiring physically than preparing the clay. It was taxing on one’s back to repeat the motion of bending down, throwing clay into the mold, straightening up, lifting the mold, running the distance with it, and bending down again to dump it. It was a painful repetition of bending and straightening with a heavy load.

  Our initial efforts did not yield as many bricks as we had hoped. The mound of clay we prepared was gone quickly. When we tallied up the bricks the three of us made, we found that there were about 600, only about 200 bricks per person. Yet everyone was so tired we did not feel like walking the distance back to the company barracks. To make matters worse, we learned that Dasheng’s team made about 300 bricks per person. We had to work harder or smarter to improve our productivity. I found it hard to imagine how we could work any harder, as we had certainly given it our best effort.

  Exhausted, we dragged our feet back to our barracks. I was so tired that night that I, unusually, did not feel like reading anything. I spent the evening lying in bed listening to Baoquan talking about his life as a little hooligan in Tianjin and some other nonsense. His team only made about 100 bricks per person, but Baoquan could not care less about their productivity. He said he would not risk his precious health to be a hero worker.

  “You prove yourself to be a book idiot for driving yourself so hard making bricks. Take it easy, like me,” he advised. “Let HaBai and Chongjie do the work. How can you match strong guys like them? Steal a break whenever you can. Nobody is going to give you even one more mantou to eat for working so hard.”

  I fell asleep even before the lights-out bugle blew, as Baoquan and Zhou Wanling were still bragging about the adventurous trips they took last fall stealing melons from peasants’ fields.

  I woke up in the middle of the night and my whole body ached so terribly that for a long while it was difficult to fall back asleep. My back was the worst part: It was in pain constantly. Other parts did not feel much better either. My arms and legs were also very sore. I lay in my bed wondering if there was any way we could alleviate our hard work and make more bricks.

  The next day we had to start the process from the very beginning. Step one: preparing clay. I learned that both HaBai and Yan Chongjie were in pain, too. HaBai was complaining that he was dead tired. Yan said that he was exhausted also. We all felt quite discouraged that we were behind some others in the number of bricks we made. We felt it was a loss of face. We also felt challenged because ours was a strong team and we should be doing better. Somehow, we had to catch up and make more bricks.

  HaBai was not known as a hard worker in the platoon, although he had the build for it. Yan was more of a sporadic type. When he was in a good mood, he could work like a horse and few could match his strength. If he was feeling down, he did not care to work at all. I liked HaBai but was never close with him. Yan was one of my closest friends. Even though the two of them might skip a day or two or steal a break when we worked on our own, they both worked hard when we were together as a team. None of us would be willing to let the others down. Counting muscles—and by that I meant HaBai’s and Yan’s muscles, as mine were rather pathetic in comparison—we were a strong team. Although I myself was not muscular, I was known for my endurance and capacity for hard work. I hated to be left behind by anyone. There was an implicit competition among us to see which team produced the most. Whichever team I joined for whatever job, we had always had that competitive urge to beat other teams. I think that competitive urge is innate: We were not paid a penny more for producing more, but we surely felt good to have done better than other teams.

  I found it hard to understand how other teams could be so productive, as we certainly exerted our very best efforts. There had to be a better way to do it.

  We went around to see how others were doing their jobs. As expected, some people were just taking it easy, not caring how many bricks they made. But the few groups with strong hands, like the one led by Dasheng and Platoon Leader Liu, were working hard. Liu had had some experience making bricks in his home village before he joined the army. Dasheng’s group was doing even better. We could see tha
t they were using a different method entirely. They divided up the job among themselves so that each person was specializing in one function, either throwing the clay or transporting the mold.

  After a little discussion and consultation among ourselves, we decided to divide our responsibilities so that each person could specialize in one function of the process. This was really teamwork. Each one had to do his part of the work quickly, otherwise he would hold up the entire “production line.”

  For my part, I had to run with the fully loaded mold, empty the molded brick onto the ground, and then run back with the empty mold. Two wet bricks were heavy, probably weighing five to six kilograms (∼11 to 13 pounds). Running with them was so hard that soon I was exhausted and my heart beat rapidly. My legs became weak and I began to feel nauseated. But I continued, trying to keep up with the other two. Soon, the feeling of nausea was gone. And our work became synchronized. Every so often, we would rotate roles to give our bodies a break.

  Now we were making more bricks. Soon, we were counting about 300 bricks per person each day. The work was still tiring, but much more productive. As we gained experience, our output increased. In a week or so, the combined output by the three of us stabilized at around 1,000 bricks a day.

  Soon, every team adopted the method. Nonetheless, it was backbreaking labor and, as the days passed, everyone became more and more exhausted. Even though we had become more productive, we found it increasingly difficult to keep the output at 1,000 bricks a day for our three-person team.

  One day Political Instructor Zhang came to “inspect” our work. Baoquan greeted him, calling him “General” as usual. Zhang beamed, protruding his belly even further and smiling from ear to ear. The humorous thing about the political instructor was that he could never tell if anyone was mocking him. He always felt good about himself. He was rather pleased with our work, and announced that, in a week or so, we would start to fire the kiln. The company would invite an experienced kiln master from somewhere to guide the work. Therefore, he exhorted us to work even harder to make sure that there were enough bricks by the time the kiln master arrived.

  It was easy for him to say, we thought grimly. I did not think that we could work any harder than we were, after having honed our technique. HaBai sneered that the political instructor certainly would not hurt his back by chattering while standing up. Baoquan, though, knew exactly how to deal with the political instructor. “You can’t be serious with him,” said Baoquan. He challenged the political instructor to join his team to make a few bricks. In a good mood, Zhang agreed.

  Baoquan suggested that Zhang throw clay into the mold as the job did not require running back and forth, which would be hard for the overweight instructor. We were all amused to see him splashing mud all over himself, clumsily filling the mold. By the end of the day, he looked like a general wearing a Peking opera mask. To hide his embarrassment, he declared that he was too old to compete with us youngsters. That was the first and last time we saw him making bricks. But at least he knew now that making bricks was a hard job.

  When the stacks of raw bricks we made were dried out, we found, to our dismay, that the quality of our bricks was not uniform. Some batches were perfect and others less so. In one batch, every single brick cracked after it dried. Apparently, the sand content in that batch was too low.

  It pained us to throw away the thousand or so bricks that we knew contained so much of our sweat and effort. We learned a lesson and had to be careful mixing clay with enough sand so that this type of waste would not happen again. But the next day, we made a major mistake to the other extreme. The prepared clay contained so much sand that the bricks would not stay together in one piece. The whole batch was wasted. It was not until about two weeks later that we finally mastered the perfect balance of sand and clay.

  Once we had enough dried bricks, we began to transport some back to the barracks where some houses would be built with unbaked bricks. Our team loaded bricks into a cart drawn by an old cow that plodded along slowly. But when we were about to be passed by a horse-drawn cart, surprisingly the cow began to run fast to keep up. Even the cow had a competitive spirit. We doubled over with laughter sitting on the pile of bricks on the cart, as we passed the boys in the cart drawn by the horse.

  One day some time later, I captured a horse grazing alone near our brick-making ground. Usually a horse grazed with its herd. If you saw a lone horse, its owner was usually somewhere nearby. But this one was grazing all by himself, with no one in sight. Nobody knew where he came from. Maybe he was from Outer Mongolia and traveled here in a sandstorm. In any case, we harnessed him on our cart. He was much faster than our cow and we were all delighted with him because we won every race with other carts. But one day he somehow got startled as we were racing and the cart overturned, throwing all of us, along with our bricks, to the ground. Fortunately, no one was hurt. But our horse began to limp after we put him back into harness. He must have hurt his leg. We could not let an injured horse work so we let him go.

  The spring weather of the Gobi frequently changed. More often than not, it was windy. When the wind blew, it stirred up a lot of dirt and sand. It was particularly difficult to make bricks against a strong sandstorm. At the end of the day, there would be mud all over our bodies and sand in our mouths and ears. I hated the inconveniences caused by windy days and sandstorms.

  * * *

  For the most part, while we were at this work, I had not been reading. It was impossible. I felt so exhausted that I did not have the strength to hold a book or to concentrate. I would simply collapse into my bed after washing the mud off my body from head to toe, getting up only to eat dinner. I was amazed to find that both HaBai and Chongjie were in much better shape. Although they were as tired as I was when we first started, they seemed to have become used to this hard labor. Yan would take out his erhu after dinner to play a tune from a Peking opera, and HaBai sometimes would howl out a piece of opera when Cui Xianchao was around. Baoquan was the same, fond of talking about life at home in Tianjin and the strange things happening there. I felt great enjoyment simply reclining on my quilt and pillow, watching and listening to them. But I was reluctant to go outside even when the weather was good because my back and legs ached so much that even going to the outhouse required an effort. Every night, I went to sleep earlier than them, but I still did not feel rested enough in the morning. I wasn’t sure how long I could last.

  We had not had a break for several weeks. I felt that each day, my fatigue increased. We all longed for a rest. Even one day off would be so good. Now I had to struggle to get out of bed every morning and after a short noontime nap. In the first few days, I was too tired to even eat dinner. But as we settled into a routine, our rations became more and more inadequate for my appetite. Platoon Leader Liu complained to the political instructor that our platoon deserved a larger ration because of our hard labor. Surprisingly, Instructor Zhang agreed, allowing us one more wotou with dinner. Baoquan took the credit, saying that the experience of being a laborer for a day must have convinced the “General” that we indeed deserved a little more. But there was still not enough to eat.

  I had a reputation as a good worker that I did not want to ruin. Besides, I was thinking that I had to be worthy of the food that we were provided. Baoquan said I was being naïve. He argued that if we worked hard, we were simply contributing to the welfare of those who never had to work, such as the political instructor and the fat-cat officers in the regiment headquarters. I could not argue with him. I knew that I was doing my job, which I considered to be my responsibility. But by that time, HaBai and Chongjie had started to take turns being on “sick leave.”

  * * *

  I was thinking of ways to mechanize the process of making bricks. The techniques we were using seemed ancient. In fact, they were. Many years later, on a trip to Italy, I noticed that bricks found in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii (which had been buried by volcanic ash and pumice in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD) had been
made using much the same technique. There had to be a more modern way of doing it. I had seen dough-making machines in the noodle shop at the grocery shop near our home in Beijing. The principle of mixing clay to make bricks should be similar, except the machine and the power required had to be much larger for the large quantities of clay and sand.

  I went to consult with Li Rongtian.

  Li was clever with his hands and had inventive ideas. When it came to mechanical things and machines, he knew better than anyone. I believed that he would have little difficulty designing a brick-making machine if he set his mind to it.

  Li went with me to the brick-making ground. After thinking about the problem for a while, Li agreed with me: Making bricks was just like making noodles or steamed buns. He, too, had seen the noodle-shop machines, which basically consisted of a large mixing bowl in which dough was created from flour and water. Then the dough would be pushed out of the container through a chute with a spiral shaft. The dough came out, shaped like a thick noodle, which a revolving steel wire would then cut into pieces. The same technology could be used to build a brick-making machine, Li said. But a brickmaking machine would require a container made with thick cast iron. Furthermore, a diesel engine was necessary to power the machine.

  I was encouraged by his words and the thought that we would save our backs and legs and not have to work like slaves every day. Moreover, we would be able to produce more. Our bricks would be superior to those made the old-fashioned way. I urged Li to give some careful thought to it and try to draw a blueprint or a design for such a machine. Li agreed.

  I told both HaBai and Yan Chongjie about my conversation with Li Rongtian. They were as excited as I was. But they were skeptical about how our project would be greeted by the company leaders. We needed the leadership’s backing for the purchase of some components. Although it was our consensus that the company leadership could probably not care less about how hard we had to work, I thought they would be interested in the productivity increase a machine like this would produce. After all, the political instructor and the company commander were eager to fulfill their production targets, which would make them look good to higher authorities.