“So will I.” As I said this, I suddenly felt let down.
We lapsed into a long silence. He was moody, and my spirits plunged as the meaning of his words sank in. Both of us were debating with ourselves. Conflicting ideas and emotions jostled together and kept us silent. Several times I saw him looking hard at me, as though counting my freckles. Then suddenly he would grow conscious of his stare and abruptly turn away.
“I don’t write much now myself,” he said again, “but I still keep churning out reports about the difficulties writers face, and especially about the meddling and ineptitude of bureaucrats and political busybodies who think that they know everything, including how to write plays, novels, music, and poetry. I send these reports to various conferences and committees and then they travel back to me. We stumble along. I’m in the middle of the cross fire: On one side are the dissident writers—some of them gifted, some of them not too wise either; and on the other, these know-it-all dogmatists. I can land myself in a hell of a mess. One day I’ll have stepped on too many toes, and that will be it. ‘You’ve let off enough steam. It’s time to shut you up.’ ”
For the first time I saw him unsure of himself, insecure. “Sometimes I’ve felt as if I were on a treadmill exerting a lot of energy but going nowhere.” This was not the familiar Wang Sha talking.
I was slowly scribbling on the ground with a twig. The characters in the dust overlapped and as I scribbled faster became less and less legible. Just a jumble, like the chaos of thoughts in my head. Every one of us—peasants, work teams, and landlords alike—was caught in the wheel of history. Immense forces beyond our control were moving us forward, but at the same time molding and remolding all our hopes regardless of who and what we were. This thought thrust like a dagger into my chest. A blind and stubborn determination to hit back welled up within me. I pressed the twig so hard that it broke.
I had missed some of Wang Sha’s words. “… I can guess, now and then, you think about going back to your aunt and uncle. That’s natural. But if you uproot yourself and leave China, your own land, you will find it even harder to grow as an artist and a writer. You told me before that your family wanted you to go to the United States. It’s true, there are immigrant writers and artists from Europe, and some of them have managed to integrate themselves into that kind of life. But Chinese culture is too different from the American for you to bridge that easily. You’ll be like a fish out of water.” He halted, casting a questioning glance at me. “Don’t delude yourself. There’s censorship everywhere. In different forms, wherever you go, you’ll run into it.”
“Have you finished?” I asked. I was more than ready to move on to something less painfully personal. “Let’s do something practical while we’re here. Look at all this good firewood lying around. Let’s make a bundle and carry it home for Da Niang.”
I wandered about picking up dry twigs. My mind, however, kept coming back to thoughts of Wang Sha. I understood that he was trying to give me a word of warning, to alert me to the hard facts of life. They were exactly the same hard facts that had scared several generations of women back into the refuge of marriages of convenience. They were scaring me now.
When I was a younger girl, I used to eavesdrop behind the door of my aunt’s small upstairs parlor, listening to her friends confiding to her about their love affairs. Some had been to middle school and college and in the twenties and thirties had taken part in the various revolutionary movements that had swept the country. For more than a hundred years, ever since the Opium War with the British, China had been a nation in continuous upheaval. Women too had been caught up in the turmoil. Some had breasted the waves like bold and agile swimmers. Women like Ding Ling, the novelist, and many others both famous and obscure. In their young days these women had left home seeking a more fulfilling life; some had found the struggle too hard. Disillusioned, they had returned home and got married as their parents had wished. But their lives of luxurious monotony drove them crazy. These were the ones who confided in my aunt. Some went into a second adolescence and had girlish crushes on men; through them they felt that they could bring more meaningful encounters into their lives. Each time love promised a new realm of feeling, a new world. But these had all been little worlds in which nothing much could ever really happen—a new house, a dress, friends—things not so new after all.
I think it was from them that I first heard about books such as Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. Wondering why these books had such an emotional impact on them, I took them down from my aunt’s bookshelf and devoured them. They were intoxicating, and I yearned to act out the same grand passions in real life. For a time this had been an obsession: The pages of fiction became my real world.
But in the past year I had moved into a very different world, one filled with living women of creative achievement, and women of the slums. Here in Longxiang I had gone even further into a whole new environment. The sufferings of Anna and Madame Bovary seemed like luxuries in which only ladies of leisure could indulge.
“Have you picked enough?” Wang Sha came up with a small bundle of twigs under his arm.
“Yes, but not as much as you.” My tone was natural and tranquil. The flood of feeling that had nearly made me lose my head had receded. I wanted to be off before anything else should happen.
“Shall we go back?” I said abruptly as I gazed at the thin, glimmering stream below us. Tears misted over my eyes. I could not quite comprehend what was going on in my heart, though my mind seemed clear and it was saying over and over again, “Beware, beware.”
Back in my room, I could see my problems in a more objective way.
The paths of Wang Sha and myself had crossed at a crucial moment in our lives. For me it was a starting point of an adventure that by turns exhilarated and appalled me. For him it was just another turn in a road he had long traveled. He knew that although he could choose, the choice was already made; there was no turning back for him. He fought for creative freedom in a “legitimate” way as a leading cadre of the Party. In his committees and conferences he argued, debated, and haggled for it. Eventually, however, even though it fell short of what he wanted or thought necessary, he would obey the decision of the majority of the Party members or those who spoke for them. To win this sort of seesaw battle took time. It was no overstatement when he said it might take another fifty years before it was possible for writers and artists to get where they would like to go. It was not in my nature to sit, pray, and wait patiently. So I couldn’t fit into Wang Sha’s picture and he certainly couldn’t fit into mine.
I could still decide to end this adventure and probably be welcomed back by my aunt like a Prodigal Daughter. But were there really only two options open to me: To press ahead and be engulfed by the revolution or to turn tail and resume my old life? I didn’t want either. Could I find a way to walk the knife edge between these two fates? I had always believed that if one concentrated hard enough to solve a problem, one would probably come up with an answer, and I lay down on the kang to think.
I pulled the quilt up to my chin and closed my eyes tight. My thoughts trailed away. Instead of a solution, I found myself sobbing. I cried until I entered that hazy, dreamy realm between sleeping and waking. Outlines were blurred in a world of grey.
I don’t know how long I lay there before I dozed off, nor how long I had slept when I heard footsteps. A man, immense and threatening, was coming up the steps slowly and ponderously, his left hand sliding up the handrail. His face was shadowed by his cap. He wore a belted tunic and heavy boots. He was conducting a search. I called to my aunt but no sound came from my throat, and the man came relentlessly on. He moved to my desk and put his hand out to take my diary. I overcame my paralysis enough to leap out of bed and snatch the diary and run.
The footsteps chased me. “Ling-ling,” I told myself, “run for your life!” Out of breath, I came to the alley where Ma Li had once lived in those tiny partitioned spaces. Partitions inside partitions. I could hide in this labyrinth. B
ut the footsteps kept coming nearer. There was no escape. I screamed, but my voice sounded like a whimper.
I sat up in the dark, still trembling with fear from the nightmare. These people who were chasing me were the same people who had been chasing Ma Li. I could not care less what they called themselves: Guomindang or Communist, rightist or leftist, counterrevolutionary or revolutionary. They were the same people.
I eyed my diary among the few books stacked in the lower corner of the kang. I pushed aside the quilt and bent forward to pick up the diary. But at that moment I felt too weary and listless even to lift it, and I leaned back against the wall. I recalled Wang Sha’s words: “Diaries can sometimes be dangerous things to leave lying around.” In mine I had written down as frankly and vividly as I could my perceptions of Longxiang and the people I had met there.
How would all this look when read out at an interrogation? I had heard that in the turbulence of the so-called rectification campaigns such as the Yanan Purge, even thrown-away papers of no importance had been found and sometimes caused serious trouble, attacks in open meetings, secret torture, and even death. Some people developed special talents in reading between totally innocuous lines and deciphering nonexistent codes showing that the owner of such papers was involved in “subversive activities.” If I dropped that diary and lost it, if Dai Shi should get so much as a glimpse of it, that would be more than enough to undo me. Compared to mine, Chu Hua’s sin would look like a childish prank. I decided to burn the diary.
My feet touched the cold earthen floor and, shivering, I felt around for my slippers. With an effort I got up from the kang and took the match box from my table. I lit a match and started to burn the diary page by page. On one page I caught a glimpse of some lines that I particularly liked. I tried to snatch it back, but it had already caught fire. I slapped the flame with my hand and my fingers got burned.
Tightly hugging the remaining empty pages of my diary I threw myself back onto the kang. I was sure that I was not the only secret writer. If we refused to bow in submission to tyrants, small or big, some of us would outlast them.
I lit the small oil lamp on the table and began to write about my nightmare, jotting down every single detail.
14
Electioneering
It was time to elect a new government in Longxiang. Since the old Guomindang officials had fled late in the previous year, Shen and Tu had in effect been the local provisional government. They received orders from the county government in Yuzhong. But the presence of the work teams and the land reform movement were changing all that. In all the villages and townships, including Longxiang, a growing number of militant peasants were beginning to want to take affairs into their own hands. Responding to the new situation, the county leadership had sent word that every township should elect a local council that could throw its authority behind the land reform and carry it through. Every work team had been told to cultivate good candidates and get out the vote.
Like all the other instructions we had been getting from the county this was easier said than done. We wanted a government that represented all the peasants, but the work teams had sometimes been too successful when they encouraged the middle peasants to become more active. I had heard of elections in which the middle peasants, despite being a minority, had carried off most of the seats. The power of this group should not have been underestimated: They had not gotten where they were by accident. They had to be skilled and toughly egotistical to survive and prosper in conditions where most others had sunk into abject poverty. Usually, they were astute enough not to exclude the poor peasant candidates entirely, but they did their best to get their own candidates in.
We in Longxiang tried to prepare for the election by fostering some very good candidates: veteran farmers like old Gao, the village sage; adults in their prime like Shen; and a few forceful, capable younger people. We felt it very important to have at least one woman cadre in the government, and we were hopeful—indeed, confident—that Xiu-ying would be elected. But even with such a strong slate, Wang Sha, Cheng, and I knew that we would have to do all we could to help elect our young poor peasant activists and have a good turnout at the election.
One morning two weeks before the election I went to visit Xiu-ying. She wasn’t home, and her mother told me that she’d gone out on an early-morning errand but would soon be back. There was a pile of dry stalks in a corner of the courtyard and I lay down on them, snug in my padded coat and trousers, and waited for her. The winter sun played warmly on my face but was too bright for my eyes, so I turned over to lie face down. The scent of the stalks was pleasant and I closed my eyes to enjoy the quiet and the calm.
“Ling-ling is here,” I heard Xiu-ying’s mother call out from the cottage.
“Where?” came Xiu-ying’s voice.
“Right under your nose.”
“She’s gone to sleep.”
“No, I’m awake.” I rolled over and lay on my back. I smiled up at her. “Where have you been?” As I asked this I got up and followed her into the house.
“I was chatting with Shen and Tu. They’re worried that they are going to lose their authority when the new cadres are elected.”
“Rubbish. There’ll be much more work to do after the land reform. They couldn’t possibly do it all by themselves.”
“Shen said he doesn’t care how the voting goes. He was bragging that he would go to Xian to visit relatives and that they will get him a job in a factory there. He says that city life is much more interesting.”
“He’s just talking. Of course he cares if he’s elected or not.” I looked right at her. “What do you really think of Shen?”
“He’s a bit lazy and he doesn’t like to take on big responsibilities. But he’ll win. He has many friends in the Poor Peasants’ Association. Everyone knows now that that’s where the power will be when the land share-out takes place. So he sits there all the time and lets people get used to him sitting there. They will vote him in, most of them, because his face is familiar. Why choose someone you don’t know?”
“Xiu-ying, you are exaggerating,” I chided her.
She laughed. “Not much.”
Xiu-ying was a delightful chatterbox. The activities of the land reform had brought out her real capabilities and opened up a world of new possibilities. Every day I discovered some new facet of her character as she asked questions tirelessly, thirsting for knowledge. She wanted to know how my watch worked, how a bank operated, how women lived in the cities. One day we were talking about marriage. In Longxiang, a new bride immediately puts up her hair. Xiu-ying asked me, “Do girls keep their long braids after they are married in the city?”
“Some do, some don’t.”
“Uh.” She thought this over while she reached into the stove and pulled out a roasted ear of corn, which she handed to me.
“Here, eat this,” she said.
“No, you eat it.”
“Let’s share it.” And she broke it in two.
My hand was reaching out for the half, but her hand holding it suddenly pointed at the door leading to the bedroom, from which were coming some muffled sounds and then some angry shouting.
“Listen. Father is beating Mother again.”
“What’s the matter?” I had come to love this family, and I was genuinely concerned.
“Nothing.” She shrugged as if there really were nothing unusual going on, no reason to get upset. “My father is good-tempered and will only give her a taste of his fist.”
Indeed, Xiu-ying’s mother soon emerged from the room, unhurriedly, smoothing down her disheveled hair with her hands. She asked kindly, “How do you like the corn, Young Sister?” and passed on out into the courtyard. She picked a dock leaf, spat on it, and put it on her red swollen cheek. Then she sat down on a millstone, some old clothes on her lap ready for patching and her arms resting idly. Looking quite serene, she sat for a while basking in the morning sunshine. We watched her as we munched on the ears of corn, enjoying the kernels’ s
weet burned taste.
“Mother told me that men all beat their wives,” remarked Xiu-ying. “There are no exceptions. I’ll be lucky if I marry a man as kind as Father.” But even as she said this, her face clouded.
The older woman bent over her sewing, using her worn teeth to break a thread. The leaf fell from her face. As she picked it up, she glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. She squirmed in her seat like a child as if to say, “Aren’t I shameless? An old woman acting as awkward as a child who has been spanked.”
“Do men in the cities beat their wives?” asked Xiu-ying.
I didn’t know how to explain to her, so that she could understand, that I grew up in one circle in one city at one specific time; it wasn’t that easy to generalize about a vast city like Shanghai. I said, “I’ve never seen it happen among my friends. But I do know one wife who beats her husband.”
She stared at me, speechless, for a while, and then throwing away the finished cob, reached for its stalk. She chewed at this, peeling the shiny skin away with her strong, white teeth.
The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China Page 18