Xiu-ying looked to me for a lead and when she saw me shrug my shoulders, answered ambiguously, “It depends.”
“What!” The Broken Shoe jerked her head back astonished. Her voice came low when we had expected a new strident outburst. “Why?”
“You have your landlord pals to help you!” came a voice from the back of the room. The speaker had deliberately disguised his voice so that the Broken Shoe could not recognize it.
“To help me?” She lowered her face and wiped her eyes and cheeks with her hands. I doubted if there were any tears there. But when she lifted her head, her expression had changed. She was no longer the defiant tigress. She needed to overcome their stony faces, to win them over to her side.
“You all know that I was sold as a slave girl into a landlord’s house. I worked like a beast of burden, and I was treated worse than one. At least oxen and donkeys had their fodder and a warm stable; I was cold and hungry, hot and overworked. Then I was raped. They said it was I who raped him. His wife sold me off to a poor peasant. That was how I got here. My husband died and left me nothing. Who ever helped me? I never knew my father or my mother.” She gagged on the words and could not go on. The trembling hands she moved to her breast had broken fingernails and calloused palms. She beat her breast three times as if trying to beat down the bitter memories that were surging up and would choke her. “The cook-woman in that landlord’s house was the only one who had a kind word for me. I felt for her as for a mother. She told me that I should try to settle down with some man, however poor, who had a bit of land. ‘With land you cannot starve. Raise a family,’ she said.”
That one word “land” resounded around the room.
“You see what I have here?” Broken Shoe pressed her finger against the tarnished copper hairpin that still held up some of her bedraggled hair. A white gauze thread was twisted round it. “She wore a thread like this for a neighbor who had died, dead broke and without a husband or children to remember her. The white light from the thread would help her soul grope its way to the Underworld King. That way she would not be doomed to wander forever in the dark and cold. Now I wear this thread for her. If I die now who will put on a thread for me? Land. I must have land of my own. Then I will have a home and family. Now I am afraid. Afraid to live and afraid to die.”
Her voice trailed off as she looked around at the roomful of hazy faces. When she saw the phalanx of men, she glared and bridled up again: “You spit at me and call me names. You think you’re better than I am? How many of you have sisters here? None, eh? Where are they? They were sold off to pay your family debts. They were killed or exchanged for your food? How do you know they’re not living as I am? And you call yourselves men, you stuck up—”
Her eyes flashed with bitterness, but her shoulders sagged. She walked in silence to the door, and her steps were shaky as she passed out into the night. No one moved or spoke for a moment, long enough for us to hear a sob outside the door. I felt it as a terrible rebuke to me. I had treated the Broken Shoe just as we had always treated “her kind.” I had never considered what it meant for her to have been poor and exploited and oppressed.
Xiu-ying’s mother broke the silence. Pointing to Little Tian she said, “His mother was sold to a very bad place in a far-off town. A very bad place. He was only four years old then. He held on to his mother’s leg and wouldn’t let her go. They had to pry his fingers loose one by one.”
“What are we waiting for? Let’s go ahead and take back our land and be done with it,” a young voice cried impetuously. No other voice echoed it right away, but the meeting had found a new momentum. The room buzzed with a dozen conversations and arguments. The Broken Shoe had begun by disturbing the meeting but she had ended by spurring on her listeners to push ahead more vigorously with the work of reform.
When order was finally restored, Cheng read the next section. All went smoothly until he came to the passage that said the landlords and their families should get a share of the land and tools so that they could make a living. At first, several young peasants immediately raised a clamor. Cheng explained that honest work would make a new man out of even a feudal landlord. “You know, many, many years ago our earliest ancestors were monkeys. Work transformed them into men.”
“Monkeys? No!” The old men looked at each other in bewilderment as if trying to see if there were really any resemblance to a monkey in their neighbor.
“Yes,” continued Cheng, “they used their forelimbs, worked very hard, and gradually their paws became hands. If work could turn a monkey into a man, surely it can transform a landlord into an honest toiler.”
“Our ancestors were not monkeys,” Old Tian said assertively, voicing the conventional wisdom. “They were like us, tilling the land—farmers, good farmers.” He reinforced his argument with the evidence of the classics. “Three thousand years ago, King Zhou met a wise man at a fish pond and asked him how to rule the kingdom. The wise man replied, ‘Teach people to know their places. Since most of them are farmers, tilling the land, they must never desert it.’ ”
“That’s true,” responded Cheng, “but I am talking about times long before three thousand years ago.”
“No matter,” said Old Tian with an air of finality. “Men have always tilled the soil.”
“Old Tian is right,” Xiu-ying’s father nodded his head in agreement. “The spirits of our ancestors are always with us. Is it proper for us to call them monkeys? Cheng, you assure me again and again that the revolution will make us happy. But how can we be happy if we insult our ancestors and they curse us?”
“But Papa, why do you sometimes call me a ‘son of a monkey’?” Xiu-ying’s little brother queried.
“Quiet!” bellowed his father. “When your father is talking, you keep quiet. Never talk back to your elders.”
Xiu-ying murmured reflectively but loud enough for others to hear, “Twice a year at Qing Ming and the Spring Festival we have saved and denied ourselves to buy spirit money and incense to burn at the graves of our ancestors. We knelt and prayed before their tablets. But we got poorer and poorer. Now we are depending on ourselves and we will get back the land we lost.”
“How dare you contradict your father?” The old man glowered at her. But what else he said was drowned out in the new wave of excited talk that swept through the room.
“The landlords forced us to work so hard that we were turned back into monkeys,” a young activist cried.
“Well, anyway, we mustn’t be too hard on the landlords,” said Old Tian. “Otherwise we will turn them into monkeys, troublemakers. A restless demon possesses people with idle hands. People must have land to work on. If they don’t work and support themselves, who will feed them? Live and let live.”
So our discussion started with Malvolio Cheng’s smattering of Marxism and ended with peasant pragmatism.
8
The First Sacrifice
Our work went better after that night’s discussion. We began to hold weekly meetings in the office, and more and more peasants attended. The constraint that was so obvious in the early meetings disappeared, and bit by bit they exposed the skulduggery of the landlords, the tricks that were used to make more money and seize more land. We learned much about how the landlord system worked. It seemed that a peasant could not just go out and rent land. He had to have guarantors of his “good character”; he had to give “gifts” to the landlord—a few chickens, a lamb; and he had to put down a guarantee deposit. If he didn’t have money, a father even had to sign over one of his children as an indentured servant for a fixed number of years; during that time he could make no claim on the landlord even if the child was worked to death. He had to pay over fifty percent or more of the harvest as rent, even if, as in some famine years, the total crop was not big enough to feed himself and his family. As harvest time approached, suspicious landlords made sure that they received the right amount of rent by going out to the fields and estimating the size of a tenant’s crop before it was cut. Landlord Chi t
ook the lead in seeing to it that these barbarous old customs were observed.
Some middle peasants spoke out because they wanted to claim the advantages that superior suffering bestowed. They viewed the meetings as a place where combatants jostled for their future status in the new society. They wanted to rival the poor peasants in the extent of their sufferings even if they had to exaggerate their woes. We understood what motivated them, but still we welcomed their support. The important thing was that much which had been left unsaid before was now out in the open. Deeply buried memories were the talk of the village. Trees, cottages, stones told stories where before there had been silence.
Encouraged by the way the peasants were rallying behind the work team, Wang Sha, Malvolio Cheng, and I gathered in the township office one afternoon to discuss what our next step should be. Wang Sha passed on the county leadership’s instructions to open a study class for our young activists, a mixed class for both girls and boys. Cheng and I would devote some time each day to teaching them reading and writing, and giving some of them a grounding in elementary math and geometry. They would then be responsible for taking a census of the households, keeping accounts, and measuring the fields to be confiscated for later redistribution. If they lacked these tools and abilities, the only other literates here—the landlord and rich peasant families—could still pull their old tricks on them. Of course, we could still enlist the aid of the middle peasant families, but it was too much to expect that such peasants as Old Gao could suddenly change their laissez-faire attitudes and become not only capable administrators but revolutionaries. By educating and training the poor peasants and the young ones in particular, we were preparing the ground for an all-around advance in the villages in which all would share, but some of the older generation shortsightedly viewed our efforts as simply a way of pulling the middle peasants down one rung in the social scale.
Wang Sha had been discussing all this with Cheng and me when Xiu-ying burst in. She leaned against the doorframe, panting and hardly able to speak. Wang Sha stopped in mid-sentence. I jumped off the kang and held her arm as she caught her breath. “What’s the matter?”
“He’s been beaten to death!” she cried, a look of terror in her eyes.
“Who?”
“A-rong, Da Niang’s young son—you remember? You taught him to sing the first day you came.”
Yes, I remembered the comical way he had swayed his head as he sang
“Who killed him?” Cheng asked.
We were astounded to hear her reply, “His brother.”
“How could that be?”
“Tu’s wife likes to wag her tongue too much,” Xiu-ying blurted out and her face clouded over. It hardly seemed an answer to my query.
“What has Tu’s wife got to do with it? Aren’t Da Niang and Tu’s wife friends?” I asked.
Wang Sha took her arm and led her gently to the kang. “Sit down and tell us what happened.”
There was a moment’s pause while she calmed herself. Then she told us that Tu’s wife had told old Da Niang about the fight between A-rong and the landlords’ children. Da Niang, who had already suffered a great deal from the local landlords and was terrified of crossing them any further, wanted to punish her son both to silence him and to try to appease the landlords’ wrath. Her elder son, a great lout of a youth and known as the village idiot, had carried out her order to beat the boy. He had accidentally hit him on some fatal spot, and A-rong died instantly. Now the mother was wailing beside the body.
“Xiu-ying, go home now,” I said. “I’ll go to Da Niang and stay with her until you can come and relieve me. All right?” She agreed to this and left.
I turned to Wang Sha and queried him silently with a gesture.
“You two go and visit Da Niang. After I finish up work here, I’ll join you.” He thought for a moment and then added, “Or you join me here.”
As on a screen before my eyes I saw A-rong’s comical little face raised in song; then it was blotted out in blood. It was only at that moment that a full realization of what had happened came home to me.
Da Niang sat inside the door of her cottage—in the compound where I had spent my first night in the township—a distraught look on her face. As soon as she saw me, she threw up her arms and her cries rent the air:
“I may be poor, but I’m not crazy. I don’t believe in getting anything without paying for it. I’m fifty years old now and going downhill, but I’ve managed to survive. Why should I worry now? But my son is dead!”
Strange disjointed cries. She burst into tears, beating her breast. She slapped her own face, punishing herself. I tried to comfort her, as did the other women gathered in the cottage. Then all of a sudden she stopped crying and became very quiet. She leaned forward, listening, straining her ears. To our surprise she darted out into the courtyard. She was no longer the mother distraught with sorrow.
“You son of a bitch, how dare you drink from my pail?” she yelped and let out a string of curses against a mongrel that had wandered into the yard. She returned carrying two pails of water. After she set them down, she angrily hit her elder son with the flat carrying pole. “You lazybones, why did you leave the pails outside? Oh, you’ll be the ruin of me!”
She was so frail that the blow hardly jolted him as it glanced off his shoulder. He just looked up, staring at her from where he sat by the wall. Tu’s wife gingerly took the pole from Da Niang’s hand.
Da Niang resumed her seat with a thump. She settled her feet comfortably apart and immediately began wailing again about her misfortunes.
The child’s body lay on the kang in the inner room. His face was blue and swollen. Vomited blood had congealed at the corner of his mouth. I had never seen death before and I trembled with fright, but under the gaze of so many pairs of curious eyes I was determined not to show my fear. I bit my lip to prevent myself from crying out. I placed the white sheet I had brought with me in Da Niang’s lap.
“Da Niang, let him take this with him.”
Da Niang wiped off her tears and narrowed her one good eye—the other was opaque and blind—to look at my gift. She felt the sheet lovingly and murmured, “What good cotton. Wrapped in this, he’ll be luckier than his father. His father died in the depths of winter, but still he had nothing to wear but his summer clothes. I dream that he shivers with cold in the underworld.”
The women neighbors came over to feel these burial clothes, chattering all the while. They took my gift to the window and held it up to the light to scrutinize every seam. Though it was worn, it was fine, machine-stitched Swatow linen, from my aunt’s linen closet. They had never seen anything like it.
Da Niang folded the sheet. Her elder son, who had not uttered a single word, now came up wanting to touch the sheet too. But I angrily pushed his hands away and said sharply, “It’s none of your business.”
Da Niang shot a glance at him. He stepped back, perplexed, and stood still. His long, flat face was immobile, but his disproportionately long arms with their thick veins were twitching spasmodically at his sides. I knew the boy was not responsible for what he had done, but emotion got the better of me. Cheng, who had also come to offer condolences to Da Niang, succeeded in irritating me still further with his whispered admonishment, “Be considerate. He didn’t know what he was doing.”
Instructed by an old and experienced neighbor, we began to prepare the little corpse for burial. First, we fetched water to wash the child’s face and body, though Da Niang nagged us not to waste precious water. Then we clothed him neatly and placed the little body wrapped in the sheet on two boards set on trestles in the front room. While we hastened to complete these dismal rites, the idiot son sneaked away. The other women soon departed, leaving Cheng and me to keep Da Niang company.
She was tired. She had suffered a terrible loss. Who would look after her now in her old age? Her cheeks, the skin stretched tight over her high cheekbones, shone red as if with fever. We insisted that she go into the inner room to rest on the kang while
we kept vigil beside the corpse.
Night had fallen. Only the dim light of the oil lamp remained. I felt that the place was haunted by the wronged ghost of the boy. I shuddered at Da Niang’s intermittent whimpering. My teeth chattered uncontrollably. Cheng was mumbling to himself while he paced the room.
A rat was gnawing at something in a corner. I’ve always particularly hated rats, with their nauseating smell. Oddly, now I felt friendly towards this one. At least its presence meant life, and it lessened my fear.
There was a knock on the door, and at my answer it opened softly. Xiu-ying stood in the stream of bright moonlight which flooded in.
“You can go home now, Elder Sister,” she said quietly. “I will keep Da Niang company.”
Returning to Wang Sha’s room, Cheng and I found him seated before a pile of papers which he had been reading. He pushed them aside. “Do you know exactly how it happened?” he asked. “Is what we heard the full story?” He looked grave.
“I don’t know,” Cheng replied. “It was no time to discuss the matter with Da Niang.”
I felt that I ought to tell them about that midnight meeting of Tu and the Broken Shoe, and I did. “It was Tu’s wife who egged Da Niang on to punish the boy. Are all these things somehow connected? Perhaps Da Niang has been hoodwinked by them,” I suggested.
“How could Tu choose this moment to get mixed up with such a woman?” Cheng wondered. “It’ll ruin his career.” He cautiously glanced around. “You can’t make accusations like that in an offhand way. I’m sure more than a few solid family men around here have played around with the Broken Shoe. No one will take her word for it; you have to catch them in the act. And then—well, I’ve seen villagers tie two guilty parties together with ropes and expose them publicly. It would be disastrous for all of us.”
“Cheng is right,” interjected Wang Sha, no doubt wishing to skim over the appalling picture Cheng had called up. “It’s a touchy question and we mustn’t act rashly. Tu is a peasant activist and one of the first in the village. If we wrongly accused him it would be a first-class scandal.”
The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China Page 12