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

  I sighed disconsolately.

  Ma Li and I were separated at the county town which would be the center of our work teams’ activities. We learned that since there were not enough women cadres, only one could be sent to each township group of villages and hamlets. By this time the leaders, headed by Wang Sha, had a pretty fair idea of the work teams’ rank and file, so it was not too difficult to decide the makeup of the small groups of work teams. I was quite inexperienced in mass work so they teamed me up with Malvolio Cheng, a veteran; Wang Sha himself would be the third member of our small team. As a senior cadre, he would have a great deal of work to do supervising several teams and helping with overall guidance at the county center; in fact, he would stay for another day or so of talks with the county leadership to plan the first steps of work in the area, but Cheng and I were told to prepare to leave for our work post immediately.

  Next morning the work teams dispersed in groups of three or four to their several destinations in the surrounding villages. Cheng and I piled our baggage onto an ox cart and arranged our bedding so that we had something to sit on. Like everything else in this region, it was a decrepit wreck, a travesty of a cart. No single piece of wood on it was straight or flat. Its cartwright had evidently lacked tools and proper timber and hacked it out with an adze. It jolted along the rough track that served for a road. The wheels squeaked maddeningly for lack of grease, and the cart’s shape changed alarmingly as it negotiated the ruts and potholes. I was worried that it might disintegrate at any moment and was thankful that the bullock in the shafts was plodding along even slower than a man could walk. I sat next to our taciturn driver and dozed as we swayed. Every now and then I roused myself to look at the slowly passing landscape. Sometimes I got off impatiently to walk ahead, but that simply meant a long, tedious wait for them to catch up with me or added anxiety that I might have taken the wrong road.

  Malvolio Cheng was as cheerful as I was at the start. But after the first hour or two he too fell silent, lulled by the monotonous swaying of the cart and the bleak landscape around us. Finally the only sound was the creaking of the cart. We passed few people on the road.

  Towards noon we approached a district market town where we stopped to rest and feed the ox. This was smaller than the county center we had left but larger, I supposed, than the township of Longxiang we were making for. Near a river crossing, it was a walled town with most of its wall intact, fifteen feet high, made of hand-hewn stones surrounded by a now empty moat. Crossing a low, humpbacked bridge, we entered it through a narrow gateway. Weathered wooden gates bound and studded with rusty iron lay back in niches in the wall. I noticed that the hinges were black with grease. It was evident that they had only recently become museum pieces. Beyond them, the tunnel of the gateway opened onto a narrow cobble-stoned street between rickety, low houses. They were so close together that long poles spanned the space between the windowsills of opposite houses and washing fluttered above the heads of pedestrians. Open drains flanked the roadway. There was limitless land outside the town walls, but over the decades, banditry and freebooters had driven more and more people to seek safety in the crowded space within the stout medieval walls. From there they sallied out each day to the surrounding farm fields. I had seen just such a street scene in a Song dynasty painting. It had not changed for a thousand years.

  A few open-fronted shops were doing business. A mosaic of color spilled out from the opulent dry-goods shop: bolts of blue and white cotton, colors of life and death; enamel washbasins with gaudy old designs of simpering, rosy-cheeked beauties or flowers and birds; gay ribbons and socks dyed with red and emerald green stripes; cheap mirrors and colorful, shiny Thermos bottles, a fantastic luxury that most peasants could only gape at. Further down in front of a food shop were a few large vats of dark, unappetizing-looking pickles, dried herbs, and salted meat encrusted with brine and dust. In an ironmonger’s shop covered with a grey film of iron filings a tinsmith was cutting up old kerosene cans to make crude kettles and pans. The bare shelves of other shops gave no clue to what they sold. The owners or apprentices lolling over the counters followed us with lackluster eyes. They were like Rip Van Winkles wakened by the noise of our approaching cart, sleepy and annoyed rather than curious at the disturbance we made. We smelled the sharp odor of vinegar, the barnyard stench of latrines, and the fragrance of incense sticks.

  Slow as it was, our cart crossed the town in a few minutes and emerged through the opposite gateway into the open countryside. Ancient, crumbling, feudal, the half-awake town still dominated the parched land around it. When I looked back I thought how much the battlemented walls looked like stage props now, and yet two thousand years ago generals of the Han dynasty had fought great wars here against the Huns and driven them westward to crush the Roman Empire. Then this became a western borderland of China. The emperors used to send exiles here, criminals or dissidents, rebellious scholars. Desperate characters, outlaws and free spirits, used to make their way here seeking safety in anonymity in the wild and harsh Northwest where one did not ask possibly embarrassing questions of a newcomer.

  As I looked at the desolation around me, I knew how far I was in time as well as space from the always green southland and Shanghai, that Paradise of Adventurers now purging itself of its past and boldly proclaiming itself a new modern city. Here in the Gansu countryside, everything—land, sky, cottages, even the people in the distance—was yellow-grey in the fading autumn light, dun-colored, cold. I could not see a single green leaf or blade of grass. And yet there was change here too. We trundled over a new bridge built of stone. It was then that I noticed that the town wall on this side had been pulled down and its stones brought here to build the bridge.

  Twilight began to fall. We passed even fewer people on the road. Soon our ox cart was the only thing moving on this wide, dead plateau stretching emptily into the distance, a speck in the yellow valleys of Gansu. Something damp and cold fell on my hand. I started, surprised, and then realized that it was Cheng, our clown, holding my hand. I drew my hand back slowly, slowly enough to let him understand that I had no wish to hurt his feelings, but not so slowly as to allow him to mistake it for shyness on my part. I was sympathetic and yet had no intention of obliging him when he needed a loved one in this loneliness. He turned his head away. I caught a glimpse of a triangular scar on the back of his head. A blow? A wound in battle? I wondered, and yet I never asked.

  It was almost dark when, passing an empty pond and a grove of now leafless trees, we finally reached Longxiang, our destination. The village was nothing more than a sorry collection of cottages built of rammed earth, loess soil mixed with puddled clay and chopped straw, and roofed with the same adobe. The roadway between the cottages was deeply rutted and eroded by the rain-wash from their roofs. A few houses, built of blue-grey bricks and roofed with black tiles, had solid walls around them and arched gateways leading to inner courtyards. Dim lights from small kerosene lanterns lit a few of their windows. In the peasants’ homes, too poor for oil lights, they groped around in the dusk. It was too dark for work, too early for bed; immobile, obscure shadows, they stood or squatted at their front doors. Tiny dots of flame in their pipes flickered red in the twilight. A stray dog sniffed and licked at the roots of a leafless tree. Some ragged children, still stuffing their evening meal of porridge into their mouths, ran after our cart.

  Our cart stopped outside what seemed to be an abandoned shop. A roughly painted sign beside the door indicated that it was the office of the Longxiang Provisional Township Government and Communist Party Group. “Group” meant there were not even the five Party members needed to form a committee. Two peasant cadres hurried out to greet us.

  “Welcome! Welcome!”

  It was good to hear their obvious pleasure at our arrival. They bustled around and helped us take our baggage from the cart. We introduced ourselves. Their names were Shen and Tu.

  Something was wrong with Shen’s eyes. When he spoke to me, one eye looked at me and the o
ther squinted at something else. But he seemed quite jolly all the same. Tu, after a perfunctory greeting, looked on soberly while Shen did the honors. Tu was tall and strongly built, clearly well able to take care of himself. His jacket was unbuttoned even in this chilly evening, revealing swelling muscles under his vest. The lines of his face were set, hard, and immobile. I didn’t like him.

  Shen’s first greeting had been cheerful, but when he looked beyond us, saw no one else, and realized that there were only the two of us, he showed some surprise with a touch of disappointment. “Just you …!” he let slip. But to tell the truth, if I had been in his place I wouldn’t have been much impressed by this work team either. So I hastened to reassure him: “Comrade Wang Sha, the head of our work team, will come later.”

  After our long journey, this subdued reception was a real letdown. The newsreels had shown peasants meeting work teams on the road with clashing cymbals and drums. In other places there was less fanfare, but I had never heard of any cadres getting such a cold greeting as this one. Our village, as I quickly tried to rationalize, was abysmally poor and remote and off the beaten track. Shen and Tu did make some effort as our hosts. They poured hot water into a battered enamel basin so that we could at least wash up, and they gave us a simple meal of a strange dish they called pian-er gruel. Then Tu took my heavy bag and escorted me to my home while Shen guided Malvolio Cheng in the opposite direction.

  Tu led me to a cottage on the outer fringe of the hamlet. It had three doors and was inside a walled enclosure, but the wall offered small protection; it merely indicated the limits of the compound. Opposite was a courtyard with another cottage in it. As I shone my flashlight to see where I was going, from the corner of my eye I glimpsed a female figure in a red jacket disappearing around the opposite corner.

  A single family, Tu told me, inhabited two rooms of the cottage which would now be my home. I was given the empty end room. I felt the coldness of the welcome even more. My neighbors must have heard us approaching, but their doors remained tightly closed. No one even put his head out to take a look.

  My quarters turned out to be an outer room empty except for a shaky table with three sound legs and a broken fourth. Beyond was a smaller, inner room—tiny, windowless, with no door in its doorway, containing the kang. Tu gave me an oil-blackened earthenware lamp with a smoky wick and abruptly said good night. When he had gone I looked around my new home. I found that the latch on the door was broken. My unease increased. I had heard many times already that landlords had murdered land reform work team cadres. Had I played into their hands? I didn’t even know where Cheng was. I felt a cold shudder pass through me. Trying to put these thoughts aside, I dusted off my clothes, threw myself fully dressed on the kang, and covered myself with my quilt.

  Time went by, but despite my fatigue I could not sleep. In a corner near the kang a spiderweb glittered in the moonlight. I inadvertently touched it with my elbow. It quivered and a villainous-looking spider dashed out of hiding. Trying to sense its prey, it stopped short on the swaying web. It circled around menacingly and then once again retreated into its hiding place.

  I heard a rustling sound at the latticed window. I thought it might be a rat gnawing at something on the windowsill. I threw my slipper at the square of light. I missed it, but a tomcat poised outside gave a screech of alarm and fled. My neighbor to the right thought that the cat was attacking her chicks. I heard her unlatch her door, mutter a curse, and reset the old millstone that secured the door of the chicken coop.

  I got up, wetted my finger, and pressed it through the paper which covered the window. I could see through the small hole I had made. A light flickered in the gloom opposite and then went out. Someone had lighted a match. Who could be up and about at this late hour? I grew even more apprehensive as I kept my vigil. From the shadows of the doorway in the cottage opposite a man and woman emerged for a moment into a fleeting gleam of moonlight. The woman was the one I had seen earlier in the red jacket. Now she was buttoning it up. She inclined her head in my direction as she whispered to the man. When he turned to follow her gaze I saw it was Tu. My heart skipped a beat and then fluttered like a mad thing as Tu made what seemed a stealthy step towards my room. Then he stopped short and gaped. The woman withdrew into the house.

  I did not know what to make of this charade. It certainly boded no good. For a long time I kept watch at the window, but all remained quiet. Finally, drained by fear and weariness, I dragged the three-legged table against the door, threw myself down on the kang again, and slept the sleep of utter exhaustion.

  The next morning, breakfastless except for a piece of stale steamed bread I had saved from the day before, I went early to the township office. I wanted to move out of that courtyard, but I thought I should discuss the matter first with Wang Sha when he arrived. The office was empty. Shen and Tu had not yet come in.

  Longxiang still had no telephone, or even a single bicycle. The only way to contact the county town twenty miles away was by ox cart or on foot. Anxious to talk to someone, I decided to find Malvolio Cheng, and knocked on doors till I finally found a soft-spoken old farmer who agreed to lead me to the cottage where Cheng was staying.

  I found him sitting cross-legged on his kang smoking a small-bowled peasant pipe with a long stem and a tiny bag of tobacco hung on it. With his half-closed eyes staring at the pipe bowl while he listened to me, he was already the very picture of an old peasant, a new and interesting role for him. Peasant men did not look at women. When they talked to a woman, they looked at something straight ahead as if they were talking to some other man in the same room.

  I told him of my experience the night before, leaving out the fact that I had seen Tu and the woman in red. I mentioned only that I had seen someone moving near the courtyard opposite.

  “Cheng, are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “What shall I do, then?”

  “Well, I think … I don’t think …” He even mumbled like an old peasant talking to a strange woman. I could hardly hear what he said.

  “Cheng, please don’t act awkward,” I cried, exasperated.

  “Well then,” he spoke in his normal voice. “You don’t want Shen and Tu to know that you are already scared out of your wits even before we start our work, and yet you want to shift your quarters?”

  “That’s about it.”

  With a sudden twinkle in his eyes, he waved his arms like a dancer. “You learned to do the peasant yangge dance and sing peasant folk songs before you came here. Why don’t you go out and dance and sing? That’s the way to make friends in the village. Then you can move to your new friend’s home.”

  “You want me to put on some kind of monkey show on the street to entertain the villagers? How about coming with me? I’ll dance and you can hold out your hat to collect the coins.”

  “I’m serious. You girls were asked to learn dancing and singing, because that’s the sure way to win the peasants’ hearts. They like it.”

  I stalked out of the cottage and slammed the door shut in half-mock anger. But outside in the bright autumn sunshine I thought over what he had said. I could think of no better plan; why not give his a try? As I wandered rather aimlessly around the village, Cheng’s crazy idea came back to mind and, my courage aroused, I began to weave romantic fantasies of carrying out the land reform all on my own. But when a mongrel dog approached me, growling angrily, my heart sank into my boots. I have a phobia about dogs, but to bolster my courage I picked up a stick and put on a bold front. Fortunately the dog took fright first. This little comedy attracted several children and, curious, they began to follow me around.

  With a burst of confidence, I decided to give singing a chance and, coaxing them into line, began with a simple children’s song composed for the land reform by some Peking musicians. One boy, about eleven years old, took to the idea with gusto. He sang at the top of his voice, rolling his eyes and swaying his head comically in time with the beat. We attracted a crowd of more children,
and even a few adults. This further inspired me to introduce myself to them formally. With the children’s chorus ranged in front of me, I addressed my words over their heads to the knot of older folk gathered behind them.

  “Fellow villagers,” I began. We had been told to identify ourselves immediately with the peasants. “We have come to help you carry out the land reform. You toil on the land, day and night, all the year around, and yet you are dressed in rags and you are hungry. Why?”

  I thought these words would act like a spell and inflame their souls. I thought I would hear them give answering shouts to my slogans: “Long live the land reform!” “Down with the feudal landowners!” But after listening soberly enough while I spoke, some drifted away as if embarrassed. Others laughed as though I had been a street performer doing tricks or a patent medicine seller making his pitch. They had enjoyed it. It wasn’t every day that you could see a young girl making a speech, but when the show was over they sauntered off to gossip about it to their neighbors.

  I found myself alone with the children, alone except for an attractive and robust young girl about my own age who stood on a slope of parched grass about ten steps away. We caught each other’s eyes. She looked away shyly, lifting her eyes to the sky and then lowering them to gaze fixedly at the ground below her.

  I went over to her. “What is your name?”

  “Xiu-ying,” she replied in a barely audible voice.

  “Xiu-ying, did you understand what I was talking about?”

  She was too shy to say anything, but gave me a friendly smile.

  “My name is Ling-ling.” To liven up our chat, I added, “Actually my real given name is Ling-long. Do you know what Ling-long means?”

  She made no reply but waited for me to continue.

  “It means ‘lively and pleasant.’ But when I was small, it was easier for me to remember my name as Ling-ling. Do you know what your name means?”