My Name is Number 4 (22 page)

If at the beginning of my interrogation the prisoners had been mean and cruel to me, some of them now tried to make things right. They looked at me with sympathy. Whenever I was washing or doing laundry, the stooped, white-haired old uncle who worked at the pump house would give me a rubber hose connected directly to the pump so that I didn’t have to fetch water from the jars. I thanked him each time, but never learned his name. When I was too late to get my vacuum bottle filled with boiled water at the supply hut, a prisoner would take it over and have it filled in their hut. He always refused my penny. “You are one of us now,” he would say. Though I appreciated his kindness, I often cried to think that I was on the same level as a criminal.

The busy rice-planting season was over and still no word came down about my jail sentence. No one seemed to care too much. Some students were friendly enough, but distant. I hadn’t talked to Yu Hua since we had been arrested, not even when we bumped into one another. We were forbidden to speak to one another, but we could have got around that if we had wanted to. But things had changed between us. Our friendship had become a casualty of the purge. I wanted more than anything to tell her what I had done and to ask her forgiveness.

So I became even more withdrawn. When I was not working in the paddies, I kept to my bed, isolated under my mosquito netting. In early August, just when our workload lessened somewhat and I could breathe a little easier, I came
down with malaria, a disease as common as colds in winter, but much more severe. Jia-ying added her blanket to mine, but the chill crept into my bones and I lay curled up in a ball until the tide of the disease turned and sweat soaked my clothes. In the breaks between attacks I lay feeble and exhausted, waiting for another onslaught. So many of us fell ill that a medical team was sent to the farm from Shanghai before the malaria got out of hand, and we were all urged to kill every mosquito under our nets before going to sleep.

The summer dragged on. In the fall, Cui and Zhao called a meeting to announce the sentences meted out to us “counterrevolutionary conspirators.” We got two years each. We should consider ourselves lucky, Cui said, because he and Zhao had recommended five years. The sentencing was “semifinal,” awaiting approval by the Shanghai Labour Reform Bureau, then under the Number Four Air Force Command.

That same night, while I was writing home to tell Great-Aunt and Number 2 the news that their Ah Si was going to jail, the girls in the dorm were all chattering about a greater tragedy. Xiao Jian, one of the three young men also sentenced, was the son of a man who had participated in the legendary Long March. When he learned that his son had been branded a counterrevolutionary, he told everyone in the family to cut off all relations with him. It was Xiao Jian who had “blinded his left eye,” he claimed, referring to an injury he had sustained in the March. In her grief and shame, Xiao Jian’s mother hanged herself in a closet.

Soon after, I learned how my “crimes” had affected my family. Number 2 had spent two years trying to join the
Communist Party. He was grateful to the Party because of their help during the factional battles among the workers in Shanghai, when he had barely escaped hanging. His application had been at long last accepted; finally, he thought, he would get away from the shadow of our bad class background. But when it was discovered that he had a counterrevolutionary sister, his bubble of hope burst. The Party rejected him. He was furious with me, and said so in his letter.

“I warned you to stay out of trouble,” he wrote. “Obviously you didn’t listen, and I must pay for your errors.” If my own brother and adviser could blame me in that way, believing my accusers instead of me, what would my “revolutionary” Great-Aunt say? I felt abandoned by my own family.

My
tan-qin
was cancelled that February because I was still awaiting final word on my sentence. “It’s a pity Representative Huang can’t help you this time,” Cui sneered as I left his office.

I dreaded the idea of going to prison, and kept the news away from Number 1 and Number 5. Until my arrival at the farm, I had never seen a real convict. In my childhood I had pictured criminals as green-faced, long-toothed monsters. How could I tell my eldest brother and my baby sister, who had their own problems, that I would soon be behind bars?

CHAPTER TWENTY

T
hat spring I was strangely at peace. To people like Loaf, Leggy and Fatty I was now a non-person and they left me alone. To others I was invisible. To many more I was an example, a reminder of the rule, “Obey or be destroyed.”

A whisper began to circulate around the farm. Three female students from our brigade, well-groomed and well-dressed, were swept away in a military jeep. Pretending to recruit talented young women for song and dance troupes, the air force was rounding up attractive young women to be mistresses for Lin Li-guo, Lin Biao’s only son. Like an emperor and, as I learned many years later, like Mao himself, Lin Li-guo liked to surround himself with young virgins—who didn’t remain virgins for long.

It was like a beauty contest. The candidates from each brigade were selected by the PLA reps, after their political
backgrounds had been investigated. Political purity was the first criterion; next came beauty. The three women from our brigade returned the next afternoon, downcast. They had been turned down, and would have to stay on the farm.

That evening, as soon as political study had been concluded, the women in my dorm swirled around one of them, Xiao Hong, like a flock of sparrows. Where had the soldiers taken her? What had happened? Had she actually seen Lin Li-guo?

There had been a panel of seven judges to examine her. “All in uniform,” she said. “They told me I was too big and tall, and that my feet were too long and wide! How can they expect us to have small feet when they know we work barefoot in the paddies for over six months a year?” she whined. “Why do they prefer small feet, anyway? Isn’t that a feudal idea that was condemned a long time ago? Look at the women in the posters everywhere. Aren’t they all big and strong?”

Xiao Hong went on to confirm the rumour that the recruitment had nothing to do with singing and dancing. “How could our leaders be lining up mistresses?” the women around her whispered. “How could the glorious PLA allow itself to be used in this manner?”

I overheard this conversation as I lay in bed. At one time I too would have been shocked to learn that the PLA would involve itself in such seamy practices, but Cui and Zhao had taught me otherwise. But China’s leaders? That was a blow to what little idealism I had left. If the leaders were so corrupt, so hypocritical, how could anyone be safe?

“Do you know something, Xiao Ye?” Jia-ying confided from the bed beside mine. “If you were from a ‘red’ background, you would be a perfect candidate.”

“Don’t be silly!” I shot back, though I was half flattered.

I wondered how many of the women at the prison farm would have jumped at the chance to escape the farm and return to civilization, wear elegant and costly clothing, eat rich and carefully prepared food, enjoy sumptuous surroundings and, most important, live without politically motivated harassment.

“If you ever had the chance, would you go?” Jia-ying pressed.

Although I was eighteen, I knew nothing about intimate relations between men and women. Like many women my age, I was ignorant about sexual intercourse, or how babies were conceived or born. I was aware that to be Lin Li-guo’s mistress was dissolute, but had no idea what such a role entailed.

“Well, would you?”

There were, as I knew now, only three ways to escape a lifetime of exile in this desolate and strife-ridden place: suicide, prison or selection as a mistress. I had tried the first. The second loomed over me.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“So would I,” said Jia-ying.

Since her return from her home visit the previous February, Jia-ying had changed. She was bolder now—the only one who would speak to me directly—and nothing seemed to intimidate
her, not even Cui and Zhao. I surmised that something was in the air when she was transferred to the vegetable-growing team, an assignment we all considered heavenly. Usually only the PLA reps’ favourites were given this privilege.

A couple of months later Jia-ying’s mother showed up at the farm, shocking everyone, since parental visits were unheard of. She soon let it be known that her younger sister, Jia-ying’s aunt, was married to Li Zheng-dao, a Chinese-American scientist who had won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics along with another Chinese-American, Yang Chen-ning. During the early phase of the Cultural Revolution, this “foreign connection” had worked against Jia-ying’s family, causing them untold misery; but now that China–U.S. relations were improving, the family fortunes had been reversed and they had returned to the home from which they had been evicted several years before.

The same government that had encouraged Red Guards to pillage, beat and kill families like Jia-ying’s was now “looking forward and forgetting the past” because of the change in relations with the United States. Although she was my friend and I was happy for her, I envied her unexpected good luck.

A week or so later word came that a woman from our sub-farm had been chosen by the panel selecting young virgins for Lin Li-guo. After a big farewell meeting she was paraded in a jeep from one village to another, waving to the crowds like a queen, then sent to the city of Guangzhou, where the young Lin lived.

“I told you so,” Jia-ying said to me as we watched the procession. “Only in the Tang dynasty were big and tall women considered beautiful. That’s why they turned down Xiao Hong.”

I wished I had brought Number 2’s glasses with me so that I could see what the fuss was about. All I could make out was a petite young woman in a blue Mao jacket, squeezed between two officers in the back seat of a jeep. In a society where beauty was officially labelled bourgeois, where femininity was condemned and where women and girls wore blue, brown or gray Mao suits, cut their hair short (unless they were young) and tried hard to look revolutionary, many women did not carry mirrors. I used the window glass to braid my pigtails.

Great-Aunt had once said, “A human being needs fine clothes the way a Buddha statue needs gold paint to enhance its glory.” But I had grown up wearing my brothers’ shabby clothes. How could I be good-looking, as Jia-ying had told me? No one else had ever even hinted that I was attractive. Until my friend made that remark I had never really thought much about how I looked to others, especially boys.

That evening I borrowed Jia-ying’s mirror. Outside, in the fading light, careful not to be observed, I had a long look at myself. I saw a young woman with jet-black braids, an oval face with even teeth and large eyes with folded lids. Folded eyelids were considered more beautiful than unfolded.

The woman who looked back at me from the little mirror was not beautiful, I thought. Pleasant-looking, perhaps, and certainly not ugly, like Fatty or Loaf. But not lovely.

I recalled my first trip to the farm on the bus. Because I knew no one and I had sat alone on a seat for two, the boys had vied with each other to fall “accidentally” into the seat beside me. Absorbed in my feelings about leaving my family, I had
paid no attention at the time, but now I wondered if they too had found me attractive. Was that why they had shyly offered me candy and cookies? Even after some people in my brigade had started to call me “Mila” after a pretty woman in an Albanian movie, I never took it seriously. But at least I didn’t have a thick rump and ugly big breasts like Mila. Chinese standards of beauty preferred a small bosom and a flat bottom.

I turned the mirror over. What did it matter anyway? A woman with my bad blood could be as beautiful as a goddess and no one would give her the time of day.