The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China (14 page)

“I have been robbed of everything,” she declaimed dramatically.

“Are you saying that you have been exploited?” Xiu-ying liked to use her new vocabulary and made every effort to memorize the words and phrases she was learning.

“Exploited?” The newcomer wrinkled her nose, trying to puzzle out what Xiu-ying meant.

“Robbed … made use of by others.” Xiu-ying assumed a superior sardonic air. I was puzzled by this change in her attitude.

“Do they rob you or do you rob them?” asked Tu's wife sharply as she returned from chasing away the children.

The other women giggled and nudged each other.

The strange woman leaped to her feet and yelled, “All right. So I am unclean, but none of you is clean. You all wait and see and one fine day I'll blow the whole thing up.”

Tu's wife quickly averted her eyes from us and turned around. The newcomer lowered her head like a snarling cat and spat out a curse as she hurried away. Her gesture had jogged my memory. She was the woman in the red jacket I had seen with Tu on the night of my arrival in Longxiang.

As soon as she was out of earshot, Tu's wife came back to us and muttered vindictively, “That ‘Broken Shoe'!”

That explained their hostility: A “broken shoe” was ready to fit any man's foot, big or small. I wondered if Tu's
wife knew that her husband was visiting the Broken Shoe at night.

“She is forced into it,” said a woman with a flat, freckled face. She stated this as a fact rather than with sympathy and stressed the word “it” with a meaningful drawl.

“There are other widows in this village. They may remarry—sometimes that's fate—but they don't sleep around,” said another woman, looking up from her task of cleaning her little daughter's head.

“Da Niang's husband died when she was not much older than Broken Shoe. But she has remained virtuous.” Tu's wife spoke with a vehemence which stirred my curiosity even more. I remembered someone—Cheng, I suppose—telling me that she herself had been married before she met Tu, but she obviously chose to ignore this fact now.

“Who is Da Niang?” I asked Xiu-ying.

“She's the old widow who lives in that cottage you stayed in before you moved to our house. A-rong is her younger son,” Xiu-ying whispered in my ear.

I remembered: Da Niang was the woman who had kept her door closed against me the night I arrived in Longxiang. And she and Tu's wife were friends.

“A-rong is making trouble again.” Tu's wife spat in the direction where the older children were running together again with bloodcurdling cries.

All of a sudden there was a confused, scuffling knot of boys, shouting and yelling. Another band of children rushed around the side of a cottage and showers of stones fell on the scuffling group. A battle was raging. Some children cried as the rocks found their targets. They were from all the homes in the village, children of landlords and rich peasants as well as poor peasants and laborers. Xiu-ying's brother was among them.

One child was knocked off balance and fell as he ran. Two other boys pounced on him and mercilessly began to pummel him. The beaten child screamed. It was A-rong. He was down on his belly and tried desperately to raise his back, straining to throw off his tormentors. I bent my arm over my head to shield it from the blows as I ran into the
crowd of children and bent over A-rong. I wanted to cover his escape, but he crawled out from under my arm, and darting at a boy twice his size, butted him with his head.

“You sons of bad eggs! You rotten feudal landlords!” he screamed, beside himself with rage and hurt.

A stone hit him in the chest, and he doubled over with his hand squeezed to his breast. For a moment they all stopped fighting and circled around A-rong, watching expectantly and stamping their feet with excitement. Then, with a movement as swift as lightning, he snatched up a stone and aimed it wildly at the children around him.

As he did so, another stone hit his forehead. Blood trickled down over his eyebrows, around the corner of his eyes, and over his cheek, forming bright red lines on his face. My heart ached at the sight. I grasped him by the shoulders. “Go home,” I ordered him sharply.

His shirt collar was in tatters and it came off in my hand as he wriggled free. He seized the chance to rush at his enemies again. I tried to hold him from behind but only got a grip on his trousers. There was a rent and half of his bottom was left showing. The children burst out laughing and clapped delightedly. The more helpless and humiliated he looked, the more hilarious they became. Friends and enemies, they screamed with laughter. Doubled up with glee, they rolled on the ground. As suddenly as it had begun, the tension broke. Then, feeling a little guilty, they slipped away to find other games to play.

Slowly, all by himself, A-rong got to his feet in a daze. Shaking with fear and anger, he turned to me, stretching out his skinny arms. His clothes suddenly seemed to dangle on his thin body. His eyes, filled with confused tears, seemed to be saying to me, “But I was only doing what you taught me to do. Wasn't I right?”

7
  

Wang Sha and Malvolio Cheng were having as difficult a time as I was. The men were no more open-minded than their wives and even more cautious. Alone with Wang Sha or Cheng, however, some would reveal what they knew about the situation in the township, and in this way, with Shen and Tu's help and Xiu-ying's confidences to me, we gradually began to build up a picture of Longxiang.

No one knew for certain, but it appeared that three or four families owned a little less than half of the arable land thereabouts and with this hold on land had dominated the place. Among this handful of landlords the most powerful was a man named Chi, and though he kept a low profile these days, he was clearly still their leader.

Under this landlord domination, the landless hired hands were the worst off. They were at the beck and call of the landlords and the few peasants rich enough to hire them. To get enough land to make a living on, the landless and landpoor peasants had to rent land from the landlords, and they paid dearly for it—usually half or more of the harvest—and all of them were over their heads in debt to them as well. The middle peasants, as we had heard before we came, were subsisting on their own land, but precariously. There was little leeway for error or bad luck in their farming. There is an old peasant saying: “Snatch the harvest from the dragon's maw.” In peasant folklore the
dragon is a symbol of rain and here in North and Northwest China the rain appears sometimes with startling suddenness during or right after the summer harvest. In just a few hours the weather turns cold; a chill wind blows, the dragon's breath; black clouds fill the sky; and the rain comes down in torrents. If the harvest isn't stacked but lies out in the fields or on the threshing floor, a farmer can be ruined in a day. Such a ravening storm the previous year had forced several farmers into debt despite the fact that the new government had prohibited usury.

Now it was all so clear to me. The only way to give the peasants a fresh start was to break the grip of the likes of Chi by taking away their power over land.

“Let's go ahead and do it,” I proclaimed boldly when we met to go over our first week's work.

“We can't do it for the peasants. Only they can find out how much land the landlords have and who owns what,” Wang Sha pointed out.

“The landlords can't make the land disappear,” I rejoined aggressively. I wanted to hold his attention with my cleverness.

“Yes they can,” he replied mysteriously.

“They don't look like magicians to me. They all hang their heads and walk around like ghosts. I can't tell one face from another, because I've hardly seen them.”

“You had better believe me when I tell you that the landlords can make not only their land disappear but a lot more too. They have probably already bribed or blackmailed some of the peasants to join their conspiracies. Those peasants will claim land that actually belongs to the landlords and hide other property for them as well. They'll wait for us to leave, and then all that will go right back to the landlords.” He spoke with a slightly condescending touch of authority, but it sounded provocative to me.

“Then Cheng and I will have to work something out,” I said decidedly, to show our independence. There was more truth in my assertion than I realized then; Wang Sha in fact had very little time left from his many duties to lead the work in Longxiang personally. He was in charge of twenty work teams scattered around the county. He
checked over their activities and kept contact between them in the intervals between the periodic meetings of their delegates. While he was away, we in Longxiang were responsible for day-to-day work. At the moment, this was to get the more active farmers together and in such numbers that they would feel strong and sure of themselves. But Longxiang was cautious.

With few exceptions, everyone was waiting to see which way the wind was going to blow. One of the young farm laborers put it succinctly: “What if I stick my neck out and things don't go as you say they will? I'll be left out on a limb.” And he pulled his worn jacket from his back where Landlord Chi's cudgel had left a long, red weal.

As time went by, though, the peasants grew to like Cheng. They liked his unassuming ways, his clowning, and his good humor. They appreciated his sober good sense, increasingly took him as one of their own, and often stopped in just to chat with him.

Some youngsters were already solidly with us. There was Xiu-ying, of course, and two young men as well. Little Tian was a strapping youngster with a swarthy face. He was helping Shen reorganize the Poor Peasants' Association. Little Gao, with his two large ears always flapping out of his hat, was getting fresh recruits to train for the Peasants' Militia. When they heard that the Poor Peasants' Association ought to accept most of the middle peasants, Little Gao brought along his cousin Gao, a man in his fifties and the village sage, while Little Tian recommended his great-uncle, Old Tian, to Malvolio Cheng.

Old Tian, a middle peasant in his seventies and an unofficial village elder, became a frequent visitor. Although he could not read, he was thoroughly versed in the folktales. His political and social beliefs came from his understanding of tradition and folklore, and the other villagers had great respect for his erudition and opinions. His crony Gao, who could read, was regarded as an intellectual in the village. His clothes were always carefully patched, his chin and head clean-shaven.

“In my lifetime I have seen quite a few dynasties change. They rose and they fell,” said Old Tian, stroking
the wispy thread of beard on his chin. To him all the rulers of modern China were still emperors.

“So there was no difference between them?” asked Malvolio Cheng, comprehending both the words and the dispassionate tone in which they were spoken.

“No. They all sent their inspector-generals to Longxiang. The landlords entertained them with banquets and gave them presents. After that, they said they were satisfied with what they saw, and they left. Nothing changed.”

“But this time we come to be your friends, not the landlords',” I interposed. “We are your guests, not the landlords'.” I was annoyed that they completely ignored me in their conversation and seemed to take it for granted that young women should be seen—if at all—but not heard.

“Once in my native place … um … erh …” Gao paused and thought for a while, unhurried. “It was more than twenty years ago that there came some imperial inspector-generals. They talked like you do and they dressed like you too.” He pointed the stem of his pipe at Malvolio Cheng's cadre-style jacket to emphasize the point. He was answering my question through Cheng. “They came to talk to us. They seemed to be nice people. But the landlords came back with their militia, and that wasn't all. An army came from Changan with shiny new arms—an all-conquering host, like the Emperor's army of old. Your guys with rusty old guns were no match for them. They had to clear out. We found ourselves in deep water. Everyone who had accepted land was called a rebel. The landlords settled accounts and killed us like flies. I was lucky. I have long legs and could run faster than they. In fact, that's how I came to settle here.”

“I well understand your misgivings. In more than twenty years I have worked with the peasants in many places.” To bring me into the conversation Cheng turned to me and added, “That was during the civil war period. Every time we moved into a new area and took it from the warlords and the Guomindang, we tried to help the peasants get back their old lands. But as soon as the Guomindang army reoccupied a place they undid what we had done and gave the land back to the landlords. For a time it
was a seesaw struggle, and in some places it was a terrible time for the peasants.”

Taking Malvolio Cheng's cue I added, “But this time the landlords and their gangs are finished for good. And what's left of that ‘heavenly host' has run away to Taiwan along with Chiang Kai-shek.”