The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China (9 page)

Dai Shi would have depressed me less had she been a Jezebel full of venom. But she was not. She was just an ordinary person but with a narrow mind, caricaturing the revolution while believing that she was helping it. Bit by bit, she dampened spirits all around her. When I saw that catty, disapproving look come over her face, I grew self-conscious and could no longer enjoy myself. I averted my eyes from her and looked out the window.

The scenery was absorbing. Because of the years of war, many of us, and all of us younger ones, were seeing these northlands for the first time. As we chugged westward, another visitor, our archaeologist, Hu, grew more and more excited, and finally persuaded me to give him my place by the window.

Hu had been the cashier at our theater. It was difficult to
find a job in the field of archaeology during the war years in the Guomindang regime, and so he had gone into the more practical business of counting money. But his first love was history, and he would spend all his spare time reading about the past and going to museums and antique shops. Periodically, at our discussions about work and discipline, he would upbraid himself for thinking too much about history and not enough about money. Now, money forgotten, he sat with his eyes glued to the window. The dusty old cities of Kaifeng and Luoyang, every mountain, mound, and river brought forth his “ohs” and “ahs” as he picked them out on his map. “This area was the cradle of Chinese civilization,” he explained his absorbed interest almost apologetically.

Ma Li was in a carping mood. “I suspect you joined the land reform work with your eyes on the past,” she chided. “You shouldn't think of this as a free trip to visit historical sites.”

Hu shrugged his shoulders and pursed his lips. With his small, kind eyes, fat, round nose, and chubby cheeks, he seemed to be a man who preferred to be at peace with the world.

Chu Hua gazed up at the ceiling light. Her smiling eyes, perpetually amused, peeped out from under a fringe of black, luxuriant hair that fell out from under her khaki cadre's cap. “I plan to see as many ancient sculptures and paintings as possible. They'll help me to create new dance movements. What's wrong with that?”

But Ma Li would not retreat from her dogmatic stand. “You know we've been told again and again that we should keep our minds on our task,” she insisted, “and that's the land reform.”

Chu Hua tipped her head to one side and turned her round, doll-like eyes to Ma Li. She was obviously not satisfied with Ma Li's answer, but she did not rebut it. She too would rather shun than provoke an argument, partly out of good nature, but also out of a coquettish urge to please.

Yet her words had emboldened Hu. “In my opinion, one of the purposes of the land reform is to put new life into our dying culture. To do that we must also rediscover it.”

Ma Li opened her mouth to speak but then thought better of it. It promised to be a complicated argument and she doubted if she could wage it single-handedly. Besides, she had also noticed that Dai Shi, listening from the inside corner, was girding herself for battle, and she had no wish to have Dai Shi as an ally.

As the train completed a wide curve, the landscape suddenly changed as if someone had shaken a kaleidoscope into a completely different pattern. At the foot of a mountain we saw a cluster of white-walled cottages with black-tiled roofs, a creek with a rushing stream, and a stone bridge. It was as beautiful a scene as any in the rich South and doubly entrancing after those miles and miles of dun-colored plains. Reminders of our gentle southland rushed through my brain, and I took a deep breath of happiness.

“The Hua Mountains!” someone cried in great excitement.

“It's our southern scenery right up here in the North,” exclaimed Liao. He started humming some nostalgic southern tune and then said abruptly, “Let's sing its praises!” It was a cry from the heart. He was a southerner in the North, already homesick for the South.

“Good, let's sing,” we all cried.

Liao gave the key and beat the rhythm. The carriage resounded with our voices. Only our soprano was silent. When she performed on the stage, she sang with passion and great artistry. Now she did not so much as open her mouth, but sat there demurely. The sunlight danced on the windowpane. Her profile, set off by this backdrop, was beautiful. Perhaps she didn't want to spoil the picture.

“Will we have time to climb Mount Hua?” the archaeologist Hu eagerly asked.

“The train will stop only for a few minutes,” Ma Li answered.

“What a pity.” Hu sank back disappointed.

“Perhaps we can climb up there on our way back,” suggested Liao, gazing at the height wreathed with clouds.

An impish smile spread over Chu Hua's face. “So you too want to climb Mount Hua? ‘Mount Hua in the midst of clouds and rain.' ” To anyone who recognized the classical
erotic association of mountains, clouds, and rain from folklore and literature, it was a daring remark.

Liao immediately blushed in response; luckily Dai Shi, never much of a scholar, missed the reference entirely. Ma Li, however, looked over at me, her eyebrows raised in sudden astonishment. I caught the soprano looking me straight in the eye, unblinking but with a hint of a knowing smile on her lips. Hu was too taken up by the scenery to notice anything else.

As Ma Li held up her cup to drink, she motioned with her little finger, pointing to the corridor. A moment later we were standing together outside the compartment.

“Shall I warn Chu Hua not to make a fool of herself?” She was clearly worried. Her big, black eyes were solemn. “You know how old-fashioned the peasants are. If Chu Hua talks and acts like she is talking and acting now, they'll think it's nothing less than free love and the end of the family. If even two of us misbehave, they'll suspect all of us. It would be a disaster.”

“But we aren't in the village yet. Why not let them enjoy each other's company while they can? Don't be such a moralist.”

“Don't you be too permissive,” she retorted, unconvinced.

As I turned to re-enter the compartment, everyone was still crowded around the windows. But now the train had passed Mount Hua, and Wang Sha, who had come in while Ma Li and I were out in the corridor, was the center of their clamor.

“All right, all right,” he was saying, “when we reach Xian you can spend a whole day visiting historical sights.”

Mount Hua was forgotten. Now the talk was all about Xian, the Changan of the great dynasties of Han and Tang; China's Athens, Rome, and Constantinople rolled into one.

Arriving in Xian, we were like any other group of tourists in this ancient capital. We wanted to see everything: the Bell Tower, the White Crane Pagoda where the Buddhist scriptures were translated, the famous Tang dynasty reliefs
of horses. Remembering our schoolday poetry lessons, we all wanted to see the Wei-yang Palace of the Han emperor with its

But most of all we wanted to see the E-fang Palace of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, who had unified the warring petty feudal states into the first great empire of China. We were constantly told, “The peasants are waiting for you,” but we gladly sacrificed sleep, rest, and food to satisfy our curiosity and look two thousand years into the past.

Leaving the gateway through the city wall, we bumped and clattered over farm roads in an antiquated bus until finally it came to a stop on the edge of some suburban farm fields, and our guide, a thin, bespectacled young man from the Archaeological Institute, solemnly intoned, “This is the E-fang Palace.” We craned our necks out of the windows, looking for the palace. What we saw was a flat space with some haphazardly scattered mounds of muddy earth and old tiles, surrounded by a few trees, brambles, and fields. We were a bit cast down, but our guide could see a great deal more than we. He pointed out to us where once the famous audience halls and pavilion stood, gracing the earth with their splendid courtyards and gardens and sparkling streams. He described them all with enthusiasm and imagination as if all that splendor and magnificence were actually there before us, with towering columns of cedar and vermilion lacquer, marble pediments and golden ornaments tinkling at the corners of upturned eaves.

In the afternoon, we made our last excursion. We went to bathe in the Hua-qing hot springs where the famous beauty Yang Gui-fei, favorite of the Tang Emperor Ming Huang, had come to bathe twelve hundred years before. The once luxurious bathing rooms were now not much
better than the bathhouses in any second-rate county town, but the water was still as delightful as in the days of the imperial favorite. Bubbling hot out of the ground, it filled the room with steam, and we were all flushed with the heat. Our eyes sparkled. In the half-light and vaporous clouds, pretty girls seemed prettier than ever. I was in a room with the soprano and Chu Hua. Eyes smiling, Chu Hua positioned herself in front of a long mirror, wiped the steam off it, and did a slow series of ballet movements, back straight, arms rounded and upraised, slender legs stretched forward and back, toes pointed, and then a graceful arabesque.

She darted me a glance through the mirror. Childishly she drew her neck down between her shoulders and put out her small pink tongue.

The soprano was reclining on a wicker couch covered with bright towels. Suddenly I heard Chu Hua say to her, “I am in love.” Chu Hua's eyes opened wide as if surprised by her own words. “I am in love with someone,” she repeated, standing motionless before the soprano as if her whole life hung on the outcome of this conversation. But the soprano did not seem to hear her. Unhurriedly she took a small pot of cold cream from the army duffle bag she carried.

“What did you say?” She carefully massaged her neck and throat with the cold cream. “You are in love?”

“But I don't know whether he loves me or not,” Chu Hua pouted.

“Ah! Unconsummated love.” The soprano paused in her movements, gazing at Chu Hua with a sentimental look in her eyes. The next moment, she sighed softly and a look of sadness veiled her face. With the stage thus set, she spoke to both Chu Hua and me in a subdued, earnest voice with great sincerity and relish about her own romance. “I was just sixteen when I fell in love with a man who lived on the same block as I did. We used to pass each other almost every day. He wore a French beret and looked very handsome in it. One day we began to say ‘Hi' to each other, and soon we had made a date for dinner.

“I was in a fever of expectation as I waited for him in
the restaurant. I felt a sudden premonition of happiness. Then in he came, the same man, yet totally different. He wasn't wearing his beret.”

Chu Hua, on tenterhooks, asked, “Did you confess your love for him?”

“To that total stranger? Of course not. I was in love with the man in the French beret.”

“But it was the same man,” I cried.

“Yes and no,” said the soprano, and she went on lamenting her lost love.

We had been carried along with her story. She spoke expressively. Chu Hua could not get a word in edgeways about herself. When the soprano finished her story, she paused and then gave us some advice.

“Real love is always tragic. Read the great love stories. They are all great tragedies. Right? But who wants to fall in love in an ordinary way?” She looked from Chu Hua to me, obviously including me as one of three special people, with special sensibilities. Love, she continued lecturing, was a wonder that came in many forms. A fancy sometimes, a phantom; sometimes a splendid reality. We should not be rash. We should wait for that special person and be satisfied with no one else.

I learned later that she had recounted her story to many people. She herself never tired of it, and neither did her listeners, old or new like myself, because each time she told it there were new details and aspects never revealed before. Her lover was part real, part an amalgam of past loves, part fantasy—her ideal. Merging past and present loves into one, she invested that new creation with a life of its own. If some cynic asked her, “Which love are you talking about?” she would answer artlessly, even with tears in her eyes, “I was only in love once: my most cherished first love.”

Hearing her talk gave Chu Hua time to cool off. But the warmth, the mists of steam, the associations of the place were heady. Perhaps as we emerged from the grotto it wasn't just we who felt like the beloved imperial beauty.

5
  

Early the next morning the shrill voice of Dai Shi brought us back to reality and the task at hand. She strode down the corridor of the Xian Guest House, banging on doors and shouting, “Meeting! Meeting in the ballroom! Ten o'clock sharp!”

Xian was crowded with hundreds of cadres, work teams gathered from Peking, Tianjin, and other northern cities. Of the southern cities, only cosmopolitan Shanghai could send a large number of cadres who for some reason or other could speak Mandarin, the northern Chinese dialect. The Guest House, the tourist hotel once operated by the Guomindang government's travel agency, where we were staying four and five to a room, had the only hall in the city large enough to hold us all. We packed it wall to wall, and the old, worn clothes we wore especially for our coming stay in the villages seemed to mock the fancy chandeliers and the plush red velvet curtains still adorning the windows. From Xian we would disperse to the villages of the Northwest. This would be the final meeting before we left.