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“What about you?” I ask. “You’re a Pig, aren’t you? Maybe you and Tao should marry.” I don’t mean a word I say, but perhaps my questions will get her going in another direction.
“Yes,” she agrees, considering. “It could work. But I’m a widow and I have a child. No one will marry me now.”
“But it’s the New China and there’s the new Marriage Law. Widows …”
As we near Tao’s house, he steps out into the sunlight. It’s as if he’s been waiting in the shadows for us to come near. I’m not the only one to observe this.
Kumei lowers her voice. “Forget about me and let’s think about kisses for you. A Tiger needs a practical and good Dog. Such a good match.” She sighs theatrically, which only emphasizes that she’s teasing me. “Or, since this is the New Society, you could try free love.” Then, “Good morning, Tao. Are you going to the fields? Would you like to walk with us? Comrade Joy has been very quiet this morning. She must still be living on city time. Maybe you can wake her up.”
I blush. It happens every time I see Tao, but I notice color rising in his cheeks too.
He ruffles his spiky hair and grins. “I might be able to help our city comrade.”
Just then Tao’s mother joins her son on the hard-packed earth outside the door of the house. The sleeves of her patched shirt are rolled up to the elbow as if she’s about to wash more clothes or salt vegetables. She carries a child strapped to her back, and another three children cluster around her legs like little chicks. (Chairman Mao has encouraged the masses to have lots of offspring, so China will have many survivors to replenish the population at great speed in case America drops atomic bombs on the country. Also, as he has said, “With every stomach comes another pair of hands.” China needs those hands to build the New Society, and Tao’s parents have helped provide them.) Tao’s mother gives me a resentful look and says to her son, “Come home as soon as you’re done. I’ll have a simple meal prepared for you. Simple, because we’re simple in our tastes.”
Somehow Tao’s mother has come to the conclusion that I’m not simple in my tastes. Maybe it’s because of the shift I wore my first night here. Or maybe she’s afraid I’m going to steal Tao and take him to Shanghai. We may be living in the New China, but Shanghai has the aura to these people of someplace mysterious, decadent, and sinful.
Tao
jumps down from the terrace and strides ahead of us. I’ve found that men in the village always walk out front with the women behind. I don’t mind, because it allows me to watch Tao glide up the hill, the sinews in his arms and legs sliding gracefully over his bones.
It’s a good thing Kumei isn’t in my head to hear my thoughts.
We reach the crest of the hill. From here we can see five other villages—each comprising its own collective—nestled between or against rolling hills. Neat rows of tea bushes grow in terraces on the slopes. In the valley, rice paddies and fields of corn, millet, sorghum, sweet potatoes, and hay create a checkerboard of food and wealth. We swing down the path and join others in our work team who are also on their way to the fields.
Some days we work on the tea terraces, picking leaves and tending Green Dragon’s most precious crop. Or we’ll gather sweet potatoes to dry, store, and feed to livestock. We’ve also labored in water, building irrigation ditches, wells, and ponds. We women are luckier than the men. The government has issued a proclamation that women can’t work in water up to their waists. No one, and this is kind of creepy if you think about it, wants any infections to enter a woman through her private parts. Today, though, we’ll just be working in a cornfield. Since all tools have been given to the collective, we check out hoes and other implements we’ll need from the work team leader.
Now that we’re with other people, I’m careful how I interact with Tao. When he marches straight into our assigned field, I linger on the edge to put a straw hat over my kerchief to shield me from the sun before stepping out into the ripening rows of corn. Kumei is ahead of me. She chooses a furrow next to Tao, but I go another five furrows over and drive my hoe into the soil to dislodge a weed.
A month ago, I didn’t know how to do this work. I did my best, but I was hopeless and exhausted. I kept thinking about one of my professors, who said that the Chinese peasant is “the twin brother to the ox.” I wasn’t at all like an ox. I’d come back from the fields with an aching back, sore muscles, and blisters on my hands. The hot sun was brutal, and I didn’t understand that I needed to keep drinking boiled water and tea. But as they say around here, “Seeing something once is better than hearing about it a hundred times. Doing something once is better than seeing it a hundred times.” I’ve been learning and observing from real life. I’m still a long way from becoming one of Mao’s “shock team” women, but I’ve found what the villagers call an iron spirit.
All around me I hear people working: the shush shush as they glide between the cornstalks, the hacking of hoes as they aerate the furrows, and the melodies of a recently authorized harvest song rising into the air from the hayfield adjacent to us. This is everything I imagined the New China would be: rosy-cheeked peasants helping one another and sharing the benefits, the sun warming my back, the sound of cicadas and birds accompanying our songs.
At eleven, some married women arrive from the village with tin canisters tied to the ends of poles and strung over their shoulders. They serve us rice and vegetables—cucumbers, eggplants, tomatoes, and onions, all of which were grown by the collective—and then we go back to work. A little after noon, Z.G. appears. He wears a big-brimmed straw hat and carries a satchel and an easel. He works in the field for an hour or so before going to sit under a tree to draw. No one objects. He’s recording our work.
At four, the hottest time of the day, the married women return, bringing tea thermoses and more rice. During our break, people gather around Z.G. to look at his sketches, often exclaiming and laughing as they recognize themselves and others.
“Look, there’s Comrade Du’s bat-shaped scar!”
“Are my legs as bowed as that?”
“You can see the girls from the irrigation team walking together in this one. You put those girls together and all you get is laughter. They think life is so carefree.”
These compliments should be hard for Tao to hear, since he once received them himself, but he knows he’s in the presence of a far better artist.
After our break, we return to the furrows. It’s almost the end of the day when I hear a woman shriek. The singing stops, but the cicadas continue to whine as we listen through the warm air for the source of the sound. We begin to hear shouts and a woman’s pained cries. Kumei and I rush through the cornstalks and into the adjacent hayfield. The harvest has begun in this field, and the far end has already come under a sharp-bladed hay cutter. It’s there, in the cleared area, that a group of people cluster together. We run to them and elbow our way through the crowd. A man, splattered with blood, stands over a woman. He looks pale and distraught. The woman’s neck has been torn open, and her arm is nearly gone from her body. Blood spurts and pools around her. Three women have stripped off their kerchiefs and are using them to try to stop the bleeding, but it doesn’t seem to be helping.
The smell of the blood under the hot sun is thick at the back of my throat. I feel sick and repelled, but flies and other insects have been attracted to the scent and are buzzing about the woman, swooping in to drink her blood. I’ve seen her before—in the village, at our evening art classes, and on the paths to the fields—but I don’t know her name.
“It’s not my fault,” the blood-splattered man says in a shaky voice. “I was working in my furrow. Comrade Ping-li was next to me. The next thing I knew, she threw herself in the hay cutter’s path—low, so I couldn’t miss her. She must not have seen me. But how can that be?” He looks at us, searching for an answer, but none of us have one. “She had to see me. We work next to each other every day.”
“You’re not responsible, Comrade Bing-dao,” someone says from the crowd. “These things happen.”
Murmurs of assent greet this assessment. But I’m thinking, These things happen? Who throws herself in front of a hay cutter? And then more practical thoughts: Where’s the ambulance? Where’s the hospital? But no ambulance or hospital exists within miles of here. And there isn’t a tractor, truck, or car to use for transportation even if there were a hospital. All that doesn’t matter anyway. The woman is dying. Her skin has gone waxy. The pool of blood has continued to grow, but the spurting has slowed. Her eyes are glassy and she seems unaware of her surroundings. The kneeling women comfort her as best they can.
“The collective will take care of your children,” one says. “There are no orphans in the New China.”
“We’ll make sure your children remember you,” promises another.
