The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China (18 page)

I thought I heard footsteps outside my door. I strained my ears. Nothing. My imagination was playing tricks on me. My senses keyed up, I did not know how long it was that I dozed and worried. I heard light steps again approaching my door. This time it was not my imagination. When they stopped at the door, my heart sank. My scalp tingled and I could feel my hair rising in terror. Now he was testing the door. He paused. He was trying to find out how to open it. I listened intently. His hand was on the door, shaking it. I could follow his every movement. My heart jumped into my throat. It stuck there, preventing me from uttering a cry. Slowly, so as not to disturb the intruder, I moved aside the quilt. I took my flashlight from
under my pillow and grasped the stick I had placed at the head of the kang. This was the moment I had been dreading.

The door was flung open violently and an immense black shadow moved into the room. I lost all self-control. I screeched like a stuck pig and covered myself with the quilt, clutching it to me as if it were armor. I heard feet padding around the room. I awaited annihilation. Then silence. Nothing happened. Hours seemed to slip by. Nothing had happened. My left leg, doubled up under me, was numb. I stretched it out, slowly, quietly, tentatively lest he should see that someone was there huddled under the quilt.

Again I heard footsteps. Was he waiting outside the door? I had only half unbent my leg. Now I dared not move it further.

“Did you have a nightmare?” said Da Niang's voice. It sounded unutterably comforting there in the dead of night.

“Da Niang,” I breathed, “someone broke into my room.” I slowly emerged from my quilt fortress.

She chuckled. “It was just a dog.”

What a mess I had made of things! And what a coward I had shown myself to be. Fortunately only Da Niang could see me now; but if the joke got around the village, it would mean a complete loss of face. If I had been scared to death by a dog, what about a landlord? Who would believe then that I would stand up to them?

“Da Niang, please sit down here.” I moved and made room for her on the kang. “Da Niang …” I began, abashed. Da Niang sat down. I held her arm. “Da Niang, please don't tell anyone about tonight.” My voice trailed away into the darkness.

“I won't. That I won't,” she whispered back. She shook her head and spread her hands palm out and fingers outstretched in opposite directions, to stress that the incident was over and that she would never break her word. Sharing this secret drew us closer together. In that moment she could see me as just an ordinary teenager despite my cadre's uniform; it opened a flood of words and feelings in her.
Suddenly she began chattering away with me as she would with any village girl.

“You city people are really strange. Aren't your parents worried about you in this faraway place? If we marry a daughter into a family ten miles away, it's as if she was at the other end of the world.”

“My parents died a long time ago.”

“Oh, then that's why you could decide things for yourself. Poor girl, you have no one to guide you.” She clicked her tongue sympathetically. “Dear child”—it was the mother in her that spoke—“listen to me. You had better go home. This place can be hell.”

“How could I run away before I even have a chance to look around?”

Seeing me twisting around uneasily, she asked, “Lice?” As I nodded uncomfortably, she said, “Bite it.” She pushed my hand holding the louse I had caught towards my mouth. “Take your revenge on them and they don't dare come back to bother you.”

“Oh, no!” I exclaimed, appalled.

“Let me bite it for you.” Apparently it did not matter who wreaked vengeance on the lice, so long as it was done.

“Oh, no. I can't put you to so much trouble,” I said, remembering my manners, and I did as the peasants did. I crushed the louse with the back of my nail on the edge of the kang and brushed the remains with distaste onto the floor. What a Shanghai young lady I was now!

“If you stay with us much longer and drink our water, your blood will turn bitter. Now it is still sweet and the lice like to drink it.” Genuinely concerned, she shared with me her peasant wisdom.

How could I suspect her? She was not unkind or devious by nature; but like some gnarled tree on a windswept mountainside her body and soul had been twisted by the harshness of her environment. I began to like her, but the mystery of her attitude to the landlords remained between us.

“Da Niang, if I hadn't moved here to stay with you, we might never have got to be friends.” I put my hands behind
my head, lying back on my pillow. “Perhaps I ought to stay with some other family next. How about the young widow?”

“No, Heaven forbid! That house is haunted by the ghost of her husband.” Da Niang was really disturbed by my proposal. She darted a stealthy glance at the darkness outside the window. She edged closer to me and spoke almost in a whisper. “The widow is so haunted that he has become a living ghost.”

“What is a living ghost?”

“Every night he comes to her kang.”

“Da Niang, surely you don't believe that?”

“I have never seen him myself, but some people say that they have heard her talking and singing to him in the middle of the night.” Then, deciding she'd said enough for one evening, she pulled up the quilt and tucked it under my chin. She trimmed the wick of the sputtering oil lamp so that I would have no trouble lighting it in the morning, frugally blew it out, and left me to return to her own room.

The day had not yet broken when I woke again. A cold twilight filled the room. Half awake, my thoughts wandered idly. My vest was damp and sticky from perspiration and dirt, and I remembered the louse. I had not bathed once since coming to the village. There was no bathhouse and no one remembered when there had ever been one; there wasn't even a tub in any of the peasants' houses, for, of course, water was too precious to waste on such an activity—so I had had to make do with a sponge bath every now and then. I thought how nice it would be to soak myself in a real bathtub like the one in my aunt's house in Shanghai—hot and cold running water and an overhead shower, white enamel gleaming, blue tiles glistening with steamy drops, chrome taps sparkling; or, better yet, swimming in a pool; or, better still, in the sea. I saw in front of me an emerald green sea, shot through with blue-green currents; an ultramarine sky with fleecy clouds, rust-colored cliffs crowned with green. Square-sailed junks against a background of white skyscrapers piled one above another up the mountainside, far away on
the other side of the strait. And the lazy waves lapping the golden sand, calling me in.

I must have dozed off again. I was in my uncle's house in Hong Kong. I had drunk tea on its porch, watching the sunset play on the sea. I had walked down to the beach and dived into the reflection of the high-sailing clouds, swimming away from land, letting the water caress my cheeks and lull my body. And then suddenly I was in trouble. Something was pulling me down. The water closed over me. My lungs ached, gasping for breath. I flailed my arms and kicked my feet frantically in an effort to keep my mouth above water, to get a gulp of air.

I woke up again with a start, my heart pounding. My eyes stung and I seemed to be enveloped in a heavy fog. My throat was parched. Suddenly I sat up, alarmed. The “fog” was smoke, and it swirled around my tiny bedroom. Had someone set fire to the house? I jumped off the kang. Coughing and groping, not feeling the cold earth of the floor, I stumbled into the outer room. Here the smoke was even thicker and it billowed out through the front door, which was ajar. I caught sight of a vague figure in the corner by the brick and mud stove and I was just about to scream when I heard Da Niang's voice ask, “Is there too much smoke?”

The room was swimming in smoke. But she had spoken quietly, excusing herself as if it were nothing—a small cooking mishap. I felt the cold on the soles of my feet and hurried back onto the kang to put on my clothes. Da Niang followed me carrying a basket of what looked like mud cakes.

“The weather has turned cold and I wanted to heat your room up a bit before you got up.” She fumbled in her basket and took out a few pieces of mud cake which she put beside the flue of the kang. “When it gets really cold, you can use more of these. It's just dung, chopped hay, and a bit of coal dust, but it burns. Put a few twigs and some stalks in first as kindling. Trouble is it stinks when it burns, and it smokes something awful, but what's to be done? We have no wood to burn here.”

“Da Niang, it's good of you to think of me,” I thanked her.

She wandered into the outer room in that vague way she sometimes had, mumbling to herself, and I was left alone. I took a clean vest from under my pillow and changed into it in the warmth of my quilt. Then I got up and hurriedly washed and dressed myself while I still felt warm. I opened the battered front door and the cold air of the half-dawn brought me fully awake. The sky was leaden grey and so was the expanse of plain beyond Da Niang's broken wall. The horizon was lost in the morning mist and the little courtyard seemed like an island in a grey void. My head throbbed painfully after my troubled night, and I thought I would walk the ache away, but my limbs felt heavy. I breathed hard even though I had walked only a short distance. I sat down to rest on a rock jutting into the narrow footpath in the field. Dew from the weeds had beaded my shoes and the ends of my trousers.

It was quite dark. Gusts of wind blowing across the empty fields around me chilled to the bone. My whole body was numb and aching with cold. Many peasants started their day at this hour and would soon be getting up. I could join them. And then I was struck by a thought even colder than the morning wind: Why did I not admit at least to myself that I was not one of them? I didn't belong here. It was completely alien to me. I could just do what was normally expected of one in this job. Why strain to do more? I was making myself sick. If nothing else, this cold would kill me. It had never been as cold as this in Shanghai. “Oh, Mother!” It was the first time in my life I had called out to my dead mother. I felt lost like a child in the wilderness.

I heard footsteps in the mist, and my first instinct was to turn and run; fighting that impulse, I froze in my tracks.

A figure carrying a mattock on its shoulder emerged out of the darkness. It was the virgin widow. Accustomed to her solitary existence, she either did not notice or ignored me. She entered the unkempt field near me and began to break up the clods of earth. Her mattock's blade was broken
and blunt. The handle was too short. Soon she was breathing hard from this back-breaking toil. As she paused to rest and straighten her back I greeted her and offered to lend a hand.

She turned her face to me. As I looked into it, at the wide-set eyes drained of all expression, my heart contracted.

She gave me her mattock and then walked away, still without a word. She disappeared into the darkness, but soon returned with another broken mattock in her hand. We worked together in silence. The earth was dry and frozen hard as stone. Layers of some whitish substance ran through it. I knew enough country lore by then to recognize that this was poor alkaline soil and that no matter how much she toiled on it with her broken tools it would never yield enough to feed her and her parents-in-law disabled by age and illness.

I wondered what she was going to plant. But then I thought that it would make very little difference unless there was a radical change all around. Since coming to Longxiang I had never seen a peasant eat meat or fish, fresh vegetables, or rice or flour. Yet how they toiled with their broken hoes on this grudging soil! Year after year the virgin widow had slaved drearily on her little plot of land with never a hope of release. With tears of rage in my eyes, I felt like crying out loud to the whole world about this exhausted, barren land and its owner. Then a spasm gripped my empty stomach. I was famished, my head dizzy, my hands trembling. I swallowed my anger.

“Soon you will have more and better land,” I said, comforting her as well as reassuring myself. “About nine
mu
—four times what you have now.”

She did not appear to hear me.

“Doesn't that make you happy?” I persisted.

“Even if we get more land I can't till it all by myself.”

“What will you do then?”

“We will sell it,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Sell it?” I exclaimed, aghast. “But then when you have used that money up, you will be as badly off as you are today.”

She paused in her work and gave me a long, hard stare. “No tools, no plow, no water, no work hands—no nothing. We are too poor to till nine
mu
.”

Her words were like a slap in the face. All this effort and struggle for the land reform and then she would turn around and sell the land and after a few months be back where she was now. I was going to remonstrate with her but I stopped with my first words. Suffering, want, and ridicule had utterly crushed her spirit.

She went back to hacking away at the earth with her blunt mattock, and I joined her, working silently while I collected my thoughts. Her last words had been a complaint, but also a query and a challenge. She wanted an answer to the bitter questions in her heart, and I wanted to be sure that I gave her the right answer, if I could.

Mutual aid, cooperatives, mechanization, electricity, modernization—we had discussed all this in our study classes back in Shanghai. Although the details of these plans were still not clear to me, because I knew next to nothing about farming, I accepted them on trust. It had seemed to me then that the peasants' problems would be easily solved once they got land of their own and had the will to prosper. Once you had your own plot, what was so hard about raising a good crop on it? I had had no conception of the magnitude of the problems the peasants faced. No wonder the young widow could think only of traditional ways of solving her problems: If you had land and were driven to extremities, you sold it and staved off the final catastrophe for yet another few months. The inadequacy of my answers was clear. There was no way short of a miracle for a poverty-stricken widow with two ailing parents to prosper.