The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up (15 page)

LIAO:
That was quite dramatic.

FENG:
Well, before Wenxin regained consciousness, I left the clinic in a trance. Then leaders of the Communist Youth League came to talk with me. They wanted me to review the list of Rightists in my department and then sign off on it. With my signature, they were going to submit the list to the city government. I refused to sign the paper, which included Wenxin's name. When the Party secretary and the president of my university heard about it, they came to my dorm and tried to talk me into signing it. I knew that my refusal could jeopardize my future. But I was quite stubborn and didn't budge.

The university president warned me: The Party has spent many years training and nurturing you. You should understand your boundary and don't trash your future. I retorted: The Party should be honest and transparent. Why would the Party secretary lie about my relationship with Wenxin? The president patted me on the back and said, Don't you know that the Party secretary tried to protect you from the criticism? I didn't agree: Wenxin should be treated as our ally. She has betrayed her family and is willing to join the revolution. But the president laughed at me: Don't be fooled by her act. If she is as progressive as you have suggested, why did she take you to visit her father's concubine? She attempted to entice you into her world and corrupt your revolutionary spirit. We know everything you and she did. I was flabbergasted. The Party secretary continued: You are the one who is insane at the moment. You would throw away your political future for the sake of that woman.

I became incensed and started to argue with the president: I don't agree with the charges against Wenxin. I swear to the Party that she is nowhere close to being a Rightist. The president banged on the desk and yelled at me: You'd better think before you open your mouth. Your judgment has been clouded by your emotions. For a young hot-blooded guy like you, it's understandable. But human emotion has to succumb to reason and political thinking. Chairman Mao teaches us, there is no such thing in the world as pure love. You can't love an enemy. I was so irrational and blurted out something that I had never said before: I love her. The Party secretary looked at me and softened his tone: OK. You have to make a choice between that woman and the Party. I said again, very firmly: I love her.

Two weeks later, I was expelled from the Party and was labeled a Rightist as well as a bad element.

LIAO:
Were you officially dating Wenxin at that time?

FENG:
No, we were just friends. She liked me but certainly not as a boyfriend. She was just grateful that I was willing to talk with her since none of her classmates wanted to have anything to do with her. Wenxin changed my political views. Before the Communists came, my family was so poor that I had to beg on the street. One time, I knocked on the door of a landlord, asking for food. The guy let his dog out to chase me away. As the dog was barking at me, I barked back. I ended up biting half of the dog's ear off. That incident made me hate that landlord. After 1949, the Communists told me that it wasn't that specific landlord who was merciless. The whole ruling class was evil. Since then, I started to despise all people who belonged to the landlord or capitalist class. But talking with Wenxin helped me see things differently. I no longer believed in Mao's “class struggle” theory.

LIAO:
So what happened to you?

FENG:
Have you read the American writer Edgar Snow's book,
Red China Today
? In the book, the author interviewed an American-educated Chinese intellectual who had returned to China to join the revolution. That intellectual became a Rightist. This is how he described his experience: “Everybody in my bureau, from the office boy or scrubwoman up, can tell me how bourgeois I am, criticize my personal habits, my family life, my intellectual arrogance, the way I spend my leisure, even my silences. I have to sit and take it . . . Some people prefer suicide rather than submit to it. It took me years to get used to it but now I believe it has been good to me.” This is exactly what happened to me and Wenxin. After graduation, I was denied a job. I stayed at home and had to attend public denunciation meetings. In the old days, I was the one who was in charge at those meetings and always criticized others. Then, as a Rightist, I was the target all the time. Like the guy in Snow's book, I got used to it, especially after I had kids.

LIAO:
Did you ever regret your decision?

FENG:
No. Many people felt sorry for me, for what they called “my sudden irrational act.” But I think it was a good thing. Between the Party and a woman, I picked the latter. People need to put their personal life first, don't you think, young man? We joined the Communist revolution so we could live a better life, have enough to eat, marry a beautiful woman, and raise a family. This basic concept was totally distorted in the Mao era. All we talked about were the abstract ideas such as the Party and the People. Private lives were considered something disgraceful. You can't marry the Party or the People, can you? We used to hear phony stuff like “So-and-so has been nurtured by the Party and the People.” What do the Party's breasts look like?

I would really regret the rest of my life if I had signed the paper and supported the Party's decision to punish Wenxin and other Rightists. Things have changed today. We really should thank Deng Xiaoping for ending the era when humans lived like ghosts, devoid of any feelings or emotions.

LIAO:
How did you make Wenxin love you?

FENG:
After I became a Rightist, I was somehow at peace with myself. I wrote her a love letter. One night, I snuck out and stopped by her stepmother's house. I pushed the letter in through a slit in the door and rushed back home. I sent five or six letters that way and never got anything back from her. I made lots of inquiries and found out that Wenxin had been exiled to a state farm in Aksu, in Xinjiang. So I went to look for her. I took a train, and then a long-distance bus. By the time I got there, I had literally no money in my pocket. I begged my way around. Then I was detained by the local police for migrating without a permit. They were going to send me to a detention center in the middle of the Taklimakan Desert. I told them that I was looking for Wenxin. It so happened that the detention center was not too far away, on the northwestern side of her farm. Authorities contacted the farm, found Wenxin, and confirmed my story. The day they dropped me off at her farm, I saw her picking cotton in the field. Her face was so tanned and she looked healthy—reform through hard labor had done some good to her health. Anyhow, when I called her name, she hardly recognized me. It took her quite a while to realize that the guy with the disheveled look in front of her was her beloved Feng Zhongci.

The rest is just history, nothing extraordinary. We were both Rightists. In that sense, we were quite a match. Since I went all the way to court her, she couldn't reject me, even though I wasn't her ideal companion. After we asked permission to marry from the authorities at her farm, they were quite accommodating. They issued her a travel certificate and granted her two weeks of vacation. So we came back to Chengdu and obtained our marriage certificate from the city. Then, after the wedding, we both applied for the cancellation of our city residential permit and moved to Xinjiang. A counterrevolutionary couple was willing to relocate to China's frontier to support the socialist revolution. Nobody had objections to that. Since Aksu was so far away from the political center, our lives were really unaffected by the ensuing political campaigns. In the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping reversed the Party's earlier verdict against Rightists, we brought our two Xinjiang-born kids back to Chengdu and reunited with the rest of our families. This is pretty much my life. I have to say that right now, I'm pretty contented.

THE RETIRED OFFICIAL

When famine first struck Sichuan in 1960, I was two years old. Since my mother couldn't get enough milk or food to feed me, I was dying from severe edema and my body puffed up like a loaf of bread. Thanks to an herbal doctor, I miraculously survived, but millions of other children and adults didn't. Experts believe that an estimated thirty million people starved to death in the 1958–1961 famine. Zheng Dajun, a retired government official, headed a government work team at a rural region in Sichuan around that time. He witnessed the devastating impact of the famine, which he said was a shameful chapter in the history of the Chinese Communist Party.

I met Zheng in June of 2002 at a resort in Huilonggou, Chongqing County. Zheng was seventy-two years old. He was short with broad shoulders and looked very distinguished. Before his retirement, Zheng had held senior positions in the Sichuan provincial government.

LIAO YIWU:
When I was growing up, we normally referred to the 1958–1961 famine as “three years of natural disasters.” The government attempted to cover up its mistakes by blaming the famine on drought and flood, even though many areas hit by the famine had mild weather conditions during that time.

ZHENG DAJUN:
Most people knew exactly what had happened, but nobody dared to challenge the official version. That part of the history has been treated as a “state secret.” In 1959, Marshal Peng Dehuai wrote to Chairman Mao and criticized his extreme policies which had led to the disasters. Marshal Peng was purged and persecuted to death during the Cultural Revolution. Things have changed now. From the information that has been made public we have learned that the famine was mostly manmade. I think the Communist Party owes an honest explanation and apology to the Chinese people, especially the peasants.

LIAO:
I don't think that's going to happen soon. Could you tell me about your experience during those three years of hardship?

ZHENG:
I joined the Communist army to fight against the Nationalists in 1948, at the age of eighteen. Two years later, after the new China was founded, I was demobilized and assigned to work in the rural areas. My job was to mobilize peasants to participate in the Land Reform movement. Since my family couldn't afford to send me to school when I was a kid, I was illiterate. So I worked during the day and took literacy classes in the evenings. I made good progress in my education and as a result, I was promoted very fast. By the time I turned twenty-six in 1958, I had become the deputy director of the County Agricultural Task Force.

In the 1950s, people were passionate about the new Communist government and would do anything the Party called on them to do. For example, Chairman Mao said sparrows ate the crops and needed to be eliminated. Soon, a nationwide campaign was launched and everyone turned out to chase and catch sparrows. After two years, sparrows nearly disappeared in China. Little did we know that killing sparrows would disrupt the delicate balance of nature. Sparrows ate crops, but they also ate bugs, which flourished and brought disasters to many areas after the sparrows had gone. But passion was running so high that nobody dared to question the practice in a scientific way. Similar things happened in the Great Leap Forward campaign.

In the spring of 1958, the county chief dispatched me to inspect progress on the Great Leap Forward at the Second Production Division of Dongyang Commune. Let me give you some background because many young people don't know much about that period. The late fifties were a critical period for the Party. The split between the Soviet Union and our country began to widen. The world's two largest socialist countries started turning hostile to each other. Increasingly, the Soviets threatened to withdraw financial aid. Chairman Mao and the Central Party Committee realized that China had to become
zili gengsheng,
or self-reliant and independent. We had to transform our country into an advanced industralized country within a short time. That was why Chairman Mao launched the Great Leap Forward campaign. The slogan at that time was “We are running toward an advanced Communist society.”

The region where I stayed was hilly country, with very fertile land and mild weather conditions. It was famous for rice, wheat, corn, beans, and sweet potatoes. However, after the Great Leap Forward started, people were in such haste to produce results that they began to discard traditional ways of farming. The commune leaders followed instructions from the Party and ordered peasants to use a new method called “reasonable density,” which had been invented by a Soviet scientist. Based on that new method, furrows were plowed very deep. Rice or wheat seedlings were planted very densely. The Party claimed that the method could increase the grain output ten times. Newspapers carried big photos of densely planted rice, with headlines like “Peasants in Such-and-Such County Have Produced Miracles.” Many peasants knew that it was an impossible task, but nobody wanted to be labeled “backward and conservative.” They began to follow suit and experiment. Members of the Dongyang Commune planted and packed the seedlings as tightly as possible in one
mu
[0.164 acre] of farmland. Initially, those green seedlings looked terrific. Not long after our work team left, a friend from the region told us that many had died and the surviving ones didn't pollinate or set. The commune leaders got really worried because another inspection team sent by the provincial government was coming. So they ordered peasants to pull twenty
mu
of healthy rice planted in the traditional way and move them over to a small plot right before the inspection team arrived. As expected, the inspectors left, fully impressed. Reporters wrote a long feature with a big picture of the commune Party secretary. He was seen smiling and waving. The article attracted many admirers and visitors to the region. It became quite a circus. Nationwide, officials tried to outbid one another in producing agricultural miracles. Deception became quite common at that time.

In the fall of 1958, our country switched its focus from agriculture to steel production. Our slogan was
chao-ying-gan-mei
—“surpassing the U.K. and catching up with the U.S.” For the second time, the county sent me to Dongyang Commune with a work team. All the peasants, old and young, men and women, climbed up the nearby mountain. They cut down trees to fuel backyard furnaces and searched for iron ore. Meanwhile, officials went from door to door, ordering peasants to hand over their pots and pans, metal doorknobs, and farm tools for smelting. They kept the furnace going day and night. There was nobody harvesting crops, which were left to rot in the field. The mountain was stripped of forest. To cap it off, the “iron” they produced was totally useless.

LIAO:
After the peasants handed in their pots and pans, how did they cook?

ZHENG:
All private property had been confiscated to pave the way for a full-blown Communist society. They told the peasants to dismantle their stoves for a communal kitchen set up for each village. It became illegal to cook your own meal at home. In one village, all families moved into a big warehouse so they could live together as a big socialist family. Prior to collectivization, many families had raised pigs, sheep, and chickens. Then the commune seized all the animals and penned them in the commune lot.

The second day after our arrival, the Party secretary took us to a communal kitchen at lunchtime. When we walked in, everyone stopped eating, stood up, and welcomed us with applause. Then they began to sing “Socialism is good.” On behalf of the work team, I asked the peasants if they had enough food to eat. They all raised their voices and shouted in unison, Yes. Then a singer from the village performed to the accompaniment of bamboo clappers. He was singing something like this: Peasants no longer depend on heaven or earth for their livelihood. They depend on Chairman Mao and the Communist Party, which has brought happiness and bumper harvests.

I walked up to each table and shook hands with everyone. I noticed corn bread piled up on their tables. Two big pots filled with sweet potato porridge sat in the corner of the kitchen. Each peasant, regardless of age, was allowed four big pieces of corn bread with all the porridge they wanted.

One peasant came up to me and complained that the bread and porridge didn't last long: We need to have some meat or oil. The Party secretary pushed him away by saying: If you work hard, China will become a true Communist society. When that takes place, we will have an abundant supply of meat. You can eat a whole pig if you want.

The guy walked away, with a confused expression on his face. The Party secretary told me to ignore him.

Then he escorted six of us into a private dining room, where a table full of “twice-cooked pork,” “stewed pig intestines,” and roast chicken was waiting. I asked why we were treated differently. The Party secretary answered: The commune leadership had a meeting yesterday and decided to slaughter a pig and some chickens to show our respect for the county work team members. In those years, it was very common for local officials to bribe work team members so they could report good news back to the government. In response, the Central Party Committee had promulgated strict rules to crack down on corruption. So we were very prudent. I told the commune Party secretary to bring us some corn bread and porridge and dish out the meat to peasants during dinner.

In the late fall of 1960, I led another work team to Dongyang Commune. That was my third trip. Things had changed dramatically. The Great Leap Forward distracted peasants from their farmwork. Crop yields were reduced, but peasants had to fulfill the government grain quotas. In many places, commune leaders had turned over the grain that peasants saved over the years to meet the quotas. Peasants were left with little food for the winter.

The once prosperous communal kitchen was in disrepair. The wall separating the kitchen and the dining hall had been demolished because peasants accused cooks of embezzling food. They wanted to see exactly what the cooks were doing. At lunchtime, hundreds of people lined up, each carrying a bowl in their hand. They looked feeble. Lao Wang, a fellow work team member, told the Party secretary not to disturb the lunch crowd. We simply stood outside and watched. The dining hall looked very empty. All the tables and chairs had gone. The food served at lunch was porridge mixed with vegetables, rice, and husks. After people got their share, they squatted around in various circles. Most poured the porridge into their mouths quickly, then they all licked their bowls very attentively, as if they were going to swallow the porcelain container. One local official who was our aide told me in private that having the rice and husk porridge was considered a special treat. Under normal circumstances, they could only have sweet-potato soup. We were really shocked. At the county level, food was scarce but each official was guaranteed a fixed amount per month. Nobody was starving there. Seeing the crowd here, I felt really guilty.

After peasants finished their meals, the Party secretary led us into the dining hall and yelled loudly: Please welcome the comrades from the county work team to our commune. Everyone stood up and began to applaud rhythmically while shouting the slogan three times: The communal kitchen is good. We have excellent food. Thanks to Chairman Mao! Thanks to the Party for leading us onto the socialist road! Before their slogan shouting ended, several people collapsed to the floor, too weak to stand up for so long.

That evening, the work team called a public meeting, where I relayed the latest news to the peasants: Considering the extremely difficult situation in the rural areas, the Party had decided to reverse some of its earlier collectivization policies. Confiscated private property would be returned to its previous owners. Attendees were very excited at the news. One old guy stood up and said with tears in his eyes: Thank heavens! I can finally die under my own roof. But local officials, including the commune Party secretary, pulled long faces and remained sullen throughout my speech. After the meeting was over, the Party secretary pulled me aside and said, There's nothing to give back to the peasants. Over the past two years, people have grabbed and stolen most of the public assets. They even smashed the big rice container in the public kitchen as a protest. I can't blame them because they are hungry. It's hopeless. I criticized him for being too pessimistic about the future. He defended himself by saying: As a Communist Party official, I have tried to do my work. But this is truly a tough situation. More and more people are dying of starvation. Do you know that people in this region are turning into cannibals?

His remarks came as a shock. I probed further. The Party secretary looked around and then whispered to me: My daughter is married to a guy at a village on the other side of the mountain. She ran back home last week, telling me that many little girls in her village have been killed and eaten.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. If what he said was true, I needed to report the information back to the county as soon as possible. So I sent a fellow team member back to headquarters. I borrowed a bicycle and went directly to the village that the Party secretary had mentioned. I briefed Comrade Liu, the head of the work team there. He was totally in the dark about what was going on in the village.