China Witness (15 page)

It was so cold in Yan'an in winter, there was over a metre of snow. Still, nobody complained, none of us showed the slightest anxiety or worried about the hardship, we felt almost holy, living in a cave house in
Yangjialing, a place where Chairman Mao had once lived. I was in charge of three small groups in one subunit, all girls, six to a cave house, with six army canvas
travelling cots and a basin of burning charcoal to keep out the winter cold. The quilts were very thin, just light summer quilts, and everyone had a heavy cotton-padded jacket and a pair of padded trousers. They only had millet in Yan'an, they'd never even seen rice, and
mantou
[steamed bread buns] were for field training only. Field training was very tough; we got up before daybreak, and set off carrying a water bottle and a dozen
mantou
in our backpacks. By noon our
mantou
were lumps of ice, sometimes we couldn't get our teeth into them at all, there was no fire to heat them on, and we'd finished all the water, we were so thirsty we had to eat snow, we always had good appetites in those days. Walking around in the ice and snow, tens of degrees below zero, the girls' hair stuck together in icy clumps, and when the boys went out their moustaches went all white. The
Yan River had frozen solid, and we had to cross it every day to climb the snow-covered mountain; if you fell into a hollow where the snow had piled up you couldn't climb out by yourself, somebody had to pull you out. At that time we lacked even the most basic necessities for our tasks – we didn't even have warm shoes, just light military summer shoes with rubber soles, and those are very slippery. It was impossible to climb mountains in thick cotton-padded trousers, so we didn't wear them, just two pairs of unlined trousers, and nobody complained of the cold either.

We were young, we were healthy and full of energy, but even so, going out early and coming back late, some of our classmates' hands froze up like the
mantou
, sometimes we couldn't get our socks off because they were stuck to our skin. In the evening, when the cold became unbearable, we had to sleep in pairs, huddled together for warmth. I feel a real nostalgia for our enthusiasm and cheerfulness under those conditions: we used to sing songs while we were resting. Sometimes we'd start to sing on one mountain, and they'd pick up the tune on the next mountain; we sang back and forth to each other. There was the "Song of the Pioneers", and songs from the Soviet Union, "Katyusha", "One Road", I've sung them all. And that was our three months of practical study. Back in Xi'an we spent two or three more months reinforcing what we'd learned, and then we were posted to jobs in the
Jiuquan Big Brigade. There were three survey brigades then, two with male leaders, and I was the leader of the third brigade. We were the vanguard of the survey, the advance guard of the oil pioneers; our duty was to draw topographical maps of the areas they were exploring, so we were always first on the scene. At that time trains from Xi'an only went as far as Lanzhou, there was no railway from Lanzhou to Jiuquan, so we
set off from Lanzhou in big trucks, with the vast yellow sands of the Gobi all along the route, we could go for a day with nothing but endless yellow sands, no sign of human life, and then another day would come and go without a soul to be seen. All the roads were dirt tracks, all bumps and hollows, we were tumbled about in the trucks until even our insides hurt from all the shaking. Our track was a strip of yellow road under us; behind us was dust like a tail of thick, choking smoke, our throats were burning and dry. We could do nothing about our hair – we all had matted hair and grimy faces. Every time we reached a stop in the evening, there'd be over a dozen of us to one big
kang
, all in a row, one next to the other, with grass mats to lie on, we were stung and bitten all through the night, and we couldn't do a thing about it. What did we burn? Cow and horse dung! It was still very cold indeed in the Great North-West when we first went out in April and May, and we only had dung for fuel, which filled the room with its stink as soon as you lit it, but nobody said a word about the dirt or the harshness of the life. It's very interesting to look back on that time, our generation takes pride in having experienced this memorable part of history.

And that was how our band of girls arrived at the Jiuquan Big Brigade base. It was a single-storey building, we slept on iron beds, and we couldn't have been happier if we had gone to heaven. It was almost International Labour Day when we arrived, and I still remember 1 May very clearly: snow was still falling from the sky – we all sat on the ground in the open air, wearing big thick padded jackets, but no hats, holding an activists' meeting.

*

In post-1949 China, 1 May was a very important festival. First, it was a holiday that belonged to the working people themselves; second, it was an opportunity for propaganda, crusading against the oppression and exploitation of the labourers under capitalism; third, work units or the government would use this day to hold activists' meetings, introducing new schemes or work plans for the summer.

*

MRS YOU:
In the activists' meeting the leaders told our group that we were going to leave for the worksite. The following day a long file of more than ten trucks set off in the direction of Jiayuguan, carrying my women's survey team and a few tents. Our worksite was on the far side of the Jiayuguan pass. In the past, many majestic, beautiful epic poems
had been written by scholars and poets about this Jiayuguan, but when we got there all we could see was the vast Gobi Desert stretching out boundlessly in all directions, a great, barren desert with no sign of life and no vegetation! There wasn't a living soul to be seen.

But do you know something? When we saw it we were full of pride. I told our group: we too can bring our work to places where the great poets of ancient times have been, this is an honour. Really, at that time that was what I thought.

We put up our tents in a village in Jiayuguan and moved in. The only technicians in the team were me and my classmates, all women. One of the apprentice workers from Nanjing was just sixteen, and I was only eighteen. On outside fieldwork we were split into many small groups: Terrain Reconnaissance, Site Selection, Observation, Mapping. My team were the vanguard of the survey, the people in Mapping would survey and map the terrain based on the control points we had measured.

XINRAN:
And was that where you met Teacher You?

MRS YOU:
Yes, he was in the Jiuquan Big Brigade too. He came to work in our brigade in 1952, to help us with the technology. He was also responsible for the organisational work of the Communist Party Youth League, and he often came to inspect our work. At that time I was still young, I hadn't started thinking about courtship, marriage or anything of that sort. Then a writer called
Yu Ruobin (his pen name was Sha Duoling) came to the site; he'd come to experience life with us in the Jiuquan Big Brigade, and he wrote a lot of poems about our women's survey team and the Gobi Desert. Many journalists from the
Xinhua News Agency used to come to report on our team, and they took lots of photographs. This writer Sha Duoling told me about You's background: he was a graduate from the Lanzhou University physics department, a Hero of Labour, and his work was first-rate. He said he'd done a special report on You, a man who struggled fiercely for the sake of the construction of the motherland. He suffered from stomach trouble, and once he'd fainted dead away on the worksite, but when he came round he just carried on as normal . . . he was a man with a very strong work ethic. I began to notice this man, and later on You himself suggested that he would like to make friends with me.

XINRAN:
Do you still remember the words he used when he asked you to marry him?

MRS YOU:
He didn't say the romantic words you would see in books
today, he just asked me if I wanted him to make friends with me, and was that all right?

*

In China before 1990, "lover" was an embarrassing word, even a louche, dissolute word. When a man and a woman were said to be "making friends", this referred to courtship. In the period between 1930 and 1980, a couple who were Party members had to gain authorisation from the Party organisation before "making friends"; from the 1950s to the 1980s this rule was an unwritten law in Chinese society.

*

XINRAN:
How did you reply?

MRS YOU:
At first I really didn't know what to reply. When I kept silent he said: "It's perfectly simple, just tell me, do we or don't we? Be frank." At that time there were quite a few people who were keen on me, but I agreed anyway. Why did I choose him? This has a lot to do with my family, and the influence of my older girl cousins: they had all married university students in the 1920s and 30s, and they were all very talented men: one was a professor in the
Shanghai Finance and Economics Institute, and one had been a student of literature at the
Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong, and after the Liberation he became a teacher, everyone thought he was amazing – at that time people who had been to university were rarer than a unicorn horn or phoenix feathers. So I thought I couldn't do less than them, and I had always admired educated people. At that time I'd never heard of MAs, PhDs or anything like that, and though my ambition had been to be a university student myself, it was impossible then, so I would naturally tend to look favourably on a university graduate as a marriage partner! The best candidates among my classmates were only vocational school graduates, none of us had been to university. So You's educational background and his personal circumstances both met my standards, but actually the most important thing was the man himself. Besides, that writer Sha Duoling, our deputy group leader and the organisational secretary of the Youth League had all told me: "A Hero of Labour is bound to be a hard worker, and a hard-working man is always good news."

XINRAN:
So, your marriage was influenced by the Party, and by the Party organisation.

MRS YOU:
Oh, at that time an introduction from the Party organisation was as good as a guarantee, many people said yes as soon as the organisation introduced them! In those days we'd only just freed ourselves from
arranged marriages – anything that wasn't decided by our parents was a kind of freedom! Besides, I had this notion of marrying a university student, so when other classmates suggested getting together, I turned them down. He was the first one I considered, but I didn't know how to answer him.

XINRAN:
So how did you answer him?

MRS YOU:
He was a leader – even when proposing marriage he knew a thing or two about leadership. He saw I was unable to speak so he said: "Can we or can't we? If not, we don't have to," just like that. I still didn't reply, but I didn't refuse him either.

XINRAN:
And how long did your courtship last?

MRS YOU:
Not that long. It was silly of me, he won a Hero of Labour prize (back then prizes were always
The Complete Works of Mao Zedong
) but when the time came for him to collect it he didn't go himself, but sent me to collect it for him, so I went blundering off to collect his prize. All this had a purpose, it was to test whether I was really serious, and to show me that he was a famous Hero of Labour. Afterwards when we returned from Jiuquan to Xi'an, he took my suitcase for me, and put it in the truck for me. He didn't lift a finger to help any of my other classmates, I remember it very clearly. When we were back in Xi'an for theoretical study, we went to the Xi'an restaurant on our rest day to eat snacks, especially their local speciality. Xi'an was very backward in those days. There were no cars or buses – we took a horse and cart from outside the city wall to the city centre.

XINRAN:
What was the local speciality?

MRS YOU:
Different kinds of Xi'an dumplings, all different types, and there was
yang-rou-pao-mo
– lamb stew with coriander and crumbled flatbread.

XINRAN:
When you ate out together, who paid?

MRS YOU:
He paid. I wanted to pay, you know, equality between the sexes and all that, but he wouldn't let me.

XINRAN:
What was your marriage ceremony like?

MRS YOU:
The marriage ceremony I do remember. Before we were married, the
Petroleum Bureau wanted to train a group of people in aerial surveying at the
Beijing Central Mapping Bureau, in order to improve the speed and quality of surveying. My name was on the list. But then the leaders said: "You're getting married soon, you don't have to go." At that time I always felt I had never learned enough, I'd always dreamed of a university diploma; given a chance like this, I couldn't not go. So I said:
"It doesn't matter if I'm getting married, I can still go once I'm married. I'll come back when the course is over." I was already China's first head of a women's surveying team, I wanted to be a member of China's first aerial surveying team as well. In those days new training programmes were kept secret, there was no announcement. I'd heard the phrase "aerial surveying" but didn't knew whether it meant flying in the air or walking on the ground. I had no idea. I supposed that if it was aerial, it must be flying in the air, surely? I was determined to fly up to the sky; I wanted to be the first female aerial surveyor of the New China. Since I was going away to study, my colleagues said: "Have your wedding right away, before you leave, a settled relationship is beneficial to study" – and so we got married. We were still wearing our fieldwork clothes, even in our wedding photograph, but I bought us two new scarves for the photo, both the same colour and style, and we wore rosettes, attached to our work clothes. Our colleagues had a whip-round and got us two sets of bedding and some sweets, it was a very simple wedding.

XINRAN:
Was there any of the traditional horseplay at your wedding?

MRS YOU:
Of course – at that time marriages were the biggest events in our social life. They forced us to sing a song. A few of his geophysicist classmates were a bit more unruly, they were slightly older, they'd seen more of the world. I could sing Shaoxing Opera, and so I sang a bit of that, not very well, just "Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai". When I was young I used to join in the community singing, and I was in the singing group. Later on I had my tonsils out, and my voice turned hoarse.