Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (45 page)

Another old evil was rebounding in Deng Xiaoping’s China: trafficking in women. It was the rawest indication yet that the Maoist morality I once knew was gone forever. For the first time I felt personally at risk. Chinese friends warned me to be careful and to avoid traveling alone in the provinces. After weathering the post-Tiananmen kidnapping attempt, I realized anything was now possible, and I took their warnings seriously.

Many women were sold by their own relatives. But professional gangs also operated far-flung networks. They duped rural women with bogus job offers in remote provinces or drugged them or used brute force. Often, they raped the women before selling them. The victims would wake up in some remote village, already sold into marriage or forced into prostitution. Equipped with walkie talkies, cellular telephones and fleets of cars, the traffickers easily outmaneuvered the police.

Bride trafficking flourished because of a huge demand by unloved men and an equally huge supply of vulnerable females. Deng’s economic reforms had created “bachelor armies” as women in the poorest villages left to find paying jobs elsewhere, or at least tried to marry up and out. Female infanticide – in part a reaction to China’s strict family-planning policies – only worsened the sex imbalance. In some poor regions, as many as one in six families bought wives, the Chinese press reported.

One peasant woman who had been sterilized was resold four times by disgruntled husbands who couldn’t understand why she failed to conceive. Some families dealt with a reluctant bride by holding her down while the husband raped her, according to the official
China Youth
newspaper. “Many peasant families ignore the resistance and tears,” it said. “They think that after a while, she’ll get used to it. They believe that she’ll cry a little, but after she has a baby she’ll be obedient.” Escapees were punished, locked in latrines or beaten. After one victim repeatedly tried to escape, her husband, a Shandong peasant, gouged out her eyes.

If the women managed to return home, they were often treated like “broken shoes,” or whores who had been tried on by too many customers. No one wanted to marry them. If there were children, the offspring had to stay behind with the man’s side. Not surprisingly, many victims stayed where they were. Authorities turned a blind eye. “If a woman is sold, and she puts up with it, it is legal under the Marriage Law,” said an official of the Chongqing Women’s Federation, a Party-controlled organization.

Authorities needed the wife trade to keep restive men down on the farm. For years, the punishment for traffickers was less than five years, the same for the theft of two cows. Rescue attempts were often difficult and risky. Qu Weijia, a Beijing filmmaker who took part in one attempt, told me that even with the help of the local police and the women’s association, the rescuers barely escaped with the victim, a high-school girl who had been abducted and married off to a peasant. “Everybody is related in the same village. Who cares about some woman from the outside?” he said. “Party officials don’t want to offend fellow villagers. Nor do they have a strong sense of the law.”

Although the wife trade was flourishing, authorities refused to allow any interviews on the subject. Apparently, its very existence was too great a loss of face for China. After trying in vain for two years to go through official channels, the only way foreign journalists were authorized to conduct interviews, Lena Sun and I decided to report the story on our own. Receiving a tip from a friend, we drove east for two hours from Beijing and found a peasant I’ll call Farmer Wang. He was a combination village errand boy, deal maker, seeker of foreign investment and glib promoter of local tourist attractions, of which there were none of note. At twenty-six, he had a pinched face and a crooked jaw, and spoke with a slight lisp. When we found him, he was living with his mother because his wife had just walked out on him. I explained to Farmer Wang that we were foreign reporters. I wondered how to delicately broach the subject of wife buying.

“Anybody here bought a wife lately?” I asked.

“Loads,” he said. “Otherwise, nobody could find a wife. The women in our village all want to marry someone in the city.”

Lena asked if we could meet someone who had bought a bride.

“No problem,” he said. One of his neighbors had bought a wife the year before for their deaf, mildly retarded son. The young woman had recently run away. Farmer Wang proposed taking us to meet the family right away. After so many fruitless applications for official interviews, we were thrilled. But we suddenly had the identical thought. It had been hours since we left home.

“Uh, do you have a toilet?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Outside,” he said.

We found an open-air latrine in the front yard, shielded by corn stalks and vines. There were some rickety wooden slats to stand on. It wasn’t too bad by rural standards, but Lena looked dubious.

“You go first,” the intrepid
Washington Post
reporter said.

I had just finished when some ferocious snorting erupted behind me.

“Look out!” Lena screamed. I shot out of the latrine, my pants still around my ankles, huge jaws snapping at my derrière. It turned out that the Wang family outhouse doubled as a pigsty. Chinese sows aren’t cute, pink, cuddly North American pigs. They are huge black excrement-eating monsters with enormous snouts and sharp fangs.

Lena decided she didn’t have to go after all. Instead, we went with Farmer Wang to visit his neighbors, who were in the midst of lunch. While the son continued eating, the mother bustled about pouring cups of “white tea” — plain hot water — which she politely set in front of Wang and the
Globes
driver, Liu Xinyong. Lena and I glanced at one another. In this household, females didn’t even rate a glass of water.

“They want to know about Little Orchid,” said Farmer Wang, using the errant wife’s name, as mother and son resumed eating lunch. It was a sensitive topic.

“We paid 2,600 yuan [$325] to her matchmaker,” the mother said, the anger welling up in her voice. “They fought from the beginning. She was stubborn and had a bad temper. They never got along. They had fistfights.”

Little Orchid had been sold against her will by her own brother-in-law. Her survival technique was to make her new family
more miserable than they made her. When they gave her laundry to wash, she ripped the clothes. When they asked her to wash the dishes, she smashed the plates. “Once she ripped the hearts out of all our cabbages, out of sheer spite, just to ruin them,” the mother complained.

Her ultimate weapon was withholding sex. The family was so poor they shared one big room, the parents on one side, Little Orchid and the retarded son on the other. When he made advances, she punched him and ran outside to sit in the yard. “If she doesn’t sleep with me, what do I want her for?” the son had whined, according to a neighbor. He finally agreed to a divorce so he could remarry, but when they went to the county office to fill out forms, Little Orchid was furious to discover she couldn’t obtain one on the spot. She tore up her marriage certificate, then excused herself to go to the toilet. They never saw her again.

After we left, Lena told Farmer Wang that we really wanted to meet some brides.

“Some men from Dragon Hamlet, my mother’s ancestral village, recently went on a wife-buying expedition to the south. They bought eight women, including a bride for my cousin. I’ll take you. It’s not far.”

He brushed off our profuse thanks. When we got back to his house, we discovered we had been snookered into providing a taxi service for Farmer Wang’s sixty-two-year-old mother. She was waiting, her bags already packed. “My father is ninety,” explained Guixian (Cassia). “I want to see him one more time before he dies.”

“Not far” in peasant parlance meant a four-hour drive — on the other side of Beijing. We had no choice but to take Farmer Wang and Cassia back with us to the city so we could start early the next morning. Lena and I agreed to split the costs of putting them in a budget hotel. We all piled into the
Globe’s
Jeep. After four minutes on the road, Cassia turned green and began to gasp and clutch at her mouth.

“She’s throwing up!” Lena shouted. Driver Liu screeched to the side of the road. Lena, who was sitting in the middle, reached over the retching woman to roll down her window.

“She dribbled on my arm!” Lena cried.

“My mother’s never ridden in a car before,” said Farmer Wang, as Cassia leaned out the window.

“Lena,” I said, “I really appreciate your sitting in the middle.” “Shut up,” she said.

We rode along in silence, as Cassia hung her head out the window. It started to rain. Then it poured. After a while, we began to discuss which hotel to put them in.

“Aiya!” said Farmer Wang in the front seat, slapping his forehead. “We didn’t bring our
shen fen zheng!”
My heart sank. It was too late to turn back to fetch their government-issued identification cards. But since the Tiananmen Massacre, tightened security measures made it impossible to check into a hotel without one. One of us would have to put them up for the night. I knew that since Lena had already been dribbled on, it was my turn to suffer.

“Don’t you have anywhere to stay in Beijing?” I beseeched Farmer Wang.

“We can stay with Third Elder Brother,” he said.

I brightened. “You have relatives in Beijing?”

“My daughter-in-law doesn’t like us,” said Cassia.

Suddenly, my concern about oppressed daughters-in-law evaporated. “How nice!” I said brightly. “A family visit! You can see your son
and
your father.”

“But we don’t have his address,” said Farmer Wang.

“We have a flat tire,” Driver Liu announced.

While he changed the tire in the pouring rain, with Lena holding an umbrella over him, I tried to jog Cassia’s memory about Third Elder Brother’s address. By the time the driver had finished, I had narrowed the target area to a neighborhood of only one million people in southwest Beijing. We drove randomly around in the rain until Cassia recognized a landmark — the local greasy chopstick joint – and assured us she could find Third Elder Brother’s home from there.

The next morning we picked up Farmer Wang and Cassia at dawn. We rode in silence, warily keeping an eye on her until she assured us she hadn’t eaten breakfast. After three hours, Farmer Wang, with the nanosecond timing of a person who has never driven a car, cried, “Turn here!” Driver Liu slammed on the brakes.
“Here” was a rock-strewn slope leading down to a rushing brook. Driver Liu ordered us out and carefully eased the Jeep down the slope, across the stream and up the other side. Ahead rocky, barren mountains loomed in the shadow of the Great Wall. For another hour we wheezed in low gear before reaching Dragon Hamlet, a village of just eleven stone huts.

“Nothings changed. It can’t change,” said Cassia, gloomily surveying the village where she grew up. The surrounding mountains were so steep that, for forty days each winter, the villagers never saw the sun. Most were so poor that they tasted meat just once a month. It was easy to see why no woman willingly married into Dragon Hamlet.

The wife of Farmer Wang’s cousin was home alone when we arrived. Although the marriage had taken place only seven months earlier and the red paper Double-Happiness symbols were still on the wall, Ma Linmei (Forest Plum Ma) couldn’t recall her wedding date. She hadn’t known any of the 150 guests, except for her father, a moonshiner. He had accompanied her to Dragon Hamlet. Although he was shocked by the poverty, he stuck with the deal, which had paid him 2,000 yuan, or $250. Before he left, he gave his twenty-year-old daughter a green windbreaker and 10 yuan, or $1.25.

Forest Plum played nervously with the zipper of her windbreaker and ducked her head so that her long bangs hid her sad eyes. She was understandably wary of us, since her husband’s relative had introduced us. At a signal from Lena, I lured Farmer Wang into the courtyard so she could talk alone with Plum Forest.

“I want to escape,” she told Lena, “but if I tried, they would beat me.” There was no need to lock her up. Dragon Hamlet was her prison. Forest Plum didn’t speak the local dialect, she was surrounded by her husband’s clan and, because she was illiterate, all her letters had to go through her husband.

She had only one weapon left. As Lena gently probed, Forest Plum said she refused to have sex with her husband. The female chattel of China, it seemed, were on strike. “He sleeps here. I sleep there,” she said, motioning to opposite ends of the
kang
. But she was afraid the family might lose patience with her and sell her to someone worse.

Farmer Wang and I were discussing the intricacies of making beancurd when his cousin arrived home. He was a slight man with a pinched, angular face and bushy hair prematurely streaked with gray, a sign of malnutrition. Because Farmer Wang had introduced me, he didn’t take offense at my questions. As he untied a sack of pig feed from his bike, I asked why he had gone more than a thousand miles to the south to Yunnan province to buy a wife.

“I tried for two years to find someone around here. People said I was too scrawny,” said Cousin Wang, who was twenty-five. Apparently, no one wanted a weakling in an agrarian society that depended on brawn. Yet he couldn’t understand why Forest Plum wasn’t thrilled. She was so unhappy and homesick that she had lost a lot of weight and was now barely healthy enough to bear a child, he complained. And although she had cost four times as much as the cassette deck in his bedroom, she was turning out to be a poor bargain. She refused to work in the fields and spent most of her time lying on the
kang
.

Just then, Lena and Forest Plum came out. I asked if I could take a photo of the couple. As I focused my camera, Cousin Wang tried to put his arm around his wife, but she shied away like a nervous colt. The picture I snapped showed him smirking, hands proudly tucked behind him, with Forest Plum, hollow-cheeked, staring straight ahead.

I felt depressed as I left Dragon Hamlet. I had the urge to do something useful, like rescuing Forest Plum, or paying off her husband and setting her free, instead of merely jotting down notes and taking photographs. It was hard for me, with my old Maoist baggage and my Chinese ethnic roots, to stay detached and objective in the face of so much human suffering. After I had been a foreign correspondent in China for a while, I learned to always take a stack of exercise books and a bag of pencils and a couple of soccer balls along whenever I visited a rural school. But what good would a bit of stationery do? There were so many wretched villages like Luo Family Mill, so many women trapped like Forest Plum. China’s problems seemed vast, daunting, insoluble.