The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up (18 page)

As for my past, I have forgiven everything and moved on. Like an ancient Chinese saying goes: “Experiencing the most difficult hardships makes one the toughest of all human beings.” As an old fart myself, I have nothing to regret or to be bitter about. I simply see my past sufferings as something that I have endured on behalf of my children and grandchildren. At the beginning of the Land Reform, my fellow villagers made up lies, saying that I had kept a secret ledger, jotting down every piece of injustice that others had done to me with the intent of settling scores with my enemies in the future. They even linked me with the bad things that happened within the Communist Party headquarters in Beijing. When senior Communist leaders, such as Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao, and the Gang of Four were purged, the local government called me “the filial descendant and loyal follower” of those disgraced Party leaders. When we talk about it today, it sounds like a ridiculous charge. But in those days they really meant it. For example, during the Cultural Revolution, there was a slogan which read “Down with Zhou Shude, the loyal descendant of Liu Shaoqi.” I didn't know who Liu Shaoqi was at that time, never mind that I was related to him. If I do get the chance to claim a royal relative, I want to be related to Deng Xiaoping because he helped reverse my verdict. I don't have to be his descendant. But if he wanted me to be his slave, I'm all for it. Anyhow, as time went by, I cared less and less about what other people said about me. That was fate and I accepted it.

LIAO:
From your story so far, I can tell you are quite contented with life. That probably explains your longevity.

ZHOU:
I'm turning eighty-nine this year. I've long become tired of life. What can I do? The more I want to die, the further away I am from death. The pine coffin that lies in the main hall was made for me over twenty years ago. As you know, in China, old people like to have their coffin made before they die. It's an auspicious thing to do. Several feng shui masters have visited this house and they were full of praises for this location. The annex room, located in the southeast corner, captures all the good feng shui. That was probably why my fortune could turn around after years of suffering. The upcoming good fortune should not fall on an old fart like me. It should follow my children and grandchildren. After he graduated from high school in the mid-1970s, my grandson, Mingyue, was denied the opportunity to join the army or to find a job in the city because of me. In 1979, after the government took away my label, Mingyue was allowed to enter college. The other grandchildren of mine are also doing pretty well. At the moment, my great-grandchildren are already in elementary schools.

LIAO:
I'm sure you will live to be a hundred.

ZHOU:
Why do I want to? I'm the only one left with this courtyard house. The rest have either died or moved out. I must have taken all the luck of longevity from the other members of this family. After I was kicked out of the main section of the house, none of the new occupants lived past fifty. Can you believe that? My brother, Zhou Shugui, died in the famine of 1960. So did my wife. My brother deserved to die. Oh well, since he is dead now, I guess I should show some respect.

LIAO:
You should live with your children or grandchildren so they can take care of you.

ZHOU:
At the invitation of Mingyue's father, I lived in the city for two months. My son is a respected high school teacher. He lived in a high-rise on the school campus. I was so bored that I soon became ill. I felt like a pigeon trapped in a cage. I couldn't walk around the building freely to get fresh air because each time I was down on the street, a bunch of high school students would follow me and poke fun at me. They treated me like some kind of antique or exotic animal.

One day, I was getting some sun by a basketball court. It was warm. So I unzipped my pants and began to catch fleas on my underwear. Suddenly, I heard some loud screaming. If this had been in the countryside, nobody would give a damn about such a trivial thing. But it was a big deal in the city. How dare Mr. Zhou's father unzip his pants in public? It totally embarrassed my son. There was another thing that drove my daughter-in-law nuts. She couldn't stand it when I smoked tobacco in the house. I was forced to smoke on the balcony. There are too many rules in the big cities. On the street, you have to pay to take a dump at a public toilet. In the rural areas here, you can take a pee or dump anywhere you want. It doesn't matter where you relieve yourself around here because all the crap will be gone the next day. The wild dogs will have eaten it all.

I have been pretty mad at Mingyue and several of my grandchildren. Those youngsters have been bugging their parents about demolishing this courtyard house. Well, you can't really call this a courtyard house. The other three sides have all collapsed. This side where I live is OK, but the beams have been corroded by white ants. In the evenings, I can sometimes hear squeaking on the roof. One of these days, the roof will collapse. However, the stone and rock foundation is still pretty solid. Look at that stone lion statue in front of the house. Over the past many years, the head of the lion has become shiny because I touch it all the time for good luck. This house has been around for over a hundred years. Those youngsters don't understand the fact that once we move, it means the end of my life.

LIAO:
I didn't realize that after years of getting bullied for being an “evil landowner,” you are still quite stubborn.

ZHOU:
That's right. The thing that I hate the most is to be manipulated by other people. When my grandchildren come to visit me, they are too afraid to live here for fear of fleas. I have cats. Those animals love to play in my bed and sleep by me. I'm old and my body is cold all the time. In the evenings, those cats offer lots of warmth. I always talk with them, telling them stuff that would be of interest to people in my generation. You never know, cats could be the reincarnation of people who have died.

LIAO
(laughing): You don't sound like a former landowner. You sound like an old monk who is now taking care of an old temple.

ZHOU:
Speaking of this old temple, I don't think I can take care of it for too long. According to Chinese tradition, if a person passes away at an advanced age, it's considered an auspicious thing. His friends and relatives would snatch the stuff used by the deceased and offer it to younger people as a gift so they could rub off the luck of long life. I'm not even dead yet, but my friends and relatives in this village use all kinds of excuses to come visit me and steal my stuff—bamboo shelves, cricket cages, straw raincoat, and straw hats. They have even grabbed my bowls and chopsticks.

LIAO:
You still have a long way to go. Your grandson Mingyue and I are hoping that you could someday move to the city. There are many senior people in the city. You can practice tai chi, go fishing, or raise dogs and cats.

ZHOU:
Where should I put my coffin if I move to the city?

LIAO:
You won't need a coffin. In the city, people are cremated after they die.

ZHOU:
Burn me into ashes? That won't work for me. Cremation will make my reincarnation impossible. To tell you the truth, I have already chosen the place for my burial, next to Mingyue's grandma. I have already had a hole dug for me. It's a good location and the feng shui master has seen it. It's located right on the tail end of the Phoenix Mountain. There is an old saying that goes: “Good fortune lies at the head of the dragon and the tail of the phoenix.” It will bring good luck for my descendants. I have lived a full life. I feel as if it was worth being labeled a landowner. I have suffered to redeem the sins of my children and have created future happiness for them. I heard that we will soon be allowed to sell and buy land again. Aiya, there will be more landowners and rich people than before. Things just move in cycles.

THE YI DISTRICT CHIEF'S WIFE

The Yi ethnic group, with a population of over seven million, is one of the fifty-five minorities in China today. Most Yi people live in the southwestern provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi, farming and raising livestock. Before 1949, the Yi people were stratified into four different castes, with
Nuohuo,
meaning Black Yi, as the ruling class. The other ranks were considered Black Yi's subordinates. According to a Chinese government report, the rank of
Nuohuo
was determined by blood lineage, and used to make up 7 percent of the total Yi population, but owned 60 to 70 percent of the arable land. In the early 1950s, the government sent work teams to the Yi region and launched the Land Reform movement to end what the Communists called “oppression and exploitation” by the
Nuohuo
class.

In December of 2005, I visited a Yi village in Yunnan. My guide introduced me to Zhang Meizhi, a
Nuohuo
and the wife of a former district chief. Zhang was eighty-four years old, but in good spirits. When I arrived at her house, she stood up from her chair, her back hunched but her wrinkled face beaming with a smile. I sat down with Zhang and her two children—daughter Yang Sixian, 59, and son Yang Siyi, 57.

LIAO YIWU:
I passed by a big traditional courtyard house that stood tall and imposing in the middle of the village. My guide told me the house belongs to your family. When was the last time you lived there?

ZHANG MEIZHI:
In the early 1950s. After the Land Reform movement started, the newly founded Poor Peasants Revolutionary Committee forced us to move into a cowshed.

LIAO:
Could you tell me what happened? The Land Reform movement affected the lives of millions of people. However, that part of history is gradually fading from people's memories. All the history books say that the Land Reform movement enabled the Communist Party to change China's unequal system of land ownership. However, there is no mention of the brutal fact that over two million people were executed at random.

ZHANG:
I don't know if my story will help young people learn history. But, on a personal level, I lost over ten family members in that chaotic period.

LIAO:
Let's start from the beginning. How many people were there in your family?

ZHANG:
I had quite a large family. On my husband's side, he had two brothers. The eldest one used to be a well-known political figure in the region. He left home at an early age and attended the Yunnan Provincial Military Academy. In 1935, at the age of twenty-five, the governor of Yunnan appointed him to be the chief of Deqin County. As you know, for someone who grew up in a remote and isolated region like Zehei, becoming a county chief was a big deal.

In the old days, Deqin was overrun with triads and gangsters. They colluded with local officials to bully the innocent. After he assumed office, the eldest brother took tough measures and cleaned up the area in no time. He gained quite a reputation for himself. The Nationalist government even awarded him a medal for his good work. He was a strong believer in the old government under Chiang Kai-shek, and there was no way he would have switched his loyalty to Chairman Mao's Communist government. Luckily, he had died before Mao's army came. Otherwise he would have been tortured and executed. The second brother served as a sheriff in the Sayingpan region. My husband followed in the footsteps of two of his brothers' and served as the Yongshan district chief. In my family, I had two siblings. My brother, Zhang Yinxin, became the chief of Zehei Township. I had a sister who was married to a local landlord.

In 1952, when I turned thirty-one, a work team from Deqin County arrived in our region to mobilize local peasants to join the Land Reform campaign. Peasants were encouraged to speak out against the landlords and former government officials and confiscate their property. A week later, the work team arrested my husband and my brother. They locked the two of them up in the Zehei Elementary School for a few days and then transferred them to a county jail.

LIAO:
What happened to you and the rest of the family?

ZHANG:
During the first couple of weeks, the work team left us alone. One day in September, however, several militiamen showed up at my house. They said I had to join my husband and brother at a speak bitterness meeting and to hear my fellow villagers tell stories of their sufferings under my family's oppression. They tied my hands behind my back and then escorted me to the playground. When I got there, I saw many villagers had already gathered there. They were shouting slogans. The militiamen ordered me to stand in front of the crowd, side by side with a dozen former landlords or rich peasants. The stage was about ten meters away, right behind us. I turned around and saw my husband and my brother. They were kneeling on the ground, their arms and legs tied up with thick ropes and their mouths gagged with rags. A narrow black bamboo slate stuck out from the back of their collars. In the old days, I had seen criminals who had those bamboo slates in place before being sent to the execution grounds. I immediately realized what was going to happen. And I started to cry.

Soon the meeting began. Two militiamen pushed our heads down. One Communist official in military uniform went on the stage and shouted slogans: “Death to our class enemy! Long live the victory of the Land Reform!” The whole crowd raised their right arms and followed in unison. Then, after the shouting died down, the official declared through the microphone: These two class enemies on the stage have been sentenced to death by the village committee. The execution will be carried out immediately. His words drew a wave of loud cheers. Then the loudspeaker started to blast revolutionary songs. The militiamen pushed my husband and my brother off the stage. My group was ordered to follow them to the execution ground by a river. A large crowd walked behind us. After we arrived, the militiamen put me about two or three meters away from my husband and made me watch. Then two guys shoved my husband and my brother down on their knees, pulled the bamboo slates out from inside their collars, pointed a rifle at their chests, and then
bang, bang,
fired two shots. The sound of the gunshots was so deafening. My brother was a big guy. After he was shot, his body tilted a little but didn't fall immediately. A second militiaman stepped up and fired two more shots at his chest. Blood spewed out and splashed all over. The guy was startled by the blood. He kicked my brother's body really hard, wiped the blood off his arms, and cursed loudly. Then I saw my brother slump to the ground, next to my husband. He and my husband lay on the ground, head to head. Blood oozed out of their chests. Under the bright sunshine, their faces looked calm, as if they were whispering to each other. Two militiamen grabbed my hair and made sure that I saw the whole process. I tried to close my eyes. But my torturer propped my eyes open with his fingers. Tears ran down my cheeks. I tried to tell myself to be brave. But I couldn't. I just screamed and then passed out.

Someone poured cold water on me. I woke up and saw two militiamen prodding open the mouths of my husband and my brother with knives. So I yelled: What are you trying to do? One guy kicked me and said: Shut up. We are going to cut their tongues out. I screamed with my hoarse voice, Take my tongue if you want. Please keep their body parts intact. One militiaman hit my head with the butt of a rifle and knocked me unconscious again.

LIAO:
Why did the militiamen want to cut out the victims' tongues? Was it some sort of execution ritual?

ZHANG:
No. I was told later that a leader in our village wanted the human tongue to treat his illness. The leader had been bitten on the thigh by a dog. The wounded area became infected and wouldn't heal. Local doctors prescribed all sorts of herbal remedies and none of them worked. Then a feng shui master recommended cutting human tongues into pieces, drying them in the sun, and grinding them into powder to spread on the infected areas. The feng shui master said the powder had been very effective.

LIAO:
Did it work?

ZHANG:
No, it didn't. He had probably caught rabies, but in those days, nobody knew what was going on. There was no Western doctor in the village. The tongues didn't heal his wounds. Instead, his health got worse. He soon died. The local government held a big memorial service and made that bastard a revolutionary martyr.

After the execution, they dumped the bodies of my husband and brother at my house. I washed the blood off them and sent one of my children to tell my parents in a nearby village. That evening, three of my relatives came, took our door off, stacked the bodies on top, and carried them to a location up on the mountain. Since it was dark, they couldn't see well. They simply dug two shallow holes and buried them in a hurry. A couple of days later, when I went up there to check the tombs, I saw their bodies had been dug up by wolves. All that was left was a pile of bones.

LIAO:
Can I take a look at the court verdict against your husband and your brother?

ZHANG:
My family never received any court papers. In those days, the work team acted like members of the triad. If they decided that someone deserved the death sentence, they simply called a public condemnation meeting and then had the person executed on the spot. Over thirty people were killed like that in this region. We never heard about things such as court rulings in the 1950s. People's lives were at the mercy of the local officials.

LIAO:
Those practices were very common in other parts of China too. It was a very tragic and brutal era.

ZHANG:
My family tragedy was far from over. During the next two years, I lost more family members—my niece's husband, who had served in the Nationalist government, was also executed. In despair, my niece lost her mind and choked her three children to death with ropes. She then gulped down two bottles of rat poison and killed herself. My husband's second brother, the sheriff, and his two sons were shot to death at similar public speak bitterness sessions. My mother was branded as the lazy wife of a rich landlord. The militiamen dragged her through the street during a parade. Her body couldn't take the torture. She died shortly after. My father was locked up inside a warehouse where he was beaten constantly. One day, when the militiamen were asleep, he hanged himself from the ceiling with his belt. I had a brother who was executed at the age of twenty, a week after he got married.

LIAO:
You probably know I also grew up in a landlord's family. My grandpa was also badly tortured during the Land Reform movement . . .

ZHANG
(sobbing): I know we were not alone. Why did the government murder so many people? What crimes had we committed to deserve this? After all these years, I'm still haunted. In the middle of the night, I constantly wake up from nightmares and shake with fear.

LIAO:
Could you tell me how you managed to survive those horrible years?

ZHANG:
Following the execution of my husband and brother, the militiamen came again to get me. They locked me up for over forty days. Whenever there was a public speak bitterness meeting, the militiamen would drag me out in front of the podium, with hands tied behind my back and my head down. I had to carry a big cardboard sign on my neck. The cardboard sign said “Wife of the Evil Landlord.” I would be asked to confess the crimes of my husband. I was an ordinary woman who had spent most of my time at home with the kids; how was I supposed to know what crimes my husband had committed? I simply read a prepared statement drafted by the work team. Also, they confiscated all of my property. They accused me of hiding money and dug holes all over the dirt floor of the house to look for it.

While I was away at the detention center, nobody was home taking care of my kids. My youngest daughter died of starvation. She was only two years old.

LIAO:
How many children did you have?

ZHANG:
I had seven children, four boys and three daughters. The first two were my stepchildren. By the way, I was nineteen years younger than my husband. His first wife had died. When the Communists came, my elder stepson, Yang Siyuan, had turned nineteen and was a student at a county college. After I was detained, the village committee accused him of harboring evil intentions of killing Communist soldiers. Good heavens! He was a bookish young man too timid to even touch a gun, never mind kill people. You know, in those days, there was no way for us to defend ourselves. He simply ran off and hid inside the mountain for two years. My second stepson, Yang Sipu, was barely sixteen. A neighbor reported to the authorities that Sipu had written anti–Land Reform slogans on the wall of a latrine. Since our neighbor belonged to the Poor Peasants Revolutionary Committee, the authority believed everything he had said about my son. My poor Sipu was sentenced to seven years in jail.