China Witness (38 page)

XINRAN:
Were cadres in the past as corrupt as they are now?

CHANGZHENG:
Very few of them were. I think it's because now they don't have much to worry about, and they have a good standard of living. Some cadres develop the wrong attitude to their work – they do a bit and they think they're great. They guzzle huge dinners and gulp down the liquor – that's something I can't get used to. I was asked to give a lecture at
Shanghai University, and they invited me to dinner afterwards. I said, "I'm not eating your food. Thank you for inviting me to speak today. When I was on the Long March, we ate roots and leather, and those hardships and those struggles were what I was talking about today. If I come and eat your banquet, then none of my stories would mean anything, would they!?"

XINRAN:
How many survivors of the Long March of your age are there in the world?

CHANGZHENG:
If you add together those in Chinese cities and villages, there are reported to be only around two thousand of us in total.

*

I accompanied him to the next-door room where he would take a rest. Changzheng's wife watched his hands gripping the dragon-head walking stick, and said to me: "That walking stick has a radio and an alarm – it has everything. He was given it at the ceremony at the Great Hall of the People. His life has not been easy. I suppose you've seen his feet. So many scars – all of them from the Long March. His life has not been easy, not easy at all." She then sat down for a chat with me.

*

XINRAN:
He's just told me how well you look after him. You do the main jobs at home, right?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
That's right, I do everything at home myself, I do all the tidying up, I don't need anyone's help.

XINRAN:
May I ask how old you are?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
I'm seventy-seven. Thirteen years younger than him. We married in the army. I was a soldier too. We married in 1947.

XINRAN:
I'd like to ask you, if I may, how you met your husband.

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
Times were hard back then. Women comrades who had no education, we couldn't think about things like that, so our chiefs did the matchmaking for us! Think of it – a difference of thirteen years between us.

XINRAN:
And what did you feel when you first set eyes on him?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
It didn't matter what I thought, we had to do what we were told by our chiefs.

XINRAN:
Did you have a boyfriend back then?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
No.

XINRAN:
No?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
Well, discipline in the army was very strict, so there was none of that sort of thing. We were in the vehicle unit, we were always on the move so we were always busy.

XINRAN:
Where did you join the army?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
In Jilin, where my family were.

XINRAN:
You joined in 1947?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
We were a very poor family. My father, his sister-in-law and his older sister all joined up. After they had joined, my father said to me: "Guiying, you join up too. The good thing is they'll give
you your meals." My grandmother disagreed. She said: "You must have seen how hard it is being a soldier. It's no life for a girl! If you're all soldiers and the GMD come, they'll kill our whole family!" My mother didn't want me to go either. But I joined up anyway. I hadn't been in the army long, when my chief introduced me to him. At first I wasn't keen, because when he talked I couldn't understand him.

XINRAN:
How many of your age group joined up in that way?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
Quite a few. But they checked you very carefully back then. They wouldn't let you in if you were from a rich family. I'd done six years of primary school in the north-east, but then the Japanese devils came, and you couldn't go on at school. Being a soldier was another way of leaving home, wasn't it? So that was how I left my home village.

XINRAN:
Your five children, what do they do?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
My oldest daughter worked for Great Wall Lubricants, but she's retired now. The second daughter has been in the army for twenty-one years; she's still a doctor in Sichuan. The third was also in Great Wall Lubricants, and is also retired now. The fourth works in Capital Hospital in Beijing, after being in a commune during the Cultural Revolution. The youngest also became a commune member. None of them were wild, like children in some families, they're all very decent. When they were small, I didn't worry about them. I went out to work, and I brought them up too. I was in the army then, and in my position as a cadre, I could get a nanny. Later on, you could take them to work with you. In 1955, there were too many people in the army, and there were economic problems in the country too. There were cuts, and I was made redundant. I couldn't afford the nanny any more, so after that I took care of the children.

XINRAN:
What benefits do you get now?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
I get money from the
National Civil Administration Department, but it's a bit of a problem. After I left my job, I did "army dependants support work" for twenty-five years, but I never got a fen for it, except the last two years, when they paid me a little, twenty yuan a month. I've dedicated myself to the army for my whole life and I've hardly got a thing. The government ought to fix up jobs for ex-army people like me. The National Civil Administration Department has regulations for demobbed soldiers, they pay them a few hundred yuan a month, but no one's said straight out what I should
get, so I have no income now. But in any case, we've got my husband's house to live in and the children are very good. Everything's fine and I've nothing to complain about.

I'm an impatient sort of person, and if I want to do something, I'm not worried about it being hard work. The grandchildren phone me and say: "Granny, get yourself someone to help, I'll pay for it." But I can still do it on my own, I don't want a maid. I do all the buying, cooking and cleaning myself and getting someone in won't spare me any worries.

XINRAN:
What kind of upbringing did you give your children?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
When I was a child we were poor and we had no needle and thread so I had never done needlework. But after I had the children, I did all my own sewing. I got the kids ready for bed and I started work. That meant making everything clean as a whistle, wiping the floor, washing the clothes . . . then I made their clothes. Every winter, the whole family needed two outfits each. I lined the cotton with kapok and slowly stitched it together. When it was done, and nice and clean, then I went to bed. The next evening I did the same again. I didn't take a siesta like everyone else. When we first got a sewing machine, I didn't know how to use it, but I knew I could learn. I practised by sewing bits of rag, old bits of clothes, and kept on going at it, practising on scraps, and that way I taught myself.

XINRAN:
There's another question I'd like to ask you. I've visited many couples, but very few husbands have expressed such a high opinion of their wives as yours has. So I'd like to hear what you think about things, since there's a thirteen-year age difference between you. When people get old, they probably think more about what happened in the past, and the further back in the past, the easier it is for them to remember. What part of your life do you think most about? Your childhood, your parents, or the difficulties you had bringing up your children?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
I don't have anything I think about, I don't have any views on that.

XINRAN:
Do you never think about your mother when you look at other people, and when you look at your children? Don't you think about when you were little?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
Oh yes, I do. I was the only girl in the family, and I had two elder brothers and one younger. When I joined the army, girls could earn a bit doing cleaning work. I saved it and bought things
for them when I went home. The thing I most regret is that my mother didn't live long enough to enjoy our good fortune. We live well now, but she's not here. I often think of her.

XINRAN:
When did you last see her?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
I last saw her when she was eighty-three. She died soon after that. I can't bear to think about it. My husband was in the army, and we were a bit better off. I wanted her to come and live with us, but she wouldn't come. She said she was too old-fashioned: since she had a son, it wasn't right to go and live in her daughter's house. My mother had her principles, and she didn't want to be a nuisance. My father worked on the railways and could travel free, so he always used to come and see us, and my mother came several times to fetch him and take him home. But every time she arrived, she'd go straight home with him. Eventually he got too old and retired, and they didn't come any more.

XINRAN:
Did you ever hear how they met each other, your mum and dad?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
In those days it was all done by the parents. The old folks paired them up – they'd never met before they married. When my mother talked about it sometimes, she was very against that way of doing things.

XINRAN:
How did you help your mother when you were a child?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
Cooking, putting the cotton wadding into quilts, washing, making quilt covers, that kind of thing. I was always tired when I worked, I was always yawning. My dad said to me: "If you're so tired when you work, you'll never finish such a big quilt. If you don't finish it, what are we going to put on the bed at night?" I didn't pay attention, I carried on very slowly with the wadding. I had so little to eat when I was a kid, I was always hungry, and then I was too tired to work. So my mum gave in, and said I could go and be a soldier and save my life. That was how it was at home.

XINRAN:
Have you ever talked to your children about how things were then?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
No, I haven't.

XINRAN:
Why not?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
Because it makes me too sad. Besides, my children have never wasted money or food like other people's children do. They're good kids, they've never given me any cause for worry.

XINRAN:
If anyone asked you what was the hardest time of your life, what would you say?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
When I was at home, before I joined up, that was the hardest. In order to get that bit of schooling, I had to go out weeding in the heat of the day in the summer. I didn't want to go. My mother said: "You're doing it to go to school, aren't you?" So then I went. In those days, boys got sent to school, but no one bothered about the girls. My mother was a capable woman, she reared pigs and sold them, and kept chickens. I remember when I was a kid, before Liberation, there were bandits, they were terrible, scared us to death. We lived in a small house and the bandits tried to get inside. The door was shut and they were banging away on it, which was frightening in the middle of the night. We were so poor then that we didn't even eat dumplings at New Year. I remember when I was a kid, the Japanese devils came and killed the cattle. They hung their hides up outside, and they got covered in flies, but some people still ate the scraps of meat left on them. If pigs and chickens died, no one cared, you ate them because, if you didn't, you starved.

XINRAN:
Your husband told us earlier what a hard time he'd had. Has he ever talked to you about it?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
Sometimes about the Long March. Actually, he doesn't need to say anything – you saw his feet, his toenails. The veins are all black and the toes are thickened, all from walking. I was a soldier too, so I know what he went through, and it was all for China.

XINRAN:
Was it worth giving all those years of his life, do you think?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
Oh yes. If that generation hadn't made the sacrifice, and we still had what Chairman Mao called the "three mountains" of feudalism, imperialism and the GMD on our backs, then where would we be today? I think it was definitely worth it.

XINRAN:
Do you think that young people today understand what your generation went through and what you did?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
Some do, but some don't.

XINRAN:
Is there anything else you'd like to tell me? If you had your life again, would you still set up a family with Mr Changzheng?

CHANGZHENG'S WIFE:
My old man's OK, he's a good man. We've never fought about things, we get on really well. We only fought once. It was in Guangxi, and his office was in our house. Our eldest daughter was squabbling with a friend and he wanted to shout at them, but I wouldn't let
him. We only fought that once, and it never happened again. I must have been twenty-two then. In 1997 we had our fiftieth wedding anniversary, and next year it's our diamond anniversary. It's hard to believe we'll have been together sixty years.

XINRAN:
You can see his rosy cheeks, and he's in good voice and good heart. He's a credit to you.

*

I was not able to find here the answers to the questions I had been asking about the Long March. If we were lucky and these old people lasted until there was real freedom of speech in China, then we might really be able to prove or disprove some of the stories of the past. But perhaps it was already too late, the old had taken the "real yesterdays" away with them, and that was another loss to the Chinese people.

But the "marital Long March" of these old Red Army soldiers was a success which led me onward.