Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

23. "The More Books You Read, the More Stupid You Become Become"

Jin-ming and I sat on the bank of the Golden Sand River, waiting for a ferry. I rested my head on my hands and stared at the unruly river tumbling past me on its long journey from the Himalayas to the sea. It was to become the longest fiver in China the Yangtze, after joining the Min River at Yibin, 300 miles downstream.

Toward the end of its journey, the Yangtze spreads and meanders, irrigating vast areas of flat farmland. But here, in the mountains, it was too violent to build a bridge across it. Only ferries linked Sichuan province with Yunnan to the east. Every summer, when the torrent was high and fierce with the melted snow, the river claimed lives. Just a few days before, it had swallowed a ferry with three of my schoolmates in it.

Dusk was descending. I felt very ill. Jin-ming had spread his jacket on the ground for me so I would not have to sit on the damp grass. Our aim was to cross over to Yunnan and try to hitch a lift to Chengdu. The roads through Xichang were cut off by fighting between Rebel factions, so we had to try a roundabout route. Nana and Wen had offered to get my registration book and luggage, and those of Xiao-hong, to Chengdu.

A dozen strong men rowed the ferry against the current, chanting a song in unison. When they reached the middle of the river, they stopped and let the ferry be carried downstream toward the Yunnan side. Huge waves broke over us several times. I had to hold on tight to the side while the boat listed helplessly. Normally I would have been terrified, but now I felt only numbness. I was too preoccupied with the death of my grandmother.

A solitary truck stood on a basketball court in the town on the Yunnan bank, Qjaojia. The driver readily agreed to give us a lift in the back. All the time, I kept turning over in my head what I could have done to save my grandmother. As the truck jolted along, we passed banana groves at the back of mud houses in the embrace of cloud-capped mountains. Seeing the gigantic banana leaves, I remembered the small, potted, fruitless banana by the door of my grandmother's hospital ward in Chengdu. When Bing came to see me, I used to sit beside it with him, chatting deep into the night. My grandmother did not like him because of his cynical grin and the casualness with which he treated adults, which she considered disrespectful. Twice she came staggering downstairs to call me back.

I had hated myself for making her anxious, but I could not help it. I could not control my desire to see Bing. Now how I wished I could start all over again! I would not do anything to upset her. I would just make sure she got better although how I did not know.

We passed through Yibin. The road wound down Emerald Screen Hill on the edge of the city. Staring at the elegant redwoods and bamboo groves, I thought back to April, when I had just returned home to Meteorite Street from Yibin. I was telling my grandmother how I had gone to sweep Dr. Xia's tomb, which was on the side of this hill, on a sunny spring day. Aunt Jun-ying had given me some special 'silver money' to burn at the tomb. God knows where she had got it from, as it had been condemned as 'feudal." I searched up and down for hours, but could not find the tomb. The hillside was a battered mess. The Red Guards had leveled the cemetery and smashed the tombstones, as they considered burial an 'old' practice. I can never forget the intense flame of hope in my grandmother's eyes when I mentioned the visit, and how it darkened almost immediately when I stupidly added that the tomb was lost. Her look of disappointment had been haunting me. Now I kicked myself for not telling her a white lie.

But it was too late.

When Jin-ming and I got home, after more than a week on the road, there was only her empty bed. I remembered seeing her stretched out on it, her hair loose but still tidy, biting her lips hard, her cheeks sunken. She had suffered her murderous pains in silence and composure, never screaming, never writhing. Because of her stoicism, I had failed to realize how serious her illness was.

My mother was in detention. What Xiao-her and Xiaohong told me about Grandmother's last days caused me such anguish that I had to ask them to stop. It was only years later that I learned what had happened after I left.

She would do some housework, then go back to bed and lie there with her face taut, trying to fight back the pain.

She constantly murmured that she was anxious about my trip, and worried about my younger brothers.

"What will become of the boys, with no schools?" she would sigh.

Then one day she could not get out of bed. No doctor would come to the house, so my sister's boyfriend, Specs, carried her to the hospital on his back. My sister walked by his side, propping her up. After a couple of journeys, the doctors asked them not to come anymore. They said they could find nothing wrong with her and there was nothing they could do.

So she lay in bed, waiting for death. Her body became lifeless bit by bit. Her lips moved from time to time, but my sister and brothers could hear nothing. Many times they went to my mother's place of detention to beg for her to be permitted to come home. Each time, they were turned away without being able to see her.

My grandmother's entire body seemed to be dead. But her eyes were still open, looking around expectantly. She would not close them until she had seen her daughter.

At last my mother was allowed home. Over the next two days, she did not leave my grandmother's bedside. Every now and then, my grandmother would whisper something to her. Her last words were about how she had fallen into this pain.

She said the neighbors belonging to Mrs. Shau's group had held a denunciation meeting against her in the courtyard. The receipt for the jewelry she had donated during the Korean War had been confiscated by some Rebels in a house raid. They said she was 'a stinking member of the exploiting class," otherwise how could she have acquired all that jewelry in the first place?

My grandmother said she had had to stand on a small table. The ground was uneven and the table wobbled, and she felt dizzy. The neighbors were yelling at her. The woman who had accused Xiao-fang of raping her daughter hit one leg of the table ferociously with a club. My grandmother could not keep her balance and fell backwards onto the hard ground. She said she had felt a sharp pain ever since.

In fact, there had been no denunciation meeting. But that was the image that haunted my grandmother to her last breath.

On the third day after my mother came home, my grandmother died. Two days later, immediately after my grandmother was cremated, my mother had to return to detention.

I have often dreamed of my grandmother since, and awakened sobbing. She was a great character vivacious, talented, and immensely capable. Yet she had no outlet for her abilities. The daughter of an ambitious small-town policeman, concubine to a warlord, stepmother to an extended but divided family, and mother and mother-inlaw to two Communist officials in all these circumstances she had little happiness. The days with Dr. Xia were lived under the shadow of their past, and together they endured poverty, Japanese occupation, and the civil war. She might have found happiness in looking after her grandchildren, but she was rarely free from anxiety about us. Most of her life she had lived in fear, and she faced death many times.

She was a strong woman, but in the end the disasters which hit my parents, the worries about her grandchildren, the tide of ugly human hostility all conspired to crush her.

But the most unbearable thing for her was what happened to her daughter. It was as though she felt in her own body and soul every bit of the pain that my mother suffered, and she was finally killed by the accumulation of anguish.

There was another, more immediate factor in her death: she was denied proper medical care and could not be looked after, or even seen, by her daughter when she was fatally ill. Because of the Cultural Revolution. How could the revolution be good, I asked myself, when it brought such human destruction, for nothing? Over and over again, I told myself I hated the Cultural Revolution, and I felt even worse because there was nothing I could do.

I blamed myself for not looking after my grandmother as well as I might have. She was in the hospital at the time when I had come to know Bing and Wen. My friendships with them had cushioned and insulated me, and had blunted my awareness of her suffering. I told myself it was despicable to have had any happy feelings at all, by the side of what I'now realized was my grandmother's deathbed. I resolved never to have a boyfriend again. Only by self denial I thought, could I expiate some of my guilt.

The next two months I stayed in Chengdu, desperately looking, with Nana and my sister, for a 'relative' nearby whose commune would accept us. We had to find one by the end of the autumn harvest when food was distributed, otherwise we would have nothing to eat for the following year our state supply ran out in January.

When Bing came to see me, I was very cold to him, and told him never to come again. He wrote me letters but I threw them into the stove without opening them- a gesture I had perhaps picked up from Russian novels. Wen came back from Ningnan with my registration book and luggage, but I refused to see him. Once I passed him on the street, and looked straight through him, catching only a glimpse of his eyes, in which I saw confusion and hurt.

Wen returned to Ningnan. One summer day in 1970, a forest fire broke out near his village. He and a friend rushed out with a couple of brooms to try to put it out. A gust of wind threw a ball of flames into his friend's face, leaving him permanently disfigured. The two of them left Ningnan and crossed into Laos, where there was a war going on between left-wing guerrillas and the United States. At the time a number of high officials' children were going to Laos and Vietnam to fight the Americans secretly, as it was forbidden by the government. These young people had become disillusioned with the Cultural Revolution, and hoped they could get back their youthful adrenaline by taking on the "US imperialists."

One day soon after they got to Laos, Wen heard the alarm which signaled that American planes were coming.

He was the first to leap up and charge out, but in his inexperience he stepped on a mine which his comrades had planted themselves. He was blown to smithereens. My last memory of him is his perplexed and wounded eyes watching me from a muddy street corner in Chengdu.

Meanwhile, my family was scattered. On 17 October 1969 Lin Biao ordered the country into a state of war, using as a pretext clashes which had broken out earlier that year on the border with the Soviet Union. In the name of 'evacuation," he sent his opponents in the army and the disgraced top leaders out of the capital and placed them under house arrest or detention in different parts of China. The Revolutionary Committees used this opportunity to speed up the deportation of 'undesirables." The 500 members of my mother's Eastern District staff were ordered out of Chengdu to a place in the Xichang hinterland called Buffalo Boy Flatland. My mother was allowed ten days at home from detention to make arrangements. She put Xiao-her and Xiao-fang on a train to Yibin. Although Aunt Jun-ying was half-paralyzed, there were other aunts and uncles there who could look after them. Jin-ming had been sent by his school to a commune fifty miles northeast of Chengdu.

At the same time Nana, my sister, and I finally found a commune that would take us in a county called Deyang, not far from where Jin-ming was. Specs, my sister's boyfriend, had a colleague from the county who was prepared to claim we were his cousins. Some communes in the area needed more farmhands. Although we had no proof of kinship, no one asked any questions. The only thing that mattered was that we were or at least seemed to be extra labor.

We were allocated to two different production teams, because two extra people was the maximum any one team could accommodate. Nana and I went to one team and my sister to another, three miles away. The railway station was about five hours' walk away, much of it along eighteen inch-wide ridges between rice paddies.

My family of seven was now dispersed in six different places. Xiao-her was happy to leave Chengdu, where the new Chinese-language textbook at his school, compiled by some teachers and members of the propaganda team there, contained a condemnation of my father by name, and Xiaohei was ostracized and bullied.

In the early summer of 1969, his school had been sent to the countryside on the outskirts of Chengdu to help with the harvest. The boys and girls camped separately in two large halls. In the evenings, under the starry vault of the sky, the paths between the paddy fields were frequented by young couples. Romance bloomed, not least in the heart of my fourteen-year-old brother, who started to fancy a girl in his group. After days of summoning up his courage, he nervously approached her one afternoon when they were cutting wheat, and invited her to go for a walk that evening. The girl bent her head and said nothing. Xiao-her thought this was a sign of 'silent consent," mo-xu.

He leaned on a haystack in the moonlight, and waited with all the anxieties and longings of first love. Suddenly, he heard a whistle. A gang of boys from his form appeared.

They shoved him around and called him names, then they threw a jacket over his head and started to hit and kick him. He managed to break free, and staggered to the door of one of the teachers and shouted for help. The teacher opened the door, but pushed him away, saying, "I can't help you! Don't you dare come back!"

Xiao-her was too frightened to return to his camp, and spent the night hiding in a haystack. He realized it was his 'sweetheart' who had called in the bullies: she had felt insulted that the son of a 'counterrevolutionary capitalistroader' should have the audacity to fancy her.

When they returned to Chengdu, Xiao-her went to his street gang for help. They appeared at his school with much flaunting of muscles, and a gigantic wolfhound, and hauled the leading bully out of the classroom. He was shaking, his face ashen. But before the gang set upon him, Xiao-her was overtaken by pity, and asked his helmsman to let the boy go.

Pity had become an alien concept, and was seen as a sign of stupidity. Xiao-her was bullied even more than before. He made a feeble attempt at enlisting the help of his gang again, but they told him they would not help a 'shrimp."

Xiao-her approached his new school in Yibin dreading more bullying. To his amazement, he received a warm.

almost emotional welcome. The teachers, the propaganda team members who were running the school, the children all seemed to have heard of my father and referred to him with open admiration. Xiao-her immediately acquired a certain prestige. The prettiest girl in the school became his girlfriend. Even the most thuggish boys treated him with respect. It was clear to him that my father was a revered figure in Yibin, in spite of the fact that everyone knew he was in disgrace, and the Tings were in power.

The population of Yibin had suffered horribly under the Tings. Thousands had died or been injured in the factional fighting or under torture. One family friend escaped death because when his children went to collect his corpse in the morgue, they found he was still breathing.

People in Yibin had developed a great yearning for the days of peace, for officials who did not abuse their power, for a government that was dedicated to getting things to work. The focus of this nostalgia was the early 1950s, when my father was the governor. It was then that the Communists were at their most popular just after they had replaced the Kuomintang, put an end to starvation, and established law and order, but before their incessant political campaigns (and their own, Mao-induced famine).

My father became identified in the folk memory with the good old days. He was seen as the legendary good official, in stark contrast with the Tings.

Because of him, Xiao-her enjoyed his stay in Yibin although he learned lit He at school. Teaching materials still consisted of Mao's works and People's Daily articles, and no one had any authority over the pupils since Mao had not retracted his blanket dismissal of formal learning.

The teachers and the workers' propaganda team tried to enlist Xiao-her's help to enforce discipline in his class.

But here even my father's reputation failed, and Xiao-her was eventually ostracized by some of the boys for being the teacher's 'lackey." A whispering campaign began claiming that he had embraced his girlfriend under lampposts in the street, which was a 'bourgeois crime." Xiao-her lost his privileged position and was told to write self-criticisms and to pledge to carry out thought reform. The girl's mother turned up one day insisting on a surgical examination to prove her daughter's chastity. After a big scene, she took her daughter out of the school.

Xiao-her had one close friend in his class, a popular boy of seventeen who had one sensitive spot: his mother had never married, but had five children all with different and unknown fathers, which was extremely unusual in a society where 'illegitimacy' was heavily stigmatized, in spite of having been formally abolished. Now, in one of the witch-hunting tides, she was publicly humiliated as a 'bad element." The boy felt very ashamed of his mother, and told Xiao-her in private that he hated her. One day the school was awarding a best-swimmer prize (because Mao liked swimming), and Xiao-her's friend was unanimously nominated by the pupils; but when the award was announced, it was not to him. Apparently one young woman teacher had objected: "We can't give it to him: his mother is a "worn shoe."

When the boy heard this, he grabbed a kitchen chopper and stormed into the teacher's office. Someone stopped him while the teacher scuttled off and hid. Xiao-her knew how much this incident had hurt his friend: for the first time, the boy was seen weeping bitterly. That night, Xiaohei and some of the other boys sat up with him, trying to comfort him. The next day, he disappeared. His corpse was washed up on the bank of the Golden Sand River. He had tied his hands together before he jumped.

The Cultural Revolution not only did nothing to modernize the medieval elements in China's culture, it actually gave them political respectability.

"Modern' dictatorship and ancient intolerance fed on each other. Any one who fell foul of the age-old conservative attitude, could now become a political victim.

My new commune in Deyang was in an area of low hills dotted with shrubs and eucalyptus trees. Most of the farmland was good, producing two major harvests a year, one of wheat and one of rice. Vegetables, rapeseed, and sweet potatoes grew in abundance. After Ningnan, the biggest relief for me was that we did not have to do any climbing, and I could breathe normally instead of panting for breath all the time. I did not mind the fact that walking here meant staggering along narrow, muddy ridges between paddy fields. I often fell on my bottom, and sometimes in a grab for support I would push the person in front usually Nana into a rice paddy. Nor did I mind another peril of walking at night: the possibility of being bitten by dogs, quite a few of which had rabies.

When we first arrived, we stayed next to a pigsty. At night, we fell asleep to a symphony of pigs grunting, mosquitoes whining, and dogs barking. The room smelled permanently of pig manure and anti-mosquito incense. After a while the production team built Nana and me a two-room cottage on a plot of land which had been used for cutting mud bricks. The land was lower than the rice paddy which lay just across a narrow footpath, and in spring and summer, when the paddy He Ids were filled with water, or after heavy rain, marshy water would ooze up from the mud floor. Nana and I had to take off our shoes, roll up our trouser legs, and wade into the cottage. Fortunately the double bed we shared had tall legs, so we slept about two feet above the muddy water. Getting into bed involved putting a bowl of clean water on a stool, climbing up onto the stool, and washing our feet. Living in these damp conditions, my bones and muscles ached all the time.

But the cottage was also fun. When the flood receded, mushrooms would spring up under the bed and in the corners of the rooms. With a little imagination, the floor looked like something out of a fairy tale. Once I dropped a spoonful of peas on the ground. After the water had come and gone, a cluster of delicate petals unfolded from slender stems, as though they had just awakened to the rays of the sun, which brimmed through the wood-framed opening in the wall which was our window.

The view was perpetually magical to me. Beyond our door lay the village pond, overgrown with water lilies and lotuses. The path in front of the cottage led up to a pass in the hill about 350 feet above us. The sun set behind it, framed by black rocks. Before darkness fell, silver mist would hang over the fields at the foot of the hills. Men, women, and children walked back to the village after their day's work in the evening haze, carrying baskets, hoes, and sickles, and were met by their dogs who yapped and leaped about them. They looked as though they were sailing in clouds. Smoke curved out from the thatched cottages.

Wooden barrels clicked at the stone well, as people fetched water for the evening meal. Loud voices were heard as people chatted by the bamboo groves, the men squatting and puffing their long, slender pipes. Women neither smoked nor squatted: these were traditionally considered unbecoming for women, and no one in 'revolutionary' China had talked about changing these attitudes.

It was in Deyang that I came to know how China's peasants really lived. Each day started with the production team leader allocating jobs. All the peasants had to work, and they each earned a fixed number of' work points' gong fen for their day's work. The number of work points accumulated was an important element in the distribution at the end of the year. The peasants got food, fuel, and other daily necessities, plus a tiny sum of cash, from the production team. After the harvest, the production team paid part of it over as tax to the state. Then the rest was divided up. First, a basic quantity was meted out equally to every male, and about a quarter less to every female.

Children under three received a half portion. Since a child just over three obviously could not eat an adult's share, it was desirable to have more children. The system functioned as a positive disincentive to birth control.

The remainder of the crop was then distributed according to how many work points each person had earned.

Twice a year, the peasants would all assemble to fix the daily work points for each person. No one missed these meetings. In the end, most young and middle-aged men would be allocated ten points a day, and women eight.

One or two whom the whole village acknowledged to be exceptionally strong got an extra point.

"Class enemies' like the former village landlord and his family got a couple of points less than the others, in spite of the fact that they worked no less hard and were usually given the toughest jobs. Nana and I, being inexperienced 'city youth," got four the same number as children barely in their teens; we were told this was 'to start with," though mine were never raised.

Since there was little variation from individual to individual of the same gender in terms of daily points, the number of work points accumulated depended mainly on how many days one worked, rather than how one worked.

This was a constant source of resentment among the villagers in addition to being a massive discouragement to efficiency. Every day, the peasants would screw up their eyes to watch how the others were working in case they themselves were being taken advantage of. No one wanted to work harder than others who earned the same number of work points. Women felt bitter about men who sometimes did the same kind of job as they, but earned two points more. There were constant arguments.

We frequently spent ten hours in the fields doing a job which could have been done in five. But we had to be out there for ten hours for it to be counted as a full day. We worked in slow motion, and I stared at the sun impatiently willing it to go down, and counted the minutes until the whistle blew, signaling an end to work. I soon discovered that boredom was as exhausting as backbreaking labor.

Here, as in Ningnan, and much of Sichuan, there were no machines at all. Farming methods were more or less the same as 2,000 years ago, except for some chemical fertilizers, which the team received from the government in exchange for grain. There were practically no work animals except water buffaloes for plowing. Everything else, including the transport of water, manure, fuel, vegetables, and grain, was done entirely by hand, and shoulders, using bamboo baskets or wooden barrels on a shoulder pole. My biggest problem was carrying loads. My right shoulder was perpetually swollen and sore from having to carry water from the well to the house. Whenever a young man who fancied me came to visit I displayed such helplessness that he never failed to offer to fill the water tank for me. And not only the water tank jugs, bowls, and even cups too.

The team leader considerately stopped assigning me to carry things, and sent me to do 'light' jobs with the children and the older and pregnant women. But they were not always light to me. Ladling out manure soon made my arms sore, not to mention churning up my stomach when I saw the fat maggots swimming on the surface. Picking cotton in a sea of brilliant whiteness might have made an idyllic picture, but I quickly realized how demanding it was directly under the relentless sun, in temperatures well over 85 F, with high humidity, among prickly branches that left scratches all over me.

I preferred transplanting rice shoots. This was considered a hard job because one had to bend so much.

Often at the end of the day, even the toughest men complained about not being able to stand up straight. But I loved the cool water on my legs in the otherwise unbearable heat, the sight of the neat rows of tender green, and the soft mud under my bare feet, which gave me a sensuous pleasure. The only thing that really bothered me was the leeches. My first encounter was when I felt something ticklish on my leg. I lifted it to scratch and saw a fat, slithery creature bending its head into my skin, busily trying to squeeze in. I let out a mighty scream. A peasant girl next to me giggled. She found my squeamishness funny. Nevertheless, she trudged over and slapped my leg just above the leech. It fell into the water with a plop.

On winter mornings, in the two-hour work period before breakfast, I climbed up the hills with the 'weaker' women to collect firewood. There were scarcely any trees on the hills, and even the bushes were few and far between. We often had to walk a long way. We cut with a sickle, grabbing the plants with our free hand. The shrubs were covered with thorns, quite a few of which would always manage to embed themselves in my left palm and wrist. At first I spent a long time trying to pick them out, but eventually I got used to leaving them to come out on their own, after the spots became inflamed.

We gathered what the peasants called 'feather fuel." This was pretty useless, and burned up in no time. Once I voiced my regret about the lack of proper trees. The women with me said it had not always been like this. Before the Great Leap Forward, they told me, the hills had been covered with pine, eucalyptus, and cypress. They had all been felled to feed the 'backyard furnaces' to produce steel. The women told me this placidly, with no bitterness, as though it were not the cause of their daily battle for fuel. They seemed to treat it as something which life had thrust on them, like many other misfortunes. I was shocked to come face-to-face, for the first time, with the disastrous consequences of the Great Leap, which I had known only as a 'glorious success."

I found out a lot of other things. A 'speak-bitterness' session was organized for the peasants to describe how they had suffered under the Kuomintang, and to generate gratitude to Mao, particularly among the younger generation. Some peasants talked about childhoods of unrelieved hunger, and lamented that their own children were so spoiled that they often had to be coaxed to finish their food.

Then their conversation turned to a particular famine.

They described having to eat sweet potato leaves and digging into the ridges between the fields in the hope of finding some roots. They mentioned the many deaths in the village. Their stories reduced me to tears. After saying how they hated the Kuomintang and how they loved Chairman Mao, the peasants referred to this famine as taking place at 'the time of forming the communes." Suddenly it struck me that the famine they were talking about was under the Communists. They had confused the two regimes. I asked: "Were there unprecedented natural calamities in this period? Wasn't that the cause of the problem?"

"Oh no," they said.

"The weather could not have been better and there was plenty of grain in the fields. But that man' they pointed to a cringing forty-year-old 'ordered the men away to make steel, and half the harvest was lost in the fields. But he told us: no matter, we were in the paradise of Communism now and did not have to worry about food.

Before, we had always had to control our stomachs, but then we ate our fill in the commune canteen; we threw away the leftovers; we even fed the pigs with precious rice.

Then the canteen had no more food, but he placed guards outside the store. The rest of the grain was to be shipped to Peking and Shanghai there were foreigners there."

Bit by bit, the full picture came out. The cringing man had been the leader of the production team during the Great Leap. He and his cronies had smashed the peasants' woks and stoves so they could not cook at home, and so the woks could be fed into the furnaces. He had reported vastly exaggerated harvests, with the result that the taxes were so high they took every morsel of grain the peasants had left. The villagers had died in scores. After the famine, he was blamed for all the wrongs in the village. The commune allowed the villagers to vote him out of office, and labeled him a 'class enemy."

Like most class enemies, he was not put in prison but kept 'under surveillance' by his fellow villagers. This was Mao's way: to keep 'enemy' figures among the people so they always had someone visible and at hand to hate. Whenever a new campaign came along, this man would be one of the 'usual suspects' to be rounded up and attacked afresh. He was always assigned the hardest jobs, and was allocated only seven work points a day, three fewer than most of the other men. I never saw anyone talking to him. Several times I spotted village children throwing stones at his sons.

The peasants thanked Chairman Mao for punishing him. No one questioned his guilt, or the degree of his responsibility. I sought him out, on my own, and asked him his story.

He seemed pathetically grateful to be asked.

"I was carrying out orders," he kept saying.

"I had to carry out orders… Then he sighed: "Of course, I didn't want to lose my post. Somebody else would have taken my place.

Then what would have happened to me and my kids? We probably would have died of hunger. A production team leader is small, but at least he can die after everyone else in the village."

His words and the peasants' stories shook me to the core. It was the first time I had come across the ugly side of Communist China before the Cultural Revolution. The picture was vastly different from the rosy official version.

In the hills and fields of Deyang my doubts about the Communist regime deepened.

I have sometimes wondered whether Mao knew what he was doing putting the sheltered urban youth of China in touch with reality. But then he was confident that much of the population would not be able to make rational deductions with the fragmentary information available to them.

Indeed, at the age of eighteen I was still only capable of vague doubts, not explicit analysis of the regime. No matter how much I hated the Cultural Revolution, to doubt Mao still did not enter my mind.

In Deyang, as in Ningnan, few peasants could read the simplest article in a newspaper or write a rudimentary letter. Many could not even write their own name. The Communists' early drive to tackle illiteracy had been pushed aside by incessant witch-hunts. There had once been an elementary school in the village, subsidized by the commune, but at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution the children abused the teacher to their hearts' content.

They paraded him around the village with heavy cast-iron woks piled up on his head and his face blackened with soot. Once they almost fractured his skull. Since then, no one could be persuaded to teach.

Most peasants did not miss the school.

"What's the point?" they would say.

"You pay fees and read for years, and in the end you are still a peasant, earning your food with your sweat. You don't get a grain of rice more for being able to read books. Why waste time and money?

Might as well start earning your work points right away."

The virtual absence of any chance of a better future and the near total immobility for anyone born a peasant took the incentive out of the pursuit of knowledge. Children of school age would stay at home to help their families with their work or look after younger brothers and sisters. They would be out in the fields when they were barely in their teens. As for girls, the peasants considered it a complete waste of time for them to go to school.

"They get married and belong to other people. It's like pouring water on the ground."

The Cultural Revolution was trumpeted as having brought education to the peasants through 'evening classes." One day my production team announced it was starting evening classes and asked Nana and me to be the teachers. I was delighted. However, as soon as the first 'class' began, I realized that this was no education.

The classes invariably started with Nana and me being asked by the production team leader to read out articles by Mao or other items from the People's Daily. Then he would make an hour-long speech consisting of all the latest political jargon strung together in undigested and largly unintelligible hunks. Now and then he would give special orders, all solemnly delivered in the name of Mao.

"Chairman Mao says we must eat two meals of rice porridge and only one meal of solid rice a day."

"Chairman Mao says we mustn't waste sweet potatoes on pigs."

After a hard day's work in the fields, the peasants' minds were on their household chores. Their evenings were valuable to them, but no one dared to skip the 'classes." They just sat there, and eventually dozed off. I was not sorry, to see this form of 'education," designed to stupefy rather than enlighten, gradually wither away.

Without education, the peasants' world was painfully narrow. Their conversations usually centered on minute details of daily living. One woman would spend a whole morning complaining that her sister-in-law had used ten bundles of feather fuel for cooking breakfast when she could have made do with nine (fuel, like everything else, was pooled). Another would grumble for hours that her mother-in-law put too many sweet potatoes in the rice (rice being more precious and desirable than sweet potatoes).

I knew their restricted horizon was not their fault, but nonetheless I found their conversations unbearable.

One unfailing topic of gossip was, of course, sex. A twenty-year-old woman called Mei from the Deyang county town had been assigned to the village next to mine.

She had allegedly slept with a lot of city youths as well as peasants, and every now and then in the fields someone would come up with a lewd story about her. It was rumored that she was pregnant, and had been binding her waist to hide it. In an effort to prove that she was not carrying a 'bastard," Mei deliberately did all the things a pregnant woman was not supposed to do, like carrying heavy loads.

Eventually a dead baby was discovered in the bushes next to a stream in her village. People said it was hers. Nobody knew whether it had been born dead. Her production team leader ordered a hole dug and buried the baby. And that was that, apart from the gossip, which became even more virulent.

The whole story appalled me, but there were other shocks. One of my neighbors had four daughters four dark-skinned, round-eyed beauties. But the villagers did not think they were pretty. Too dark, they said. Pale skin was the main criterion for beauty in much of the Chinese countryside. When it was time for the eldest daughter to get married, the father decided to look for a son-in-law who would come and live in their house. That way, he would not only keep his daughter's work points, but would also get an extra pair of hands. Normally, women married into men's families, and it was considered a great humiliation for a man to marry into a woman's family. But our neighbor eventually found a young man from a very poor mountain area who was desperate to get out and could never do so except through marriage. The young man thus had a very low status. I often heard his father-in-law shouting abuse at him at the top of his voice. To torment the young man, he made his daughter sleep alone when the whim took him. She did not dare to refuse because 'filial piety," which was deep-rooted in Confucian ethics, enjoined that children must obey their parents and because she must not be seen as being keen to sleep with a man, even her husband: for a woman to enjoy sex was considered shameful. I was awakened one morning by a commotion outside my window. The young man had somehow got hold of a few bottles of alcohol made with sweet potatoes and had poured them down his throat. His father in-law had been kicking his bedroom door to get him to start working. When he finally broke the door down, the son-in-law was dead.

One day my production team was making pea noodles, and borrowed my enamel washbowl to carry water. That day, the noodles collapsed into a shapeless mess. The crowd that had gathered excitedly and expectantly around the noodle-making barrel started muttering loudly when they saw me approaching, and glared at me with disgust.

I was scared. Later I was told by some women that the villagers blamed the sagging noodles on me. They said I must have used the bowl to wash when I was menstruating.

The women told me I was lucky to be a 'city youth." If it had been one of them, their menfolk would have given them 'a really good hiding."

On another occasion, a group of young men passing through our village carrying baskets of sweet potatoes were taking a break on a narrow road. Their shoulder poles were lying on the ground, blocking the way. I stepped over one of them. All of a sudden, one of the young men jumped to his feet, picked up his pole, and stood in front of me, with fiery eyes. He looked as though he was going to strike me. From the other peasants, I learned that he believed he would develop shoulder sores if a woman stepped over his pole. I was made to cross back over it 'to undo the poison."

During the whole time I was in the countryside, I never saw any attempt to tackle such warped thinking in fact, it was never even mentioned.

The most educated person in my production team was the former landlord. I had been conditioned to regard landlords as evil, and now, to my initial uneasiness, I found that I got on best with this family. They bore no resemblance to the stereotypes that had been drilled into my mind. The husband did not have cruel, vicious eyes, and his wife did not wiggle her bottom, or make her voice sugary, to appear seductive.

Sometimes, when we were alone, he would talk about his grievances.

"Chang Jung," he once said, "I know you are a kind person. You must be a reasonable person as well, since you have read books. You can judge whether this is fair." Then he told me why he had been classified as a landlord. He had been a waiter in Chengdu in 1948, and had saved up some money by watching every penny. At the time, some farsighted landlords were selling their land cheap, as they could see land reform coming if the Communists reached Sichuan. The waiter was not politically astute, and bought some land, thinking he had got a bargain. He not only soon lost most of it in the land reform, but became a class enemy to boot.

"Alas," he said, with resignation, quoting a classic line, 'one single slip has caused a thousand years of sorrow."

The villagers seemed to feel no hostility toward the landlord and his family, although they kept their distance. But, like all 'class enemies," they were always given the jobs no one else wanted. And the two sons got one work point less than other men, in spite of the fact that they were the hardest-working men in the village. They seemed to me to be highly intelligent, and also the most refined young men around. Their gentleness and gracefulness set them apart, and I found that I felt closer to them than to any other young people in the village. However, in spite of their qualities, no girls wanted to marry them. Their mother told me how much money she had spent buying presents for the few gifts whom the go-betweens had introduced. The gifts would accept the clothes and money and then walk off. Other peasants could have demanded the presents back, but a landlord's family could do nothing. She would sigh long and loud about the fact that her sons had little prospect of decent marriages. But, she told me, they bore their misfortune lightly: after each disappointment, they would try to cheer her up. They would offer to work on market days to earn back the cost of her lost presents.

All these misfortunes were told to me without much drama or emotion. Here it seemed that even shocking deaths were like a stone being dropped into a pond where the splash and the ripple closed over into stillness in no lime.

In the placidity of the village, in the hushed depth of the nights in my damp home, I did a lot of reading and thinking. When I first came to Deyang, Jin-ming gave me several big cases of his black-market books, which he had been able to accumulate because the house raiders had now mostly been packed off to the 'cadres' school' at Miyi, together with my father. All day while I was out in the fields, I itched to get back to them.

I devoured what had survived the burning of my father's library. There were the complete works of Lu Xun, the great Chinese writer of the 1920s and 1930s.

Because he died in 1936, before the Communists came to power, he escaped being persecuted by Mao, and even became a great hero of his whereas Lu Xun's favorite pupil and closest associate, Hu Feng, was personally named by Mao as a counterrevolutionary, and was imprisoned for decades. It was the persecution of Hu Feng that led to the witch-hunt in which my mother was detained in 1955.

Lu Xun had been my father's great favorite. When I was a child, he often read us essays by Lu. I had not understood them at the time, even with my father's explanations, but now I was engrossed. I found that their satirical edge could be applied to the Communists as well as to the Kuomintang. Lu Xun had no ideology, only enlightened humanitarianism. His skeptical genius challenged all assumptions.

He was another whose free intelligence helped liberate me from my indoctrination.

My father's collection of Marxist classics was also useful to me. I read randomly, following the obscure words with my finger, and wondering what on earth those nineteenth century German controversies had to do with Mao's China. But I was attracted by something I had rarely come across in China the logic that ran through an argument.

Reading Marx helped me to think rationally and analytically.

I enjoyed these new ways of organizing my thoughts. At other times I would let my mind slip into more nebulous moods and wrote poetry, in classical styles. While I was working in the fields I was often absorbed in composing poems, which made working bearable, at times even agree able. Because of this, I preferred solitude, and positively discouraged conversation.

One day I had been working all morning, cutting cane with a sickle and eating the juiciest parts near the roots.

The cane went to the commune sugar factory, in exchange for sugar. We had to fill a quota in quantity, but not in quality, so we ate the best parts. When lunch break came, and someone had to stay in the field to keep watch for thieves, I offered my services so I would have some time alone. I would go for my lunch when the peasants came back and so have even more time to myself.

I lay on my back on a stack of canes, a straw hat par fly shading my face. Through the hat I could see the vast turquoise sky. A leaf protruded from the stack above my head, looking disproportionately enormous against the sky.

I half-closed my eyes, feeling soothed by the cool greenness.

The leaf reminded me of the swaying leaves of a grove of bamboo on a similar hot summer afternoon many years before. Sitting in its shade fishing, my father had written a forlorn poem. In the same ge-lu pattern of tones, rhymes, and types of words as his poem, I began to compose one of my own. The universe seemed to be standing still, apart from the light rustle of the refreshing breeze in the cane leaves. Life felt beautiful to me at that moment.

In this period, I snatched at the chance for solitude, and ostentatiously showed that I wanted nothing to do with the world around me, which must have made me seem rather arrogant. And because the peasants were the model I was meant to emulate, I reacted by concentrating on their negative qualities. I did not try to get to know them, or to get on with them.

I was not very popular in the village, although the peasants largely left me alone. They disapproved of me for failing to work as hard as they thought I should. Work was their whole life, and the major criterion by which they judged anyone. Their eye for hard work was both uncompromising and fair, and it was clear to them that I hated physical labor and took every opportunity to stay at home and read my books. The stomach trouble and skin rash I had suffered in Ningnan hit me again as soon as I came to Deyang. Virtually every day I had some sort of diarrhea, and my legs broke out in infected sores. I constantly felt weak and dizzy, but it was no good complaining to the peasants; their harsh life had made them regard all nonfatal illnesses as trivial.

The thing that made me most unpopular, though, was that I was often away. I spent about two-thirds of the time that I should have been in Deyang visiting my parents in their camps, or looking after Aunt Jun-ying in Yibin. Each trip lasted several months, and there was no law forbidding it. But although I did not work nearly enough to earn my keep, I still took food from the village. The peasants were stuck with their egalitarian distribution system, and they were stuck with me they could not throw me out. Naturally, they blamed me, and I felt sorry for them. But I was stuck with them, too. I could not get out.

In spite of their resentment, my production team allowed me to come and go as I liked, which was partly because I had kept my distance from them. I learned that the best way to get by was to be regarded as an unobtrusively aloof outsider. Once you became 'one of the masses," you immediately let yourself in for intrusion and control.

Meanwhile, my sister Xiao-hong was doing well in the neighboring village. Although, like me, she was perpetually bitten by He as and poisoned by manure so that her legs were sometimes so swollen she got fever, she continued to work hard, and was awarded eight work points a day. Specs often came from Chengdu to help her. His factory, like most others, was at a virtual standstill. The management had been 'smashed," and the new Revolutionary Committee was only concerned with getting the workers to take part in the revolution rather than in production, and most just came and went as they pleased. Sometimes Specs worked in the fields in my sister's place to give her a break.

At other times, he worked with her, which delighted the villagers, who said: "This is a bargain. We took in one young girl, but we've ended up with two pairs of hands!"

Nana, my sister, and I used to go to the country market together on market day, which was once a week. I loved the boisterous alleys lined with baskets and shoulder poles.

The peasants would walk for hours to sell a single chicken or a dozen eggs, or a bundle of bamboo. Most moneymaking activities, such as growing cash crops, making baskets, or raising pigs for sale, were banned for individual households, on the grounds that they were 'capitalist." As a result, peasants had very little to exchange for cash. Without money, it was impossible for them to travel to cities, and market day was almost their only source of entertainment. They would meet up with their relatives and friends, the men squatting on the muddy pavements puffing on their pipes.

In spring 1970 my sister and Specs were married. There was no ceremony. In the atmosphere of the day, it did not cross their minds to have one. They just collected their marriage certificate from the commune headquarters and then went back to my sister's village with sweets and cigarettes with which to entertain the villagers. The peasants were thrilled: they could rarely afford these precious treats.

For the peasants, a wedding was a big thing. As soon as the news broke, they crowded into my sister's thatched cottage to offer their congratulations. They brought presents like a handful of dried noodles, a pound of soybeans, and a few eggs, wrapped carefully in red straw paper and fled with straw in a fancy knot. These were no ordinary gifts. The peasants had deprived themselves of valuable items. My sister and Specs were very touched. When Nana and I went to see the new couple, they were teaching the village children how to do 'loyalty dances' for fun.

Marriage did not get my sister out of the countryside, as couples were not automatically granted residence together. Of course, if Specs had been willing to relinquish his city registration, he could easily have settled with my sister, but she could not move to Chengdu with him because she had a country registration. Like tens of millions of couples in China, they lived separately, entitled by regulation to twelve days a year together. Luckily for them, Specs's factory was not working normally, so he could spend a lot of time in Deyang.

After a year in Deyang there was a change in my life: I entered the medical profession. The production brigade to which my team belonged ran a clinic which dealt with simple illnesses. It was funded by all the production teams under the brigade, and treatment was free, but very limited.

There were two doctors. One of them, a young man with a fine, intelligent face, had graduated from the medical school of Deyang County in the fifties, and had come back to work in his native village. The other was middle-aged with a goatee. He had started out as an apprentice to an old country doctor practicing Chinese medicine, and in 1964 he had been sent by the commune to attend a crash course in Western medicine.

At the beginning of 1971, the commune authorities ordered the clinic to take on a 'barefoot doctor." The name came about because the 'doctor' was supposed to live like the peasants, who treasured their shoes too much to wear them in the muddy fields. At the time, there was a big propaganda campaign hailing barefoot doctors as an invention of the Cultural Revolution. My production team jumped at this opportunity to get rid of me: if I worked in the clinic, the brigade, rather than my team, would be responsible for my food and other income.

I had always wanted to be a doctor. The illnesses in my family, particularly the death of my grandmother, had driven home to me how important doctors were. Before I went to Deyang, I had started learning acupuncture from a friend, and I had been studying a book called A Barefoot Doctor's Manual, one of the few printed items allowed in those days.

The propaganda about barefoot doctors was one of Mao's political maneuvers. He had condemned the pre Cultural Revolution Health Ministry for not looking after peasants and concerning itself only with city dwellers, especially Party officials. He also condemned doctors for not wanting to work in the countryside, particularly in the remote areas. But Mao took no responsibility as head of the regime, nor did he order any practical steps to remedy the situation, such as giving instructions to build more hospitals or train more proper doctors, and during the Cultural Revolution the medical situation got worse. The propaganda line about peasants having no doctors was really intended to generate hatred against the pre-Cultural Revolution Party system, and against intellectuals (this category included doctors and nurses).

Mao offered a magic cure to the peasants: 'doctors' who could be turned out en masse barefoot doctors.

"It is not at all necessary to have so much formal training," he said.

"They should mainly learn and raise their standard in practice." On 26 June 1965 he made the remark which became a guideline for health and education: "The more books you read, the more stupid you become." I went to work with absolutely no training.

The clinic was in a large hall on top of a hill about an hour's walk from my cottage. Next door was a shop selling matches, salt, and soy sauce which were all rationed. One of the surgery rooms became my bedroom. My professional duties were left vague.

The only medical book I had ever set eyes on was A Barefoot Doctor's Manual. I studied it avidly. There was no theory in it, just a summary of symptoms, followed by suggested prescriptions. When I sat at my desk, with the other two doctors behind me, all wearing our dusty everyday clothes, it was clear that the sick peasants who came in very sensibly wanted nothing to do with me, an inexperienced eighteen-year-old with some sort of book they could not read, and which was not even very thick. They went straight past me to the other two desks. I felt more relieved than offended. It was not my idea of being a doctor to have to consult a book every time patients described their symptoms, and then to copy down the recommended prescription. Sometimes, in an ironic mood, I would contemplate whether our new leaders Chairman Mao was still beyond questioning would want me as their personal doctor, barefoot or not. But then, I told myself, of course not: barefoot doctors were supposed to 'serve the people, not the officials' in the first place. I settled happily for just being a nurse, doling out medicines on prescription and giving injections, which I had learned to give to my mother for her hemorrhage.

The young doctor who had been to medical school was the one everybody wanted. His prescriptions of Chinese herbs cured many ailments. He was very conscientious, too, visiting patients in their villages and collecting and growing herbs in his spare time. The other doctor, with the goatee, terrified me with his medical nonchalance. He would use the same needle to inject several different patients without any sterilization. And he injected penicillin without testing whether the person was allergic to it, which was extremely dangerous because Chinese penicillin was not pure and could cause serious reactions, even death.

Politely, I offered to do it for him. He smiled, not offended by my interference, and said there had never been any accidents: "The peasants are not like delicate city folk."

I liked the doctors, and they were very kind to me, always helpful when I asked questions. Not surprisingly, they did not see me as a threat. Out in the countryside, it was one's professional skills, rather than political rhetoric, that counted.

I enjoyed living on that hilltop, far away from any village.

Every morning I got up early, strolled along the edge of the hill, and to the rising sun recited lines from an ancient book of verse about acupuncture. Beneath my feet, the fields and cottages began to wake up to the cocks' crowing.

A lonely Venus watched with a pale glow from a sky that was getting brighter every minute. I loved the fragrance of the honeysuckle in the morning breeze, and the big petals of nightshade shaking off pearls of dew. Birds chirped all around, distracting me from my recitations. I would linger for a bit, and then walk back to light my stove for breakfast.

With the help of an anatomical chart and my acupuncture verses, I had a fairly clear idea where on the body I should stick my needles to cure what. I was eager for patients. And I had some enthusiastic volunteers boys from Chengdu who were now living in other villages and who were keen on me. They would walk for hours for an acupuncture session. One young man, rolling up his sleeve to expose an acupuncture point near his elbow, declared with a brave face, "What are men friends for?"

I did not fall in love with any of them, although my resolution to deny myself a boyfriend in order to dedicate myself to my parents and appease my guilt over my grandmother's death was weakening. But I found it difficult to let my heart go, and my upbringing prevented me from having any physical relationship without surrendering my heart. All around me, other boys and girls from the city were leading rather freer lives. But I sat, lonely, on a pedestal. Word got out that I wrote poetry, and that helped keep me there.

The young men all behaved most chivalrously. One gave me a musical instrument called a san-xian, made of a snakeskin bowl with a long handle and three silk strings, which were plucked, and spent days teaching me how to play it. The permitted tunes were all in praise of Mao, and were very limited. But that did not make much difference to me: my ability was even more limited.

In the warm evenings, I sat by the fragrant medicinal garden encircled by Chinese trumpet creepers, and thrummed to myself. Once the shop next door closed for the night, I was entirely alone. It was dark except for the gently shining moon and the twinkling of lights from distant cottages. Sometimes fireflies glowed and floated by like torches carried by tiny, invisible flying men. The scents from the garden made me dizzy with pleasure. My music hardly matched the enthusiastic chorus of the thundering frogs and the wistful croon of the crickets. But I found solace in it.