Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

T his is, at once, both an ordinary and an extraordinary kind of book.

I call it an ordinary book because it is written in an entirely different style to my previous work. It doesn’t have the same richness of description; there is none of the mystery or magic of my other writing — the language is simple and unadorned, devoid of symbolism and metaphor. It is the story of an ordinary female intellectual in China, charting the events of the fifteen-year period between her wedding and her divorce. Reflected in her individual fate, we see the changes wrought in the country at large over the course of those fifteen years of Chinese history.

I call it an extraordinary book because this is the first book by a mainland Chinese author to speak so frankly about sex and Chinese women.

At the first mention of sex, people’s thoughts usually turn to erotica and pornography. If that’s the kind of book you’re expecting, however, you will be sorely disappointed. What interests me is another aspect of sex entirely — namely, the fact that for three decades of Chinese history, sex was a completely taboo topic. There was no such thing as sex education for the teenagers of my generation. As a result, when it came to sex, our behaviour tended toward one of two extremes: sexual promiscuity or sexual repression. Naturally, neither of these two extremes is especially healthy, but that’s how it was. The protagonist of this novel, Yang Tianyi, is thirty when she gets married, and her attitude towards sex is one of absolute terror. Her husband, Wang Lian, is just as clueless — to the point that, one week after her wedding, Tianyi’s hymen is found to be still intact.

While this might seem like a joke to Western readers, I assure you that I did not make it up: this was not an uncommon occurrence among girls of my generation. And those who ended up the butt of this joke were precisely those model students and well-behaved little girls who believed the lies fed to them during that repressive era and, as a result, threw away their youth, the most precious part of any person’s life.. They sacrificed their youth for the party and the good of the motherland. That was a popular slogan of the time. Only many years later would they come to realise that, while they were dutifully abiding by all those rules, their great leader was out there living the life of a playboy. Some of them, incensed by this discovery, went on to be wildly promiscuous in their later lives.

In more recent years, sex has become a tool used to bribe senior officials. Dark corners of every city bubble with seedy undercurrents. There are no such things as state-sanctioned brothels, but there are whorehouse signs hanging over the entranceways to every second restaurant. High-schoolers work as escorts, girls from good families have one night stands — and these are no longer things we’re ashamed to talk about. People will do whatever it takes to get ahead. Sincerity, on the other hand, will simply get you laughed at. This, surely, is an altogether much more alarming set of values.

The damage to women runs particularly deep. During the Mao era, when they talked about equality of the sexes, about how ‘women can hold up half the sky,’ what it meant was that men and women were equal when it came to physical work. That girls had to do the same kind of hard labour as men. It was the age of the much-revered ‘Iron Girls’ and we were girls in the prime of our youth; for us, as for everyone, notions of beauty shifted accordingly. We would think long and hard before wearing an outfit with even a dash of colour. We would curl the ends of our hair — but only ever so slightly — or venture a tiny flash of a pretty collar here and there. If you were fair-skinned, you had to go out and roast yourself darker in the sun, for fear someone would accuse you of being a bourgeois little miss. If you were slim, well, then you had to be even more dedicated, and make sure you worked especially hard, training your calf muscles until they were thick and solid. After this kind of a revolutionary baptism, what hope had any girl of retaining her femininity?

I was sent to Heilongjiang for the wheat harvest. There, male or female, you had to haul 200 jin (100 kg) bales of wheat up a gangplank — try to imagine, underdeveloped girls of fifteen or sixteen, carrying weights of 200 jin balanced across their shoulders, walking up narrow planks, three metres long and set at 45 degree angles, to off-load wheat into grain storage bins. Isn’t it horrifying, to think of it now? Many girls developed ailments that would stay with them for life; many girls, no matter how hard they tried, simply couldn’t do it. Me, for example. I was tasked with carrying 100 jin of urea on my back — and this was considered benevolent of them — but the strain was still so great that I was practically spitting blood. The slogan during the summer hoeing season was especially absurd: ‘Work your hardest while alive, be buried in Heilong when you die.’ Human life had no value. During a mobilisation meeting, our leader said, ‘Every person, every day, one row of crops. I don’t care how many tears you shed in the process.’ And you have to understand, ‘one row of crops’ in Heilongjiang terms, was fourteen li (7 km)! I was only sixteen, suffering from severe dysentery, and the old ox cart that dropped off rice at midday only ever made it as far as the places with the most people. This meant that I, always lagging behind, never got anything to eat at lunchtime. So I had to endure the brutal intensity of the work, plus the sickness, without even a bite to eat. To drink, we’d knock over the water vats and worm our way inside like little dogs, just so we could take mouthfuls of the silty water collected along the bottom. Worse than that, when the fields flooded, we were forced to wade through water that came up to our knees and dredge up the wheat plants. This was November, it was bitter winter, and there we were, fishing hemp out of glacial river water; even when we had our periods, there was no respite. Thirty-eight girls slept on two big wooden bunk beds. It was fifty-two degrees below zero and we had no coal to burn. In order to survive, we’d burn bean stalks we dug out from under the snow and drink melted snow we collected in our chamber pots. And every day we had to praise the Great Leader, wishing him a long and prosperous life. I’m still amazed that I made it. Perhaps the only explanation is the natural resilience of youth! That is certainly the only one I can think of.

The ‘Iron Girls’ era finally passed. Things did not improve, however, because what came next was the era of the ‘Little Woman.’ What mattered now was not your IQ, but your EQ — your emotional intelligence. And what did it mean to be emotionally intelligent, Chinese-style? It meant that a woman knew how to charm a man; how to charm her boss. There was no question of falling in love, because to fall in love was to lose the game. There was a female student I knew in the 70s, for example, who was not particularly attractive and suffered from a series of physical disabilities. And yet, she would have several men at the same time, all eating out of the palm of her hand. It was about strategy: whenever she needed someone, she’d calculate her moves very carefully, as though carrying out a detailed piece of operations research. She was proud of herself for this; she felt like she’d won. Lots of girls were the same, even the so-called ‘elite’ ones. They thought they had life all figured out. They knew how to play on a man’s emotions in order to win his favour, how to manipulate their way into relationships and wrap these men around their little fingers. They’d figured out how to get rich and they thought this a fantastic achievement. They were the envy of hundreds of thousands of female students, who considered them prime examples of ‘high EQ’.