The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China (40 page)

“Then your mother must get you a husband and you will live happily ever after,” Ma Li consoled her half jokingly, half in earnest.

“If you girls ever want to get married, it's better to marry young. Once you get used to living single it's difficult to adjust to married life,” our soprano said. “Look at me. I'll give you one example. I like to eat my breakfast alone. That's when I feel most relaxed, and I need that moment if I'm to last through an exhausting day of rehearsals. A few years ago, I had a love-thirsty suitor. One morning he came to visit me just as I sat down to breakfast. I didn't want him to join me at the breakfast table. So he said that he would wait in the living room. But if I know someone is around, I simply cannot digest my breakfast properly. I asked him to take a stroll and come back in half an hour. Can you guess what he did? Try! I give you three guesses.”

“I thought you had only one suitor when you were very young.”

There was a touch of irony in Ma Li's voice.

“So you can't guess? Well, let me tell you. He never came back,” the singer ended with a laugh.

“That's not funny,” cried Chu Hua. “He was hurt.”

“I can laugh about it now, but I felt very sad then. That's another reason why I came to do the land reform, to distract my attention from my worries and from love.”

“So it happened only a few months ago, not a few years ago!” exclaimed Chu Hua innocently.

“We'll talk about that some other time. Now we must stop. The girls are coming. Listen,” commanded Ma Li in a loud voice, her patience running out.

We could hear the crash of big drums calling the people
to the festival and their land. Four young activists, two to a team, were wielding drumsticks as big as cudgels, bringing them shatteringly down on the enormous red drums that the villagers brought out on grand occasions. The ra-ta-ta was punctuated by the clash of cymbals and the bursting of firecrackers. Little waist-drums chattered out the beat of the Yangko, the Northwest folk dance that, like the French Carmagnole, had become the dance of the revolution.

We danced the Yangko together down the village street. At first the girls were timid. Hesitantly they put their left foot forward and raised their arms high; their hands held the ends of bright scarves which were tied around their waists. They lowered their eyes because they didn't know where to look. But the steps of the Yangko come from the movements of working in the fields, and soon they were dancing with natural grace and feeling. They shed their shyness, which made them look solemn, and discovered their real, vital selves in the gay, bold rhythm of the dance. Their cheeks were rouged red. On their heads they wore bright red kerchiefs like Xiu-ying's on election day. A posse of boys before and behind them banged out the dance rhythm on waist-drums slung from their shoulders and decorated with red ribbons. They got me into the festive mood. By the time we reached the meeting place in the theater I had danced myself out of breath. Panting, I paused and stepped aside. In the crowd I saw Sun's wife waving at me with one hand while with the other she held her baby girl. Then she raised the baby's tiny arm and waved it to me too. Sun, her husband, still sullen, kept five steps away from them, far enough away to express his dissatisfaction with this topsy-turvy world, near enough to get some of the best land along with his family.

The stage was the center of attraction. The huge cauldron which we had confiscated from Landlord Bai was in the center, propped up on a low pedestal of bricks covered with red cloth. Behind it was a table neatly piled with sheets of white paper, the new land deeds giving title to the land allocated to the landless and landpoor peasants in equal shares. Off to one side was another table piled higgledy-piggledy
with tattered pieces of paper—old land deeds belonging to the landlords, mortgage deeds, loan vouchers, account books. An ever-increasing crowd of villagers thronged about the stage.

I caught sight of the virgin widow hanging around diffidently at the back of the crowd. As they surged forward to get a better view of the proceedings she was jostled even further back, along with a stocky, middle-aged peasant, her neighbor. They seemed to have been thrown into each other's arms. I waved my hand to her. She nodded and threaded her way to me out of the crowd. As she neared me she felt her bare head and exclaimed, “My head scarf! I've lost it. I must go back and look for it.” She turned and saw her neighbor holding up the scarf.

When she looked back at me, she saw that I was smiling, and to hide her confusion complained, “I get so flustered in a crowd.”

“But he doesn't,” I said meaningfully, and she blushed scarlet and cast down her eyes.

“We've known each other quite a while but we never dared to dream that my parents-in-law would give me permission to remarry,” she murmured shyly.

“You don't have to ask for such permission now. Both of you are single and old enough to decide for yourselves. You just go to the township office and register as man and wife. That's all there is to it. That is what the new marriage law says, you know.”

“That's what he told me,” she said, but without the excitement that I would have expected in a new bride-to-be.

“I'm happy for you,” I exclaimed.

“What is there to be happy about?” Her eyes filled with tears. It was traditional for a widow remarrying to express her apprehension about the future. A sense of propriety demanded that she show reluctance to change her state, even though deep down I knew she must have felt very differently.

We sat down with our backs to the wall, the warm, early spring sun playing on our faces.

“He's nothing much,” she said deprecatingly. “If I weren't a widow, I wouldn't choose him. If he were more
clever he wouldn't take me. You can't imagine how hard it is for a woman to live with an old, crippled couple and no able-bodied man around. The roof leaks, the wall crumbles. Who could I turn to for help? I tell my parents-in-law that I'm not going to remarry for my own pleasure and happiness. Besides, who knows whether he'll become a brute of a husband or not? An underdog must find an outlet for his unhappiness. He vents his anger on his wife. She's handy.”

“You mustn't let him lord it over you,” I admonished her.

“If he starts to beat me, to whom can I complain? It can't be my parents-in-law. They will sneer at me, ‘You asked for it. Who told you to fool around with him in the first place?”

“You can always complain to the Women's Association,” I advised her, and then with a sudden inspiration added, “You know what I can do? I will write you now and then asking you how you are getting on. If he knows that you have friends who care for you, he will think twice before he lays a hand on you.”

“Will you?” Her face lit up.

At that moment I heard the soprano start to sing a long, thrilling note of joy.

“They're setting fire to the old land deeds and mortgages!” We scrambled to our feet and ran to join the crowd, shouting and cheering. Shen and Ma Li took great handfuls of the yellowed, time-stained documents and tossed them into the flames leaping from the cauldron. The peasants roared out their approval, and once again the drums crashed and the firecrackers crackled.

“Good, good!” yelled the crowd each time the flames leaped high to devour the papers heaped upon them.

Xiu-ying was busy sorting out the new land deeds, ready to distribute them. Gao the sage was there too. He turned to consult with a peasant whom at first I didn't recognize until I saw that it was Malvolio Cheng with a towel for a turban and a pipe tucked into his sash. I missed Wang Sha. He was at the big meeting in the county town. Fleetingly in the crowd around the platform I glimpsed the Broken
Shoe looking intently and wonderingly at Xiu-ying. As I made my way to help Xiu-ying, I passed close by her and she tugged at my sleeve. Her eyebrows were still plucked and painted, but she had discarded the ridiculous rouge that she used to wear on her cheeks. She was in a high good humor.

“I've left that old scoundrel for good,” she cried. “I'll get my own land today. Ah, how I've longed for this day! A pox on them all.”

The surging crowd separated us. Everyone was trying to get as close to the platform as possible. I saw Da Niang picking her way through the press of people. She waved to me and I waved back. But she waved again with such urgency that I realized she had something to tell me.

“Da Niang, what is the matter?”

She did not reply. She took me to a quiet corner behind the wall of the theater. Her yellow jowls and the muscles in her face twitched.

“Da Niang,” I repeated, “what is the matter?”

Hesitantly she raised the hem of her tattered jacket and with her old teeth unpicked the thread. From the opened hem she took out a tightly rolled piece of paper.

“My old master gave this deed to me not long before you came here.” Her hands shook. The flimsy piece of paper fluttered like a leaf in the winter wind. She stared at it for a long moment with her single good eye. It was a meaningless statement “granting” her a few
mu
of land, actually less than she and her idiot son would receive in the land share-out that day.

“So he bribed you to keep quiet!”

She drew in her breath in a long sigh. She wanted to say something, but the words wouldn't come. Tears welled in her eyes. She bit her lip to stifle a sob. She blinked her eyes to hold back the tears that streamed from both her eyes. Then she spoke in a strangled voice. “He thought this would pay me for the ten lives that I have lost through him and his kind … my husband, my children.…”

The network of wrinkles on her face deepened. Bitter memories flooded back to mind. She gave a stifled cry, one she had wanted to utter for years. It was perhaps also a
cry of fear relieved. She had been afraid that her old master Chi would expose her complicity and tell us about this false deed.

“Da Niang, do you think there are other peasants who still want to keep these fake deeds?”

“Yes, and not only fake deeds; they will be up to other tricks too.” Her one eye, still wet, lit up with mischief. It was evidently irresistibly tempting to tease me, a meddlesome girl who went about bothering people.

I couldn't help being amused by her unblushing candor. I wouldn't let her spoil this day for me. I took her hand. Reassured, she tightened her fingers over mine.

“Da Niang, come. Come and get your land. It's time.”

Yuan-tsung Chen was born in Shanghai, China, and educated in a missionary school for girls there. In the autumn of 1950, following the establishment of the People's Republic of China, she went to work at the Film Bureau in Peking, and in 1951 she joined a group of cadres carrying through the agrarian revolution in Northwest China's Gansu Province, the setting of this book. Over the next twenty years, like other cadres, she several times “went down to the countryside” to help the peasant farmers in their co-operatives and, later, farm communes.

Yuan-tsung Chen came to the United States in 1972. She has taught at Cornell University, and is currently researching a catalog of Chinese films at the Chinese Culture Center in San Francisco. She and her husband, a journalist and artist, live in El Cerrito, California.