The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China (23 page)

“Let me walk in front,” I said.

They looked silently at each other.

“Then you take this stick,” a rosy-cheeked girl said to me, offering a pinewood cudgel.

“Landlord Chi has spread it around that if anyone makes trouble for him, he'll do him in,” said Little Gao, the young man with the unruly head of hair, an uncertain expression coming over his face. “A stab in the back and when the dagger comes out it is red with blood, so to speak.” He used the phrases of the classical horror stories.

“I can't take this stick,” I said a bit huskily. My throat was dry. My tongue felt heavy. “I won't let them have the satisfaction of being able to accuse me of brandishing a weapon at them.”

“Suppose they start first?”

“We can't fire the first shot or strike the first blow. That's against instructions.” I lost my voice completely, but Xiu-ying came to my rescue.

“Come here,” she ordered two tall, muscular men, members of the new Peasants' Militia being trained by Shen and Little Gao. “You stand on each side of her and if you see anyone about to attack her, you hit them first. Don't spare them.”

When we stood before Landlord Chi's gateway my heart was thumping. We had allowed Chi's reputation to frighten us, just as that young activist had said, but now we all put on a bold front. One of my bodyguards used his cudgel to thump on the door and the peremptory knocking evidently threw the household into confusion. We could hear women calling to each other and whispering. Someone finally opened the door when I announced that we
were the representatives of the Poor Peasants' Association of Longxiang. We pushed our way in.

Only Chi's wife, two concubines, his aunt, and his children were at home. Our array of strength seemed excessive, and my fear subsided. I decided to adopt the strategy of the “short attack.” We would finish the search as quickly as possible before Chi returned or had time to take countermeasures.

This was our fourth search in three days, and this time the search party was experienced and disciplined, no longer distracted by a crowd of unruly villagers. Businesslike and without theatrics, we went through Chi's rooms systematically and made a full inventory.

We found nothing particularly incriminating in the house. The account books, all started recently, were straightforward lists of rents paid, debts owed, purchases, and sales. This did not surprise us. Only the most thorough of searches now yielded any secret hoards of grain, real valuables, or evidence of wrongdoing. We all realized now how important it would have been to have searched Chi's house first and taken this biggest landlord by surprise. But psychologically we had not been prepared to take on Chi at that time. And now the search of his house seemed like an anticlimax.

We were just preparing to leave when Chi himself entered the courtyard. He took in the situation at a glance. His eyes burned with venom. He fixed his gaze on me as if he wanted to remember my face forever. “One day, one day,” I could almost hear him think, “I'll take my revenge on you.” He was fat, his nose was flat and discolored from drinking. I knew he was ill-humored and crafty but the sight of him did not scare me. I only felt repulsed. But we knew he was tough. It was said that once he had lost all the money he had in his pocket, but he did not want to leave the gambling table. He staked his little finger, cut it off when he lost, then borrowed money and won back all that he had lost and more.

For a moment there was a palpable tension in the air. But seeing the odds were heavily against him Chi held his rage in check. We presented him with the inventory we
had made, room by room, and told him that he would be held responsible if anything was hidden or destroyed before it was decided what should be done with it. With a shrug, he quickly went over it and signed it. On that note we left.

Out of sight and earshot of his house, the disciplined silence of our group broke down. Everyone wanted to talk at once. The things they had seen! Landlord Chi's house was richer and larger than any other in the township. A two-story building—the only one in Longxiang—with a heavy tiled roof, interlocking courtyards shaded with trees, and a private well, it seemed to the youngsters to be the last word in comfort and luxury. On this point I kept my own counsel. Chi's heavy old teak furniture was lasting, solid stuff, but it would never have gotten into even a third-rate Shanghai furniture shop. Feudal landlordism had reduced the whole country to such a state of destitution that even its main social props were impoverished.

But the search party was excited, chattering on about the chests of warm quilts and fur-lined clothes, the good food in Chi's cellar, his livestock, farm tools, and land. It was rumored that Chi had a store of silver dollars, grain, and other valuables squirreled away, but where these were no one knew but Chi. We had seen no trace of them. But apart from this we now knew what he did have, at least aboveground, and most important, we had tackled the biggest of the Longxiang landlords head-on in his own domain. Our young people were elated and ready for anything as we dispersed.

Even before we returned to Longxiang the whole village knew about our exploit. Da Niang welcomed me at the front gate and brushed the dust off my clothes.

“Good girl,” she exclaimed admiringly. “You are bold.”

“Da Niang, you …” I thought it was a good opportunity to try again to break through her silence, but she interrupted me.

“I know. You young people even tackled Master Chi.” “But the chain that binds you has not yet been smashed.”

She gave a quick glance over her shoulder. She leaned
her head on one side and looked up to the heavens as if to see where the chain was.

“Da Niang, that chain still holds you back. You simply won't listen to me!” I pretended to be angry with her.

“My dear child, how can you say that? How can you think I'm taking the landlords' side?” She winked at me slyly. “Da Niang cares for you. I'll prove it. I will cook a good meal for you. This afternoon you eat with me.”

She sat on a small stool and fed dried grass and twigs into the stove. After looking for matches, she started the fire and the smoke from the stove made her eye smart. She used a corner of her tattered old jacket to wipe away the tears.

“Da Niang, let me light the fire.”

“I'm all right.”

“But wasn't it smoke that blinded your eye?”

“Oh, no, it wasn't only that. I bore ten children. Today only this idiot is alive. And their father died too. We were poor people. When we fell sick, we couldn't even afford noodle soup to drink, much less medicine. Our old master didn't care. Poor people's lives were cheap. I cried. Every day I cried. That was what blinded my eye. This one went blind. And the other one is blurred. I can't see clearly with it. Well, it's better this way. Since I got blind, that eye doesn't hurt anymore.”

Her crooked smile revealed the gaps in her brown, jagged teeth. For the first time I noticed her thin grey hair, so sparse it hardly covered her scalp and scarcely made a bun at the back of her head. Her words echoed in my mind: “It's better this way. It doesn't hurt anymore.” In my mind I saw her, frail and light as a dried twig that a summer breeze might blow away, tottering along the road all by herself, shoulders bent, resigned to suffering. I wanted to say some words of comfort but my chin was shaking as if with a fever. If I said a word, I knew the tears would gush out.

“What's the matter with you?” She paused with her hand on a bundle of twigs half-thrust into the mouth of the stove.

“Da Niang, how you have suffered!”

She raised her head quickly. There was puzzlement and surprise in her face. Her life had seemed so spent, so worthless to her. For the first time someone felt for her. She lowered her head slowly and slowly let the dried twigs fall from her fingers.

The kindling in the stove had burnt out and the embers cast a red glow on her face. The water stayed cold on the stove.

“I felt happy when I knew you had searched old Chi's house,” she blurted out to my surprise.

This was the moment I had been waiting for.

“Da Niang, tell me about your past,” I coaxed her.

She hesitated. She was apparently of two minds about it.

“As I think back, I cannot say that old Chi was too bad, to us at least. If he had not hired us, we might have become beggers. There were too many poor people. They were all hardworking, but even more unfortunate than we were. No one hired them. They were forced to leave their homes and go begging, and who knows where they are today.” Da Niang, who could curse like a real shrew, now looked resigned.

“Da Niang, what do you think of Tu's wife?”

“Don't talk about her. Tu is her second husband. A decent woman would never agree to marry more than once.” Da Niang was very proud of her own virtue as a chaste widow. Self-righteously, she continued: “About fourteen years ago she fled from her own village with her baby daughter. There was a famine there. She came to beg in our village. Tu had just become a widower. He was dirt poor then with no chance of getting a virgin bride. He sheltered her and they lived together as man and wife. He often beat her. The daughter could not stand it and ran away some time ago. No one knows where she is.”

“She never came back?”

“No.” The word came out of her after an almost imperceptible pause, as though she had remembered something.

She changed the subject: “You must be hungry. I'll start the fire again.”

13
  

When I look back now, I understand some but not all of our mistakes. We had been told to seize only such things as enabled the landlords to exploit the poor peasants and which the peasants urgently needed—such as land and implements—but we had taken away personal belongings and so created needless animosity. And we had timed our searches badly. Only simultaneous surprise searches could have prevented the landlords from hiding property and arms.

The land reform laws and regulations might be written down in a very cool and rational manner, but once the reform actually got going all sorts of unpredictable forces were released. Touching as it did on every aspect of their lives, more and more people were deeply stirred. Each person touched was an emotional as well as an intellectual being. And while their intellectual side both calculated and miscalculated, their emotional side often reacted in the most unpredictable ways. There was an unexpected strain of anarchism and violence in the villages that should have been expected and guarded against, and later on this was to have evil consequences.

Nevertheless, after the searches had demonstrated the firm resolution of our young activists there was no doubt that the peasants had greater confidence that the actual distribution of land could be carried out. Xiu-ying, Little
Tian, and Little Gao had put into action what before had been only theory. Now, even as we faced harder and harder decisions, they were ready to take on greater responsibilities instead of always waiting until someone from above told them what to do.

By this time we had a fair idea of how much land would be confiscated from the landlords and how many peasants needed land. It worked out to about three
mu
or half an acre each for the landless and landpoor peasants and everyone else eligible to receive a share of land, which included the landlords themselves and their families. From that figure we determined that if each member of a family already owned four to six
mu
, they were designated middle peasants. Rich peasants were those who owned about twelve to eighteen
mu
apiece.

According to that standard, Xia actually fell between the categories of more affluent middle and rich peasants. His family of four owned about forty-five
mu
, but his children were little more than toddlers, so, shorthanded for the moment, he rented out quite a portion of his land. This fact had made him look like a landlord. The strict letter of the law said that that portion of his land could be confiscated, but any law has its ambiguities. It was up to us to find a solution to this problem.

Talking over such matters with Wang Sha one afternoon, I sat with him on the old millstone that served as a public bench on the outskirts of the township center. “We're playing God now,” I sighed. “If we register Xia as a small landlord, that will put a label on his children that will hurt them in the future.”

Wang Sha said, “We have made one mistake about Xia already, it seems. We mustn't make another.”

“That's for sure.” At least I could now carry on a conversation with Wang Sha without blushing at every word.

We began to wander along a path trodden crookedly across the fields. We talked as we strolled, weighing the pros and cons of Xia's case and other village problems. We had nearly reached the foot of Green Dragon Mountain before we realized how far we had walked. Actually this was no mountain but just a low hill, the only oasis of green
in the midst of the dry loess plain. Its pine trees probably guarded some ancient tomb, and it was green even in winter. The peasants said that spring came here earliest, guided on its way by the dragon that gave the township its name: Longxiang in Chinese means the Dragon's Township.