The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up (21 page)

To the students, the blacksmiths were scarier than those legendary man-eating monsters in old Chinese horror stories. Not long after the peasant–Red Guard conflict started, the head of the Young Rebels, Red Plum Zhang, disappeared without a trace. Students suspected that those blacksmiths had murdered her. Several hundred Red Guards showed up at the factory demanding answers. Some were even armed with guns that they had obtained from the County Public Security Bureau. They surrounded the factory for half a day. The blacksmiths were really mad. They dashed out of the wrought-iron gate and swung their hammers at the Red Guards. Many were hurt. A couple of guys were hit on the head and blood spewed out. It was horrible. Out of desperation, the Red Guards, who outnumbered the blacksmiths, fired several shots to the sky to scare the blacksmiths. They eventually got into the factory and destroyed many machines. One Red Guard shot at a blacksmith and blew one of his ears off. In the end, the Red Guards never found Zhang, nor could they find any evidence against the blacksmiths.

LIAO:
What happened to the commune Party secretary?

HUANG:
Our Party secretary was a nice and honest man. That was the reason why the peasants and blacksmiths had defended and protected him. He came from a family with three generations of blacksmiths. Even after he was promoted to be the commune Party secretary, he would still sneak back into the farm equipment factory now and then, and pick up his old trade. Soon after we met him, he was labeled a “capitalist road taker” and was publicly humiliated and denounced. One day, the blacksmiths snatched him away from a public denunciation meeting. They hid him inside the factory for over two years. Eventually, when the Red Guards took over the factory, they captured him, moved him to our school campus, and locked him up in the same room as the former school principal. Every day, he and other deposed leaders were forced to run barefoot on the school playground in rain or snow. While they were running, their captors would order them to shout slogans or randomly ask them to stop, or run faster, without any warning. Many of them ended up falling head over heels, and had bruises all over their bodies. One day, the Party secretary couldn't take the torture anymore. He threw a blacksmith's temper tantrum and resisted orders from the Red Guards. The poor guy was beaten up so severely that he became incontinent. The Red Guards still wouldn't let up. Every morning, they would grab him and drag him all the way to a statue of Chairman Mao, forcing him to confess to Mao about his “crimes.” He refused to talk and, later, he bit off the tip of his tongue. He died a couple of months later.

There were many sad stories like these. Many years after his death, I still remember vividly how he was the night when I arrived in Shanya: his hair was parted on the side, and he looked like those warm and caring Communist characters in old Chinese movies.

In 1969, as chaos began to spread all over China, the central government issued another edict, calling on all Red Guard factions to unite and form revolutionary alliances. The famous quote from Mao at that time was “Learn from workers and peasants.” With that mantra, workers and peasants entered schools and began to help manage the students. Let me tell you, the wind suddenly changed. In Shanya, Red Guard leaders were denounced as gangsters. They were paraded around the commune and humiliated in public meetings. With their leaders gone, the students were easily put under control and their arrogance evaporated. The campus was once again in the hands of local peasants. The playground soon became the harvesting backyard. Several classrooms were turned into pens for pigs or chickens. When school started in the fall, no student registered. Not surprisingly, the peasants, who were given the authority to run our school, encouraged students to do more farmwork. If any faculty ignored their instructions, the peasants would knock on their doors and insist on talking with them until they agreed to obey orders.

LIAO:
You have told me a lot about the Cultural Revolution. How hard was it for you to live there?

HUANG:
It was tough. In the sixties and seventies, hunger was a daily struggle.

We were put on a ration system. Every adult was given 13.5 kilograms of food per month. It was certainly not enough. To improve the nutritional intake, many of us would get up at midnight to catch frogs in the rice paddies, and boil them. They tasted really fresh.

Many of my students lived on campus because their villages were pretty far away. They brought food from home. The staple food was normally rice with vegetable soup, without meat at all. As a result, many students suffered from malnutrition.

Luckily, there was a cook for teachers. He cooked awful food. Nobody dared to complain because asking for nicely prepared food was not a revolutionary thing to do. Once a week, we could have meat. On Sundays, before dinner, a crowd would gather outside the canteen. Bowls were laid out on the big table and everyone would wait for the cook to dish out the meat. When he did it, all eyes would be focused on the ladle. If someone lingered a little longer, hoping to get some extra morsels, others would immediately boo him away. After getting our share, we would instinctively turn the meat pieces around as if to make sure they were real. Then we would carefully bite a small piece at a time so it could last a little longer.

Because of the gnawing hunger, I developed such an obsession with food. I met my wife because of food. She was brought up in the local village there and used to work in the noodle shop. Each time I went to buy noodles, she would sneak some extra into my bowl. Her bribes really worked. Soon we started dating and then we got married. After the marriage, she began to complain about my food obsession and even my eating habits. She complained that I made too much noise when slurping on noodles. She would say, People can hear you a kilometer away.

LIAO:
You were a college graduate and she was an uneducated country girl. How did you end up with her?

HUANG:
In those days, college graduates or intellectuals were trampled down as stinky bourgeois. Many people tried to stay away from me for fear of getting into political trouble. I was in my thirties and no girl wanted me. By contrast, she was a well-known beauty in the village and was not short of suitors. We dated secretly for over a year before we made it public. When her dad found out about our relationship, he strongly objected to it. He said his daughter was like a rose planted in the cow's dung. But like the old saying goes: “People with the same stomach make good husbands and wives.”

LIAO:
Why did you leave Shanya?

HUANG:
The older I got, the more homesick I became. So in 1984, after twenty years of teaching in Shanya, I quit my job and came home. I was forty-five at that time. Because of my resignation, I lost my government pension. When I returned to Chengdu, I found myself without a city
hukou;
no government agency or schools could hire me. So I became an illegal resident for many years. I took on odd hard-labor jobs to make ends meet. I worked as a porter for at least five years. Then, I drove a flatbed tricycle.

The ones who really suffered were my wife and two kids. My kids couldn't enter any schools. My wife had to pick up some odd jobs. The most unbearable thing is that police constantly visited homes to check on people's
hukou.
We constantly had to be on the run. It's ironic that this is the city of my birth and I wound up being an illegal alien.

LIAO:
Have you read the novels by Li Rui, a writer in Shanxi Province? Peasants in Li's novels love and worship the land they grow up on. Despite the extreme poverty, they choose to stay and make changes there.

HUANG:
That was pure propaganda crap. In every regime or dynasty, there are writers who like to fabricate stories to ingratiate themselves with the rulers. Since peasants seldom read novels, whatever you write about them, they won't know.

China's remote mountainous regions are hopeless. No matter how much money you invest there, the returns become as intangible as moonlight in water. In many areas, where trees have been cut, the water has become polluted and undrinkable. Under Mao, you couldn't go anywhere without a residential permit. So people were tied to their land, poor and ignorant. Under Deng Xiaoping, the rules are becoming flexible. Those muddy-legged peasants are running faster than us. They go to faraway places in droves to search for better opportunities. Look at Chengdu—there are so many migrant workers. I have bumped into a couple of my former students from Shanya. Some of them are running businesses; others are working at odd jobs. No matter what they do and how well they do, they share one common aspiration: to get the hell out of the countryside.

Speaking of my former students, let me tell you a story. One day, when I was driving my flatbed tricycle near the Mozi Bridge area, I ran into the city police. They cornered me and confiscated my tricycle because I didn't have a permit. I squatted by the side of the road in complete despair. At that moment, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around, and saw a chunky young man who addressed me as “Teacher Huang.” I had long forgotten that I had been a teacher. I had no idea who he was.

The chunky guy pulled me into a nightclub nearby. When we started talking, I realized that he was the second son of the commune Party secretary in Shanya. I had been his head teacher for three years. He graduated from junior high in 1980 and was transferred to a different school. He gave me his business card. It said he was a nightclub manager.

The Party secretary's son became nostalgic about the past. He invited me for a couple of drinks and then called his contact at the police station, asking the police to return the confiscated tricycle. That guy certainly had lots of connections. He could drink, too. Not long after we started, he downed a bottle of red wine and was a little tipsy. He offered to get me a girl for what he called “entertainment.” That almost scared the hell out of me. He said to me: Teacher Huang, you are a city guy and my dad was a country bumpkin. Both of you ended up with a similar fate: he was killed by the Red Guards and you ended up on the street. Life is so unfair. As your former student, I have to show you how to enjoy life.

I shook my head hard and told him that in China, we teachers keep our dignity. You students should respect teachers. How could you pull your teacher into a muddy hole like this? He laughed. You were my teacher in school. Outside school, we are friends. Do you remember that you used to offer me all sorts of special treatment? After my dad died, you always let me use your office to do my homework and you shared food with me. It's time for me to pay you back today. I said, I understand your kindness, but moral values are important to me. Your father's spirit would agree that— He burst out laughing and interrupted me: Forget about my father. When a person dies, he is like a flame that has been put out. Before I even had the chance to argue, two young women came up to me, snuggled against me, and offered me a drink. I became so embarrassed that this old face of mine began to blush. When my former student saw my awkwardness, he got up and said: Take your time. I will go get you a prettier one. I want to change the outlook of your generation.

When I finally got rid of the two women and left the room, I saw a crowd gathering at the other end of the corridor, blocking the passageway. I managed to squeeze to the front and found that my former student was beating up a young woman. He grabbed her hair, punched her, and kicked her with his feet and knees. The woman curled up in a fetal position, her body shaking and her face bleeding. Several onlookers tried to stop my former student, but he had the genes of a blacksmith and nobody could subdue him. Sensing that he could kill her, I went up and tried to stop him. But I ended up getting punched in the face.

When he saw the blood coming out of my nose, my former student began to realize that he had hit the wrong person. Sobriety returned somewhat. He explained to me: When I asked this bitch to service you, she thought you are too old for her. No shit. She has slept with hundreds of men and she still thinks she has a fresh pussy. I couldn't bear to hear him talk like that and left right away.

Later on, I didn't even go ask for my tricycle, for fear that the Party secretary's son could find me. One day, I was reading the
Huaxi Metropolis Daily
and found a report in the social news section about how my former student had been charged with beating up a young woman and forcing her into prostitution. When he was interviewed in the detention center, he was quoted as saying: My former teacher took care of me when I was kid. Now it's time to pay him back. I don't regret staying at the detention center because I did it for him.

LIAO:
I have never seen such a loyal student as him.

HUANG:
If his father knew about this, he would be turning over in his grave.

LIAO:
Have you been back to that school?

HUANG:
No. I heard that the Shanya High School has been closed. The classroom buildings have been demolished and the playground is piled with dirt. The school is now turned into farmland. My guess is that the school lacked financial resources and couldn't get qualified teachers to work there. Times have changed. College graduates are no longer as idealistic as we were. They are all looking for high-paying jobs with international companies. Sometimes, I don't know who is right, Old Mao or Old Deng. Is it good to open China's door to the West or is it good to keep it shut?

THE MORTICIAN

There is a funeral home on Chengdu's Qunzhong Road. Next to the funeral home is a big teahouse, with a run-down façade. The business at the teahouse is fairly good. About 80 percent of its clients are senior citizens. It was inside the teahouse that I recently met the seventy-one-year-old Zhang Daoling, a senior mortician at the funeral home.

LIAO YIWU:
Master Zhang, how long have you been in this business?

ZHANG DAOLING:
Over forty years. I'm about to retire. I was one of founding members of this funeral home. I started out here in 1957, when I graduated from the local art school. It was the time of the anti-Rightist campaign. Many educated folks had been purged for speaking out against the Communist Party. So people were quite nervous. When my school assigned me this job, I took it right away. If I had refused, I would have easily been labeled a Rightist for disobeying Party orders. When I first started out here, we had about ten staff members. In those days, people seldom used funeral homes. All burial services and rituals were conducted in their own private homes or villages. Most of the dead people were sent to our funeral home by police who had picked them up on the street. They were either murder victims or people killed in traffic accidents. Starting in the mid-1950s, Chairman Mao and other senior Chinese leaders began to encourage citizens to change the traditional practice of burial to cremation because there was simply not enough space for cemeteries. Our funeral home added the cremation service. But the concept of cremation was something that people found hard to accept. As a result, we didn't have much to do at work. My supervisor assigned me the job of designing a bulletin board to publicize Chairman Mao's political teachings. As you know, the Party was launching one political campaign after another. Lots of propaganda materials came in. I had to read them and then publicize them via the bulletin board.

LIAO:
I assume the extra assignment kept you fairly busy.

ZHANG:
Yes. Following the anti-Rightist campaign in 1957, Chairman Mao launched the Great Leap Forward movement in 1958. In this neighborhood, some young people stormed into the funeral home, urging us to convert the cremation furnace into one that could produce iron and steel. Their reason was that we didn't use the furnace that much and that we needed to make contributions to Chairman Mao's great plan. The funeral home director tried to explain to them that the two types of furnaces were designed differently. The neighbors didn't believe a word he said. They claimed that if a furnace had the capability to cremate a human body, it could be easily converted into one that could melt scraps of metal. When the funeral director refused their demand, they turned him over to the police and had him arrested for obstructing Mao's Great Leap Forward. After our director was taken away, the neighbors moved chunks of ore and coal into the courtyard. Luckily, the county chief heard about it; he rushed over and stopped the mob from destroying the furnace. As a compromise, the county chief allowed the neighbors to build a new furnace in our courtyard. As you can imagine, the quiet and spooky funeral home was turned into a mini smoke-filled noisy factory. I was quite caught up in the movement. I rushed in and out of the funeral home like crazy, collecting every piece of metal I could find from bicycles to cooking utensils. I had almost forgotten that my real job was as a beautician at the funeral home. Oh well, in the next few months, we produced quite a few chunks of useless, low-quality iron. It was a total disaster. The only good thing that came out of that crazy campaign was that I met my current wife. She was in the Communist Youth League and was assigned to the funeral home to help out with our steel production.

LIAO:
When did the funeral business officially take off?

ZHANG:
It was in the famine of 1960. About twenty to thirty thousand people died of starvation in this county alone. The large number of deaths made it impossible to conduct burial services for each individual. People didn't even have the time and strength to prepare a coffin. All they did was to wrap up the dead in a straw mat and dump the bodies in here for cremation. In the second half of 1960, we were so overwhelmed here that I had to work overtime. The furnace operated quite differently then. We needed to carry the body and push it into the furnace. Sometimes, if the power button didn't work as planned, the flames would start before we had fully adjusted the body in the furnace. Often, we would end up having the leftover ashes blown all over our faces. We looked like we had just murdered the person. But nowadays everything is automatic. You press a button; the body is sent down to the furnace on a conveyor belt.

LIAO:
I thought you were a beautician. Why did you have to arrange the actual cremation?

ZHANG:
All the dead folks sent over to our funeral home were famine victims. Their relatives couldn't afford extra makeup services. Initially, we could still do a little something to make them look better. In the spring of 1961, food shortages got worse. As more bodies poured in, I didn't even have time to do any makeup. In that year, thousands of people roamed the mountain like locusts, desperately searching for things that were edible—tree bark, grass roots, wild vegetables, even bugs. Unfortunately, all the mountaintops had been deforested to feed the furnaces for iron and steel production. There wasn't much available for people to eat. While walking around to look for food, many people simply dropped dead. The public security guards would force the prisoners—former landlords, rich peasants, Rightists—to climb up the mountain and pick up dead bodies. Those poor prisoners were also hungry. They staged a strike. If they didn't get a steamed wheat bun, they refused to go. When the guards punched them with the butts of their guns, the prisoners still wouldn't budge. Then the county sheriff came up with an innovative body-collecting idea. He used a long rope, tying several dead bodies together and then had some young people drag them down from the mountain. It did save us a lot of energy.

LIAO:
Were you affected by the famine?

ZHANG:
Luckily, state employees were guaranteed a fixed monthly ration of food. Since the funeral home played an important role in preventing the spread of disease caused by dead bodies, the county government made sure that the furnace ran properly and employees were fed. At the beginning of 1962, signs of cannibalism appeared. The bodies brought back from the mountain were mostly dismembered. The flesh around the thighs, the shoulders, the backs, and the buttocks was all gone. Local government leaders ordered us to keep quiet and get rid of the bodies right away. The public security officials patrolled the mountains at night, ambushed a couple of cannibals, and sent them to jail. Do you know why they wanted to eat human flesh? Many people were suffering from constipation after swallowing a combination of wild grass and white clay to appease the gnawing hunger. Their stomachs became very bloated. Then some herbal doctors told them that human flesh was an effective laxative. They wanted the relief badly.

LIAO:
I remember the famine very clearly. I suffered from edema and almost died from it. Let's switch to another topic. What happened to you later? Did you ever switch professions?

ZHANG:
Nope. After the famine was over, the funeral business went back to the normal workload. In subsequent years, burial was banned in many places, and more and more people began to accept the practice of cremation. As a result, the funeral home was expanded to include a special hall for memorial services and a makeup room. Makeup procedures varied according to the social status of the dead. For government officials or the more educated folks, we were asked to do a more elaborate makeover for the wake. For ordinary folks in the rural areas, their families didn't even request a wake or a memorial service. All they did was to have a private viewing so relatives could say goodbye. In that case, makeup was very simple: I would wash the face of the deceased, comb the hair, stuff some cotton into the mouth, and apply lipstick and some powder on the cheeks.

LIAO:
That was it?

ZHANG:
Yes. Sometimes makeup jobs can be challenging. According to Chinese tradition, when a person passes away, the family sets up a wake at home, with his or her body on display for three days. On many occasions, when the body was brought in for a memorial service and cremation, the arms and legs had already become very stiff, the cheeks all sunken and the face blue. If the death had occurred in the summer, the deceased would start to smell. It took a lot of work to make the dead look presentable. The hardest job is to treat violent murder victims. It needs skill and patience to make a ghastly looking face into a normal smiling one.

LIAO:
This is a profession for the brave.

ZHANG:
Can't say I'm that brave. In many ways, I'm like a doctor who dissects the body. After a while, you just become too desensitized to feel anything. Many writers have written spooky ghost stories about the mortuary. I have worked here for many years, and have not encountered any ghost as described in those books. One time, some guys played a practical joke on me. In the middle of the night, they removed a body that I had worked on and put it against my door. Later on, when I got up and opened the door to use the outhouse, that sucker bumped right into my face, its mouth hitting mine. It scared the hell out of me. Luckily, I soon recognized the body and quickly got myself back together again. I held the dead body, slapped its face twice, and carried it back to the funeral home. After it was all done, I went back to sleep. I didn't really feel anything afterward except my mouth tasted of formaldehyde for several days.

LIAO:
When you told the story, my hair almost stood on end. But you talked as if this were something funny.

ZHANG:
I was used to it. During the Cultural Revolution when factions of the Red Guards began to engage in gunfights, they made quite a mess in the area. Every couple of days, dead bodies wrapped in red flags would be wheeled in. The Red Guards would force me at gunpoint to clean and embalm the bodies of their comrades. When I dipped some of the bodies into the sink to wash them, the water would immediately turn red. After the wash, I would carefully cover the holes and cuts on the bodies with adhesive plasters. Then, I would change them into the Red Guard uniforms—green army jacket and red armbands. One time, a Red Guard leader was stabbed in the heart by his opponent. When his comrades brought his body into the mortuary a couple days later, his teeth were still clenched, and his eyeballs almost bulged through the sockets. In the end, I had to use a pair of pliers to pull down his eyelids to cover them.

LIAO:
Didn't realize you had to use those mechanical tools.

ZHANG:
We had to. It was quite a challenge to open his mouth. After I pried it open with a knife, a bunch of maggots crawled out. It turned out that his tongue had rotted. I was so grossed out. I covered my mouth and dashed out for some fresh air. A few minutes later, I pulled myself together and returned. I brushed his teeth, and pumped bottles and bottles of formaldehyde into his stomach. It was like washing a toilet bowl. After I worked on it for a whole afternoon, that angry, distorted face was finally turned into a friendly one, with the smile that everyone remembered. The Red Guards were really touched by my work and my perfectionist attitude. They put a Red Guard armband on my arm and shouted slogans based on Chairman Mao's quotes, “Learn from the workers” and “Serving the people.” They even made me an honorary member of their group.

LIAO:
I'm very touched too. I assume that the majority of people coming to pay tribute to the deceased are overcome with grief. After the funeral is over, very few can remember you, a magician who could turn a rotten piece of flesh into a miraculously human-looking body. We seldom read about people like you.

ZHANG:
Even if journalists write wonderful things about us, people still don't want to be in this profession. Last year, I bought a new house and moved into a new neighborhood. I was completely cut off from my old friends and from things I was familiar with. The only advantage is that none of my new neighbors knows what I do. Once my son's girlfriend found out about my profession; she vowed never to visit my house again. I heard that she was so scared that she wouldn't stop washing her hands after shaking hands with me. Luckily, my son was really close to me and the incident with his girlfriend didn't affect our relationship. After all, what's to be afraid of? Sooner or later, everyone is going to die. But when people are alive, I guess they don't want to be reminded of death. I understand that perfectly. When I work on those dead bodies, I don't even associate them with death. I block it out of my mind completely. It is just a job.

LIAO:
Does it mean that you have transcended human emotions?