The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China (10 page)

The speaker was a veteran Party member, full of years and experience. He had helped with land reform during the recent civil war, and at first we listened intently, expecting revelations. But he was too pedantic and humorless, and he droned on and on. I knew that I should listen
and, like all the other cadres, I diligently noted down in my notebook everything he said. Whenever he paused all one could hear was the scratching of pens on paper.

“It is now more than a year since the Liberation. Things are in better shape. In the places where you are going, landlords' rents and rates of interest should have been lowered. That is the law. The peasants should have formed their Poor Peasants' Associations and their own militia. These will be the backbones of the land reform campaign. As it gets going, the middle-income peasants will side with them. You must try to get the rich peasants to remain neutral at the very least.

“Generally speaking, a bare three to five percent of the population in these areas are feudal landlords, but they hold sixty percent or more of the land. Expropriate all their land, tools, and draft animals, but,” he paused and significantly repeated, “but not their needed houses and personal property. When a new local government is elected it will distribute land, tools, and beasts to those who need them. But you must see to it that the landlords and their families also get a share large enough to support themselves on.”

We had heard most of this before, and I began to nod. He must have been an army propagandist once. When the troops marched, he was there by the roadside, beating his drum and shouting slogans so that, tired as they were, they would not fall asleep on their marching feet.

Just as I was beginning to doze off, he suddenly raised his voice: “What you are doing is something unprecedented in China and the world. Three hundred million peasants, one-sixth of the world's population, must liberate themselves from thirty centuries of feudal landlord domination. Smashing the landlords' economic power means smashing their political power. Only that can make secure the power of the people.”

As I recall it, perhaps it would have been better if we had paid more heed to his words: “Put frivolous thoughts behind you. Concentrate all your thoughts on the work at hand.”

We left Xian the next day at daybreak. It was a short journey by train due west to Baoji, where at that time the line ended. There a convoy of open trucks was waiting by the side of the unfinished railroad, and soon we were roaring along the ancient caravan trail to the Northwest, first to Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province, and then on again across the bed of the Yellow River, almost dry in the autumn drought.

We entered the panhandle of Gansu, the long neck of upland valley leading to the Plateau of Central Asia. This is where the Great Wall ends, fifteen hundred miles from where it starts on the Gulf of Liaodong. Then we drove across the northern spurs of the Big Snow Mountains, whose peaks, solitary and grand, thrust into the autumn clouds.

Soon the road was climbing the steep flanks of a mountain. Looking down I saw a river raging through a gorge with a sheer precipice on either side. I had never seen such landscapes except in picture books. I tightened my hold on the side of the swaying truck. I was glad to be with Ma Li and clowning Cheng. It reassured me to know that Wang Sha was in the last of the convoy of trucks bringing up the rear. Sometimes, as we zigzagged up the mountain road, I could look down and see the last truck directly below us, two hundred feet down, laboring up the steep rise. Wang Sha sat in a back corner, covered with yellow dust.

Our ancient truck, a resurrected wreck made of cannibalized parts, wheezed and creaked along the road. Once near the top of a narrow pass, where the wheels of countless carts had worn deep dust-filled ruts in the track, it groaned to a stop. The driver tried to coax it back to life, then at his urgent command we all sprang to the ground and put our shoulders to its wheels, pushing and dragging, getting it moving slowly inch by inch up the hill, until, with a sudden spurt, it made the summit.

As we went further west our convoy grew smaller,
groups of trucks branching off to the north and south to carry the work teams to their destinations.

The wind howled down a gorge. I remembered words from a classical poem:

Now I saw this with my own eyes. Thick yellow dust dimmed the light of the sun. We had been issued surgical gauze masks, and although I wore one over my mouth and nose and kept my lips shut as tightly as I could, the fine sand still seeped through and I felt grit in my mouth. A Tang dynasty poem called this a “barren, barbarous land never reached by the Spring breeze.” I could well believe it.

As dusk descended quickly in the gorge, making further progress dangerous, we stopped for the night at a small inn near the head of a pass. Inn is perhaps too fancy a word for a couple of hovels tucked in a cleft of the cliff where they were partly sheltered from the wind. They had no beds or separate rooms or any conveniences. Just two bare rooms with half their space taken up by low kangs.

Here at least for foreign and southern readers who sleep on beds, and never saw kangs, I think I should explain that the kang in a northern house does not only serve as a bed. At night when you spread your bedding on it, it is your bed. During the daytime when you have rolled up your bedding and stacked it on one side, the kang can be used as a place to work, eat, and receive visitors on. A large kang can take up half the space in a room. It is actually a raised room within a room, a split-level room, the inner, raised one with a flue beneath it where a fire can be lit for warmth. Here, in the northern villages, when guests come visiting, you invite them to sit by the low-legged table set on the kang: “Come onto the kang. You don't have to take your shoes off. It's quite all right for you to keep them on.” But, of course, polite guests will certainly remove their shoes before getting on the kang or they will sit with their feet dangling over its side.

In these two hovels there were only the kangs for beds. The men left these for us twenty-five girls. They brought in bundles of hay which they had found outside and spread this on the dirt floor to make extra beds for themselves.

It was decided that we should start next morning at first light and press on to the plateau which was our destination. Exhausted by the day's journey, we hurriedly ate what food we had ready with us and then threw ourselves down, dressed just as we were and huddled together for warmth, to sleep.

My drowsy eyes wandered around our inn. A little light came in through the cracks in the door, which was close to falling off its hinges, and through the single window, which was hardly more than a hole in the wall roughly latticed with slivers of wood and white paper. But those same cracks in the doorway and around the window let in drafts of cold air. An oil lamp in the wall niche burned smokily. In its dim, flickering light, I stared in mounting alarm at the beams overhead, black and furry with soot and grime. Ugly black bugs and spiders crawled jerkily across them.

“There's worse to come.” Ma Li lay beside me, pressing her mouth against my shoulder.

“Umgh.”

“Do you hear that wolf howling?”

“Umgh.” I did not want to say anything stupidly comforting that might only increase her misgivings.

“The latrines are all outside. If we go out in the middle of the night, will the wolves attack us?” Chu Hua asked anxiously.

“We'll go together.” Reassuring, but what good I would be in case of an attack by wolves I hadn't the faintest idea. I was afraid even of a cat.

“I'll go with you,” Ma Li added. She knew my weakness.

“I hope we'll be assigned to the same village,” Chu Hua sighed.

“I doubt if the three of us will work together. But you two might try,” Ma Li said with the magnanimity of one who felt stronger and superior.

I looked around again at our inn. The earthen walls were
pitted with ugly dents where large pieces of loess and straw plaster had fallen off.

The innkeeper was of a piece with the hovels he looked after. His face was a dense web of wrinkles. Although he said he was still in middle age, he looked like a hoary veteran of seventy. His perpetual squint against the wind-borne Gobi sand, the blinding summer sunshine, the bitter winter cold had etched fine lines around his eyes. His habit of silence had formed deep-set lines around his mouth. His clothes were so patched with different shades of cotton that there was no way of telling the original color of his suit. Never had I seen such poverty, not even in the slums of Shanghai where at least the poor could rifle through the garbage bins of the rich.

We had traveled for a whole day over this ancient land. The further west we had come, the more poverty-stricken, worn-out, and dilapidated was the countryside. We were on the Old Silk Road where once rich caravans passed laden with silks and brocades, jades and other finery. Imperial couriers in princely trappings had coursed through here at breakneck speed bringing the emperors news from the Western Regions. Surely they never slept in such squalor.

At first, we had marveled at the strangeness of the landscape. It was a plain riven by deep gullies so that the dirt road either meandered wildly to avoid the slits in the earth or plunged zigzag down and up the sides of the ravines that couldn't be avoided. The earth had been ravaged and made desolate. I knew from my history books that these eroded lands were once pastures and forested plateaus. Then the pastures had been ploughed up to grow crops and the forests had been cleared for farmland. The natural rhythm of nature had been disturbed. The animals had disappeared and so had their dung. War had devastated the farms. Marauding warlord armies had chopped down the remaining trees for firewood. Without vegetation to hinder them, the rains and run-off rivulets of centuries had eaten into the fields and carried them away. The green clothing
of the earth had been filched and the naked earth was dying of cold.

I sighed disconsolately.

Ma Li and I were separated at the county town which would be the center of our work teams' activities. We learned that since there were not enough women cadres, only one could be sent to each township group of villages and hamlets. By this time the leaders, headed by Wang Sha, had a pretty fair idea of the work teams' rank and file, so it was not too difficult to decide the makeup of the small groups of work teams. I was quite inexperienced in mass work so they teamed me up with Malvolio Cheng, a veteran; Wang Sha himself would be the third member of our small team. As a senior cadre, he would have a great deal of work to do supervising several teams and helping with overall guidance at the county center; in fact, he would stay for another day or so of talks with the county leadership to plan the first steps of work in the area, but Cheng and I were told to prepare to leave for our work post immediately.

Next morning the work teams dispersed in groups of three or four to their several destinations in the surrounding villages. Cheng and I piled our baggage onto an ox cart and arranged our bedding so that we had something to sit on. Like everything else in this region, it was a decrepit wreck, a travesty of a cart. No single piece of wood on it was straight or flat. Its cartwright had evidently lacked tools and proper timber and hacked it out with an adze. It jolted along the rough track that served for a road. The wheels squeaked maddeningly for lack of grease, and the cart's shape changed alarmingly as it negotiated the ruts and potholes. I was worried that it might disintegrate at any moment and was thankful that the bullock in the shafts was plodding along even slower than a man could walk. I sat next to our taciturn driver and dozed as we swayed. Every now and then I roused myself to look at the slowly passing landscape. Sometimes I got off impatiently
to walk ahead, but that simply meant a long, tedious wait for them to catch up with me or added anxiety that I might have taken the wrong road.

Malvolio Cheng was as cheerful as I was at the start. But after the first hour or two he too fell silent, lulled by the monotonous swaying of the cart and the bleak landscape around us. Finally the only sound was the creaking of the cart. We passed few people on the road.

Towards noon we approached a district market town where we stopped to rest and feed the ox. This was smaller than the county center we had left but larger, I supposed, than the township of Longxiang we were making for. Near a river crossing, it was a walled town with most of its wall intact, fifteen feet high, made of hand-hewn stones surrounded by a now empty moat. Crossing a low, humpbacked bridge, we entered it through a narrow gateway. Weathered wooden gates bound and studded with rusty iron lay back in niches in the wall. I noticed that the hinges were black with grease. It was evident that they had only recently become museum pieces. Beyond them, the tunnel of the gateway opened onto a narrow cobble-stoned street between rickety, low houses. They were so close together that long poles spanned the space between the windowsills of opposite houses and washing fluttered above the heads of pedestrians. Open drains flanked the roadway. There was limitless land outside the town walls, but over the decades, banditry and freebooters had driven more and more people to seek safety in the crowded space within the stout medieval walls. From there they sallied out each day to the surrounding farm fields. I had seen just such a street scene in a Song dynasty painting. It had not changed for a thousand years.