Hi, do you have the full translated text of this book available on any single page? I would like to convert to epub if I may. Would be happy to pay you something for your book, too.
Hi! Weâre working on editing this book -- the translation is still a bit rough, and Dad wrote the original for a Chinese audience, so we want to add some footnotes for a wider audience. After weâre done, weâll put up a PDF, as well as the option to get a print copy.
This is going to take a while, so if you put your email in this Google Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfKvZrBngchQDFz7CUYQLuf9BULmfwYfeQ5qFqiVQlTQMLn6w/viewform , we can send you a quick email when we have the PDF version ready.
The little round table by our open-plan kitchen is always buzzing with activity. It was on this table that Jianfeng propped open his laptop computer and steadily - tik tak, tik tak - tapped out Ten Years a Peasant - Memories of Libeishang to leave for our children.
Jianfeng recounted story after story about life in the village. As my sent-down friends and I followed along, we discovered thoughts that had lain undisturbed and scenarios that had been dormant for decades.
In the late 1960s, we were middle schoolers who had grown up in Shanghai. We were swept up in the feverish winds of the Cultural Revolution and deposited in distant, strange, isolated villages in the mountains. At the time, we didn't expect to encounter a farming civilization that had been passed down through millenia. Looking back on it, we didn't know how valuable that perspective could be.
This realization came long after I left the village and even the country. Since then, I've kept realizing new ways in which that culture contained many facets of our ancient civilization. For example, I was recently reading about the origins of the character "ć, again." I was shocked to learn that the oracle bone script and bronzeware script versions were practically illustrations of the fish traps we used in the villages*. We called them "ç±(hĂĄo)," and there's a photograph in chapter 29. I remember following along curiously as the villagers installed hĂĄo in the creek. It was strange to realize that I had literally touched something in the same way as someone from the birth of my civilization! In the Classic of Poetry, from the seventh century BC, they mention è(sĆ«o) and çŹ (lĂŹ), the traditional cape and hat worn in the rain. While reading that poem I thought of my younger self wearing such things in the spring rain. I was singing a harmony with my ancestors; the barrier between us, a million days' worth of time, was suddenly lifted.
Oracle bone script.
Bronzeware script.
The local dialect had many archaic characters and pronunciations. For example, calling old people "èè , older ones", or going home as "ć»ćœ, returning." Their strange pronunciations of "sister" and "brother" confounded me at the time. Later, when I was reading Shuowen Jiezi (an ancient Chinese etymological dictionary), I learned that the villagers were using the pronunciations recorded in the Eastern Han dynasty. That sent a chill down my spine. Their illiterate culture contained the ideas of Sunzi Suanjing (The Mathematical Classic of Master Sun), Zengguang Xianwen, and countless folk songs, riddles, and stories. Very few of the villagers had gone to school, but I never felt that they were ignorant or uncivilized. Their stubborn vitality - hardy, honest, frugal, inventive - inspired me. They were amazed by the material conveniences from the city, but their culture and lifestyle shocked this city girl. What Jianfeng has here is a record of his observations while immersed in this ancient culture.
In my mind, everything we were a part of in those villages, including the flashy "signs of the times," is connected to the thread of Chinese civilization. Jianfeng described his experiences working on the reservoir with the whole commune. I myself participated in a multi-county effort to build the Jinggangshan Railroad. Tens of thousands of villagers brought their own tools and supplies to the labor site dozens of miles away from home. Without any compensation we worked on a public project, a re-emergence of the ancient tradition of conscripted labor. Even the "collective production" methods, which may seem misguided now, had their roots in the ideal of "all the world for the public" from Book of Rites.
And yet, unthinkably, as society modernizes and globalization continues its march, these customs that had weathered thousands of years are disappearing before our eyes. They are collapsing under the intoxicating convenience and material wealth of modern times. In the last few years, when we've returned to the villages, we saw a new world: plastic containers replacing a variety of bamboo and ceramic containers; huge concrete edifices replacing traditional brick and lumber; plastic ponchos replacing the tradition suoyi and douli. Even the fragrant rice wine was being replaced with beer. In the rice fields thick with pesticide and chemical fertilizer, fish were few and far between. Even the hĂĄo, which had survived since the days of oracle bone script, will have a hard time escaping such a fate. Traditional crafts are on death's door after the introduction of external manufacturing. Folk music, riddles, and stories are withering under the shadow of broadcast media. On the roads, tire tracks cover footprints and engines swallow up the sounds of the village. The rustic culture is changing subtly as luxury is pitted against restraint, laziness against diligence, greed against contentment, recklessness against respect.
Are these swift unbridled changes a blessing or a curse? We can't know. All we know is that to survive, a civilization must remember, and remembering these vanishing forms of life is valuable. Zhang Zeduan painted Along the River During the Qingming Festival in the late Song dynasty. He was able to show us, 800 years later, life in the capital of Bianliang. Maybe Jianfeng's book recording life in the mountain villages of Jiangxi in the 1970s will be able to help others understand the civilization it was a part of.
Beyond the technology sector, our home in Silicon Valley is famous for its reliable sunshine. In the mornings, a square of sunlight splashes onto our dining table as Jianfeng writes. He says that, as he's getting older, the sun warms his back comfortably. Between the tapping of his keyboard, that square sneaks away with time's unceasing footsteps. We leave Ten Years a Peasant for the generations to come, to help them remember today.
Ma Liping, November 2014.
* The meaning "again" derives from these traps' ability to be re-used. The early oracle bone script symbol clearly depicts the shape of the trap and its re-usable mechanism.
They were years and months that dragged on and on. It was a broken path of holes and ruts.
The book in front of me describes one facet of those years, one silhouette on that path: the ten year career of a sent-down youth. Xia Jianfeng has a plain style and a calm attitude. He does not decorate his prose or exaggerate emotions. He has effortlessly distanced himself from the other books on the topic; his stories are thrilling, the local customs richly described. Reading it reminds me of Stone Lake by the Song dynasty poet Fan Chengda. Fan Chengda was one of the greats, and his literary contribution was much greater, of course, but in terms of historical content and lifelike depictions, this book can go toe-to-toe with Fan's best work. One cannot overlook this book's anthropologic and sociologic value.
The Down to the Countryside movement happened during the 1960s and 70s. It's been over four decades since then, and those who have lived through it are approaching old age. They had diverse experiences, and different outcomes as well; when the old sent-down youth look back, each has their own interpretation and understanding. In some cases being sent-down built character; this character manifested in their later success. To some, the villages were the furnace in which they were smelted into gold. To others, being sent down was an ordeal forced upon them. Its effects lingered, causing mediocrity and failure later in life. The villages were the underworld, and having been there once could never truly escape. Perhaps not many think exactly those thoughts, but it is only human to project our presents onto our pasts. Between the two extremes there is a hazy border, with "no regrets" on one side and "it is unthinkable to look back" on the other. This book provides a third perspective, and in this it is valuable.
Between 1966 and 1968, as the nation was swept up in the wave of the Cultural Revolution, the tides were slowly changing. I didn't hear the phrase "baby boomers" until I arrived in America; as much as it was a tide surging onto the shores America, it was a wave crashing onto the beaches of China. Starting in the early 60's, middle school education was becoming widespread in urban China. High school education also expanded, though not as much. Where would the graduates go? College was out of the question - there was no money to pay professors and not enough dormitories to house the students anyways. There wasn't nearly enough industry to provide jobs, either. No matter how low the wages, this enormous surge in the working population was going to wreak havoc on the economy. This sort of imbalance is hard to avoid in the process of industrialization. Sacrifices had to be made. To that end, we had inspiring slogans, as well as governmental coercion. We can criticize the efficacy of the slogans, or the ethics of the coercion, but they represented decisions made in desperation. Under swirling red banners and earth-shaking drumming, the educated youth walked toward the altar of Chinese industrialization. Between 1966 and 1976 the manufacturing and agricultural sectors grew by 79%, or 7.1% a year.
If we take a step back, both perspectives share the same premise. We were supposed to be city folk, and we sacrificed for the country by going to the villages. After our return, we could be especially proud of our successes, and explain away our failures. After all, we had been delayed on our paths. They say that the Down to the Countryside movement delayed a whole generation. But was it really a whole generation? Seventeen million sent down youths, out of a population of 800 million to one billion - four fifths of which were farmers. So nearly a hundred million of our brothers and sisters made the same sacrifice as we did, not to mention their ancestors! Nobody asked if they had regrets, or if they could think of looking back on their youths. Even if we did ask, they might not have the energy to articulate such philosophically charged opinions; when the sun rises they still have to go farm, to support the advancement of industry, science, and education with their blood and sweat.
We sent-down youth are some of the most narcissistic groups in Chinese history. Including myself, of course, as I similarly was sent down for ten years. We can skip over the memoirs - I've even written a few myself. Just in terms of media related to the period, the poems, novels, illustrations, movies, TV shows, music, and more haven't stopped since the day we got back from the villages. Maybe "narcissism" isn't the right word. We're afraid, afraid of being forgotten by society. At the beginning of a new dynasty, the loyal followers are rewarded; when a revolution succeeds, the rebels are respected. We, too, suffered for the revolution, but many of us have retired into obscurity. It seems that nobody else remembers us. This is not unsurprising. After all, we'd only received a middle school education, and we live in different times now.
In these times, hundreds of millions of Chinese farmers flock to the cities for work. They live at the lowest levels of society, where city folk look down on them.
Four decades after the fact, the author often thinks of the farmers who he lived and worked with for ten years.
Clearing away the ashes of a dynasty to carry the spark of civilization; enduring countless conflicts and famines, preserving the vitality of the nation; generations of backbreaking labor, hoping against hope for better days; leaving their families behind to chase prosperity in the cities, buoying the national economy with their blood and sweat; these are all Chinese farmers' contributions.
In those wandering years and months, you were once our companions; on that winding tattered path, we once walked with you. We will never forget.
Appendix 1: The Down to the Countryside Movement During the Cultural Revolution - The Shanghai Local Records Office
1. One million high school and middle school students are sent-down
Two years into the Cultural Revolution, the students who should have graduated in 1966 and 1967 were still in school. Beginning in 1968, the city began to allocate these students.
On July 2, 1968, the city's Revolutionary Committee held a "City of Shanghai Convention For Sending the Class of 1966 Down to the Countryside." The records of the time show that there were 149,669 students who were to have graduated from middle school in 1966, and 30,970 students who were to have graduated from high school. On July 8, the city established an office of the Down to the Countryside movement (which came under control of the Revolutionary Committee in September). Each district, street, and town followed suit, and they began to mobilize "educated youth" to go to the countryside en masse. On July 27, the first group of Red Guards left Shanghai for villages in neighboring Anhui province. On August 9, the first group to go to Heilongjiang province left. There were about 445,000 students in these two graduating classes, and over 220,000 were sent to the countryside. But the 1966 and 1967 graduating classes were still under the "Four Directions" policy, and many entered industrial work.
On December 21, 1968, the People's Daily published Mao Zedong's famous quote, "It is imperative that educated youth go to farming villages and be re-educated by the peasants." Hundreds of thousands of Shanghainese took to the streets overnight, cheering, "Chairman Mao waves us forward to live in the villages for the revolution! We'll charge into the mountains and the countryside, and continue to serve the revolution!" Many workers' communications groups were stationed in schools, and they took this opportunity to publicize and prepare for the Down to the Countryside movement. The Shanghai branch of the Chinese Communist Party and the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee decided to send the three accumulated graduating classes to the countryside. They also decided the that 460,000 students of the 1968 and 1969 graduating classes would be combined with the 1966 and 1967 classes and sent to the countryside, with few exceptions. This totaled 507,000 students and enacted the "Red Nation" policy.
On November 7, 1970, the Shanghai government followed other cities' examples and changed their policy of sending all the students to the countryside. AT the time, the manufacturing and mining sectors were in need of labor as well. The graduating class of 1970 were assigned posts according to the old "Four Directions." Where one's elder siblings were assigned determined where one would work and what sector that work would be in. This class contained 210,000 students, of which 115,000 were sent to rural villages and 95,000 entered the industrial workforce. This policy lasted until 1978.
On August 17, 1971, Shanghai sent seventy thousand students to other provinces as industrial apprentices. There were two main forms of being sent to the countryside from Shanghai. One was to go to a large state-run farm in Heilongjiang, Neimenggu, Yunnan, or other border provinces. These sent-down youth had set wages, state-provided medical care, paid time off to visit family, and other benefits. They lived an organized communal life. According to records from 1968 to 1970, over 256,000 students were sent to such farms. The other form was to be sent to rural villages in Jiangxi, Anhui, Jilin, Yunnan, Guizhou, Neimenggu, Heilongjian, Liaoning, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and other provinces. Each village usually had four to ten students as a "sent-down youth corps." They were to labor with the locals and earn their own living. These places were quite poor and already had an excess of labor. As a result, work credits were scarce and the standard of living was quite low. 318,000 students followed this path. According to the Shanghai Department of Labor, between 1968 and 1978 there were 1,112,952 people sent down. They had ended up in ten provinces including Heilongjiang, Neimenggu, Yunnan, Guizhou, and others. Starting in 1968, many parents wanted to make sure their children were looked after. They asked their friends and relatives in rural villages to find a way to bring them to their families' ancestral homes. Between 1968 and 1972, over 83,000 people were sent down to neighboring provinces like Jiangsu and Zhejiang to live in their distant relatives.
There were 156,000 (93,000 in the class of 1968 and 63,000 in the class of 1969) students from local villages in Shanghai. They went back to their homes to farm, and were not counted in the sent-down youth tally.
In April 1974, the Shanghai Down to the Countryside Office reported to the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Communist Party and the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee. They said that there were 398,908 people from Shanghai sent down across the nation at the time.
When the "A Nation of Red" policy was in effect, many youths and their parents were opposed. As a result, various communities such as schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces were leveraged to create political pressure to conform. This took the form of classes, "criticism meetings," and even drastic measures such as cutting off rations and deregistering residency. The party leaders led the way in sending their children away. The railroad department scheduled three new routes to ferry students from the city. Even the navy was involved in shipping students from Shanghai to Dalian; from there they would head to Jilin or Heilongjiang.
Starting in 1970, middle and high schools in China reinstated the "Four Directions" policy, though mobilizing youths to go to the countryside was still the highest "political priority." This upset some already sent-down youths and their parents.
On August 29, 1972, the city's Down to the Countryside office met with the Shanghai City Council and Revolutionary Committee. They reported that more people were coming to the office - over a hundred a day. They were parents who had only one child, or whose children had all been sent down. Or they were families where the parents had fallen ill or died or suffered some other disaster. At the same time, rumors spread that only children from other cities had already returned home. Some parents felt that it was unfair that the policies had changed so much in one year - had their child been just a little younger they might have been spared. Others rallied behind the call, "Return my only child!" But because the Down to the Countryside Movement had great political implications, and affected the grand plan of "Strengthening the proletariat and preventing the restoration of the capitalist class." As a a result, these complaints were largely ignored.
On March 31, 1973, over 800 students were sent to the border province Heilongjiang, and the city organized a sending-away party of over 100,000.
On December 29, 1975, the city's Red Representatives Council organized a "Swearing-in of Red Guards Going Down to the Countryside Convention." There, the 1975 class of Red Guards was exhorted to "Strike back against the critics of the Cultural Revolution with actions, and ignite a new surge of going to the countryside." In the later phases of the Down to the Countryside movement, there were always sent-down youth who returned to the city permanently at the end of the year. At the end of 1974, 91,241 sent-down youth returned to Shanghai to visit their families. On April 26, 1975, the Revolutionary Committee held a meeting to mobilize the sent-down youth to return to the villages to "bolster the revolution and spur production." According to central records, Shanghai's trade school and work-study graduates were being assignd according to the original "Four Directions" principles at the time. These graduates were fully processed by the end of 1972, by which time 21,220 had been assigned positions.
2. Sent-down youth settlement policy and its evolution
Everyone sent down to a local rural village during the Cultural Revolution, excepting those who were staying with their relatives, was entitled to a resettlement fee from the government. This fee was to be used for building houses, buying essential tools, transport to the village, and emergencies in the first year. Their rice rations were under the jurisdiction of the local authorities in the first season. Starting in the second season, the rations would be assigned in the same way as the others in the production team. For vegetables, each production team was to apportion a garden for each sent-down youth. Medical fees were paid with the communal insurance policy; for certain serious illnesses, the sent-down youth paid from a variety of sources - their own income, the insurance, their parents' workplaces, discounts from the hospital, their resettlement fee, etc.
The students who were sent to villages in other provinces also received between an additional 25 and 35 renminbi for travel gear. They also received cloth rations, cotton rations, and a mosquito net. Those headed to Neimenggu, Heilongjiang, Jilin, and other cold provinces were also provided with green army jackets, cotton parkas, cotton hats, and warm shoes. Starting in 1973 they were also provided with 40 renminbi for additional winter wear. The one-way tickets were reimbursable. During the first year of being sent-down the national government would supply rice and the local government would supply fuel and gardening space. After the first year the sent-down youth were treated as normal community members. These sent-down youth were usually enrolled in the local health insurance as well; payment for serious illnesses were supported for by the settlement department. Those sent down to distant regions such as Neimenggu, Heilongjiang, Jilin, Yunnan, Guizhou, Shanxi, Gansu, NingXia, and Xinjiang enjoyed two reimbursed trips home over the course of their stay. Those who were assigned to the Production and Construction Corps, or government-run production facilities (farms, lumberyards, ranches, tea orchards) were provided for by the national government.
The Shanghai sent-down youth set to work passionately after arriving the in the villages. They wanted to transform the villages with their hard work. However, China has a high population and low amount of arable land. Coupled with the poverty in many rural areas and the influx of sent-down youth, this gave rise to conflicts between sent-down youth and villagers for rations and wages. Further problems arose, including the excessive drain on the resources of the sent-down youths' families, what to do about marriage, and even how to deal with forced marriage or rape. This caused many sent-down youth and their families to be disillusioned with the policy, especially after the death of Lin Biao.
In 1973, one parent wrote a letter to Chairman Mao in desperation. It described the struggles of sent-down youth, including those of this own son. On April 26, Mao Zedong replied, "I have attached 300 yuan as reparations for the lack of rice. There are many such incidents in the country, and it should be dealt with at a high level." After this reply, the central party organization released the [1973]21 document on June 21. The State Department also hosted a working meeting from June 20 to August 7, to consider methods of "dealing with the problem at a high level." After this, a group of criminals who had harmed sent-down youth were convicted. This improved conditions somewhat. Starting in 1973 many such "reparations" were paid out to sent-down youth and their families, especially from the parents' work-places. There were also many sent-down youth who still required financial assistance from their parents. In the second half of 1973, workplaces organized to pay out reparations to their workers whose children were sent-down. They conducted a semiannual survey to determine which families needed help. About 30% of the families were found eligible, and each was paid an average of thirty renminbi. Over 1973 and 1974, over 23 million renminbi was paid out in such reparations. Between 1975 and 1977, an average of 15 million was paid each year.
In 1974, The Shanghai Revolutionary Committee approved the Down to the Countryside Office's proposal, "Draft of Policies Regarding Various Problems Facing Shanghai Sent-Down Youth." This raised the one-time aid to youth sent to local villages from 230 renminbi to 480 renminbi. Those who were sent to state-run production facilities received 400 renminbi. Sent-down youth were assigned rations at the level of normal city residents. There were also improvements to healthcare payments, and everyday tools were to be bought and apportioned by the local government.
After Deng Xiaoping's re-emergence in 1973, his first task was reorganizing the education system. He reinstated the college entrance exams for workers, farmers, and soldiers. In early 1974 the Shanghai Department of Education created an organization of sixteen trade schools. These were to try providing night classes in Anhui's Fuyang, Jiangxi's Shangrao, Heilongjiang's Heihe, Jilin's Yanbian, and Yunnan's Xishuangbanna. There were twenty-three majors, including political science, Chinese literature, history, agricultural production, agricultural engineering, and healthcare. Over twenty-eight thousand students were enrolled, and about 50% of these were sent-down youth from Shanghai. In 1975, this expanded to the Daxingan Mountains, Mount Jinggang, Suxian, Chuxian, and other regions, and enrollment expanded to sixty thousand students. Additionally a small group of Shanghai sent-down youth participated in the national college admissions process and became "Worker/Farmer/Soldier college students."
Between 1974 and 1975, neighborhoods worked together with various companies to hold short training courses for sent-down youth home on a family visit. These courses included lessons in over 560 subjects including electrical wiring, carpentry, masonry, agricultural machinery, pesticide usage, medicine, sewing, hairdressing, and more. This program reached over sixteen thousand students. Between 1968 and 1975, the Down to the Countryside Office published 43 Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside pamphlets. There were over 6 million copies and they reflected the experiences of the sent-down youth. The Shanghai People's Publishing House organized a group of nearly one thousand people to write over twenty types of self-study materials, as well as publishing 36 other books relevant to rural village life. They published a total of 2.8 million copies. The city gave these books to sent-down youth. Those close to Shanghai received four sets and 51 different books; those far from Shanghai received four sets and 41 different books. In total, over four million books were given out.
Starting in June of 1975, the Shanghai government began to set up small factories and workshops for sent-down youth. They focused on poor areas in Jiangxi, Anhui, and Jilin which had high densities of sent-down youth. In the end there were over 550 of these workshops, with 335 in Jiangxi, 187 in Anhui, and 28 in Jilin. Later, the Shanghai government created another 257 workshops in Heilongjiang, Liaoning, Neimenggu, Yunnan, Guizhou, and other provinces. These workshops had such diverse purposes as machinery repair, processing agricultural byproducts, bamboo and wood crafts, pot making, brick making, sewing, fixing shoes, and many others. These stimulated the local economy and helped sent-down youth overcome some of their personal economic troubles. This initiative eventually employed over ten thousand sent-down youth who were struggling with agricultural labor and allowed them to support themselves economically. According to the Shanghai Labor Department, between 1968 and 1973 the city paid over sixteen million renminbi in aid to various sent-down youth areas.
In 1975, Shanghai provided over seven thousand tractors, eight hundred tractor trailers, fifty cars and trucks, and other supplies such as kerosene engines, generators, electric motors, transformers, water pumps, and construction materials. This all cost over fifty five million renminbi. The city also provided no-interest loans worth five million renminbi. In the end all these debts were forgiven.
3. Learning Care Teams
In the beginning of 1969, the head of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, Zhang Chunqiao, proposed sending party members in the Four Directions (to the border regions, farming villages, mines, and grass-roots education systems). On August 27, the Revolutionary Committee held a mobilization meeting, and assigned tasks to each member. The slogans at the time included "the Four Directions lead us down Chairman Mao's revolutionary path." Eventually, over two thousand party members constitued the "Learning Care Teams" that were distributed across Heilongjiang, Yunnan, and other regions with sent-down Shanghai youth. Their charge was to boost morale as well as help the sent-down youth with some practical matters. At the same time, the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee entered into an agreement with the Heilongjiang Revolutionary Committee. They would send seventeen hundred party members, with their residencies, their connections, and a hundred and sixty thousand sent-down youth to Heilongjiang.
In October of 1969, the Shanghai Office of Sent-down Youth was officially established. Zhang Fangxin, from the military's media department, was its head. It was dissolved on January 1, 1981, and its functions merged into those of the labor department. On November 2, 1973, the Shanghai representative of the Chinese Communist party officially announced the creation of a leadership group for the administration of the sent-down youth of Shanghai.
On November 10, 1973, this leadership group held its first meeting, led by Wang Yiping. The meeting produced three suggestions: First, to send 670 "care teams" of party officials to various other provinces. These would help the sent-down youths in the different provinces they had been sent to. Second, to hold a second annual meeting of the parents who had sent children away. Third, to add another group to the Office of Sent-down youth, which had subgroups regarding mobilization, communication between the city and the villages, taking care of and sending ambassadors, and organizational operations. On December 16, 1973, this leadership group had their second meeting, discussing the work being done around the sent-down youth. Many party officials in neighboring Anhui province also attended this meeting. They decided to send representatives to Guizhou to investigate the real situation with sent-down youth.
In the first half of 1974 the city representatives held another meeting to discuss the "learning and care teams" initiative and report on their findings to the central leadership and state department. At the time, over two thousand party officials had been mobilized throughout the city, forming eight "learning and care teams." They were dispatched to nine different provinces, which at various levels consisted of 265 counties, 3782 communes, and 549,000 production teams (including military units and other production facilities). They had worked with 468,000 sent-down youth. These party officials were rotated out in 1975; until then, they were distributed in the following way: over 540 from the public transportation department were sent to Jiangxi and Anhui, with a small minority sent to Yunnan; over 50 were sent from the technical systems department to Neimenggu and Heilongjiang; over 50 were sent from the suburban administration to Yunnan; over 90 from the finance and business administration were sent to Guizhou; over 100 from the cultural and educational sector were sent to Jilin; and over 130 from the revolutionary committee and the public safety department were sent to Heilongjiang. At the same time, the representatives decided that the "learning and care teams" were no longer allotted vacations to return home for Chinese New Year. The new policy was one vacation every two years, for up to twenty days. The reasoning was that the learning and care teams were not only "useful measures for educating and exercising our party officials, they are critical to maintaining the direction of the Down to the Countryside movement and limiting capitalist thought." This work naturally ended after the sent-down youth returned to Shanghai. It is worth noting that the party officials in Heilongjiang were not able to be re-accommodated in Shanghai. They had to be re-assigned to the Tonglin Xingqiao mine in Anhui, and Datun and Zhangjiawa in Jiangsu. Only later, after the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, were they able to slowly return to Shanghai.
The Sent-down Youth Return
Sent-down youth were allowed to return home in the event of serious health issues. In the spring of 1978, the State Department released a document that relaxed these requirements. Some healthy sent-down youths were able to return because their families were in particularly difficult circumstances. Many other healthy sent-down youths were able to receive fake medical histories from doctors they knew in Shanghai. The hospitals, out of sympathy, would provide evidence of their ill health to let them return. Between October and December of 1978, the various offices of sent-down youth across the nation began to make adjustments. They stopped sending more people from the cities away, and prioritized reintegrating sent-down youth into city life. During this time, some sent-down youth in Shanghai requested a parade to celebrate the return. Wang Yiping, the CCP representative, met with the sent-down youth to understand their situation. Other party officials were sent to the front lines to boost morale. At the same time, on December 4, 1978, the fourth subdivision of the Jinghong Dongfeng farm in Yunnan sent a telegram to the city government. They asked, in the name of all Shanghai sent-down youth, to be rehabilitated and included in working towards the Four Modernizations. They also requested a special investigative group to be dispatched to Yunnan.
On January 3, 1979, the Shanghai party representatives called a meeting to determine the general strategy around the sent-down youth. They agreed on the direction of "mobilize the whole party, broaden opportunities, consider the big picture, and preferentially hire the best candidates." At the time, there was not enough demand to drive hiring. As a result, much employment was generated through the "substitution" system, where children replaced their parents in the workforce, or through various make-work programs. Those sent-down youth who had been approved for return were, on principle, guaranteed work in this way. The records show that in 1979 alone, three hundred and three thousand people were re-absorbed into the city's workforce.
By the end of 1983, the sent-down youth who had not permanently settled in their new homes had largely returned to work in Shanghai. At the same time, there were still some remaining problems that were being dealt with appropriately.
One such problem was how to treat the children of these sent-down youth fairly. The city government, including the labor department, the education department, the public safety department, and the food department announced their solution on March 21 of 1989. They ruled that every sent-down youth who had not returned was allowed so send one of their children back to school in Shanghai. The child had to be between the ages of one and sixteen, or had to have completed middle school but be unwed and never employed. They needed to have close relatives to stay with - the sent-down youth's immediate family members would be their guardians. The children of sent-down youth who qualified would be able to move their residency back to their parents' original locations. That year, 35,955 people were approved through this program. In 1990, 15,205 were approved.
There was a major incident in China in September of 1971. Chairman Mao's official successor, Vice Chairman Lin Biao suddenly got on a plane and flew away, then died when that plane crashed in Inner Mongolia. After that, things began to change in subtle ways.
In 1972, I was home for the new year when President Nixon visited China and shook Chairman Mao's hand. This was very clearly an attempt to warm up to America after ten years of worsening relations with the Soviet Union. The government was trying to use America, an ocean away, to exert some control over our neighbors to the north. My mother said this was the traditional method of keeping your friends far and your enemies close by.
President Nixon meets Chairman Mao in February 1972.
My family lived in the employee dormitories of the railroad department. Before the revolution the building was called a "Chinese garden." Every Thursday afternoon, the residents' study group would meet in the courtyard. The female party official on the neighborhood committee was very loud, and I could hear everything she said from my room.
She said, "Why did Nixon come to see Chairman Mao? First, because we scared him during the Korean War. Second, after the Cultural Revolution, he's lost hope of peacefully changing us. So, he is surrendering to us." According to her, this was a sign of our victory.
Upstairs, I laughed out loud. America was always our biggest enemy, and this was how the party official was trying to reconcile that with the visit?
Everything has its counterpart. Twenty years later I was in Washington DC, in a building near the White House. There was a US government photo exhibition. The last one was from Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping's visit to America, where he was pictured standing next to President Carter. I remember the caption ended with, "... Our new allies - China." The implication here is that America won. No wonder once Deng Xiaoping returned, we started warring with Vietnam. It was like we were getting revenge for America's defeat to prove our worth as new allies. I thought about this, and felt that the alliance between America and China was very good for our own safety - it was now less important to send hundreds of thousands of young people to the borderlands.
In those years, as the political and economic arenas changed, so did the policy around sent-down youth.
Starting in 1970, not every middle or high school graduate needed to be sent to the countryside. The "four directions" returned: one could focus on the countryside, borderlands, factories and mines, and the lower class. Some students could be assigned to factories in Shanghai. Because I was already in a village, my parents only had my little brother Jianyuan left. So he was able to get a job at the cargo shipping department. Half a year later Nixon came to visit, and we started needing to export manufactured goods to America. Jianyuan then transferred to an apprenticeship in a factory.
My mother always liked me, and would often say to my brother, "You're in the factory now because we lost your brother to the countryside."
The first time I heard of getting "sick leave" from the village was in 1970. A man from the Pioneer Production Brigade, by the name of Ru, had a brain infection. When he returned to Shanghai, I heard his residency had been transferred back and he wouldn't have to come back. A few years later, I heard that the criteria for sick leave had been expanded to include pre-existing conditions as well. For example, if your vision was worse than -8 diopters, you shouldn't have been sent down anyways and were allowed to leave.
Starting around the second half of 1974, there was another change. Those families where all the children were in villages while the parents were childless in Shanghai were allowed to bring one child back to Shanghai to work. As a result, Lu Yuping's older sister was able to return from a village in Jilin province, and Ma Liping's little sister was able to return from a village in Anhui province. Since the older of Xia Yuanlin's little sisters was already working in Shanghai, nobody else from his family was allowed to leave Yang'aosisters was already working in Shanghai, nobody else from his family was allowed to leave Yang'ao.
Chairman Mao and Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping.
In 1975, Chairman Mao wanted Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping to take charge of the daily operations of the country. Some of Deng Xiaoping's actions were seen by others as "walking the capitalist road." After a bit over a year, he was again disgraced and fired. In the early summer of 1977, I went to Lugang to hear an official announcement. Deng Xiaoping's former position had been restored. The commune added that Deng Xiaoping did make mistakes in the past, but had personally guaranteed Chairman Mao that they would not occur again.
Immediately after Deng Xiaoping (re)assumed office, the universities reinstated their entrance exams. The sent-down youth in Lugang ran to spread the good news: "We can apply to college!" But from 1966 to 1977 we had spent eleven years without any formal education. Our fingers, which had once grasped pens and pencils, had been reshaped by our hoes and sickles. The test was imminent, and there was no time to learn or review. So applying to college was not an easy task.
In 1977, the siblings Xia Yuanlin and Xia Yuanjie both got into college. That was the first entrance exam in ten years; allegedly the acceptance rate to colleges nationwide was four percent.
In the latter half of 1978, I heard in the villages that a Vice Premier had identified the "Four Dissatisfactions" of the Down to the Countryside movement. These were the dissatisfactions of the sent-down youth, their parents, the farmers, and the nation as a whole. At the end of the year, Deng Xiaoping replaced Chairman Hua Guofeng. Deng Xiaoping was officially the Vice Premier, but in reality he was the paramount leader. The newspapers began to criticize some aspects of the Cultural Revolution. With this, the sent-down youth's discontent of the last decade exploded.
Before the plenum, a Shanghainese sent-down youth in Yunnan province wrote "A Petition to Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping," which allegedly garnered six thousand signatures. The petition detailed the various complaints of the sent-down youth in Yunnan: first, they felt that life was monotonous and devoid of meaning; second, a majority were losing hope for their futures; third, some sent-down youth got married very early and only cared about their nuclear families; fourth, many female sent-down youth left the villages to try to get married in a city, which made it hard for the men who remained to find partners; fifth, the sent-down youth who spent their time at home with their parents were squandering their youth; sixth, the sent-down youth who thought only of getting home were unproductive workers. The petition asked for sent-down youth to be allowed back home.
At year's end, they organized a group of volunteers to head to Beijing. They held up a banner that said, "We want to go home" and started walking north. When they got to the province capital, Kunming, they lay down on the train tracks and blocked train traffic in order to force the officials to let them go to Beijing. After consulting with the national leadership, the party leaders in Yunnan allowed them to return to their homes.
The activists asking to go home in December 1978.
Almost simultaneously, during the Chinese new year celebrations in 1979, hundreds of thousands of sent-down youth went back to Shanghai to visit their families. The Shanghai government held various events to try to support the sent-down youth who were particularly unhappy. But there were still many sent-down youth who took to the streets and blocked railroads, asking to go to Beijing to make their case.
Suddenly, everything changed.
My mother sent a letter saying that the residents' council told her that she didn't need any specific reason to apply for my "sick leave." She had already done all the paperwork, and it was en route to Yongfeng.
About ten days later, I received not the paperwork but another letter from my mother. She wrote that the railroad department had told my father a few days prior that he could retire, which would open up a spot in the department's labor quota, which he could then transfer to me. Then I would be able to work for the railroad department. Now that paperwork had also been done, and it, too, was in the mail. She said that my father was still working every day at age sixty-four, and his wages had not gone down even a single cent.
Everything was changing so fast. I was in shock. I was unspeakably happy, of course, but had an inexplicable sense of loss as well.
The great return of the sent-down youth was beginning.
I was a substitute teacher at Yongfeng Middle School. After receiving my mother's second letter, I told the school what my plans were, and went back to Libeishang. I never did get that paperwork - it must have been lost in the mail.
There was one family in Libeishang that had a patriarch who worked outside of the village. He was over fifty years old. At the time he was home to celebrate the new year. He had heard that I was going back to Shanghai, and came to find me. Very seriously, he said, "In the past couple of years, all the college spots have gone to you sent-down youth. Us farmers have been upset by that. Now, you all are oing back to Shanghai. What are we villagers going to do then? Aren't we a country of workers and farmers? Is it right for the government to do this to us?"
I knew in my heart that the great pendulum of Chinese politics was swinging rapidly toward the right, but I didn't know how to explain this to him. Faced with his confusion and doubt, I was completely speechless. All I could do was explain the "subsitution" method that my father had used to get me a job. Later I heard that he quickly prepared his own retirement, transferring his job to his son. No individual among us is strong enough to turn the tides of history.
When the villagers learned that I was leaving, they came to my house to express their congratulations. The old team leaer, Zhang Famao, took issue, saying, "Old Xia's been here for so long, everyone should be thanking him for his time." Qingkui, Sixi, and other major figures in the village fell in line. Sixi had some education, and he suggested giving me a pennant. They all agreed. Famao went to buy the fabric, Sixi was to write the characters, and a deft young girl was to cut the characters out and attach them to the flag.
Famao and Sixi gave it to me without much ceremony. The pennant was red, with a yellow borrder. It wasn't very big, and there were three lines of white text attached to it. The first line was "A Memento For Comrade Xia Jianfeng," the next read "Leaving behind love for the people," and the last read, "A gift from the members of Libeishang, Feb '79."
I pointed at the characters on the pennant, and jokingly said to Sixi, "Wow, being a teacher really left an impression on you. The 'Jian' and the 'memento' are both written as alternate forms, and the 'leaving' and 'members' are in Traditional Chinese."
After they left, I stared at the four characters "éç±ćŸ æ°, leaving behind love for the people." I couldn't tear my eyes away, and I felt a little twinge in my nose as a few tears welled up.
Did I really deserve such high praise? Wasn't this pennant a little like the old "Umbrella of the People?"
I read that the upstanding government officials of yore were described as "creating fortune for a whole region by working for one term." When they left the people would give them an umbrella in thanks. Inside, the umbrella would be covered with the names of his constituents. This was the "Umbrella of the People," signifying that the official had been able to protect the people from all sorts of misfortunes. I had also read that corrupt officials would sometimes force their citizenry to make one on their departure.
Later, I found the phrase in the encyclopedia, where it said that the "love" in the phrase also means "benefit" in this case.
When I was production team leader, I felt like I was fairly upstanding, but I didn't count as a government official.
That night I couldn't sleep as various scenes flashed through my head. Digging the emergency spillway at the reservoir during a storm; the soreness of my back during planting and harvesting; horsefly and leech bites; the mice running races above my bed; frozen in fear before the jackals; pigs oinking endlessly in hunger; my yellow dog happy to see me; jogging with a bamboo stalk on my shoulder; nearly falling over while carrying a big sack; villagers bringing me piping hot dishes...
I began to pack my things. Only then did I find that I had many things that I couldn't bring home: the water tank, water buckets, the dining table, benches, the pigpen, the chicken coop, the rice bin and the bed, the pantry cabinets, pottery urns, my hoe and sickle, the chamberpot...
There were twenty-six families in Libeishang, so I split the things I wasn't bringing with me into twenty six parts, and gave them to teach family. Something to remember me by, and a way to thank them for taking care of me for all these years.
After all this, I still had a substantial amount of luggage. Not only did I have the brown synthetic leather trunk from my arrival, I had a few camphorwood trunks and a round hardwood tabletop. To protect my luggage, the villagers made me an immeasurable amount of straw rope, to tie all of my things together tightly.
I went to the Lugang bank to transfer my account. I still had over two thousand yuan in my account. I wrote a two thousand yuan check and took the rest out as cash. The accountant sighed, saying, "If only more sent-down youth were like you. I heard you even gave your things away to all the families in Libeishang."
The accountant knew that in the future, when a villager was in dire need of some money, they would come to the bank and borrow some from that fund. If someone couldn't pay it back down the line, I wasn't going to collect on their debt.
As the last sent-down youth to leave the Pioneer Production Brigade, I went to their headquarters and asked if they could give me a tractor ride to the Jiangbian village railroad station in Le'an prefecture. The production brigade secretary told me, after some discussion they had already agreed that I could use the tractor whenever I wanted. To express their thanks for my ten years of work, they waived the fuel fee of fifty yuan.
The secretary especially emphasized that my contributions were worth far more than those fifty yuan; waiving the fee was to express their gratitude, not to remunerate me for my service.
It was a beautiful morning when I left Libeishang. The village sent four people with me to go down to the train station.
Libeishang village slowly moved farther and farther away, and I couldn't see it anymore.
Lugang bridge was up ahead. When we were picking tea tree seeds every year, I'd often rest my shoulders under the bridge here.
We passed by the production brigades' oil press. I felt the heat, as if I were still there, shirtless, pressing oil.
The road to Cunqian was close by, which I once traveled to go see Ma Liping.
The "Grain Mountain" was swelling towards me. This was the mountain we went to harvest tea tree seeds on.
The narrow "Flag Row Ridge" swept by in an instant. Was there someone digging on the ridge? Was someone singing a folk song?
The Pioneer Production Brigade oil-press near the road, in 1998.
I didn't know the next mountain by name, as it wasn't part of the Pioneer production brigade. I did know that there was the "White Cloud Temple" on it. They said that no matter how hot it was, you would feel cool when you went there. Unfortunately I never made it there.
The tractor rumbled louder as it worked its way up the mountain towards Guanqian Production Brigade.
Goodbye, Libeishang. I've bled in your mountains, I've sweated in your fields, I've dug in your rivers and I've fished in your ponds.
Goodbye, Libeishang. Even though you've humiliated me in some ways, you've given me bits of pride in others.
An individual is a tiny speck in the universe, but I still left the most important ten years of my life here.
I would definitely return, but I would be a different person then. You can't step in the same river twice, after all.
When we arrived at Jiangbian village, the railroad station was completely empty. There was a new announcement posted on the wall. It read, "Because this station's luggage rooms are full, we will not check baggage or other cargo starting today." It was dated five days prior. I guess I wasn't going to leave after all.
Someone who looked like a sent-down youth walked up. I asked, and he was also going back to Shanghai. He had already stayed here for three days because he was unable to check his luggage.
"There are too many people going back to the city. The railroads can't keep up. I hear tomorrow they'll open up the luggage again. I guess we'll just have to wait and see," he said.
"Where's all your luggage?" I asked.
"Oh, over there." He gestured with his mouth. "I come by twice a day, doesn't seem like people are going to steal it."
I guess I could try my luck too. The villagers helped me bring my luggage down, and put it next to that person's.
Then they climbed back onto the tractor and went back to Lugang.
At eight the next morning, the ticket window opened, and I successfully bought my train ticket. Even better, they were checking baggage again!
I transfered at Xiangtang station, and my final destination was Shanghai. I sat in the train, the cabin gently rocking. The wheels clattered over the sections of rail as they always did. I thought of my first train ride to Jiangxi, a decade before. Ten years had passed in the blink of an eye, and the tides of history were pushing me back onto a green train, but in the opposite direction. The train was going a different direction this time, and so was China.
The PA system crackled to life, bringing my attention to the present. The announcer used her well-trained voice to welcome us, "Travellers, we have arrived at the last stop Shanghai station." The way she said "travellers" was " æ ćŒ, lĂŒkai," not the standard "æ ćźą, lĂŒke." There had been a skit about this in the 1950s. In any case, the railroad department stated that this was intentional, and created a friendly environment on the train.
When I got back to Shanghai, my father told me that because of the great return, the travel season for the new year was particularly busy. Even the ample luggage rooms of the Shanghai station were no longer ample, and they had to build temporary ones on the platforms.
When I went to the police station to transfer my residency, the young police officer looked up at me. What a coincidence, they said, you left in February 1969 and are returning in February of 1979, a round ten years. That's not easy.
Everyone in Shanghai knew that over ten years, over one million youths from a city of six million had been sent to the countryside. Their lives were certainly not easy.
But many in Shanghai didn't know that there were many peasants in China who, like those in Libeishang, were born, lived, and died in the same place for generations. Their lives were even harder.
In the innumerable villages of China there were many people whose natural environments were not as rich as what we had in Libeishang, and their lives were especially hard.
If you thought closely, I was lucky to have lived and worked in Libeishang for ten years.
Some sent-down youth got rashes and sores when they started working in the rice paddies. It was called "paddy rash." I was lucky, and didn't get it.
I later found out that I would get altitude sickness anywhere over 1500 meters above sea level. Fortunately, Libeishang was barely 100 meters above sea level.
Even more luckily, I was in the relatively rich Libeishang, where I could feed and clothe myself with just my own labor.
By the time of the sent-down youth's great return to the cities, many had already made their way back. Only about seven million were still living in the villages, about forty percent of the original total. Many of them were like Lu Yuping and I, unremarkable and not well connected. Over the course of a few months, all of these people went back into the cities.
In 1981, the departments of sent-down youth across the country began to shut down. Before the Lugang department was disbanded, the director went to all of the villages to ask them to buy the houses the government had built for the sent-down youth. The asking price was low, as they were only looking to offset the initial investment, but he had few takers.
In most villages, they knew that even if they didn't spend a single cent the houses were effetively theirs. If the whole department was being disbanded, was the government going to take the houses too? But Libeishang's Zhang Xianzong and Zhang Sixi decided they would do as the department said, and bought our house.
The director of the sent-down youth department heard there was still one sent-down youth living in the Qingshan Production Brigade, who didn't want to go back to the city. So he went to pay him a visit.
It turns out that this sent-down youth was very happy to stay in the village. He didn't have to work - his parents sent him an allowance regularly. He bought food from the village and vegetables from the villagers, and spent his days without a care in the world. He was living the pastoral lifestyle.
The director had no choice but to send someone to bring this last sent-down youth back to Shanghai.
Lugang Township of Yongfeng Prefecture of Jiangxi Province turned the page on their life with the sent-down youth.
The old Lugang Commune sent-down youth department office had become the Mount Linhua Tea Orchard lobby in 2013.
The old director retired soon after sending the last sent-down youth back to Shanghai. Many of the Lugang sent-down youth should recall that, in his office that doubled as a bedroom, beyond a bed, a desk, and a chair there was also a small file cabinet. Rumor has it that there were dossiers on every one of us in there.
Now his office has been merged with the next room over, and is the lobby for the Mount Linhua Tea Orchard, a company developed by someone from Zhejiang province.
I once asked the manager, "Where exactly is this Mount Linhua?"
He had probably talked to many visitors before me, and he waved his hand toward the window, at a local hilltop in Lijiacun. "Right here." I laughed to myself.
Mount Linhua is the tallest mountain in Yongfeng Prefecture, at the intersection of the Yongfeng, Ningdu, and Le'an prefectures. It's 54 kilometers from Lugang Township, and has no relationship to Lugang. Its peak is 1454 meters above sea level, allegedly the ideal altitude for growing tea. But of the 2000 hectares of Mount Linhua Tea Orchard, not a single one is above 200 meters in altitude.
Ma Liping likes drinking tea, and she says that their white tea is actually pretty good.
The Cultural Revolution began in 1968. A total of seventeen million middle and high school students across the nation were sent "up to the mountains and down to the countryside" to farm. They formed a new demographic, the "sent-down youth." Actually, before the Cultural Revolution began, there were already about a million students who had gone to support rural and frontier initiatives. Only until the 1980s did the government officially recognize them as sent-down youth.
Lugang Commune was a relatively remote northwestern sector of Yongfeng prefecture. It had an area of about 160 square kilometers and a population of about six thousand. All of a sudden they had to absorb three hundred and fifty youths from Shanghai, as well as sent-down youth from other cities in Jiangxi such as Nanchang, Ji'an, and Yongfeng.
Nowadays Lugang Township has about eighty people per square kilometer, the lowest density in Yongfeng (trans: this comes out to about thirteen thousand in total).
Lugang is not a particularly poor area; even in the poorest production teams a full ten credit workday would earn you about forty cents. Our Libeishang was above average. Depending on the harvest, ten credits could be worth anywhere from eighty cents to a full yuan.
Libeishang had a couple who were raising four children. They were all young, the oldest being only six, and could not work. The parents earned about five thousand credits a year; in a bad year that worked out to about four hundred yuan. They were allotted about three thousand pounds of rice per year (this came out to thirty pounds per mouth per month, a substantial amount). This was withheld from their income, leaving one hundred yuan left. After withholding the oil, meat, and fish from the production team they had just enough to buy some salt and cotton fabric. In the end they were able to support all six people. And as the children began to grow up and contribute, their standard of living would go up.
The sent-down youth were largely in their late teens and early twenties. Xia Yuanlin's little sister, Xia Yuanji, was just under sixteen. And others were just past twenty. We were young and strong, and, unlike the locals, hadn't started families yet. If one person had enough to eat then we had fed the whole family, so to speak. If one followed the traditional schedule, working from dawn til dusk - planting vegetables, chopping firewood, fetching water, cooking, and working in the fields - they could certainly support themselves, as I did for ten years. But some sent-down youth didn't spend as much time working, and relied on support from their families in Shanghai.
After being sent-down, we saw with our own eyes the difficult lives of the peasants, and participated in the hard labor of planting and harvesting. Most sent-down youth were determined not to "grow roots in the village" and spend the rest of their lives here, with no hope of leaving.
One sent-down youth said to me, "If I was born here, of course I would be content to be peasants like them. But I was born in the big city, in Shanghai! I can't live like this forever!"
They had a point. In the decades since, we can see that even the Lugang natives flock to the cities when they hear about the greater opportunities there. They go south to Shenzhen or north to Shanghai.
In all of Lugang Commune, I only knew of one sent-down youth, the vice secretary of the production brigade, who expressed a desire to "grow roots in the village." Later when the sent-down youth were returning en masse, the prefecture leadership suggested that he, too, return. He hesitated, thinking he would be going back on his word.
But Shanghainese sent-down youth had already had our residencies transferred to the villages. We couldn't just leave and go back to Shanghai on our own, we had to have an official reason. The main ones were joining the army, getting hired at a factory, getting into university, and being on sick leave.
Joining the Army
To do this, the army had to have a spot on their conscription quota. For example, in 1974, the army came to conscript in Lugang. In the whole of Lugang only two sent-down youth from Shanghai made the list. One of them eventually made their way to Shanghai and became a mid-level bureaucrat; the other became a successful business owner after leaving the service.
Getting hired
Jiangxi's manufacturing sector was not particularly developed, so the factories didn't hire many people from the villages. When there was a hiring call, the sent-down youth had to compete with local villagers too.
In my ten years in Libeishang, there were seven men who successfully left the Pioneer Production brigade to work in a factory. Four of these were sent-down youth and three were from the villages (children of major party officials). We were relatively naive in Libeishang - by the time we heard about these sorts of opportunities the new hires had already left.
Going to school
In 1972, the universities re-opened enrollment. They mainly accepted students from the military, agriculture, and industrial sectors. In Lugang they were mostly accepting sent-down youth. The competition was fierce. One year, during the application period, there was an upstanding woman, who had been sent down to the Qingshan Production Brigade. The production brigade recommended her to the commune, and all was proceeding smoothly. Suddenly, another sent-down youth posted a big-character poster at the commune headquarters in opposition. The height of the Cultural Revolution had begun to fade into memory at that point, and the commune leadership panicked. They decided that it was too risky to send this person to school.
The sent-down youth in Libeishang were all hard-working, and had a good reputation in the production brigade. The local party leadership was well aware of this as well. The process consisted of "apply, be recommended by the community, approved by the party leadership, then be accepted by a school." This was much more transparent than the various machinations involved in getting hired, and those of us in Libeishang had an advantage here.
The entrance exams were reinstated in 1977. In the five years before hten, the Pioneer Production Brigade was allotted one per year. Of these five slots, three of them were taken by sent-down youth from Libeishang. And many felt that if I had applied in 1976, I could have been the fourth. From another perspective, we sent-down youth in Libeishang greatly reduced the chances for other sent-down youths to go to college.
Sick leave
There were over thirty sent-down youth from Shanghai in the Pioneer Production Brigade. In the end, only eight were able to leave for school or work. The majority had to find some other means. The most popular was "sick leave," a legitimate way to go back to Shanghai. In 1965, Xue Zhiming got into middle school. When the school found out that he was extremely near-sighted, they sent a teacher to his home to convince him to drop out (which did not succeed). In 1974, he was able to get sick leave from Libeishang for his nearsightedness, and his residency was transferred back to Shanghai. He quickly found a job. In the eyes of other sent-down youth his nearsightedness was a blessing in disguise. In Shanghainese parlance he was a "lucky dog, (trans: literally, lucky big brother)." Zhiming later became a government official in the Hongkou district of Shanghai.
Many sent-down youth were hoping to obtain sick leave to return to Shanghai. In their view, even being a street-sweeper in Shanghai was far better than being a peasant in the village. So, one successfully got approval for lupus; someone else went back for diabetes. I would occasionally hear such stories. And of course some of these people got better once they got back to Shanghai. They might have been able to work some connections to get medical "proof" of their illness.
Some sent-down youth said it was easy to get such proof. If you ate a "White Rabbit" cream candy, popular among us Shanghainese, right before they took your temperature, it would look like you had a fever. Or, if you memorized the symptoms of some kidney disease from your own medical book, the doctor would ask you for a urine sample. Then you could add a little bit of milk to fake proteinuria; or you could prick your finger and drop some blood in for hematuria, or add some sugar for diabetes. Someone else said you could cut a small shape out of a toothpaste tube and stick it to your back with a bandage, then fake some sort of lung disease. It would show up on the X-ray and you'd get your diagnosis. This is all hearsay; I never tried such tricks.
I also heard that many doctors were sympathetic to our situation. Maybe their own children had been sent down too. So they would look the other way and let us through (see Appendix 1 for such records).
The sent-down youth who were unable to leave through the above means had to make their own way.
Some of the sent-down youth had parents who were party officials in Shanghai. They weren't necessarily very high-level, but they could help Yongfeng prefecture obtain important resources. In exchange for this service, the sent-down youth would be hired in Yongfeng city. Some other sent-down youth had relatives in the city that could get them a job. In any case, one by one the Shanghai sent-down youth disappeared from Lugang Commune. Some of them went to Nanchang or Jiujiang in Jiangxi, some went to Hunan province, or Hebei province, or even the distant Yunnan and Xinjiang provinces.
Some other sent-down youth transferred to their ancestral villages where they still had relatives. This required their relatives to have some amount of social capital to get their village to accept a newcomer. The hope was that the relatives could then help find opportunities for the sent-down youth to go back to the city.
Of the sent-down youth who remained in Lugang, some became teachers in the production brigade's elementary school; others became "barefoot doctors" at the medical station.
Every production brigade had an elementary school. The principal was often a graduate of some normal school, and would receive a monthly stipend from the government. Beyond the official government's teachers there were also community teachers, who were selected by the production brigade. Despite only having a middle-school education, the sent-down youth were considered highly educated, the "literati" of Lugang. Of the five or six community teachers in some production brigades, fully half were sent-down youth from Shanghai.
June 2013, Central Lugang Elementary school. The Jianfeng wing technically stands for "Building (ć»șèźŸ, jianshe) Yongfeng(æ°žäž°)." It's a three story dormitory.
The community teachers spent most of their time teacher but worked in the fields when needed. They received a fixed amount of work credits, and the work was less physically taxing. My friends Xia Yuanlin from Yang'ao and Ma Liping from Cunqian were both community teachers. In Lugang, even during the Cultural Revolution they were still heavily influenced by Chinese traditions. The villagers still respected the educated people, and especially respected teachers.
Every production brigade had a medical station too, and "barefoot doctors" similarly worked there except when they were needed in the fields. There were fewer doctors than teachers, so fewer sent-down youth were "barefoot doctors."
Some sent-down youth worked hard for a couple years, then lost hope of ever leaving. Then they would go back to Shanghai to visit their families, for six months to a year at a time. Eventually the residency department would send someone to encourage them to return to their village. Then they would reluctantly return, and wouldn't work hard once they got back. We had a woman in Libeishang who worked hard and had good relationships with the villagers. One time she went back to Shanghai and just never came back. I still don't know where she ended up.
These people were already in their twenties, and were no longer children. But regardless of whether they were holed up in Shanghai or in Libeishang, they were still being supported by their parents, a burden on their families. These were the precursors to today's NEET (not in education, employment, or training). Their parents wanted the government to change policy so that these sent-down youth could lead normal existences in the city.
The sent-down youth who remained in the fields noticed that fewer and fewer of them were still around. So there was even more incentive to get out of the villages.
Around 1975 various departments of sent-down youth decided to incentivize staying in the villages. They began to collect all the sent-down youth together, to better support them, and improve their standard of living.
The Yang'ao production brigade established a special sent-down youth farm. There was a fifty-horsepower "Shanghai-50" tractor, and the leader was my friend Xia Yuanlin. The Cunqian production brigade set up a lumberyard, and got their hands on a "Shanghai-130" truck.
The Lugang commune started a "general production facility", which collected sent-down youth from Guanqian, Yushan, Luojia, Qiancun, and other production brigades. They had a "Shanghai-35" tractor. "General production" in this case included farming, production of traditional medicine, milling lumber, and generating electricity.
My good friend Lu Yuping was transferred from his post as the head of the lumberyard in Luojia production brigade. Now he was in charge of the general production facility, and had a whole hand tractor at his disposal.
From the right: Lu Yuping, Chen Fuzhong, and Chen Weiyu. In the distance you can see the "Shanghai-35" hand tractor and trailer. Image provided by Lu Yuping.
Left: In June 2013, the old general production facility water tower still stands. Right: Lu Yuping was once responsible for maintaining this water tower. Provided by Lu Yuping. Images provided by Lu Yuping.
In Appendix 1 we can see that the city of Shanghai provided over seven thousand tractors, eight hundred trailers, fifty vehicles, and all sorts of engines, generators, transformers, and other important equipment to the various sent-down youth organizations. The total value of this was fifty-five million yuan.
Teachers, barefoot doctors, and those who worked at various sent-down youth labor organizations all had relatively stable incomes. They didn't have to cook for themselves either, with the extra labor that entailed. In the end, though they were better off than those still farming, they were still in the villages.
People are not easily satisfied, and are always looking to better their own predicaments. Ideally these sent-down youth wanted to escape the villages entirely. As they began to feel their youth slipping away, they became more desperate to leave.
Nowadays there are many rumors about female sent-down youth needing to go to bed with the villainous party officials before being approved to leave the village. In my ten years, I heard of various relationships in Lugang: between male and female sent-down youths (there were some in at least the Pioneer, Yushan, and Cunqian Production Brigades), male villagers pursuing female sent-down youth (I knew of two instances, neither of which were successful), and of course there were inappropriate relationships between party officials and the local women. Libeishang was a backwater, and didn't get all the gossip, but I didn't hear of any instances where the party officials had inappropriate relations with female sent-down youths. I also didn't hear of any women similarly bribing party officials.
Within the commune I only knew of one exception. One young party secretary from some production brigade, who was married, often stayed with a female sent-down youth. They were practically openly cohabitating. My impression was that they genuinely loved each other; the only transgression here being that the secretary was already married to someone else. In the end he was arrested for the crime of "humiliating a female sent-down youth." He was brought to the town square in Yongfeng city and condemned by thousands of people before being sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
As the saying goes, "the buildings close to the water get the moonlight first." Those party officials responsible for the sent-down youth should be the most likely to get mixed up with female sent-down youth. But the head of the Lugang Department of Sent-down Youth was very careful to only get friendly with the local woman who was in charge of the telephone station. He knew that the consequences for "corrupting" the sent-down youth were severe.
Outside of Lugang, I heard that a militia captain got involved with a female sent-down youth at the broadcast station. This resulted in him being stripped of his title and re-assigned somewhere else for a few years. A party secretary somewhere else had an affair with a sent-down youth, and ended up losing his job and writing six months of self-examinations.
No matter what, at every level, the departments of sent-down youth had a responsibility to protect sent-down youth, and especially to protect female sent-down youth from any sort of violations. So, even the villagers knew that bedding a Shanghainese woman was as bad as bedding the wife of a soldier and would result in jail time.
Now I know that I didn't know very much back then. Decades later, I heard a sent-down youth from Lugang say that when Shanghai sent some people to check on the sent-down youth, they rescued a female sent-down youth who had been "kept" by a party official.
I feel that, compared to the scattered sent-down youth in Lugang, those who were concentrated in military or governmental farms and isolated from the greater society were more susceptible to such abuses of power.
Even though they say that food and sex are both human nature, anyone who wields their institutional power to get them were viciously attacked, even in the Cultural Revolution. They had a "bad ideology" and were condemned and sentenced to jail.
I'm truly happy to see how far the Chinese economy and standard of living has come in the past few decades. But I can't help but wonder, is the government more corrupt now than it was when I was in Libeishang?
Happily, the highest party leadership has been taking a harder stance against corruption recently.
In the mid-seventies, sent-down youth started to wander away from the villages. The "Down to the Countryside" movement had begun to struggle, and was about to run into serious problems. When the political situation changed, it was inevitable that the sent-down youth would return to their cities.
If our descendants want to inherit the skills and experience of their elders, they're going to have to learn. And for this we need education.
Earlier I wrote about the living situation in the villages. Naturally this made me think of the education there.
Shaxi township in Yongfeng prefecture was the ancestral home of Ouyang Xiu and one of the "Eight Grade Clans of the Tang and Song Dynasties." The famous stela of the æł·ćéĄèĄš(Shuanggang qianbiao) stands right in the Setting Sun Pavilion.
The Setting Sun Pavilion.
Xiaxi Square in the town of Enjiang was home to the Qing dynasty primus (ç¶ć , zhuangyuan, the one who scored highest on the imperial exams) Liu Feng. Even Lugang was home to Xi Xu'an, who was a teacher to the Jianwen Emperor of the Ming dynasty. The Zhang clan in Libeishang is able to trace their ancestry back to none other than the famous Tang poet Zhang Jiuling. Yongfeng has historically been very cultured. Even now, nearly every year there are students who make it to Peking or Tsinghua Universities, the best schools in China.
1. The rise and fall of the village elementary school
But when I was at Libeishang, the most educated villager was Zhang Sixi. He had completed 'simple normal school,' the equivalent of middle school. The next was Zhang Baimao, who had completed elementary school. The rest were illiterate, with only a handful able to recognize any characters at all. The children would go to elementary school at the Pioneer Production Brigade, but a year or two in they would be needed in the fields. By the time they grew up, all they retained was recognizing their own names. They gave the rest of the knowledge back to their teachers, so to speak.
Here in America, many Chinese-Americans only spend a year or two in Chinese school before giving up. In the end they have learned nothing.
I asked the villagers, why quit school? They said it was too hard. "The worst part of farming is weeding; the worst part of school is the tests." If they couldn't do well on the tests, they felt like it was better to just go home and farm.
It is true that not all people are good at school. And yet, not all people are good at farming. To them, farming was very easy, and schooling very difficult. Yet to me, schooling was very easy, and farming was nigh incomprehensible.
But the dropout rate in Libeishang was far too high.
When I became the production team leader, some villagers suggested that we could run a small school inside the village. This would let the children get an education and still help out around the house. Then many parents would be happy to let their children get an education. This seemed promising, so we whitewashed one of the walls of the now empty shrine and got some of the handier villagers to make some benches and desks for the classroom. When the villagers saw we were serious, over a dozen children signed up.
I tried to get two sent-down youth who were teaching elsewhere to come to Libeishang. They weren't interested. There was another sent-down youth who was, but I thought they wouldn't be good. As the beginning of the school year approached I still had no confirmed teacher. In desperation, I asked the commune's director of sent-down youth to help. Soon, he recommended a sent-down youth to come teach in Libeishang. Our school began on time, and the enrollment rate in Libeishang shot up.
We had first and second grade in the same room, which was very common. This was called "ć€ćŒæćŠ, reinforced education." We used the national Chinese curriculum; at the time there was no alternative.
Zhang Sixi, who had taught before, showed me an old introductory textbook. It had vocabulary lists such as "Pots, stoves, rice zeng, windmills, drying baskets, and rakes." Even though my middle school education didn't prepare me for a few of the more obscure agricultural terms, I could easily tell that this book was all about everyday vocabulary. The publisher's note indicated that it was published in the early 1950s as part of the province's adult literacy movement.
But the school was not successful for long. In two years, I was no longer the team leader, and Master Hang, the sent-down youth who was the teacher, went back to the city. The school, which had no official name, shut down. The children could only go to school at the Pioneer Elementary School, and the dropout rates increased again.
At the time, Zhang Sixi's son Zhang Fengsheng was in first grade at the school. Many years later, he was a high school chemistry teacher at Yongfeng Middle School. He still remembers his time in that school, and mentioned it to me when I visited.
Zhang Meifa's child Zhang Fageng never attended our little school. But they're the principal of Zuolong Middle School in Yongfeng now.
Fengsheng and Fageng are upstanding citizens from Libeishang, and live in the city of Yongfeng. They rarely go back to Libeishang. Since they're both in education, I hoped that they would work to help the community of Libeishang. When I asked them about it, they both shook their heads, saying, "It's too hard. Things are complicated in the village."
Call me old fashioned, but I keep thinking of Mencius' advice, "the poor must care for themselves; the rich must care for the world," and Fan Zhongyan's famous lines, "When living high in the monastery one worries about the people; when on the frontier one worries about the country's ruler." I often think, if even the native Fengsheng and Fageng don't care about the progress of the village, why should an outsider like me?
But I can't stop myself from caring and worrying.
Fan Zhongyan also wrote, "Advancing and retreating are full of worry. When can one be happy? We must be the first to worry and the last to enjoy."
2. Teaching in Yongfeng Middle School
Starting in 1977, Chinese universities re-instated their entrance exams. Of the 2500 Shanghainese youths sent to Yongfeng prefecture, fewer than a thousand remained. Many of them went to the Culture and Education Department to enroll in the entrance exams.
The department said that, since it was a "re-instatement," the rules would be the same as for the 1965 entrance exams. Critically, the maximum age for enrollment was twenty-five. This excluded the vast majority of the sent-down youth.
Some of those excluded stayed at the department and refused to leave. A few days before the test, the Jiangxi province's education department suddenly announced that the age restrictions would be relaxed. So many of the sent-down youth were actually able to take the test. But many also didn't hear the news after going back to their villages, and missed out on the 1977 entrance exams.
Xia Yuanlin and his little sister Xia Yuanjie were in the Yang'ao Production Brigade. They were able to take the 1977 test. Xia Yuanjie had completed some middle school, and got into the Jiangxi Traditional Medical School. Her brother Xia Yuanlin had been in high school before coming to Jiangxi, and got the highest score. But this was just when the government in Ji'an, a major city, was starting a new normal university (a university for teachers). They snatched up all the best students, including Xia Yuanling.
I visited home in the summer of 1978. When I got back, a villager told me that someone from Yongfeng Middle School had come to look for me. I didn't think much of it.
But a few days later, Mr. Wang from Yongfeng Middle School came and found me in the fields. He said that, starting the next year, there would be an English portion of the exam. So the middle school needed to improve its English instruction. He had heard that the sent-down youth in Lugang were from some of the better schools in Shanghai, so He came here, only to find that most of us had already left.
So as one of the last remaining sent-down youths I followed him to the English department. He told me to read an instructional text in English, and I became a substitute teacher at Yongfeng Middle School. My salary was thirty-three yuan per month.
The Yongfeng Prefecture Department Store. The author bought two thermoses here when he got his first paycheck.
There was a cafeteria in the school, so I didn't have to plant vegetables or chop firewood to cook. There was a movie theater across the street; the department store and restaurant were around the corner. After I got my first paycheck, I went to the department store and bought two green thermoses. Every day I could go to the cafeteria and fill them up with hot water. I had gone a long time without such a luxury. These bottles are still in my house in Shanghai. The school also had electric lights, which were much better suited to reading than oil lamps.
The campus had an abandoned Catholic church; the doors were tightly locked. There was a small two story house nearby, which was once the priest's quarters. I had a room in this building. My window faced the basketball courts.
In 1998, not long before the house was demolished. The right window on the second floor belongs to the author's old room.
Looking out from the window, you could see the school entrance in the distance. There was a slate wall next to the gate, with a small door in it. The other side of the door also belonged to the school, originally. But the school was under jurisdiction of the Culture and Education Department, and they had built a two-story office building there to serve as their headquarters. They had even dug a fish pond in front of the building.
Most importantly, there was a room on the second floor of that building which housed the new graduate from normal university, Ma Liping. Just after six in the morning, I could see from my window that the students had gone into the classrooms for morning study hall. The door in the slate wall would open, and Ma Liping would come in. She had neatly-combed short hair and white sneakers, and promptly began her workout, running around the track. I was swallowed by waves of tenderness and love.
I was responsible for teaching seventh grade English. I had five to six classes a day, and had grading and prep work on top of that. It was not a particularly easy job. Adding to the stress of work was the fact that, despite having been the class representative for English class in school, I was still very bad at English.
I had only taken two years of English in Shanghai. At the time, there was a pedagogical trend of "oral skills first." So we focused mainly on listening and speaking. The school I was at took foreign language instruction quite seriously, and emphasized small class sizes. Our homeroom split into two section during English class, and we had one teacher for each section. Our half went to a special foreign language classroom. I thought that maybe this was why I got the job after just reading one passage. Mr. Wang had a very strong Upper Yongfeng (he was from Tengtian) accent himself.
I asked people to bring the English typewriter my father had bought in America, and Linguaphone English textbooks. I made a lot of flashcards and studied them after dinner. After waking up I would turn on the light, grab the flashcards by my pillow, and keep reviewing. Sometimes I forgot to turn the light off before sleeping. It got bad enough that the school's teaching supervisor reprimanded me for wasting electricity at night.
The students worked extremely hard.
From six to seven in the morning was morning study hall. The school took attendance, and the students were supposed to arrive before six. The doors closed at exactly six. Tardy students wouldn't be able to get in to school. Some of them would turn around in a panic, not knowing what to do. Some even burst into tears.
I taught seventh grade, in a newly built classroom. The windows hadn't been put in yet, and neither had the electricity. In the wintertime, study hall happened in darkness; the students all lit candles in the dark so they could study.
When gust of wind blew into the room they all shielded their candles with their hands so they could continue studying.
After a while, it got to be too cold. Intermittent stomping became a constant rumble in the classroom.
I often went to the room to check on the students. One of the more mischievous boys sat in the first row. Since his candle kept going out, he was always busying himself lighting the candle. Later, he got his stubby candle to stay lit, and put it inside his desk with his textbook. He stuck his hands in, as if he was warming his hands by the campfire. He looked down, forehead red from the cold, beaming with pride at his innovation.
Suddenly, the student next to him began to scream. The other students saw a wisp of smoke coming from his desk. His textbook had caught on fire! I ran over and helped him put it out. I sentenced him to stand outside for a while, which didn't really make a big difference in terms of temperature.
Evening study hall was from seven to nine.
Luckily, the school decreed that, since seventh graders were still young, they needed to sleep early in order to wake up early the next day. So they were spared evening study hall.
Including me, there were six teachers in the English department, of which four were accredited.
Mr. Qin sat across from me. Coincidentally, I went to the same middle school that he did, just years later. When the Cultural Revolution began, he was a student at the Beijing Normal University. He was studying "economics and geography," and after graduation he was assigned to Yongfeng Middle School to teach geography. Later, due to the lack of English teachers, he filled in and taught English. At the time, he was working hard to get an assignment in Nanchang, and was on the brink of success.
Unfortunately, on his way to Nanchang he died in a car accident. His wife, Ms. Yu, was also a teacher at the Yongfeng Middle School. Later she retired as the vice prefecture head and returned to Shanghai.
The homeroom teacher for my class was Ms. Wang, who had graduated from Shanghai Normal University. She later found a way to get re-assigned to Fengxian prefecture in Shanghai, and eventually became the director of the Shanghai governmental agency for "the study of public governance and human resources."
I only taught English at Yongfeng Middle School for one semester.
As the political climate changed, my parents were figuring out ways to get me back to Shanghai. I went back from Yongfeng Middle school to Libeishang, handed off my various responsibilities, dealt with my personal belongings, and then followed the great tide of sent-down youth returning to Shanghai.
In 2010, when I went back to Yongfeng Middle School, one of the administrators told me that he had been in my class. I couldn't remember him, though. He reminded me that I didn't have a Yongfeng accent, and that I had "authentic American English." I was shocked to say the least. He then said, his homeroom teacher was Wang Xin; I had to admit that he was right, but I still couldn't remember him. That night, he brought his son, a student at Yongfeng Middle School, to come see me. I immediately recognized his face. He sat in the front row, though he was not that boy who set his textbook on fire.
Yongfeng Middle School has moved to a new location.
When a man is grown he must want a wife; when a woman is grown she must want a husband. From presidents and princesses to smugglers and country girls, most everyone follows the rule. It's hard to imagine what the future of our species would be like if we stopped getting married.
In Libeishang, marriages were often arranged by the parents.
1. Taking a wife
I saw a wedding during my first winter in Libeishang. Zhang Qingkui was twenty-one, and marrying Ju Heilan, a woman from Gaokeng. She was nineteen.
At the time, we had just passed the peak of the Cultural Revolution. There was a fervor for new customs in the villages. Ju Heilan walked into Libeishang with a set of brand new red clothes. Qingkui's family hadn't set out a lavish feast; instead they shared a modest meal with just the two families.
When Ju Heilan was in Gaokeng, she became good friends with many of the sent-down youth. After all, they were about the same age, and had worked together. Soon after her marriage, one of the male sent-down youths stopped by Libeishang on the way back from the commune. They chatted in her house until lunch, when the couple invited him to stay for lunch.
When Qingkui's mother heard of this she was furious. How could they casually invite a young man from Gaokeng over for dinner? She was suspicious of something, and inquired loudly about it all through the village. She even sent someone to Gaokeng to investigate the situation. Later she realized it was all a misunderstanding. That sent-down youth might still be oblivious to the disturbance he caused in Libeishang that year.
By the summer of 1970, when Zhang Xiantong was getting married, the old customs were beginning to come back.
Zhang Famao was a major figure in the village and was quite busy managing the festivities. He found some dirty old gongs from somewhere in the production team's storehouse and cleaned them up. He got two old men to carry them and stand by the entrances to the village and Xiantong's house.
An old bronze gong.
The man standing at the village entrance kept watch on the road from Gaokeng. The moment the bride appeared, he began to strike the gong. The sound traveled into the village, setting off a flurry of activity. The children, even more excited than usual, ran back and forth, breathlessly reporting the latest situation.
A particularly energetic round of gong-ringing was followed by the sound of firecrackers. This meant that the bride had already crossed the threshold into the village. The children, red-faced, ran back from the entrance to Xiantong's house shouting, "She's coming, she's coming!"
The bride turned the corner, and the gong holder at Xiantong's house began to strike his own gong. Famao took the cigarette out of his mouth. This was in preparation for setting off an extra-long string of firecrackers that was one thousand firecrackers long. When the bride was about ten steps from Xiantong's door, the crowd began to cheer. The firecrackers were lit, and the bride stepped over the threshold in a deafening wave of sound. She was followed by a few of Xiantong's younger relatives, who he had sent ahead to escort the bride and carry the dowry.
Zhang Xiantong was wearing a new black suit, with a black hat to match. He didn't usually smoke, but he had a cigarette tucked behind his ear, and was joyfully handing out cigarettes to his guests.
At the time, the custom of welcoming the bride with suona (trans: a traditional Chinese horn) had not yet returned. But the villagers knew that Xue Zhiming and I could play a bit of harmonica, so our duty was to substitute for the suona. We stood by the door and played some songs of the revolution when she stepped through. But the firecrackers were too loud, and I couldn't hear what I was playing at all.
The bride rested a short while before coming into the front room with the groom. Xue Zhiming and I were huffing and puffing on our harmonicas. I don't remember what song we played exactly, but it was probably something like the soaring "Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman." When we finished, the ceremony officially began. Famao was the MC. He beamed as he pronounced, "In the year one thousand nine hundred and seventy of the People's Republic of China..."
The newlyweds paid their respects to the sky, the earth, their parents, and each other. Famao finished with "Bear a son who will be successful...let us deliver the bride and groom into the bridal chamber."
There were three tables set out for the feast. We seated ourselves excitedly. The first round of drinks had barely been poured when a villager shouted, "Bride, bride! Come refill the wine!" We fell silent, looking at the door. The bride did not come out.
Only after the third round of drinks and countless summonings did the bride demurely step out of the bridal chamber. She had changed out of her bridal clothes. She took the tin decanter and shyly poured wine for us. Some of the mischievous villagers intentionally withdrew their bowls at the last second. Then wine would splash onto their clothes, and they would heckle her, asking her to wash their clothes as if she were their wife. The laughter during the feast seemed to shake the shingles on the roof.
The next day, when we were working in the fields, a villager told me, "Old Xia, that thing you played at Xiantong's wedding yesterday sounded pretty good!"
Xue Zhiming and I knew that we weren't good at harmonica. In Shanghainese we'd call it "ććæ±Ą(ya ya wu, mediocre)." The villager was probably impressed by its novelty.
A National Light brand harmonica in C.
2. Marrying away daughters
Our neighbor Zhou Enshao was contemplative in the wake of Xiantong's wedding. He said, "I can't believe the bride's father didn't ask for a bride price. Maybe it's because he's a Communist, and has no interest in it."
Curious, I asked, "What's a bride price? The man's family has to give the woman's family something?"
Old Zhou said, "Of course! Take my daughter Nianying for example. I don't know how much love and care we've put into raising her. When she leaves for another family, shouldn't we ask for a bride price? Nianying's seventeen now. I've already gotten someone to write a list of the bride price, and arranged a marriage with the Liu family of Gangkou village. As long as they finish paying the bride price, she'll get married when she turns eighteen next year.
I was skeptical. Wasn't this just another way of selling your daughter? I asked Old Zhou, "What sort of thing is on the list?"
He smiled, saying, "Six hundred yuan, a hundred and twenty pounds of pork, ten pounds of moon cakes, two new sets of khaki clothes, two new coats, two hats, and some other things that I can't remember."
He stopped and thought for a bit, and continued, "They say that 'You can't see raising a daughter as investing rice, and you can't see feeding a pig as investing feed.' Can this bride price pay for the cost of raising Nianying?" He sighed. "And now they're just going to take my daughter away."
The women in Libeishang were expected to spend their twentieth birthday in their husband's house. If she wasn't married by then, she would go hide in the mountains for a day instead of staying in her own home.
The next year, Zhou Nianying was married on time. Zhou Enshao was an outsider in Libeishang, so there wasn't much ceremony about it. His son-in-law brought a few relatives from Gangkou and escorted Nianying to her new home.
Soon after Nianying's marriage, Zhang Baimao's daughter Sanying was going to be married. Baimao was pretty well off, and had prepared a dowry far ahead of time.
The day before her marriage there was a "face revealing" ceremony. This began with Sanying sitting on a bench while her mother removed extra hairs on Sanying's face with a thread. This marked her passage into womanhood, and it was now appropriate for her to threadher own face.
On the morning of Sanying's marriage, her dowry was placed in the hall. I remembered seeing some boxes, as well as some makeup. According to tradition, the bride was not supposed to set foot in her own house on her wedding day. So she had to stay in her bed. Her family helper her wash up, get dressed, and eat breakfast in bed. Her mother sat by the bed, providing advice about what and what not to do. She talked about how to manage the relationship with her husband, and with his parents, and such. They realized it was coming time to say goodbye, and tears welled in their eyes. The daughter was the first to cry.
Just then there was some hubbub outside. Apparently the escorts from the` groom's wedding party were here. When her mother heard, she quickly dried her tears and put herself together to welcome them.
The groom's party had also brought the last of the bride price. They had put it in the hall, and a few dogs were circling it, sniffing it curiously. The wedding party was sitting around the dining table, drinking, smoking, and snacking on peanuts and pastries. The leader finished his cigarette and stood up, saying, "Let's go. There's still much to do when we get back."
The others stood up too, and carried the dowry out. Sanying's mother cried out, but quickly dried her tears. According to tradition, she began to sing the story her daughter's life. "Sanying, you life has been so hard, when you were born your mother didn't have any milk..." At this, Sanying also began to sob. Her father walked in, dressed neatly. He put new shoes on her feet, picked her up, and walked towards the village gate. Her mother followed behind, crying, "One year you fell in the pond, and I had to come save you. You were holding on to my clothes so tightly..."
Outside the village threshold there was a shiny tandem bicycle. This substituted for the traditional palanquin. The groom's party stood next to the bicycle. Sanying's father brought her over the threshold and placed her on the back seat. Her mother sang by the threshold, "Show piety towards your parents-in-law and wake up early, and be thoughtful when you're taking care of your husband..."
By now the mother's tears had dried.
Outside the threshold, one of the groomsmen who knew how to ride a bike rode off along the road. The rest picked up the dowry and jogged after them, fading into the distance.
After her marriage, the daughter was to stay for two nights with her new family before coming back for a night. This was called "the third day." Of course she was overjoyed to be back. Even though they had only been separated for two days, there was much to talk about. Sanying's old friends in Libeishang had mostly gotten married already, and swarmed her when she left her house. "How is it? Does your husband treat you well?" "Are the in-laws mean to you?" "Do they like your food?"
For Sanying's parents, her return at the end of the third day marked the conclusion of her marriage ceremony.
In my latter years in Libeishang, the traditional suona had been reinstated. During important ceremonies like marriage, the villagers would always have some on hand. The sound was loud and high pitched, and generations of people had associated it with celebration. Nobody asked me to play harmonica for these ceremonies again.
Suona, which the villagers called ćć, haba.
As the traditions began to come back, the bride prices became more and more elaborate. The monetary price grew to eight hundred yuan. They began to include two or three hundred pounds of pork. Khaki cloth was no longer fashionable, and that switched to polyester. Moon-cakes would start at a hundred pounds.
The groom's side would say, "How are you going to eat a hundred pounds of moon-cakes?"
The bridal side would respond, "We'll take less, but only if you give us sixty yuan."
Some people say that Chinese people are born businesspeople, natural merchants like the Arabs. Maybe this has some truth.
I once had a template for these bridal price lists. The villagers asked me to write them on red paper. I've tried looking for it since, but to no avail. I hope it's hiding in a corner somewhere, waiting to jump out at me and give me a good surprise.
3. Dating
Marriage in Libeishang was managed by the parents. After initial negotiations, the prospective partners would go through a simple dating process.
The young man would be brought by his father to the young woman's house. They would chat with her family for a bit, drinking water or wine and eating dried fruit.
When they had gotten comfortable, the woman's parents would bring her out of her room, wearing a clean set of clothes. She'd blush and look down, and sit on a bench far away from her future husband. Occasionally she'd sneak a glance at him.
The man stared at his future wife, but she would look down, making it hard to see her face. The hall was also quite dark, and the woman would be backlit, so she was almost a silhouette. What a shame.
After a short time, the woman would go back into her room, and the man and his father would take their leave. If they didn't oppose it then it counted as agreement.
After this, the two families would begin negotiations about the bride price. This involved arguing over every item on the list, and attempt to find a solution that was beneficial to all parties involved. Finally the terms were written down on paper, which was effectively a binding contract. Can you say that the villagers lack the "contract spirit" of Westerners?
Speaking of which, I've been on such a date before.
I have a cousin who worked in Jingxian prefecture, near Nanchang. She brought the wife of the director of the prefecture lumber industry's to Shanghai to see the doctor in about 1974. She stopped by my house, where my mother asked her if she could get me re-stationed to Jingxian. After all, Jingxian was closer to Shanghai, and was right on the railroad.
At the end of the year, my mother sent me a letter, asking me to go to my cousin's house in Jingxian on my way home. She said the transfer to Jingxian seemed to have progressed.
It's hard to disobey your mother. It was on the way, so I went to Jingxian. My cousin and her husband welcomed me warmly. He told me, it was hard to get me transferred to Jingxian, but it would be easy if I began to date someone here. So they had arranged a date with some vice director's daughter for me.
Oh! So this was happening. I had not prepared myself at all.
The next morning, the girl came to my cousin's house. She introduced the two of us and left.
The girl looked down, blushing, and didn't say anything. It was just like the expression on the Libeishang girls' faces. She didn't respond to any questions I asked her, so I just talked to myself. I found this boring to say the least.
After about half an hour, the date was over, and the girl left. My cousin came in and asked me how it went. I could only tell the truth, and also mentioned that I wasn't in a hurry to leave Yongfeng. I asked her to not find any more girlfriends for me. I told her that I had plenty of income in Yongfeng to live on my own. I also recounted an instance in which my aunt, who was living in Hangzhou at the time, sent me some money. After some discussion with the local postman we decided to send it back. I asked my cousin to not worry about me.
This was my only such date.
When I was in Jingxian, my cousin brought me to see the director's wife that she had brought to Shanghai. She was very friendly with my cousin. When they saw each other, she said, "Too many people have been giving us gifts recently. There are too many pastries to eat, you should take some."
My cousin repeatedly refused, at which the director's wife said, "I don't have any choice. Our chickens are eating these pastries now because otherwise they'll go bad."
When I heard this, the first thing that came to mind was the old saying, "The stench of wine and meat hangs around the Zhu family door, while the poor die of starvation on the street."
Since the dawn of society, people have been being born. Once born we have gotten sick, some more than others, and then we eventually die. When we get sick, we will try our best to treat it; and we only surrender ourselves to our fate when we know we cannot.
The inhabitants of Libeishang and Shanghai shared in these human experiences, but their customs surrounding them were quite different.
1. Birth
In Shanghai, we were all born in hospitals. But the villagers of Libeishang were all born in their own homes.
Before someone gave birth in Libeishang the family would call for a midwife. They also by boiling a big pot of water and setting up a bamboo reclining chair. The midwife was another woman in the village, who had undergone some basic training through the government. She was a normal laborer during the day; midwifery was her second job. Over the years she had become quite experienced.
In Shanghai the new mother was supposed to stay in bed for a month while she recovered. But in Libeishang, if the labor went well, there was no such custom. One morning, Zhou Enshao's wife was working in the field when she began to feel contractions. So she went home to give birth. By lunchtime, she was cooking lunch for her whole family, with a towel tied around her head.
Bamboo chairs which can double as delivery beds.
If the baby was obstructed in some way, and the midwife was unable to handle it, she would ask villagers to rush the mother to the infirmary at Yanbei village. It was about ten kilometers away, but was much better equipped than the Lugang infirmary. I remember one instance where the baby came out feet-first. This was an obstructed labor. Three or four villagers immediately turned the chair into a stretcher and sprinted toward Yanbei village, saving her life.
Once the child is successfully born, the next order of business was to name it. If it was a boy, they would be named according to their generation within the clan. Each generation shared a character - for example, Zhang Gongmao, Zhang Famao, and Zhang Baimao were all from the è/mao generation. Similarly, the ç»/shao generation included Shaoyuan, Shaosheng, Shaoqiu, etc.
If the child was a girl she was eventually going to marry into another family. Accordingly, much less thought was put into girls' names. Often they would be named after the month they were born in; maybe the first child would be named "Eldest."
When the baby was one month old, the villagers would celebrate. This was called "making wine." They also celebrated every birthday, but only called it a "birthday" for every tenth one. The others were also called "making wine." So if a villager lived to be eighty they only got to celebrate eight birthdays. In Shanghai, we celebrated a birthday every year. We'd eat a bowl of longevity noodles, cook a few extra dishes, and exchange a few presents.
I asked many villagers why a child's birthdays didn't count until the tenth one.
One explanation was that, if the child made it to ten, that meant that the bodhisattva Guanyin had given the child her blessing. The child had a good chance of surviving to adulthood and having their own children. My own interpretation of this was that, due to poor standards of medical care, child mortality was very high. To avoid premature celebration, they waited until the children were ten.
A traditional child's chair.
After being born, the child was protected by Guanyin. But Death wasn't idle either. He would come around occasionally to try to snatch up a child. What could we do about this? Death would come looking for children based on the names in the family tree. So, the villagers had a custom of giving their children (especially boys) low-status nicknames, in hopes of tricking Death.
And so, like in many other villages in the area, there were many boys named Tramp, Refugee, Beggar, Castaway, and the like. These nicknames followed them around as they grew older. As time wore on, their official names became less familiar than their nicknames.
2. Family planning
From the sixties to the mid seventies, the Chinese government merely encouraged family planning; there were no enforced rules. In 1974, sent-down youth Li Guiying went to the Ji'an medical school to study. She began work at the Yanbei village infirmary soon after she graduated. By this time, the official family planning policy was in full swing. This meant that in the villages, each family could only have two children (trans: in the cities, it was limited to one - hence the "one-child policy" we hear about in America).
Once, I went to market in Yanbei village to get some supplies for Libeishang. I began to chat with Li Guiyin in the infirmary. I asked her what sort of patients she was treating. She sighed, and said, "Well, our current slogan is, 'don't let number three reach the ground.' The entire commune has had two kids, so everyone who is pregnant with a third child comes here. We're performing abortions and tying fallopian tubes all day. How am I supposed to get better at medicine if this keeps up?"
In 1979 I was working in Shanghai. I returned to visit Libeishang in the fall. In conversation, one villager complained to me, "In the past, the Kuomintang would conscript one able-bodied adult male from every family with at least two. This meant a lot of people ran away from home. Now the Communists don't do that, which is good, but they're trying to control when we can have kids. When the higher-ups send people to enforce the rules, the women escape through the mountains. There's no sense to it."
He continued, "The reason we say growth (trans: çéż, shenzhang, literally 'birth grow') the way we do is because once someone is born they will grow; and you can't grow without being born first. We don't have to worry about kids not growing, we just have to worry about not having them at all. It's like how dew always finds a leaf to condense on." Later, when Liping got pregnant as a graduate student in America, we remembered this saying. Her classmates thought we were crazy, and carefully calculated the various costs of raising a child. But we felt that, just from an economic perspective, the next generation must have a positive return on investment. Otherwise society would have collapsed long ago!
A few years after this conversation, a villager told me that the families that had too many children would be fined. At the time, very few villagers left the village for work, so money was scarce. If the family couldn't pay the fine, some villagers would send people to take their rice as payment.
Some villagers somehow dodged the rule and gave birth to a third child. But if that third child was a daughter, the family might have preferred a son. Then, in the middle of the night, they would bring the daughter to someone else's door in a neighboring village. When that family woke up and found a baby on their doorstep, they'd take it an and raise it as their own.
In the 1990s, I heard that the fine for having an extra boy was 1500 yuan and 1200 for a girl. In the 2000s, the cost had risen to 4000 for a boy and 3500 for a girl.
Later, the "migrant worker" rate of the village became a success metric for the party officials in Yongfeng prefecture. So they encouraged leaving the village for work in the cities, which increased village income greatly.
According to the most recent reports from sent-down youth who have gone back to Lugang, villagers are only allowed to have a second child if their first one is a daughter. The fines have risen to 19000 yuan for the first over-quota child, and double for each one after that. I have relatives in a village in Zhejiang province, and I hear there are similar policies in place there.
Over the course of these twenty-odd years, the fine for having extra children has gone up ten-fold.
The fine creates its own equilibrium point. If it's too low, then nobody would care about breaking it; if it was too high, then the villagers wouldn't be able to pay it. And if the government forced them to pay, then there might be significant conflict between the people and the government, which would be hard to deal with.
If we look at it this way, the rise in the fine is also an indicator of the economic growth that the village has experienced.
And as the villagers have gotten richer, some have decided to ignore the fines and keep having children until they get a son. I hope this can help right the gender balance of children in China. When the fines come down, they just treat it as a gift to the party officials.
But the government has more disincentives than just a fine. If, after the fine is paid, the mother doesn't get some form of birth control, the new child would be unable to register for residency.
I worry that these non-registered children will find it very hard to get an education or a job. If this goes on, we might find ourselves with a caste system, where these people have an even lower status than thevillagers. This would be very harmful to the harmonious growth of the nation.
Fortunately, it seems as if the central governmental leadership recognizes this problem. I've heard that some provinces have already split the registration system and the family planning system, so that extra children can still be residents.
3. Illness
Shanghai was a big city, so it had a relatively modern medical system. Soon after a child was born they would get their vaccinations. This prevented many diseases such as smallpox, diphtheria, pertussis, tuberculosis, and many others. If you got sick you went to the hospital to see a doctor. You might get lab work, pills, x-rays, or even become an in-patient.
Ever since I was a child I was frail and sickly. Other people got over their colds in a few days, but it took me over a week. I often missed class due to illness, but my test scores were quite good. I had tuberculosis and took a year off of school; I skipped a grade on my return and went back to my original class.
One time, I had a stubborn high fever. I was staying in the hospital. The doctor thought I might have meningitis, so he performed a spinal tap. It turned out that I had a bad case of the flu, which was rarely seen at the time. By the time I graduated from elementary school, my medical history booklet was thick enough that I had to get a new one.
In any case, before being sent down I was a regular at the railroad department's hospital, and was familiar with many of the various departments. Strangely, I got sick a lot less once I moved to Libeishang.
Soon after arriving in Libeishang, the ever-healthful Cui Yinghui suddenly began to run a high fever. It didn't seem like it was going down, so he hurried to the Lugang infirmary. The infirmary used to be a villager's house. It had four or five rooms, including the doctor's room. It was simple and crude to the extreme.
The infirmary's Doctor Yu was a talented graduate from the First Shanghai Medical School. She had been recently assigned to Lugang. She diagnosed Cui Yinghui with typhoid, which she was ill-equipped to handle. She sent him to the Yongfeng prefecture hospital. He stayed there for a few days, where I visited him. His older sister worked in the provincial capital; when she heard the news, she got him transferred to a hospital there. Nanchang, where she worked.
Each production brigade within the commune had a cooperative medical station. The villagers called them fitness stations, and they were staffed by a few 'barefoot doctors.' These 'barefoot doctors' actually did wear shoes; 'barefoot' meant that they were not paid by the government. Instead they received work credits, and during harvest and planting seasons they still had to work barefoot in the fields.
Due to the low education level and lack of medical supplies, many of the 'barefoot doctors' were sent-down youth. Despite not having formal medical training, most sent-down youth brought their own medical books with them. Due to this modest medical knowledge, and a certain sense of responsibility, these sent-down youth generally had good reputations.
Our Pioneer Brigade Cooperative Medical Station had four doctors in its heyday. None of them were sent-down youth, though there were two legitimate practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine. As a result, the medical station was also quite traditional, functioning mostly as an apothecary. They would often go into the mountains to harvest medicinal herbs. Then they would dry the herbs, and either grind them or cut them up. These were the ingredients for various prescriptions which they gave to the villagers. Villagers were supposed to pay five yuan per year into a communal fund, but nobody wanted to do that. They decided they felt more comfortable paying at the time of service.
One morning, maybe in 1970 or so, the villager Zhang Wuxi brought an empty chamber-pot into our room. He told us that his only son was constantly coughing. The doctor's prescription was to boil goldfish in young boys' urine.
He then asked us to please pee into the chamberpot he had brought.
I laughed, saying, "We are already adults! Your son isn't even ten yet, why not use his own urine?"
But Wuxi was not convinced. He said that, since we hadn't gotten married, and were still virgins, that we still counted as boys. And, the doctor had warned against using the patient's own urine.
Before the Cultural Revolution, I had seen a simple urine collection device near the bathroom in the Shanghai Train Station (the old North Shanghai stop). I read in the newspaper that one could extract useful chemicals from urine. Maybe some of those chemicals could help with his son's cough.
We had a chance to heal someone of sickness just by peeing, so in the end Zhang Wuxi happily left with a full chamberpot. A few days later, he told me that his son had refused to eat the urine-soaked fish. Regardless, his cough was getting slowly better.
The author Lu Xun once complained that the doctor gave his father prescriptions which included esoteric ingredients such as "a pair of crickets in love." Those were much harder to get than the urine.
The production brigade leader heard that my older brother was working in Yunnan province. Yunnan was famous for its medicinal products, so they asked me to ask my brother to buy some exotic medicines such as ginseng and tianma (trans: Gastrodia).
Of course most people couldn't afford this sort of medicine. One time when I was in Lugang, the commune's director of sent-down youth asked me, "I heard you got some nice medicine for the Pioneer fitness station?"
I asked, "How did you know?"
"I went there to get some for myself!"
These exotic medicines were probably mostly used by the party officials in the commune and the production brigade.
In Libeishang, when the villagers got sick, they would go to the doctor. Regardless of whether it was a traditional Chinese doctor or a Western style doctor, all the pills they prescribed were called "pellets." The medicines that needed to be boiled were called "tea;" and the tea that we sent-down youth drank was referred to as "tea leaf water."
One year, I heard an amusing bit. Someone had gotten some education, and as a result, began to act more cultured. Around the new year, when someone came to wish him well, he bowed and said, "Please, come in and have some tea."
The other person thought to himself, "I'm not sick, why would I come to your house and drink tea? Why are you cursing me to get sick during the new year?"
But since it was the new year, he could only politely respond, "No, no, you should come to my house and take some pellets," implying that the educated villager was the one who was sick.
When I was a child in Shanghai, it seemed that everyone had to brush their teeth. It was only natural. In our house we called brushing our teeth "rinsing your mouth;" the tools for doing so just happened to be a toothbrush, a cup, and some toothpaste.
After arriving in Libeishang, I found that the villagers also rinsed their mouths. But in their case, this just involved gargling some water before breakfast. Only then did I realize that rinsing your mouth was the Chinese tradition, and that brushing your teeth was a Western import. My family had mixed everything up!
When we first arrived, we all lived in a back room in the shrine. Every day before breakfast, we would brush our teeth in the courtyard. Many of the younger villagers would come watch curiously. Gradually, some of the young women decided they wanted whiter teeth, and bought themselves toothbrushes and toothpaste from the store in Lugang.
A few of these were particularly proud of their looks, and so would brush their teeth when the streets were busiest. They'd stand in the doorway brushing their teeth vigorously, frothy mouths occasionally speckled with blood.
If a villagers' teeth hurt, their only recourse was to endure. The saying went, "A toothache doesn't count as an illness; but when they hurt it's like life or death." I once saw the villager Zhang Xiantong with half his face swelled up from a toothache. He was grimacing and sucking in air through his teeth, dutifully pinching the pressure point between thumb and forefinger in hopes of reducing the pain.
When I was in Shanghai I had gotten a filling. A few years later, in Libeishang, one of my filled molars began to fail again. I went to the Yongfeng hospital and found that, unlike the Shanghai Railroad Hospital, they didn't have a dentist. I couldn't find a single dentist in the whole prefecture. Someone suggested I check with the 0487 corp's medics.
The 0487 corp was a field operations corp of the PLA. They were stationed in Yongfeng city. I found my way to their medical team, and explained that I had a toothache and would like to get a filling. The PLA was very happy to help the local civilians. The medic happily asked me to sit in a chair while he examined my teeth. Then he pulled out a dusty piece of equipment from the corner, wiped it down, attached the drill bit, and stepped on the pedal a few times. The drill bit began to spin.
He kept pedaling as he drilled at my tooth. As I sat there with my open mouth, I thought about how this human-powered drilling was necessary because there was no way to guarantee electricity in battle. When he finished, I tried to pay. But the medic patted my shoulder and said, "We don't take payment here. You're ready to eat again, even stir-fried soybeans."
When I got back to Libeishang, I stir-fried some soy beans to test out my tooth. It still hurt a bit. I started to get a fever that night, which lasted for two days. I thought, this might have been some sort of reaction to eating the soy beans so soon after the filling.
Whenever I visited home I would bring some medicine back to Libeishang. This was not only for my own illnesses but also so I could help the villagers as an unlicensed doctor. When villagers got sick sometimes they'd come to me. I would then attempt to make a diagnosis by comparing with my own experience and perusing my two medical tomes. If it seemed like they had something minor I would give them some aspirin, berberine, oxytetracycline, or the like. Of course, I also warned them that if they didn't feel better, they needed to go to the medical station in Lugang.
There was a rumor about a constipated villager somewhere. They should have been able to take some castor oil for it, but there was none around. So someone decided it was okay to just give them some castor oil seeds. But those are poisonous - the lethal dose in an adult human is four to eight seeds. News of this incident spread far and wide in the sent-down youth community.
When I was in America, I went many years without health insurance, just like I had in Libeishang. When someone in my family got sick, I would always say to observe the illness for a couple days.
One time, my son had a fever for two days. It didn't seem to be subsiding. I was about to bring him to the hospital when I found that he had a rash on his forehead. I immediately looked through my medical books, and thought this looked like scarlet fever. As long as his condition didn't worsen and I kept checking in on him it would probably be fine.
The rash spread from head to toe, and the fever began to subside. A week later he returned to school. On his first day back, he brought back a handout announcing that fifth disease was spreading around the school. This was what he had gotten.
4. Death
Soon after getting to Libeishang, I found out that the infant and child mortality rate was not low.
According to the villagers, there was an outbreak of measles. They referred to this as "offending mommy," meaning that they had somehow offended Guanyin, the mother. Then she was angry, and that year around half of the children ten and under "left." Many families buried their children in bamboo baskets in the mountains.
Ten years later, there was another outbreak. So-and-so's older brother, or their older sister, or their two little brothers, all "disappeared" then. It wasn't that so-and-so didn't have any sons - in fact they had several - but they didn't make it to adulthood.
It wasn't until the early seventies that the prefecture set up a vaccination station and began to vaccinate children. Their service only extended to the Yongfeng city. Dr. Yu from the Lugang medical station was transferred there.
After I got to Libeishang, there were still occasional child deaths. Once I saw a family celebrate the birth of a new child only to hear that they had "gone" only two weeks later. I asked what happened, and the child had had diarrhea, and only lasted two days after that. I asked the mother why she hadn't come to find me, since I had antibiotics. She said she didn't know why.
I remember in 1974, there was a child who had run a fever for two or three days. The doctor at the Lugang medical station said it was meningitis and it was already too late. One day later the child passed. They were the mother's first child, and she stayed home grieving for two days. On the third day she was back in the fields. The Lugang medical station only had a thermometer, a stethoscope, and a blood pressure cuff. They didn't have any equipment for doing testing, much less a spinal tap like I had had in Shanghai. I didn't know how the doctor could have diagnosed the meningitis. Maybe from the fever and the stiffness of the neck.
The medical station later moved to a long-vacant "Red Guard Reception Station." There were a few more rooms, and so they set up a few beds in one of them. However, there were practically no in-patients. People died often, and in Lugang, over 99% of the sick and elderly died at home. In Shanghai, however, the vast majority of people began and ended their lives in the hospital.
Now the Lugang hospital is on the main street of the town. It has separate internal medicine, surgery, and pediatrics departments, among others. They also have a laboratory and equipment for ultrasounds and EKGs. It's truly come a long way.
In 2014, the Lugang hospital had facilities for lab tests, ultrasounds, and EKGs.
Zhang Gongmao turned sixty during the time I lived with his family. He was in a particularly good mood that day and had a lot of wine. His normally gaunt and waxy face glowed red. After sending off the guests, he said to me, "Old Xia, of the two branches of the Zhang family in Libeishang, this one hasn't had a male live past sixty in decades. I'm the first one!"
In 1974, he was sixty-three. It was about to be the Mid-autumn Festival, a time for family to be together. But old Gongmao had been bedridden for days, and seemed like he could pass away at any time. I hurried to the medical station and bought some of the best red ginseng (which I had procured for the brigade originally). I boiled it and poured it into his mouth. He passed four days after the Mid-autumn festival; everyone in the village agreed it was the ginseng that had brought him through the holiday.
The day before he passed I went to visit him. He was lying on the bed, and when he saw me his lips trembled, though he could not speak. The house was filled with an unplaceable smell, and crows were cawing on the roof. It's said that that's a bad omen - the family that they stop over was due for a disaster, maybe even a death. My theory is that, as carrion-birds, they have a particularly keen sense for death.
After Gongmao's death, he lay peacefully in the coffin. I was surprised by how tall he was, as his back no longer hunched over.
His coffin was left in the hall for a few days, and I carved a headstone for him. When it was time to bury him, there was a different smell in the hall. Many years later, when I was reading Recollections of West Hunan by Shen Congwen, I read his account of the peasants occupying the city during a peasant uprising (trans: possibly the Autumn Harvest Uprising?). The uprising was crushed, and thousands were killed. The corpses couldn't be buried fast enough, and the city was filled with a sweet smelluprising was crushed, and thousands were killed. The corpses couldn't be buried fast enough, and the city was filled with a sweet smell. That was what I had smelled in Gongmao's house.
The villagers of Libeishang often experienced the deaths of family members, and as such seemed more resilient. I already wrote about this, but I can't help but be reminded of Zhang Shaosheng's mother. The first time she went to Yongfeng was to see the doctor. The most prestigious doctor in the prefecture said there was no treatment. When this old woman, who had bound feet, came back to Libeishang, she arranged her funeral, got her affairs in order, and swallowed some pesticide. She was buried on the ridge behind the village.
In Libeishang, only adults were interred in the ancestral grave-sites, and only adults had headstones marking their graves. The late children who could not be buried with their families were hurriedly buried somewhere in the mountains, destined to become lonely spirits and wild ghosts.
The first step in the funeral process was to dig the grave. The grave was then lined with a layer of brick. The members of the funeral procession all wore white - white headscarves, white cloth belts, even white shoe-covers. The leader cast paper money into the sky. Of course this money wasn't real. They had bought coarse paper from the Lugang general store and cut it into approximately the same shape as real money. Then they used the bamboo barrel of a brush-pen to print red circles on the paper.
Six men followed behind the leader, carrying the casket on three fir beams. They trudged up the mountain deliberately. Sometimes a piece of paper money would float down and rest on the casket for a while before making its way to the ground. If there was a young man bearing a casket for the first time, he had to keep a piece of red cloth by his chest, to suppress the evil miasma that surrounded them.
The various family members of the deceased followed behind the casket. Once they got out of the village, the women would begin to wail. They told stories about the deceased, and talked of how they were missed. Their faces were distorted by grief but very few shed tears.
When they got to the grave site and the coffin was placed inside, the crying stopped. Then they sealed up the grave, made the door, added the headstone, piled dirt on top, and scattered paper money over the whole thing. Finally, they lit a string of firecrackers. This let the ancestors know that another one of their descendants had arrived to accompany them.
The villagers of the Zhang family were largely buried on the ridge behind Libeishang. There were only a few places with good feng shui. Sometimes, villagers would re-use the graves of their distant ancestors for the recently deceased. In the seventies, I remember when a villager was buried in the grave of one of their ancestors. This particular grave was from the Daoguang reign of the Qing Dynasty. Emperor Daoguang was the one who lost the Opium Wars, so that must have been around 1840.
If you looked carefully at the various headstones on the ridge, you would find very few left from Qianlong's reign (1735 - 1795).
In any case, I was in Libeishang during revolutionary times. The government wanted to suppress the old feudalistic traditions, so the funeral rites were relatively simple.
Several decades later, the graves have become elaborate crypts. From afar they look like multi-story buildings, with white bricks on all four sides and dark shingles on top. They stick out like a sore thumb. In my view, the traditional green brick style is much better, as it blends in well with the mountain itself. That seems to better fit traditional values.
I'm sure the funeral rites in the village are now much more complicated.
Left: a traditional grave from 1988. Right: one built in 2010. By holding the doors to the same scale, we can see the dramatic size difference.
In the last few years I was chatting with my daughter and mentioned that the richer villagers in Libeishang would generally buy their coffins far ahead of time.
For example, Zhang Baimao, who was quite well-offf, was not yet fifty when he proudly told me, "Old Xia, we bought coffins for me and my wife over ten years ago. We usually keep them in the attic, and every couple years we get the painter to come touch them up." (Villagers called painters 'oil-smiths' and painting was 'oiling.') I thought to myself, it did seem nice to know what would happen to you after your death.
I didn't expect my daughter to respond by suggesting I do something similar. She said, "Dad, you always talk about how you're a farmer from Libeishang. Why don't you follow their custom?"
There's a cemetery in our town, and many residents are buried there.
My daughter took us to the cemetery to pick out a plot. The staffer was an old white lady, who enthusiastically recommended shady plots for us. She said that even the dead preferred the shade. I suspect this is a holdover from when these white people were alive - their fear of the sun had outlived them. Us Han people have the opposite custom: the shady plots have more of a yin atmosphere, and so it was best to be buried where there is plenty of sunlight.
According to the village customs and our own very limited feng shui knowledge, the plot should slope towards the front slightly. There should be some sort of barrier behind the grave, but the front should be open. My daughter helped us pick one that Liping and I were very satisfied with.
This town is the hometown of my children, and I hope that someday my descendants can come to see the first generation of their family that lived in America.
From then on, whenever I had good friends visit, I would bring them to see the new "attraction." We'd go to see my final resting place. There, I felt satisfied and at peace, in a way that many villagers were.
Nowadays, those who die of illness or old age are mostly sequestered in hospitals. So city folk do not often deal with death directly. I think this has unintentionally increased the mystery of death, and with it, our fear of it. Fearing death and seeking life is only natural. In the past there was the saying "living to seventy has been rare since ancient times." Now, because of modern medicine, and a common focus on health, the saying should be "living to ninety is not a big deal."
But I often think to myself, is a country and a people that only pursues long life really a strong one? Even though human life is priceless, some sacrifices are unavoidable. As the saying goes, only if "civil servants do not love money and generals do not fear death" will the country and the people have hope for a better future.
"Though death befalls all men alike, it may be as heavy as Mount Tai or as light as a feather." The famous historian Sima Qian wrote those words over two thousand years ago. They inspired countless Chinese people to face death courageously; these words must have some truth to them.
5. Fortune-telling
Life has many ups and downs, and its course many are difficult to predict or explain. As a result, people created the ancient tradition of fortune-telling.
I first heard the mysterious phrase "fortune-telling" (trans: literally "calculating life") when I was a child in Shanghai. When I went home, I asked my mother what it meant. She got very serious and said, with her thick Changzhou accent, "Don't talk about such crazy things. We're in the new society now."
Starting from the second grade, I began to muddle my way through various novels. Many of these described all sorts of fortune telling rituals.
One common scene involved a small street stall with a small sign. The sign would read "Letter Testing." In the stall there would be a man with a skullcap. The fortune-teller would then ask his customer to say any character they liked; then he would write it down and explain the various oracular meanings of that character. He could tell you what it meant for your future, what it revealed about your current problems, and how to deal with the bad things coming your way.
Some fortune tellers would read various parts of your body - there were palm readers, face readers, and even bone readers.
Palm reading involved looking at the various wrinkles and creases on one's palm. Their thickness, direction, and connectedness determined various aspects of one's life. Traditionally, men's left palms were read and women's right palms were read.
A face reader could read your face top to bottom, and understand your life from beginning to end. They would find correspondences between your forehead and your childhood and work their way down your face; your chin foretold the circumstances of your death.
A bone reader would feel the bumps on your skull to determine your future. I couldn't help but think of Zhuge Liang, the famous strategist from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Wei Yan, one of his subordinates, betrayed him. Zhuge Liang had foreseen this, and had a plan in place. Perhaps he had read Wei Yan's skull and found the "traitor's bone" at the back of his head.
There was another method of fortune telling which was based on a person's birth year, month, day, and hour. These were called the "Four Pillars." The fortune-teller would arrange these in an eight character array and use that to predict the future. According to legend, these fortune tellers had all suffered greatly for exposing the secrets of the gods. Many of them were deaf or blind, and some even died of sudden illness.
Of course this was all just from the books. Since fortune telling was a feudal superstition, it was forbidden by the government. The fortune-tellers of the old society had to find other ways to make a living.
Even though the fortune-teller has a smartphone these days, the customers are still few.
After arriving in Libeishang village, I heard a rumor of a fortune-telling blind man who had come by many years ago. Nobody knew where he was now.
It was midday in autumn, in around 1977. I had just finished my lunch when I heard voices shouting, "The blind man! The blind man!" and "It's the fortune-teller!"
I had to go see what was going on.
When I found this fortune-teller he was already sitting in Zhang Fukui's front room. His sideburns were over an inch long, and it looked like he hadn't had a haircut in half a year. His dirty hair was matted together. His eyes could move - was he really blind, or was he just half-blind? Since he walked into the village alone, probably only half-blind. He had a bamboo cane leaning against his body, and he had a greasy Zhongshan suit on. It fit him very poorly. I don't remember what pants he was wearing, but he had some torn cloth shoes on. You could see his toes wiggle around inside them.
I wanted to see how he told the fortunes of villagers. I waited a long time, and nobody came. I was disappointed.
Of course! If I asked him to tell my fortune, I could see what his method was. So I agreed, "Sure."
The blind man immediately responded, "Fifty cents."
Wow, his hearing was better than expected. I guess what they say about the other senses of the blind being enhanced is true. I began to believe that he was truly blind. But it seemed like it took him a lot of effort to speak - he must not be from around here. I must have looked confused, because Fukui's mother said, "The fortune-teller came by many years ago, he's from Le'an." Le'an was the prefecture to the east of Yongfeng.
I told him, "First tell my fortune, then I'll pay you."
He asked for my birthday. In Shanghai, I only knew my solar birthday. After going to Libeishang, I borrowed someone's "ten-thousand year calendar", on which I found my lunar birthday.
He began to mumble to himself, his right thumb moving from fingertip to fingertip. This was some sort of professional technique, referred to in the books as "pinching the count."
Soon, he said, "Your parents ... early ..."
I interrupted, "Please, can you go slower? I can't understand you."
He cleared his throat, and began again. "Your parents died early, so you only got married at 25..." I immediately wanted to laugh, but stopped myself.
He continued, "You will have one daughter and two sons, but your lotus pouch will have two eyes - money will come in, but you won't have money to celebrate the new year..."
I asked him to repeat this last part, and figured out what he meant. I would have two holes in my wallet (lotus pouch), which would cause all the money to flow out. The idea was that I was good at earning money but better at spending it, and I wouldn't even have enough money to celebrate the new year.
I stifled my laughter, and asked, "How long will I live?" I looked carefully at the pockets on his unwashed suit - they didn't seem to have any holes, so money wouldn't fall out.
He calculated a bit, and said, "I can see up to sixty-six, and no more."
"What do you mean by 'no more'?" I asked.
Fukui's mother said, "That means you'll live until age 66."
The fortune telling had concluded. I exchanged glances with Fukui's mother, and couldn't help laughing out loud at his ridiculous predictions. It was time to pay.
I put my hand in my pocket, and was about to take out my wallet when I remembered something.
I was a party member, and the branch representative of the production brigade. How could I set the example of asking a blind man to tell my fortune? Wasn't this encouraging feudal superstitions? How did I make such a huge mistake? The first thing I thought of was that I couldn't pay him money.
I took my hand out of my pocket, and said I didn't have any money.
"Then make me food," he said calmly.
I said I didn't know how to cook.
"Then pay me." He was still quite calm.
We went back and forth a few times. He calmly stuck to those two sentences. I got desperate, and started to say that he was a fraud - my parents were both alive, I was twenty-seven but hadn't gotten married, et cetera.
When I finished, he seemed stunned, and had a pitiable, confused look on his face. I suddenly felt very guilty about agreeing to pay him and then weaseling out of it, so I left.
When I got home I realized that he was just a beggar. A beggar who had the pretense of being a fortune teller. I heard that in Le'an, there were a few blind beggars who traveled together, playing some broken instruments and performing for the public. The performances were terrible, and just a pretense for begging. The poor beggars were people too. They had dignity, and wanted to earn their own livings. And what about me? What dignity did I have?
I went back to Fukui's house, where his mother was making food for the blind man. I knew he would leave the village after his meal, and his path would take him right past my garden. There was still some time before the afternoon shift, so I grabbed my hoe and began weeding my garden. Every once in a while I'd look up to see if he was coming. Soon, I saw him making his way out with his cane. He stumbled over the threshold, steadied himself, and began to walk towards me. I put down my hoe and grabbed the money I had already prepared. I quickly walked up to him. He must have heard my footsteps, and stopped. I thrust the money into his pockets and turned back, as I was afraid that others would see me. I knew the money wouldn't fall out since I had inspected his pockets earlier. I looked back at him, and saw him take his hand out of his pocket and start walking again.
He must have felt the money I gave him, which he had earned through his labor of imagination.
That day, I had my fortune told out of curiosity, then avoided paying out of political fear, and finally paid him out of decency. I think I ended up doing the right thing, but I still felt guilty about it for days.
This was the only time I've had my fortune told.
After returning to Shanghai in 1979, I happened across a book about telling one's fortune with the "eight character array" method. This book was very thorough - it detailed not only theory but practical application. The book used celebrities like Chiang Kai-shek, Feng Yuxiang, and Yu Qiqing as examples of people who were destined for fame or fortune.
The author, Jianfeng, once read a book with the same title. This may be a new version.
A reference manual for fortune-tellers that was published in 1929.
I was somewhat skeptical. Old Chiang had certainly once held great power, but was now in exile in Taiwan. General Feng, too, rose to great heights, but ended up dying in a fire at sea. Why use them as examples? I saw that the book was written in 1946, just when these two men were at the peaks of their power. I suspected that this author might have been engaging in some flattery.
Of course, one could also say that the method did foretell the two men's success. But with great success comes the risk of great failure, and the fortune had made no guarantees that all would end well.
Coincidentally, the person who had lent me that book was the granddaughter of Lu Yiqing, who had been used as an example in the book.
That fortune-teller hadn't gotten anything right in 1977. But I'm almost sixty-six now, by the lunar calendar. He had said that I wouldn't live past that age. Could he have been right about just this one thing?
I thought of the famous author Qi Baishi. A fortune-teller had told him that a great tragedy would befall him at the age of seventy-six. Mr. Qi then announced that he would skip that age, going from seventy-five straight to seventy-seven. I could potentially do the same. But I won't.
There is an Analect that says, "Death and life have their determined appointment; wealth and honors depend on heaven." According to the villagers in Libeishang, there will always be a day (regardless of if it occurs during my sixty-seventh lunar year) when Death will bring me to the underworld. When I arrive, I should be able to calmly face the king of the underworld. When I reflect on my life, I don't need to have committed my life to the noblest cause, but I should at least have contributed positively to society.
According to my father, parents are only temporary keepers of their children. When the children are grown they have a duty to serve their country and their society; parents have a responsibility to guide their growth so that they can make such contributions.
When I meet with my parents in the underworld, I will tell my father that I have already transmitted this ideal to my own descendants.
Mencius once described a goal of "feeling no shame before heaven, and feel no shame before the earth." I wonder if I will be able to achieve that.
In 2014, The main street of Lugang hums with activity.
"Media," when translated into Chinese, is literally "the medium for spreading." It includes newspapers, magazines, books, and other "planar media", as well as news broadcasts, television, movies, blogs, microblogs, WeChat, etc. Its definition will surely expand in the future.
When I was a peasant in Libeishang, my main media contact with the outside world was through the newspaper and news broadcasts.
1. The newspaper
For as long as I can remember, my family had ordered newspapers in Shanghai. It was either the Liberation Daily or the People's Daily. I had even made an extra large mail slot to make it easier for the postal worker to deliver the paper. This mail slot was used from 1962 all the way until the building was demolished in 2006.
When I moved to Jiangxi, my mom advised me to order a newspaper when I got there. If I read it often and thought about it, I wouldn't say anything wrong. No wonder she was always poring over the newspaper at home - she had to teach my father what to say when he went to work the next day.
After I had settled into Libeishang, I went to go find the Lugang postman, Old Xu. I wanted to order a subscription to the Jiangxi Daily. Old Xu said, "The higher ups just announced that each production team needs to order a copy of the Jiangxi Daily. It costs 12 yuan a year, and the production team is supposed to pay for it. We plan to deliver them to the residences of sent-down youth if possible, and the higher-ups seem happy with that course of action."
Perfect! I would be able to read the news in just a few days. Newspapers that had been read found another important use as toilet paper. We Chinese have a tradition of respecting paper that has words on it, but these were desperate times. If we didn't use the newspaper we'd have to learn the ancient practice of using bamboo strips, rocks, or straw instead. The only thing to remember was to make sure that there were no pictures of our leaders on the paper - that could be very problematic if someone were to report it.
The Jiangxi Daily. The heading uses the calligraphy of Chairman Mao.
After a few months, the only villager who could read the paper complained. He said that us sent-down youth were monopolizing the newspaper. I agreed, so I went to the store and bought some wire. Then I asked the villager Zhang Meifa to help make a clip for the newspaper. I put up the paper by the storehouse, so that anyone could stop by and read it. I was responsible for changing it out every day.
That villager was quite pleased, and went to read the newspaper almost every day. He'd sometimes come visit me to talk about current events. Even though I had only a few years of schooling myself, I was disappointed by his understanding. Many events were very difficult to explain to him.
I didn't expect the other villagers to start making fun of him after a month. They said that, just because he could read a little, he thought he was so much better than everyone else. They said he was pretending to read the newspaper every day, just to show off. His wife said they were running low on firewood at home - he should be spending that time gathering firewood instead of reading the paper. At some point this got to him, and he got in an argument with someone. Then he stopped reading the newspaper.
Since no villagers were reading the Jiangxi Daily anymore, hanging it up by the storehouse was not particularly helpful. The villagers suggested I just take it down.
In about 1975, Old Xu told me that production teams could choose to order Reference News. This was a Chinese newspaper, an "internal publication." It had lots of international news, but individuals were not eligible to order it. Only offices could order it, as a group. In Shanghai, my father's office had a subscription. He'd often bring it home during lunch-time, and bring it back to the office in the afternoon. I could only skim it during his lunch breaks.
I told Old Xu, the villagers were already upset about being forced to pay for the Jiangxi Daily. Since the Reference News had to be ordered by the production team, and I was the team leader, would it be possible for me to pay for it myself? Old Xu agreed to my proposal.
The Reference News; the calligraphy of Lu Xun graces the heading.
From the Reference News, I could see the news printed by foreign newspapers such as the New York Times. I could also see headlines from Pravda, and many other countries' newspapers besides. All in all, despite being heavily filtered by the Chinese government, it still reflected the state of the world somewhat accurately.
2. Magazines
Magazines are quite similar to newspapers. As I was growing up, my mother ordered several subscriptions for me: Children, Children's Times, and Youth Literature and Art. When I think of these magazines now I feel a rush of nostalgia.
In 1975, after learning the basics of agricultural machinery repair in Lugang, I bought a few books on the subject in Shanghai. Not long later, I felt that I needed to keep up with new developments in the field, so I went to find Old Xu. I asked if he could help me order a subscription to Agricultural Mechanics. This was a monthly magazine. When I went back to Shanghai, I went to Lugang Commune and canceled my subscription.
Later, when I got to Shanghai, I began to read Dushu (trans: Reading, one of the most influential literary magazines in China), which was also a monthly magazine. I was one of its earliest subscribers. After I moved to America, I asked my little brother to continue my subscription. When my friends visited Shanghai, I would ask them to bring my backlog back to America. I keep it by my pillow and read it every night. There were a few articles about the new advances in astrophysics that took me several tries to understand.
Dushu magazine, first published in 1979.
Telegraphs could also count as "media." I remembered an article about when the victors of World War I wanted to give the German-occupied province of Shandong to the Japanese at the Treaty of Versailles. As a weak country, the Chinese delegate was unable to influence the matter. He told Liang Qichao, who was outside the meeting area. Liang Qichao then ran to the telegram station and sent a long, eloquent telegram back to China. This kicked off the May Fourth movement.
In the following decades, many major political and military figures in China would publish long telegrams in the newspapers.
Even during the Cultural Revolution, people would send "tribute telegrams" to Chairman Mao, reporting good tidings. These would be simultaneously published in papers. And after Chairman Mao's passing, people sent "mourning telegrams" to Beijing to show tsuccessor loyalty. I never really figured out if you were supposed to go to the newspaper or the telegram office first. And if you were posting the message in a newspaper already, why even send a telegram?
For most people, telegrams were fast but expensive. Each character was three cents, with an additional half a cent for coding the characters into numbers. So they were only used for urgent situations. For example, "For Some Name at Some Address, Some Road, Shanghai mother gravely sick return quickly" was eighteen characters. That would be sixty-three cents, plus a twenty cent flat fee. It came out to eighty-three cents, which was ten times more than the eight cents it took to send a piece of mail. But the telegram could arrive the next day.
A telegram envelope from the 1970s.
There were nearly ten families living in our building in Shanghai. In the seventies, we sent over a dozen children to various villages. Latermy little brother told me that every year the telegrams would come pouring in before the new year. If you heard a motorcycle, odds were that it was someone delivering a telegram. The contents were mainly about when and where to pick them up at the train station.
When I went back to Shanghai, I never sent my parents a telegram. I would bring all my luggage back on my own with my carrying stick so I could surprise them!
3. Radio broadcasts
The leader of the sent-down youth in Libeishang was Cui Yinghui. He was very smart. He had a perfect score on his middle school placement test; before the Cultural Revolution, during "educational reform", he even taught Chinese to other classes as a seventh grader. He was famous throughout the school for his academics.
During the Cultural Revolution, he was quite ambitious, and joined the biggest Red Guard group in his school. He worked alongside a group of smart and hardworking high schoolers. According to him, when they met, they were afraid of being overheard by other groups. So they took chairs to the middle of the sports fields and met there. There was nowhere to hide, and they could know exactly who was listening.
In the village, he was also very active. Soon after we received our resettlement fees, he took out three months' worth and bought a radio from the general store for thirty-five yuan. This was the first radio in Libeishang history.
That night, we four boys huddled around the off-white radio, twiddling the tuner and scanning for radio stations.
The one with the best signal was the one run by the People's Liberation Army in Fujian. This station had to be quite strong to send messages across the strait to Taiwan. Among other things, this often broadcast parents who were on the mainland asking tsuccessor children to come back for dinner. I thought to myself, if my father had gone to Taiwan in 1949, maybe my mother would be on the radio right now asking for his return. But then I wouldn't even be here to listen, since I was born in 1950.
The Central People's Broadcast and the Jiangxi People's Broadcast were also quite clear. Of the Shanghai stations, we could only occasionally make out whatever was at 990 kHz.
Surprisingly, we could also hear the Voice of America broadcast. This was an enemy station. "Receiving enemy broadcasts" was disallowed - if someone caught us, we could go to jail. The signal in Libeishang was very good, since, unlike in Shanghai, there were no specialized jamming stations.
Outside of the Voice of America we received two other enemy broadcasts.
One was the Sound of Free China, broadcast by the Republic of China in Taiwan. The signal was not particularly strong. Despite imposing martial law himself, Old Chiang Kai-shek was still claiming to represent "Free China". This channel was unique in that, every once in a while, it would ask someone in some region to take down a series of numbers. This was obviously some sort of coded message for American or Taiwanese spies in China.
Were there really this many spies in China? I thought this might just be a bluff by Old Chiang. But many years later I read something about the KMT war hero Dai Li. He was tsuccessor head of intelligence. In the fifties, several years after his death in a plane crash, KMT operatives allegedly extracted his family members and brought them to Taiwan. I guess spies really did exist! Later I learned that, even before the revolution, the KMT spies were very effective. They were able to target Chairman Mao's residence for bombing, and ambush Zhou En-lai's caravan.
The other enemy station was one that only broadcast from 7:30 to 8:30 at night. This was the Voice of the PLA, had quite a weak signal, and had different frequencies night to night. This radio station kept talking about the "Mao-Lin cadre" as the "Bureaucratic military establishment." It spent a lot of time defending the disgraced Liu Shaoqi.
We also received the Soviet broadcast, Sound of Peace. It was very clear. Once considered a "friendly station," as relations with Russia deteriorated it became an "enemy station." Despite criticizing the Cultural Revolution, it seemed to take a warmer tone than other stations.
In any case, we couldn't receive many stations in Libeishang, and about half of those were enemy stations. When we first heard these broadcasts it was very exciting and novel, and we would listen until late at night. We knew this was forbidden, so we were always a little scared when we were listening. We sat in silence while we listened, and never discussed what we heard afterwards, as if it hadn't happened at all.
After a few days, both because the novelty had worn off, and because staying up late was beginning to affect our work, we cut back drastically. After Cui Yinghui left, I bought a nice radio from Shanghai and brought it back to Libeishang. I only listened to it occasionally, mostly to tune in to the Voice of America.
The Voice of America was broadcast for a large part of the day, and had a large variety of content. Not only did it have news and interviews, it had the "900 sentences in English" educational program that later swept the nation. This program was where I heard of the radio announcers Zhou Youkang and He Lida. The news was also reported in Cantonese.
In the middle of September of 1971, I turned on my radio. I heard a report from the Voice of America that there had been an incident at a military airport near Hangzhou. The artillery company tasked with defending the airport was now pointing its guns at airplanes within the airport, and no airplanes had flown at all in Chinese airspace for several days. Something important must have happened within the Chinese government.
If this was all true, then something very big was happening.
After about ten days, I heard a rumor that Lin Biao wanted to usurp power, and ended up dying in an accident.
Though I knew something was coming, I was still shocked by the news. Vice-Chairman Lin Biao was Chairman Mao's designated successor. It had been written into law already. His previous successor, Liu Shaoqi, had been purged only five years prior - what happened with Lin Biao? Chairman Mao was already 78, and Lin Biao was only 64. And his ascension was already in law. There was no reason for him to jump the gun.
A few weeks later, we all congregated in the Lugang Commune to listen to a reading of the official documents. They announced that Lin Biao had committed the treasonous crimes of opposing Chairman Mao, opposing the party, and betraying the country. I heard that in some other places, the militia stood guard outside the meeting-rooms where this was read.
Soon, it was the end of the year. A party official in Lugang told me something about the Lin Biao incident.
The story went that after the official line was announced, even the old ladies in the villages knew that Lin Biao was a bad man. When two of them were chatting, one said, "Have you heard of Lin Biao?"
The other replied, "Yes, he's a bad man, I think he was the Vice Premier."
"No, I think he was the Vice Chairman. He did many bad things, have you heard?"
"I heard he stole three chickens (trans: three chickens, äžćȘ鞥, san zhi ji, sounds like the Trident plane (äžćæ, san cha ji) that Lin Biao was on)."
"No, I heard he stole a whole flock! (trans: a flock, äžçŸ€, yi qun, sounds like Lin Biao's wife Ye Qun ć¶çŸ€)."
The thrilling political machinations at the nation's top level had become the butt of a joke for those at the bottom level.
From another point of view, this sort of satire would not have been possible, let alone popular, even a few years earlier in the Cultural Revolution. This would have easily gotten you labeled a "counter-revolutionary." But the existence of this joke showed that the people had begun to tire of constant political turmoil.
When the Gang of Four was destroyed in October of 1976, I first heard about it through the Voice of America. It reported that, despite not having official confirmation, there were already celebratory parades springing up in the streets of Beijing.
Later, the Voice of America interviewed a founder of the CCP, Zhang Guotao, who was living in Canada. He asked if this would cause a split in the party. His response was that the earlier split was because they were too young, and the party itself was too young. Now that the party had matured, it would not split.
Two years after the destruction of the Gang of Four, the Voice of America ran an analysis on who would be the new Premier. They believed that Li Peng and Tian Jiyun were most likely, and gave the edge to Li Peng. At the time, neither of them were famous or high-level party officials, so the Voice of America ran profiles on both. Later, Li Peng did become the premier. I guess the American intelligence agents were pretty good at their jobs.
Beginning in 1974, Shanghai assigned a large number of party officials to support its various sent-down youth across the country. They were stationed in the various prefectures. A party official by the name of Chen was assigned to Yongfeng. He was a member of the public security bureau in the Hongkou district of Shanghai.
One day in 1976, he came to Libeshang looking for me. After some chitchat and dinner, he formally suggested that I should go to Shaxi Production Brigade to lead a sent-down youth farm. I was skeptical. First, bundling all the sent-down youth together might make it easier to administer, but could we really understand the people in village that way? Besides, I was already deeply familiar with Libeishang, and had no desire to switch villages. So I found all sorts of excuses.
I told him that there was a local saying that "the Jiangxi soil is light; if you walk five li (trans: a mile and a half) you'll hear eighteen different languages." For example, Ma Liping's village, Gaokeng, was about five kilometers away and the dialect was already noticeably different. If I went to Shaxi, ninety kilometers away, I would surely have trouble understanding the local villagers. Would he really make me re-learn a local dialect from scratch?
This was the first reason I found. It seems kind of childish or unreasonable now.
People are hard to persuade, and I didn't really want to persuade him. We talked until eleven at night, him always attacking and me always defending. In the end he was unable to persuade me. He was tired, and I let him sleep on my bed. I went to the next door over.
He saw my radio, and turned it on. Suddenly the Voice of America was playing. After a few minutes he turned it off.
A transistor radio much like Jianfeng's.
I found it hard to sleep after that.
Many sent-down youth listened to the Voice of America broadcasts. It was common knowledge, we just didn't talk about it. The Lugang Commune even accidentally re-broadcast it once, making the entire commune "receive enemy broadcasts." No punishment came of that incident. Besides, ever since President Nixon visited China in 1972, relations with America had been warming up.
But Mr. Chen was a member of the public safety bureau. Did he know that many people listened to this broadcast? Would he confront me about it tomorrow, or use it as leverage to force me to go to Shaxi?
The next day, when he got up, I had already made breakfast. He didn't say anything, and left after breakfast. I sighed with relief.
In 1989 there was a great deal of political turmoil in China. From the beginning of martial law in Beijing to the massacre, the situation was in chaos. It was hard to know which of the many rumors were true. AT this time, many families in Shanghai would get their news from the Voice of America. They seemed only to fear that others wouldn't know this, and turned up the volume. Maybe they were sympathetic to the students' cause, and used this as a small act of political expression.
After arriving in America, I found that the American people don't know that the Voice of America even exists. It's a government-run radio station, and many major broadcasts in America are run by private corporations. When the Voice of America was created, these corporations were worried about their market share. So they lobbied in Congress until a law was passed.
The law stipulated that the Voice of America would only be broadcast outside of the United States, with the purpose of spreading American values and allowing the people of the world to understand the truth about current events.
American natives were thus unable to hear the Voice of America.
4. Wired broadcasts
Around 1972, we began to receive another kind of broadcast in Libeishang. In contrast to the wireless transmissions of radio, these were wired. The Lugang Commune set up a wired transmission station, and requested every household in the commune to install a loudspeaker in their home for one yuan and fifty cents.
Hooking up the loudspeakers was not difficult. We chopped down twenty or so cedar trees and stripped off their bark. Then we dig pits every fifty to sixty meters and set the poles. We bought two big spools of wire - over two hundred yuan - from the store in Lugang and attached to the broadcasting station. We then nailed it to the telephone poles all the way back to Libeishang, and attached it to a terminal on each family's speaker. The other terminals we just connected into the ground.
A speaker for the wired broadcast.
Because the wire was bare, when it rained the sound would be quieter, and there would be some static noise. The villagers said it was the sound of the rain.
The speakers would come on every night at seven. First, the song "The East is Red" would play. After that introduction, the announcer would announce, in Shanghai-tinted Mandarin, "This is the Lugang Commune broadcast station. We are beginning broadcasting now. Next, please enjoy some music about the revolution." Then "The Dan Flowers Bloom a Bright Red in the Mountains," a folk song about the successful conclusion of the Long March, played. The broadcast station rarely had their own programs. They mostly either played revolutionary music, or re-broadcasts from Yongfeng or Jiangxi or Central stations. When it was done, the announcer would say, "This is the Lugang Commune broadcast station. Today's broadcast ends here."
Unfortunately, most villagers in Libeishang couldn't understand Mandarin. So the broadcast didn't reach many people.
Once during a rainstorm, there was a loud thunderclap which broke some households' loudspeakers. Since they couldn't understand it anyways, they didn't spend the money to buy replacements. The new ones were over twice as expensive. In the end over half of the speakers had broken.
5. Floating balloons
Speaking of enemy broadcasts and media warfare, we once received a special kind of media in Libeishang. These were floating balloons from Taiwan.
Some time after the destruction of the Gang of Four, my friend Zhang Shouren came up to me with two sheets of paper. He had a strange expression on his face as he said, "Look, Old Xia, I found these in the fields." These were about four by six inches each. The paper was thick and glossy.
On one there was a caricature I'd never seen before. Chairman Mao had been drawn like a pig, ferocious and repulsive. On the other was written "The Mao-Zhou conflict is beginning again." There were two groups of people depicted beneath it, all of whom were very ugly. On the left was Hua Guofeng leading Wang Dongxin and others, while on the right Ye Jianying was leading Deng Xiaoping and the rest. The two groups were arguing about something.
I went to the production brigade, curious to know more. The secretary said that they'd received many of these over the past few days. Yushan Production Brigade and Cunqian Production Brigade also had received these. He then asked me what I knew about this.
I said that I knew that we were still at war with the KMT in Taiwan. The artillery in Fujian would still fire frequently. I had heard that they would launch balloons with propaganda, which would then float over here and release their leaflets. I heard that the big balloons could carry several hundred pounds!
Later, I learned that we sent balloons to Taiwan, too. Beyond propaganda, we also would send small bottles of Maotai liquor. The idea was to get them to drink the Maotai and become homesick. The Taiwanese balloons once made it to India, which raised ire about a Republic of China invasion of India.
I had only ever seen Chairman Mao depicted with a benevolent smile. I had never imagined that our enemies would draw him in this way. That night, I dreamed of that piece of paper, and woke up in a cold sweat with my heart pounding. I thought about it some more. Hadn't I only seen dehumanizing pictures of Chiang Kai-shek? Beyond being ugly, he also always had a bandage on his head.
Only after communications resumed between the two sides did I learn that Chiang Kai-shek was actually quite good-looking. I had read some numerology book which started off like this: "Southerners who look like northerners are prized; men who look like women are prized." It only got to various divinations about how to get a government position or how to get rich later. I analyzed the two leaders with this framework. Mao and Chiang were both southerners, but they were tall like northerners. But Mao was also a man with feminine features, so he was one notch above Chiang in that respect.
Over a month later, villagers were still finding these sheets of paper in the fields and turning them in to me. This damnable paper was such high quality! It had been sitting in water for over a month but was still as good as new, the pictures still clear as day.
I don't know how the quality of our own propaganda stacked up. I'm sure it wasn't worse.
In 2013, we went back to Yongfeng in 2013 with Lu Yuping's whole family. We reserved two private rooms in a restaurant in the city for our friends. Our room was mostly Ma Liping's former students. There were about ten of them, and they were now working in the city. Lu Yuping's room was mostly his former colleagues.
When I went to his room to propose a toast, someone came up to me, and said, "I was a sent-down youth in your neighboring village, Chanbei. My last name is Liu."
I was confused. "Your village is half Liu, half Zhang. But, from our village, only Cui Yinghui went to Chanpei..."
He quickly clarified, "My father was Liu Kaixuan."
It all came back to me. "Oh, right! Your father used to teach. During the cultural revolution, he was labeled a counter-revolutionary and sent down to Chanbei, with his five or six sons. Everyone in your family was bigger than you. And at the end of every year, your family would have gotten the most work credits, and the villagers were always jealous of you."
Little Liu said, "After the Cultural Revolution, my father went back to Yongfeng Middle School to teach. As a sent-down youth I went to work under Lu Yuping."
I asked him, "Speaking of Chanbei, were you there when we had the fight between Libeishang and Chanbei?"
"Yes, I was there. You won and we lost."
I laughed, raising my glass. "Nowadays nobody can believe that such a scholarly-seeming person as myself would hit someone; you'll have to be my witness. Cheers!"
1. Rumors of battles
In 1969, right after arriving in Libeishang for the first time, we heard about a large inter-clan battle in Tengtian Commune.
If you look at Yongfeng Prefecture on a map, it looks like a long S. The elevation is lower in the north, so it's called "Lower Yongfeng" and the south is called "Upper Yongfeng."
Left, a map of Jiangxi province with Yongfeng Prefecture highlighted. Right, a map of Yongfeng Prefecture.
There were many big villages in Upper Yongfeng of around two to three thousand people. They also tended to be bigger and stronger, so there was the saying that "In Upper Yongfeng they're brutish; in Lower Yongfeng they're treacherous." According to the villagers of Libeishang, the local government was headquartered in Lower Yongfeng precisely due to this cunning.
But I was always skeptical of this explanation, and had my own theory about the location of the government: Jiangxi is south of the Yangtze River, and so it's generally lower in the north than the south. The north was downstream, and as such would have better developed water transportation. Consequently, more people would settle there. You can see that the capital of Jiangxi is in its northern section, just like Yongfeng City was in the north of Yongfeng Prefecture.
It was said that in the summer of 1967, two big villages in Tengtian decided to settle a conflict with a battle. So they scheduled a time and a place.
Tradition dictated that the warring villages needed to call back all their clan-members, including the ones who were away for work or study. Those who truly wouldn't be able to make it would be expected to pay more money into a communal fund. This fund would be used to support the families of those killed in battle. In addition it could be used to support those injured in battle.
During battle, both sides would have formations and drummers. The weapons were mostly carrying sticks, hoes, darts, and such. Women provided important support roles and tended to wounds.
People from other clans were allowed to go to the battlefield and watch. They were supposed to hold up umbrellas to identify themselves as bystanders.
Even after the Second World War, in the midst of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, there were still such traditional battles in the villages. I could hardly believe it. Even though both were conducted with cold weapons, these were very different from the factional skirmishes in the cities I had seen. Traditional warfare was much more orderly.
Later, I asked Captain Jiang of the militia if this was all true.
He said it was - at the time he was the militia leader of Enjiang, where the prefecture government was located.
I asked, "What happened? How many casualties were there?"
He replied, "In the end they didn't fight. We mobilized about a hundred riflemen and rushed to Tengtian to keep the peace. People were very excited about this for a few days. Some people actually did bring umbrellas to the battlefield."
Later, Lu Yuping was a militia member. He was stationed by the road in front of the Lugang lumberyard, where he stopped villagers from smuggling lumber out of the area. However, his rifle was completely empty. He hadn't been allotted any bullets by the higher ups. The militia's bullets and guns were stored separately; the bullets were in a metal box under the militia leader's bed.
I regretted asking Captain Jiang how many of those hundred rifles he mobilized actually had bullets to go with them.
Oil-paper umbrellas.
A few years later, I heard that a driver from Liuyuan village in Xiajiang prefecture was driving his tractor in Shuibian village when he was hurt in an altercation with a local. Liuyuan was about 15 kilometers away from us, and Shuibian was about 35 kilometers from Liuyuan.
Liuyuan was one of the biggest villages in Xiajiang prefecture, and the village was outraged. They decided to go to war, and several hundred people began their march to Shuibian. During mealtimes they would stop at a village on the way and force the smaller villages to butcher pigs and chickens for them.
After two days they had only moved about twenty kilometers. At this time they were turned back by the local militia.
This battle also didn't come to fruition, and the only victims were those villages that had been extorted by the Liuyuan contingent.
2. My turn
I think it was in 1977 when Libeishang and Chanbei had a confrontation. I won it for Libeishang with a single punch.
One morning in the early summer, I was working by the Ruiyuan reservoir. It was the farthest reservoir from the village. I heard someone shouting for me and raised my head to see someone a few inches tall sprinting towards me. He got taller and taller, and louder and louder: "Old Xia, come quick!" It sounded like Zhang Fukui, my successor as team leader.
The situation was thus: Fukui and others were working by the road, when they saw a dozen or so villagers from Chanbei village (the aforementioned son of Liu Kaixuan was among them). The Chanbei villagers each had a carrying-stick's worth of freshly cut wood. Fukui stopped them, accusing them of chopping the wood from Libeishang's mountains. The Libeishang villagers had already retrieved their own carrying sticks to confiscate the wood, and now the two groups were at a standoff, about to come to blows.
I hurried from the paddies. Even if I ran it would take over ten minutes to get there. As Fukui and I rushed toward the village I cursed under my breath. Both groups had carrying sticks, so a brawl could become quite serious.
Libeishang and Chanbei were neighboring villages. In the early stages of the revolution, the Communist Party led the people in redistributing land to the farmers. Various deeds were handed out. When communalization came around, the deeds were seen as archaic and counter-revolutionary and burned.
The two village's fields were separated by a river; their property boundaries in the mountains were much murkier. When I was the team leader, I wanted to set the borders down properly, and brought representatives from both villages up into the mountains. But because it had been a long time, and because the deeds had been burned, we weren't able to agree on where the borders should be.
Had Fukui and the others not confronted them, it wouldn't have been a big deal - just a dozen or so bundles of wood. If we had caught them in the act of cutting the wood on our property, then this would have gone smoothly. But because they had already come off the mountain, there was nothing we could really do. If we dragged them back up the mountainside they could easily say they chopped the wood on their side.
Fukui told me that the Chanbei villagers had gathered pine wood. We could use that as a reason to confiscate the wood, since there was a rule against cutting pine trees. But we didn't have the authority to do so.
If their Gangkou production brigade and our Pioneer production brigade brought this to the commune, nothing would come of it. There were far too many such petty squabbles for the commune to handle.
The two villages had similar populations, but the stand-off was occuring in our territory, so we had the advantage. If they decided to run and get reinforcements, ours would arrive faster. Chanbei also didn't have any sent-down youth, which I was, and I was also branch representative of the Pioneer production brigade. So I had some minimal official authority, and it fell to me to resolve the situation.
Whoever could bring the wood home would be the victor here, so we needed to confiscate it from them. I thought the best course of action was to strike hard and fast, and take them (and their wood) by surprise. I figured out a plan.
I asked Fukui, "Which one of them is the most belligerent?" I wanted to get their ringleader first.
"It's the pock-marked guy named Zhang," he replied.
"When we get there, get everyone to follow behind me and act on my orders."
I stopped by my house first, and put on my special sneakers that I only wore when carrying bamboo. I took off my glasses and put them in my pocket, and then followed Fukui to the altercation. As he ran he shouted, "Old Xia's coming!"
The raucous group suddenly quieted down. I shouted, "Quiet down out here!" and quickly walked toward their leader, who was still hollering. Before he realized what was happening I had clocked him across the face. He jumped back, startled, and said, "You? You hit me?" Our villagers surrounded me, holding their carrying sticks.
This was my first time hitting someone, and I hadn't practiced before. I had accidentally hit his forehead, and my own fist hurt quite a bit. I raised my fist again, trying my best to channel a Shanghai bar brawler, and spat, "You illegally cut pine trees and you're trying to play the victim here? That's what I hit people for."
Their leader quickly backed down and hid behind his own group. They didn't expect this, and put down their carrying sticks in their confusion. When I took a step forward they took a step back. Their wood stayed still. After a few more steps I waved my hand and said, "Fukui, you stay here and keep an eye on things with a few other people. Everyone else, bring the wood back to the village." I glared at the Chanbei villagers, and said, "Don't move a muscle."
Within a minute I had punched someone and the wood had all been taken back to Libeishang. I told the Chanbei villagers, "You can go to the commune to clear up the matter if you'd like." I then said to our side, "Let's get out of here," and walked back into the village. Just like a mob boss in the movies. Fukui and a few of the stronger guys brought up the rear.
Fukui said, "Old Xia, look, they're going to the commune."
I said, "Don't worry about it, I'm ready for that."
A group of the elderly and women were waiting by the village to welcome us in our triumphant return. The leading elder walked up and said, "Old Xia, I'm glad you were around." Fukui's mother insisted on having me over to dinner at their house. Everyone was excitedly chattering about what had just happened.
As I watched I thought that the atmosphere in Chanbei must be quite different. Angry and helpless, maybe.
Within the hour, Captain Song of the commune's militia showed up. He said to me, "Hey, I can't believe a weedy-looking guy like you would hit someone!"
I explained the situation, and said, "If I hadn't ended the situation quickly, who knows how it might have escalated."
He smiled, and said, "How about this? Write up a report of what happened and give it to me. Then I'll have some concrete documentation for my boss."
I wrote a report and submitted it, and nobody ever talked to me about it again. Captain Song also borrowed "The Cases of Pufuzhou" (trans: a famous modern Chinese doctor, who lived from 1888 - 1975), and never returned it. He probably just forgot about it.
Pock-marked Zhang went to the Lugang infirmary to get his injury examined; the doctor said he was fine.
A few days later I ran into him at the same place we had fought earlier. When he saw me he immediately turned to run. But in his hurry he dropped his shoe. He turned and slowly squatted down to pick it up, never taking his eyes off of me. I nodded to show my assent. He put on his shoe and disappeared to Chanbei.
During this encounter I was also pretty worried. I had taken advantage of our numbers on that day, and had hit him without warning. If this had happened now, he probably could sue me for psychological damages.
Word of the fight spread quickly, even though it was just one punch. I did get a certain amount of respect for that punch; no wonder they say that a general's reputation is built on winning battles.
3. Gunshot wounds
Speaking of Chanbei, one of the villagers, Dong Daode, suffered a gunshot wound once. He was not shot during an inter-village battle, but by a member of the army.
There were many rumors about how it happened. One of the more plausible ones is below.
In the 1970s, the 0487 division of the PLA were stationed at Yongfeng. The Chief of Staff, Mr. Cui, was an avid hunter. Rumor had it that when he had free time he would go hunting in the country with a few soldiers and a jeep.
One day, in the eleventh month of the lunar calendar, Mr. Cui was driving along the road between Yongfeng and Le'an. It was around four in the morning. After entering Lugang they slowed down; when they got to Chanbei there was heavy fog. He could make out a small bamboo thicket in the headlights; it seemed like there was some sort of animal moving around in there, potentially a wild boar.
The Chief of Staff got excited and told the driver to stop the car. He opened the window and fired off a shot. He was a good shot, and the animal fell to the ground. He hurriedly ran over to see his prize, but surprisingly he heard calls for help coming from the downed animal. When he got there with his flashlight he saw that he had actually shot a villager in the leg.
He knew that this was a big mistake, so he got the soldiers who were with him to bring him to the military infirmary to be treated for his gunshot wound. He also asked around in the village about the man he had shot. Luckily, he hadn't hit any vital organs, and had missed the bone as well as any major blood vessels. After recovery, the villager was unlikely to be crippled.
The villager who was hurt, Dong Daode, was originally from Niutian village in Le'an prefecture. He was living in Chanbei, having married a woman from Libeishang, and was known for having a good work ethic. Libeishang and Chanbei were neighboring villages, and that very morning his family members came to tell us the news: Old Dong had been shot by a member of the PLA, and was now in a hospital in Yongfeng.
We couldn't believe it. How could such a thing even happen? After verifying the truth of this news, the first to respond were the youth. All at once, they began to suggest: "He should get the PLA to reimburse him for damages!" or "His son can join the military and stop farming!"
Old Dong spent over a month recovering, and went back to Chanbei for the new year.
Soon after new year's, Dong Daode and his son were eating dinner at their relatives' house in Libeishang. I was invited, too, and I sat next to Old Dong. He looked like a whole new person - he'd lost his tan and gained a fair amount of weight.
The main topic of conversation, of course, was his account of the shooting.
That morning he'd woken up early and couldn't get back to sleep. He remembered the fish traps he'd set a few days before, and went to go check on them.
So he put on his clothes, grabbed a flashlight, and went out. He didn't have far to go - the traps were set in the bamboo thicket that had been planted years ago to improve the feng shui of the village. He clambered into the thicket and shined his light on the traps. They had been dislodged, and water wasn't flowing through them anymore. Naturally, there were no fish in the traps. He turned off the flashlight and began to readjust the traps.
He said, "That was when I saw two beams of light shining toward me. It was just a car coming, no big deal. But I was confused - why didn't I hear the engine of the car? Suddenly I heard a bang, my leg went numb, and I fell down."
He took a drink of rice wine, and continued, "On the way to Yongfeng, there was an older member of the PLA who kept apologizing to me. I eventually learned that he was the Chief of Staff. He said, he had heard there were wild boar near Guanqian in Lugang Commune, and that they were known to be active in the second half of the night. He was trying to hunt down a boar, but didn't expect to mistake a villager for a boar."
Old Dong's son sulkily said, "What use are apologies? My dad's such a fool! He should have asked if I could join the army! Then I wouldn't have to farm anymore."
Old Dong slapped his chopsticks down on the table, and raised his voice, "You ingrate! We're guests here in Chanbei - if it weren't for the Communists, we wouldn't be nearly as comfortable as we are now. When I was recovering in Yongfeng, I had meat to eat every day! Mr. Cui came to visit every day, as did other government officials. I had never imagined that I would even see so many big shots in my life, let alone talk to them! After I recovered, they gave me gifts, and they let me take the Jeep back to the village! Back in the day, the Kuomingtang came through conscripting. I've seen their soldiers - if one of them had shot me, nobody would have noticed!"
His son was quiet. Old Dong took a breath, and said to his son, "I know you want to take advantage of this opportunity. Of course I asked the Chief of Staff about the possibility of you joining the army. But he said it would be hard. He must have had some reason to say that, and so I didn't keep bothering him about it."
His son seemed like he wanted to say something, but thought better of it. I could see, in the dim light, that he was bright red.
I sat next to Dong Daode, and wanted to avoid more quarreling, so I offered him wine and food. Besides, it was unlucky to argue during the beginning of the year.
As I was drinking, I thought to myself: if the Chief of Staff had agreed to get Old Dong's son into the military, any investigation into his background would reveal the facts of the incident. The Chief of Staff would be punished for breaking the rules and hunting privately, much less for shooting a villager. It would have been career suicide.
What became of Dong Daode? In the early 1980s, the villages began to redistribute the land back to the individual farmers. When he heard that he could get land in his old village, he ended his guest residency in Chanbei and went back to Le'an Prefecture.
At the time, many local villagers felt that it would be more comfortable living with people in the same clan. So they moved back to their ancestral homes when they could.
For example, Gao Fazong and Gao Fayou, who lived in Yuanjiacun and Libeishang, returned to the Gao home of Shangpao village. Libeishang's Zhang Shaosheng had a little brother in Gangkou village, who moved back to Libeishang. The tractor driver in Cunqian, Gao Xiangfa, went back to his family's old home in Pingxia village. He earned some money running cargo, and built two big houses in Pingxia. He had many sent-down youth friends. Whenever one of us visited, he would invite them over to his house.
In 2014, Jianfeng visited his friend Gao Xiangfa in his new house.
There were also people who didn't return. Libeishang's Zhou Enshao asked the government at his ancestral home, but they didn't agree to give him any land. So he had no choice but to become part of Libeishang's land distribution. And Dong Daode's youngest son married someone from Chanbei village and settled down indefinitely.
When I was in Libeishang, the Lugang Commune would often come into conflict with the Pioneer Production Brigade. The commune represented the government; it prioritized the respecting the decisions made by higher-ups and following through on their plans. The production brigade was really a continuation of the village's traditional self-governance structures, and thus prioritized the interests of the villagers.
The leaders in the commune believed that their decisions and those of the higher-ups were made with the village's best interests at heart. As the higher-ranking faction, they were usually at an advantage. However, they were often out of touch with the everyday activities in the village. Sometimes, their decisions would unintentionally harm the villagers. But the party members in the production brigades and production teams didn't have the political power to directly oppose the leadership from the commune. Their main tactics were to delay and procrastinate; sometimes they would even sabotage the commune's policies. When I was the production team leader, I followed the others' example and put the villagers first. We worked closely with the production brigade, to the extent that the commune described our own leadership as "gridlocked" and "uncooperative."
The Pioneer Production Brigade was also in a unique position to be uncooperative. The commune was headquartered in Lugang, a village located in the Pioneer Production Brigade. The commune leadership drank Lugang water, burned Lugang wood, and ate Lugang food. Nothing they did was particularly mysterious; thus the villagers were emboldened to resist them. It was a little like the saying, "the closer you are to danger, the farther you are from harm."
1. Non-cooperation
Every planting season, the commune would request that we plant the seedlings "reasonably densely". They emphasized "densely", while we emphasized "reasonably."
Experienced villagers knew that, if we planted the seedlings too densely, they wouldn't get enough fertilizer each. This would compromise the total production down the line. Not to mention that planting so densely took extra labor and time. The saying went, "When people waste an hour, the fields waste a year." Time was of the essence, and wasting it would risk a poor harvest.
When the commune sent inspectors, they would find our seedlings too sparse for their liking and request that we replant. At this point they would be met with complete silence. After being completely ignored, the inspectors had no choice but to call on specific villagers to pull out the just-planted seedlings. The villagers were loathe to do so because it was seen as a cursed act. Eventually the inspectors would be able to physically force a villager to pull out the seedlings in a field or two by the road. Then we'd only have to replant the seedlings in those fields. The inspectors could also say they had done their jobs.
In 1975, Deng Xiaoping was still issuing edicts from on high. By 1976 he was an object of widespread criticism. To this effect the prefecture sent a group to the Pioneer Production team to organize a meeting where we would all express our criticisms.
A fervent headline from 1976, reading "A new tide of counter-attacks rises against the right in Beijing and Tianjin - Criticizing Deng Xiaoping, who walks on the capitalist road."
Ever since the Cultural Revolution, many people had grown tired of politics. Deng Xiaoping had hardly reappeared on the national scene, bringing some measure of stability, before the political winds changed on him. Many people were upset by this. The production brigade accountant, Old Yuan, made a mistake at the meeting and said, "I stand by the party leadership - I stand by Deng Xiaoping."
This was a common sentiment until recently. But things were different now. One of the young people from the prefecture was very upset and agitated to criticize Old Yuan.
I quickly decided to intervene before things got worse. I explained that Old Yuan was actually saying, "I stand by the hatred of Xiaoping." Hate (heng, æš) and Deng (é) sounded very similar in the local dialect. Everyone smiled and agreed, and the tension dissipated. I could see that the young person from the prefecture was annoyed, but he couldn't do anything about it. He insisted that Old Yuan repeat "I stand by the hatred of Deng Xiaoping" several times.
The leader of the group was the Women's Director from the prefecture. After the meeting, she told me that she was surprised someone as oblivious as me could be a party member or the production team leader.
After a few days, someone from the commune told me that my interference at the meeting was reported as "non-cooperation."
One time, a vice director of some sort from the prefecture came to Libeishang for an inspection. I had just finished breakfast, and was at Zhang Famao's house discussing some village matters. The vice director sat down. He didn't say much before he noticed a black hen at his feet. He kicked the hen with his shined leather shoes, turned his head, and squinted at me. He pointed his chin at the hen and said, "That looks tasty, I'll be around at lunchtime. What do you think?"
I was still staring at his leather shoes. I'd never seen someone wear them in the village before.
Of course I understood him. He wanted to eat lunch in the village, and, moreover, he wanted to eat chicken. Most of all he wanted to eat Zhang Famao's black hen. But the hen was in the laying season, and Zhang Famao's family was looking to sell some eggs for some additional income. How could a member of the Communist Party be so selfish? No wonder Xia Yuanlin (who worked at the Yangao sent-down youth farm) had that story about giving gifts to party members. Apparently they had gone door to door to the various party leaders in the prefecture, and each one had gladly received a gift of a camphorwood cutting board. Never mind that the camphorwood was a protected species.
In any case, I just pretended to not hear him, and changed the subject. The vice director was obviously upset and left within ten minutes.
When I went to Ji'an for a meeting in the fall of that year, he was the leader of the Yongfeng contingent. Immediately upon seeing me, he said, "You're unsuitable for this team, last time we didn't work well together."
I knew what he was trying to get at, but all I could do was smile and ignore it.
2. Dismissal
Non-cooperation had a price to pay.
In 1978, the commune selected Libeishang as a testing ground for hybrid rice. We planned to completely replace traditional rice with hybrid rice the next year. The commune assigned a team of ten or so workers to Libeishang for the year to train the villagers. They were led by someone who had worked on a similar project in Hainan.
When the training team showed up they took over control of everything. This was only natural, as none of us had any idea how to plant hybrid rice. I was Libeishang's branch representative in the production brigade at the time. I was relieved of all my normal responsibilities; all I had to do was listen to their instructions and work during the day. Zhang Fukui was the production team leader, and he had only one more role than I did: he had to blow the whistle to call everyone to work.
But the training team was not particularly polished. The villagers didn't understand the new farming techniques, and the training team was bad at explaining their reasoning. Soon, there were many villagers coming to me to complain. I had some thoughts of my own, but I suggested that we should all just do as the training team said.
After a while, the training team came looking for me. They said that I was the ringleader of a group of regressive villagers who were sabotaging the hybrid planting efforts. They also said I was non-cooperative, which was extremely unbecoming of a party member. Had I forgotten my party oath? I had no clue what they were talking about. In any case, I had never sworn a party oath. And I didn't care whether or not they thought I was cooperative. I couldn't afford to lose my temper.
So I didn't say anything, which meant that I also didn't say that I'd cooperate eagerly. From their perspective that was as good as stubborn resistance. The team leader soon told me that I had been dismissed as the branch representative. This was a punishment for my non-cooperation, and served its purpose of bringing the other villagers in line.
My dismissal itself meant little to me; I cared more about working for the interests of the village. In more fashionable terms, I wanted to "serve the people." What bothered me was that, when pressured, not a single villager stuck up for me. In fact, at least one had framed me.
I was chatting with Old Yuan, the production brigade accountant, one day. We were discussing how we felt about the state of the world, and he said, "Old Xia, do you know why we're called farmers (ćæ°, nong ming)? It's because we're as worthless as a blister (èć , nong bao). Think of us as like ants on the ground. When a foot comes stomping, all we can do is run away." As he said this, he stomped his foot, for emphasis.
He then said, "During this whole deal with the hybrid rice, the training team had lots of people and lots of power. The villagers had to work with them to live. The sent-down youth, however, only had you left. Of course the villagers would instinctively distance themselves from you and cozy up to the training team. And, don't forget, you sent-down-youth are still seen as outsiders in Libeishang."
He was right. I had thought that the villagers would cooperate with me in non-cooperation like they had in the past. But of course they would work with whoever had more power. No wonder that one of my closest friends was now one of my most distant acquaintances. He probably wanted to avoid being associated with me; it is instinctive to avoid harm, after all. I felt a lot better about the situation.
It was also true that us sent-down youth were outsiders. From a historical point of view, when outsiders live somewhere, their descendants are either assimilated or driven away. In any case the group disappears. The natives naturally stick together, consciously or unconsciously. In the end, us sent-down youth were still outsiders.
In the past, since we were sent by Chairman Mao, the villagers had another force pressuring them to accept us.
But now Chairman Mao had passed, and the sent-down youth movement had slowly but surely withered away. Its historical importance would take at least several decades to ascertain.
The pendulum of history had swung all the way to the left, and was beginning to swing right again. I thought of the old postman, Old Xu, who was a model progressive of the Jiangxi postal department. One time, he was arguing with a worker in the Lugang general store. The worker bit his finger, and followed up saying, "That was for being progressive, and for being a party member."
In 2014, Jianfeng finally tracked down the old postman, Mr. Xu.
When people fought in the villages of Lugang, you could occasionally hear things like, "Screw you Communists!"
I felt like I understood what had happened logically, but I was still processing things emotionally. I went back to Shanghai before the slow season. This was the first and only time I would do that in my ten years.
My parents were happily surprised to see me, but also confused. Why would I come home at such a time? They quickly figured out that I had run into some sort of incident in the village. They didn't want to bother me about it, though, so they didn't ask. But I heard them quietly discussing with each other.
By then, you could buy non-rationed, 'market price' meat. Each pound was 1 yuan and 30 cents. My parents knew that I liked to eat meat; what they could do was make a big bowl of red-cooked pork every day.
After a month's worth red cooked pork, I decided to go back and finish my work. I was still the accountant, after all. My mother didn't want me to leave, but my father said, "Let him go. How can a young person like him spend all his time at home? If he runs into trouble he'll figure it out."
I never did tell them what trouble I had run into in the village.
3. Hybrid rice
During the most important part of the hybrid rice planting process, I was teaching in Yongfeng. I thought I would never have to deal with hybrid rice again.
In the fall of 1979, I got some time off of work and returned to Libeishang. The accountant told me that I hadn't given him complete records - some entries were missing. I took a look, and found that this was related to the hybrid rice.
According to the commune, in the fall of 1978, the various production teams had to bring their regular rice to Libeishang to exchange for the hybrid seed rice for the next year. This regular rice was to be Libeishang's sustenance for the year. Some production teams didn't bring enough rice; when they took the hybrid rice back, they promised to quickly repay us.
When I tallied up our account at the end of the year, I counted the owed rice as part of our income, under "yet to be paid."
So I told the accountant, "We probably can't get them to bring us the rice they owe. But if we bring some baskets over, we can probably get them to give it to us. We can just bring it back ourselves."
He responded, "No way. They got that fake hybrid rice from us last year, we'd be run out of town."
We were never going to get that rice back.
The most surprising thing I learned that trip was that the leader of the hybrid rice training team was now being punished by the party. He was now under party supervision, and was constantly writing self criticisms.
In 1978, the hybrid rice training team was supposed to sort our hybrid rice into two groups. Group one had a high yield, and would continue to have a high yield in the next year. Group two had a low yield, and would continue to have a low yield. That was supposed to be used only in emergencies. When we harvested the rice we found that we had unexpectedly low amounts of group one rice and unexpectedly high amounts of group two rice. There was not nearly enough group one rice for the whole production brigade. Clearly, the hybridization work had failed.
The team held a secret meeting and decided to claim that group one seeds were actually group two seeds, and vice versa. They thought they could get lucky.
If every production team in the brigade had planted the "group one" seeds in 1979, and had a bad harvest, it could be easily blamed on the weather. But a few teams had accidentally planted the "group two" seeds, which grew vigorously. So their treachery was revealed.
I didn't cooperate with the team leader, and he got me dismissed. Now he was being punished, and I felt vindicated. But then I thought, how can I be happy about this when the production brigade suffered such heavy losses?
If I had cooperated with them back then, would I have been pulled into this mess? Would I have decided to cheat the people and the government?
I think I would have stood up and refused.
4. Auditing
Before I became the production team leader, the villagers hid nothing from me. But afterwards was a different matter. When I overheard discussion about something and walked over, they would stop talking. I thought to myself, if even I, in this barely-official position, couldn't hear what the villagers really thought, what hope did any higher-ups have?
One time I heard a villager say, "I just don't believe he's not getting some sort of kickback. Why else would he work so hard?"
When he saw me, he immediately stopped. He was obviously talking about me. I looked at him and sighed inwardly. You poisoned my dog, and I didn't press the issue. During the team leader election, you grumbled about outsiders getting power, and your family was the only one to vote against me. I just ignored that. When your son became responsible for recording work credits, in the very first year he gave himself an extra 150 credits. When I found out, I just corrected it, and didn't pursue any further punishment. Now you say I'm corrupt? If you're so sure, why don't you get people to come audit me?
When I was dismissed from my branch representative post, the commune actually did send people to audit me. They probably figured it'd be hard to find any dirt, so they brought accountants from many production brigades and ordered me to turn over all my records. They didn't let the Pioneer Brigade's accountant come, probably under suspicion of collusion.
The audit went on for two days, during which I worked in the fields as usual. Of course people were talking about me behind my back the whole time. After lunch on the second day, the Qingshan Brigade's accountant, Old Jin, came to visit me. I asked him, "Why are you here alone? Aren't you afraid of people suspecting something?"
He said, "We finished up yesterday, and didn't find anything wrong. The higher ups want us to keep going, so we're just killing time at this point. But, I did have a question. How did you record the transaction where the commune gave your village a hand tractor?"
He was a smart guy, both the accountant and a tractor driver. After a little explaining he seemed to understand.
Fifteen minutes later, the accountant group returned my records. They nodded, and then went back to the commune to make their report.
It seems like when many people are in the same place, a meeting ensues.
When I was in middle school during the Cultural Revolution, there was frequent occasion for meetings. We started each meeting with the same ritual: we wished Chairman Mao a boundless life of ten thousand years, then wished the Marshal Lin Biao good health, then we read a selection from Chairman Maoâs âLittle Red Bookâ. The worst part was that every one of us had to say something about how we learned from the quotations we had read. The empty cliches in this part annoyed me, so I often took this opportunity to âgo to the bathroom.â
After arriving in America, some friends dragged me along to a Bible study meeting. We would read from the Bible, then each of us would volunteer something about what we learned from the reading. The situation felt very familiar. I stopped going after a few sessions.
Americans meet often, too. Whether itâs my daughter teaching in an American school, or relatives working in American companies, or friends whoâve started their own businesses, they all have many meetings.
We had meetings during my time in Libeishang, too, but they were slightly different.
1. Production team meetings
The Libeishang production team usually met at night. The production team leader would blow their whistle several times before a few people filtered in. Often, these few would be the only attendees, and the meeting would have to be cancelled. By the team leader announced that the meeting would not proceed, some of the attendees were already slouched over, dripping drool onto their shirts and snoring. The only meetings with good attendance were the ones where we discussed work credits. People cared about their incomes, after all.
On particularly rainy days, we wouldnât be able to work during the day. An opportunistic team leader might then announce that men over eighteen would receive work credits for attending a team meeting. This would draw the necessary attendance.
If a party member from the commune was the one calling the meeting, attendance would be slightly improved. Even more people would show up if the team leader threatened and intimidated the truants-to-be.
At the meetings, most of the villagers would be smoking tobacco from homemade bamboo pipes. The tobacco was home-grown. Once the leaves turned yellow the villagers would dry them out in the sun, cut them into strips, and add some tea oil. This had a much harsher taste than normal cigarettes.
A bamboo pipe.
The bowl of the pipes were very small - you could only smoke a thumbnail-sized pat of tobacco at once. A few puffs later and it was gone. When the boys in the village asked about bedding women, the adults would laugh and deflect, saying âItâs just something that takes as long as smoking a pipe.â
2. Production Team Leader Meetings
The team leaders often had to go to meetings at the production brigade. Attendance at these was near perfect. During these meetings, the team leaders would fight hard for every small advantage for their teams. This often led to red-faced confrontations with the party members.
Sometimes, there would be someone from the prefecture, or some leader would be here from the commune. Then the brigade would bring all of the team leaders in for a full-day meeting, which was worth work credits.
If the meeting was in the wintertime, weâd close the windows and doors. When the meeting started, weâd distribute cigarettes to all attendees. When we ran out of cigarettes, weâd send someone out to buy more. When the door opened, smoke would float out. It must have looked like there was a fire. Each person could go through three packs in one day of meetings.
Iâd smoke three packs of cigarettes, and Iâd make sure to keep the smoke in my lungs for as long as possible. Otherwise I wouldnât feel the buzz. Strangely, though, I was never addicted. I felt good when I was smoking, but never wanted to smoke when I wasnât smoking. I guess the nicotine had no effect on me.
Back in the meeting, by the afternoon some of the team leaders would be complaining about sitting for so long.
âIâm not used to sitting, now my feet are swollen after half a day of sitting.â
I didnât believe it at first, but after I poked at someoneâs ankle I was convinced. I later noticed that this would happen to me, too, just to a lesser degree. Iâm not sure why this might be. It doesnât seem to have anyting to do with my circulation. Maybe some people are just born sitters.
Every year, the commune would hold a âthree level meetingâ with leaders from the commune, the brigade, and the production team. This would last a whole day. The commune leadership would report on the state of the commune in the morning. In the afternoons the brigades would have separate discussions. What us team leaders looked forward to the most was the meat at lunchtime. The commune would slaughter a few pigs on the day of the meeting and distribute the meat. I guess it was a way of thanking us for our hard work.
At lunchtime, each person was allotted around two pounds of pork. The commune had it red-cooked, and it was tender and fragrant. They filled up a big tray and put it in the middle of the room. Weâd fill our zengs with about half a bowl of rice before surrounding the tray and piling the pork on top. Then weâd sit anywhere we could and dig in. As we happily ate, weâd keep an eye on the tray in the middle.
One time, after we had stuffed ourselves and the meat was all gone, one of the team leaders gently tapped his rice bowl with his chopstick. He announced, âIâve never eaten meat like that, even when Iâm slaughtering my own pig. Being a team leader is great, I havenât lived for nothing after all!â
As the team leader in 1976, I went to the âfour level meetingâ in Yongfeng prefecture; what I remember most about that was also the food.
After the report was over, we rushed to the cafeteria. The doors were still closed, so many people just jumped in through the open windows. Each table sat eight people; there were four dishes and one soup set out on each table. When a table was full weâd start eating. Four minutes elapsed between when the eighth person sat down at our table and when we finished. Sated, we happily returned to the meeting.
3. Sent-down youth meetings
In 1971, the commune held a three-day-long meeting for all of the sent-down youth. All the men slept on the floor in the great hall. At night-time, we sang and told jokes in the dark room.
During the all-hands portion of the meeting, we publicly denounced two âreactionary sent-down youth.â We even had some people beat them while onstage.
Afterwards, we split into our brigades again. In the Pioneer Production Brigade, Zhang Zhicheng and I were the âexamplesâ that were to be denounced. But it was all a misunderstanding.
Zhang Zhichengâs nickname was âdivision leader (ćžéż, shizhang).â He was shy and stuttered a little bit. When he started in middle school, his schoolmates asked what his name was. He said, âItâs⊠Zhang⊠(æŻćŒ , shizhang),â and so he became the âdivision leader.â When the brigade leadership heard him referred to as the âdivision leaderâ they assumed he was part of some secret organization. But he hardly seemed the sort, so they wanted him to explain. This situation was understandably chaotic and so our whole time onstage as âexamplesâ was wasted.
My problem was of my own making. Once, around the Duanwu Festival (trans: a summer holiday), I went to the brigade infirmary to talk to the âbarefoot doctorâ (trans: this was a term from the Cultural Revolution for a minimally trained doctor) for a high fever. I hadnât expected the commune to slaughter a pig on that day. Consequently, all the infirmary staff had gone to buy meat, and there was nobody to help me. In a fit of anger, I wrote an angry note and left it on the desk. Unnecessarily, I added a small drawing of a dagger under my name. This led to problems.
The infirmary staff showed the note to the brigadeâs party secretary, complaining that I had threatened his life. The secretary felt he was overreacting, but he needed to do something to pacify the âbarefoot doctor.â He figured that he could put me up as an âexampleâ during the meeting. I knew nothing of this plan.
The misunderstanding was only cleared up when Cui Yinghui returned from fixing the railroads.
Ma Liping had had a question in her mind for a long time. Chairman Mao was a big proponent of âsplitting one into two.â This meant that every question, every object, every event, every person, could be seen from both sides. Could this doctrine be applied to Chairman Mao himself?
This was the sort of question you kept to yourself. But Ma Liping asked it out loud. So she was one of the âexamplesâ of Cunqian Production Brigade during this same meeting.
In 1972, Lugang Commune held a special meeting. Not only were the production team leaders invited, each group of sent-down youth had to send a representative as well. It was called the âLearnings of Mao Zedongâs Philosophy in Action Meeting,â and was clearly a meeting for collective praise. The brigade, perhaps as recompense for the previous misunderstanding, nominated me as the speaker. From my point of view, I earnestly believed that I had learned a lot in the village, and still had much to learn.
When I got onstage and saw so many production team leaders down there, I couldnât stop myself. I began to speak, using the local dialect of Lugang. The audience was shocked by how authentic my accent was. The leadership commented that, based on how Iâd learned their language, they could tell that I had âreceived reeducation from the poor and middle class farmersâ well.
Since then, Iâve noticed that when outsiders speak your native language, you naturally feel closer to them.
4. Sent-down youth representativesâ meeting
Li Guiying left in 1974; of the nine original sent-down youth, only Feng Jinsheng and I remained in Libeishang full-time. I began to represent our group in various meetings.
In 1976, the mother of Yao Jianxing, from Guxian Commune attended the meeting. She was a worker in a textile factory in Shanghai, and she represented some contingent of parents. I remembered that when I had visited Shanghai, I saw a new fabric-related phrase, âmid-to-long fibers.â I didnât know what that meant, and nobody I asked seemed to know either.
So I asked Yao Jianxingâs mother. She told me that these were synthetic fibers that were between seven and eleven centimeters long. Fibers that were over eleven centimeters were conisdered long. Fabrice made from these mid-to-long fibers was moderately soft, and suitable for making clothes. Later I told Ma Liping what they were, and she found it quite novel and interesting.
At this meeting, I also saw an old man, with snow white hair and a dark, wrinkled face. He wore an ill-fitting Zhongshan suit, and his coarse hands gave away that he still worked in the fields all day. Was he a representative too? Why was he sitting all alone in the corner, smoking?
I asked the organizer, Chairman Zhang, and he said, âAccording to Chairman Maoâs instructions, youâre here to receive reeducation from poor and middle class farmers. So they should have a representative here too. Donât underestimate this man, he was a soldier under Chairman Maoâs command in the Chinese Civil War.â
I immediately went over and struck up a conversation. I hadnât guessed wrong, in that he was a farmer - he was working in the Shaxi Commune. I asked, âDoesnât the government give you anything as a veteran of the Red Army?â
âEvery new year, I get twenty yuan from the Civil Affairs Bureau in the prefecture.â As he spoke, he pulled out a nearly empty pack of cigarettes. âLook! Every month, I also get to buy two cartons of cigarettes for free.â
I recognized those as âGolden Leafâ brand cigarettes from Xuchang city in Henan province. They were twenty-seven cents per pack; two cartons was worth 5.40 yuan.
Around the Chinese new year of 1977, I participated in a group put together by the prefecture to check in on the sent-down youth of different communes. We held panels in various locations. At the time, I had heard that Vice Chairman Dong Biwuâs grandson was a sent-down youth who had already married and had a son. Allegedly, Dong Biwu wanted his grandson to be a farmer like his son.
During one of the panels, I mentioned this rumor. I later learned that it was indeed true. But now that the situation has changed yet again, Iâm sure Dong Biwuâs son and grandson are no longer farmers.
I always felt that farming was my work. I was ready to be a farmer for the rest of my life. But I hated saying that Iâd âsettled downâ or âgrown rootsâ in the village. At the time, that was what youâd say to curry favor to get out of the villages and be assigned somewhere âmore important.â Even now, I think of myself as a farmer, and I believe that Chinese culture is rooted in the villages. I get mad when people disrespect farmers.
In the fall of 1977, I went to Ji'an to participate in the Jingang Mountain Region sent-down youth meeting. I met a few people I had only heard of. Xin'gan prefecture and Xiajiang prefecture had many sent-down youth, and many famously accomplished ones too. For example there was Jin Miaolin from Xin'gan prefecture. She had brought some people to be sent-down before Chairman Mao had even said the order. I heard that she retired as the vice procurator of Ji'an city.
There was also Wang Jianhua from Renhe Commune in Xiajiang prefecture. He was a leader of the Shanghai Red Guard when he was in middle school. He, too, had brought people to the villages early. Our grade leader, Yang Shixiong, and our Red Guard leader, Chen Xixiang, heard him speak in Shanghai. They followed him down to Xiajiang prefecture. These people were ahead of the curve, unlike the rest of us who had to wait for Chairman Mao to tell us what to do.
What really impressed me about Wang Jianhua was that, after moving to the village, he went back for college. And then after finishing college, he brought his wife back to the village. This was unthinkable. After the Cultural Revolution, I heard that he had undergone thorough investigation for his actions in those early stages.
The sent-down youth of our Yongfeng prefecture paled in comparison. However, we had historically been very successful agriculturally, and the sent-down youth from those prefectures would often come buy vegetables in Yongfeng.
The thing I was most excited about during this visit to Ji'an was a play. We were to see a play commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Red Armyâs Rendezvous at Jinggang Mountain. This was put on by the Jinggang Mountain Region art troupe in conjuncton with the Ji'an normal school. Most importantly, Ma Liping was going to be performing. She walked onstage in a military uniform, wearing a towel on her neck, and hoisting a carrying stick on her shoulders.
After the performance, an actor walked out made up as Chairman Mao. I didnât think he looked particularly similar, but the tide of applause smothered my doubt. Allegedly this was the first time a real person had acted as Chairman Mao. The makeup artist spent several hours on the costume.
The representatives from Yongfeng in October 1977.
In 1978, I participated in a Jiangxi province-wide agricultural conference as a sent-down youth representative. This time, the seating was different. Usually you would be seated next to people from your area, so at least youâd recognize each other. But this time you were seated next to strangers; the people from your area were in front of and behind you. A high-ranking representative from your region sat at the back, so they could keep an eye on who left in the middle.
5. Going to Beijing
I cared much more about farming than political advancement. Yet somehow I was sent on a special train to Beijing. How did this happen?
Iâd made a promise to Feng Jinsheng, that Iâd get him out of Libeishang, so I didnât apply for college in 1975. That meant that it would be my turn in 1976, but I ended up changing my mind.
Vice Chairman Yuan was part of the Yongfeng prefecture government. He was from Yuanjiacun, which was in the Pioneer Production Brigade. He always took an interest in us sent-down youth. Right after we arrived in Jiangxi, the worker who brought us felt that the Lugang Commune had done a poor job of preparing for our arrival. He brought that up at a prefecture level meeting, saying that our accomodations were not up to the same standards as those of normal immigrants.
Old Yuan told me later that he was running the meeting at the time. He said, âEven though we are considered an âimpoverished prefectureâ by the government, we sould still have some empathy. If any of you had to send your teenage child thousands of miles away, wouldnât you want them to be treated well by the locals?â
It was at that meeting that the prefecture, as our hosts, agreed to give us half a yearâs worth of rice and some relocation money. This was in accordance with the guidelines set forth by the government and as requested by the Shanghainese government, and Iâm thankful that Old Yuan helped push it through. From then on, the prefectureâs Secretary Liu from Civil AFfairs would come check in on us often. He made good friends with many of the sent-down youth. After many decades, Secretary Liu retired; when he came to Shanghai to visit, many sent-down youth excitedly invited him to dinner.
Jianfeng visiting Old Yuan in Yongfeng city in 2014.
Old Yuanâs oldest daughter attended high school in Yongfeng city. When she finished, she was sent down to Yuanjiacun, and was an upstanding citizen. The villagers said that her mother was some sort of vice secretary at the prefecture level. She visited the Lugang commune once, and within a week her daughter became a party member.
The 1976 college admissions period began. At this time, the process was: apply for college, be recommended by your organization (in my case it was the production brigade), be approved by leadership, then be reviewed by the college. I heard that Old Yuanâs daughter had applied. I thought, well, there werenât a lot of admissions slots, the competition was fierce, and her political background was much better than mine. I figured that the brigade would be recommending her, so thereâd be no use for me to apply.
The brigade secretary asked me why I, yet again, didnât apply. Was I really going to settle down here? I told him what I had thought, and said I would definitely apply the next year. But there was no next year; starting from 1977, the college admissions returned to the usual admissions test.
Later many people said that I had been foolish. They felt that, if I had also applied then, the both of us would have been able to go to college. But thatâs all behind us now.
In 1977, the Mausoleum of Chairman Mao was completed. Before it was opened to the public, a central edict came out that each province should send a group of representatives from all walks of life to Beijing, on a special train. They were to pay their respects to his remains. Yongfeng prefecture got ten spots on this train.
One day, when I was working in the fields in Libeishang, I saw Little Ai jogging over. He was the party secretary at the commune. Uncharacteristically, instead of standing at the edge of the paddy, he jumped in with a splash and walked over. He said, loudly, âOld Xia, the prefecture just sent word! Youâre going to Beijing!â
I heard that it was Old Yuan who mentioned that they should send a representative from the sent-down youth, and that it should be me. I had given up my chance at college of my own accord, but I think he still felt responsible for me, since my decision had been influenced by his daughterâs situation. He must have wanted to repay me to some extent.
The ten of us were lead by Liu Guolin, the prefecture party secretary. Everyone said he was descended somehow from Liu Feng. Liu Feng had been the ç¶ć (zhuangyuan), the highest scorer on the Chinese imperial exams, during the rule of the Daoguang Emperor (1820 - 1850). We got on the train at Xinyu, and went directly to Beijing. The best part of the trip was that I didnât have to worry at all about someone stealing my luggage.
Eleven years ago, during the âGreat Rallyâ at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, due to my fatherâs political situation, I didnât participate in any local rallies, and certainly didnât go to Beijing. Now I was riding a special train to Beijing.
Upon stepping into the mausoleum I was greeted by a marble statue of Chairman Mao. On one wall, there was some of his calligraphy: âTen thousand years from now is too late; Iâm fighting for victory today.â At the time, I repeated that to myself, thinking that Chairman Mao had seemed a bit impatient as of late.
This was the first time Iâd walked on carpet. It was like grass under my feet! I also looked up often, taking in the decor and architecture. When I walked up to the crystal coffin, I looked down at his remains. He looked like he had too much makeup on, and didnât look natural.
When our time was almost up, I noticed that everyone else had their head down, either in sorrow or in reflection. It was completely silent. In my curiosity I had committed thought-crime by forgetting to show the correct emotions.
When in Beijing, I got to see the Revolutionary History Museum, across the street from the Great Hall of the People. I saw an old patched bathrobe that belonged to Premier Zhou Enlai, who had worn it for decades. I also saw the special shoes that he wore near the end of his life due to swelling in his feet. On his old desk, there was a glass cup, which had his pencils in it; the base of the cup was a five-pointed star, exactly like the cups I used as a child. They cost fifteen cents each. I had heard of his spartan habits, so I wasnât particularly shocked.
I stayed in front of one exhibit for a long time. There was a note inside, with the simple words âWith you in charge I can be at ease.â It was written in pencil; each character was walnut-sized, and the strokes were wobbly and child-like. There were no punctuation marks. Allegedly, this was a note to Acting Premier Hua Guofeng from Chairman Mao. It looked as if this was written with great effort when Chairman Mao was quite ill.
I stared at those six characters, thinking about how Chairman Mao had separately endorsed and then unendorsed three people as his successor. Was this simple note, written in pencil while deathly ill, really enough to determine his successor?
The exhibit was plainly intended to show people that Hua Guofeng was Chairman Maoâs rightful successor. But it didnât have the intended effect on me. Instead, it increased my doubts about the process of succession, and I felt an unspecified chill.
A portrait taken in September of 1977, after paying respects to Chairman Maoâs remains.
When we heard of Chairman Maoâs death, I was at the lumber yard in Cunqian production brigade. The elementary school teacher, Ma Liping, was also there, and she said that the Cultural Revolution was over. Afterwards, we all guessed at what they would do with his remains. Most people said that theyâd be preserved, like Leninâs remains, in a crystal coffin, for the people to pay their respects. I said, there was some central decree that beyond a certain level, all party members were to be cremated. Chairman Mao should not be exempt.
A few days later, the Peopleâs Daily ran an article titled âThe Will of All the People.â It stated that they would build a mausoleum, with a crystal coffin for Chairman Mao to receive the respects of the people. This was the will of all the people. I thought to myself, heh, I guess I donât count as part of the people.
The villager Zhou Enshao very earnestly said to me that he didnât know who was going to be the emperor now that Chairman Mao had died. In their eyes, he was interchangeable with the emperor. During their marriage ceremonies, they used âIn the year 1970 of the Peopleâs Republic of Chinaâ to replace âIn the year 30 of Emperor Guangxuâ or âIn the year 25 of the Republic of China.â
There was a villager who was once an unlanded farmer in Yuanjiacun. When he heard the news, he remarked, while working, that it was about time. Someone told the brigade leadership; nobody wanted to turn a blind eye, and kept reporting this to higher-ups. In the end, this villager was sentenced to several yearsâ hard labor, and was reassigned to a forced-labor farm in Jiujiang city.
I privately asked Old Gao, a party member in the brigade, âIf Chairman Mao was alive and heard of this villager, would he agree with this sentence?â
Old Gao thought for a bit, and said, âProbably not.â
After a while, he changed the subject, and said, âI heard someone say that, after Chairman Mao, the next person to hold power is supposed to be from Shandong province. But now itâs someone from Shanxi province.â
I had never heard such a thing and was taken off guard. By someone from Shandong province did he mean Jiang Qing or Zhang Chunqiao (trans: these were members of a faction called the Gang of Four)? The person from Shanxi was obviously Chairman Hua Guofeng.
Decades later, I saw on a newspaper that there were two versions of Chairman Maoâs remains - one real and one wax. It doesnât really matter which one I saw that day. But I still canât help but wonder if I really saw Chairman Maoâs body.
In Libeishang, you worked for ten hours a day. Men could earn up to ten credits a day; women could earn six. How many credits you earned was determined at a team-wide meeting. This process was called "assessing work credits." First we would suggest a value for ourselves, then the whole group would discuss it. Work credits corresponded to income.
There were no work credits before the revolution. Landed farmers worked their own land; un-landed farmers were hired by the landlords for a proportion of the harvest. Usually the farmers received 40% and the landlords (the villagers called them "wealth-lords") received 60%.
After the revolution the land was redistributed to the poor. Each villager owned and worked their own plot of land. Their income was tied to their individual harvests.
This went on for a time before the land was communalized. Now the ownership of the land was centralized again. How should the income be distributed among the farmers? At first, they used a timecard system much like that used in factories.
However, the timecard system didn't take into account fluctuations in individual quantity or quality of work. So the work credit system came into use. This was similar to the wage system in a company, which incentivized hard work and penalized laziness.
The work credit system, like many others around the world, seemed reasonable from the outside only.
In any case, assessing work credits was a very important aspect of a villager's life.
I first attended such a meeting in May of 1969. We had just finished the planting.
I felt that, according to the quantity and quality of my planting, I could probably get about 8 credits for a day's work.
The meeting began. The production team leader asked for people to volunteer their own credit values. There was no response. Everyone had their heads down. Some even looked like they were sleeping; occasionally there was the sound of someone smoking from a water pipe.
After repeated encouragement by the team leader, Zhang Shunxi suddenly raised his head, and said, "I should get ten credits."
There was some rustling, and someone cleared their throat. Everyone was paying attention now. Everyone knew he didn't deserve ten credits, but as the oldest of five brothers in the vilage, he had a certain amount of social capital. Nobody spoke.
Eventually, his youngest brother, Zhang Wuxi, said, "Okay."
After several failed attempts by the team leader to coax out any dissent, Zhang Shunxi received ten work credits.
The best worker in the village, Zhou Enshao, couldn't restrain himself. He proclaimed loudly, "I'm getting ten and a half."
The crowd burst out in agreement. Even though it was against the rules to assign more than ten work credits, it would have been impossible to continue without doing so.
Afterwards the meeting went very smoothly. The men all self-assessed at 10.3 or 10.4 credits, and the deed was done. The public assessment was merely a formality. Everyone knew how good everyone else was. So if you under-assessed your work credits, people would be more lenient when assessing your wife and children. At least they wouldn't embarrass you with a long silence. On the other hand, if you over-assessed your abilities, people would be shocked, but would usually let it slide after a long silence. But after the meeting you'd be subject to an array of insinuations and behind-the-back discussions. You'd have a hard time taking the moral high ground in any disagreements.
The last group to be assessed were us sent-down youth. The crowd quieted down. The team leader praised us for learning to plant rice right after arriving. In light of that, he said that we each deserved about four work credits.
What? Each one of us was as productive as a ten-year-old?
With that one sentence the team leader had set the boundaries. In the end, the women in our group received 4 credits and the men received 4.4. Zhang Famao argued successfully that due to my slightly greater skill in planting, and, more importantly, my slightly greater age, I should get 4.5 credits.
After the meeting, Zhou Enshao vented angrily, "Whoever thought of this work credit system had no idea what he was doing (trans: literally, 'lacking morals')!" As someone from an outside clan (trans: most of the residents of Libeishang were from the Zhang clan), it was risky to offend Zhang Shunxi's family, and he regretted losing his temper earlier.
Indeed, traditional Chinese society can be described as "favor-based" or "reputation-based." Especially in a tight-knit community like the village, how could you afford to lose face? Pitting villagers against each other during the assessment of such a fundamental thing as their livelihoods was foolish. How were they supposed to go on living with each other after a harsh review? When Old Zhou said the inventor of the system 'had no morals,' he meant that they didn't understand the rules of traditional Chinese society.
After that meeting we were scolded by higher-ups. The Pioneer Production Brigade requested that we did not exceed ten credits a day in the future.
They also reminded us that we were expected to re-assess work credits every month, and, failing that, at least twice a year. Even so, our reluctance to assess credits won out, and it was a year later when we re-assessed.
Re-assessment meetings were the most subdued village meetings. But if the gap between them got too long, they were also the most quarrelsome.
Four years later, local figure Zhang Qingkui suggested that I get ten credits.
When I was elected production team leader of Libeishang, the first order of business was to re-assess work credits.
I started off by announcing, "Everyone knows that the team leader has the most responsibility, and has to work the hardest. That's why in all of Lugang, even all of Yongfeng, every team leader gets ten credits. Now, you all can go for ten credits, but I'm going to assess myself at 9.8. I'm doing this for two reasons. One, so that the meeting can go smoothly. Two, so in the future we can assign work more easily."
Jianfeng's handmade credit booklet from 1976. I once went to the Yangtze River Letter-Carvers' Association in Shanghai to get a seal with my name on it. They said that was one of the "Four Olds" and refused. Later, when I went to the Yongfeng Seal-Carver's Association, they put the "Xia" on the left, contrary to the traditional placement. I consulted one of my father's seals to write the ć€ character on the cover.
Inside the booklet - my credits for the month of May. We can see that I earned over 400 credits in May, and on the 31st I helped butcher a pig.
I only returned to earning ten credits a day when I resigned as team leader.
In 1979 I returned to Shanghai to be a benchworker. The apprenticeship period was three years. Each month's pay was 17.83 yuan. Due to my inexperience, I neither expected nor received any raises. But I still had to sit in on the self-assessment style raise discussions.
Since only about five percent of the workers would get a raise, those of us who didn't expect to get a raise would just sit and be silent. But those few who thought they had a chance would show up guns blazing. They'd talk at length about their achievements and the sacrifices they'd made, trying to monopolize the conversation. The atmosphere was different from that in Libeishang, as more people were talking.
Everyone knew that this self-assessment was a sham; the leadership had already decided the raises far in advance. But since these was literally the workers' livelihoods, very few people backed down during the meeting. Even if you weren't going to get the raise this time, it was worth laying foundations for the next round of raises.
So it was that some people would go the the houses of the leadership, telling stories of the difficulties they faced. Others would try to take as much credit as possible on the job. Some would even smear and sabotage their perceived rivals.
When the dust settled and the leadership had posted the final raises, the infighting finally stopped. Those who got raises would either buy dinner for their group, or give out candy, or some other method of "bleeding" for the team. After all, everyone was still going to have to work together the next day.
Self-assessment in the villages sounds fair and democratic, but the villagers hated it. Pitting usually civil villagers against each other in these self-assessment meetings caused needless strife.
Self-assessment in the workplace also sounds fair and democratic. What was wrong with coming together as a company, reflecting on the mistakes, and learning from them? Every leader wanted to be able to incentivize hard work with a raise. Yet the conflicts caused by the process often felt like too high of a cost. Afterwards, some of the leaders would say things like, "This isn't worth it. We might as well stop giving raises."
The workers who didn't get a raise would angrily ask, "why don't we give this work to the guy who got a raise?" And those who did would complain, "I don't make that much more than the others, why do I have to do everything?"
My general impression was that the working class was no more enlightened than the agricultural class at the time.
In my view, most people only care about their own material benefits. As long as they make more money they are happy. Only a small minority, who have ideals and strong convictions, care about doing good. And of those only a few are willing to sacrifice their material benefits for their ideals.
The self-assessment in villages and workplaces didn't take this into account, and so the outcome was counter to the intent.
Villages and workplaces have both long stopped this practice. Each worker's compensation is a private matter now. Some people say this allows the forces of capital to better control other forces. But that seems to be outweighed by the costs of self-assessment and discussion.
As to the forces of capital, they must be controlled by different means.
Us Shanghainese sent-down youth lived separately in villagersâ homes for nearly two years.
During this time, we not only learned various life and agricultural skills, we also developed strong relationships with our foster families. For example, after Xue Zhiming stayed with Zhang Meifaâs family, Meifaâs father would always refer to him as âour familyâs Old Xue.â He seemed to have truly adopted Xue Zhiming as a son.
We left their families under pressure from the government. But during the holidays our old families would invite us over to have dinner and catch up.
We started living together as sent-down youth again in 1972. During later village meetings, some villagers would volunteer that, for example, their sent-down youth was very capable, and could handle purchases and sales. Someone else would follow up that their sent-down youth was very hard-working, and could be the accountant.
The villagers had many reasons to recommend us for various official positions. Of course, our own hard work and honest demeanor was a factor. But another reason was rampant day-to-day feuding between the villagers. In such positions, us sent-down youth could act as mediators for the complicated intra-village relationships.
In any case, us sent-down youth ended up taking responsibility for many of the administrative tasks within the village, and were referred to as the âRed Stewardsâ of the production team.
Li Guiying was the accountant.
At the end of the year, the production team had to calculate how much each day of work was actually worth. We had to use the modern accounting method of double-entry bookkeeping, which very few villagers understood. So only the production brigade had a real accountant; each production team only had to fill out a few forms for the higher-ups and turn them in on time.
To simplify matters, the province introduced a measure to âreplace accounts with formsâ in the early 1970s. In lieu of complicated bookkeeping, the production brigade accountant was required to fill out some long forms instead. This initiative was abandoned after two years, and was credited to âLin Biaoâs counter-revolutionary group.â
Wang Junwei was in charge of purchases and sales, as well as the team leader for the housewives of the production team.
As the buyer and seller of goods, one often had to go to Lugang to buy things. Villagers viewed this as an opportunity for embezzlement; the majority of villagers whoâd held this position in the past had embezzled village funds to some extent. Villagers termed this âbeing falsely accused.â When Wang Junwei was in charge, no such corrupt deeds occurred. As to being the leader of the housewives, nobody really cared about that position - it was merely mandated by the higher-ups.
Xue Zhiming was the storehouse keeper.
This job involved a lot of weighing rice in the storehouse and parceling out rice to various families. This was a nice gig, since you could avoid some fieldwork. More importantly, having a sent-down youth in this position ensured that they wouldnât parcel rice out unfairly due to various family loyalties. This was a common occurrence for earlier storehouse keepers, and caused a lot of unnecessary friction within the village.
Feng Jinsheng was the platoon leader of the militia.
This was also one of those non-jobs that was required by the party. A perk was that he could go âreceive trainingâ in the community center for a couple days a year. This training was hardly strenuous, and they provided meat to eat - all in all a pretty good deal.
I was the recorder of work credits.
An abacus. As a âsteward,â you needed one, no matter if you were an accountant, purchaser, storehouse keeper, or work credit recorder.
This job involved taking down each villagerâs work credits every night. Technically I was drawing circles and crosses. We had three work shifts: early morning, late morning, and afternoon. For each shift worked, I would draw a circle. For each one missed, I would mark a cross. I have a decent memory, so I could usually figure out which villagers hadnât showed up once I knew how many people were missing.
One day, I was looking around the fields, checking to see who was working, and noticed that Zhang Famao wasnât around. I asked his wife, âWhat happened to Famao?â
She responded, âHeâs making a miexi (çŻŸćž, bed-mat) at home.â
I was surprised, and asked, âHeâs not a mie weaver, did he learn the craft in the past? Iâve never seen him make a miexi, Iâve got to go see him after we pack up.â
The villagers erupted in laughter. I stood there, wondering what was so funny.
Zhang Shouren told me that, when the mie weaver made a bed mat, once it was big enough they would sit on the mat and slowly make it bigger and bigger. So the expression âmaking a bed matâ meant that Famao was sick.
I hurried over to his house after work, and found that he was indeed lying on his bed mat. When he saw me coming, he struggled to get up and greet me. His forehead was hot to the touch. I got some aspirin for him. He returned to work the next morning.
When it was time to record the work credits each evening, villagers would bring the credit booklets of all of their family members. As soon as I saw them walk in the door I would put them down for their dayâs work. When they compared my records with theirs there was seldom a discrepancy.
The âLabor Manualâ was commonly referred to as a âcredit booklet.â
I made short work of the seventy to eighty people in the production team.
At the end of the year, I had to aggregate all of the records for the year. Previous recorders would get some assistants to help with the addition. This would take several weeks, and errors would still creep in. There would always be someone complaining that their credits were mis-calculated. After all, credits were basically money.
This is not to say the previous recorders were bad. The process itself was complicated and error-prone. One day was worth 9.6 work credits: 1.92 credits for the early morning shift and 3.84 each for the late morning and afternoon shifts. If someone missed an afternoon, theyâd only get 9.6 minus 3.84, or 5.76, for the day. Each page of the booklet held nine days of credits, and the total was added up at the bottom. Then these subtotals were tallied for the final total.
Women were only able to receive six credits per day.
After I had to go through it, I improved the process. It became a matter of counting circles. I called the late morning and afternoon shifts "big circles.â Each one of these counted for two fifths of a day. The early morning shift was a âsmall circle,â which counted for one fifth of a day. So one big circle was worth two small circles.
Letâs work an example. If someone had 56 big circles in a month that counted for 112 small circles. Then if we add their 27 existing small circles that comes out to 139. If we divide that by 5 weâd get the number of full work days of credit they received. For convenience I multiplied by two (278) and then divided by ten (27.8). This was all fairly simply done in my head, which took about fifteen seconds including the counting. Then I used an abacus to multiply by 9.6, coming to a total of 266.88 credits for the month.
By consolidating the calculations in this way, I was much faster and less likely to make mistakes. I could do all the calculations for the year in just two days, without any helpers. The villagers were duly impressed.
When some party members at the production brigade heard of this, they wanted to spread this practice more broadly. They came to Libeishang to learn what exactly I was doing. I spent a long time explaining and working examples, and it seemed like they understood what was happening. However, I never heard of any progress made on this front. Maybe the initiative fizzled out because of the political problems with my family.
Later, we switched from circles to writing the number of credits directly in the record books. This was much better for morale as the work done was much more tangible.
When the spring planting or the double hustle came around, we switched over to a per-piece system of awarding work credits. The villagers called this âcontract workâ. One year, during spring planting, we split into three groups. Each group would come record their work credits with me. Each hectare of planted field was worth ten credits. Because of this incentive system, the villagers worked particularly hard. Those who were limited to ten credits a day were now making over fifteen.
However, the oxen in each group were of varying strength and number. So when we calculated the work credits of each plow-worker, we were supposed to use the middle credit value achieved by the three groups.
In school, I had learned that the âaverageâ of a group of numbers was their arithmetic mean. Once, I summed up the groupsâ credits for the day (19, 17, and 12) and divided by 3, reaching a value of 16 credits for the plow workers.
They immediately complained, saying that I had given them the mean value, not the median, which was 17 credits.
In America, I found that in labor and real estate markets we also use the median instead of the mean; I guess there was some convergent evolution in these two systems that developed so far apart.
The recorder was entitled to a 100 credit bonus at the end of the year, but I didnât take it. After all, I had still been earning my usual credits while doing this work.
In those years, only the production team leader was still a villager. All the other various roles were filled by us sent-down youth. This was unique among the villages in Lugang. Weâd suddenly became a progressive group of sent-down youth. Li Guiying went as our representative to a prefecture-level conference. She was eventually elected as a councilmember. Secretary Wu, the council secretary, was something of a scholar and was a good publicist. He summarized the situation like so: âThe sent-down youth from Shanghai are 'Red Stewardsâ for the lower and middle class farmers of Libeishang.â
After Li Guiying went to Ji'an for school, a villager was supposed to be the next accountant. But that villager wanted two hundred credits compensation, which drew opposition. In the end, they settled on me as the accountant.
By now, we had restored the old method of double-entry bookkeeping. This was invented by a French monk four centuries prior; as a student who hadnât even finished middle school, I was in far over my head. Fortunately, when I was at the Xinhua bookstore in downtown Shanghai, I found a book titled Accounting in the Peopleâs Community Production Team. It had detailed instructions about double-entry bookkeeping. I treated this as a sacred text. I studied its ins and outs when I returned to Libeishang and spent countless hours practicing the techniques within.
The most stressful time for the accountant was the end of the year calculations.
One year, one production team in the brigade had just appointed a new accountant. He calculated that each villager was owed 91 cents per credit. But the old accountant said there was an error, and came up with a figure of 93 cents per credit. An even older accountant put in a figure of 90 cents per credit.
This was confounded by the feuds between and within clans, of course, but was made possible by not adhering to strict accounting standards. Eventually they settled on the highest value, 93 cents per credit. This meant that everyoneâs income went up, so nobody complained. Whether or not it would lead to a deficit in coming years was a question left for the future.
One year, the production brigade got all of the accountants together for the end of year calculations. This was going to take five days. The production brigade hoped that we would work together. But these accountants were high status individuals in their home villages, and had a lot of trouble working as a team.
Because I had other things to attend to, I was late. I walked in at noon on the second day, abacus and ledgers in hand. Nobody said anything. The only sound was the rattling of a room full of abacuses. I spent a day and a half working out the teamâs finances.
The accountant from Yuanjiacun said, âOld Xia, youâre really 'Late to rise and early to pee!ââ
The local custom was to put a chamberpot in the bedroom. This was for urinating in the middle of the night. Of course, the first person to get up in the morning would have first rights to the chamberpot. So it was strange for a late riser to be first on the chamberpot.
The Pioneer Production Brigade (now Lugang Village) accountants once all gathered here, in the brigade headquarters.
In 1975, when I was elected the production team leader, I suggested that I resign from the post of accountant. It was too easy for a joint team leader and accountant to be corrupt. After much discussion, the villagers decided that I should be both until a proper replacement was found. I taught the villager Zhang Fukui to be the team leader and stepped down.
The higher-ups agreed to my resignatio, but felt that this demotion might give the appearance that I had commited some wrong. So they decided to assign me as the brigade representative in our production team.
When I was both the team leader and the accountant, Feng Jinsheng was the militia platoon leader and the purchaser. So between the two of us, we were still the âRed Stewardsâ of Libeishang.
At this time, the tide of sent-down youth was retreating, and over half of us had already returned to the cities. There werenât many of us âRed Stewardsâ left.
I wasnât like some of the sent-down youth, who were passionate about politics. Instead I tried to avoid it. But it kept finding me.
The head of Yongfeng prefectureâs sent-down youth division once asked me to write an article about the sent-down youth of Libeishang. He said the Jiangxi Daily wanted to publish it. I reasoned that, since it wasnât putting me in the spotlight as an individual, I didnât need to diminish our achievements for modesty. I sat in their kitchen with a powerful cup of tea and wrote the draft overnight in one sitting. Then I hurried back to Libeishang. Soon, the article got published in the Jiangxi Daily. I took a look. The editor hadnât changed a thing! I was proud that my meager middle-school education was sufficient to write for the newspaper.
In early 1977, the Jinggang Mountain region (Ji'an City) wanted to publish a book about the progressive sent-down youth of the region. I went to Ji'an for a proposal eeting. I edited my prior draft a bit and sent it in (In modern times this would be considered illegally sending my manuscript to multiple publishers, but at the time there were no royalties to confuse matters). The editor was a graduate of East China Normal University who had majored in Chinese. After taking a look at my manuscript, he accepted it. Then he asked, âWhat middle school did you go to in Shanghai?â
I said, âThe First Middle School Affiliated With East Normal University.â
He said, âOh, no wonder,â before turning to guide the other writers.
And at this time my heart was already at the Ji'an Normal University, where Ma Liping was a student.
This book was titled A New Generation is Growing. In the final proof, we were still referred to as the âRed Stewards.â Later, the person responsible for this book was ousted in the fallout of some higher-level political struggle. And so this book never ended up getting published.
Sometimes the Lugang Commune would broadcast something about our âprogressive phenomenonâ in Libeishang. I was a little proud, but a voice in the back of my head said, âThe 'Red Stewardsâ are basically all gone. But weâre actually getting more and more famous outside of Libeishang. As someone who wrote about this, Iâm partly responsible. At least the villagers in Libeishang donât really understand the Mandarin broadcasts.â
In early 1979, I was working at the Yongfeng middle school. In my last month before returning to Shanghai, I took a day off and spent a long weekend back in Libeishang. I finished out the yearâs accounting and gave the ledger to the next accountant.
So ended the seven years of âRed Stewardsâ in Libeishang.
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