Naked Earth (2 page)

And the people on top, the system’s beneficiaries? Perhaps they, at least, are free of worry? Here, too, Chang is clairvoyant. Near the end of
Naked Earth
, Liu reflects that “As long as one man like him remained alive and out of jail, the men who ruled China would never be safe. They’re afraid, too, he thought, afraid of the people they rule by fear.” Had Liu foreseen that in 2015 those “men who ruled China” would still be spending hundreds of billions of yuan annually on “stability maintenance”? Chang seems even to foresee the paradoxical connection between communism and luxury that has emerged recently in China. After normal human values have shriveled, where does a human being turn to measure success? Only material scales remain, and in
Naked Earth
, we see already how officials in the regime have begun to take this route: villas, banquets, concubines. Chang died in 1995; how surprised would she be to see the stupendous wealth of the Communist super-elite today?

The distinguished journalist Tai Ch’ing has suggested that the Communist Party failed to buy off Chang, even with lures like “member of the Political Consultative Conference or Vice Chair of the National People’s Congress.” I cannot vouch that such offers to Chang were made, but Tai Ch’ing, who grew up in the family of Marshal Yeh Chien-ying, who was a confederate of Mao Tse-tung, has considerable credibility on such topics. What we do know is that Chang accepted a grant from the United States Information Service (USIS) to write
The Rice-Sprout Song
and
Naked Earth
after she left China in 1952. This fact has been widely noted, and its significance sometimes exaggerated. It is far-fetched to imagine that the USIS distorted Chang’s writing. She is too powerful a writer for that—too “immune from being tricked,” in Tai Ch’ing’s phrase. Indeed there is irony in the fact that the U.S. government still has not collected what it paid for: Its understanding of the language and politics of Chinese communism still lags far behind what Chang offered it sixty years ago.

If nothing else, the beauty of Chang’s writing makes it hard to view as anyone’s propaganda. After a rain squall on a dusty loess plateau, trees “were still sniffling and shedding big tears.” At a nearby river, “Long wisps of yellow mud trailed sluggishly in the current, like half-beaten egg-yol
k..
.” On the whole,
Naked Earth
has less of this than Chang’s 1940s novellas do, but it would be a mistake to view this change as a compromise with USIS style. Chang has matured in this novel to a sparser naturalism, to a plane where “the shimmer of the unsaid,” in Marianne Moore’s phrase, can say even more than brilliant metaphor does.

—PERRY LINK

IT SOMETIMES
happens that when I describe one of my stories, I’m met with a puzzled look. “This really happened!” I’ll say (maybe a touch defensively), as if that automatically increases the story’s worth. Of course whether a story is good or not really has nothing to do with whether it’s true or not. Even so I’ve become almost compulsively fixated on reality, believing that real experience, no matter whose, will never become stale, but will remain always fresh and evocative.

Naked Earth
is based on real people and their true stories. Fiction is, at heart, not reportage, however, and in this novel I’ve changed the names of characters and some places; I’ve drawn from many stories and compressed, trimmed, and reorganized them into the story you read here. As large as my canvas is, I can’t help but fall short of showing everything going on in China today. The recent Five-Anti Campaign, for example, appears nowhere in my book but has affected the lives of ordinary people even more profoundly than did the Three-Anti Campaign.
*
I was limited as well by the limits of my characters’ perspectives. Not that my aim was ever to cover absolutely everything, it was instead to capture the atmosphere of the time, as best I could. The book is not intended to be a comprehensive report; my hope is that readers, in turning its pages, get a whiff of what real life was like for the people living through those days.

—Eileen Chang

THE YELLOW
dust rolled on, across what was once called the Central Plain because it was considered the center of the world, surrounded by barbarians. Two trucks sped along the highway one after the other, in two balls of yellow fog.

A plump middle-aged man in the standard civilian Liberation Suit of bluish gray cloth stood on the running board of the second truck. He was the driver’s assistant. His eyes popped out in his choleric red face as he shouted supplications to the slow, lumbering coal truck just ahead of them. He had shouted himself hoarse but either his words were drowned in the roar of the engines or the coal-truck driver pretended not to hear him.

When they had reached a bend in the road the other truck finally, in a burst of conscience, swung out of the way and let them move up front.

“Let’s slow down a bit,” the assistant said to the driver, “so they’ll also eat some dust.”

The driver nodded.

Hanging on to the window frame with one arm, the assistant twisted around to look back, grinning happily. Now and then his plump face would suddenly go all red and blotchy again with rage and he would yell back, “
T’a ma ti!
Your turn to eat some dust!”

The truckful of young people started to laugh. One of them said half seriously, “This driver’s
tso-feng
, style, is no good. He should go under discussion. Maybe we should call a meeting tonight.” He winked at his comrades.

They were all students from various universities in Peking. When the People’s Government mobilized university students to take part in the Land Reform, all the Active Elements in the student body vied with each other in signing up. Some of them had just graduated this summer.

Liu Ch’üan, one of the new graduates, sat at the back of the truck where it jolted the worst. He had his arms crossed loosely, elbows resting on his knees. The sun was still broiling hot though it was already autumn. His bluish gray summer uniform, soaked through with perspiration, clung in ripple-marks on his back. Warm puffs of wind blasted the dust against his face like a flapping, stinging, coarse veil. He frowned and could hardly open his eyes, but he was smiling. He was tall with a thin, dark gold face dimpled on one cheek, and keen narrow eyes.

They had started singing in a corner up front. With a sudden lurch towards the side of the road the truck just managed to miss a mule-cart coming from the other direction. Half a tree and a big clump of green reeds swept into the open truck and switched against the faces of the riders. The girls shrieked and squealed with laughter, piling on top of one another as they ducked. One of them pulled off a leafy branch from the tree and started to beat time with it on her friend’s back as they sang.

They sang a Land Reform song they had just learned, “Unite, hey!—Tillers of the land
!..
.” But they liked the old favorites best, like that one beginning with “Our China, so big and wide.” The tune was probably adapted from some Russian song. It had the gray, windy sadness that vast spaces bring.

The road gradually sank and the bare smooth banks on either side kept rising until they stood up sheer, like yellow mud walls. The earth was loose and sandy in this part of the country. Every time a mule-cart passed with its iron-bound wheels it dug deep ridges in the road. Centuries of traffic had worn the road into a ditch from ten to twenty feet deep. Sitting high up on the truck the students could just see the yellowish green tree tops on the plain.

Some of the riders began to complain that their legs had gone to sleep, so they shifted position as best they could. A pretty girl now sat facing this side, framed in a hole in the crowd. Her skin had the bluish pale translucency of fresh-peeled lichee flesh and her eyes were wide splits in the ripe fruit showing the moistened lacquered surface of the purplish black seed within. Liu Ch’üan looked at her. The fold of her eyelid made a long deep line fading out at the end with an upward sweep. The wind had plastered a small green leaf on her hair. She had short hair curling outward a little at the ends. Set against the dully throbbing, changeless yellow countryside, her head and shoulders made a startling little picture, distinct and yet infinitely far away, like a patch of sky reflected in a wayside puddle.

Just glancing in her direction once or twice made Liu Ch’üan feel that everybody was watching him. She was too pretty. Before they got on the truck they had each announced their own name and the university they came from. And they usually mumbled it half laughing, feeling that self-introduction is a ridiculous thing if you perform it seriously. But somehow all the male members of the group had managed to catch Su Nan’s name and knew that she was a graduate of Yenching University.

Liu Ch’üan turned and looked the other way, fanning himself with his cap. Then it occurred to him that this was really superfluous with a roaring wind blowing straight at him, so he put the cap back on his head. The wind immediately snatched at it. He caught it just in time.

He could not remember hearing Su Nan talking to anybody. But she looked happy. She was carrying an oil-paper umbrella and she often stuck it out, brushing it against the trees so that it kept bouncing back jerkily with a sharp noise like ripping silk. The sleeves of her bluish gray uniform were rolled up above the elbow, showing thin young arms.

The singing died down when throats went dry. The girl who had been beating time with a tree branch was Yü Ling, a classmate of Liu’s. She leaned over and tapped him on the shoulder with her long whip of a bough.

“Hey, Liu Ch’üan, Liu Ch’üan,” she called out. “How much longer to go?”

Because he did not answer at once the tree branch knocked him on the head. “Hey, Liu Ch’üan! We’ve covered half the distance, haven’t we?”

He didn’t like it much when he saw Su Nan looking at him. “No use asking me. Ask the driver!” he said smiling. Maybe this was nothing between classmates, but other people might misunderstand. They were all cadres now, he told himself. And for a low-ranking cadre, one of the worst offenses was to
nao nan-nü kuan-hsi
, get up man-woman relations. Besides, they were setting out to do a very serious and important job. This kind of
tso-feng
would give the leaders the wrong idea.

The man who represented the leaders in this group was Comrade Chang Li, a party member, an organizer sent down by the Cultural Bureau. In his middle thirties, Chang was of medium height, with full, long blue-green cheeks and rather full mauvish pink lips. He sat quietly smiling among these effervescent youngsters, trying to get all their names straight. Liu had introduced everyone he knew to Chang. Liu had been active in the Students’ Association of Peita, the University of Peking, so he had been in constant contact with similar groups in all the other universities. He was also a member of the Youth Corps and was being considered for admittance into the Party. Chang obviously regarded him as a leader among the students and relied on him to maintain order in the group.

The dusty, creamy glare of the sun gave them a headache. They all dozed off sitting back to back, until they were wakened by the soreness at the end of the spine where the jolting hurt them. Thus they alternated between sleeping and waking, headache and rump-ache.

Towards mid-afternoon it looked like rain. The sun became a furry, soft white spot in the oppressive uniform gray of the sky. The truck was now bumping along at breakneck speed. Rain would turn the dust into mud as slippery as rice gruel. Wheels wouldn’t be able to move an inch in the mire and it would be disastrous to be stranded in these parts, miles away from anywhere. The driver stepped on the gas.

Liu Ch’üan’s last nap was cut short by a burst of song. He looked out the back and saw rain. The drenched young people at the back were singing, defiantly cheerful. The truck had already turned out of the ditch and was running along a narrow lane with broad fields stretching away flatly to the sky on both sides. They passed a
kao-liang
patch, the stalks taller than a man. It was the season of the “green gauze curtain,” the affectionate name the farmers give to late summer
kao-liang
. Then came cabbage patches and the small humps of burial mounds and an occasional thatched hut. In the greenish twilight of the shower, everything looked dark and clear like preserves swimming in a green glass jar.

The driver looked over his shoulder and said something to Comrade Chang. He nodded “We’re there!” Everybody cheered.

The vegetable patches gave way to an endless stretch of yellow mud wall about ten feet high. In this part of north China all villages had been walled in as protection against brigands.

With sudden shouts and clanging cymbals and thumping drums a crowd of peasants surged forth from a rectangular entrance dug in the wall. White towels tied around the militiamen’s heads bobbed behind the soaked and tattered paper flags they were waving. A double file of youths and children moved forward wriggling the Rice-sprout Song. The girls had trouble with their sticky wet silk sashes which clung to their bodies and legs instead of whirling gracefully around them.

The people on the truck, a bit nervous at this noise, could not hear the slogans being shouted. But of course these were the villagers out to welcome them in spite of the rain. They waved back shouting “Thank you, kinsmen!” and broke out into the deafening chorus of “Unite, hey!—Tillers of the land!” Meanwhile the truck had splashed its way through the crowd, pushing them into the field or against walls, their little bamboo flag-poles tilting
en masse
like windblown reeds.