“Good, good!” yelled the crowd each time the flames leaped high to devour the papers heaped upon them.
Xiu-ying was busy sorting out the new land deeds, ready to distribute them. Gao the sage was there too. He turned to consult with a peasant whom at first I didn’t recognize until I saw that it was Malvolio Cheng with a towel for a turban and a pipe tucked into his sash. I missed Wang Sha. He was at the big meeting in the county town. Fleetingly in the crowd around the platform I glimpsed the Broken Shoe looking intently and wonderingly at Xiu-ying. As I made my way to help Xiu-ying, I passed close by her and she tugged at my sleeve. Her eyebrows were still plucked and painted, but she had discarded the ridiculous rouge that she used to wear on her cheeks. She was in a high good humor.
“I’ve left that old scoundrel for good,” she cried. “I’ll get my own land today. Ah, how I’ve longed for this day! A pox on them all.”
The surging crowd separated us. Everyone was trying to get as close to the platform as possible. I saw Da Niang picking her way through the press of people. She waved to me and I waved back. But she waved again with such urgency that I realized she had something to tell me.
“Da Niang, what is the matter?”
She did not reply. She took me to a quiet corner behind the wall of the theater. Her yellow jowls and the muscles in her face twitched.
“Da Niang,” I repeated, “what is the matter?”
Hesitantly she raised the hem of her tattered jacket and with her old teeth unpicked the thread. From the opened hem she took out a tightly rolled piece of paper.
“My old master gave this deed to me not long before you came here.” Her hands shook. The flimsy piece of paper fluttered like a leaf in the winter wind. She stared at it for a long moment with her single good eye. It was a meaningless statement “granting” her a few mu of land, actually less than she and her idiot son would receive in the land share-out that day.
“So he bribed you to keep quiet!”
She drew in her breath in a long sigh. She wanted to say something, but the words wouldn’t come. Tears welled in her eyes. She bit her lip to stifle a sob. She blinked her eyes to hold back the tears that streamed from both her eyes. Then she spoke in a strangled voice. “He thought this would pay me for the ten lives that I have lost through him and his kind … my husband, my children.…”
The network of wrinkles on her face deepened. Bitter memories flooded back to mind. She gave a stifled cry, one she had wanted to utter for years. It was perhaps also a cry of fear relieved. She had been afraid that her old master Chi would expose her complicity and tell us about this false deed.
“Da Niang, do you think there are other peasants who still want to keep these fake deeds?”
“Yes, and not only fake deeds; they will be up to other tricks too.” Her one eye, still wet, lit up with mischief. It was evidently irresistibly tempting to tease me, a meddlesome girl who went about bothering people.
I couldn’t help being amused by her unblushing candor. I wouldn’t let her spoil this day for me. I took her hand. Reassured, she tightened her fingers over mine.
“Da Niang, come. Come and get your land. It’s time.”
About the Author
Yuan-tsung Chen was born in Shanghai, China, and educated in a missionary school for girls there. In the autumn of 1950, following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, she went to work at the Film Bureau in Peking, and in 1951 she joined a group of cadres carrying through the agrarian revolution in Northwest China’s Gansu Province, the setting of this book. Over the next twenty years, like other cadres, she several times “went down to the countryside” to help the peasant farmers in their co-operatives and, later, farm communes.
Yuan-tsung Chen came to the United States in 1972. She has taught at Cornell University, and is currently researching a catalog of Chinese films at the Chinese Culture Center in San Francisco. She and her husband, a journalist and artist, live in El Cerrito, California.
The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China Page 30