Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (66 page)

The second evening we entered a place called Asbestos County, named after its major product.  Somewhere in the mountains, our convoy stopped so we could use the toilets two mud huts containing round communal pits covered with maggots.  But if the sight inside the toilet was revolting, the one outside was horrifying.  The faces of the workers were ashen, the color of lead, and devoid of any animation.

Terrified, I asked a nice propaganda team man, Dong-an, who was taking us to our destination, who these zombie like people were.  Convicts from a lao-gai ('reform through labor') camp, he replied.  Because asbestos mining was highly noxious, it was mainly done by forced labor, with few safety or health precautions.  This was my first, and only, encounter with China's gulag.

On the fifth day, the truck unloaded us at a granary at the top of a mountain.  Propaganda publicity had led me to expect a ceremony with people beating drums and pinning red paper flowers on the new arrivals with great fanfare, but all that happened was that a commune official came to meet us at the grain station.  He made a speech of welcome in the stilted jargon of the newspapers.  A couple of dozen peasants were there to help us with our bed rolls and suitcases.  Their faces were blank and inscrutable, and their speech was unintelligible to me.

My sister and I walked to our new home with the two other girls and four boys who made up our group.  The four peasants who carried some of our luggage walked in complete silence, and did not seem to understand the questions we put to them.  We fell into silence, too.  For hours we trekked in single file, deeper and deeper into the great universe of dark-green mountains.  But I was far too exhausted to notice their beauty.  Once, after I had been struggling to support myself against a rock to catch my breath, I looked around, into the distance.  Our group seemed so insignificant amid the vast, boundless mountain world, with no roads, no houses, and no other human beings in sight, only the wind soughing through the forests, and the purling of hidden streams.  I felt I was disappearing into a hushed, alien wilderness.

At dusk, we arrived at the lightless village.  There was no electricity, and oil was too precious to be wasted if it was not completely dark.  People stood by their doors and stared at us with open-mouthed blankness; I did not know flit denoted interest or indifference.  It was stares like these which many foreigners encountered in China after it was first opened in the 1970S.  Indeed, we were like foreigners to the peasants and they to us.

The village had prepared a residence for us, made of timber and mud and comprising two big rooms one for the four boys, and one for the four girls.  A corridor led to the village hall, where a brick stove had been built for us to cook on.

I fell exhausted onto the hard plank of wood that was the bed I was to share with my sister.  Some children followed us, making excited noises.  They now started banging on our door, but when we opened it they would scamper away, only to reappear to rap on the door again. They peeped into our window, which was just a square hole in the wall, with no shutter, and screamed odd noises.  At first we smiled and invited them in, but our friendliness met no response.  I was desperate for a wash.  We nailed an old shirt onto the window frame as a curtain and began to dip our towels into the freezing water in our washbasins. I tried to ignore the children's giggles as they repeatedly flipped up the 'curtain."  We had to keep our padded jackets on while we washed.

One of the boys in our group acted as leader and liaison with the villagers.  We had a few days, he told us, to get all our daily necessities like water, kerosene, and firewood organized; after that we would have to start working in the fields.

Everything at Ningnan was done manually, the way it had been for at least 2,000 years.  There was no machinery and no draft animals, either.  The peasants were too short of food to be able to afford any for horses or donkeys.  For our arrival the villagers had filled a round earthenware water tank for us.  The next day I realized how precious every drop was.  To get water, we had to climb for thirty minutes up narrow paths to the well, carrying a pair of wooden barrels on a shoulder pole.  They weighed ninety pounds when they were full. My shoulders ached agonizingly even when they were empty.  I was vastly relieved when the boys gallantly declared that fetching water was their job.

They cooked, too, as three out of us four girls, me included, had never cooked in our lives, having come from the kind of families we did.  Now I began to learn to cook the hard way.  The grain came un husked and had to be put into a stone mortar and beaten with all one's might with a heavy pestle.  Then the mixture had to be poured into a big shallow bamboo basket, which was swung with a particular movement of the arms so that the light shells gathered on top and could be scooped away, leaving the rice behind.  After a couple of minutes my arms became unbearably sore and soon were shaking so much I could not pick up the basket.  It was an exhausting battle for every meal.

Then we had to collect fuel.  It was two hours' walk to the woods designated by the forest protection regulations as the area where we could collect firewood.  We were only allowed to chop small branches, so we climbed up the short pines and slashed ferociously with our knives.  The logs were bundled together and carried on our backs.  I was the youngest in our group, so I only had to carry a basket of feathery pine needles.  The journey home was another couple of hours, up and down mountain paths.  I was so exhausted when I got back that I felt my load must weigh 140 pounds at least.  I could not believe my eyes when I put my basket on the scales: it came to only five pounds.

This would burn up in no time: it was not enough even to boil a wok of water.

On one of the first trips to gather fuel, I tore the seat of my trousers getting down from a tree.  I was so embarrassed I hid in the woods and came out last so no one could walk behind me and see.  The boys, who were all perfect gentlemen, kept insisting I should go in front so they would not walk too fast for me.  I had to repeat many times that I was happy to go last, and that I was not just being polite.

Even going to the toilet was no easy job.  It involved climbing down a steep, slippery slope to a deep pit next To the goat fold.  One always had either  one's bottom or one's head toward the goats, who were keen to butt at intruders.

I was so nervous I could not move my bowels for days.

Once out of the goat fold it was a struggle to clamber up the slope again.  Every time I came back I had new bruises on me somewhere.

On our first day working with the peasants, I was assigned to carry goat droppings and manure from our toilet up to the tiny fields which had just been burned free of bushes and grass.  The ground was now covered by a layer of plant ash that, together with the goat and human excrement, was to fertilize the soil for the spring plowing, which was done manually.

I loaded the heavy basket on my back and desperately crawled up the slope on all fours.  The manure was fairly dry, but still some of it began to soak through onto my cotton jacket and through to my underwear and my back.

It also slopped over the top of the basket and seeped into my hair. When I finally arrived at the field I saw the peasant women skillfully unloading by bending their waists sideways and tilting the baskets in such a way that the contents poured out.  But I could not make mine pour.  In my desperation to get rid of the weight on my back I tried to take the basket off.  I slipped my right arm out of its strap, and suddenly the basket lurched with a tremendous pull to the left, taking my left shoulder with it.  I fell to the ground into the manure.  Some time later, a friend dislocated her knee like this.  I only strained my waist slightly.

Hardship was part of the 'thought reform."  In theory, it was to be relished, as it brought one closer to becoming a new person, more like the peasants.  Before the Cultural Revolution, I had subscribed wholeheartedly to this naive attitude, and had deliberately done hard work in order to make myself a better person.  Once in the spring of x 966 my form was helping with some roadwork.  The girls were asked to do light jobs like separating out stones which were then broken up by the boys.  I offered to do the boys' work and ended up with horribly swollen arms from crushing stones with a huge sledgehammer which I could hardly lift.  Now, scarcely three years later, my indoctrination was collapsing.  With the psychological support of blind belief gone, I found myself hating the hardship in the mountains of Ningnan.  It seemed utterly pointless.

I developed a serious skin rash as soon as I arrived.  For over three years this rash recurred the moment I was in the country, and no medicine seemed able to cure it.  I was tormented by itchiness day and night, and could not stop myself from scratching.  Within three weeks of starting my new life I had several sores running with pus, and my legs were swollen from infections.  I was also hit by diarrhea and vomiting.  I was hatefully weak and sick all the time when I needed physical strength most, and the commune clinic was thirty-odd miles away.

I soon came to the conclusion that I had little chance of visiting my father from Ningnan.  The nearest proper road was a day's hard walk away, and even when one got there, there was no public transport. Trucks were few and far between, and they were extremely unlikely to be going from where I was to Miyi.  Fortunately, the propaganda team man, Dong-an, came to our village to check that we were settled in all right, and when he saw I was ill he kindly suggested I should go back to Chengdu for treatment.  He was returning with the last of the trucks which had brought us to Ningnan.  Twenty-six days after I had arrived, I set off back to Chengdu.

As I was leaving I realized that I had hardly got to know the peasants in our village.  My only acquaintance was the village accountant who, being the most educated man around, came to see us often to claim some intellectual kinship.  His home was the only one I had been in, and what I remember most were the suspicious stares on his young wife's weather-beaten face.  She was cleaning the bloody intestines of a pig, and had a silent baby on her back.  When I said hello, she shot me an indifferent look and did not return my greeting.  I felt alien and awkward, and soon left.

In the few days I actually worked with the villagers, I had little spare energy and did not talk to them properly.

They seemed remote, uninterested, separated from me by the impenetrable Ningnan mountains.  I knew we were supposed to make the effort to visit them, as my friends and my sister, who were in better shape, were doing in the evenings, but I was exhausted, sick, and itchy all the time.

Besides, visiting them would have meant that I was resigned to making the best of my life there.  And I subconsciously refused to settle for a life as a peasant.  Without spelling it out to myself, I rejected the life Mao had assigned to me.

When the time came for me to leave, I suddenly missed the extraordinary beauty of Ningnan.  I had not appreciated the mountains properly when I was struggling with life there.  Spring had come early, in February, and golden winter jasmines shone beside the icicles hanging from the pines.  The brooks in the valleys formed one crystal-clear pool after another, dotted around which were fancifully shaped rocks.  The reflections in the water were of gorgeous clouds, canopies of stately trees, and the nameless blossoms that elegantly wriggled out of the cracks in the rocks.  We washed clothes in those heavenly pools, and spread them on the rocks to dry in the sunshine and the crisp air. Then we would lie down on the grass and listen to the vibration of the pine forests in the breeze.  I would marvel at the slopes of distant mountains opposite us, covered with wild peach trees, and imagine the masses of pink in a few weeks' time.

When I reached Chengdu, after four interminable days of being thrown about in the back of an empty truck, with constant stomach pains and diarrhea, I went straight to the clinic attached to the compound. Injections and tablets cured me in no time.  Like the canteen, the clinic was still open to my family.  The Sichuan Revolutionary Committee was split and second-rate: it had not managed to organize a functioning administration.  It had not even got around to issuing regulations concerning many aspects of everyday life.  As a result, the system was full of holes; many of the old ways continued, and people were largely left to their own devices.  The managements of the canteen and the clinic did not refuse to serve us, so we went on enjoying the facilities.

in addition to the Western injections and pills prescribed at the clinic, my grandmother said I needed Chinese medicines.  One day she came home with a chicken and some roots of membranous milk vetch and Chinese angelica, which were considered very bu (healing), and made a soup for me into which she sprinkled finely chopped spring onions. These ingredients were unavailable in the shops, and she had hobbled for miles to buy them in a country black market.

My grandmother was unwell herself.  Sometimes I saw her lying on her bed, which was extremely unusual for her; she had always been so energetic I had hardly ever seen her sit still for a minute.  Now her eyes were shut tight and she bit her lips hard, which made me feel she must be in great pain.  But when I asked her what the matter was, she would say it was nothing, and she continued collecting medicines and standing in line to get food for me.

I was soon much better.  As there was no authority to order me to return to Ningnan, I began to plan a trip to see my father.  But then a telegram came from Yibin saying that my aunt Jun-ying, who had been looking after my youngest brother, Xiao-fang, was seriously ill.  I thought I should go and take care of them.