This is part two of my translation of Kong Lingping’s rightist memoir Blood Chronicle. Here Kong Lingping, a student in mechanical engineering at Chongqing University when the Anti-Rightist Campaign began, is persecuted because of his family background — his parents were educated people who stayed out of politics but worked for the Republic of China goverment before 1949 as a teacher and as a physician.
Read the first installment of my translation at Kong Lingping’s Rightist Memoir “Blood Chronicle” By Long-time Prisoner of Mao Zedong Part I . So far I have translated over 700 pages of Kong Lingping’s memoir — it comes to 920 pages in Chinese — that takes him from Chonging University through two decades of labor camps to life as a politically rehabilitated factory worker back home in Chongqing. Kong Lingping’s memoir was banned in the PRC but was published in Hong Kong and in Taiwan. When I worked at the US Consulate General in Chongqing I visited him once in Chongqing and talked with him many times on the telephone.
Several translation excerpts from Kong Lingping’s book I have already put on my blog — you can find them in the category Rightist Memoir “Blood Chronicle” in reverse chronological order. I will revise them as I gradually put the entire book in chronological order on my translation blog.
The Chinese language text of Blood Chronicle is available on many websites outside of Mainland China.
Previous installment: Kong Lingping’s Rightist Memoir I: “Blood Chronicle” By Long-time Prisoner of Mao Zedong
Section Four My Days of Being Struggled Against and the Perversion of the Human Spirit
I worked at Jingkou with the army of laborers and didn’t get back to school until just a few days before the end of the year. What disturbed me the most was how my classmates, even though we had been apart for over two months, never asked me about my illness. They saw in me some indescribable strangeness. Our laughs and friendly conversations were all over. I was especially worried that I never saw Ma Kaixian. I asked Liu Yuhua about her when nobody else was around. She answered mysteriously, “You don’t know? You’ll find out eventually.” I felt it hard to express the weight on my soul when students from my own dormitory treated me so coldly.
On the fifth day of Lunar New Year 1958, Chen Si and Guo Yinghua called me to a classroom. They handed me the “self criticism” that I had written the previous year. Chen Si in a serious, reproving tone told me “Do you call that an honest confession? We gave you two whole months to write it but you have wasted your chance. In your file you defend yourself but you are also hiding something. How could there not be any rightist words or actions in what you wrote?” Guo Yinghua added angrily, “You have such a stubborn attitude that beginning tomorrow you will make a confession to the entire class.” I suddenly felt a pounding in my chest. How could students I had been in class with since middle school suddenly turn on me like this? They had become savages. I remembered how the previous year, during the purge of the Hu Feng counter-revolutionary clique, an upper class student was put in isolation for reflection. A few days later public security came to detain him and take him away to prison. Thinking about that student I got very frightened.
On the first day of the criticism meetings they called on me. All the classmates had obviously held a preparatory meeting behind my back. I noticed that Ma Kaixian wasn’t there. Liu Dakui, a committee member of the Communist Youth League, took the lead in making accusations against me. We had been in the same classroom in our sixth year of secondary school.
We had once together stolen tomatoes planted in our school’s banana grove. Another time we stole a small boat belonging to the school to cross the river and rowed across for a nighttime outing. During winter vacation we fought like wild dogs. In our dormitory we had secretly cooked some “improved meals”. We had even teased a girl in our class who was five years older than we were. We made phony accusations that she was having an affair with our teacher and even broadcast it as news to our entire school on the loudspeaker system.
– 35 –
All the naughty things that children do we did together. Later, after my father was arrested, I got old fast. That was the end of my escapades. After we graduated from secondary school, we tested into the same department at Chongqing University and lived in the same dormitory. We had always felt close. The difference between us was that he became active in the Communist Youth Organization while I, because of my family background, was long excluded from the Communist Youth League.
Nonetheless, I wasn’t afraid when the struggle meeting began. What I could never have guessed was that a close friend would turn against me. He insisted that when my father was arrested, I cried out “The Communist Party arrests people for no reason!” He also revealed that in private I often praised the Big Rightist Pu Shiguang 蒲世光 . [Translator’s note: One of the few rightists who was not rehabilitated in the early 80s.]
I tried to deny it and started to argue. Chen Si said I was denying the facts while under investigation. This shows, he continued, that my case is particularly serious and that the Organization is already aware of more serious issues. He warned me again that I must be honest and to not even think about trying to lie my way out of trouble. I was shocked that my close friend Liu Dakui could be so cruel. This was the first time I had ever been the subject of a criticism meeting. During struggle sessions, I was shocked to see sons climb to the platform to denounce their fathers in order to make a firm distinction between themselves and their fathers.
How could it be that a person’s character could be twisted so quickly and so terribly under political pressure?
The next day, the criticism meeting ordered that I stand in the middle of the group. The atmosphere was much more serious than it had been the previous day. But I saw that half my classmates looked at me with sympathetic eyes and said nothing. They only raised their hands and yelled out slogans for show.
Probing for a significant little detail to discover its critical bearing on great overriding principles was a regular tactic of the Communist Party. The political struggle campaigns I had seen had already given me some sense of that. A man like me, who normally would carefully avoid politics, and never even thought about whether the Communist Party was good or bad, and had never expressed any opinions, could never have imagined that I would be swept into this political campaign just because of a few letters that I had written home to my mother.
Faced with that, I felt I had to stand up for myself. As soon as I started to say that those letters don’t mean that I have any ideological problem, Liu Dakui and Chen Bosi began to denounce me. They insisted that these letters between mother and child were just a cover for an effort to help a counter-revolutionary get off. They said that my words and actions were openly opposed to the people’s democracy. I felt disgusted that they would say such a thing. I hardened my heart, determined not to give in at the criticism meeting. I held to my position that during the time of the free airing of views I had not said anything against the Communist Party. I said that Liu Dakui’s accusations were total fabrications.
My determination not to admit guilt inflamed the anger of my classmates gathered all around me. The atmosphere became hostile. Chen Si said she had never seen any person being struggled against at any of the school’s struggle meetings who had had such a bad attitude. Slogans filled the air of the meeting room.
After three days of struggle meetings, the Machine Department’s anti-rightist leading group named me as the rightist with the worst attitude in the entire department and decided to use special struggle tactics against me.
(1) Cao Ying Leads the Struggle Session Against the “Rightists”
On the fourth day, Cao Ying, the head of our year’s Anti-Rightist Leading Group, led a struggle session against me. Ever since the anti-rightist campaigns had begun, her anti-rightist leading group was set apart by how, out of all the dozens of anti-rightist meetings held by our department, she got aroused by the pain and dejection of the people who were the objects of her attention at struggle meetings.
To satisfy her perverse craving she would use vulgar tactics. She humiliated twenty classmates in the Machinery Department by forcing us to bow our heads and obediently accept the label of Rightist.
One woman in section four of our class was nearly driven to suicide by jumping into the Jialing River. Only twenty years later did I learn that that woman had been singled out because she had rejected Cao Ying’s amorous advances. She loved to boast that no rightist ever failed to bow their heads before her and so was in the good graces of the school’s party committee.
That day, Cao Ying had the struggle meeting place specially decorated. Slogans were pasted on the walls and all the desks were moved to the back of the classroom. The three members of the anti-rightist leading group sat on chairs on the platform at the front of the room, with Cao Ying sitting in the middle. Tension enveloped the room. Malice gleamed out of Cao Ying’s “triangle eyes”.
The struggle session began. She ordered — “Grab hold of the rightist Kong Lingping!”
My heart beat loudly as I was pushed to the center of the room. The meeting room rang with slogans. My mind felt empty. My ears couldn’t make out just what was being said. The struggle session went on all day. I had to stand up all day. My legs felt stiff, my eyes became heavy. The pressure was hard to take.
Cao Ying declared the meeting over. I was not allowed to return to my dormitory. I was compelled to continue my reflections in a room to which she assigned me and to write out my self-criticism. That evening, three party members took turns supervising me, making sure that I spent the night writing my self-criticisms.
Right in front of me Cao Ying tore up the self-criticism that I had given her that morning. She growled “What kind of self-criticism is this? Do it over!” She cursed me “You little pup born of a counter-revolutionary family. You were counter-revolutionary from birth. Nonetheless you need to get smarter. You revealed your views in your letter to your mother. She has already made her confession, how can you fail to do so as well? The more you try to defend yourself, the tighter the noose around your neck is getting.”
The next day I turned in a nearly blank sheet of paper. I really had no idea what I should write. Cao Ying made a stern face and with a cold laugh said, “You really think that during the great Speaking Out Boldly movement that you could get away with not saying anything and so hide your right-wing character? Now, according to the principle of everyone revealing themselves, we can see that you are a classic right-winger. Now tell me honestly, you counter-revolutionary so determined to be a loyal son to your Nationalist Party father. As Mao Zedong said, after the proletarian revolution has won victory, you counter-revolutionary families and people with a position in society won’t be eager to step off the stage of history. All you can do is hatch endless plots to restore your lost heaven. Ever since birth you have been destined to have class hatred for the Communist Party and the people in your very bones!. The more you held back and didn’t say anything during the Speak Out Boldly campaign, the more you showed just how deep your class hatred really was!”
By this logic, I realized, carrying out a dictatorship towards me was perfectly justified. Since my guilt was stamped upon me at my very birth, I would never be able to escape my fate.
Now I wondered, how many struggle and criticism meetings will be held and what will I have to confess to my classmates?
The next day, Cao Ying said suddenly, “Today you will confess to the entire class your connections to Ma Kaixian.” This reminded me of how I hadn’t seen Mai Kaixian for a long while. She did not take part in the struggle meeting. Some said that she was being interrogated in another classroom and that Cao Ying planned to struggle us separately.
– p. 36 –
“Look, this is Ma Kaixian’s confession.” Cao Ying said cunningly, holding a folded piece of paper in her hands. “You must honestly confess to the affair that you and Mai Kaixian had during the Speak Out Boldly Movement. For just that small offense, you can be punished and kicked out of school. She has already confessed to that sordid affair, now all we have left to discover is what your attitude will be.
Love affairs between men and women were a taboo left over from China’s old society. Although times had changed and contact between men and women was not strictly forbidden as in the old days, still everyone looked at “relations between men and women” as a serious moral failing. Among university students, anyone suspected of being involved in a love affair would be criticized by society, and not only by their parents but they would also get the cold shoulder and even be attacked by their classmates.
We would hear every so often about young women suspected of having affairs who would drown themselves in the lake by the university in order to avoid being criticized. Although Kaixian and I had felt physical temptation, we had never dared to taste the forbidden fruit.
Now what was the matter with my Kaixian? She could be feeling so bad that she doesn’t want to live anymore. Could it be that things had gotten so bad that, not being able to seek death, she abased herself by wallowing in shit?
Why did this rumor of a sex scandal get mixed up on this kind of serious political criticism session? I had no time to think it over carefully, so I just screamed at Cao Ying. “Show me the proof!”. I stared at the folded paper in her hands. She laughed and put the folded paper away.
“Let her come here to confront me!” I yelled at her, but to no avail.
The trick worked. The people got more excited and built towards a climax. Those few classmates who had kept silent and looked sympathetic now showed in their faces astonishment and contempt.
Some people in the hall had started yelling, “You hypocrite!” “You are scum!”, “You are a big faker!” That evening I was locked once again in my little room, facing that table. One the table was a pile of paper. Cao Yingzhen sat opposite me.
“It’s no use pretending you are going crazy, that will only get you into more trouble.” She spoke sarcastically as a winner does to a loser. “When confronted by the mighty masses of the workers and peasants, what capitalist rightist can but surrender to the people? Don’t say that you are just a student. People famous all over China like Zhang Bojun and Luo Longji had to write self-criticisms. What are you compared with them? You must make the decision to thoroughly confess your crimes, make a full explanation. This evening you must write out a deep self-criticism….
I don’t know how I ever managed to write that last “self-criticism”. I still don’t remember what I wrote. It was mostly written as answers to Cao Yingzhen’s questions.
“Just grab shit and plaster it all over your face.” That was the only way. When I had finished, I felt emptied out, so badly that I wanted to spit. I lay, I don’t know for how long, on that table, sound asleep, until a thunderous slogan suddenly woke me up.
Cao Ying had already gone. The room was quiet. Only me. I looked out the window. The yellow light of the lamps shown upon this disheveled figure. My heart felt as if it was being torn apart. I felt the swelling in my head, my ears still echoing those yelled accusations: “The son of a counter revolutionary must also be a counter-revolutionary.”
– 37 –
I thought to myself could I already have gone crazy? I thought of those crazy people who search for something to eat in rotting piles of food and then jam it into their mouths when they find something. Shocked, I quickly ran my hands over my head and face. Once I realized that I could still feel those most important parts of my body, I sighed in relief.
From then onwards, I wanted to sing a song or yell out something in a loud voice that I myself thought was strange. Evenings I wanted to “go out for a walk” and went around on the back roads of the campus, feeling the stimulating touch of the cool river breeze that helped me forget this pain and sadness that I could not bear. I heard clearly steps following me from behind. I sang songs although I didn’t know what I was singing. I thought I was going insane. I need to somehow ward off these terrible aftereffects of my struggle sessions.
Thinking back on it, I don’t know how many people treated like I was were driven crazy or to suicide. I had my own taste of those tragedies. When I was just about to have my own psychic break, I was suddenly inspired by what had become common in those days — teacher and students writing letters in blood to the Party baring their souls. I too thought I would write my own “letter written in blood” to Song Dianbin of the Party Committee.
At the struggle sessions, one voice after another denounced me as a last survivor of the Nationalist Party who therefore had a deep hatred of the Communist Party. That being the case, in order to loosen the rope around my neck, to prove my “innocence” I asked the Chinese Communist Party to send me to the front lines of the “fight against the enemy” so that I could be tested by the Party. I thought that once the Chinese Communist Party had received this “letter written in blood” then the accusation that I was a loyal son of the Chinese Nationalist Party would no longer weigh on me. I didn’t realize that that letter itself would become a hangman’s noose that would haunt me ever after. But that is a story for later.
I don’t remember much beyond Chen Si, Liu Dakui and Guo Yinghua guarded me closely like a criminal. Even when I went to the toilet they would guard closely and stand on guard at the door. However, they stopped trying to prevent me from yelling out or singing in a loud voice. Perhaps they were really afraid of putting more pressure on me that would turn me into a hopeless madman or make me try to kill myself. “He died ” would be hard to explain. Perhaps they even had some glimmerings of conscience from their childhood that made them sympathize with me! As an “extreme example of a right winger” I was given the most serious punishment of “maintain in student status, to be tested through labor” status. That was the school’s most serious variety of extreme right-winger. With the exception of Pu Shiguang 蒲世光 who was arrested for “contradictions between ourselves and the enemy” and Lin Yusen 林毓森 who was sent away for rectification through labor, I was the most serious case of a “right-wing element”.
The university had in all 76 extreme right-wingers including four teachers who were in their fifties. Their punishments had already been set. All seventy-six were sent to the general affairs department of the university for their cases to be handled together.
Spring Festival was approaching. I can’t recall how I spent that year’s Spring Festival. I only remember Chen Si, Liu Daqui, and Guo Yinghua following me closely as if I were a prisoner. They even had to wait outside the toilet door to go to the bathroom. But they didn’t stop me from crying, laughing and singing anymore. Perhaps they were afraid that they would really drive me incurably insane or attempt suicide.
I finally moved out of the second student dormitory, which had been surrounded and watched from all sides, and into the building next to the old school building where I used to study with Pu Shiguang and formally began my life of labor reform under surveillance.
(2) The Herd of Oxen on Campus
Beneath the cliff at the old university library, part of the old overgrown playing field had been transformed into the fields of the Chongqing University farm. There we 76 hardcore right wingers arrived at the re-education through labor base that was to transform us. In the spring chill of February 1958 our band of 76 dug, carried loads to fill in uneven spots around the playing field to turn it into a 10 acre “paddy field”. After the “paddy field” was irrigated, we pulled a plough to make the field even.
– 38 –
We five or six university students would get in line and then step through the bone-chilling ice water, forcing our way forward through the uneven field. Mud splattered us so much that we became mud people. If we fell into the paddy, things were even worse. We shivered in the cold of early spring. That “magnificent sight” often drew the attention of our old schoolmates who were passing by.
They stood in groups of four or five and looked down on us from above, pointing to that “herd of oxen” pulling the plough through the field. Sometimes we could hear their whispered laughter.
In the old days when students demonstrated against Japan, they would advance wave after wave in the face of jets of high pressure water. Students used to have a fine tradition of helping each other. Didn’t they still read about that in the middle school Chinese literature textbooks? How could students now treat their classmates so cruelly? Had Mao Zedong with his endless series of persecution campaigns, completely erased the compassion that people felt for one another?
With me, now outwardly looking like a beggar, hatred flamed. Anyone who is terribly mistreated, tortured and insulted yet doesn’t feel hatred is either a fool or a madman!
Evenings, my feet would get very itchy from the irritation and hookworms from the shit that flows from the university building’s septic pool into the paddy field. Along with the sharp stones and debris that had cut me, it made my feet both painful and itchy.
My physical pain somehow took away my mental anguish so I just focused on the pain. Every time I looked out the window at the evening sky and was about to break down and cry, I would instead furiously scratch the painful and itchy soles of my feet.
Once, when Teacher Zheng of the foreign languages research section was brought in to pull a rake, he fell into the paddy. Two other people and myself just kept on pulling our rakes. We didn’t stop to help him get up or try to console him. We saw him struggle up from the paddy, shivering badly. When he got sick, I didn’t give him a cup of water. Later, I felt ashamed about this. When faced with his troubles, didn’t this show that my treatment by those loving classmates had damaged my own character? In those days didn’t I just think about the misfortunes of individuals? In those days wasn’t I preoccupied with all sorts of ideas about how to defend myself against the “crimes” that the Commmunist Party had falsely accused me of?
I never forgot, however, just as we were struggling to prove ourselves in that “class on public display” of “supervised labor” in the paddy field before the entire student body, they were all swept up in the “Both Red and Expert” debates under the leadership of the university’s party committee.
A banner hung on steel wires between the branches of a pine tree by the auditorium at the Songlin hill. The banner held frank statements from the heart “to the Party”. What was remarkable about these masterful products of intense effort was that on many of them one can faintly discern drops of blood.
These kinds of statements that were then becoming common numbed people. As a rule, they followed the pattern of starting out with the salutation “Beloved mother”, then proceeded to criticize themselves severely for being so confused as be the sort of person who “aims for a bureaucratic career after feeling they have demonstrated scholarly abilities” and tries to “bring honor to their ancestors”.
Are the authors of these letters sincere or are they just intimidated? If they are sincere, then I think the premise is false. As for me, ever since I started school as a child, I never had the idea of “once I have finished my studies I can become an official”. I never thought that oppressing other people could bring honor to my ancestors.
– 39 –
From secondary school to university, I had grown up under the Chinese communist education system. I feel that if it hadn’t been for the step-by-step ratcheting up of pressure by constant political movements, if it hadn’t been for the discrimination and oppression from society, how could my fear have changed into hate?
Certainly not until those days did I hate the Communist Party. Even less had I any thought of making a violent attack upon it. I was then only a pitiful, insignificant victim. I was only a tool, a victim to create fear in the people around me so that they would not oppose the Communist Party!
As for the question of how those “letters baring one’s heart” got started, when I saw how my classmates had endured being walked all over by their tormentors, the thought came to my mind that perhaps I too would write such a fine “document”.
There was nothing else to do. Well, let’s read another one:
The title is “Exposing the backward element XX, Discussing XX”
“Observing you these days, I can see that you have much on your mind. You are depressed every day, you aren’t speaking up during study sessions and haven’t taken a position in the fight against the rightists. You seem to be keeping yourself apart from the movement. You think that you understand things better than anyone but you have been making many errors in what you have been saying during this big speak out campaign. You say that we aren’t free. We aren’t sure what kind of freedom you are talking about. Freedom has class characteristics.”
If there is freedom for the capitalist class, then there is no freedom for the proletariat. Today we of the working class have a freedom in which we are the masters. We cannot tolerate your capitalist freedom. These days we can only judge freedom by the standards of the proletariat. Of course you will say that there is no freedom. We can see by this that you are taking the position of a rightist capitalist who is attacking the society of today. You also said “Now we judge right and wrong entirely by what the Party says and not according to the standards that everyone believes in. ” Wrong again.
Could it really be true that what you call “standards of behavior that everybody agrees with” and the standards of the Party are completely opposed? If that were true, then wouldn’t your “everyone’s standards” be the standards of the capitalist rightists? You also said, “The Speak Out Boldly campaign has made me confused, but I certainly don’t have any intention to oppose the Communist Party. I only want to respect the facts.”
Even if we were to accept that you have no bad intention, your “respecting facts” must recognize first of all the fact that the leadership of the Communist Party is the most correct of all; the dictatorship of the proletariat is the most powerful fact of all. Any fact that contradicts it if it is not an error, then it is reactionary. You have been passive these days and have committed many errors. You don’t understand the fundamental cause of your errors. You have taken the position of the capitalist class for a long time so deep in our soul that still stubbornly persists. You hold up the reactionary flag of being expert but not red. However, you have already seen the sad fate of capitalist rightists who attack the Party! You can learn from the lesson of the fate of others. Although a sheep has been lost it is still not too late to close the paddock. “
What devastating logic! It is as if in the entire world only the Communist Party is completely correct. There is no place for any other point of view. Naturally, along with that comes the absolute power and the personality cult of the leader. One person deciding everything is the root from which despotism grew.
This “campaign” was like grabbing people at random on the street, framing them for a crime, and then hauling them off to be executed, demanding at the time of execution that they confess to having committed a great unpardonable sin.
Until someday it will be proven that a one man dictatorship, one party rule became the path for a minority to seek “power” for themselves. The “benefit” it gave the country was not prosperity and well-being but disaster and a dead end. Then the people will rise up to overthrow it. But at what a bitter cost to the Chinese nation?
– 40 –
To me, a person who has suffered decades of abuse but somehow managed to live on down to today, recalling what it was like to live in the great family of students on campus in the 1950s. I realize today that many of my classmates were cowardly, weak people who followed leaders blindly. Once they were rational, thinking beings. Then terror at themselves becoming the victims of violence at the hands of the dictatorship twisted their minds. The one party dictatorship that stops at nothing tramples upon their human dignity.
Its leaders were typical representatives of party dictatorship. Instilled with a faith that the Communist Party was more important than anything else, the school became a wellspring of furious cult of blind hero worship. The Chinese nation confronted the prospect of mutual slaughter and annihilation.
Moreover, the cruel reality of China in those days repeatedly assaulted the campus. The supply of necessities in the markets fell steadily. This became even worse after agricultural collectivization was imposed to strengthen control over the peasantry. After that, the entire nation felt the bitter fruits of that policy as the so-called ‘natural disasters’ actually a famine brought hunger to every Chinese.
At every mealtime, as the students lined up to get food at the kitchen window to get the three steamed buns and a scoop of cabbage, they must have remembered how different things had been ten years earlier. Then, their elder brothers and sisters, secretly organized by the Communist Party, would, after they had eaten and drunk their full, go into the streets and march in small groups behind flags calling out the slogan “We oppose the civil war, we oppose hunger”.
Yin Shihong, who only said that the porridge had “waves pounding upon waves” in it, was grabbed for a struggle session and finally sent to a reform through labor camp.
Today, as I think back to the “sincere statements from the heart” that were posted in those days, the fruit of a sudden impulse, should we feel conflicted and embarrassed? Why, the Communist Party itself also says one thing and does another, so why did we need to be so ‘conscientious’ on the Party’s behalf?
How could it be that when they were suffering from hunger, why didn’t anyone dare even hint at a “no”! When people finally woke up and rose up to oppose this, the country was already at the brink of disaster and hopelessness. The Chinese people paid a great and bitter price for this.
(3) Hungry College Students
On May 1, the cafeteria announced some good news. In order to commemorate International Labor Day, we would all get a day off and everyone could eat their fill at all three meals that day. This news really got us 76 students who were doing hard work for our misdeeds all excited. At 5 PM on the afternoon of April 30 we all quit work early and Jiang Yuan, who ordinarily suffered the most from not eating his fill was sent to the kitchen to help the cook. When he got back at midnight, he told us all with great excitement that “The mess is using five times as much flour as usual and Section Chief Zhang says that they are doing that so that everyone will be able to eat their fill.” Section Chief Zhang said “Everyone keeps saying that they can’t eat their fill. Actually, we are only short of a little soy sauce. Ordinarily I don’t get to eat as much as you do. We let you eat your fill this time and see how much you actually eat.”
Misfortune is the fate of the Chinese people. Meat is only to be seen on special occasions. Hardworking Chinese peasants have to be content with rice as their staple food. Ever since China has had a state purchasing monopoly, the peasants haven’t been raising pigs and never eat pork. Moreover we students too had become manual laborers who couldn’t get by on the rations we had originally and so we understood. We all understood. Even though on the May 1st holiday we could eat a fine meal to our fill, how many hours would that keep us going?
How could it be that China’s population suddenly increased sharply, that the harvests had become poor, and that that was already not enough to feed 600 million people? Does this mean that the paradise of Communism has already become a mirage? We were excited at the prospect of a ‘wonderful’ life in the future. Jiang Yuan reported that breakfast tomorrow will be watery rice gruel, soybeans, deep fried peanuts and rice, lunch cabbage and soup, and we could have as many steamed buns as we liked but can’t take out any. Someone said in a loud voice, “Let’s celebrate with sorghum liquor! This morning we have liquor, so let’s all get drunk this morning!”
– 41 –
I was the only one to stay in bed thinking about home. Ever since my brother left, I hadn’t gotten a single letter from home. I had no idea how they were doing. They may have guessed I had gotten caught up in this rightist swamp, lost my freedom and in the terror of these days will have a hard time getting home. The one I worried the most about was my grandmother. It would be better if she didn’t know about my present misfortune.
Ah, the Communist Party which has taken about itself the task of rescuing the entire human race! Don’t you call yourself the savior of the suffering and the oppressed? Why can’t you be forgiving towards our family of four made up of elderly people and children?
The next day our food was not the thin gruel we had before but it was so dry that chopsticks could stick upright in it. That dried tofu and peanut rice hadn’t been on the table for six months. The soybeans, peanuts and rice were sold exclusively through the state monopoly purchasing system. Ordinary merchants couldn’t buy them. When I asked why ordinary merchants couldn’t buy it, I got the answer — “The soybeans, peanuts and rice were exported by the Soviet big brother in exchange for machinery.”
At lunchtime, six bowls of vegetables and one big bowl of spareribs and bean sprouts were on the table. The staple food were gleaming white steamed buns in a big basket on each table. At that meal I had five steamed buns. Liu Wu ate nine of them.
The steamed buns weren’t as good as the breakfast of rice porridge and meat. Our stomachs felt uncomfortable that afternoon. The distended feeling really wasn’t any better than feeling hungry. I found a secluded spot and massaged my stomach. Soon more and more of us were massaging our stomachs. No matter how long we massaged our stomachs, we were still unable to digest it. At suppertime we didn’t want to eat anything.
Section Chief Zhang popped up out of nowhere and said in a mocking tone, “How are you doing? The amount of food that the state has given you was carefully calculated and planned. If you keep saying that there isn’t enough to eat, I’d say that you have ideological problems. If you don’t thoroughly reform yourself through labor but instead keep insisting that you are not getting enough food then you will just have to focus on that issue as something you need to reform.”
At eight o’clock that evening, the sound of an ambulance siren could be heard from the male students’ dormitory. The word came: one of the students from the welding department had a perforated stomach and so had just been sent to the hospital. Merciful Buddha, we 76 students singled out for “collective reform” are still safe. Although we dodged today’s bullet, we had no idea of the disasters we would face in the years to come. We young people had already fallen into that hopeless situation. We still didn’t know what disasters awaited us!
Once we had been criticized before a large group and we had seen some people punished as examples, just as a chicken is killed to frighten the monkey, we 76 thought about our school and those few acres of rice paddy. How long could we, these people of the five despised bourgeois groups sit still awaiting criticism so that we can one day emerge thoroughly remolded into new people?
How could we have guessed that the “free airing of views” was just a “plot” that let out a long line to catch big fish, and to label intellectuals as notorious “capitalist class rightists”, sealing the lips of those who were about to stand up and say “no”? This way of doing things is an original totalitarian creation never before seen in China or in other countries.
Mao Zedong well understood that a large group of intellectuals could not be put in the position of being part of the “dictatorship” since this made it temporarily impossible to “kill” some as a warning to the others. Mao had taken “great pains” to handle this group properly. Mao in his essay “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People” had written that “a broad-minded and forgiving” political attitude was essential. Mao was proposing a method for handling contradictions among the people to resolve a problem with the rightists that had already become a “contradiction between ourselves and the enemy”.
This kind of deception did in fact dupe the Party faithful and stifled the condemnation of the world.
– 42 –
History has since shown that consuming this group of innocent intellectuals by a dictator’s plot shaped a Chinese tragedy even greater than the First Emperor of Qin’s who burned books and buried Confucian scholars alive. I am one of those who went through this entire process of digestion and reform. I was one of the lucky ones who survived. On May 28, all the teachers, students and staff of the school took part in a mammoth and impressive parade. At about ten o’clock in the morning, colorful flags, slogans and banners merged into the indoor sports arena from all directions. A banner stretched across the speaker’s platform proclaimed “Welcome to the First Group of Chongqing University Cadres Sent Down to the Countryside”. On either side of the speaker’s platform were two slogans. On the left was “Conscientiously Responding to the Party’s Call, Cadres Are Going Down to the Countryside”. On the right hand side was “Accepting Re-education by the Peasants, We are Determined to Transform Our World View”.
University President Jin Xiru made a speech from the speaker’s platform and then people called out “Hail to the Cadres Sent Down to the Countryside” and “Hail to the Communist Party” and “A Long Life to Chairman Mao”. Twenty people, including a group of staff who had a bad “family background” and “cadres” who were saddled with complicated social issues stood in front of the speaker’s platform. While the slogans were being called out, the group put on hats the school had made for them labeled “Big Red Flowers”. The parade accompanied the group to a gaily decorated bus. Then the bus got on its way as the paraders beat gongs and drums. The crowd walked along as the bus slowly made a circuit around the campus as a farewell.
These cadres sent down to the countryside would later form a working group in charge of the monitoring and reform of 76 “extreme rightists”. This group of twenty people however, except for several Communist Party members who were special agents, all had their own issues. They too had left the school forever, never allowed to return.
One morning, we got an order to put together some bags of personal things and then got to a designated place to accept our punishment. We knew that although we had not been allowed to participate in the ‘welcome rally’ we were in fact what that rally had been all about. We all stood in silence in front of the yellow building, each of us caught up in our sadness and anxiety.
After lunch, five “Lucky” model trucks drove up and we filled up the baggage compartments with our bags. That afternoon at one o’clock, guided by the colorful bus, we left Chongqing University and drove towards the Nantung mining district. As the trees and grass along with the dormitories and buildings of Chongqing University sped past our windows, my feelings were hard to express. I must have spent three whole years on campus. I thought of Ma Kaixian, I hadn’t seen her again. Was she truly lost to me forever? She had finally quit school of her own volition. That was certainly a much better choice than I, who was now being escorted off campus as a prisoner, had made. Nonetheless, a girl in those days who had been saddled with the label “rightist” would certainly have a hard time in the future. Where was she being sent? What will be her fate? Maybe this is our destiny to be parted in this way. What an ill-fated love this has been.
(4) Yu Xiehe’s Visit to My Old Dormitory
Two months after we left the school as prisoners on the purgatorial road, in July 1958, Mother Yu’s eldest son came to our dormitory.
As soon as he entered the dormitory, he saw the bedding I used to sleep in amidst the chaos of the room and not seeing my baggage and other things, he started to ask people about me. They just nodded but wouldn’t answer. When asked about who sleeps on the upper bunk, they responded shakily “Nobody ever sleeps up there.”
As Yu Xiehe looked at that mess of things on the bunk, suspicion grew in his mind. He was only sixteen years old at the time and although he had heard many rumors, he didn’t understand what the “Anti-Rightist Campaign” was all about. He worried and wondered how a neighbor just three years older than himself, and a university student who had not yet graduated could suddenly disappear into it?
– 43 –
When I passed the entrance examination for Chongqing University in 1955, there were seven people in the family home of Mother Yu who was our closest neighbor. A family with six boys and girls to feed, clothe and educate would have been difficult to support on just the small salary of their father if Mother Yu hadn’t been working day and night helping other families as a servant, with washing, and making every effort to earn money to support the family. Just as I had, Yu Xiehe when he was just ten years old had wandered the hillsides with a basket on his back looking for firewood and gathering charcoal. After finishing middle school at age 14, he had wanted to skip school and earn some money on the street but good and kind Mother Yu said that she would not let her eldest son at just 14 years of age lose his chance of getting an education. (I only learned a decade or so later that in order to earn money for her children to go to middle school, she not only exhausted herself with work but also went to the hospital once a month to sell blood.)
Yu Xiehe, who graduated middle school in 1955, who got excellent scores on the entrance examinations was accepted by both Chongqing High School #1 and Chongqing High School #3. In order to save money on tuition, he had, at my suggestion chosen Chongqing High School #1 which gave out full scholarships based on high grades. Chongqing High School #1 was Chongqing’s key school and was located next to Chongqing University so whenever he he had a problem with his studies he would walk over to my dormitory and ask me for help, a fellow who as a child had gone out with him to collect firewood, and also a way of looking out for each other. He could never have imagined that this companion with whom he used to walk all around the hills to gather firewood could have left school like that and disappear into who knows where! The campus in those days was full of spies. It was a scary place with pitfalls everywhere.
– 44 –
Chapter Two The First Years of Supervised Labor
We went from Shapingba to Nantong, arriving at our destination, the Forest coal mine in the Nantong mining district a little after 8 PM. Our group drove into the Conglin Elementary School and came to a stop at the embankment at the edge of the playground. Taking advantage of the dim light coming from the classroom building corridors, we each got our bags off the bus and put them into a row of empty classrooms, opened our bags and ate the dried steam buns that we had brought with us. By the time we had washed up at the basin next at the left of the flagpole platform, it was already late.
Disregarding the dampness of the classroom mortar wall, we spread out our bedding and went to sleep.
The next day at dawn we were awakened by the sent down cadres group. We assembled next to the flagpole and Wang Huaishou, leader of the sent down cadres group, called the roll, then divided up everyone into five groups. Each group was assigned four or five sent down cadres and a leader was named for each group.
Lu Zhao was the main supervisor for our big group of eighteen rightists and four sent down cadres. One of the four sent down cadres was a woman — she was the only one who was quiet as if she was always going over something in her mind. After splitting us up into four groups, Wang Huaishou spoke to us. He said, “From today onwards, according to the policy of the Party and arrangements made by the school, each rightist will be assigned to a designated peasant household where their labor will be supervised. This is an opportunity for you to get re-educated by the middle and lower class peasants. Everyone needs to understand clearly what their future will be. In this remolding environment, you will be thoroughly transformed so that you can get a fresh start in life.
Once the speech was over, each big group lined up. Our big group went off across the mountains and hills under the leadership of Lu Zho. We went over three kilometers on a winding mountain path. At about noon, we reached a place called Jiepai. Nantong is well-known in Sichuan for its coal mines. There were over ten mine pits scattered in the ups and downs of the mountainous terrain among peasant fields. These villages were criss-crossed by footpaths and babbling brooks. Small villages nestled in the gaps between mountains.
We arrived during the ripening of the wheat in early summer. The hills were covered by yellow wheat. The air smelled of mud and dampness. Although the sky was clearing up after several days of rain, it was still hard to make out the peasants laboring in the fields below. The wheat looked messy that way it was all tangled up with grass. Nonetheless, cool tree-shaded footpaths were beautiful. Walking along these footpaths we didn’t feel hot but with all the luggage and handbags we were carrying we broke out in a sweat after just a few kilometers.
While we took a five minute break on a mountain ridge, enjoying the breeze that came up from the fields. As we opened up our clothing to the cool air, tension that had built up during the last few months on campus seemed to dissipate. Everyone started to speak, pointing at the tree-shaded peasant homes. “The closely-spaced small buildings are empty. Where the kitchen smoke is coming out is where people live.”
Unfortunately, in our demoralized state we were making hasty judgements. We just didn’t know….where were we supposed to live?
(1) Conglin, Nantong Mining District
Jiepai was originally a town. After collectivization began, it became a commissary center. At the center was an old temple and an ancestral hall called the Cao Family Ancestral Hall surrounded by 100 peasant families. This was the place where we would gather for our study sessions.
– 45 –
The paint on the Guanyin statue in the temple, once in glorious colors, has all peeled off, leaving it in poor repair and speckled with mud. The furnace for burning offerings had also been knocked down and was half-buried in a pile of rubble in the mud wall. However, the temple area was still being swept clean. A dozen tables stood in the hall apparently to serve as a cafeteria.
When our strangely attired group bearing backpacks, holding canvas bags and wearing cloth slippers walked into the hall, we were surrounded by a swarm of children. With curious and childish eyes they watched our strange procession. We weren’t like a group of coal miners and we weren’t like the work groups that came through to conduct political movements. We all felt very bad about ourselves. Two people wearing white cloth bands at the top of their heads came out. They seemed to be local cadres. Lu Zhao approached the older one who looked like he was in his forties and handed over a letter of introduction and modestly turned down an invitation to go inside. The younger one called us over and yelled at the children surrounding us.
We put down our luggage and found places to sit down. We took towels to wipe off our perspiration. The temple clock was already at noon.
Shortly thereafter, two kitchen workers came out with a rice steamer and two large baskets of cabbage and put them on two tables. That was the first meal we had in the village since leaving school. Yellow corn and rice wraps in the steamer without a single grain of white rice we ate whole. The big bowl had steamed oxhide in vinegar. The small dishes on each table held red chili powder and salty water. Greeted eagerly by the rumbling stomachs of both ourselves and of the cadres sent down to the countryside, the meal was delicious. That as the result of three months of fixed quantity meals and bone-wearying labor, we all ate our fill and were well-satisfied.
The children surrounding us did not disperse. From their skinny bodies and waxen yellow faces and eager childish eyes we could see that they could not hide their envy at our meal. After lunch at three in the afternoon, the turbaned middle-aged man brought along ten-odd young people with rifles. We guessed that these people were the town government’s armed people’s militia. The middle-aged man told us that each of us would be taken by a militia man under guard to where we would stay to accept the “supervised labor” in a farm family.
The militia man who took me was a short fellow a little older than me. From his arrogant attitude I could tell from our first acquaintance that he would see himself as a person of superior status “managing” me. His face reflected his hostile attitude. Putting on my back sack and lifting my book bag, I marched forward through the main gate of the ancestral hall. He kept a distance of five meters as he escorted me. After exiting the big yard of the ancestral hall, we took a winding path on the ridges between the fields. At each fork in our path, I would head behind me the harsh order “turn left” or “turn right”.
Sometimes I would turn my head and ask him which path we are heading towards. Each time he would brandish the rifle menacingly and ask in a very mean tone “What are you doing?” Fortunately, three months of trials at school had made me clear about my status. I had gotten used to being lower ranking and gotten used to rude and nonsensical orders. I never showed any sign of opposition or even anger or embarrassment. After we had crossed many rice paddies and gone along many footpaths, we got onto a well-shaded mountain path. I didn’t pay attention to what crops were growing in those fields or what the scenery was like. I just felt alone and frightened. I felt like a wounded small animal that was being led along by hunters.
– 46 –
Seeing the sky darken, my backpack getting heavier, sweat soaking my vest, my eyes frozen in a faraway stare, I didn’t have anything to say to the person behind me. I felt all tangled up in knots, thinking what kind of terrible place am I being sent to?
Part Two Zhaojiawan
(1) An extraordinary father and son
Once we had passed over a mist-shrouded mountain pass, we saw before us a paddy field twisting along a basin between two hills. Looking past hillsides that were overgrown with weeds, we could see in the distance on the left, halfway up a mountain, a mud-walled compound partly covered by a bamboo grove. We walked along a flagstone covered path towards the compound.
We reached the compound at dusk. We had finally arrived at our destination, a small compound with three buildings arranged around an about 500 square meter courtyard. We went in the main entrance and saw a man on the steps of the hall who had just taken out some tobacco sitting in an old bamboo lounge chair. His pipe was about a meter long, black like copper.
He wore a large white turban, a traditional gown and a pair of pants that went down below his knees. His dress and general appearance made me think of an old bandit in the story “Wiping Out The Bandits on Wulong Mountain” 《乌龙山剿匪记》. As he saw us enter, he turned towards us to study us carefully. He took out his long pipe and putting it on the nearby wall, and slowly got up from his lounge chair and called out in a hoarse voice, “Second Child Zhang, why are you only getting here just now?”
“Ah, Grandfather Zhao, we left Jiepai at three o’clock. This fellow took his time too so we dawdled along until now. Now this job is done and I am turning him over to you. I’ll tell the brigade leader. It is already late so I’ll hurry back.” Now that Second Child Zhang had briefed Grandfather Zhao, he shouldered his rifle, and left by the gate in the walled compound.
I put down my backpack in the middle of the compound. Two families of adults and children of the rooms on the two wings had already come out on their steps to watch me. I felt like a monkey surrounded by a group of people. I didn’t yet have any clear idea of just what this environment I was entering for my “transformation” would be like. Confronted by a dozen pairs of curious eyes, I put down my head and stood there blankly, gripping my canvas bookbag. I felt like I was a student who had done something wrong and was being punished by the teacher.
Then Grandfather Zhao lifted up his long pipe, lit a pouch full of tobacco that he had just put in the pipe and worked his way down from the stairs at the center of the hall. He looked me up and down and then asked me in a hoarse voice, “Are you Kong?”. I fearfully looked up to him and nodded my head.
“My son hasn’t come back yet so come into the room with me.” His tone had become much milder. I thought that I must make a pitiful sight. I went up the stone steps with my backpack in one hand and my bookbag in the other and passed through a doorway from which the vermillion lacquer had all peeled off.
It was already dark but I could see by the dim light bulb hanging at the center of the hall that this family had three rooms. The central room had dusty shrines for memorial talents for the spirits of the Above, Heaven, Earth, Monarch, Teacher, Family and Teacher had been replaced by a painting of Mao Zedong. Below the shrines was an old black lacquer table and on the left was a big cabinet for storing food.
The door on the left opened on a room with two wooden beds and an old wardrobe. The wooden bed was covered by a bed cover that was obviously black and yellow in the dim light. Probably it hadn’t been washed for a long time.
– 47 –
Each of the buildings was quite large and seemed unusually empty. Behind the door on the right side of the hall wall there was a kitchen piled with stalks of grain, grass and other fuels along with a small pile of coal.
I walked into the bedroom and the elderly man went in too, lighting up a pine torch. I could then see in the thick boards of the ceiling an attic. A moveable ladder was leaning against a two meter long skylight. Zhao pointed at the skylight and said “The upstairs is empty. You will be living up there.”
By the light of the torch in his hands, I climbed up into the “attic”. The attic was spacious but there was no lamp. A little moonlight was reflected from roofing tiles on either side so I could faintly make out odds and ends piled up in the corner. Two rats suddenly scurried out of the pile and went through a crack in the tile.
Bits of mud, dust and dried leaves were scattered about the floor. They must have come in through gaps in the tiled roof. The buzzing of insects coming from all directions sounded like a squadron of bombers flying by.
Old man Zhao handed me a broom through the opening in the ceiling. I started to sweep by the moonlight and the torchlight. I swept an area of about 10 square meters. Then with the help of Old Man Zhao I got my bags up into the attic and opened them. Just then the master of the compound, Brigade Leader Zhao came in.
Brigade Leader Zhao was a young man of medium height about two years older than me. He made a careless glance in my direction, grabbed a long bench, set it on the stairway and began to smoke. After about half an hour, old man Zhao came from the kitchen with a dish of meat and vegetables, a small dish of hot peppers and salt, along with a bowl of cabbage mixed with corn with vegetables and radishes thrown in. The dish had a bitter taste. Brigade leader Zhao did not ask about my family background or studies. He only set down his policies: “You must work with the others everyday. Work as hard as you can and don’t be lazy. Don’t speak out of turn or make any trouble. If you need to go somewhere, first get permission from myself or some other senior person.”
By the time I finished supper it was already dark. I washed the mud off my body in the brook that ran past the courtyard. Old Zhao had already lit a pile of Chinese mugwort in the bedroom so I couldn’t stay inside. After quite a while and the smoke had dissipated, the air still had a strong odor of absinthe. The bomber squadron of insects had been scattered by the smoke.
I climbed up into the attic and lay down on my bedding. It was still very hot. Cool breezes came through gaps in the tiles and brought some cool relief so I drew a blanket over myself. The moonbeams shining through the rafters now angled towards the corner of the room. Although I was exhausted from walking all day, my mind was busy thinking about the drastic changes in my situation that had come that day.
The memory of my maternal grandmother stroking my head at the bamboo fence on the day of our last parting floated up before my eyes. Also came the last meal my little brother and I shared at the Little Dragon Ridge. Mother’s tears and my father and I looking at each other on the mountain top also came to mind. That together with the hateful glance of Ah Xian all came back to me.
Two streams of tears quietly fell onto my pillow. As the poet said: “In the deep night, the melody of the wind knocking the bamboo rises, the thousand voices of clashing leaves all bring regrets. The solitary pillow seeks stirring tales, but dreams don’t come and the light has gone out. (The Magnolia Flower by Ouyang Xiu) “夜深风竹敲竹韵，万叶千声皆是恨。故欹单
枕梦中寻，梦又不成灯又尽”——（木兰花．欧阳修）
After the parting I know not if he is far or near.
What meets the eye is bleak and doleful.
Slowly he journeys, slowly he goes farther, slowly his letters grow fewer.
Broad are the waters, deep swim the fish, where can I ask for him?
In depth of night the wind and bamboos tap out the music of Autumn;
Myriad leaves give a thousand sounds—all are lamentation.
So I choose the solitary pillow in search of dreams,
But dreams come not, and the lamp is guttering out.
– 48 –
Father and son Zhao were directly in charge as my “educators”. Before liberation, Old Zhao had been a tenant farmer for the landlord who worked at Hill Two. He had carried the landlord’s sedan chair and gone with him to the docks at Chongqing. With that city and market experience, he was very different from the men who had never left that hollow. The three hundred-odd people who lived in Zhaojiawan treated him with respect.
He had three sons in all. His eldest, Zhao Guangrong had died on the battlefield in the War to Oppose American and Support Korea. He was respected as belonging to a revolutionary martyr’s family. His second son had died in a work accident while building the Sichuan-Tibet highway. That was the glorious history of his family.
Now only his youngest son, 23-year old Zhao Fan remained. Zhao Fan was also the leader of the Zhaojiawan production brigade and leader of the core group of the local people’s militia. He had not yet married. His father said that he was aiming too high. None of the young women in Zhaojiawan interested him. He wanted to find an educated wife.
Old Zhao’s wife died in 1950 so for now, the two of them were the only ones living in their over 100 square meter dwelling. They got the ornaments in the home from the landlord’s house when the fields were divided up as the “fruits of victory”.
Therefore, this father and son pair were the “father and mother officials” in the Zhaojiawan community of fifty households so it was only natural that I would be sent to reside there under their supervision.
Fortunately, since I had been used to working hard ever since I was a child, I quickly adjusted to the tempo of daily labor, no matter whether it was digging out the soil below, carry human excrement up the hill on a basket and pole carrier slung across my back, I could do it all. Moreover, since they were transitioning from an agricultural cooperative to a people’s collective and to the system of state monopoly for purchasing and marketing and quota policies, the peasants had been resentful for several days. Therefore nobody paid close attention as to whether the collective members were actually working or how much work they were doing. It all depended upon the record kept by the workpoint person in the collective to determine how food would be distributed.
Thus the pressure on me declined. After a while, dealing with these simple peasants and hearing them speak their minds, I realized that things just weren’t as complicated as those classmates at school who had their minds full of class struggle thinking. There was no longer any need to take great care in what one said. One need not fear that disaster would come out of one’s own mouth or fear that someone would be taking down any words of “dissatisfaction” to use against me later at a struggle session. Gradually I was relieved of that load and felt a lot better.
The next day I got up at dawn and quietly walked out the main gate. The courtyard is in a nice setting. A bamboo grove goes all around it. The stone stairway from the gate to the courtyard faces the stone paved road towards Jiepai. The embankment of a clear brook parallels the road. On the other side of the embankment are the paths that go to the fields in the hillsides.
– 49 –
The two big jujube trees shaded either side of the gate stairway made the small courtyard even more beautiful. The environment calmed me down. I felt I was living with a normal peasant family. What was missing? I listened carefully but still didn’t hear the cackling of chickens or the barking of dogs. When I asked Old Zhao about it, he rolled his eyes and said in an irritated tone, “The story of the animals here, according to the cadres in the commune, is the problem of the tail end of capitalism. The animals were all slaughtered. Moreover, once the grain is all doled out, there isn’t even enough for everyone, so how can we think about feeding chickens and ducks?” The room Zhao father and son lived in was next to the kitchen and a pig pen made of bamboo posts and sticks. In the pen was a small, hunchbacked and emaciated feeder pig.
Lao Zhao said that ever since collectivization had begun and the peasant’s grain was centrally procured by the state there hadn’t been any food to feed the pigs. All the pigs were raised in the collective’s central pig pen. Each pig was allocated two packs of grain a day while the families of the people feeding the pigs got much less. As a result, the pigs had to just “eat grass”. The pigs gradually became emaciated and most had died during the winter. Only a few had survived to the present. Behind the house was a small private plot surrounded by a bamboo and stick fence. Old Zhao spent most of his time working on the private plot. Most of the vegetables were chard beets but there were also pumpkin, and sweet potato. Pumpkin vines extended well beyond the boundary of the plot. The flower buds on the vines had already started to fall off. The garden pumpkins and the pumpkins in the big fields were very different. The pumpkins grown in the garden were much bigger and more luxurious.
(2) How Peasants Handle Hunger
The biggest problem we faced was not having enough food to eat. According to the state food purchasing and marketing monopoly and specifically the harvest of the Jiepai village and township, the grain ration for people who did a full day’s work was 400 grams of foxtail millet which was equivalent to 300 grams of rice.
The Zhao father and son pair were no exception. My rations however, were issued according to the urban resident’s monthly ration of 14 kilograms of white rice. Even that was not adequate so could Zhao father and son who were used to hard work make do with even less? Naturally our household of three people ate from the same pot. The rest people had to get from their own private plots. I came to understand that the people hurt most by the state monopoly for purchasing and marketing are the peasants who grow the food. Late May was the season when the plums ripened. Their hilly area, I heard Old Zhao say, was full of wild plum trees. During this season the plum trees and their branches would be groaning with the weight of plums. Hungry peasants on short rations were all sorely tempted by these fruits, but according to the rules of the cooperative, these fruit trees were all the collective property of the cooperative. Anyone who picked fruit or even took fruit that had fallen to the ground would be punished by having their rations cut.
Fortunately the peasants who had been forced to join the cooperative this year understand that the cooperative harvests all the peaches and sells them on the market. The cooperative members don’t get anything from this. They realize that it makes no sense to harvest or to take care of the peach trees. Better than they ripen on the tree where someone could pick one up and eat it to allay their hunger.
Nobody pays any attention to the ripening plums. Many cooperative members don’t go home at noon since there is nothing to cook and they would just be idle in front of a cold kitchen stove. Better to get up and down the hills to find rotting fruit that has fallen into ravines and crevasses in the soil to allay their hunger. One day, a cooperative member named Old Man Ceng from East Beiminanwan Village at 2 o’clock or so in the afternoon yelled amidst the corn that he was hungry and suddenly went home to rest. Once home he sweated as waves of hot and cold overcame him and rolled about on the ground. The cooperative medical from neighboring Lingyuan Village was called in. When the medical assistant took the bag and went to Old Man Ceng’s home. When the assistant saw how pale and frothy his mouth was, Second Daughter Ceng hurriedly called for some young people to carry Old Man Ceng to Jiepai. However, they couldn’t find a litter. Before midnight had come, Old Man Ceng was dead.
The next day, Erye’s courtyard in Beiyuan was full. Ceng Erniang hovered between life and death. The neighbors said that all month Old Man Ceng hadn’t come home at noon to cook a meal. He had relied on the rotting fruit on the hillsides to gather a meal for himself. They supposed that he must have eaten some rotting plums that a poisonous snake had crawled over. When I went to see, Old Man Ceng’s whole body was swollen and his two eyes were open as if he had done an injustice that he would not accept. After Old Man Ceng’s death, people still climbed all over the hills to gather up rotting plums that had fallen from the trees. Now they became more careful when they picked up fruit. They put the fruit in their sacks and took it down the embankment to wash in the stream.
(3) From Then Onwards Many People Began Starving to Death
The swollen body sickness finally started to spread. The Zhao family’s private plot couldn’t support three people. The chard beet were nearly all gone. The cabbage had only just begun to sprout. Old Man Zhao ground the grains and their husks together to make “grain flour” and took kidney bean leaves, pumpkin leaves and the leaves above the sweet potatoes and mixed them into the “grain flour” too to replace staple grains. At first they steamed it to make vinegar, later they dispensed with that and made it into a kind of porridge. Among the three of us, Old Zhao was the first to get the body swelling of edema.
– 50 –
From my personal experience, the nationwide epidemic of edema began in the summer of 1958 and only ended when Mao Zedong died of old age. The cause of death is simple — poor nutrition as a result of starvation. The medical remedy is also very simple — just eat! Mainland China was hit by an unprecedented long period of “going hungry”.
The night after Old Man Ceng’s death, I awoke amidst buzzing insects to rumblings in my stomach. From the kitchen I suddenly heard an indistinct stuttering sound. Then the smell of cooking rice wafted in. I looked down from the attack and saw that there was no one in the beds of father and son Zhao. I climbed down the ladder and tiptoed into the main room and put my head into the kitchen. From the area in front of the stove that usually shed a weak flame and smoke to keep insects away I saw the Zhaos taking something out of the fire. I looked more closely and saw that it was on a stick and smelled the delicious taste of corn that was radiating in all directions. The private plot did not have corn, which fell under a state category for “purchasing monopoly material”. The food on this fire had clearly been stolen from the fields on the hillsides.
In a little while I saw the Zhaos take these delicious tidbits off the iron wire and wipe them off on the ground to make a pile. Then picked some bits of ash off the pile and then munched it thoroughly as they wolfed down the food. After seeing that, I felt a chill, and hurriedly retreated back to the main room and climbed up the ladder. All the while my heart pounded hard.
Three days earlier, a child cowherd from a compound in Xiashuiwan while cutting grass for the cow in a cornfield stole several dozen packets of corn buried in the field. A militiaman caught the child ‘red-handed’. The militiaman brought the child and the corn bags to give to team leader Zhao. Zhao had the child tied up and bound to the Jujube tree by the entrance of his compound. Zhang Erwa was only 15 years old. How could the child be expected to bear up under this kind of punishment? The child cried his heart out and by the time he was cut down in the evening, he had already fainted.
That evening, the Party Secretary of the Jiepai Cooperative hurried to Zhaojiawan about this matter. Leader Zhao in the main room complained to his superior how very hard it was to keep the cooperative members under control. He said wasn’t able to protect the crops on the hillsides. People were stealing from the field every day. He asked the Party Secretary for help solving the problem. Immediately a meeting of all members of the Zhaojiawan cooperative was called. In the small courtyard crowded with a hundred-odd people, Zhao sternly declared: “The crops on the hillside are not yet ripe. Whoever takes any will be captured by the militia and tied up. Stealing or having others steal on your behalf is the same as hurting and killing other people. Everyone keep this in mind.” He ended with a furious glance at the people gathered there. The hundred-odd cooperative members didn’t make a sound.
I remember when I was eleven years old seeing a struggle session against a village landlord in Longfengqiao. The landlord was forced to kneel in charcoal. Seeing how the landlord had been mangled scared me to death. The wife of a landlord who could not bear to accept this cruel treatment was instead forced to hang herself but I never tried to find out what had been behind it all. Those peasants who had “suffered deeply and were aflame with resentment” may not have been wrong. Later at Chongqing University during the ‘speak out’ campaign, some people condemned that kind of behavior. They said that tyrannical cadres were using kangaroo courts to have their way. People who said this were labeled “rightists”. Today I had seen with my own eyes the leader of the cooperative treated a herder child of no more than 15 years of age very cruelly. I felt very afraid. The peasants who lived among these hills were naturally simple but were also rough, sly and conniving. This cooperative leader was the master of this bend of the river. His orders were law. Everyone must obey them. For stealing a few little packages of corn, that 15 year old child could be nearly put to death. Mao Zedong had never talked about handling contradictions among the people in this way.
– 51 –
When I thought about the stories about people begging for rice in the old historical work “Strategies of the Warring States” [Zhanguo Ce] in the state of Qin and the state of Jin. Despite the enmity between the two states, the ruler of Qin would still say “Although I hate the rule of Jin, the people of Jin have done me no wrong. Disasters are always occurring. Every country has them generation after generation. Sending them in supplies after years of scarcity is the right way. We may not deviate from the way of righteousness under heaven” and so he bought grain for the hungry people of Jin”. If a foreign ruler can do that, how can someone be so cruel to his friends and relatives in his own village?
I knew my own position. How could I say anything? What I had just seen of Cooperative Team Lead Zhao made me very frightened. The wisest thing to do would be to protect myself. My only choice was to avoid him.
The next day when I took excrement up the hill for the corn, when I had just finished dumping my first load, the weather suddenly changed. A strong wind pushed dark clouds in my direction. No more than five minutes later, a chill came to the air and a big thunder and lightning storm began. Cooperative members who had been taking excrement up to nourish the crops took up their things and hurried down the hill. I carelessly stepped on some loose gravel when I was halfway down, slipped, and began tumbling down the hill. The ring of metal on top of one of the excrement buckets on my pole broke. The rocks bruised my left foot. Trying to ignore the pain, I picked up my bucket and limped back, nearly helpless, to the Zhao’s house in the heavy downpour.
Old Zhao was kind this time. He not only did not charge me for the broken ear of the slop bucket, he told me to dry myself off and lie down. He washed the mud off my wound and pulled a packet of medicine out of the old shrine. This was a medicinal herb that he had used to gather up in the hills. He ground it up into a kind of home made medicine for treating falls. He poured out some sorghum liquor into a small dish to blend it with the medicine and spread it lightly on my wound. I felt a little spicy tingling on my wound. Old Zhao didn’t say anything. He just took a few dried eggplant leaves, put them in a long pipe, put the pipe in his mouth and sat down. A smell of grassy mist blew out of his mouth. Sometimes he looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
Amazing to say, Old Zhao’s dropsy swelling gradually went down and my foot got better and better each day. The relationship amongst us three changed in a subtle way that we all recognized. It seems that I had been right to keep quiet.
Ever since that evening, I kept my guard up in the evening. About five nights later, an hour after we had all gone to sleep, the opening of the main gate and some low crackling noises woke me up. Then that smell of cooking corn wafted into my nose. After another half hour, the gate opened again softly. By the weak moonlight, I made out a familiar figure. Wasn’t that Zhang Erwa? He seemed to be carrying something in his arms. The gate closed and all was quiet again. Ever since I discovered the midnight secret of that father-and-son pair, our relationship had subtly changed. Our relationship changed each day. I spoke frankly with Old Zhao about the days before and what happened after my family was labeled “rightist” so that he would understand. His eyes filled with astonishment that this could be someone that the “organization” had assigned him for close supervision. Things were however much simpler that they appeared.
– 52 –
(4) The Villages During the Great Leap Forward
Mao Zedong liked to do one mass campaign after another. He wanted to become the Great Red Sun of the Chinese people so what else could he do but shine all the time? Zhao Fan took all the documents issued by the joint purchase-sale commissary at Jiepai to show to me. He said that although they wanted him to read out all these documents to the assembled members of the cooperative, he never had read any of them himself since he had only an elementary school education. He decided to have me read out the documents to the members of the cooperative. I agreed to read out the texts.
Just after the ripened corn had just been harvested up in the hills, we had four days of heavy autumn rains. The rice that had ripened in the paddy fields, however, was dislodged by the rain and became black and mildewed. Nobody gathered it in. Sweet potatoes in the hills also grew moldy and sprouted shoots as everyone was too frightened to gather them and bring them home. They already knew from the 15 year old “example” what would happen to anyone who collected that rotting food and stored it at home. Everyone monitored everyone else no matter how much hunger and longing that those eyes felt. They would at the criticism meetings yell out “Keep a lookout. Find out who has been digging sweet potatoes in the hills and report them to Zhao Fan”. They would with the worst rumblings of hunger look at the rotting food and say that because of “the swelling illness” that they couldn’t work. They would just keep their mouths shut and accept the obscene policies of the cooperative.
However, some families in Xiawan, probably taking heed of the death of Old Man Ceng, took advantage of two rainy nights in late fall. They suddenly raided and left all the potatoes in a two mu potato field. That same night, they took the sweet potatoes, wrapped them in leaves and ashes from their kitchen fires, and put them in two big storage cellars. Once the weather had cleared, Zhang Erya went to Leader Zhao to make a report that half of the potatoes in the storage pit had already been consumed by hungry peasants.
There was nothing else he could do. Leader Zho in addition to reporting the facts of the matter to his superiors, led three people’s militia to collect all the sweet potatoes that remained in the cellar. Then he called three days of criticism meetings. Now for the first time, the people of Xiawan were of one mind. They sat, bored and depressed, and nobody wanted to say anything. Zhao Fan, since he had no alternative, reduced everyone’s daily ratio by 100 grams for one month and made a report to his superiors.
Rain continued without let up for 20 days. Mildew grew all over the floorboards in my room. I kept some bags of corn in my room. This was corn that had been left behind in the embankment outside the courtyard when the corn was harvested. There were also some jujubes that I had knocked down from a tree. As the food accumulated, rats around my legs as I slept. I felt very alone.
I wanted to get back to school. I took my textbooks and notebooks out of my bag and spread them on the floor. I took advantage of the light coming through the rafters to thoroughly review my lessons. I still naively thought that once my labor assignment ended I could go back to school. How then could I neglect my schoolwork?
Only as the Mid Autumn Festival was about to begin did the teary face of Nature finally disappear. Immediately after the weather cleared up, Leader Zhao sent the one hundred-odd workers back up to the fields. The first thing to do naturally was to gather the rice that had already rotted in the fields. During rest breaks, people pulled hard on the rice plants in the palms of their hands and put the grains that had rubbed off one by one into their mouths. The ability of country people to eat grain husks was really impressive. They swallowed the grains and not a minute later spit the husk onto the ground, and then chewed and spit the rice in the husk. That was a good way to “allay one’s hunger”. That was better, both nutritionally and for our health, than stealing sweet potatoes, corn and picking up rotting plums. I learned how to do it too. That prickly chaff rubbed off the husk of the grain was always sticking to my tongue.
The next day Zhao Fan went to Jiepai for an all-day meeting. He didn’t get back until very late. He brought back with him the news that the Jiepai People’s Commune would call a big meeting next week to celebrate the establishment of the commune. He brought back with him a big pile of application forms for “voluntary applications to join the people’s commune.” The Communist Party makes a practice of following a discussion of ideological matters with a discussion of practical matters. Although the purpose of the endless waves of mass campaigns differed, they all followed that pattern.
Zhao Fan himself led the next evening’s study session. Out of his mouth streamed a string of awkward and unfamiliar words such as the people’s commune transformation, the Great Leap Forward, and the general line of the Party. Sometimes he looked right at me as if he were asking me to be tolerant of the mistakes he made in his talk.
Yet the awkwardness in his frustration and his serious attitude conveyed the idea that this was something very important to “higher authority”. This can’t be treated casually like an ordinary study session. Although people asked him questions like “What is a people’s commune?”, “What good is a people’s commune?”, “Why is there this insistence on the principle that people “voluntarily” join the commune?” “Is it allowed not to join the commune?”. Some people talked of things like working on their own. It was not clear what it was all about. Even Leader Zhao didn’t have a clear idea of just what was going on. Most of the “commune members” just snored away.
He didn’t pay attention to their misgivings. He knew the task that the “higher authorities” had set out for him to do and so he was going to do it. He gave an “application to join the people’s commune” form to every family at the meeting. He had the neighbors of two families who had not come to the meeting take the application form back to give to them. He told everyone you need to fill this out within three days and give it back to him.
– 53 –
Taskings came down from superior authority. I got more work to do. I had to fill out nearly all the hundred or so applications from the fifty households of Zhaojiawan. Those three days I kept busy from dawn til dusk. I emerged as a “crack shock troop” for filling out applications. Although I know that nearly none of these applications were being done according to the principle of “voluntariness”. Fortunately, higher authority certainly would not be looking into that! Nor would they be checking to see if the applications were being filled out truthfully.
Part Three A “People’s Commune” is Created Overnight
When the news came the afternoon of the day that the Jiepai People’s Commune was founded we had already quit work. Leader Zhao picked our representatives to the ceremony. The sun had just set when we reached the Jiepai Ancestral Temple. The big courtyard of the Jiepai Temple was all lit up. On the temple steps a temporary master of ceremonies platform had been set up. A banner in the middle of the platform proclaimed “Jiepai People’s Commune Inaugural Meeting ”. Slogans hung on both sides of the courtyard. I stood in the back of the crowd, facing the platform. Today Lu Zhao was also sitting on the platform. I looked all around to see if I could see members of the group that had arrived with me.
Renmin gongshe hao (人民公社好)
A straw-hatted man on the platform proclaimed the founding of the Jiepai People’s Commune. Listening to that voice, I realized it was the same middle-aged man with a turban whom I had met when I first arrived in Jiepai. He announced to the meeting that 99.5% of the households in Jiepai had voluntarily applied to join the Jiepai People’s Commune. There was scattered applause. Then a man in a military cap read the “Organization Regulations of the Jiepai People’s Commune” which had already been prepared. The regulations stated that this people’s commune was a collective composed of peasants, foresters, herders, people in auxiliary occupations and people engaged in fishing. The people’s commune is a rural combined social and political unit. This kind of social system is unique in the history of all humanity.
The people at the meeting had no idea what kind of organization that they had signed up for and what it would mean for their prospects and their fate. The slogans “Long live the people’s commune!” “Long live the general line of the Communist Party”, “Long live Chairman Mao” resounded to the beat of drums and the popping of firecrackers. The Jiepai Advanced Cooperative had become a people’s commune. Over ten thousand peasants had overnight entered upon the “heaven of communism” that was large in size and collective in nature.
It was already eleven pm when the meeting broke up. By the bright moonlight we got back on the mountain road to Zhaojiawan. A series of pine torches lit the mountain road for us. The next evening was the eve of the Mid Autumn Festival. Zhao Fan announced to the 200 members of the Zhaojiawan People’s Commune that we will combine forces to get our planting and harvesting done quickly. will complete the “three urgent autumn tasks” before us. From now on, sweet potatoes are not considered food. The entire labor force of the village had now been formally mobilized as the Zhaojiewan shock troops of the Jiepai Region.
This was done to celebrate the Mid Autumn Festival and the arrival of communism in Zhaojiawan. Old Zhao even brought out some Jiangjin sorghum liquor that he had been saving for who knows how long. Some of the older people crowded around and poured the wine into clay cups and raised them in a toast. Zhaojiawan had become very lively. However things did not go as smoothly as Zhao father-and-son had planned. Some elderly people weren’t willing to travel far just to eat some sweet potatoes. Some of the elderly in Zhaojiawan had kept up the same kitchen all their lives and didn’t want to give it up now. They said they stood on their rank and qualification as poorer or middle peasants and said they did not have to do what Zhao said. When Zhang Erwa led some militiamen one afternoon to take their pots and to destroy their kitchen, they were confronted by Old Man Li and Old Men Ceng.
How could the kitchen god and memorial tablets handed down by their ancestors for one thousand years be abandoned? Is that just as bad as letting your children and grandchildren go hungry? These old men have seen the militiamen grow up from infancy. They thought that by relying on the authority of elders and the customs of the past that they could prevail over the militiamen and drive them away.
The old men knew that times had changed. Ordinarily they looked down on this gang of lazy second class cadres. However, they just had to accept it, pretending somehow that what they were seeing was not really happening. They sighed, saying they had failed by not being strict enough with the young people. However, tearing down the shrines and tablets of the old men was just too much to bear.
– 54 –
The sons and grandchildren of the two old men consulted with Zhang Erwa. The kitchen was not torn down. There was only one pot and just a few cups. It was better just to let the meager possessions of the two old men be. Naturally these two old men would be mobilized too. During the day they would watch over the children of Zhaojiawan.
This was something that Zhao Fan hadn’t expected. The request of the two old men to keep their kitchens did not conflict with the principle of everyone eating together in the People’s Commune cafeteria and so could not just be brushed off. However, since the grain rations for the two of them were to be transferred back to them, that would create an exception and make it hard to hold the line with the rest of the group.
The two old men wanted to continue cooking in their kitchen dedicated to the kitchen god and the Buddha were faced with not having any grain to cook. This was just the second day after the Mid Autumn Festival. The two men went together to Lao Zhao to talk things over.
Old Zhao didn’t make any headway against the religious beliefs of the two so that evening he called a work meeting to which they invited the Zhao daughter-in-law. The three of them discussed the matter. They decided that the old men could keep their kitchen but food could not be cooked there privately. The younger generation of the two families were called in to be informed of the decision. The children under political pressure had to convince the two old men that although the kitchen would not be torn down, meals may not be cooked there. If the two men couldn’t get to the cafeteria, their children would take the food to them. The kitchen could be used to warm up a meal but not to cook it.
Once the excitement had died down, Zhao Fan admonished the militia members to be more vigilant over the next several days. Particularly at meal times, the people were told, do not light your own charcoal or cook without permission. Any household violating this order will have their cooking pots and their kitchen destroyed. Every evening the militia was sent to patrol on the ridge to see which houses had lit charcoal and were cooking. They would go to that house and smash the pots and the kitchen, no two ways about it. For sometime after that, every other day there was a case of a household having its pots and kitchen destroyed.
While Zhaojiawan was in an uproar because Zhao Fan was forcing the peasants to change their customs and traditions, I got a notice to immediately report to the Jiepai People’s Commune.
Part 4 Rapidly Advancing Towards Communism
Thus ended my first, four month long course of being sent down to the countryside. I got along well with the two Zhaos. It hadn’t been anywhere near as bad as I had feared at first. Although I couldn’t say that I was treated with great respect, I was still treated correctly according to the methods of “handling contradictions among the people ”. I left on much better terms with the Zhaos than I had been with my schoolmates while I was subject to “struggle sessions”.
When I brought my bags down from the loft that afternoon, Old Man Zhao took out a paper bag and stuffed it into my luggage. In the bag were roasted red dates. Ever since I had started working, I was , according to school regulations, only entitled to two RMB a month spending money which I could spend on daily necessities such as soap, hand towels, toothbrushes etc. Even though I had been frugal since childhood, I still wasn’t able to save anything on two RMB a month. At that moment I felt that I didn’t have anything I could give them as a souvenir. I took out a five RMB note and put it in Old Zhao’s hands and asked him to buy himself a new set of clothes the next time he goes to market.
It seemed as if now that they had met a rightist, their original enmity towards rightists had changed completely. Although they didn’t know about all I had got through or the bitterness I kept bottled up inside, still they understood that the bad person whom higher authority had sent to them to keep a close watch over was actually just a naive student.
Once I got back to Jiepai, I was reunited with the 22 people I had arrived with at that temple [??] before getting my assignment. Together with three other “classmates” and Lu Zhao I was put into the home of Auntie Wang who lived less than 100 meters from the commune dining hall. She set aside a room for the five of us.
– 55 –
Auntie Wang, her only child, and her daughter-in-law all worked in the public dining hall. The Jiepai public dining hall was many times bigger than the one in Zhaojiawan. More than nine people worked in the kitchen or fed the pigs. About three hundred peasants and their children ate in the dining hall. Next to the dining hall were some small shops that sold tobacco, wine and sundries. Behind the dining hall were pigpens suitable for raising several hundred pigs. However these days there were only about 20 pigs. The pigs had originally been raised by various households but now, after collectivization, all the pigs were moved here. These feeder pigs resembled the scrawny picky eaters that Zhao Fan had at home.
However, these sweet potatoes weren’t measured by quantity, they not only supplied the dining hall, but with each ton picked a big clay container of potatoes was lifted so that the people’s commune members could eat their fill and work hard in the fields. They set aside for those hungry skin and bone feeder pigs. Yet still the food management person said that there was only a limited quantity of sweet potatoes. It hadn’t been decided how many the commune members would get. The pig raisers selected two pigs from the hundreds crying out to be fed and put them in a separate pen. These two pigs would be slaughtered to feed commune members at Spring Festival time. Strangely enough, these two pigs in the separate pen, when fed sweet potatoes for only a little over a month, grew to be fat pigs of over 200 kilograms.
The ones who suffered most from having sweet potatoes meal after meal were the several dozen children. At each meal, the children gathered around the container of sweet potatoes to choose sweet potatoes that had some grains of rice sticking to them. Children under three years of age cried out for their mothers to give them something to eat. Each meal in the dining hall was noisy.
Auntie Wang’s daughter-in-law had just had a baby. She didn’t have enough breast milk to feed the baby and so made some rice gruel to feed the child. The grain management officer had to tell her, “Everyone still gets the same daily ration of 100 grams of grain. For infants, the commune provides in addition 100 grams of white sugar. People will talk so we can’t make special arrangements. How could we issue a special ration of rice gruel in the middle of the big meal given to everyone?” Auntie Wang had no alternative, she made an application that the four adults in the household will only eat sweet potatoes and all their grain ration will be assigned to the child to make rice gruel.
Unexpectedly, this was opposed by other members of the commune. The collective referred the matter to the Party Secretary, asking that Auntie Wang be fired from her job at the dining hall and be assigned to work with everyone else in the fields. The entire household made a sacrifice for the sake of the newborn. The adults made their own no-rice mess in their kitchen.
Part Five Jiepai People’s Commune
The common dining hall became the center of life, gatherings, and “study meetings” for the Jiepai People’s Commune and the nearly one hundred peasant households in its vicinity. At every meal, two speakers hanging from the ceiling relayed the Nantong mining district broadcast. I had gotten used to the monotonous sound of the broadcast loudspeakers during my student days. I don’t remember clearly just when I started to detest those repetitious, lying and boring broadcasts. What was said was false and not credible. The number of lies in the broadcasts grew day by day. If you just thought the opposite of what the broadcasts were saying, you could draw correct conclusions about what was really going on.
The headlines on the New China News Agency reports were just the opposite of what I knew from my own personal experience. The crops weren’t flourishing. The contrast couldn’t be starker. Ripened grain was rotting on the ground, unharvested. The peasants were overcome with hunger. They didn’t have any food. Their bodies were swelling with dropsy. Many died. For example in 1958, the report came from Sui County in Hunan Province that the wheat harvest there of 2300 jin of wheat had been grown per mu (Translator’s Note: one jin is a traditional Chinese unit of about half a kilogram; a mu is one-sixth of an acre, so this comes to about 4600 lbs of wheat per acre) was a great achievement of socialism. After that county won the honor of setting the Chinese record for spring wheat production, othèr localities did not want to appear laggard and so they claimed tremendous achievements of their own by producing 4000 jin, 4500 jin or even 5000 jin per mu.
It was already in late spring when those reports came out. The newspapers and broadcasts sounded like a casino where the stakes pushed every higher and higher. Finally with one final push, the Red Flag People’s Commune in Huanjiang County, Guangxi boasted a middle season rice harvest of 130,000 jin per mu.
At the same time as these reports of record grain harvests were coming out, the broadcasts also reported tremendous achievements throughout the country in the production of cotton, oils, vegetables etc. Some reported production that “augured well” for the country such as one million jin of Chinese cabbage per mu and of live pigs weighing 8000 jin.
– 56 –
What purpose could these monstrous lies have except to provide proof that Mao Zedong’s People’s Communes were a success? What could its effect be other than to bolster the morale of China’s agriculture as the hungry and destitute peasants cried out? How could Mao Zedong but stupid enough not to know what was going on? Could Mao have been ignorant of the mere basics of governing a state that he didn’t know the very simple principle that “the people see getting food as the most important thing” and that “How can a man who is not trustworthy achieve anything?”
During my year in the countryside, each time I heard on the broadcast “The East is Red” and “The People’s Commune’ are good”, I had this instinctive reaction — they are lying to the Chinese people.
Each lying news report I heard was a tragedy for this country of six hundred million people. Today, the news coming from the loudspeakers was the exact opposite of what was really going on. I couldn’t have been more disgusted with the Communist Party!
Just as Mao Zedong passed along with his endorsement the report “Do Real Stuff and Abandon Empty Theory” of the Hongzhao County, Shanxi Province Communist Party Committee, which lavished praise on the record harvest of 89,000 jin per mu had been achieved. This kind of fairy tale rose from the “imagination of the revolutionary romantic” that a determined assault seemingly sufficient to batter through to heaven itself could make it possible to achieve in just one day what would otherwise be the labor of twenty years.
This was nothing other than a replay of the farcical old story from Chinese history “Setting up a demonstration for fear that the ministers will not obey, so that they will be too frightened to se that the deer before them is not a horse as the ruler has said.”
However, while he was in Zhongnanhai getting reports from throughout the country about great agricultural achievements and record harvests, and saying in great delight “what will we ever do with all the excess food”, an historically unprecedented famine was descending upon China’s six hundred million people.
Part I A High Productivity Experimental Field
In line with the high production general policy, the Jiepai People’s Commune designated a 100 mu wheat field as a high production field. According to the guidance from the commune cadres, if we cultivate the field intensively and plant the seedling closely, we will achieve productivity of at least 5000 jin per mu — even more than in previous years we had grown in a 5000 mu wheat field. Therefore the Jiepai Party Committee after the October 1st National Day Celebration rallied a troop force of 200 laborers to fight a total war of wheat seed planting.
A ten mu field near the commune dining hall was chosen as the first experimental field. According to the direction of the construction corps (bingtuan) headquarters, a group of two hundred laborers, including we thirteen “rightists’ ‘ were divided up into four ranks. The commune cadres and commanding officers of the bingtuan held a meter long bamboo pole to check on each transplanting row. If a meter deep trench had not been dug, then the laborer would have to redo the work. That field was Jiepai’s most fertile winter paddy field. In order to carry out the “deep plowing” we put in two weeks worth of irrigation water. Even so, the fertile soil was no deeper than two-thirds of a meter. If we were to dig to the one meter depth, we had to dig into the fertile mud, put down a layer of old red millet husks on it, and then turn over the soil so that we could dig to the standard one meter depth. This work was like digging a trench for trench warfare. At the start we would get ourselves all muddy but still didn’t get to the required depth of one meter. Later, after we fumbled our way to more experience, we loosened up a big pile of red millet, threw down our hoes, jumped into the rows and trenches and threw a clump after clump of millet onto the fertile soil. Then we could say that the trench was deep enough.
The row hadn’t been dug more than a meter deep but we were already covered with mud and perspiration. Our hands had blood blisters. Our legs hurt so much that we shook as we stood up.
– 57 –
That confused that female sent-down cadre. She was short. The depth of the row trenches reached her waist. Getting out was harder for her. Although she hadn’t worked more than an hour, she could only sit down in the trench and not get up. When she looked at that “field” which had just been dug out, it seemed like an ironing board with a “red belt” that she had trampled into shape. She exclaimed, “This is not planting crops. This is tormenting people!”. When she screamed, everyone turned around, leaning on their hoes, and looked out over the area that had been dug out. They just stood there silently and caught their breath. The “commander” with the white ribbon around his head who monitored the depth of the trench digging walked over, and yelled at us in a stern voice to get back to work.
She had been depressed ever since she had been sent down to the countryside. Her self-respect was eroded by people yelling at her so she talked back at the man in the white turban. All the classmates roared with laughter. One classmate however, said nothing. He just shouldered his hoe and kept on digging. The argument at the work site also brought over Lu Zhao. He was also today’s “commander”. When he saw her arguing with a cadre from the commune, he walked over and yelled at her to get up.
The first work day lasted until sundown with only an hour for lunch and a rest break of only half an hour. We saw in the gathering twilight the “fruits” of our day’s labor. Old peasants shook their heads and sighed, “What kind of stupid idea is this? When we plant the wheat, how will it take root?” We, however, couldn’t be bothered with thoughts about how crops would grow and what harvests would be like on the experimental field. We had some soup and then carelessly splashed off most of the mud that was covering our bodies. We all wanted to collapse into bed but Lu Zhao ordered us to go to the dining hall. At the dining hall Lu led a criticism session on the words and actions of that sent down cadre.
Our status made us right-wing students ineligible to say anything. The three other sent-down cadres however sat mutely and didn’t utter a word of protest. Therefore Lu Zhao asked the classmate who had continued digging to say something.
– 56 –
The classmate started to curse that female cadre who had been sent down to the countryside. For a rightist under supervision to turn the tables and criticize a sent-down cadre was a serious violation of the rules.
If one thinks more about it, however, hasn’t “switching sides” been approved behavior all along? Looking at this more objectively, among us ten-odd “rightist” classmates, all of us very naive victims, who doesn’t want to escape this terrible situation and return home again and go back to school and study hard in the classroom?
When I heard people criticizing her for her mistakes, I felt myself gradually getting more alert and guarded. Talking with these “rightists” is very different from speaking with illiterate peasants who speak frankly.
However, as a result of her protest, we didn’t have to dig so deeply in the field the next day. We could dig just to the bottom of the soil so we made more progress. Nonetheless it took 200 people eight days to dig out a 10 mu field. After we dug, we had to break up the soil, break up clumps, plant seeds and then cover them with soil. The deep-plowed soil was pounded mirror-flat by the diggers.
The digging out of small rows was strictly managed by the commanders. Each of them held two wooden sticks — one only an inch long, like a match. These measured the width of the hollow. The other stick, two inches long, measured the distance between hollows.
Production of five thousand jin per mu is simply a matter of the average harvest of ears of wheat per row times the number of rows. Therefore measurement of the rows is essential to “ensuring” production of five thousand jin per mu. Who would dare say that the inventor of “close planting” did not understand science? Moreover, trampling the flat of the field and then digging it with hoes, no matter how gentle the digging might be, always brings up clods of earth that are bigger than two inches long.
The advantage was that even if there wasn’t time to let the plowed soil dry and harden, we could use a hoe to beat down the soft soil so that it in the end meets the requirements after all. However, the garden rows beaten down by the hoes, shiny as they may be and as densely packed as a beehive, have in the end a disadvantage when the time comes to plant. If you are not careful to set them straight into the rows, the seeds can easily scatter. Actually packing the rows so close together comes out in the end a lot like just scattering the seeds.
– 57 –
Naturally, since this was an order that had come down from the highest authority in Beijing, we had taken to heart the lesson and didn’t dare to grumble about this in any way at all. For the entire year from October 1958 to October 1959, hardly a single grain of wheat was reaped. This man made disaster resulted in a great famine that starved to death more people than in any famine in all of history.
When Old Man Wang celebrated his 30th anniversary, two tree stumps burned bright red in a pit in the central room of their house. Old Wang was in good spirits. Possibly the excitement in the air that evening had dispelled his sadness at living alone for so many years. He was clearly a real old school Chinese peasant. He set down two cups of sorghum liquor and started to talk about the decades he had worked helping the landlord for over a decade starting in 1941.
He said, “In those days I was a tenant farmer in seven of Old Li Qi’s five mu fields. In two mu of sloping fields, at the autumn harvest I paid in grain. However, do you realize that this was a very fertile spot — a real storehouse of heaven?” He wiped his white beard and looked at us like a teacher teaching a group of children. Every year when we had harvested everything, those seven mu produced about three thousand jin. Even after paying the rent, in the worst years we could still fill up the grain bin. In my generation we never heard of people going hungry.”
Auntie Wang turned pale and signaled for him to stop talking but Wang, already red in the face from his wine, paid her no attention. He kept on chattering, “When the Mid Autumn Festival came, I went with Lao Qi to visit tenant farmers to give them some grain. Li Qi was kind, he gave us several jugs of wine. The Li family winery is still over in Yanwan. Do you know how much wine was in a jug? A big one held sixty jin, a small one thirty jin. He gave all his tenant farmers a big jug.
He drank another small cup of wine and held it out in front of him. “In those days, we observed our customers. The host family would go from door to door, going to the homes of each of the tenant farmers and invite them to drink with him. This went on from the evening of the last day of the year until the fifth day of the Lunar New Year. On the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month everyone would slaughter a pig for the Spring Festival. Every household would bring along their New Year’s pig to be slaughtered. By the time we got to the fifteenth day of the Lunar New Year, we had all gotten tired of eating meat. Every year we would save half a side, smoke it and hang it up.” He spoke very cheerfully, his callus-covered hands gesturing vigorously.
Lu Zhao had already gotten red in the face from alcohol. He listened and said nothing. He had lived for a long time in the city and knew nothing of what village life had been like “before Liberation” so Wang’s words came to him as a revelation. When Wang spoke of Old Li Qi, I thought of how I saw how the landlord, a man who had passed the county-level imperial examination, was struggling in Longfeng Village in 1950. That landlord I had seen kneeling in hot coals surrounded by seated peasants, bleeding at both knees, whimpering. Those people are all dead by now. What stays with us now is strict control by the People’s Militia. Nobody dares utter a single word of truth. Naturally, the problem wasn’t with Old Li Qi. What happened to him was what was happening to us now.
The sky grew darker and so Old Wang gradually stopped talking. Children fell into his embrace and fell asleep by the fire. I stared, transfixed, at Auntie Wang’s whitening hair and realized that she looked about ten years older than my mother.
In my mind I again revisited the extraordinary things that I had experienced over the past year. I had been isolated for self-reflection, labeled a rightist, struggled against in a struggle session, and sent down to the countryside; father and son Zhao toasting their corn; the full-on battle for agricultural production in Jiepai….
I felt in those big changes the misfortunes and desperate situation of hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants and especially those who had themselves experienced the real story behind the “experimental fields that were ‘launching satellites’ – setting new records in agricultural production” 卫星实验田 Wèixīng shìyàntián that the newspapers were in those days praising to the skies.
– 58 –
In the long years that followed, I have always suspected that the perversion of human nature leaves us hopeless.
Next installment: Rightist Memoir III: Rightist-Fueled Rural Blast Furnaces
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