The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China

by Yuan-Tsung Chen

  At the bottom of the social scale were millions of rural dispossessed—beggars and bandits.

  I might have been able to grasp everything more clearly at that time if I’d had more time to study all the documents we were given and listened more attentively to the lectures. But because of the Korean War there was a special urgency about the land reform. Unless the peasants were able to begin tilling their own land by the time the spring sowing started in February or March, there would be a national disaster. That left only about four months in which to accomplish the task for the year. What remained to be done would have to be completed in the next winter lull in farming. The leaders were therefore anxious to have us on the road as soon as possible. But after the lectures we still had to shop and make the warm clothes needed in the remoteness of Gansu Province where the weather was much colder than in temperate Shanghai. All this barely left time for even basic orientation courses.

  When I met Wang Sha to discuss my application he joked with me. “I thought you would choose Gansu, where the Silk Road goes and the Great Wall ends. You have romantic ideas. Well, I’ll approve your application, but don’t blame me if you find it too tough.” Despite his words, there was a hint of tenderness in his teasing. I didn’t answer, but just watched the way he ran his fingers through his tousled hair as he left the room.

  Two weeks later, we gathered in the early morning at the theater to start our journey to the Northwest. Two buses and a truck were soon filled with the seventy of us and our belongings, and we were off to the railroad station. The lead driver took us by way of the Bund, the riverside embankment road, to give us a last look at the Huangpu and its shipping. “You won’t see a river like that for a long time,” he told us. “The place you’re going to is a real desert.”

  Even at that early hour the river was alive with activity. Big ships swung at anchor from the buoys in midstream. Scurrying launches set junks and sampans bobbing in their wakes. On the far side Pudong was shrouded in morning mist that made its smoking factory chimneys seem like silent, stiff sea wraiths with gently waving hair. We passed the skyscraper banks and hotels and then turned away from the river up teeming Nanking Road with its many-floored offices and department stores with their glittering window displays. It would be five months at least before we saw such sights again. The part of Gansu Province we had been assigned to was more than one thousand miles away, three hundred miles beyond the railhead west of Xian. There was little chance of returning from there on leave. I turned my head back for a last look at the broad river before it was lost to sight amid the traffic and the throng of pedestrians in the morning rush to work.

  Shanghai people, like no others in China, know how to make an “occasion” of an event. The station was filled with a hurrying, jostling throng of cadres and their relatives and friends come to see them off. As more and more buses rolled up with groups from other organizations and districts, the noise and commotion reached a peak. To avoid being separated we formed a tight phalanx and pushed our way through to our train. Wang Sha had been appointed to lead our group of seventy going to the Northwest, and we found him waiting for us on the platform, holding up a card on a tall stick with the name of our destination—Gansu—written on it. A score of posters with other names cataloged the many other destinations of land reform workers that day. Writers, musicians, film workers, dancers, singers, artists, producers, scholars, and a sprinkling of office workers and veteran cadres like Wang Sha moved along the platforms to their trains. The director of our theater and the heads of many departments and organizations of Shanghai were there to wish us well. There was even a band of our orchestral musicians tuning up for a farewell song.

  Wang Sha called the roll—still a few missing—and then in a moment of immense confusion we piled into the train with our belongings, trying to find our compartments and places. Like soldiers we had little baggage. We had been told, “Only essentials; no luxuries, please.” Like most, I carried a backpack of a bedding roll and a change of clothes, wrapped in a piece of oilcloth or raincoat, with an enamel basin tied to the outside and an extra pair of cotton shoes or sneakers. In practical fashion, we girls all wore cadres’ uniforms: trousers and soldier-style jackets of blue, grey, or khaki. We tied our enamel drinking mugs or bowls to our leather belts. A couple of notebooks, a pen, an extra sweater, little bags and baskets of goodies for the journey, and that was all. It was autumn and we could travel light. Our bundles of warm cotton or floss-padded coats and jackets and trousers and winter underwear had been sent to the baggage wagons. Everything else we possessed we had left with our families or stored with our organizations.

  Ma Li wore a floppy soldier’s cap pushed back on her head, the cardboard peak forming a halo over her thick bobbed hair. Now she was a girl soldier like those we had seen in the propaganda pictures. I had changed my long pageboy hairdo to a straight bob cut just below my ears. It seemed more appropriate to life in a farming village.

  A bell clanged a warning to us all to take our seats. For one awkward moment, all the good-byes said, there was nothing more to say. Anyway, I had no one special to say good-bye to except office friends. My uncle had already left Shanghai. Impatient to leave, we kept eyeing the station clock. Two minutes. One minute. The first whistle. There was a wave of movement across the platform as a late arrival pushed his way through the crowd. Of course it was our amateur archaeologist, Hu, late as usual. We shouted and beckoned him to hurry, but with packets and bags big and small under both arms threatening to slip down at any moment he could only jog along, body swaying like a duckling waddling to a pond. The guard bundled Hu aboard and slammed the carriage door shut just as the final whistle blew. People took out pocket handkerchiefs, shouted last messages. Mothers wept and waved. A bedlam of good-byes. With the loudspeakers playing a sprightly folk song, we were off.

  The train moved slowly at first through the railway yards and past the factories that crowded down the railroad tracks, picking up speed beyond the sheds and hovels of the suburban slum, and finally racing as we got out into the countryside.

  As the morning wore on, and the excitement of leaving wore off, conversation in our compartment flagged. I watched the lush landscape pass by. Here in the “Land of Rice and Fish,” south of the Yangzi River, every inch of rich black soil was neatly cultivated up to the very verge of the narrow footpath. The square sails of a junk moved above the tops of the mulberry trees and seemed to be sailing on land.

  Ma Li, curled up in one corner, dozed. The troupe’s soprano, in the seat opposite me, gazed silently out of the window. Chu Hua, a pretty ballerina, dexterously knitted a winter sweater.

  Someone peered into our compartment.

  “Is this seat occupied?”

  It was Cheng, the comedian. We had recently seen him playing the steward Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. His performance was superb. He gave a sensitive and convincing portrayal of the buffoon in love with his high-born mistress. When he spoke about his unrequited love with anguished tears in his eyes, the audience was moved in spite of the fact that he was clowning. Even I had found myself wishing that Olivia would return his love, although she, fine lady, would never even dream of being loved by such a clownish inferior. After that performance the nickname “Malvolio” had stuck permanently.

  “There’s plenty of room. Sit here,” Ma Li answered, inviting him to take the empty seat between us.

  He rubbed the top of his head and sat down obediently. His head was oddly shaped: a narrow forehead but broad in the chin. He dressed untidily no matter what he wore. Even his best clothes seemed wasted on him. It was the way he wore them on his ungainly body. He was always playacting. Now he looked like a farmer with his sturdy neck and broad back dressed in an old peasant jacket, a perfect picture of a country bumpkin traveling by train for the first time, sitting straight up on the edge of his seat, a bamboo basket covered with a piece of white cloth balanced on his knees.

  The train attendant, making his rounds with a huge tin kett
le, filled our mugs and bowls with tea. I took one sip, frowned, and put my mug down. It was strong red tea such as northern Chinese like; we southern Chinese, especially Shanghai people, love our delicate green teas. Malvolio Cheng, after swallowing down a mouthful, held his mug as embarrassed as though it were he who had poured out the wrong tea and now did not know what to do. At last he put down his mug as I had done.

  “Pfui,” exclaimed Chu Hua, the young ballet dancer, making a comic grimace. “That red tea is so bitter!”

  “Yes, it’s too bad,” commiserated Malvolio Cheng. “I’ll get you something better.” Without waiting for a reply, he left the compartment and soon returned with a thermos bottle of hot chocolate which he shared out among us. It was an unexpected treat.

  Encouraged by our response, he diffidently held out his bamboo basket to us, looking from one to another. Ma Li lifted the square of white cloth and exposed a basketful of delicious food: pieces of smoked chicken, preserved duck, fancy sweets. We could not restrain our cries of surprise and delight as we sampled his delicacies and came back for more. His eyes moved merrily from one mouth to another.

  Liao, a dancer from Chu Hua’s troupe, looked in to find us all munching away at Malvolio Cheng’s food. “What a feast!” he exclaimed.

  “I’m afraid you’ve come too late,” I apologized.

  “There’s one chicken wing left,” Cheng said, peering into the basket and fishing it out.

  Ma Li passed it to Liao, inviting him in. When he had picked the bones clean, he wiped his fingers, stretched his long legs out under the opposite seat, crossed his arms over his chest, and closed his eyes in an exaggerated expression of bliss. Ma Li was wiping her hands on a towel. Suddenly she turned to Malvolio Cheng with a look of dismay on her face:

  “But you haven’t eaten anything!”

  Chu Hua threw her head back and laughed. “We completely forgot about him!” Malvolio Cheng himself seemed delighted and laughed with us.

  I noticed the admiring glance that Liao gave Chu Hua before he shyly turned away. With Liao sitting beside her, Chu Hua grew light-headed and giggled all the time like the teenager she was. Her gaiety was contagious. Liao hummed a lively tune and our soprano joined in.

  In sight of the huge grim battlements surrounding Nanking, the “southern capital,” our train was ferried across the mile-wide Yangzi River. The rice fields of the South were left behind, as we rattled north across the central wheat and millet plains. The harvests were in, and the dry, brown, stubbled fields were bare. The only spots of color were the orange-yellow corncobs drying on the roofs of the cottages. At the big junction of Xuzhou we turned due west, making for the ancient heartland of China in the valley of the Yellow River. Here and there through gaps in the hills we caught sight of the river’s turbid, cocoa-brown waters, heavy with the silt which it carried to the estuary far to the east, into the Yellow Sea.

  The day passed quickly. From time to time Wang Sha dropped in to see us. The long train ride gave him a chance to relax a bit after the hectic organizing to get together the work teams in Shanghai. He was in a genial mood. As he sat by the window, a beam of afternoon sunlight lit up his face. The color of his eyes changed from dark brown to lighter brown, giving them a milder look.

  Malvolio Cheng too was a welcome visitor, and when we were all together we joked and fooled around. Our jokes drew disapproving frowns from one of our companions, Dai Shi, the girl who had tried to stop me from applauding Mao Dun at the first discussion meeting in our theater. Dissatisfied with the people in her own compartment, she had taken to visiting ours. She was young and not bad-looking, and when in a good mood she even looked pretty. She chased after men indomitably, but her sharp tongue and mischievous gossip frightened them away. Now, unable to reach the grapes, she decided that they were sour. Unhappy, she poked her nose into other girls’ affairs. Offering caustic comments, with the air of a moralist, she criticized “loose behavior,” and now, to cap it all, she assumed an unbearable air of superior revolutionary fervor. I once heard her proclaim in a strident voice: “The best way to deal with these liberal dissidents is to give them a good blow to sober them up.”

  Dai Shi would have depressed me less had she been a Jezebel full of venom. But she was not. She was just an ordinary person but with a narrow mind, caricaturing the revolution while believing that she was helping it. Bit by bit, she dampened spirits all around her. When I saw that catty, disapproving look come over her face, I grew self-conscious and could no longer enjoy myself. I averted my eyes from her and looked out the window.

  The scenery was absorbing. Because of the years of war, many of us, and all of us younger ones, were seeing these northlands for the first time. As we chugged westward, another visitor, our archaeologist, Hu, grew more and more excited, and finally persuaded me to give him my place by the window.

  Hu had been the cashier at our theater. It was difficult to find a job in the field of archaeology during the war years in the Guomindang regime, and so he had gone into the more practical business of counting money. But his first love was history, and he would spend all his spare time reading about the past and going to museums and antique shops. Periodically, at our discussions about work and discipline, he would upbraid himself for thinking too much about history and not enough about money. Now, money forgotten, he sat with his eyes glued to the window. The dusty old cities of Kaifeng and Luoyang, every mountain, mound, and river brought forth his “ohs” and “ahs” as he picked them out on his map. “This area was the cradle of Chinese civilization,” he explained his absorbed interest almost apologetically.

  Ma Li was in a carping mood. “I suspect you joined the land reform work with your eyes on the past,” she chided. “You shouldn’t think of this as a free trip to visit historical sites.”

  Hu shrugged his shoulders and pursed his lips. With his small, kind eyes, fat, round nose, and chubby cheeks, he seemed to be a man who preferred to be at peace with the world.

  Chu Hua gazed up at the ceiling light. Her smiling eyes, perpetually amused, peeped out from under a fringe of black, luxuriant hair that fell out from under her khaki cadre’s cap. “I plan to see as many ancient sculptures and paintings as possible. They’ll help me to create new dance movements. What’s wrong with that?”

  But Ma Li would not retreat from her dogmatic stand. “You know we’ve been told again and again that we should keep our minds on our task,” she insisted, “and that’s the land reform.”

  Chu Hua tipped her head to one side and turned her round, doll-like eyes to Ma Li. She was obviously not satisfied with Ma Li’s answer, but she did not rebut it. She too would rather shun than provoke an argument, partly out of good nature, but also out of a coquettish urge to please.

  Yet her words had emboldened Hu. “In my opinion, one of the purposes of the land reform is to put new life into our dying culture. To do that we must also rediscover it.”

  Ma Li opened her mouth to speak but then thought better of it. It promised to be a complicated argument and she doubted if she could wage it single-handedly. Besides, she had also noticed that Dai Shi, listening from the inside corner, was girding herself for battle, and she had no wish to have Dai Shi as an ally.

  As the train completed a wide curve, the landscape suddenly changed as if someone had shaken a kaleidoscope into a completely different pattern. At the foot of a mountain we saw a cluster of white-walled cottages with black-tiled roofs, a creek with a rushing stream, and a stone bridge. It was as beautiful a scene as any in the rich South and doubly entrancing after those miles and miles of dun-colored plains. Reminders of our gentle southland rushed through my brain, and I took a deep breath of happiness.

  “The Hua Mountains!” someone cried in great excitement.

  “It’s our southern scenery right up here in the North,” exclaimed Liao. He started humming some nostalgic southern tune and then said abruptly, “Let’s sing its praises!” It was a cry from the heart. He was a southerner in the North, already homesick for
the South.

  “Good, let’s sing,” we all cried.

  Liao gave the key and beat the rhythm. The carriage resounded with our voices. Only our soprano was silent. When she performed on the stage, she sang with passion and great artistry. Now she did not so much as open her mouth, but sat there demurely. The sunlight danced on the windowpane. Her profile, set off by this backdrop, was beautiful. Perhaps she didn’t want to spoil the picture.

  “Will we have time to climb Mount Hua?” the archaeologist Hu eagerly asked.

  “The train will stop only for a few minutes,” Ma Li answered.

  “What a pity.” Hu sank back disappointed.

  “Perhaps we can climb up there on our way back,” suggested Liao, gazing at the height wreathed with clouds.

  An impish smile spread over Chu Hua’s face. “So you too want to climb Mount Hua? ‘Mount Hua in the midst of clouds and rain.’ ” To anyone who recognized the classical erotic association of mountains, clouds, and rain from folklore and literature, it was a daring remark.

  Liao immediately blushed in response; luckily Dai Shi, never much of a scholar, missed the reference entirely. Ma Li, however, looked over at me, her eyebrows raised in sudden astonishment. I caught the soprano looking me straight in the eye, unblinking but with a hint of a knowing smile on her lips. Hu was too taken up by the scenery to notice anything else.