She shook her head again.
“It means that you are a pretty, intelligent, and brave girl.”
“I wish my mother could hear you say that.”
“She will. Why don’t we go to tell her?”
We found her mother at home. A heavyset woman, like many northerners, kind and hospitable, she was bustling about her household chores. The father, a similarly thickset northerner, was a gruff-voiced patriarch, very much the head of the family. Her younger brother was the very image of his father, but pint-sized. I wondered from whom Xiu-ying had inherited her good looks.
Xiu-ying was unusual among the girls of the township in several ways. First, she could read and write. She had had three years of schooling, and she showed me her tattered old textbooks and exercise books and even a world atlas. Her education had come about by one of those strange quirks of fortune: An enlightened local administrator, an old scholar, came to the village filled with lofty ideas of rebuilding the nation through education, and he had a feminist wife who had bobbed her hair and taken a minor part in the 1924–1927 revolution. Xiu-ying had attracted their attention and had been recruited for the school they had briefly run before being removed by the Guomindang government for “radical activity.” Xiu-ying had kept alive the glimmer of enlightenment she had received, and it flared to life again immediately when she got news of the arrival of our work team. She would never have dared present herself to Shen or Tu or Malvolio Cheng, but a girl was different. We had much to tell and learn from each other.
Her brother peered inquisitively around her shoulder and put his head over the textbook she was showing me, vainly trying to elucidate the large characters. I could not see the pages. Xiu-ying slapped his shaven head. He cried “ouch,” compressed his lips, and pulled away. Their mother apologized for her daughter.
“Although we are poor people, we have spoiled her. Xiu-ying is still childish. She often squabbles with her little brother.”
“When we start a reading class, please let Xiu-ying come,” I begged.
“She is a girl. What is the good of her studying?” the mother said, stroking the boy’s head.
“Aren’t I a girl too?”
“But you have a lucky face. She is fated to suffer.”
Learning from my experience that morning I did not press the point. There was no shaking her belief that women were not as good as men and they had better know that their proper place was in the kitchen. Over two thousand years of Confucian teaching had molded her mind: “The sovereign guides the subject, the father guides the son, and the husband guides the wife,” even if experience and common sense had shown her many ways of guiding her husband.
That evening, Xiu-ying helped me carry my bags to her house. She cleared a place for me to sleep beside her in a room barely larger than the kang. As soon as my head touched the pillow I fell asleep and, secure, slept like a log till morning.
6
The Women
At that final meeting in Xian we had been told to take two days to get settled in. “Get to know your way around. Even if it’s only groping in the dark.” I was really happy to be with Xiu-ying and her family and share her kang; she in turn was delighted to show me around. That was the easy part of settling in. Some other things were not so easy to get used to.
We cadres did not cook for ourselves but ate with the poor peasants. Going from house to house in rotation, we ate two meals a day in the homes of peasants introduced to us by Shen and Tu. To live, eat, and work with them was the way we pledged our loyalty, service, and friendship to them; fine ideas, but my first meal with a poor peasant was close to disaster.
Malvolio Cheng and I sat cross-legged in the center of the kang in the home of one of the poorer peasants. Our hostess, apologetic and dying of consumption, lay propped up in a corner beside us. The light filtering in through the small paper-covered window suffused her face, sad-eyed and listless. Our host took his bowl of gruel to sit beside the stove. He did not eat it; he threw it down his throat. Then he licked the bowl all over.
“You see, one’s tongue can do the same job as a washing machine,” Malvolio Cheng said, trying to cheer me up.
I looked down into my bowl. This was my second encounter with pian-er gruel, our daily fare as long as we lived in Longxiang. I never did find out what it was made of. Sometimes it had a bit of flour in it and sometimes corn with generous additions of husk. An unappetizing greyish-yellow color, thick as paste and spiced with rough-ground salt and dried peppers, it was as gritty as sand and rasped my tongue. I took a mouthful.
It crossed my mind that they probably only owned three bowls, so our hostess could not eat with us. Either Cheng or I was using the dying woman’s bowl. A wave of nausea rose from the pit of my stomach. I put down my bowl.
“Go on eating.” Cheng’s voice was stern.
“It’s too hot.” My throat indeed was burning. I swallowed hard to get rid of the pain.
“Go—on—eating.” His voice was now terribly insistent.
I took my bowl up again and felt no better for noticing a roach twitching its feelers before burrowing itself in a crack of our low table. Finally my manners prevailed. My aunt had taught me that if I saw something go wrong at table, such as someone dropping coffee on my dress, I should pretend not to notice it. Clenching my teeth tightly, I finished everything in the bowl.
“Thank you for a very good meal.” Having licked his bowl and wiped his mouth with his sleeve, Cheng bowed to our hosts.
“Thank you very much.” I followed his example, dutifully performing the whole ritual.
No sooner had we left the house than I felt that I was going to throw up all the food that I had managed to hold down up to then. My stomach was churning. I gave a terrified start and turned to run. I collided with an old tree and vomited on and on as if I would empty out everything that was inside me.
“Don’t make such a noise!” Cheng admonished quietly. “They may hear you inside. Don’t forget that they are feeding us free as their contribution to the land reform work.”
“I can’t help it.” I felt weak and sat on a handy broken wall. I clenched my hands together, braced them between my knees, and tried to hold my aching sides with my elbows.
“Yes you can,” Cheng snapped. I looked startled. The sharp tone was so unlike him. “Just remember that your expensive life style was supported by the labor and want of the millions like our hosts.”
“Don’t give me that stuff,” I moaned.
“You had better get used to it. It’s the only dish you’ll get and you’d better learn to like it.” He refused to feel sorry for me. We parted at the crossroads without another word.
And so I began to wander around the township “groping in the dark.” A few minutes’ walk in any direction always brought me out to the surrounding earthen wall and moat and the fields beyond, dotted with groups of cottages or isolated, more solid-looking houses of brick with tiled roofs, surrounded with brick walls, quite evidently the homes of better-off peasants or landlords. There were no hedges or walls in the fields, and with the autumn harvest in, there was no way that I could see of telling where one farm ended and another began. Foot-high stone markers didn’t offer much help. Stubbled fields and barrens spread as far as the eye could reach, broken only by low hills or ravines. Bare mountains ringed the horizon.
Returning to the township center I stopped here and there to chat with women I met. Here again my aunt’s training in making conversation with guests came in handy.
“Isn’t he a cute baby?” “Are you making a jacket for your husband?” I had soon learned the peasant’s usual morning greeting: “Have you eaten?”
Hoping to take a shortcut in my “groping,” on my second day in Longxiang I went to chat with the village cadre Shen. His office was just an ordinary peasant’s room, but a bit larger than most. There were quite a number of empty houses and rooms in the village—many peasants had left during the last famine and never returned—and the provisional governmen
t had simply requisitioned one of these, a former shop on the main road, for its office. Shen had knocked two rooms into one to form a single large room.On one side of it was a large kang; in the opposite corner was a dusty, broken cabinet, and in the middle a long trestle table with a few wooden benches around it. A poster on the wall showed how to build better latrines, while a chart with pictures showed how to develop a compost heap in six steps. Hanging from a nail in the wall by a string tied around its spine was the “library”—a copy of the Farmers’ Calendar. Shen was affable and readily answered all my questions.
“Is this the Longxiang Party headquarters too?” I asked, and he nodded.
“And how many Party members are there?”
“Just me. I joined the Party right after the area was liberated a year ago. Tu is still a candidate member. But I’m sure many more men will join in the coming land reform campaign.”
“And you have a Poor Peasants’ Association already formed?”
“Right here,” he grinned.
“And the headquarters of the Peasant Militia?”
“Here too.” The grin was wider.
“And the Chairman of the Peasants’ Association?”
“He is in Lanzhou with his eldest son’s family.”
“When will he come back?”
“Who knows? The old man likes to nag. Last year he quarreled with his second son and he left home. Just like that,” Shen said. I marveled at his serenity, but continued to “grope.”
“Old Shen,” I said in a confidential tone. “Do you really have a Poor Peasants’ Association?”
“Of course.” He went to the cabinet and took out a sheaf of papers. “Here you are: the complete list of members,” he proudly declared.
I thumbed through the sheets carefully. “How come most of the members are either men over sixty or boys under ten? Where are the able-bodied men and women?” I felt the darkness thickening.
“Well, when we asked them to put their names down, they suspected that we wanted to press-gang them or something like that, and yet they didn’t want to be left behind if we really intended to hand out land. So they sent their old fathers and uncles to register in the Poor Peasants’ Association. They reasoned that if it was a trick, there would be no use taking in old men over sixty. If we really meant business, they could always argue that the old man represented the whole family. Some families hadn’t got any old men left, so they put down their small sons’ names.”
“How can a small boy represent the whole family?”
“Oh it happens all the time. My son’s name is Spring Boy. Our villagers call me Spring Boy’s Pa and my wife Spring Boy’s Ma, and—”
“But where is the man in charge of the militia?” I was determined to sort the situation out properly.
“He went off somewhere to peddle goods during the last spring hunger.”
“Old Shen,” I brushed aside the lists, “these are meaningless pieces of paper, filled with meaningless words!”
“But that’s what reports are—words, right?” It was his turn to be mystified.
“What reports?”
“Aren’t you going to write a report about our work here?”
I burst into helpless giggles. “Old Shen, if I ever write about this place, I will certainly give you a good write-up. You deserve it.”
He beamed at me. “I try to be a good cadre. I hope by now the villagers can see how different I am from the old village head, Landlord Chi. He was a favorite of the Guomindang. Landlord Chi got rich quick when he took over that post—he was a good gambler, and whenever he wanted money, he forced the peasants to gamble with him. When they played with him, they were only allowed to lose, you know. But since I took on this job, I became poorer. I don’t get paid for it, and my three children and my wife and I live off what we can grow on our own few mu. If I could help my wife work on it, we might eke out some sort of living. But you see how busy I am. Do I get any thanks? No, none at all. I get criticized and criticized. You know, whoever is the housekeeper gets the blame. A whole crowd even came here to criticize me openly—it made me so mad! They shouted at me and I shouted back, ‘You foul-mouthed bastards, throw your dirty words at the feudal landlords if you dare. Did you ever dare? No, you cowards!’ My wife wanted me to quit. I told her to shut up. ‘Woman,’ I said, ‘you cannot quit the Revolution.’ ”
Intrigued by what he had said, I asked, “What makes you so determined to hang on to this job?”
“Because I am poor,” he replied simply. “From the beginning my wife didn’t like it. ‘You fool, haven’t you got yourself into enough trouble by being meddlesome?’ she whined. I told her, ‘Woman, I was born that way and I cannot help it.’ ” He waved his hand in a “who the hell cares?” gesture.
“Old Shen, thank you for your help. I hope we can talk again soon.”
“No problem. Anytime. I tell everybody that he can drop by and have a chat anytime and they do.” Shen did not seem to realize that some people might be trying to exploit his warmheartedness. He was pleased with his popularity.
Wang Sha arrived on the third day. We had a meeting with Shen and Tu and it was agreed that we should start making a systematic round of all the peasant households and ask them to join our meetings. We hoped that there they would tell about their lives in the past. It was, as Wang Sha put it, a means of “raising their level of consciousness.” “Speak bitterness meetings,” as they were called, would help them to understand how things really had been in the old days, to realize that their lives were not blindly ordained by fate, that the poor peasants had a community of interest, having suffered similar disasters and misery in the past—and that far from owing anything to the feudal landlords, it was the feudal landlords who owed them a debt of suffering beyond all reckoning.
Wang Sha and Malvolio Cheng, Shen, and Tu rallied the men; the women and children were left to me. Xiu-ying and her mother were of invaluable help in this task. Through them I met quite a few women in the village, and for several days I visited them in their homes and talked with them.
Talking with Xiu-ying’s family first, I thought my job would be a simple one: They had their differences, but it was a close-knit, happy, outgoing family. The mother was living again through her daughter, whom she loved. The father, though grudging, was trying to restrain himself from interfering.
But they were exceptions. Most women I met would only speak guardedly about their lives; as to doing something about changing their lives, they believed that was useless. Their suffering had little to do with landlord exploitation. Everything was predestined, all their hardships and subjection. The landlords or whoever were simply the instruments of fate. Once when I urged a middle-aged woman to speak further, she gave a heavy sigh, pressed her hands to her breast, and murmured, “The bitterness is here. I can’t get it out.” They refused to accept me as a living example of a girl who had “come out of the kitchen.” I came from Shanghai—another planet to them—where the natural laws were different; besides, I had what they considered “a lucky face.” For these reasons they tolerated my often “strange” behavior like mixing with men almost as if I were a man myself.
Only two women refused to talk to me at all.
First there was the virgin widow, a short, big-boned woman with over-broad shoulders. Twenty years previously, when she was only fourteen, her betrothed died suddenly on the very eve of their wedding. But the compact had been made, the marriage presents had been given, and she was married anyway. A small wooden tablet with his name inscribed on it “stood in” for the groom. But the death was taken as a sign that Heaven’s curse had fallen on her. Barbarous old village custom regarded her as being responsible for the death of this man whom she never even laid eyes on and she was semi-ostracized by the village. The silence of the grave had surrounded her for twenty years, and she had almost lost her capacity for communicating with others. I could not get a word out of her.
The other one was the wife of the farm laborer Sun Zuguang.
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br /> If I had played my aunt’s garden hose long enough on the Suns’ hovel it would have dissolved back into the yellow loess earth it was made of. Nothing would have remained except for a few rafters, a door and window frame, a couple of rickety stools, a table, an iron pot, and some chipped crockery. Sun was at home when I went to visit his wife. It was a bright day, and their door was open to let in warmth and light. I stopped with one foot on the doorsill, waiting for them to invite me in. But Sun shot a sidelong glance at his wife, and she scurried to hide herself behind the stove in the room. I just caught a glimpse of her: two emaciated arms folded over an enormous belly and a pair of short, stick-like legs. I tried to exchange a few pleasantries with him, but he stubbornly stared into space in front of him, lips compressed, not saying a word. I sat myself down on the doorsill. He did not budge. I began to give a lengthy explanation of my visit. I spoke loudly and slowly, so that every word would be clear to them both. Several times Sun’s wife, consumed with curiosity, took a peek at me and I saw her tousled hair, scanty and brownish because of malnutrition, appearing above the top of the stove, but each time Sun growled like some watchdog, and immediately his wife’s head disappeared. I had been told that Sun’s mother, a widow, had run away with a stranger when Sun was only six or seven years old, and he had been left an orphan. Ever since he had sulked in a perpetual state of obstinate sullenness, never trusting any woman or any “intruder” again. He shut his wife off from the outside world. I hated to see his glowering face grow mean, the forehead strained and protruding, the chin jutting out, the mouth curling into a cruel snarl as he turned in the direction of the hapless woman who was his wife.
Fearful that he would take his anger out on her after I was gone, I hastened to say good-bye and left them. My lack of success with them bruised my self-esteem, but I comforted myself with the thought that Wang Sha and Cheng had not succeeded either in getting on friendly terms with Sun.
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