The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices (2 page)

The police officer on the other end of the line told me to calm down. ‘This sort of thing happens a lot. If everyone reacted like you, we’d be worked to death. Anyway, it’s a hopeless case. We have piles of reports here, and our human and financial resources are limited. I would be very wary of getting mixed up in it if I were you. Villagers like that aren’t afraid of anyone or anything; even if we turned up there, they’d torch our cars and beat up our officers. They will go to incredible lengths to make sure that their family lines are perpetuated so as not to sin against their ancestors by failing to produce an heir.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘Are you telling me you are not going to take responsibility for this girl?’

‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t, but . . .’

‘But what?’

‘But there’s no need to hurry, we can take it step by step.’

‘You can’t leave someone to die step by step!’

The policeman chuckled. ‘No wonder they say that policemen fight fire and journalists start fire. What was your name again?’

‘Xin . . . ran,’ I said through gritted teeth.

‘Yes, yes, Xinran, good name. All right, Xinran, come over. I’ll help you.’ He sounded as if he was doing me a favour rather than performing his duty.

I went straight to his office. He was a typical Chinese police officer: robust and alert, with a shifty expression.

‘In the countryside,’ he said, ‘the heavens are high and the emperor is far away.’ In his opinion the law had no power there. The peasants feared only the local authorities who controlled their supplies of pesticide, fertiliser, seeds and farming tools.

The policeman was right. In the end, it was the head of the village agricultural supplies depot who managed to save the girl. He threatened to cut off the villagers’ supply of fertiliser if they did not release her. Three policemen took me to the village in a police car. When we arrived, the village head had to clear the way for us through the villagers, who were shaking their fists and cursing us. The girl was only twelve years old. We took her away from the old man, who wept and swore bitterly. I dared not ask after the schoolboy who had written to me. I wanted to thank him, but the police officer told me that if the villagers found out what he had done, they might murder him and his family.

Witnessing the power of the peasants first-hand, I began to understand how Mao had defeated Chiang Kai-shek and his British and American weapons with their help.

The girl was sent back to her family in Xining – a twenty-two-hour train journey from Nanjing – accompanied by a police officer and someone from the radio station. It turned out that her parents had run up a debt of nearly 10,000 yuan searching for her.

I received no praise for the rescue of this girl, only criticism for ‘moving the troops about and stirring up the people’ and wasting the radio station’s time and money. I was shaken by these complaints. A young girl had been in danger and yet going to her rescue was seen as ‘exhausting the people and draining the treasury’. Just what was a woman’s life worth in China?

This question began to haunt me. Most of the people who wrote to me at the radio station were women. Their letters were often anonymous, or written under an assumed name. Much of what they said came as a profound shock to me. I had believed that I understood Chinese women. Reading their letters, I realised how wrong my assumption had been. My fellow women were living lives and struggling with problems I had not dreamed of.

Many of the questions they asked me related to their sexuality. One woman wanted to know why her heart beat faster when she accidentally bumped into a man on the bus. Another asked why she broke out into a sweat when a man touched her hand. For so long, all discussion of sexual matters had been forbidden and any physical contact between a man and woman who were not married had led to public condemnation – being ‘struggled against’ – or even imprisonment. Even between a husband and wife ‘pillow talk’ could be taken as evidence of delinquent behaviour, and, in family quarrels, people would often threaten to denounce their partners to the police for having indulged in it. As a result, two generations of Chinese had grown up with their natural instincts in confusion. I myself was once so ignorant that, even at the age of twenty-two, I refused to hold hands with a male teacher at a bonfire party for fear of getting pregnant. My understanding of conception was gleaned from a line in a book: ‘They held hands under the light of the moon . . . In spring they had a bouncing baby son.’ I found myself wanting to know much more about the intimate lives of Chinese women and decided to start researching their different cultural backgrounds.

Old Chen was the first person I told about my project. He had been a journalist for a very long time and was highly respected. It was said that even Nanjing’s mayor came to him for advice. I often consulted him about my work, out of deference to his seniority, but also to draw on his considerable experience. This time, however, his reaction surprised me. He shook his head, which was so bald you couldn’t tell where his scalp ended and his face began, and said, ‘Naive!’

I was taken aback. Chinese people consider baldness a sign of wisdom. Was I wrong? Why was it so naive to want to understand Chinese women?

I told a friend who worked at the university about Old Chen’s warning.

‘Xinran,’ he said, ‘have you ever been inside a sponge cake factory?’

‘No,’ I replied, confused.

‘Well, I have. So I never eat sponge cake.’ He suggested that I try visiting a bakery to see what he meant.

I am impatient by nature, so at five o’clock the next morning I made my way to a bakery that was small but had a good reputation. I hadn’t announced my visit, but I didn’t expect to encounter any difficulty. Journalists in China are called ‘kings without crowns’. They have the right of free entry to almost any organisation in the country.

The manager at the bakery did not know why I had come but he was impressed by my devotion to my job: he said that he had never seen a journalist up so early to gather material. It was not yet fully light; under the dim light of the factory lamps, seven or eight female workers were breaking eggs into a large vat. They were yawning and clearing their throats with a dreadful hawking noise. The intermittent sound of spitting made me feel uneasy. One woman had egg yolk all over her face, most probably from wiping her nose rather than some obscure beauty treatment. I watched two male workers add flavouring and colour to a thin flour paste that had been prepared the day before. The mixture had the eggs added to it and was then poured into tins on a conveyor belt. When the tins emerged from the oven, a dozen or so female workers packed the cakes into boxes. They had crumbs at the corners of their mouths.

As I left the factory, I remembered something a fellow journalist had once told me: the dirtiest things in the world are not toilets or sewers, but food factories and restaurant kitchens. I resolved never to eat sponge cake again, but could not work out how what I had seen related to the question of understanding women.

I rang my friend, who seemed disappointed with my lack of perception.

‘You have seen what those beautiful, soft cakes went through to become what they are. If you had only looked at them in the shop, you would never have known. However, although you might succeed in describing how badly managed the factory is and how it contravenes health regulations, do you think it will stop people wanting to eat sponge cake? It’s the same with Chinese women. Even if you manage to get access to their homes and their memories, will you be able to judge or change the laws by which they live their lives? Besides, how many women will actually be willing to give up their self-respect and talk to you? I’m afraid I think that your colleague is indeed wise.’

Old Chen and my friend at the university were certainly right about one thing. It would be very difficult to find women who would be prepared to speak freely to me. For Chinese women, the naked body is an object of shame, not beauty. They keep it covered. To ask women to let me interview them would be like asking them to take off their clothes. I realised that I would have to try more subtle ways to find out about their lives.

The letters I received from my listeners, full of longing and hope, were my point of departure. I asked my director whether I could add a special women’s mailbox feature to the end of my programme, in which I would discuss and perhaps read out some of the letters I received. He was not opposed to the idea: he too wanted to understand what Chinese women were thinking so that he could address his tense relationship with his wife. However, he could not authorise the feature himself; I would have to send an application to the central office. I was only too familiar with this procedure: the ranks of officials in our station were merely glorified errand boys, with no executive power. The upper echelons had the last word.

Six weeks later, my application form was sent back, festooned with four red seals of official approval. The time of my proposed feature had been cut down to ten minutes. Even so, I felt like manna had fallen from heaven.

The impact of my ten-minute women’s mailbox slot went far beyond my expectations: the number of listeners’ letters increased to a point where I was receiving over a hundred a day. Six university students had to help me with my post. The subject matter of the letters was becoming more varied too. The stories the listeners told me had taken place all over the country, at many different times during the past seventy or so years, and came from women of very different social, cultural and professional backgrounds. They revealed worlds that had been hidden from view to the majority of the population, including myself. I was deeply moved by the letters. Many of them included personal touches such as pressed flowers, leaves or bark, and hand-crocheted mementos.

One afternoon, I returned to my office to find a parcel and a short note from the gatekeeper on my desk. Apparently, a woman of about forty had delivered the parcel and asked the gatekeeper to pass it on to me; she had not left a name or address. Several colleagues advised me to hand the parcel to the security department for inspection before opening it, but I resisted. I felt that fate could not be second-guessed, and a strong impulse urged me to open the parcel at once. Inside was an old shoebox, with a pretty drawing of a human-looking fly on the lid. The colours had almost completely faded. A sentence had been written next to the fly’s mouth: ‘Without spring, flowers cannot bloom; without the owner, this cannot be opened.’ A small lock had been cleverly fitted to the lid.

I hesitated: ought I to open it? Then I spotted a tiny note which had clearly been pasted on recently: ‘Xinran, please open this.’

The box was filled with yellowing, faded pieces of paper. Covered in writing, the pieces of paper were not uniform in size, shape or colour: they were mostly scrap paper of the kind used for hospital records. It looked like a diary. There was also a thick recorded-delivery letter. It was addressed to Yan Yulong at Production Team X, Shandong Province, and was from someone called Hongxue, who gave as her address a hospital in Henan Province. The letter was postmarked 24 August 1975. It was also open, and written at the top of it were the words, ‘Xinran, I respectfully ask you to read every word. A faithful listener.’

Since I did not have time to look at the scraps of paper before I went on air, I decided to read the letter first:

Dear Yulong,

Are you all right? I am sorry not to have written sooner, there is no real reason for it, it’s just that I have too much to say, and I don’t know where to start. Please forgive me.

It is already too late to beg you to forgive my terrible, irrevocable mistake, but I still want to say to you, Dear Yulong, I am sorry!

You asked me two questions in your letter: ‘Why are you unwilling to see your father?’ and ‘What made you think of drawing a fly, and why did you make it so beautiful?’

Dear Yulong, both of these questions are very, very painful for me but I will try to answer them.

What girl does not love her father? A father is a big tree sheltering the family, the beams that support a house, the guardian of his wife and children. But I don’t love my father – I hate him.

On New Year’s Day of the year I turned eleven, I got out of bed early in the morning to find myself bleeding inexplicably. I was so frightened that I burst into tears. My mother, who came when she heard me, said, ‘Hongxue, you’ve grown up.’ No one – not even Mama – had told me about women’s matters before. At school nobody had dared ask such outrageous questions. That day, Mama gave me some basic advice about how to cope with the bleeding, but did not explain anything else. I was excited: I had become a woman! I ran about in the courtyard, jumping and dancing, for three hours. I even forgot about lunch.

One day in February, it was snowing heavily and Mama was out visiting a neighbour. My father was back home from the military base, on one of his rare visits. He said to me, ‘Your mother says you’ve grown up. Come, take off your clothes for Papa to see if it is true.’

I didn’t know what he wanted to see, and it was so cold – I didn’t want to get undressed.

‘Quick! Papa will help you!’ he said, deftly removing my clothes. He was totally unlike his usual slow-moving self. He rubbed my whole body with his hands, asking me all the time: ‘Are those little nipples swollen? Is it here that the blood comes from? Do those lips want to kiss Papa? Does it feel nice when Papa rubs you like this?’

I felt mortified. Ever since I could remember, I had never been naked in front of anyone except in the segregated public baths. My father noticed me shivering. He told me not to be afraid, and warned me not to tell Mama. ‘Your mother has never liked you,’ he said. ‘If she finds out I love you this much she will want even less to do with you.’

This was my first ‘woman’s experience’. Afterwards, I felt very sick.