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It’s no use. The loudspeaker hasn’t even come on yet to tell us to get up, but the Campaign Against the Four Evils—sparrows, rats, insects, and flies (which, for some reason, have their own special category)—isn’t for lazybones. The worst of the evils are sparrows. They’re said to devour seeds and grain, and now they must be eliminated. If the masses make enough noise—beating drums, clapping sticks, clanging pots and any cooking utensils that haven’t already been fed to the blast furnace—then the sparrows will keep flying, never landing, until they fall from the sky, dead from exhaustion. I put on a smiling face and leave my room.
Kumei and her little boy are in the kitchen. Ta-ming holds a small slingshot, and he bounces from foot to foot eagerly. Kumei smiles.
“Do you want to walk with us this morning?”
She always asks the same question, and I always answer the same way.
“Of course!”
We leave the villa, turn left down a cobblestone path, cross a moss-covered footbridge, turn left again, and then follow the shaded creek. After about a half mile, we veer down a new path lined with poplar trees. It’s barely dawn, yet from the hills around us we hear banging. Apart from the noise, which is as unsettling as it’s supposed to be, these early morning walks along the stream are pleasant. Kumei is a nice young lady, and her son is quite dear. He’s only five years old but earnest. He stoops to pick up a small rock, which he loads into his slingshot and shoots into the trees, hoping to hit a sparrow.
“I missed again, Auntie Pearl!”
“Don’t worry. You’ll get one eventually. You just have to keep trying.”
We pick up food at the canteen and then hurry back to the villa, where Kumei dashes inside to drop off breakfast for Yong and Brigade Leader Lai. She returns a moment later, and we wait for Joy, Tao, his parents, and his eight siblings to make their way down the hill. Together we walk from the village to the main part of the commune to receive the day’s work assignments.
Mothers drop off babies and toddlers at the nursery. Older children grab younger brothers’ and sisters’ hands to go to school. Ta-ming puts his slingshot in his pocket and joins his classmates. Everyone else separates to follow their red-flag leaders, marching with their knees thrown high and singing Great Leap Forward songs as they head off to their workstations: some to the sewing room to make blankets, trousers, and blouses; some to the leadership hall, where letters, telephone calls, and telegrams are processed; and some to the fields. Today the farmers’ assignment is one I hardly believe: crushing glass sent from Shanghai and then working it into the soil as a “nutrient.” It’s ridiculous to me, but the farmers do it because the Great Helmsman can’t be wrong.
All mothers and grandmothers must now come out to work. Tao’s mother may no longer stay at home to wash, sew, and clean for her toolarge family. Even Yong may no longer remain hidden in the villa. Most women—and I include myself in this—are ordered back to jobs in their own villages. I stop by the villa to get Yong and take her elbow as she totters to our workstation.
Brigade Leader Lai has assigned “old” people—like Yong, Tao’s mother, and me—to the nation’s Overtake Britain Battalion. Some days those of us on the gray-power team work at the blast furnaces—stoking the fires, feeding whatever metal is left in the commune to the smelter, or carrying the cooled pig iron to the central square, where men with wheelbarrows load the blocks and push them the few miles to the main road. Other days we shuck corn, sort rice, or lay out sweet potatoes for drying. I’m not old and I don’t have any gray hair, but I put on my smiling face and do as I’m told. Many of the tasks remind me of the things I did with my mother-in-law when I first arrived in Chinatown years ago. Those chores brought me closer to her, just as these chores have brought me closer to Joy’s mother-in-law. (I say “Joy’s mother-in-law” because she doesn’t have what I would consider a proper name. She was born into the Fu family. She went by No Name until she married out at age fourteen. Then shee was added to her natal family name to indicate that she was now a married woman from the Fu clan—Fu-shee.) We’re a small group—all women of a certain age, but again, not that old. Today we sit together to tie garlands of garlic, share stories, and complain about husbands, housework, and the visit from the little red sister as mothers, sisters, and friends have done for millennia.
“We’re lucky we live where we do, where we can use sand to catch the blood,” one of the women says. “Do you remember when I joined the Eighth Route Army after they came through our county? W
e used dirt wrapped in cloth between our legs. Sometimes we used soft flowers and other plants. When we went to the tundra in the far north, the local women showed us how to use dried grass.”
“When I was a girl and still lived in my natal village, we used a leaf from a tree that grew by the river,” Fu-shee recalls. “My mother gave me ten dried leaves to use for my entire life. Each month, the blood goes in. It dries, and then you use the same leaf the following month. Every month throughout your life those leaves get harder and harder. I was happy to marry into this village.”
I worry that someone will ask what I use. Would they believe that I bought sanitary supplies in Hong Kong or that my sister sent me some from America? That I throw the napkins out after every use? It wouldn’t sound good. It might even be a bad reflection on my daughter. But there’s someone even more suspect to question than me.
“What about you, Yong?” someone asks. “You lived in the villa. We always heard you used something special.”
“I regret those days and I admit my mistakes,” Yong responds contritely. In other communes, women with bound feet are going through a process of slowly unbinding their feet, preventing emotional and physical trauma—which would leave them completely crippled—and allowing the feet to regain their original shape gradually so the women can work in the fields. We have only one bound-footed woman in our commune, and so far her feet have been left alone. Still, they are a visible reminder of her privileged past. The others lean forward, ready for her confession. “The women in the villa used the scented ash from incense burned in the ancestral hall.”
“Aiya! From the ancestral hall?”
“Bah!”
The women shake their heads in disbelief. If this weren’t a matter for women alone, Yong would probably be attacked during one of the political-study sessions or be forced to make a public self-criticism.
“You were of the landowner class,” someone says. “You could do whatever you wanted.”
“It may have looked that way to you,” Yong responds, “but I had to obey not just my husband but also the first, second, and third wives. How cruel they were—worse than the worst mother-in-law.”
It’s awkward for me to hear about bad mothers-in-law, since Fu-shee has not been as welcoming to my daughter as Joy would like. But then Joy doesn’t understand how some relationships are so deep and fundamental that they cannot change just because Chairman Mao says they must. She knows, but doesn’t understand, that on a bone-and-blood level mothers-in-law don’t get along with daughters-in-law. I’ve told her that the written character for quarrel is two women under a roof. I’ve recited the old saying—“a bitter wife endures until she becomes a mother-in-law,” meaning that a wife must slowly climb the ladder of position in a family before she can command respect. According to Joy, however, this kind of thinking has no place in the new social order. She can say what she wants, but mothers-in-law will be the same long after I’m dead, Joy’s dead, and that Chairman Mao is only a bad memory.
At eleven, we recess for breakfast in the canteen, which is one thing I absolutely love. In the New Society, women no longer have the burdens of cooking for their families. Everything is prepared for us. Some people grumble that communal dining halls are destroying the heart of the Chinese family. After all, the family is built around breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I say we’re still eating together, aren’t we? Since I’ve been here, the canteen has been expanded (which didn’t take much—just more cornstalks tied together to form walls and a flimsy roof over bamboo framing) so that it can hold about a thousand people at a time. This morning, as at every meal, children run between the tables, old women gossip, and everyone else talks about the weather and the coming harvest. In this way, every meal is like a banquet, except that, over the chatter and laughter, loudspeakers blast news from the capital, patriotic music, and encouragements to keep building a better China.
I find Joy, kneeling before her husband and father-in-law, tending their badly cut feet. I sit on the floor beside her to help. They have no leather shoes. They rarely even wear sandals. Their feet are tough, but not tough enough to walk through fields filled with glass shards. I look sideways at Joy. Her lips are set in a determined line as she picks slivers of glass out of her father-in-law’s callused, cracked, and bleeding foot. Doesn’t she see how insane this is? Doesn’t anyone here see the mistakes that are being made? Sensing me staring at her, she glances my way. Her mouth spreads into a smile, and I automatically smile in return. Is her smile an apology or an expression of embarrassment? I tell myself I’m not here to criticize, even though I want to very badly. I tell myself that Joy looks happier than the morning after her wedding. I tell myself she’ll confide in me, if I give her time.
BANG, BANG, BANG. A new week, a new month. I put on my same clothes and my same smiling face.
In the canteen, people ooh and aah about reports of extraordinary activities in other communes that come to us over the loudspeaker. “Go all out, aim high, and achieve greater, faster, better, and more economical results in building socialism,” the announcer reads enthusiastically. “In Hunan, they’ve produced radishes as big as babies. In Hopei, they’ve grown melons larger than pigs. In Kwangtung, schoolchildren have crossed a pumpkin with a papaya, farmers have crossed a sunflower with an artichoke, and government scientists have crossed tomatoes with cotton to produce red cotton!” These accomplishments can’t possibly be real, but everyone loves hearing them. We need to find inspiration wherever we can, if we’re to bring in what everyone says will be the best harvest in years.
Today the commune holds a contest. Which village—Moon Pond, Black Bridge, or Green Dragon—can harvest crops the fastest? I’ll be putting in my first full day in the fields, since every hand is needed if Green Dragon is going to win.
“Drink plenty of water,” Joy recommends. “When we break, eat some pickled vegetables. They’ll help with the loss of salt. Oh, and empty your shoes at every chance, because you don’t want to get blisters. I learned that the hard way!” She grins happily. “Stay with me. I’ll show you what to do.”
