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

  As Ma Li held up her cup to drink, she motioned with her little finger, pointing to the corridor. A moment later we were standing together outside the compartment.

  “Shall I warn Chu Hua not to make a fool of herself?” She was clearly worried. Her big, black eyes were solemn. “You know how old-fashioned the peasants are. If Chu Hua talks and acts like she is talking and acting now, they’ll think it’s nothing less than free love and the end of the family. If even two of us misbehave, they’ll suspect all of us. It would be a disaster.”

  “But we aren’t in the village yet. Why not let them enjoy each other’s company while they can? Don’t be such a moralist.”

  “Don’t you be too permissive,” she retorted, unconvinced.

  As I turned to re-enter the compartment, everyone was still crowded around the windows. But now the train had passed Mount Hua, and Wang Sha, who had come in while Ma Li and I were out in the corridor, was the center of their clamor.

  “All right, all right,” he was saying, “when we reach Xian you can spend a whole day visiting historical sights.”

  Mount Hua was forgotten. Now the talk was all about Xian, the Changan of the great dynasties of Han and Tang; China’s Athens, Rome, and Constantinople rolled into one.

  Arriving in Xian, we were like any other group of tourists in this ancient capital. We wanted to see everything: the Bell Tower, the White Crane Pagoda where the Buddhist scriptures were translated, the famous Tang dynasty reliefs of horses. Remembering our schoolday poetry lessons, we all wanted to see the Wei-yang Palace of the Han emperor with its

  Rafters and ridgepoles of magnolia wood,

  Carved apricot wood for beams and pillars, and

  Golden clasps holding securing rings on doors studded with jade.

  But most of all we wanted to see the E-fang Palace of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, who had unified the warring petty feudal states into the first great empire of China. We were constantly told, “The peasants are waiting for you,” but we gladly sacrificed sleep, rest, and food to satisfy our curiosity and look two thousand years into the past.

  Leaving the gateway through the city wall, we bumped and clattered over farm roads in an antiquated bus until finally it came to a stop on the edge of some suburban farm fields, and our guide, a thin, bespectacled young man from the Archaeological Institute, solemnly intoned, “This is the E-fang Palace.” We craned our necks out of the windows, looking for the palace. What we saw was a flat space with some haphazardly scattered mounds of muddy earth and old tiles, surrounded by a few trees, brambles, and fields. We were a bit cast down, but our guide could see a great deal more than we. He pointed out to us where once the famous audience halls and pavilion stood, gracing the earth with their splendid courtyards and gardens and sparkling streams. He described them all with enthusiasm and imagination as if all that splendor and magnificence were actually there before us, with towering columns of cedar and vermilion lacquer, marble pediments and golden ornaments tinkling at the corners of upturned eaves.

  In the afternoon, we made our last excursion. We went to bathe in the Hua-qing hot springs where the famous beauty Yang Gui-fei, favorite of the Tang Emperor Ming Huang, had come to bathe twelve hundred years before. The once luxurious bathing rooms were now not much better than the bathhouses in any second-rate county town, but the water was still as delightful as in the days of the imperial favorite. Bubbling hot out of the ground, it filled the room with steam, and we were all flushed with the heat. Our eyes sparkled. In the half-light and vaporous clouds, pretty girls seemed prettier than ever. I was in a room with the soprano and Chu Hua. Eyes smiling, Chu Hua positioned herself in front of a long mirror, wiped the steam off it, and did a slow series of ballet movements, back straight, arms rounded and upraised, slender legs stretched forward and back, toes pointed, and then a graceful arabesque.

  She darted me a glance through the mirror. Childishly she drew her neck down between her shoulders and put out her small pink tongue.

  The soprano was reclining on a wicker couch covered with bright towels. Suddenly I heard Chu Hua say to her, “I am in love.” Chu Hua’s eyes opened wide as if surprised by her own words. “I am in love with someone,” she repeated, standing motionless before the soprano as if her whole life hung on the outcome of this conversation. But the soprano did not seem to hear her. Unhurriedly she took a small pot of cold cream from the army duffle bag she carried.

  “What did you say?” She carefully massaged her neck and throat with the cold cream. “You are in love?”

  “But I don’t know whether he loves me or not,” Chu Hua pouted.

  “Ah! Unconsummated love.” The soprano paused in her movements, gazing at Chu Hua with a sentimental look in her eyes. The next moment, she sighed softly and a look of sadness veiled her face. With the stage thus set, she spoke to both Chu Hua and me in a subdued, earnest voice with great sincerity and relish about her own romance. “I was just sixteen when I fell in love with a man who lived on the same block as I did. We used to pass each other almost every day. He wore a French beret and looked very handsome in it. One day we began to say ‘Hi’ to each other, and soon we had made a date for dinner.

  “I was in a fever of expectation as I waited for him in the restaurant. I felt a sudden premonition of happiness. Then in he came, the same man, yet totally different. He wasn’t wearing his beret.”

  Chu Hua, on tenterhooks, asked, “Did you confess your love for him?”

  “To that total stranger? Of course not. I was in love with the man in the French beret.”

  “But it was the same man,” I cried.

  “Yes and no,” said the soprano, and she went on lamenting her lost love.

  We had been carried along with her story. She spoke expressively. Chu Hua could not get a word in edgeways about herself. When the soprano finished her story, she paused and then gave us some advice.

  “Real love is always tragic. Read the great love stories. They are all great tragedies. Right? But who wants to fall in love in an ordinary way?” She looked from Chu Hua to me, obviously including me as one of three special people, with special sensibilities. Love, she continued lecturing, was a wonder that came in many forms. A fancy sometimes, a phantom; sometimes a splendid reality. We should not be rash. We should wait for that special person and be satisfied with no one else.

  I learned later that she had recounted her story to many people. She herself never tired of it, and neither did her listeners, old or new like myself, because each time she told it there were new details and aspects never revealed before. Her lover was part real, part an amalgam of past loves, part fantasy—her ideal. Merging past and present loves into one, she invested that new creation with a life of its own. If some cynic asked her, “Which love are you talking about?” she would answer artlessly, even with tears in her eyes, “I was only in love once: my most cherished first love.”

  Hearing her talk gave Chu Hua time to cool off. But the warmth, the mists of steam, the associations of the place were heady. Perhaps as we emerged from the grotto it wasn’t just we who felt like the beloved imperial beauty.

  5

  Cold Welcome in Longxiang

  Early the next morning the shrill voice of Dai Shi brought us back to reality and the task at hand. She strode down the corridor of the Xian Guest House, banging on doors and shouting, “Meeting! Meeting in the ballroom! Ten o’clock sharp!”

  Xian was crowded with hundreds of cadres, work teams gathered from Peking, Tianjin, and other northern cities. Of the southern cities, only cosmopolitan Shanghai could send a large number of cadres who for some reason or other could speak Mandarin, the northern Chinese dialect. The Guest House, the tourist hotel once operated by the Guomindang government’s travel agency, where we were staying four and five to a room, had the only hall in the city large enough to hold us all. We packed it wall to wall, and the old, worn clothes we wore especially for our coming stay in the villages seemed to mock the fancy chandeliers
and the plush red velvet curtains still adorning the windows. From Xian we would disperse to the villages of the Northwest. This would be the final meeting before we left.

  The speaker was a veteran Party member, full of years and experience. He had helped with land reform during the recent civil war, and at first we listened intently, expecting revelations. But he was too pedantic and humorless, and he droned on and on. I knew that I should listen and, like all the other cadres, I diligently noted down in my notebook everything he said. Whenever he paused all one could hear was the scratching of pens on paper.

  “It is now more than a year since the Liberation. Things are in better shape. In the places where you are going, landlords’ rents and rates of interest should have been lowered. That is the law. The peasants should have formed their Poor Peasants’ Associations and their own militia. These will be the backbones of the land reform campaign. As it gets going, the middle-income peasants will side with them. You must try to get the rich peasants to remain neutral at the very least.

  “Generally speaking, a bare three to five percent of the population in these areas are feudal landlords, but they hold sixty percent or more of the land. Expropriate all their land, tools, and draft animals, but,” he paused and significantly repeated, “but not their needed houses and personal property. When a new local government is elected it will distribute land, tools, and beasts to those who need them. But you must see to it that the landlords and their families also get a share large enough to support themselves on.”

  We had heard most of this before, and I began to nod. He must have been an army propagandist once. When the troops marched, he was there by the roadside, beating his drum and shouting slogans so that, tired as they were, they would not fall asleep on their marching feet.

  Just as I was beginning to doze off, he suddenly raised his voice: “What you are doing is something unprecedented in China and the world. Three hundred million peasants, one-sixth of the world’s population, must liberate themselves from thirty centuries of feudal landlord domination. Smashing the landlords’ economic power means smashing their political power. Only that can make secure the power of the people.”

  As I recall it, perhaps it would have been better if we had paid more heed to his words: “Put frivolous thoughts behind you. Concentrate all your thoughts on the work at hand.”

  We left Xian the next day at daybreak. It was a short journey by train due west to Baoji, where at that time the line ended. There a convoy of open trucks was waiting by the side of the unfinished railroad, and soon we were roaring along the ancient caravan trail to the Northwest, first to Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province, and then on again across the bed of the Yellow River, almost dry in the autumn drought.

  We entered the panhandle of Gansu, the long neck of upland valley leading to the Plateau of Central Asia. This is where the Great Wall ends, fifteen hundred miles from where it starts on the Gulf of Liaodong. Then we drove across the northern spurs of the Big Snow Mountains, whose peaks, solitary and grand, thrust into the autumn clouds.

  Soon the road was climbing the steep flanks of a mountain. Looking down I saw a river raging through a gorge with a sheer precipice on either side. I had never seen such landscapes except in picture books. I tightened my hold on the side of the swaying truck. I was glad to be with Ma Li and clowning Cheng. It reassured me to know that Wang Sha was in the last of the convoy of trucks bringing up the rear. Sometimes, as we zigzagged up the mountain road, I could look down and see the last truck directly below us, two hundred feet down, laboring up the steep rise. Wang Sha sat in a back corner, covered with yellow dust.

  Our ancient truck, a resurrected wreck made of cannibalized parts, wheezed and creaked along the road. Once near the top of a narrow pass, where the wheels of countless carts had worn deep dust-filled ruts in the track, it groaned to a stop. The driver tried to coax it back to life, then at his urgent command we all sprang to the ground and put our shoulders to its wheels, pushing and dragging, getting it moving slowly inch by inch up the hill, until, with a sudden spurt, it made the summit.

  As we went further west our convoy grew smaller, groups of trucks branching off to the north and south to carry the work teams to their destinations.

  The wind howled down a gorge. I remembered words from a classical poem:

  The wind called up columns of sand and stones,

  They madly whirled as if they danced on wings.

  Now I saw this with my own eyes. Thick yellow dust dimmed the light of the sun. We had been issued surgical gauze masks, and although I wore one over my mouth and nose and kept my lips shut as tightly as I could, the fine sand still seeped through and I felt grit in my mouth. A Tang dynasty poem called this a “barren, barbarous land never reached by the Spring breeze.” I could well believe it.

  As dusk descended quickly in the gorge, making further progress dangerous, we stopped for the night at a small inn near the head of a pass. Inn is perhaps too fancy a word for a couple of hovels tucked in a cleft of the cliff where they were partly sheltered from the wind. They had no beds or separate rooms or any conveniences. Just two bare rooms with half their space taken up by low kangs.

  Here at least for foreign and southern readers who sleep on beds, and never saw kangs, I think I should explain that the kang in a northern house does not only serve as a bed. At night when you spread your bedding on it, it is your bed. During the daytime when you have rolled up your bedding and stacked it on one side, the kang can be used as a place to work, eat, and receive visitors on. A large kang can take up half the space in a room. It is actually a raised room within a room, a split-level room, the inner, raised one with a flue beneath it where a fire can be lit for warmth. Here, in the northern villages, when guests come visiting, you invite them to sit by the low-legged table set on the kang: “Come onto the kang. You don’t have to take your shoes off. It’s quite all right for you to keep them on.” But, of course, polite guests will certainly remove their shoes before getting on the kang or they will sit with their feet dangling over its side.

  In these two hovels there were only the kangs for beds. The men left these for us twenty-five girls. They brought in bundles of hay which they had found outside and spread this on the dirt floor to make extra beds for themselves.

  It was decided that we should start next morning at first light and press on to the plateau which was our destination. Exhausted by the day’s journey, we hurriedly ate what food we had ready with us and then threw ourselves down, dressed just as we were and huddled together for warmth, to sleep.

  My drowsy eyes wandered around our inn. A little light came in through the cracks in the door, which was close to falling off its hinges, and through the single window, which was hardly more than a hole in the wall roughly latticed with slivers of wood and white paper. But those same cracks in the doorway and around the window let in drafts of cold air. An oil lamp in the wall niche burned smokily. In its dim, flickering light, I stared in mounting alarm at the beams overhead, black and furry with soot and grime. Ugly black bugs and spiders crawled jerkily across them.

  “There’s worse to come.” Ma Li lay beside me, pressing her mouth against my shoulder.

  “Umgh.”

  “Do you hear that wolf howling?”

  “Umgh.” I did not want to say anything stupidly comforting that might only increase her misgivings.

  “The latrines are all outside. If we go out in the middle of the night, will the wolves attack us?” Chu Hua asked anxiously.

  “We’ll go together.” Reassuring, but what good I would be in case of an attack by wolves I hadn’t the faintest idea. I was afraid even of a cat.

  “I’ll go with you,” Ma Li added. She knew my weakness.

  “I hope we’ll be assigned to the same village,” Chu Hua sighed.

  “I doubt if the three of us will work together. But you two might try,” Ma Li said with the magnanimity of one who felt stronger and superior.

  I looked around again at our inn. T
he earthen walls were pitted with ugly dents where large pieces of loess and straw plaster had fallen off.

  The innkeeper was of a piece with the hovels he looked after. His face was a dense web of wrinkles. Although he said he was still in middle age, he looked like a hoary veteran of seventy. His perpetual squint against the wind-borne Gobi sand, the blinding summer sunshine, the bitter winter cold had etched fine lines around his eyes. His habit of silence had formed deep-set lines around his mouth. His clothes were so patched with different shades of cotton that there was no way of telling the original color of his suit. Never had I seen such poverty, not even in the slums of Shanghai where at least the poor could rifle through the garbage bins of the rich.

  We had traveled for a whole day over this ancient land. The further west we had come, the more poverty-stricken, worn-out, and dilapidated was the countryside. We were on the Old Silk Road where once rich caravans passed laden with silks and brocades, jades and other finery. Imperial couriers in princely trappings had coursed through here at breakneck speed bringing the emperors news from the Western Regions. Surely they never slept in such squalor.

  At first, we had marveled at the strangeness of the landscape. It was a plain riven by deep gullies so that the dirt road either meandered wildly to avoid the slits in the earth or plunged zigzag down and up the sides of the ravines that couldn’t be avoided. The earth had been ravaged and made desolate. I knew from my history books that these eroded lands were once pastures and forested plateaus. Then the pastures had been ploughed up to grow crops and the forests had been cleared for farmland. The natural rhythm of nature had been disturbed. The animals had disappeared and so had their dung. War had devastated the farms. Marauding warlord armies had chopped down the remaining trees for firewood. Without vegetation to hinder them, the rains and run-off rivulets of centuries had eaten into the fields and carried them away. The green clothing of the earth had been filched and the naked earth was dying of cold.