My Name is Number 4 (17 page)

I was hit hard. After a night of violent cramps, vomiting and running to the latrine, my whole body felt like a cotton ball, totally without energy. I craved water but was afraid to drink. By noon the sub-farm medical team had arrived, bringing large quantities of antibiotics. But they were too late. The latrines soon contaminated our water supply, and before we had recovered from the food poisoning, we were in deeper trouble with severe diarrhea. On the fifth day I and three other girls were so dehydrated that we were taken to the farm hospital more than fifteen kilometres away in a flatbed wagon pulled by a water buffalo. Because I passed out, I remember nothing of the trip. My condition worsened. My body was wracked with pain and I was continuously voiding bloody feces.

Diagnosed with amoebic dysentery by a mobile medical team from Shanghai Number 1 People’s Hospital, I was rushed by jeep to the ship, then to Shanghai dock, and from
there directly to hospital. I was told my life was in danger unless I received proper medical treatment immediately. After two days in hospital the doctor said, “You have escaped Death’s hand, but barely. Your disease will likely recur.” For the next week I continued my frequent visits to the toilet, but could not eat. Instead I received glucose injections. When I was released, I weighed less than seventy pounds.

I had ached to see Purple Sunshine Lane and my family, so much so that I was almost grateful for my illness, despite its severity. Great-Aunt and Number 2 came to take me home in a taxi, an unheard-of luxury and the first such experience of my life. I had every reason to be cheerful, considering that I was still alive, but I found myself pensive and sad. In the nine months since I had left, the city had become a huge construction site, with clouds of dust in the air and piles of dirt along every road. As the taxi passed through the streets, my brother told me that after the military clashes with the Soviet Union over Zhenbao—Treasure—Island in the Heilongjiang River which separated the two countries, the whole nation was gearing up for war. Every work unit and neighbourhood committee was responsible for its own air-raid shelters. Mao’s call had been for “deep digging [shelters], massive saving [of grain] and no dealings with the superpowers [since the U.S. and Russia were both against us].” While the young continued to be sent out to the countryside, tens of thousands of government employees were “evacuated” to rural areas and remote provinces to decentralize industry so that it would not all be destroyed if the cities were hit with air raids.

Following Mao’s new policy, both Number 1 and Number 5 had been forced to leave the city in July, and I hadn’t been allowed to go home to see them off. Number 5, after spending less than a year at middle school, left as a “graduate” and was sent to an army reclamation farm in Jiangxi Province, southeast of Shanghai. My eldest brother, a student of motor vehicle engineering, was assigned to a tool-repair shop in a small town in Guizhou Province, one of the poorest and most backward areas of the country. His letters confirmed the frequent rumour that “some people in Guizhou are so destitute that the whole family shares one pair of pants.”

Thinking about Number 5 and Number 1 added to my depression. Our family was scattered now, their intelligence and abilities wasted. When I thought of my mother’s anguish at having to decide which one of her sons would get a university education, my heart was heavy. Number 1 had gone to university only to be banished to a wasteland.

As if that was not enough, when we had a chance to talk alone Number 2 informed me that Number 3 had not been home from Songjiang for months.

“I have to explain this to you before you ask after her,” he began. “For the past months Great-Aunt’s resentment toward Number 3 for letting you go to the countryside has made Great-Aunt hostile and abusive. She accused Number 3 of being a coward and the worst kind of elder sister. Ah Si, we all are aware that you made a huge sacrifice for the family, but Number 3 has not had an easy time since you left. She could hardly keep a dry eye whenever you were mentioned and the
tremendous burden will go with her for the rest of her life, even without Great-Aunt’s blame. What a time!” he sighed. “You have a home that you are not
free
to visit, and Number 3 has one that she is
afraid
to visit!”

How could Great-Aunt say things like that to someone who had spent her entire first month’s salary to buy me a fashionable polyester shirt, much prized in China at that time? But my resentment toward Great-Aunt—whom I had missed greatly—was, as usual, tinged with guilt. I understood why she treated my sister badly. I wished she could treat all of us equally, but it was not in her nature.

Lying in the darkness on my first night at home after almost a year, I was torn apart with conflicting loyalties, and my tears ran down onto the pillow. After living in pretense for the past ten months mouthing political slogans, now I had to hide my feelings at home too.

Number 3 came home to Purple Sunshine Lane a few days later. She burst into tears when I opened the door, skinny and wasted from my illness and all the hard work. “Great-Aunt was right,” she exclaimed. “This is my fault!” She asked me a thousand questions and I tried my best to answer them without including the grim details. I turned the food poisoning into a humorous episode; the dysentery I reported as a character-building life-experience. Telling the truth would do no one any good.

I tried to reconcile Number 3 and Great-Aunt but the effort was in vain. Great-Aunt ignored my sister but doted on me, doing my laundry, cooking my favourite dishes, offering
me money to see a movie or go shopping. But she never sat and talked with me. She kept herself busy all the time, playing her part in the massive earth-digging campaign during the day, distributing mosquito pesticide on behalf of the neighbourhood committee at night. “The worst year for mosquitoes I have ever experienced,” she said.

After four weeks, during which I spent most of my time alone in our apartment, the doctor stopped my sick leave and Great-Aunt took to her flour roasting again. How I wished that time could stop, or at least slow down. With every revolution of Great Aunt’s spoon as she stirred the flour, my sense of helplessness and despair increased. Before me the endless days of labour and loneliness waited north of the Yangtze River.

But, too soon, the last morning dawned. Number 2 and Number 3 saw me off at the dock, and I was on my way to the Da Feng Prison Farm once more.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I
returned to the farm early in October to find that the People’s Liberation Army had taken over—specifically, the air force, which was loyal to Chairman Mao’s right-hand man, Vice Chairman Lin Biao, and his son, Lin Li-guo, who had been named deputy commander. The PLA representatives had established themselves at leading levels of the farm, sub-farm and brigade.

Our brigade’s two reps made an interesting team. They were both officers, but there the similarity ended. Cui was in his thirties, slim, average height, appearing reasonable and well-spoken. Zhao was in his forties, chunky and strong. Everything about him was short, from his arms and legs to his almost invisible neck. After only a few days I concluded that the big head that sat on that neck was hollow.

If Cui had earned his four officer’s pockets by his charm and elementary-school education, the unschooled and illiterate Zhao had acquired his by sweating, and even shedding blood, for twenty years. The two of them reminded me of the “red face” and “white face” characters in classical plays, such as the traditional Beijing Opera, in which a red-painted face represents a good person while the white denotes its opposite, though quite often they worked together. From the beginning Cui and Zhao worked that way.

Zhao described himself to us as
lao-da-cu
—old, big and inelegant. Unlike us, he pointed out, who had drunk a few bottles of ink so that we had more twists in our minds than in our guts, making us hard to deal with, he was simple and direct. Red-face Cui would then take over, saying that he himself had a mind no different from ours, so we would get along just fine. Zhao liked to yell and shout to emphasize his remarks; Cui spoke in a low voice and sometimes joked around while conveying the same message.

Some of us felt they were a two-man comedy show, but their routine filled me with unease. Why did they act that way instead of being straightforward?

At that time I and others held the PLA in the highest possible esteem. They were the heroic “uncles” who had brought Liberation: self-sacrificing men and women who loved China and Chairman Mao. Even the Cultural Revolution had not smeared them. Their rigid “Three Main Rules and Eight Points of Attention” were well known to every schoolchild. (Obey orders in all actions; take not even a single needle or
piece of thread from the citizens; turn in everything captured—these were the three rules. Speak politely; pay fairly for what you buy; return everything you borrow; compensate for anything you damage; swear at or hit no one; damage no crops; take no liberties with women; mistreat no captives—these were the eight points.) Mao had recently called upon the whole nation to learn from the revered PLA. In the days to come I would have a hard time relating what I had been taught at school to what I saw with my own eyes.

A brick house was under construction on the south side of our village to house Cui and Zhao and their office. No wattle and thatch for them. We female labourers were divided into teams of four, given a cart and sent to the sub-farm for bricks. The long flatbed cart with projecting handles and a straw pull-rope bounced easily over the deep ruts left by the typhoons. But once loaded with bricks it became as difficult to handle as an angry water buffalo. With one person on each handle, one shouldering the pull-rope and the last one pushing from the rear, we were barely able to move the cart and wept with frustration when the two lost control of the handles and the rear of the cart slammed to the ground, throwing the bricks into the road. When we finally reached our destination we were mocked by the bricklayers for bringing hardly enough bricks to make a thin pillar.

The very day that our PLA reps moved into their eyecatching new house, Lao Chang rushed us back to the paddies, where the rice stalks had turned golden yellow. Although our paddies were nothing like the “rolling waves of
golden ears” described in songs, we were excited because we knew that every single plant had been touched by our hands, from gently tugging the seedlings from their beds, to planting them in straight rows, to endless weedings and applications of fertilizer. Now the rice would be cut down, by hand.

The paddies had been drained and harvesting could begin; once again Lao Chang reminded us that timing was everything. For two weeks we worked from dawn until dark. Our lunches were brought to the fields so that we would lose no time. Wearing boots (the paddies were still muddy) and a long-sleeved shirt to protect my forearms from the rough stalks, I wielded my sickle, bent at the waist, hour after hour, chopping the plants off at ground level and piling them carefully so that they could be bundled up and hauled away to the threshing ground.

After each day of bone-weary labour we still had to endure political study at night. Although we never saw Cui and Zhao during the day—they were rushing between meetings in their jeep, often accompanied by two lucky and usually good-looking female students chosen to take notes for them—they always showed up for political study. And both of them had “elephant bottoms,” for when the endless meetings finally drew to a close, they seemed reluctant to leave our dorm. None of us could get ready for bed while they were there. They never seemed interested in conducting political study with the men.

In November the threshing began. This was a new experience for me and it soon proved horrifying. This year the women had no help, for all the male labourers, including the
prisoners, had been commandeered to rebuild the main road. “Order Number 1” had reached the farm, Zhao told us at the meeting: “Our great leader Chairman Mao teaches us to ‘be prepared for war and natural disaster.’ The original road is not adequate for military vehicles.”

While trucks loaded with gravel and cement rumbled to and fro, throwing up clouds of dust, we worked at the threshing ground, a large flat area trampled hard and free of vegetation. Six horizontal thresher barrels were turned by long belts attached to an electric motor. From the surface of the barrels projected long, sharp metal teeth. As the drum turned, I held a bundle of rice against the top so that the teeth could tear the ears free. One careless move and my hand would be ripped to shreds. It would be even worse if I fell against the swiftly revolving barrel.

Once threshed, the bundles of rice stalks were stacked for later use in building, rope making and so on. On the other side of the barrels, where the ears fell, workers raked away the chaff. It would be used for fuel. Everyone wore a cotton mask against the cloud of dust that hung in the air so thickly that it almost obscured the lights set up for the evening shifts.

I found it impossible to hold the bundle of rice stalks against the barrel in the prescribed manner because my “kindling arms” were not strong enough and the bundle was often yanked from my hands. I tried to compensate by wrapping my arms around the bundle and pressing it against my chest. This method required that I lean closer to the whirling, flashing teeth. Even worse, since I was too short, Lao Chang ordered
me to stand on a pile of straw, making balance all the more difficult to maintain.