The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China (28 page)

“So all the time he thought you were knitting for him you actually were laughing at him.” She stood up, sighing.

“I suppose he never found that out. If he knew, he would surely haunt me.”

“That's true,” she said pensively.

We were walking towards her cottage.

“But you are—” She grasped my elbow, looking at my face with her eyes suddenly becoming bright with affection. “You are laughing at me too.”

I pressed my lips with my hands, laughing silently. We chatted on until it was time for me to go on my other errands. I had to visit Xiu-ying to tell her more about the election and then go on to visit Sun's wife.

As I left the widow and looked back to give her a farewell wave, I saw her throwing something away. I guessed that it was the heart of the dead toad. At least some new ideas were buzzing in her head.

I picked Xiu-ying up at her home and together we made our way across the field paths to the isolated cottage where Sun lived with his wife. By this time the winter sun, a large pale orb, had dispersed the morning mist.

For several days Xiu-ying had been quiet and subdued. The rape of Landlord Wu's daughter and its aftermath had not been without its effect on her too.

“Xiu-ying, didn't you go to see Sun's wife just a few days ago? Tell me how she's been doing.”

“So-so.”

“Is she going to give birth to her baby soon?”

“I guess so.”

“Then she won't be able to get to the election.”

“It won't make any difference to me. Sun will not let her vote for me.” Xiu-ying was still moping.

“We'll see. If she even gets to the election that alone will be something.”

Sun's wife was about twenty years old. She had been married to Sun when she was thirteen. She had given birth to three babies and now she was carrying her fourth, yet the couple had no children: All three babies had been girls. As soon as they were born, Sun had taken them away from his wife and left them in the brushwood on a mountainside. There they had died of hunger and cold, not knowing they had lived.

Old ideas die hard. Girls were still considered “useless baggage.” You raised them and just when they could be useful around the house they were married off and went to serve some other family. For a poor family hardly able to keep body and soul together a girl baby sometimes seemed an intolerable burden. According to local superstition, if the first three babies were girls, the fourth must be a girl too. However Sun wouldn't dare dispose of this new baby like the others because the work team in the village would surely hear about it. Yet he didn't want another baby girl and he hoped that it would die. As the time of birth neared, he spent more and more time in the wineshop, wasting his money on drink, leaving his wife unattended and hoping that the baby would perish at birth.

We entered the bare cottage to find Sun's wife huddled on the floor in a corner. Sun seemed to have absorbed every evil superstition about girls. He would not let her lie on the kang—the bridal bed—and pollute it. To give birth to an unwanted baby girl was something dirty and fraught with evil portent, so we found her at that moment abandoned on the floor, not daring, even in his absence, to drag herself onto the kang. Her eyes were dilated and terribly bright. She was in the grip of a fever and near delirious. She opened her dry, blackened lips and cursed her husband. I had never in my life heard such dirty, obscene words as came out of her mouth. Normally she was a kind, patient soul, but the pain she suffered shattered all restraint
and vented all the bitterness pent up in her heart. She was a woman possessed. She had torn her blouse from back to front and exposed her woeful, undernourished breasts. Her nails had left bloody marks in the hollow between her shoulder blades. Suddenly she was silent and lay motionless as if all energy had been drained out of her. Her eyelids closed over her blank stare.

Xiu-ying and I lifted the stricken woman onto the kang. I dipped a rag in the cold water from a jet in the kitchen and applied it to her forehead to bring the fever down, but then I paused because her brow, dripping with sweat, turned deathly cold. I held my breath. Was she dying? My God! Why had I never been told about such things? That fancy education at St. Ursula's had never taught me what to do in face of these elemental facts of life.

To my horror, she writhed with pain again, her face livid. She repeated the same curses as if they were a litany to the rite of this abnormal birth. I wanted to run away, but I knew that was impossible so I sent Xiu-ying off to get help. I stared at this tortured mother-to-be until her image was imprinted indelibly on my mind. I have hated to remember it; but I do not want to forget it either, for I felt that she was bearing the sufferings of us all. I could have been writhing in a dark corner of that hovel on a patch of rags on the floor with some monster kicking inside me. I was in a cold sweat.

Xiu-ying persuaded the old woman next door to overcome her fear of Sun and help his wife. Now she tottered in and began to feel the stricken woman's belly.

“The baby's feet will come out first,” the old neighbor gasped. She barely finished her sentence. “That's bad. I can't handle that.”

“Go and get a midwife,” I said in a hoarse voice.

“Who will pay her?”

We were not allowed either to lend or borrow money from the peasants. We wished to give no grounds for rumors that we bought over peasants or were bribed by them.

“Sun will,” I answered peremptorily. I turned to Xiu-ying. “You go to my room and fetch the first-aid box, the
one with the red cross on it, and bring it back here. I will go and hunt for Sun.”

“All right,” she answered dully.

“Let's go then.”

But as we turned to take our separate paths, she stopped and faltered out in a low voice, “I don't know anything about—erh—” She twirled her tongue to skip the word “childbirth.” According to local tradition it might bring shame on her if she, an unmarried girl, mentioned the fact of childbirth. Childbirth was associated with sex and sex was associated with shame, especially for an unmarried girl. Tradition was weighing Xiu-ying down, it seemed.

“Why don't you let me go to look for Sun?” she asked.

“That could be even worse,” I cried. “Who knows where you might find him?” If things were hard for me, they were doubly so for her. “I know some narrow-minded people are criticizing you for not behaving as a young girl should.”

“Not just
some
people are saying bad things about me. There are many, especially after the—you know—after Landlord Wu's daughter—” she stammered on in a gloomy voice. “I think I've already lost quite a lot of po—po—”

“Potential votes,” I helped her finish the sentence. “But do you think it is right to bow to their pressure?”

I was not sure of the answer to my own question. She was a candidate now and near to being elected. Should she reflect the opinions of her constituents? Was that compromising? Or should she defy them? What was practical common sense? In this case, what was common sense and what was selling out one's principles for votes? If she compromised now, what guarantee was there that she wouldn't make peace with the conservatives once she was installed in a place of power?

“Didn't you say we must win the election?” she asked.

“Yes, I did,” I replied a little sheepishly.

“I'll tell my mother to come here and bring the first-aid kit.”

By this time I knew more about Sun, and I was sure I would find him with his cronies in the wineshop. As I hurried
on my way I brooded on how to deal with him. I felt so angry I could hardly speak. I would grip him by the collar and drag him to his wife, shouting, “You can't get away with murder!”

I must have looked like an avenging virago as I went into the market center. Dealers at their stalls looking out for customers didn't even try to attract my attention as I raged past. Several peddlers were clustered on the roadway in front of the wineshop. In my haste, I almost knocked over a tray filled with needles and thread. Right next to the wineshop a man with a charlatan's face was selling an ointment. His jacket open, his chest bare, his belly bulging over his tight-drawn belt, he was demonstrating the efficacy of his “medicine.” Keeping up a stream of patter, he took a stone from the square of cotton cloth on which he displayed his wares, and struck himself in the chest. Immediately the skin at that spot turned blue and seemed to swell. With a flourish he then applied a dab of his ointment to the wound, which began to lose its discoloration. To show how effective the cure was, he jumped up and down like a child, waving his arms. He was a special kind of cheat—“a sharp beggar”—well known in cities but still a rarity out here in the Northwest. These men used cheap tricks and scare tactics to shock credulous onlookers into wasting a few coppers to buy worthless concoctions. Another mountebank's tray had an even stranger assortment of goods on display—teeth, both real and false. The latter were made of a deathly looking white porcelain. Their owner styled himself a “dentist.” He grinned ingratiatingly and constantly, baring his own array of dirty, decayed dentures. They said he was a body snatcher and dug up corpses in the middle of the night to steal their teeth. A blind man sat against the wall of the wineshop itself. He was singing, accompanying himself on the
hu-chin
violin. His two blind eyes had the texture and color of the stomach of a dead fish. They looked all the more disgusting because there was dirt in their corners. He blinked now and then at the sky as he sang a song about the violent death of an adulteress, and the
hu-chin
whined away. Another man, poorly but rather neatly
dressed, held a small teapot at his shoulder, and as the blind man finished his song, he put the spout of the teapot to his lips and fed him in an intimate way.

The wineshop was the center of town gossip and it hummed with chatter. Behind the brown-stained wooden counter its portly owner sat on a high-backed chair higher than the stools around the rickety tables. His half-closed eyes almost buried in the fat of his face, he reminded me of an obese frog sitting on a lotus leaf. On the wall were faded strips of red and green paper, pasted up at random. They exhorted us to “pay in cash. Friends and relatives no exception” and promised “Honest salesmanship to everyone, children and the elderly included.” With an eye to pleasing the new society, the proprietor had even pasted up a slip: “Long live the People's Government!” Scratched on the wall beside it were graffiti, erotic drawings, and pornographic doggerel.

The only waitress was none other than the Broken Shoe. She had taken this new job to show she was now a reformed woman. She walked in what she evidently imagined was a fetching style, wagging her bottom as she wove her way with a mincing step between the tables.

As I looked about for Sun in this dimly lit den, I felt as if I had fallen into a cesspool. It turned my stomach. Next to the counter, nearest the proprietor, sat a local “capitalist.” He owned a tiny photo shop equipped with a large and impressive box camera and two painted backdrops, one showing the famed West Lake at Hangzhou and the other a Model T Ford in front of the Forbidden City in Peking. He was held in high esteem by frequenters of the wineshop. They thought him farsighted. As long as six years ago, he had sold most of his land and invested his money in various commercial enterprises including this photo shop. It was a shrewd move. Under the laws of the new government, a man, whether a former landlord or not, whose income mainly came from an industrial or commercial enterprise, was rated a “national capitalist” and as such, if he obeyed the laws, was considered to be a member of the national democratic united front and one of the “people.” This new capitalist had memorized the text of
the land reform and carefully read all the proclamations of the new government. He never missed an opportunity to tell people, “I am a citizen with full civil rights. Do you see our national flag with the five stars in its upper left-hand corner? One of those stars symbolizes us patriotic national capitalists. Our representatives stood on Tian An Men on the national birthday with all the leaders of the country.”

Because of his forethought, he was indeed a certified “national capitalist,” a positive contributor to China's economic and social advance, while his old crony Chi was labeled a reactionary feudal landlord, an obstacle in the way of historic advance at a time when the prime target of the revolution was feudalism and its main prop, feudal landlordism.

There were several other drinkers with blurry, bloodshot eyes. But finally I spotted Sun slumped over a table in the farthest corner of the room. He seemed to be dozing, nodding his head over his tiny wine cup and pitcher of spirits.

“Sun!” I called sharply.

He started and looked up at me, glassy-eyed, as if having some difficulty bringing me into focus. I was amazed to see such pain and misery in his eyes. Suddenly moved, I could not upbraid him.

“Sun, let us go. Your wife is going to give birth to your baby,” I said in a low tone. Every eye in the den was fixed on us.

He sighed heavily, his face drawn and contorted. “I spent all I had to buy that woman. I sold my goat. Yes, I sold my goat. I looked after that goat as if it were my own mother. But what did I get? A useless creature. She cannot give me a son.”

The Broken Shoe had casually strolled over to hear what we were saying. Before I had a chance to reply, she advised in a knowing tone, picking her teeth the whole time, “Make her keep on trying. She is young. She is fertile. After another ten babies there must be a son for you.”

“I don't think there will ever be a son. You know, that part of her body has no hair.”

Sun must have been utterly distracted with grief to reveal such a secret. I gasped.

“Good Heavens!” The Broken Shoe raised her meticulously plucked eyebrows in astonishment and delivered her verdict: “It's clear that she was born under an evil star. Nothing can be done about it.”