China Witness (11 page)

XINRAN:
So do you regret coming here?

148
D:
No, why should I? If I'd stayed in
Shangqiu and never come here, I know for a fact that I wouldn't be around today. I don't work any more – they even call it being retired – and the state gives me five or six hundred yuan every month. In my home town, I wouldn't even get ten! It's so poor there that we still get people coming here – fleeing for their lives.

*

I don't know which of the villagers was passing on the news of our reporting, but once we started our interviews, more and more old people from the village gathered round. They even became talkative, and the space outside the host's inner courtyard filled up with people engaged in heated debate. It seemed like everyone was queuing up to recount their thoughts and experiences. I had not expected this. Why did everybody from the outside world believe that Shihezi people would clam up and refuse to discuss history, when in fact they were like underground magma, held down under pressure, awaiting the chance to come bursting out? Was it because this place had been sealed off for too long? Or was it that the people had been squashed by the weight of history until they were gasping for breath?

Yet another old man squeezed in, adding himself to those already "stacked up" on the small, battered old sofa next to me.

*

XINRAN:
Hello! Do you still have people back home? Are your parents still with us?

148
E:
My mother and father are both here. We were all sent by the state, the whole family, more than a dozen of us.

XINRAN:
You all came? Do you all have houses to live in?

148
E:
Yes. My older brother has the old broken-down 1960s house now. His six children all live in flats, they're all earning over a thousand a month.

XINRAN:
So when was the last time you went back to your home town?

148
E:
I was last in Shangqiu in '79. I came back in 1980, when they were just starting up the household responsibility system.

XINRAN:
Do you think it's better with land allocated to individual households? Or was it better when everybody was all working together?

148
E:
There was a lot of waste with the collective. You got no bumper harvests. It's like when two families keep a horse; I'm not prepared to fork out for feed, and neither are you, so that horse is bound to be thin. Or like several people living in a house; you don't look after it, so I won't bother either, and then it's bound to leak, isn't it? If you live by yourself, you have to keep it in good nick, don't you?

XINRAN:
So was it much better after the land was parcelled out in 1980?

148
E:
You can get a thousand pounds of wheat out of a
mu
of land. A thousand pounds a
mu
, that's pretty impressive. Back home in the 1950s it was eighty or a hundred pounds a
mu
at most, and that was the best wheat. Now it's a thousand pounds, that's quite something, it's doubled several times over. Now we have good food supplies in the corps production areas, but there's too much pollution mixed in. Too many chemical fertilisers, perfectly healthy people have been destroyed by fertilisers!

XINRAN:
So when you were just setting out to cultivate the wilderness there was no fertiliser?

148
E:
It was all piss and shit! Back then the toilets were always cleaned right out, clean as a whistle. There wasn't even time for maggots to grow!

XINRAN:
Chemical fertiliser saves time and strength, and it's cheap. That's why it replaced physical labour and the workers' piss and shit, isn't that right?

148
E:
Yes, you can save your labour to do a bit of business on the side, and earn a lot more money than you get toiling away in the fields all day. Nowadays kids don't care about the taste of food: these days it's all numbers, people and possessions.

XINRAN:
Have you told the stories of those years to your children? Stories of coming here, breaking in the ground and cultivating the desert?

148
E:
How could I tell them? That's ancient history. Nobody listens.

XINRAN:
Have you talked?

148
E:
They don't take it in. You've come and listened so eagerly, but when they listen they get ever so impatient. They don't get to hear anything good, who wants those bitter days now, who wants that hard life? At that time four of us would buy a single steamed bun. We'd break it into four with our hands – break a two-hundred-gram bun into four pieces – and we didn't dare to eat it during the meal breaks either. When it was almost time to go to work we'd each grab a piece, eating as we walked.

XINRAN:
So if someone asked you about Chairman Mao, what would you say? Do you think that what Chairman Mao did was good or bad?

148
E:
Aiya
. . . Well . . . Chairman Mao . . .
Deng Xiaoping's already made a public statement for you, right? – 70 percent good and 30 percent bad. It's been said already, hasn't it?

XINRAN:
What do
you
think? You've said it yourself, that's what Deng Xiaoping thinks.

148
E:
What do I think? I think he was OK. I didn't get hurt, so he was all right. But when you look at it from the point of view of the people who did get hurt, when you look at the big picture, the Chairman did do a few bad things towards the end.

XINRAN:
At the beginning didn't the people take him to their hearts?

148
E:
Yes, but towards the end he did some inappropriate things. It's terrifying, really. When the end came, he didn't listen to the truth, he only listened to lies. And the people around him were boasting wildly, telling him any old thing. The policies were good, but when they were carried out at the lower levels they went off.

XINRAN:
How are things now? Do you have hope now? Are things a little bit better now?

148
E:
Aiya
, now?
Jiang Zemin said it: If you straighten out the Party, the Party may die; but if you don't straighten out the Party, the nation dies. Now everything's fine apart from all those little leaks everywhere, and that's not good, is it? All these leaks in small places, it's terrible. I'm telling you, if we keep on like this, we're finished. It's always been like that, from the Qing dynasty to Sun Yat-sen to Chiang Kai-shek, you know what I'm talking about. Why did the Qing dynasty get that way towards the end? Now people are still saying,
aiya
, bring back Sun Yat-sen. It wouldn't do any good, Sun Yat-sen would be too old. They say bring back Chairman Mao, but could Chairman Mao come back? And why would we want them back? To sort out the corrupt elements who take the people's money away from them. If we don't do that, well, things start to go wrong with people when they get old – and the same is true of political parties. The cracks are already starting to show, we need to take ruthless measures to put things right.

XINRAN:
So how are conditions in the corps now?

148
E:
The corps . . . well, we can't say much about anything outside the corps. The corps is divided into leaders and workers now, split into
superiors and inferiors. They all stick together. When something happens they all present a united front. They protect each other; no matter how weak or useless an official is, he'll always have a government job to do, officials look after their own. In Chairman Mao's time, the corps was a big collective, it didn't belong to just one or two people. What you had, I had, we all had. Nobody could have any more than anyone else, or any less either. Now it's come to a pretty pass; banknotes have blocked out the sky and we common folk can't see what they're thinking up there. In Chairman Mao's day the officials used to come and ask how we were – full of concern, they were – but who comes to take care of us now? Nobody comes, nobody wants to know. We're halfway into our graves already, and when we go our thoughts will be gone too.

XINRAN:
Isn't there the Shihezi Museum? We visited there, it was really moving. Future generations will be able to learn about you from that.

148
E:
Do you believe what it says in those captions? Oh, the photographs are real enough, and the exhibits in the cases, they're real too. But what about the true stories behind their stories? Journalists aren't allowed to look into the things that went on in our corps, not even national-level journalists. What was this corps doing? How many people were they? How did they get here? Who lived and who died? What was going on? You can't say anything for sure about the people who came in 1951, and the ones who came later can't say for sure either. Try if you don't believe me! You teachers and students, you just try asking what those people did before they came to join the corps, and see what you get. Nothing doing!

*

In Urumqi I met the mother of my friend ZH. ZH's mother was sent to Xinjiang in 1958 when she was just thirteen years old. As she told me her story, it was clear from her voice that words could never express all she felt.

"That day a group of ten of us set off by train, leaving the beautiful mountains and lakes of
Hangzhou behind. We arrived in the great, bustling city of Shanghai, where we boarded another train to Xi'an. We were shocked rigid by the bleakness of Xi'an and the poverty and ignorance of the locals. Many of the girls started crying, and some ran off back to the cities in the east. I didn't have the nerve to run away with them, so I got dressed in my army uniform, and became a new recruit. I was only thirteen, I didn't
understand anything, it had never occurred to me that anything frightening would happen. From Xi'an I took one of those 'sardine-can' trains they used to transport soldiers in, which took us to Urumqi, changing at every station. Altogether, the journey from Hangzhou to Urumqi took one month and seven days.

"When we saw the Gobi Desert stretching out in front of us, we were all shocked out of our wits. We couldn't imagine how people could survive here. Most of what they ate were milk products, and the toilets were big pits beneath two slabs of wood. There were no streets or roads, and practically no lights, let alone shops. Later on I learned that the suffering and poverty were nothing. The worst part was the physical labour. Everyone who came to Xinjiang had to do a probationary year of labour, and mine was building reservoirs. For a city girl, working every day on the building sites, where I had to dig the ground or carry stones or earth on a shoulder pole, hard physical labour in the blistering heat of the sun . . . I'll never forget it as long as I live. It's also why I will never feel tired or overworked again in my whole life. We built the first Xinjiang Military Hospital in that place, and that was where I met the man who's my husband now. In those days he was the director of the Xinjiang Song and Dance Troupe. He fell ill and ended up on my ward. He liked me a lot, and he took me to visit his two sisters, who had also been sent to work in Xinjiang. But I really couldn't get used to his reserved style of courtship, and I didn't much care for the way he kept combing his hair all the time – it was very unmanly. I didn't dare to make up my mind on my own, so I asked my friends in the hospital, but most of them didn't approve. They said that he couldn't stop fussing with his hair and clothes whenever he came to see me, he was too capitalist, too petty bourgeois, and he was bound to end up a counterrevolutionary. I was very confused, but I still decided to marry him, because he was clean and very polite.

"We got married and had two daughters. Life in Xinjiang was very hard, so I made up my mind to go back home to Hangzhou. I was determined not to bring up two daughters in this cruel place, so I left the army and took my daughters back to Hangzhou on my own, where I got a job as a nurse in a local hospital. My younger daughter was only two then, and the other was nine. Every minute of every day was a struggle, with no help from either set of parents. My husband and I lived apart like this for twenty-three years, with me working and bringing up the children alone, suffering
all kinds of hardship to raise my daughters. We could only get together once a year. Often my husband was busy and couldn't come to Hangzhou, so I would have to take the two girls on the long, arduous journey of over three weeks from Hangzhou to Urumqui to see their father.

"After twenty-three years of separation, we were finally able to live together once more, but it didn't take us long to realise we had become incompatible. My husband despised the extravagance and self-indulgence of the interior, and the constant quibbling over trifles. And I was hugely disappointed in the husband I had longed for through all those lonely nights: his crudeness, his constant grousing and shouting, his total intolerance of anybody different. It made me miserable. But we didn't divorce. Both of us thought we should stay together, if only for the sake of our two daughters and our grandchildren.

"My elder daughter has a son called Haohao. He's thirteen now, and he often quarrels with his grandfather. Haohao believes that his grandfather is dragging the dark shadow of history into his life today. He thinks that his grandfather should accept the gifts that modern society has to offer. But his grandfather feels wretched and angry that his grandson has such an affluent lifestyle but understands nothing of the trials and suffering of the older generation, he doesn't know or respect what happened in the past. I don't think this is just a problem for our family, I don't know what it's like for other people."

When ZH's mother finished speaking, her eyes were staring at something far away over the horizon. I guessed that this distant place was somewhere for which she had started to yearn when she was thirteen: the life of a happy young girl, a young woman hotly in love, a tender wife, a mother telling stories in a soft, gentle voice, an old age spent hand in hand, mutual support and comfort . . . These are every woman's dreams, but what has she had of such dreams?