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

by Yuan-Tsung Chen

  She looked contemplatively at a picture pasted on the wall beside the stove.

  “But what have you done with the picture of the Kitchen God that was there?”

  Noticing the surprise in my voice, she said, “I took it down and put up that picture of Chairman Mao. I thought you people had given Shen that idea.”

  “No. He must have gotten the message and the picture directly from the Party committee in the county town. But it’s some politicians in Peking who came up with such an idea. They’re much more important than any of us.”

  “You sound as if you don’t like this.”

  “No. I don’t like any superstitions, old or new. I think Chairman Mao owes thanks to you people for giving him a chance to see if he can do better than the old governments.”

  Da Niang looked at me with the amazement she usually reserved for what she considered our “strange remarks.” Dismissing the matter of the Kitchen God, she came back to more practical affairs.

  “I’ll have some fresh grain soon, so you take this pancake now or I’ll have to bring it to you this evening after you’ve finished your work.”

  I compromised by taking a piece of the pancake with some pickles wrapped in it and folding Da Niang’s present into my handkerchief.

  “Put it away carefully now. Hungry people know no shame,” she said.

  24

  Land to the Tiller

  My neck was stiff and aching. I lifted my right hand to rearrange the pillow, but my hand felt numb. I licked it, but there was no feeling in it. Startled, I half opened my eyes, not knowing for sure whether I was awake or dreaming. Instinctively I looked for the door and the window. But no door faced me, nor was the small window there to my right. This wasn’t my room. I struggled to raise myself, but my arm lying beneath my body had gone completely numb. I rubbed my hands together and massaged my arm to restore the circulation. I settled myself more comfortably and looked around in the morning twilight. Now I saw both the door and the window but they were on the side, behind my head. Then I remembered that this was my new room. I was no longer staying with either Da Niang or Xiu-ying. The hectic days of our land reform work were over.

  Ma Li lay beside me and murmured something in her sleep. There was a slight frown on her forehead and the right corner of her mouth was pulled down in a wry grimace. She had arrived the previous evening to help us celebrate the climax of our work. This was the day when the actual distribution of land would take place and the new owners would receive title to their land. I had looked forward to this day with a sense of fulfillment. But an unalloyed sense of achievement would not be mine. I was already being nagged by the feeling that something more remained to be done. It was Ma Li with her bold ideas who once again confronted me with a new dilemma.

  I was already in bed when she arrived. She pushed the door open with her back burdened with her bedding roll and for a moment I was nonplussed to see this strange, ungainly thing entering my room. Then she turned to face me cheerily. The tip of her nose and her cheeks were red with cold. She was in an exuberant mood and so eager to share her news with me that she sat down at the edge of the kang with the bedding roll still on her back.

  “Let me help you unpack.”

  “Don’t bother. Let me catch my breath first and then I’ll take my time making myself comfortable.”

  As she undid the straps of her backpack she blurted out, “Have you heard that some of us may go to Qinghai?”

  “Qinghai Province?” I cried, staring openmouthed. If Gansu was “beyond the Great Wall,” then Qinghai was at the back of beyond.

  “So you haven’t heard? Well, it seems that, this autumn, land reform will be carried out in Qinghai. Some places there are much worse off than here. Mountain villages are snowed in for nearly half the year and I’ve heard that there are Tibetan villages where women slaves are still giving birth to babies to increase their masters’ wealth. Since the situation there is so complicated, they want only volunteers who have already had some experience in land reform work. So I’ve volunteered to go. How about that?”

  I didn’t answer her immediately but crawled back into my warm quilt.

  “Not many cadres are needed there. Early applications will be considered first.” She paused. “This is a moment in history that will never be repeated. I don’t want to miss any of it.”

  Later, as I looked down at her asleep beside me, I wondered if she were dreaming of Qinghai’s snow-blocked valleys.

  I crawled around her and off the kang. In the stillness of the early morning, every movement seemed to make a clatter. I did my best not to wake her up because I wanted to walk around the village and be alone with it to say good-bye.

  I could not love it. Its bleakness and violence horrified me. Then I reminded myself that I had seen it only in the beginning and end of winter, neither in its autumn nor its real spring when green would cover the plain, the willows would shimmer with bronze and yellow-green buds, and the dark green of the firs and pines on Green Dragon Mountain would be shot with emerald. Would I love it any better then? But love it or not, I knew I would never forget it.

  Three sides of the village were still surrounded by the eroded and broken earthen wall which had once surrounded it completely. I walked slowly from end to end along its narrow top where no one would cross my path. This suited my mood perfectly. When I reached the end of the wall on the opposite side I felt I had said good-bye. On this fourth side there was no trace of a wall or anything like a border line. They had hacked down the rampart to fill in the moat beyond it, and now the village was open on this side to the brown, flat immensity of a plain that stretched as far as one could see—without houses, trees, or even the grave mounds which usually dotted such a wasteland. Off towards the right in this direction we had gone to search Landlord Chi’s house. Towards the left, the barrenness and monotony were broken by a stranded cloud, whiter than the sky, shimmering, rolling slowly in amorphous shapes like a writhing dragon escaping to the invisible horizon. Here it fused with the mist, which, like that in a classical painting by Mi Fei, did not stop at the horizon but floated far beyond it, too far for my imagination to follow.

  I thought of Wang Sha. But I thought of him now with a strange detachment. During the months I had spent in Longxiang, and even before, my feeling for him had hardly for a single day at a time been one consistent sentiment. It had been like a melody played on a many-stringed instrument. First one string and then another had been plucked; then came cadences, delicious trills, sometimes subdued, sometimes tumultuous; and then resounding chords, unbearably exciting. But then the music had settled into a quiet measure that was already almost a memory. A theme and variations had been improvised by a mysterious hand. But the music had died away, unfinished, and now I knew that it would remain unfinished.

  The barely rising sun suffused the eastern sky with a brighter light. The west, by contrast, seemed to dim until the tip of a cloud or mist caught a glow of rosy light that seemed to be focused on it exclusively. A mirage? Beyond it I could see the Kunlun Mountains four hundred miles away, the home of all the Chinese gods and goddesses who had settled there long before Jove and Juno reached Mount Olympus. Qinghai.

  Now the whole sky was lit up. Day. The tops of the mountains were sharp-etched against the light.

  I was far from the center of the village, but I could already hear the early-morning excitement of an unusual day.

  I turned to make my way back when suddenly I thought that I would go to see Tu’s wife. She wouldn’t come to the land reform celebration; her sufferings had been too much. After our confrontation and the subsequent trial and conviction of Tu, she had been confined to her bed with a high fever. When that was cured she had gone completely deaf, and now she, like the virgin widow before, lived a life of silence and alienation.

  Thrusting my hands deep into my jacket pockets for warmth, I walked with my head down looking at the path in front of me.

  Someone’s basket brushed my elbow and the person car
rying it passed me and walked on ahead. Cotton slippers scuffed till they were grey; socks of blue and green checks. I raised my eyes a little. The back of a dark grey jacket with a large brown patch. Surely I recognized it as belonging to Tu’s wife? I looked into her basket. It was empty. I followed her. When we reached her cottage, she slipped the basket from her shoulder, put it on the ground, and stared at it for a long moment. Then she carried it to an empty corner where they used to pile their compost.

  Here she tipped it over to add its emptiness to the emptiness already there. With a complacent smile, she stood for a while to admire her work. When she turned to me the smile was still on her face as if frozen into the fine wrinkles that had gathered on the bridge of her nose, at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

  I followed her into the room. She didn’t show any sign that she recognized me, or even that she was aware of my presence. I wanted to get through to her, wondering how to make her understand me. I stood still and didn’t know what to do.

  In a corner behind the door of the room was a little pile of potatoes. I picked up a cluster and shook the mud off them. Not a single one resembled the fine, fat potatoes I remembered from my aunt’s kitchen. These shriveled spuds were her late autumn harvest, the last until the new year’s summer harvest. Potatoes were rated “famine food.” These would have to stave off the pangs of the spring hunger that tormented the peasants every year. And she would face it all by herself. I could not hold up my head. A tearless sob came from deep inside my breast.

  She picked up a potato and scrutinized it as carefully as if it were a crystal ball telling her the future. She looked up at me over the top of the root with a look of utter sorrow.

  I knew it was useless to reason with her in words. I took her hand in both of mine. I cupped it together with the potato. She did not seem to feel my touch. She had sunk too far into her own dark world.

  When I got back to my room, Ma Li was already up and dressed for the festival.

  “I thought you had gone ahead,” she said.

  “I was with Tu’s wife,” I said, dejected. “I wish I could do something for her.”

  I stopped as the door opened. Our soprano and our pretty dancer Chu Hua came in with Dai Shi.

  This time our reunion was peaceful. In the flush of our success in the land reform, we were loath to find faults. We listened to each other’s plans for the future with attentive tolerance. When Dai Shi said she was thinking of going back to Shanghai and writing a play about the land reform, I asked warmly about it. Only later did I think there was no need for her to invent excuses for not going to Qinghai. When Chu Hua admitted frankly that she could not bear the thought of going to a new, wild place like Qinghai, even stranger than here, Ma Li looked at her pinched face with compassionate understanding.

  “I don’t feel well,” Chu Hua said. “I’m going to go back to Shanghai and ask for sick leave. I’ll stay with my mother for a while.”

  “Then your mother must get you a husband and you will live happily ever after,” Ma Li consoled her half jokingly, half in earnest.

  “If you girls ever want to get married, it’s better to marry young. Once you get used to living single it’s difficult to adjust to married life,” our soprano said. “Look at me. I’ll give you one example. I like to eat my breakfast alone. That’s when I feel most relaxed, and I need that moment if I’m to last through an exhausting day of rehearsals. A few years ago, I had a love-thirsty suitor. One morning he came to visit me just as I sat down to breakfast. I didn’t want him to join me at the breakfast table. So he said that he would wait in the living room. But if I know someone is around, I simply cannot digest my breakfast properly. I asked him to take a stroll and come back in half an hour. Can you guess what he did? Try! I give you three guesses.”

  “I thought you had only one suitor when you were very young.”

  There was a touch of irony in Ma Li’s voice.

  “So you can’t guess? Well, let me tell you. He never came back,” the singer ended with a laugh.

  “That’s not funny,” cried Chu Hua. “He was hurt.”

  “I can laugh about it now, but I felt very sad then. That’s another reason why I came to do the land reform, to distract my attention from my worries and from love.”

  “So it happened only a few months ago, not a few years ago!” exclaimed Chu Hua innocently.

  “We’ll talk about that some other time. Now we must stop. The girls are coming. Listen,” commanded Ma Li in a loud voice, her patience running out.

  We could hear the crash of big drums calling the people to the festival and their land. Four young activists, two to a team, were wielding drumsticks as big as cudgels, bringing them shatteringly down on the enormous red drums that the villagers brought out on grand occasions. The ra-ta-ta was punctuated by the clash of cymbals and the bursting of firecrackers. Little waist-drums chattered out the beat of the Yangko, the Northwest folk dance that, like the French Carmagnole, had become the dance of the revolution.

  We danced the Yangko together down the village street. At first the girls were timid. Hesitantly they put their left foot forward and raised their arms high; their hands held the ends of bright scarves which were tied around their waists. They lowered their eyes because they didn’t know where to look. But the steps of the Yangko come from the movements of working in the fields, and soon they were dancing with natural grace and feeling. They shed their shyness, which made them look solemn, and discovered their real, vital selves in the gay, bold rhythm of the dance. Their cheeks were rouged red. On their heads they wore bright red kerchiefs like Xiu-ying’s on election day. A posse of boys before and behind them banged out the dance rhythm on waist-drums slung from their shoulders and decorated with red ribbons. They got me into the festive mood. By the time we reached the meeting place in the theater I had danced myself out of breath. Panting, I paused and stepped aside. In the crowd I saw Sun’s wife waving at me with one hand while with the other she held her baby girl. Then she raised the baby’s tiny arm and waved it to me too. Sun, her husband, still sullen, kept five steps away from them, far enough away to express his dissatisfaction with this topsy-turvy world, near enough to get some of the best land along with his family.

  The stage was the center of attraction. The huge cauldron which we had confiscated from Landlord Bai was in the center, propped up on a low pedestal of bricks covered with red cloth. Behind it was a table neatly piled with sheets of white paper, the new land deeds giving title to the land allocated to the landless and landpoor peasants in equal shares. Off to one side was another table piled higgledy-piggledy with tattered pieces of paper—old land deeds belonging to the landlords, mortgage deeds, loan vouchers, account books. An ever-increasing crowd of villagers thronged about the stage.

  I caught sight of the virgin widow hanging around diffidently at the back of the crowd. As they surged forward to get a better view of the proceedings she was jostled even further back, along with a stocky, middle-aged peasant, her neighbor. They seemed to have been thrown into each other’s arms. I waved my hand to her. She nodded and threaded her way to me out of the crowd. As she neared me she felt her bare head and exclaimed, “My head scarf! I’ve lost it. I must go back and look for it.” She turned and saw her neighbor holding up the scarf.

  When she looked back at me, she saw that I was smiling, and to hide her confusion complained, “I get so flustered in a crowd.”

  “But he doesn’t,” I said meaningfully, and she blushed scarlet and cast down her eyes.

  “We’ve known each other quite a while but we never dared to dream that my parents-in-law would give me permission to remarry,” she murmured shyly.

  “You don’t have to ask for such permission now. Both of you are single and old enough to decide for yourselves. You just go to the township office and register as man and wife. That’s all there is to it. That is what the new marriage law says, you know.”

  “That’s what he told me,” she said, but without the excitemen
t that I would have expected in a new bride-to-be.

  “I’m happy for you,” I exclaimed.

  “What is there to be happy about?” Her eyes filled with tears. It was traditional for a widow remarrying to express her apprehension about the future. A sense of propriety demanded that she show reluctance to change her state, even though deep down I knew she must have felt very differently.

  We sat down with our backs to the wall, the warm, early spring sun playing on our faces.

  “He’s nothing much,” she said deprecatingly. “If I weren’t a widow, I wouldn’t choose him. If he were more clever he wouldn’t take me. You can’t imagine how hard it is for a woman to live with an old, crippled couple and no able-bodied man around. The roof leaks, the wall crumbles. Who could I turn to for help? I tell my parents-in-law that I’m not going to remarry for my own pleasure and happiness. Besides, who knows whether he’ll become a brute of a husband or not? An underdog must find an outlet for his unhappiness. He vents his anger on his wife. She’s handy.”

  “You mustn’t let him lord it over you,” I admonished her.

  “If he starts to beat me, to whom can I complain? It can’t be my parents-in-law. They will sneer at me, ‘You asked for it. Who told you to fool around with him in the first place?”

  “You can always complain to the Women’s Association,” I advised her, and then with a sudden inspiration added, “You know what I can do? I will write you now and then asking you how you are getting on. If he knows that you have friends who care for you, he will think twice before he lays a hand on you.”

  “Will you?” Her face lit up.

  At that moment I heard the soprano start to sing a long, thrilling note of joy.

  “They’re setting fire to the old land deeds and mortgages!” We scrambled to our feet and ran to join the crowd, shouting and cheering. Shen and Ma Li took great handfuls of the yellowed, time-stained documents and tossed them into the flames leaping from the cauldron. The peasants roared out their approval, and once again the drums crashed and the firecrackers crackled.