Susan Barker - The Incarnations

I went back to school with my bandaged wrists and spent the first months of 1967 on the brink of another suicide attempt. Then the Red Guards of the Anti-capitalist School for Revolutionary Girls split up into rival factions; one headed by Comrade Dare to Rebel, the other by Comrade Martial Spirit, and, caught up in the civil war, they neglected the black-category students entirely. When I stopped going to school, none of the Red Guards bothered to come and get me. So every day I stayed at home with my mother and waited to see what the Party had in store for us next.

A year later I was sent to Repair the Earth in the countryside. My mother came to see me off at Beijing railway station. She gave me a box of rice and vegetables prepared for the long journey to Heilongjiang and wept as she hugged me goodbye.

‘Be revolutionary!’ she urged. ‘Love Chairman Mao and the Great, Glorious and Correct Communist Party with all your heart!’

By then I had lost my faith in Communism and willed the Great Helmsman dead, but I smiled and promised my mother I would. The train of Sent-down Youth pulled away from the platform and the crowds of parents wailed to be losing their children to the Great Northern Waste. My waving mother receded into the distance and I started to cry. I had a premonition that I would never see her again.

The train journey was forty-seven hours long and every carriage was crowded with Sent-down Youth, excited to be going ‘Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages’ to be educated by the peasants. They sang jubilant revolutionary songs all the way to Heilongjiang. The train moved us further into exile, and the Beijing students chorused, ‘I’ll Go Where Chairman Mao’s Finger Points!’ and ‘Long Live our Sickles!’ in joy.

I was one of twelve Sent-down Youths sent to Three Ox Village, a few tumbledown shacks a six-hour hike from the town of Langxiang. During the day we laboured in the sorghum fields with the peasants, the wind and rain lashing away our youth. At night we slept in a barn so cold our tears of homesickness froze on our cheeks. The idealistic Beijing students organized political classes for the peasants of Three Ox Village and meetings for ‘Recalling with Bitterness the Exploitation of the Peasant Classes by the Evil Landlords of the Pre-liberation Era’. Unfortunately, the illiterate villagers, far away from the sloganeering of the People’s Daily , had not learnt the correct political script. The hardships they recalled — the deaths from starvation, the corrupt Party officials and crippling taxes — were from Mao Zedong’s era. The Beijing students were shocked by the ignorance and backwardness of the villagers and the extent of political re-education they needed. But as the Educated Youth slowly came to understand the real reason they had been exiled in the Great Northern Waste — that the ‘rebellious youth’ had served their political ends and Repairing the Earth was the Party’s way of getting rid of us — the curriculum planned for Three Ox Village was abandoned. Consumed by hopelessness and loss of faith, the Sent-down Youth went through a re-education of their own.

Year after year, I slaved in the fields, suffering chronic backache, stiff, inflamed joints and wind-chapped skin that cracked and bled. In the evenings I drank sorghum spirits to numb the ceaseless pain. One day in 1969 a letter came from my mother, informing me of my father’s death in the Qinghai labour camp. Weeks later another letter came from Granny Xi, to tell me my mother had died. I requested permission to return to Beijing, but it was denied. Then the Sent-down Youths started dying. One girl caught pneumonia and, by the time we had hiked to Langxiang and back to get her antibiotics, she had passed away. Another Sent-down Youth died of rabies when bitten by a wild snarling dog. Another died of unknown causes in his sleep. The deaths were a warning to me that I had to get out of Three Ox Village and back to civilization. That if I continued stoically to ‘eat bitterness’ and endure, I wouldn’t last another year.

To leave Three Ox Village, I needed a local-government connection. Most of the local Party officials were no more than scruffy peasants themselves, but I remembered a regional Party secretary from Langxiang, who had come to Three Ox Village to inspect the Sent-down Youths when we first arrived. The official was bald and fat, but well dressed and rumoured to own a car. I was twenty-three and had wasted six years of my life in Three Ox Village. I decided to go to him for help.

On my day off I got up before dawn, hiked three hours to the nearest road then hitchhiked to Langxiang. I went to the town hall and requested an appointment to meet with Party Secretary Lin. His secretary turned me away and, frustrated that I had spent over four hours travelling for nothing, I lost my temper with her, and Secretary Lin stepped out of his office to see what the commotion was. He knew at once what I had come for, and what I had to offer in exchange. The labouring and harsh weather hadn’t quite robbed me of my looks, and I had bathed and washed my hair the night before to make myself presentable. He invited me into his office and locked the door. There was no discussion or negotiation of the terms — we just lay down on the floor behind his desk. Secretary Lin’s round cheeks turned very red during the act, and as he climaxed he grunted like a hog. I remember he was very pleased by the blood, and that it was my first time.

I was Secretary Lin’s mistress for a year before he got me the residence papers and job in Beijing, a year of his sweaty hands groping my breasts and cunt, a year of pretending not to care what the other Sent-down Youth and villagers thought. The official eventually arranged for me to swap papers with a red-category girl my age, willing to sacrifice her life and status in Beijing to move to Langxiang to be with her repatriated fiancé. I was to take her name, Li Shuxiang, and she was to take mine, Yi Moon.

Secretary Lin nearly didn’t let me go. He had fallen in love, and got it into his head to divorce his wife and marry me instead. To become Secretary Lin’s second wife was the last thing I wanted, and I begged him to stay with his wife ‘for the sake of his family’ until his sense of duty was restored. The official said I could come back to him if I was unhappy in Beijing. He said he would welcome me back to Langxiang with open arms. Lying through my teeth, I promised to return one day, and the lovesick man threw his head against my breasts and wept.

Seven years after leaving Beijing, I returned. Secretary Lin had found me a job as a tea lady in the Ministry of Agriculture, and I spent my days pushing a tea trolley about dreary government buildings and pouring hot water out of a thermos for the cadres. At night I slept in a workers’ dormitory in Maizidian. I was only twenty-four, but an old woman inside. I had none of the spark and vivacity of other girls my age.

Your father was just a clerk back then, but ambitious and clever, and certain to rise through the ranks. He was handsome and could have had any woman he wanted, so what did he see in me? Your father saw subservience in the meek way I served him tea. He saw compliance in my diffident smile. I was the only tea lady who didn’t flirt with the cadres, and this led to the expectation that I would be a loyal wife. He saw that I wouldn’t be controlling or demanding and would stay out of his affairs. He saw that he wouldn’t have to sacrifice his womanizing or late nights. And he was correct. I couldn’t have cared less who he slept with or what time he came home. But I was not the sweet and deferential wife he expected.

Pregnancy. The birth of a son. When you were born I was convinced there was something strange about you, that there was a cognizance in your eyes, as though you had been born with prior knowledge of the world beyond my womb. Yet, at the same time, you were defenceless and tiny. You couldn’t stand up, or walk, or do anything for yourself. You were constantly crying for milk, or to be cradled in my arms, or for your vomit or shit to be wiped up. I was twenty-six. I went through the motions of being a mother, but had no maternal instinct or feeling. Your needs were endless and I couldn’t meet them. I was an inadequate mother. I saw this judgement of me in your eyes. Your father knew it too.