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

by Yuan-Tsung Chen

  Cheng motioned me aside. With a jerk of his head he directed my eyes along a dark corridor out of the main courtyard.

  “I’m going to break the kitchen door. You get hold of the biggest pot you can find and smash it on the ground.”

  “What for?” I was bewildered.

  “That means we challenge him by destroying his honor. It’s the peasants’ custom in the South. We break his rice bowl. If he doesn’t accept the challenge, then in their eyes he will have lost face. Maybe it won’t work here, but it’s worth a try!”

  Cheng rolled up his sleeves and picked up a cleaver in the kitchen. In a corner, I found a big iron cauldron that was used to cook food for at least fifteen people. I dragged it over to Cheng who was dismantling the door.

  “I can’t even hold it up, how can I throw it down?” I asked, my face already bathed in sweat from the effort I had made.

  “I’ll help you.”

  “No, you have the door to attend to. It will be more effective if we can smash both the door and the pot at the same time,” I said.

  “That’s right.” But even Xiu-ying and I together could not lift the pot. So we decided to switch roles, even though according to Cheng’s ideas this seemed to spoil the aesthetics of the operation.

  While Cheng dragged the heavy pot out to the center of the courtyard, Xiu-ying and I took a leaf of the kitchen door and carried it along behind him. Some of the peasants stood in a ring, watching expectantly but not helping us. The three of us struggled to lift up the pot but when we let it drop on the flagstones it refused to break—a dull thud and that was all. After recovering our breath we tried to lift it higher. We failed again, but this time the flagstone cracked. Suddenly I had a brainstorm.

  “Cheng, you take the cleaver and smash the door. I’ll take a hammer and I’ll beat the pot like a cymbal.”

  “Good idea.” At least we could do something with the pot!

  Hearing the noise, the rest of the peasants ran out of the rooms into the courtyard, not believing what they saw. These cadres were certainly full of surprises! The landlord’s face turned deathly white. We clearly had spoiled his strategy. He was trembling uncontrollably. Even his head shook. It was a miserable, pitiful sight.

  “Search!” shouted Cheng, theatrically pointing at the master bedroom.

  But the peasants now showed a will of their own. To our consternation, the activists, followed by their supporters, who had unexpectedly increased in number, scattered in different directions like the Furies unleashed. Cheng and I were left standing in the courtyard while chaos reigned. We heard the sharp crack of objects breaking, the splintering of wood, sounds of dragging heavy objects. There were cries of anger, triumph, surprise, and rage. Two children, their pockets bulging with small loot, scuttled out of a room and shot like arrows across the courtyard and out the gate before we could stop them. Their mothers looked pleased, then affected surprise.

  One of the old peasant tally men had the presence of mind to close the compound gate and stand guard over it. Now no one could get in or out.

  I shouted to Cheng above the hubbub, “We came here to get criminal evidence, but this is a total mess!”

  “We can’t interfere now,” he returned. “We wanted the masses to move and now they have! We can’t stop them now. Anyway, I’m sure the landlords know what we’re after, and you can be sure they’re already one step ahead of us and our search.”

  “But the peasants are carrying out whatever they fancy—and some are stealing to boot!”

  “The owners have surely hidden away anything that’s really valuable. We can’t let the peasants go away empty-handed, but we do have to stop them from wholesale stealing.”

  “What are we going to do with all this?” And I pointed at the store of clothes, furs, quilts, and all sorts of chests and bric-a-brac that was piling up in the courtyard. It looked like a junk sale.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll let Landlord Bai keep what he really needs and divide the remainder among the needy peasants later.”

  “But …”

  “It’s legal in a revolution,” Cheng cried. He did not wait for me to finish my question but hastened to reassure me as he and the two tally men pulled and tugged things to bring some sort of order to the mounting pile of goods.

  The landlord’s family, women and children, were driven out of their rooms into the courtyard. His mother, bent with age, sat on the verandah step. Closing her eyes to the chaos around her, she pressed her forehead against the knob of the walking stick she held in her powerless, wrinkled hands. Meanwhile, the peasants continued to bring out whatever they found of value and piled these things in mounds under the direction of the two tally men. Every time a peasant threw something new onto the pile—an antique vase, a jacket—the eyes of the landlord family followed the object. But what use was it to keep count? After a while they simply hung their heads and ceased to pay any attention. They seemed crushed by their ordeal and fearful of the future.

  I saw Cheng throw a glance at them. I knew what he was thinking as surely as if he had spoken: merited retribution.

  Four peasants carried out a carved mahogany bed from the old woman’s room. On this bed she had spent her first night with her bridegroom. On this bed she had conceived her children. She struggled to stand up. The younger women helped her. She pushed them aside impatiently. She tottered forward a step or two on her tiny bound feet and spoke with offended dignity to Cheng.

  “We are a decent family. I brought up my children properly and I treat my servants kindly. Look at my white hairs. You cannot do this to me!”

  She threw back her head and seemed to choke. Never before in her life had she been treated with anything but deference. She swayed on her feet, on the verge of fainting.

  Her son rushed to her side and begged her to keep silent. She shook her head. Wiping away the tears with the back of her hand, she sat down again. She had made her protest. She also knew it was in vain.

  Her son knelt down in front of her and said in a plaintive voice, “Mother, it is your son’s fault. Your son is a worthless creature. He is not able to carry out his filial duty.” He hung his head. His words were stifled by spasmodic sobs.

  The women and children standing behind the old lady knelt down and let out a tremulous, prolonged wail.

  “Stop, you fools!” Cheng pounded on the broken door, his lips and jowls moving as if chewing something he didn’t like. “There is no death around here. This is justice. What the hell are you starting a funeral chant for?” He hastened away into the next courtyard, presumably to see what the other peasants were doing.

  After the search we marched through the village carrying the broken door. The great pot and the rest of the things we had confiscated followed us piled on a couple of ox carts. The effect on the peasants was electric. The whole village was galvanized into action. A crowd of peasants, the “moderates” who had held back, waiting, now fell in behind us.

  Children clapped and shouted gleefully, whether they understood or not. In the middle of the village, where the crowd was thickest, several young men took the broken door and the pot and held them as high as they could for everyone to see. We had made a wooden archway over the gateway of our new headquarters and had sent Xiu-ying with a group ahead of us to decorate it with evergreens and red flags. As we marched through this arch of triumph I felt intoxicated like any soldier in the flush of victory, but I felt a sharp twinge of conscience when I remembered the shattered home we had just left.

  When the hubbub had died down and the crowd had dispersed for the midday meal, Cheng and I had a moment to ourselves and I confided my doubts to him.

  “That Landlord Bai doesn’t seem to be such a bad fellow,” I said with a query in my voice.

  “He went in for usury and other ways of fleecing the peasants, but on a small scale. No big deal. You can call him an ‘ordinary landlord.’ But unfortunately he’s gotten caught in the wheel of history.”

  Malvolio Cheng paused as if considerin
g something and then continued. “My father was a benign and liberal-minded landlord, the sort of man who liked to read modern books and studied how to improve the lot of the peasants. He sent me to a modern school, because he thought that modern knowledge would reinvigorate the country, but he himself never went further than raising the wages of his farm hands. He was afraid to do more than that. He didn’t want to antagonize his friends, the other landlords.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Fortunately for him, he has been dead a long time.”

  “If he had not died?”

  “The same thing that happened to Bai would have happened to him.”

  “If your father were still alive, what would you do?” I looked into his face to see if he really meant what he said.

  “You are too inquisitive.” He raised his right hand as if he were going to smack me, and then threw up both of his hands, resigned to my impertinence.

  All through the county the peasant activists and work teams were breaking down the landlords’ kitchen doors and smashing their pots. From what we heard, the great majority of the dispossessed peasants had joined forces with us. They say that in a civil war, five percent of the people support this side, five percent support that side, and the rest of them take the side of the winner. Our offensive against the landlords made it clear who were the winners. There were sporadic acts of violence, particularly when a landlord resisted the searchers. We heard that Dai Shi, working in a mountain village, led a militia unit like a woman general into a fight in which people had had their noses broken and a landlord’s house had gone up in flames.

  I got overtired and my nerves were on edge, and I felt increasingly depressed. In my eyes, with my memory of Shanghai wealth, these wretched landlords had just managed to make a mere pittance in these godforsaken villages, and now they were paying a heavy price for it. The faces of Bai and his innocent family haunted me that night as I tossed sleepless on the kang.

  12

  Two Confrontations

  Tu was in charge during the searches the next afternoon. At the last house, taking a bullying tone from the start, yelling insults, he spattered ink over the landlord’s clothes, tied his hands behind his back, and hung a cardboard sign around his neck that read, “Counterrevolutionary Landlord Xia.” But Xia was hardly a big landlord; he was more like a rich peasant who rented out some of his land. But thus humiliated, he was paraded around the little hamlet near his house. When I heard of this I was furious, but, taking my cue from Malvolio Cheng, I said nothing.

  Xia had not been on the list of landlords to be searched, and the reason for the unscheduled search was bizarre. Xiu-ying told me that as Tu’s search party was passing Xia’s house on their way to Chi, the biggest local landlord and their final target, a dog inside Xia’s courtyard barked. “A warning to its master?” Tu asked no one in particular. And so they broke in on Xia.

  I was even more outraged when Tu gave his excuse for abandoning the search of Chi’s house, which our plans had clearly included. “Chi’s house was far away and it was getting dark,” he said. But it had not been too late when he had started out but then had dragged out the search at Xia’s.

  “But it’s our responsibility too. It was all very well to give responsibility to Tu, but why on earth did we leave him entirely on his own?” I said.

  “It’s a touchy situation,” said Cheng. “He said he knew how to handle things. After that, if we had insisted on going along with him, he would have felt we didn’t trust him.”

  “Maybe we should have started on Chi first.”

  “But we needed to build up momentum.”

  When Cheng and I reached Xia’s house after the incident to see things for ourselves, we found him dazed and shocked, utterly mortified at his humiliation before the entire hamlet. He was sitting disconsolate on the step outside his cottage. It was a shambles. He and his wife had kept a tidy home. The walls were well repaired, the paper on the latticed windows fresh and whole, the courtyard swept clean. Now clothes and knick knacks were strewn around on the floor amid overturned furniture. Books lay scattered in a large inside room. I picked up one—the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a popular classic novel, part folklore, part history. There were pamphlets and charts showing new methods of farming, composting, close planting, and irrigation. A torn page of an account book was covered with neatly written characters and figures. Xia had started out life as a middle peasant. Thirty years of hard work had enabled him to realize at least in part the ancient dream of every Chinese countryman: a farm, land, and a house of his own. And now in one afternoon all his hopes had been dashed.

  For the moment there was nothing that Malvolio Cheng and I could do about what had happened, but we did at least speak to Xia consolingly and say that a full investigation of the matter would be undertaken and, if necessary, restitution made for any losses.

  “Why didn’t we at least rebuke Tu for bullying Xia?” I asked Malvolio Cheng as soon as we were out of earshot.

  “Because it would not do to have an open clash with him on such a controversial issue in front of the peasants.”

  “But you know as well as I that Tu’s action was unnecessary. No court has yet indicted Xia as a counterrevolutionary. And he’s certainly not a feudal landlord—he’s just a hardworking peasant who’s managed to become well off. But by attacking him in this way, Tu is forcing other rich peasants to make common cause with the landlords when it’s to our advantage to keep them neutral.”

  “You’re tired,” he said. “Tomorrow I have to go and meet Wang Sha for a conference in the county town. Take a day off. I mean, you can do some paperwork in the office or just go to your study class.”

  “Every time you try to dodge my questions, you say I’m tired. I am not tired. I know why we didn’t interfere: because allowances are always being made for people like Tu. They are given the green light to do anything in the name of the revolution.” Cheng never wanted to “rock the boat,” and I couldn’t contain myself any longer.

  I spent a poor night. Tu was only too clearly demonstrating his “firm revolutionary stand” at the expense of a harmless landowner while postponing a clash with a landlord tyrant whom most suspected of being the ringleader of the reactionaries in Longxiang. Landlord Chi had been given a whole extra day’s warning to prepare for the search which he knew was coming.

  Next morning my head ached as if from a hangover but I dragged myself to my study class. It was more crowded than ever before.

  Everyone wanted to talk about the recent events. Most agreed that Landlord Bai was not such a bad egg himself, but several confirmed that the older Bai, his father, had been a high-handed scoundrel who had used every base method to grab land which Bai now owned. Several families were bankrupt and broken because of him.

  “Why haven’t we gone to search Landlord Chi’s house?” asked Little Tian, the young peasant with a hoarse voice. His tattered old cap was pressed down over his eyebrows so that it was difficult to see his eyes.

  “Because he can still scare us out of our wits, especially Shen and Tu,” rejoined a voice from the back row in a tone that set going a ripple of laughter.

  “Who’s afraid? Speak for yourself.” Xiu-ying tossed her head to emphasize the bravery of women.

  “Then let’s go now. Ling-ling can lead us.”

  “Why not?”

  “What the hell!”

  I hesitated and played with the end of my short braid. In their eagerness, they were pushing me where even I didn’t want to go yet. It wouldn’t be easy to control them once they got going, especially if I alone led them to search Chi’s house. This I had already learned. I considered calling in Shen, but he would insist on consulting Tu and that I didn’t want.

  “Let’s plan this out first,” I said, playing for time.

  “What’s there to plan? We’ve made searches before,” cried a tousle-haired youngster.

  This was the first time they themselves had taken the initiative in such bold action.
If I held them back now it would be difficult to arouse their enthusiasm again on a later occasion. It was like riding a tiger or a green dragon in full flight: To go ahead was less hazardous than getting off.

  “All right, let’s go,” I said finally with more resolution than I really felt. I gathered up my notebook and pencil and made for the door.

  Walking fast and outwardly determined, I kept hoping that someone would come and head off this expedition. But no one appeared to intervene. Only a few peasants looked at our marching column, but without much curiosity. The sight was no longer unusual in the township. If they had known where we were going, I doubted that they would have crowded after us. Very few people wanted to antagonize Landlord Chi.

  After less than half a mile, I suggested that we take a rest and we all sat down by the roadside. I sat a little apart from them. I had a premonition that I would be killed and at this thought I felt a wave of cold rise from my feet and envelop my body. My knees trembled. My aunt had warned me that I might end up this way. “Ling-ling,” she had said just before she left, “I know you don’t want even to listen to what I say now, but I must tell you that you will suffer for your willfulness. You are taking an irrevocably fatal step that will lead you to another and another.”

  Death, I thought, was certainly irrevocable.

  “What a waste of your life,” Aunt had said, shaking her head. “No, Auntie, I haven’t wasted my life. I’ve tried to make something out of it. I wanted it to shine once, just once, like a moth I once saw trying to reach the flame of a storm lamp. It dashed against the glass globe and fell to the table stunned. Bruised, it skidded across the glass, wings trembling and shedding a light yellow powder. It was so weakened that it fell to the table before it could complete another lunge, but the insect would not stop moving towards the light. Finally, I removed the glass globe to let it fulfill its wish. It stretched out its wings and made its last desperate dash to the flame. It caught fire. The light shot up, flickered, and died.”