Back in Xiu-ying’s little room I took out my diary and confided my frustration to its pages.
“Are you writing about us?” Xiu-ying asked, sitting down on the kang and pointing at my diary notebook on the short-legged table between us.
Her question took me by surprise. Flustered, I closed the diary and stammered no, then added more truthfully, “Well, not really.”
“That looks like our house and yard.” She pointed to the paper lying beside my diary. It was a rough sketch I had made to use in our next study class. “Even the wooden loom is the same as ours.”
“It’s the house of a peasant family in the Han dynasty, two thousand years ago.”
“So long ago?”
“Even before that time, it seems, the peasants lived practically the same way they do today.”
“Did that mother tell her daughter the same thing Mother tells me?”
“What’s that?”
“When a girl lives at home, she must obey her father. When she is married, she must obey her husband. And when her husband dies, she must obey her son.”
“Exactly the same,” I said emphatically and with obvious disapproval in my voice.
“If a good teaching has lasted for two thousand years, why do you want to change it?” Xiu-ying’s father interposed from the next room. He looked at us through the open door, his eyebrows raised, dubious and puzzled.
“It’s not a good saying. People believe it because it has been drilled into their minds.”
I tried to speak quietly and reasonably, but I felt a rising impatience and I could not keep it out of my voice.
“Nobody can drill wrong ideas into my mind. Let me tell you: You say I can get the land without paying for it and I don’t believe it.”
His honest, broad face grew red and his stubbornly pursed lips quivered. “I always tell my children not to take anything they haven’t worked for. I don’t want them to be led astray.”
Xiu-ying’s mother stopped spinning and looked imploringly from her daughter to her husband, and then to me. “Are you going to your study class this morning?” she asked hurriedly.
“It’s early yet,” I replied stiffly.
“Let’s take a walk,” interrupted Xiu-ying. There was a conciliatory note in her voice. And she added in a whisper, “Don’t take him too seriously.”
Goodness knows there was plenty that needed to be done in the village as well as in the fields, but when winter set in, the peasants seemed to abandon work. Low on food supplies and energy, they passed the cold months in near hibernation. So when Xiu-ying and I announced we would start a class to study “women’s questions” we met unexpected enthusiasm from the restless village women. When we came to the class on the first day, several women already sat on the ground on the open space in front of Tu’s house, chattering while they waited for the class to begin.
Some had come to learn, others to watch the new “show” and, while watching, do their morning toilet. Water was a precious item in Longxiang, which had only one pond and a scattering of half-dry wells. A person in Longxiang was only assured of getting three baths in his whole life: one on the day he was born; one on the day he got married; and one on the day he died. So instead of washing their children’s faces and brushing their teeth with precious water, they cleaned their families by catching the lice which plagued everyone in the village, big and small, rich and poor.
Some young mothers suckled their babies as they talked. As modest young girls and matrons before their first baby was born, they had buttoned their blouses up to the neck. Now they opened their jackets and exposed even their bare breasts and bellies. A toddler in split pants squatted down and made water. With great interest and concentration she watched it flow in a little rivulet through the dust. Then she thrust her fingers into the mud and patted it against her cheek like rouge. A sheep languidly relieved itself of a few droppings; Tu’s wife hastened to sweep them up with a dustpan and throw them into her compost pit.
About a dozen women had now gathered in a rough circle on the ground. When I took my seat among them, they all looked expectantly at me. It was clear that only I had some idea of what we were there for, but even I could only put general questions.
“How many of you have worked in the landlords’ households? Please raise your hands.” I started to count. “Did they pay you as much as they did the men?”
Only a sharp-chinned woman sat still without even lifting her little finger.
“What about you?” I asked her.
“She doesn’t want you to know that bungler Landlord Wu paid her a lot more,” a masculine-looking woman interposed. As she spoke, she twisted her neck and head in an odd way. “He hired her to cook for his farmhands during the harvest. Sister Ling-ling, you know, the harvest was a big occasion for us here and Landlord Wu was generous. He wanted to give his men some special dish. But this woman here, she took the money and bought cheap food. You should have seen her soup! It was nothing more than water, a few drops of oil, and some rotten vegetables that the stirring ladle brought to the top when Landlord Wu came to look at it. And her pancake! It was so coarse that it stuck in their throats. They couldn’t swallow it and they couldn’t throw it up.”
“So you can’t keep your big gap closed! Then speak again!” the sharp-chinned woman screamed, and turned to me: “She worked for Landlord Chi. See if she’s honest and tells you the truth about him!”
“Why not?” The other woman tossed her head angrily, but I noticed that she quickly lowered her head again, pretending that some dust had blown into her eyes as she shot a quick glance in the direction of the main road. “Landlord Chi didn’t pay me on time, so I went off to work for Landlord Bai.”
“Any more?” I asked.
“What’s more?” She squinted at me with an arch chuckle. “Maybe you want to know how Landlord Bai treated me. Not too bad. But he was stingy, never gave me a cent more than he had to.”
“You mean he never miscalculated?” Tu’s wife interjected.
“Oh, he did miscalculate now and then by giving me a cent less.”
“That’s the way they are!” and they laughed and chuckled.
“Now, be serious. We’re not at a tea party—” Before I finished speaking, there was a sudden hubbub among the group of children playing nearby. They shouted furiously at each other. I recognized Xiu-ying’s brother and A-rong, the boy I had taught to sing on my first day there, but it was difficult to see who was doing what to whom. A-rong was shrieking out the accusations that he had heard us make against the landlords. “Thieves!” he shouted. “Bad eggs … feudal landlords!” He blurted out bits and pieces of ideas he only half understood.
“He needs a good beating.” Tu’s wife threw a small stone at him. “Get away from here, all of you. Don’t shit on my doorstep!”
Tu’s wife was a tiny little woman. She had a perpetually alert look in her darting eyes as though she were scared that she would get beaten at any moment. Now and then she cupped her hand behind her left ear and bent forward to catch what you were saying. It was said that once Tu had slapped her so hard that she had become partially deaf.
The other women paid no attention to her complaints. A few merely lifted their heads to gaze indifferently at the brawling children. Shouting vengeful threats, the boys scattered in different directions as she advanced on them wielding the long-handled dustpan.
“I’ll tell old Tu to give you a good beating,” A-rong shouted defiantly over his shoulder and made an ugly face.
“You little son of a bitch! I’ll settle you,” and she moved a few steps after him.
“Can I join you?” asked someone in a high-pitched, nasal voice. Her face struck me as familiar. I knew I had seen it before, but couldn’t remember where and when.
“I am a poor peasant woman, but you didn’t come to visit me,” the newcomer complained in a coquettish way, pouting.
“Didn’t I?” I studied her intently. She didn’t look like the other peasants. Her eyebrows
and the short hairs around her forehead were meticulously plucked, accentuating the blackness of her once fine eyes. But the powder and rouge heavily applied to her skin could not hide the wrinkles, distended pores, and blackheads.
“I have been robbed of everything,” she declaimed dramatically.
“Are you saying that you have been exploited?” Xiu-ying liked to use her new vocabulary and made every effort to memorize the words and phrases she was learning.
“Exploited?” The newcomer wrinkled her nose, trying to puzzle out what Xiu-ying meant.
“Robbed … made use of by others.” Xiu-ying assumed a superior sardonic air. I was puzzled by this change in her attitude.
“Do they rob you or do you rob them?” asked Tu’s wife sharply as she returned from chasing away the children.
The other women giggled and nudged each other.
The strange woman leaped to her feet and yelled, “All right. So I am unclean, but none of you is clean. You all wait and see and one fine day I’ll blow the whole thing up.”
Tu’s wife quickly averted her eyes from us and turned around. The newcomer lowered her head like a snarling cat and spat out a curse as she hurried away. Her gesture had jogged my memory. She was the woman in the red jacket I had seen with Tu on the night of my arrival in Longxiang.
As soon as she was out of earshot, Tu’s wife came back to us and muttered vindictively, “That ‘Broken Shoe’!”
That explained their hostility: A “broken shoe” was ready to fit any man’s foot, big or small. I wondered if Tu’s wife knew that her husband was visiting the Broken Shoe at night.
“She is forced into it,” said a woman with a flat, freckled face. She stated this as a fact rather than with sympathy and stressed the word “it” with a meaningful drawl.
“There are other widows in this village. They may remarry—sometimes that’s fate—but they don’t sleep around,” said another woman, looking up from her task of cleaning her little daughter’s head.
“Da Niang’s husband died when she was not much older than Broken Shoe. But she has remained virtuous.” Tu’s wife spoke with a vehemence which stirred my curiosity even more. I remembered someone—Cheng, I suppose—telling me that she herself had been married before she met Tu, but she obviously chose to ignore this fact now.
“Who is Da Niang?” I asked Xiu-ying.
“She’s the old widow who lives in that cottage you stayed in before you moved to our house. A-rong is her younger son,” Xiu-ying whispered in my ear.
I remembered: Da Niang was the woman who had kept her door closed against me the night I arrived in Longxiang. And she and Tu’s wife were friends.
“A-rong is making trouble again.” Tu’s wife spat in the direction where the older children were running together again with bloodcurdling cries.
All of a sudden there was a confused, scuffling knot of boys, shouting and yelling. Another band of children rushed around the side of a cottage and showers of stones fell on the scuffling group. A battle was raging. Some children cried as the rocks found their targets. They were from all the homes in the village, children of landlords and rich peasants as well as poor peasants and laborers. Xiu-ying’s brother was among them.
One child was knocked off balance and fell as he ran. Two other boys pounced on him and mercilessly began to pummel him. The beaten child screamed. It was A-rong. He was down on his belly and tried desperately to raise his back, straining to throw off his tormentors. I bent my arm over my head to shield it from the blows as I ran into the crowd of children and bent over A-rong. I wanted to cover his escape, but he crawled out from under my arm, and darting at a boy twice his size, butted him with his head.
“You sons of bad eggs! You rotten feudal landlords!” he screamed, beside himself with rage and hurt.
A stone hit him in the chest, and he doubled over with his hand squeezed to his breast. For a moment they all stopped fighting and circled around A-rong, watching expectantly and stamping their feet with excitement. Then, with a movement as swift as lightning, he snatched up a stone and aimed it wildly at the children around him.
As he did so, another stone hit his forehead. Blood trickled down over his eyebrows, around the corner of his eyes, and over his cheek, forming bright red lines on his face. My heart ached at the sight. I grasped him by the shoulders. “Go home,” I ordered him sharply.
His shirt collar was in tatters and it came off in my hand as he wriggled free. He seized the chance to rush at his enemies again. I tried to hold him from behind but only got a grip on his trousers. There was a rent and half of his bottom was left showing. The children burst out laughing and clapped delightedly. The more helpless and humiliated he looked, the more hilarious they became. Friends and enemies, they screamed with laughter. Doubled up with glee, they rolled on the ground. As suddenly as it had begun, the tension broke. Then, feeling a little guilty, they slipped away to find other games to play.
Slowly, all by himself, A-rong got to his feet in a daze. Shaking with fear and anger, he turned to me, stretching out his skinny arms. His clothes suddenly seemed to dangle on his thin body. His eyes, filled with confused tears, seemed to be saying to me, “But I was only doing what you taught me to do. Wasn’t I right?”
7
Meeting
Wang Sha and Malvolio Cheng were having as difficult a time as I was. The men were no more open-minded than their wives and even more cautious. Alone with Wang Sha or Cheng, however, some would reveal what they knew about the situation in the township, and in this way, with Shen and Tu’s help and Xiu-ying’s confidences to me, we gradually began to build up a picture of Longxiang.
No one knew for certain, but it appeared that three or four families owned a little less than half of the arable land thereabouts and with this hold on land had dominated the place. Among this handful of landlords the most powerful was a man named Chi, and though he kept a low profile these days, he was clearly still their leader.
Under this landlord domination, the landless hired hands were the worst off. They were at the beck and call of the landlords and the few peasants rich enough to hire them. To get enough land to make a living on, the landless and landpoor peasants had to rent land from the landlords, and they paid dearly for it—usually half or more of the harvest—and all of them were over their heads in debt to them as well. The middle peasants, as we had heard before we came, were subsisting on their own land, but precariously. There was little leeway for error or bad luck in their farming. There is an old peasant saying: “Snatch the harvest from the dragon’s maw.” In peasant folklore the dragon is a symbol of rain and here in North and Northwest China the rain appears sometimes with startling suddenness during or right after the summer harvest. In just a few hours the weather turns cold; a chill wind blows, the dragon’s breath; black clouds fill the sky; and the rain comes down in torrents. If the harvest isn’t stacked but lies out in the fields or on the threshing floor, a farmer can be ruined in a day. Such a ravening storm the previous year had forced several farmers into debt despite the fact that the new government had prohibited usury.
Now it was all so clear to me. The only way to give the peasants a fresh start was to break the grip of the likes of Chi by taking away their power over land.
“Let’s go ahead and do it,” I proclaimed boldly when we met to go over our first week’s work.
“We can’t do it for the peasants. Only they can find out how much land the landlords have and who owns what,” Wang Sha pointed out.
“The landlords can’t make the land disappear,” I rejoined aggressively. I wanted to hold his attention with my cleverness.
“Yes they can,” he replied mysteriously.
“They don’t look like magicians to me. They all hang their heads and walk around like ghosts. I can’t tell one face from another, because I’ve hardly seen them.”
“You had better believe me when I tell you that the landlords can make not only their land disappear but a lot more too. They have probably
already bribed or blackmailed some of the peasants to join their conspiracies. Those peasants will claim land that actually belongs to the landlords and hide other property for them as well. They’ll wait for us to leave, and then all that will go right back to the landlords.” He spoke with a slightly condescending touch of authority, but it sounded provocative to me.
“Then Cheng and I will have to work something out,” I said decidedly, to show our independence. There was more truth in my assertion than I realized then; Wang Sha in fact had very little time left from his many duties to lead the work in Longxiang personally. He was in charge of twenty work teams scattered around the county. He checked over their activities and kept contact between them in the intervals between the periodic meetings of their delegates. While he was away, we in Longxiang were responsible for day-to-day work. At the moment, this was to get the more active farmers together and in such numbers that they would feel strong and sure of themselves. But Longxiang was cautious.
With few exceptions, everyone was waiting to see which way the wind was going to blow. One of the young farm laborers put it succinctly: “What if I stick my neck out and things don’t go as you say they will? I’ll be left out on a limb.” And he pulled his worn jacket from his back where Landlord Chi’s cudgel had left a long, red weal.
As time went by, though, the peasants grew to like Cheng. They liked his unassuming ways, his clowning, and his good humor. They appreciated his sober good sense, increasingly took him as one of their own, and often stopped in just to chat with him.
Some youngsters were already solidly with us. There was Xiu-ying, of course, and two young men as well. Little Tian was a strapping youngster with a swarthy face. He was helping Shen reorganize the Poor Peasants’ Association. Little Gao, with his two large ears always flapping out of his hat, was getting fresh recruits to train for the Peasants’ Militia. When they heard that the Poor Peasants’ Association ought to accept most of the middle peasants, Little Gao brought along his cousin Gao, a man in his fifties and the village sage, while Little Tian recommended his great-uncle, Old Tian, to Malvolio Cheng.
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