The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China Read online

  “To regiment and impose restrictions on writers, Communists or not, is to kill their creative urge. I have been writing for years. But many of my poems—and some I consider the best—have never been published and never will be if some people have their way. The reason is simple: I was told first in Yanan and then in Peking, ‘They are not revolutionary. Why do you waste your time describing a cloud lit by the morning sun?’

  “Sometimes when I take these poems out and recite them to myself I feel like an actor playing in an empty theater. Without lights. Without an audience. With neither applause nor hisses; surrounded by emptiness that responds to nothing I say or think. When people are constantly telling me to write this or that I feel my brain drying up. If this goes on, one fine day it will be as dried up as the orange peel that old wives use to make herb medicine.” This quiet outburst caused a considerable stir; he was a Communist and had spent the war years in Yanan.

  He was just about to resume his seat when on the spur of the moment he pulled out a sheet of paper and began to read aloud a poem, the very one describing the cloud in the morning sky. When he finished, the audience applauded noisily while he himself bowed ostentatiously to all the prettiest actresses.

  As he replaced the poem in his pocket he reminisced, “I wrote that on the first day I returned to Shanghai from Paris. It was in 1932. Or was it ‘31? Anyway, on the third day the French Concession police arrested me. In those days I hadn’t a thought in my head but poetry, but they said that my poem about the cloud was obviously revolutionary because the sun tinted the cloud red and furthermore nobody but a Communist would go all the way to Paris just to study poetry. It took years to convince them that I had gone to Paris to study painting and the information they had got from their Guomindang spies was wrong. It was shameful. The Guomindang government handed over their own innocent people to the foreigners who occupied our land, and treated not only them, but their top boss, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, like dirt. However, they had put ideas into my head. What they didn’t like, I liked, and I became a Communist.”

  When he finally sat down, he leaned his tall frame over to speak to a neighbor and his movement revealed a short, middle-aged man in the seat behind him.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Dai Shi, another note taker sitting beside me.

  “Chen Bo-da,” she whispered. “He is one of Chairman Mao’s chief secretaries. Now be quiet. I think he is going to speak.”

  “Did we invite him? When did he come in?” I turned to ask Ma Li, who was sitting behind Dai Shi.

  “No, we didn’t. But he likes to play the inspector-general incognito.”

  “Comrades, I find the meeting most interesting. Everybody speaks out what is on his mind. May I do the same?” The newcomer spoke modestly, but I couldn’t help thinking it was a bit forced. He must have known that most people in the room knew who he was. “I personally believe that if a writer takes a firm Party or pro-Party stand, he will produce a better book or play.” Then he praised Mao Dun’s Midnight as the most effective satire in modern Chinese literature directed against the bourgeoisie. “Comrade Mao Dun, will you tell us how you wrote that novel?” It was a shrewd move. Mao Dun was a formidable figure among Chinese intellectuals. It would be quite useful to set him up as a revolutionary proletarian writer.

  Mao Dun rose slowly and stood for a moment as if debating with himself. With a smile on his elfish face, he declined the role assigned him and said, “I must be frank. I was hard up at the time. I borrowed money from a friend and tried my luck on the Shanghai stock exchange. I lost every cent I had and was worse off than before. When a publisher suggested I do a book about the business world and pay off my debts that way, that’s exactly what I did!”

  The hall erupted in laughter and cheers. Mao Dun held his hand up for silence and added, “Don’t follow in anyone’s footsteps. Write as you think best.”

  Chen Bo-da’s face flushed red, but when I glanced around I saw many faces looking up with glowing eyes.

  I too put down my pen and began to clap. Dai Shi restrained my arm and whispered fiercely, “You’re just supposed to be taking notes!”

  “Comrade Minister,” a soft voice from the back of the hall addressed Mao Dun respectfully. “Please advise us how we can come to grips with contemporary life?”

  “Go among the people; go among the peasants.” He paused for a moment to look around at the walls as if considering whether he ought to say more. “I don’t think I am letting out a secret when I tell you that the land reform movement will soon start in all the newly liberated areas.”

  “Will volunteers be called for?”

  “Naturally,” Mao Dun answered. “Scores of thousands of educated young people will be needed to help the peasants carry it through.”

  To “go among the peasants” was a movement that had started in the mid-twenties when revolutionaries first realized that no revolution could succeed in China without the support of the ninety percent of the people who were peasants. In those days, in reality or in fiction, it was the man-hero who made the choice between revolution, love, and family. Women were almost condescendingly awarded the role of helpmate, or were condemned to pine at home and wait for their men to come back and share their glory. Maybe now it was the woman’s turn. I smiled involuntarily.

  “Why are you smiling when everyone else is wrapped up in a heated discussion? We are in a meeting, you know,” Ma Li whispered to me.

  “Hush,” someone hissed at us.

  “… I am glad that question has been raised,” Wang Sha was saying. “After talk comes action. We must not neglect plays that deal with the past, but we would be delinquent if we didn’t write about the present. China is charting new paths and you young people will confront a new world and experiences which will often seem baffling. You young writers face the challenge of creating a literature that will truly reflect reality and by its truth invigorate the struggle for the new.

  “Our veteran writers here—Mao Dun, Pa Chin, Ai Ching, and all the others, have taken over the inheritance of the traditional Chinese literature—the beautiful short stories and poetry of the Tang dynasty, thirteen hundred years ago, the wonderful novels and plays of the Ming and Qing dynasties. But they found there an almost total lack of psychological portraiture of individual characters. Those characters are vivid. They come alive through action and dialogue. But their creators did not delve deeply into their minds and thoughts as the great writers of modern Western literature do. Our modern writers have made a breakthrough, but much still remains to be done to create a literature worthy of our times. Where is the full-blooded portrayal of our modern heroes that we are all waiting for?”

  At this, Ding Ling, the firebrand feminist, jumped to her feet and cried: “Heroes! Heroes! I have been waiting in vain for someone to say even one word about our heroines. About our women. It’s as though half the population doesn’t exist. What about looking deep into their minds!”

  The women in the audience got to their feet and gave her a standing ovation. Wang Sha, to show his contriteness, leaned over to shake her hand.

  But time had run out. The meeting was over. The participants dispersed, continuing the discussion in noisy groups as they left. I busied myself putting my notes in order and then tidying up the hall, which doubled as our reading room. A magazine lay on the speakers’ table near where Wang Sha was chatting with the director of the theater. As I stretched out my hand to pick it up, Wang Sha glanced at me, and I drew back.

  “No, I don’t want it,” he said politely, interrupting his conversation. He added, speaking to his companion, “This is our future playwright.”

  “How did you know I want to write?” I asked.

  “Just a guess,” he replied, laughing.

  “If you find playwriting too much of a headache, switch to acting. We need actresses too,” the director joked, sizing me up as he spoke. “Anyway, if you want to try writing first, you won’t find a better tutor than Wang Sha.” At which he left.

&n
bsp; “Well, I do want to write,” I confided to Wang Sha.

  “So? Then you must have found tonight’s discussion interesting.”

  “I certainly did. Will the report of what was said be read in Peking? Will it get to the real authorities there?”

  “Certainly, they will get it and I hope they pay attention to it. The fact that Mao Dun has been appointed Minister of Culture may mean business. You see, he’s not a Communist and has often disagreed with the Party’s cultural policy. That’s why he didn’t accept the Party’s invitation to stay in Yanan during the war years.”

  “If he had, he might have been purged like the others who opposed the Yanan Talks,” I said.

  “The 1942 Yanan purge was a disgraceful episode!” The vehemence in his voice was more eloquent than his words. “On the other hand, he and many others were persecuted in the Guomindang-ruled areas. By defending their social and artistic ideas, they’d gotten their heads into a noose and at any minute the Guomindang might have drawn it tight around their necks.”

  The theater was more than a place of work for us; it was our school and university and club as well. Although I still lived in our villa in the old French Concession, I spent less and less time there. I was up early and at work by eight, and I came home just in time to catch supper before rushing out again to a play or film or to attend a study meeting.

  I joined a writers’ workshop, and the plays we wrote were terrible. I can’t remember one that didn’t preach some message or spout slogans before its pat ending. However, in helping to write them I got to explore parts of Shanghai life that were utterly unknown to me. Taking our cue from Zola, when we wrote playlets about ending prostitution, wiping out organized crime, cleaning up the slums, or about a model worker we went to visit former brothels and streetwalkers, prisons and gangsters, slum dwellers and factories. Our efforts to describe their lives so intrigued the girls of a former brothel that they took over the whole project and wrote, staged, and acted the play themselves. It took Shanghai by storm and played to full houses for weeks. Actors and audiences were all in tears in the climactic scenes and shouted with joy at the end. It only ended its run when the energy and freshness of the amateur actresses flagged and, tired of living through their old life again and again on the stage, they began to act as badly as our professional actors acted when they tackled characters they knew nothing about.

  My history books had taught me to be proud of China, and I wanted to express that pride and wonder at what her people had done; but a book or a play needs a hero, and I found that I did not know the hero of my future play, that enormous character who was a composite of China’s people, because I did not know those people. Everything and everybody was changing right in front of my eyes. A drama was being acted out in Shanghai, but it was so diverse, so vast with its cast of six million characters that I could not take it in. If I did not know Shanghai, how could I know China?

  Two events determined what I should learn next. War broke out between North and South Korea in June 1950, and the Americans joined in.

  This was too much for my uncle. War again! He was certain that the new government would now accelerate its radical policies and tighten control over the business community. He decided to leave as soon as possible for Hong Kong.

  October 1950 was a month for decisions. The American army was advancing in North Korea and had neared the Chinese border. Its planes dropped bombs in Northeast China, just over the border from North Korea, and Chinese troops were ordered into action to back up the North Korean army in a counteroffensive across the Yalu River. Young people like myself who felt that we had missed the historic fight for the establishment of the new China did not want to miss this new battle to preserve it. Many of us, myself included, volunteered, but only two young people in our theater were accepted. The armed forces, we were told, would handle that situation with some special volunteers. Civilian cadres would have another task: The government issued a call for volunteers to help carry out the recently passed land reform law. The lands of the feudal landlords would be confiscated and shared out among the landless and landpoor farmers. The reform had already been carried out among the hundred million peasants in the area that had formed the Communist Party’s base at the start of the final civil war. Now it would be carried out in the areas taken over from Guomindang rule in the final offensive. Three hundred million peasants would be involved, the great bulk of the population in Central-South, South, Southwest, and Northwest China. About twenty-eight million landlords and their families would be affected.

  Like every other able-bodied cadre in the theater I volunteered to go. This time I was accepted.

  The day the decision to carry through the land reform was announced, my uncle greeted me with a gloomy face. “I told you so,” he said. “Things are heating up. We can’t delay any longer. No one knows what this war will lead to. We’ll leave the house to the servants and be off as soon as we can pack.”

  “Uncle, what has the land reform got to do with us personally? We don’t own farmland.” I tried to prepare him a little before dropping my bombshell. “And … well, you see, I’ve just volunteered to go out and help with the land reform.” There.

  My uncle was stunned. Words failed him, until finally he stuttered, “My God! Madame Lu still owns land near Shanghai and collects rent from the farmers there! What will happen if you’re sent to the place where her estates are? What will happen to her and Bob? What will happen to our marriage plans?” His world was collapsing.

  Uncle prepared to turn the house over to an old, loyal servant and began to pack in earnest. I too began to pack: first the things for the rest of my stay in Shanghai, in the theater’s dormitory for single cadres; then, another trunk to send with my uncle to Hong Kong. We still held on to the plan that I would join them there later.

  When the war began in Korea, it had already been decided that Bob Lu should leave China rather than run the risk of being caught up in the fighting. The day after the decision on land reform was announced, Madame Lu sent word that they were leaving immediately for Hong Kong, and they were sure that we would understand. We would all meet there soon, the note ended. I never saw Madame Lu or Bob again. I wasn’t heartbroken and I didn’t grieve. It had just been one of those typical Shanghai family arrangements, I suppose. A matter of putting two people and their money together.

  4

  Journey to the Northwest

  Lana Turner had disappeared. A huge painting, the size of a billboard, had been hoisted up to take her place over the marquee of the Cathay Cinema. Center left was a determined-looking worker in blue overalls carrying an oversized hammer. He clasped the hands of a smiling peasant holding a sickle. Behind the worker were smaller figures of white-collar workers, men and women, professionals and intellectuals, carrying red banners, a whole forest of them. Factory chimneys spouted smoke in the background. Behind the peasant were serried ranks of other peasants marching against a background of neatly ordered fields being ploughed with tractors. A morning sun rose red in the cloudless blue sky. Over all floated the words “Land to the Tillers.”

  All over Shanghai, billboards that had once extolled Camel cigarettes and other goods now sang the praises of worker-peasant unity and land reform. Every day the press carried articles and editorials instructing and exhorting the cadres selected to go to the villages. We volunteers were given a crash course in the theory of agrarian revolution. Each of us was presented with a folder of documents to study. Meetings, lectures, and study groups were organized for us. Wang Sha and other veteran cadres who had already taken part in the land reform in North and Northeast China tried to pass on as much of their experiences to us as possible, but it became even clearer to me that without firsthand experience of working and living with the peasants in their villages it would be hard for us tyros to understand exactly what we had to do or how to do it. The landpoor peasants, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and farm laborers were a vast mass of faceless strangers, separated from me by a wide gap of
incomprehension. And yet it was precisely for them that I would be going to help carry through the land reform.

  And then there was that other, so much smaller group of faceless strangers—the feudal landlords. The men now termed feudal landlords had been chosen by the former Guomindang government, just as they had been by the emperors for centuries past, to run the show in the rural areas. They were the gentry, the literates, lording it over the vast mass of the illiterate. They rented out land at exorbitant rents, charged high interest rates on loans, and in especially backward areas were real rural despots, using their power to amass wealth by every means. Now they and their families would have to atone for these sins.

  And yet, although there were indeed some very large landowners, the material difference between the good poor and the bad rich was often no more than 180 mu or about thirty acres a family. Some tyrannous landlords abused their power and position and deserved punishment, but it seemed harsh to me that because of some small difference in wealth, a small landlord family should be assailed and its children stigmatized as members of an “exploiting class.” It seemed unfair too that the really big landlords had been able to flee the country, leaving behind their puppets, these millions of little landlords, to deal with the consequences. Then I thought of Madame Lu. But it was hard to picture my erstwhile proposed mother-in-law as a “feudal landlord,” or, as I now learned to categorize her, “part feudal landlord, part capitalist,” who would be slated to lose her land but not her bourgeois capital.

  Between these clearly “good” and “evil” classes were two more groups, and here it wasn’t always easy to draw distinct lines. The largest group between the two extremes—and our greatest hope for allies—were the “middle peasants.” Where the poor peasant was always on the verge of sliding down into the abyss because of drought or flood or unpayable debts, the middle peasant could just about make do. Then came the much smaller group of “rich peasants.” These relatively well-to-do farmers had more land than they could till themselves so they hired laborers or rented out a portion to tenants or sharecroppers. They were closer in spirit and interests to landlords, though not as established in wealth and power. We were warned in our preparatory classes to keep a wary eye on them while avoiding action that would force them over to the side of the landlords.