Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

Might as well start earning your work points right away."

The virtual absence of any chance of a better future and the near total immobility for anyone born a peasant took the incentive out of the pursuit of knowledge. Children of school age would stay at home to help their families with their work or look after younger brothers and sisters. They would be out in the fields when they were barely in their teens. As for girls, the peasants considered it a complete waste of time for them to go to school.

"They get married and belong to other people. It's like pouring water on the ground."

The Cultural Revolution was trumpeted as having brought education to the peasants through 'evening classes." One day my production team announced it was starting evening classes and asked Nana and me to be the teachers. I was delighted. However, as soon as the first 'class' began, I realized that this was no education.

The classes invariably started with Nana and me being asked by the production team leader to read out articles by Mao or other items from the People's Daily. Then he would make an hour-long speech consisting of all the latest political jargon strung together in undigested and largly unintelligible hunks. Now and then he would give special orders, all solemnly delivered in the name of Mao.

"Chairman Mao says we must eat two meals of rice porridge and only one meal of solid rice a day."

"Chairman Mao says we mustn't waste sweet potatoes on pigs."

After a hard day's work in the fields, the peasants' minds were on their household chores. Their evenings were valuable to them, but no one dared to skip the 'classes." They just sat there, and eventually dozed off. I was not sorry, to see this form of 'education," designed to stupefy rather than enlighten, gradually wither away.

Without education, the peasants' world was painfully narrow. Their conversations usually centered on minute details of daily living. One woman would spend a whole morning complaining that her sister-in-law had used ten bundles of feather fuel for cooking breakfast when she could have made do with nine (fuel, like everything else, was pooled). Another would grumble for hours that her mother-in-law put too many sweet potatoes in the rice (rice being more precious and desirable than sweet potatoes).

I knew their restricted horizon was not their fault, but nonetheless I found their conversations unbearable.

One unfailing topic of gossip was, of course, sex. A twenty-year-old woman called Mei from the Deyang county town had been assigned to the village next to mine.

She had allegedly slept with a lot of city youths as well as peasants, and every now and then in the fields someone would come up with a lewd story about her. It was rumored that she was pregnant, and had been binding her waist to hide it. In an effort to prove that she was not carrying a 'bastard," Mei deliberately did all the things a pregnant woman was not supposed to do, like carrying heavy loads.

Eventually a dead baby was discovered in the bushes next to a stream in her village. People said it was hers. Nobody knew whether it had been born dead. Her production team leader ordered a hole dug and buried the baby. And that was that, apart from the gossip, which became even more virulent.

The whole story appalled me, but there were other shocks. One of my neighbors had four daughters four dark-skinned, round-eyed beauties. But the villagers did not think they were pretty. Too dark, they said. Pale skin was the main criterion for beauty in much of the Chinese countryside. When it was time for the eldest daughter to get married, the father decided to look for a son-in-law who would come and live in their house. That way, he would not only keep his daughter's work points, but would also get an extra pair of hands. Normally, women married into men's families, and it was considered a great humiliation for a man to marry into a woman's family. But our neighbor eventually found a young man from a very poor mountain area who was desperate to get out and could never do so except through marriage. The young man thus had a very low status. I often heard his father-in-law shouting abuse at him at the top of his voice. To torment the young man, he made his daughter sleep alone when the whim took him. She did not dare to refuse because 'filial piety," which was deep-rooted in Confucian ethics, enjoined that children must obey their parents and because she must not be seen as being keen to sleep with a man, even her husband: for a woman to enjoy sex was considered shameful. I was awakened one morning by a commotion outside my window. The young man had somehow got hold of a few bottles of alcohol made with sweet potatoes and had poured them down his throat. His father in-law had been kicking his bedroom door to get him to start working. When he finally broke the door down, the son-in-law was dead.

One day my production team was making pea noodles, and borrowed my enamel washbowl to carry water. That day, the noodles collapsed into a shapeless mess. The crowd that had gathered excitedly and expectantly around the noodle-making barrel started muttering loudly when they saw me approaching, and glared at me with disgust.

I was scared. Later I was told by some women that the villagers blamed the sagging noodles on me. They said I must have used the bowl to wash when I was menstruating.

The women told me I was lucky to be a 'city youth." If it had been one of them, their menfolk would have given them 'a really good hiding."

On another occasion, a group of young men passing through our village carrying baskets of sweet potatoes were taking a break on a narrow road. Their shoulder poles were lying on the ground, blocking the way. I stepped over one of them. All of a sudden, one of the young men jumped to his feet, picked up his pole, and stood in front of me, with fiery eyes. He looked as though he was going to strike me. From the other peasants, I learned that he believed he would develop shoulder sores if a woman stepped over his pole. I was made to cross back over it 'to undo the poison."

During the whole time I was in the countryside, I never saw any attempt to tackle such warped thinking in fact, it was never even mentioned.

The most educated person in my production team was the former landlord. I had been conditioned to regard landlords as evil, and now, to my initial uneasiness, I found that I got on best with this family. They bore no resemblance to the stereotypes that had been drilled into my mind. The husband did not have cruel, vicious eyes, and his wife did not wiggle her bottom, or make her voice sugary, to appear seductive.

Sometimes, when we were alone, he would talk about his grievances.

"Chang Jung," he once said, "I know you are a kind person. You must be a reasonable person as well, since you have read books. You can judge whether this is fair." Then he told me why he had been classified as a landlord. He had been a waiter in Chengdu in 1948, and had saved up some money by watching every penny. At the time, some farsighted landlords were selling their land cheap, as they could see land reform coming if the Communists reached Sichuan. The waiter was not politically astute, and bought some land, thinking he had got a bargain. He not only soon lost most of it in the land reform, but became a class enemy to boot.

"Alas," he said, with resignation, quoting a classic line, 'one single slip has caused a thousand years of sorrow."

The villagers seemed to feel no hostility toward the landlord and his family, although they kept their distance. But, like all 'class enemies," they were always given the jobs no one else wanted. And the two sons got one work point less than other men, in spite of the fact that they were the hardest-working men in the village. They seemed to me to be highly intelligent, and also the most refined young men around. Their gentleness and gracefulness set them apart, and I found that I felt closer to them than to any other young people in the village. However, in spite of their qualities, no girls wanted to marry them. Their mother told me how much money she had spent buying presents for the few gifts whom the go-betweens had introduced. The gifts would accept the clothes and money and then walk off. Other peasants could have demanded the presents back, but a landlord's family could do nothing. She would sigh long and loud about the fact that her sons had little prospect of decent marriages. But, she told me, they bore their misfortune lightly: after each disappointment, they would try to cheer her up. They would offer to work on market days to earn back the cost of her lost presents.