My Name is Number 4 (16 page)

The next morning the figurative worship of Mao Ze-dong became literal. Each dorm was issued two plaster statues, along with pieces of red cloth and yellow paper hearts with the character
zhong
—loyalty—embossed on them, the same word Number 2 had cleverly selected as his new name. We
were ordered to set up a
zhong-zhi-tai
—loyalty shrine—at each doorway. Every morning after that we stood before the shrine and held our little red books to our hearts, requesting instruction and greeting Chairman Mao with rehearsed shouts, wishing him life “forever and ever” and his successor Lin Biao, “our beloved vice-chairman, good health, always, always.” We could not even fully dress or wash ourselves first, because, we were told, the adoration exercise was the first and most important political matter in our daily life.

As I stood there on the dirt floor or on my unmade bed, surrounded by waving arms, my thoughts went back to my childhood when my siblings and I accompanied Grandfather to our ancestral hall in Qingyang. Never in my life had I seen or heard of people erecting a shrine for someone still alive. Even I knew that worshipping the living guaranteed bad luck. Less than half an hour later we repeated the same words in the canteen while we waited in line for breakfast.

One day the female students were ordered to the rice-threshing ground and taught the “loyalty dance” by professionals sent out by the Shanghai city government. While we struggled to learn the steps, we sang, “Our beloved Chairman Mao, you are the sun which will never set and we are sunflowers always swirling around you …” Our dancing won us the title “Flowers on the Cow Shit” among the prisoners, who had watched us dancing during a work-break from spreading cow dung to dry before it was hauled to the paddies.

My genuine effort to meet my daily vegetation quota touched my squad leader, Yu Hua, who offered to pair up with
me to help me out. At that time I was only about four-foot-three and weighed no more than eighty pounds, and I needed all the help I could get. Yu Hua was a strong, sturdy woman of eighteen, with short hair and a no-nonsense manner. Her kindness moved me deeply. It was the beginning of the first real friendship of my life.

We worked together well. I was quick with my sickle; she toted cuttings to the weigh station. We met our quota regularly. But the newly formed paddies were hungry monsters, eating up everything we cut. The vegetation near the farm had long since been stripped away and we had to go farther and farther afield.

One day Yu Hua and I packed a lunch of steamed buns and pickled vegetables and left right after breakfast to search for vegetation. Our shoulder-poles bounced with each step as we headed north along the main road, gathering weeds and grass as we went. After a few hours’ work we spied a swampy pit in which new shoots had sprung up where the reeds had been cut. We made our way over the spongy ground to relieve ourselves. A moment later Yu Hua called out to me. She had come upon a pathway leading over a bank into a stand of plane trees. I followed her, curious to see where the path led.

Yu Hua stopped. “Look, Xiao Ye!”

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Among the trees, newly in leaf, tall grass grew, uncut and undisturbed.

“We will be able to meet our quota for weeks,” I said, “if we keep this secret.”

We fell to work immediately and by noon two of our mesh bags were stuffed full. After our lunch break, Yu Hua shuffled
off under the weight of her shoulder-pole, leaving me busy with my sickle.

After months of living day and night in a crowd of students and amongst the circus of Mao worship and dancing, I found myself alone. I worked steadily, enjoying the solitude. The breeze stirred the grass and whispered in the branches of the surrounding trees. After a while I sat down to rest, leaning against a tree, and closed my eyes. Strangely, the isolation began to make me uneasy. Why had Yu Hua been gone so long? I decided it would be better to get back to work than to think of bad things that could happen to a girl left alone. Gathering my cuttings into piles, I bent to pick up a bundle of grass and found myself staring into the empty eye sockets of a human skull.

I screamed and dropped my burden. Stumbling down the embankment into the reeds, running and falling over the soggy ground, feet and arms torn by the brittle reed stubble, I finally gained the road. Blood ran down my legs and arms. Heart pounding, chest heaving, I ran toward the village.

When I met Yu Hua I burst into tears, breathlessly describing the horror of the skull. Only after she had calmed me down did I realize that I had left my sickle and shoulder-pole behind and would not be able to meet the day’s quota.

“Never mind that for now,” Yu Hua said, examining the slashes on my arms and legs. “You need a doctor.”

The doctor dressed my wounds, tut-tutting and wondering under his breath how such a slight young woman could have done such damage to herself. Then Lao Deng came into the
clinic with Yu Hua. I braced myself for criticism for losing my tools and for the usual remarks that we spoiled bourgeois youngsters were lazy and incapable of hard work.

“Now, Xiao Ye,” he began. “Let’s hear your report.”

When I told him where Yu Hua and I had been cutting grass and what I had seen, his reaction surprised and confused me. He seemed amused.

“You two are quite the detectives, aren’t you?” he said. Then, suddenly serious, he demanded, “How did you find that graveyard? What—”

“Graveyard?” I interrupted him. “Is that what I found? Why is it unmarked, and where are the burial mounds? The skull was just lying on the ground.”

“Listen, girl, that’s Wu Mao Yu—Number Five Unmarked Burial Ground, an execution site. You’d better keep your discovery and all your questions to yourself. That’s an order. And don’t ever go back there again!”

For the first time since I had come to Da Feng Prison Farm, I eagerly embraced a command.

Before Lao Deng left, he wrote out a chit for a new sickle and shoulder-pole and sent me away.

14.
In a self-criticism you were required to examine your actions and thoughts and to report, verbally and in writing, your “errors”—anything you thought or did that was not approved by the Party. Saying you had done nothing wrong only aroused more suspicion.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

F
rom the time I arrived on the farm I was aware of the prisoners’ resentment of us “spoiled” city kids. We lived in dorms meant for them, they claimed bitterly, and we took rice from their mouths while they ate substandard food. Sometimes there were shortages of food and cooking oil which caused fights with their canteen staff. And it was true that there was a double standard in work assignments. While we foraged for vegetation, the prisoners had the more difficult task of tilling the paddies with plows drawn behind water buffalo. They also constructed the rice seedbeds, a laborious and exacting job, since the mud had to be smoothed by hand before the seeds were sown.

With the coming of the busy season at the beginning of June, when the emerald seedlings were ready to be transplanted
to the flooded paddies, a compromise was reached under which we students had to work the same hours, with the same quotas, as the prisoners. If we didn’t succeed, Lao Chang warned us, there would be ugly consequences.

Each day, when dawn broke, we were whistled awake and, after our Mao worship, we gulped down our breakfast and headed to the fields. We carefully pulled the rice shoots from the seedbeds, shook them to free the roots of soil, bundled them in straw, and carried them to the paddies, on each of which a grid had been laid out with straw ropes pegged into the dikes. Wading up to our knees between the parallel ropes, we transplanted the seedlings. It was an arduous, precise job, six seedlings across making a straight column, about four inches separating the rows. Such precision, Lao Chang instructed us, made for the most efficient weeding and harvesting. He waved a ruler, warning us that any deviation from the measurements would lead to punishment.

Our daily quota was seven twenty-five-metre columns a day. It was a backbreaking job, bending down constantly, even for someone like me, so small, the others said, that I didn’t have a waist. The only relief came with the short walk from the seedbeds to the paddy and back. By the time the day ended, I could hardly straighten my back. Before long I had worn my elbows raw from resting them on my knees as I worked. My hands swelled and developed cysts from pulling out the seedlings and plunging them into the cold water. Leeches were a frightening menace. They crawled up and hung on to my legs, and I had to slap the skin hard to make
them let go. Thin streams of blood flowed from the wounds. The disgusting creatures startled me so much that I often fell back onto my bottom in the cold, muddy water.

Lao Chang said timing was the key to growing rice and no delay could be tolerated. Swollen hands and feet met with no sympathy. He even went so far as to have his wife check the girls who claimed to have their periods, because, according to the rules, they were allowed two days of dry land work at such times. For the first time in my life I welcomed my period, wishing it would come weekly rather than once a month.

I lost count of the times I slept in my clothes after returning from the fields, too exhausted to clean up first, my mud-covered calves poking out from under the mosquito net. Yu Hua continued to look out for me, particularly after I told her I had no parents. “I will be your
Jie-Jie
—elder sister,” she said. Although I was conscious of my daily mounting unpaid debt to her, I often thought how true was Teacher Chen’s advice that a friend was a treasure beyond price.

When the summer arrived, one wave of suffocating heat followed another, bringing thick clouds of mosquitoes, which made sitting outside at night impossible. The living conditions inside the ovenlike dorm were unbearable. We propped the windows open but, afraid of the prisoners, we locked the doors when we were sleeping, so there was little air circulation. Although we had managed to persuade the committee to allow us to break up the long trestle bed into separate doubles so that we could more easily hang our separate mosquito nets, nothing relieved the heat. Almost everyone was covered with
heat rash as well as skin afflictions caused by the fertilizers we spread by hand in the paddies.

There was no bath- or shower-house, but I was able to wash in the nearby river. Not everyone was so lucky; the others feared the river because they couldn’t swim. Bathing in the warm river water reminded me of the day when the news came to Shanghai that seventy-three-year-old Chairman Mao had swum in the Yangtze. The city government had organized the citizens on numerous occasions to emulate Mao by swimming in the polluted Huangpu River. I had joined Number 2 and his factory team, but suffered severe diarrhea after swallowing a couple of mouthfuls of polluted water. On the farm, I was more careful.

As a reward for their work in rice transplanting, Lao Chang had always allowed the prisoners to catch fish by blocking off a section of the river. So in early August, they built dikes to partition the river; then, with wooden barrels, they bailed the water out of the temporary pond. It was a round-the-clock operation for a day or so until the water was shallow enough to wade in and grab the fish. This year, instead of handing the catch over to the canteen immediately, they secretly stored the fish in barrels until it began to rot.

Then, to our surprise, one day our canteen was presented with a load of cleaned fish covered with salt. The salt was to keep the fish fresh, the prisoners explained. Inexperienced and
ignorant, the staff washed off the salt and sent out the news that we were to receive a treat that night. We were delighted. Fish is always a delicacy; to us, living as we did on boring and often inadequate food, it was a gift from the gods. There was a long lineup before the canteen opened.

By midnight the doctor and his assistant were run ragged making trips from dorm to dorm, cleaning up vomit and caring for those who rolled on the floor clutching their abdomens. Everyone was on the move, either to or from the latrines or helping out the doctors and patients. When the morning arrived, hardly a student was able to get out of bed.