Here’s what I’ve learned in three months of marriage: Even in the New Society, women must care for the husband, children, and older members of the family. They must look after the house, clean, make and wash clothes. All this they do and work outside too. Since the inauguration of the communes, a few adjustments have been made. Three rules now apply to working women: No women may labor in wet places during the visit from the little red sister. Expectant mothers will have light physical tasks. Mothers will toil near their homes. There are some unwritten rules too. At the end of the day, women should be ready to make another baby for the great socialist nation. In return, we are to be happy with a few words of praise or a pat on the arm. I grasp at these things and hold them to my heart as proof of Tao’s love and my worth.
The alternative isn’t so great. “Criticism and self-criticism should apply in marriage,” Tao tells me almost every day. “Unity is possible only when one side wages the essential and proper struggle against errors committed by the other.” Now that we’re married, I commit a lot of blunders in Tao’s eyes.
I was once enamored of Tao, but sex is a huge disappointment. Even if Tao touched me in the right places and wasn’t so rough and fast, how could I feel anything but nervous and uncomfortable with ten people in the other room? Sometimes I ask if we can go to the Charity Pavilion. I want to feel what I felt before we got married. I imagine all the things we could do there if we had that privacy. I’ve even whispered some of them to Tao. I can feel his response in my hand, but he says, “It’s not necessary to go there now. We’re married. You shouldn’t be so self-concerned.” In other words, I’m trying, but so what? He doesn’t care.
Sex is one thing, happiness is another. I hate this place, and I’m not even sure I like Tao now that I’ve gotten to know him.
Does this seem sudden? Not at all. I knew the morning after I married Tao and every morning since that this was a mistake, but in my own stubborn Tiger way I’ve accepted it as the punishment I believe I deserve. On the other hand, I constantly castigate myself for being so easily deceived and swayed. Yes, I’m still as mixed up as always.
I couldn’t talk about these things with my mother when she was here, because I didn’t want her to worry. I tried to act happy in front of her after that night we talked in the villa. I told her what I thought she wanted to hear. I needed her to believe I was happy so she could go back to Shanghai. But the truth is I’m heartbroken. I’ve ruined not just my life but hers as well. My actions have only made things worse, and I’m unable to change or fix them. And now that she’s gone, the dark feelings that have plagued me since my father’s death wrap their oily blackness around me.
ALL THROUGH NOVEMBER, I stay peasant busy—mending clothes, making pickles, storing dried vegetables. Pigs are killed—which is disgusting to begin with—and then soaked in salt water for a couple of weeks, and finally covered with chilies to keep the flies away. Since we’re part of a commune now, the body parts are hung outside the leadership hall instead of individual houses as they once were. We keep eating as much as we want in the canteen, but when December arrives and the temperature drops below freezing—and those cornstalks added to the canteen walls are not much of a barrier against the weather—Brigade Leader Lai introduces rationing.
Tao tells me not to worry. “This always happens between the yellow and the green. The fields are bare of crops, the harvest begins to run out, and the planting that starts at Spring Festival hasn’t happened yet.”
“But I thought we had a bumper harvest,” I say. “How can the commune run out of food?”
“Don’t concern yourself with these matters,” my husband responds, trying to act like a grown-up, but I learn from others that the brigade leader pledged a huge amount of grain to be delivered to the government based on our bumper harvest. He made good on his promise by handing over the inflated amount, told us to eat as much as we liked, and now the granary in the leadership hall is dangerously low.
As the month progresses, it gets colder and damper. Tao’s family home faces north, so we don’t get much warmth from the winter sun. Frost whitens the ground. Standing water freezes overnight. Snow falls sometimes, but it melts quickly. Frigid air blows through cracks around the door and roof. And as far as I’m concerned, the window—we’ve reglued the rice paper over the opening—does absolutely nothing to keep cold air out or warm air in. I can see my breath inside the house all day. Tao’s family has had a long time to learn how to make do. They dress in layer upon layer of padded clothes. I do too, but I never get warm.
I write to my mother every Sunday, since it’s the one day I don’t have to work for the commune. I tell her about Yong, Kumei, and Ta-ming. I tell her about the weather. I tell her that I’m learning how to be a wife. Then, on Monday, I walk down to the pond and wait for the mailman, who visits the different villages that make up the commune on his bicycle. I give him my letter, which he’ll take to be sorted, read, and processed in the leadership hall. Today he hands me a letter, which I read to the entire family:
“Z.G. and I went to a tea party at Madame Sun Yat-sen’s home. She has a beautiful garden with thirty camphor trees. Did you know that she writes all her speeches in English? If you were here, I bet your father could get you a job helping her, since you went to college in America, just like she did. Anyway, representatives from Burma, Nepal, Pakistan, and India also came to the party. You should have seen the women in their saris. They were very elegant compared with the Russian women. Your father talked me into wearing a red silk cheongsam with yellow piping from the old days. Everyone said your father and I were the most handsome guests in attendance. I believe they were right, if I say so myself.”
A week later, she sends Christmas presents—a red scarf, a tin of cookies, and cloth purchased with her cotton coupons. I give the cookies to Tao’s brothers and sisters and the cotton to my mother-in-law so she can make clothes for the children. I keep the scarf for myself. I don’t explain Christmas to them.
Two weeks later, my mother writes with news we’ve also heard over the loudspeaker. Officials in Peking have announced the construction of ten projects in the capital to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China next year on October 1, 1959. “The greatest of these will be called the Great Hall of the People,” I read to Tao and the others. “It will be bigger and grander than anything China has built before, except perhaps the Great Wall. Most important, the Great Hall of the People is being built with volunteer labor. Your father promises to take me to the celebration. That will be something to see!” Here’s what I think she means by her false enthusiasm: Volunteer labor? I’m happy I don’t live in Peking and won’t have to work on this or any of the other nine ostentatious shrines to Mao’s ego. Censors can’t black out what isn’t written.
But to my husband and in-laws it all sounds glamorous, and the main room is filled with their excited exclamations. Madame Sun Yat-sen! The Great Hall of the People! They’ve been less impressed by May’s letters, because they don’t understand anything about television sets, cars, or movie stars. Still, they look at the photographs she sends and ask questions like “Why is she wearing that? Isn’t she cold with her naked shoulders?” Sometimes they look at the photos in which May wears makeup and teased hair, and they don’t say a word. They may never have seen a prostitute, but they know a broken-shoe when they see one.
My mother and aunt always ask me the same questions: Are you happy? Are you painting? I’m not happy, but I don’t want to tell them that. I’m not painting either, but Tao is. Knowing of Z.G.’s success with his New Year’s poster, Tao now wants to enter the national competition. “If I win, we could move to Shanghai or maybe even Peking,” he often says. He works at the table, bundled in padded clothes, with a quilt over his shoulders and another over his legs. He’s taken a traditional subject—door gods—and transformed them into two peasants bringing in an abundant harvest. He doesn’t use me as a subject or as inspiration as Z.G. did, which hurts my feelings
something awful. Whenever I say anything about it, Tao says, “Quit complaining and do your own painting. No one’s stopping you.” That’s easy for him to say. I wish I could put brush to paper with as much confidence as my father and husband do. I have something in my mind—I know I do—but I haven’t yet been able to reach it and I have no one to encourage me.
At night, Tao and I lie on mats in the main room. The clothes we’ll wear tomorrow are under our mats, so they’ll be warm when we put them on in the morning. The older children curl around us. Tao nuzzles my neck. He puts a hand under my sleeping shirt. If we’re really quiet we can make the night pass in a way that will bring warmth of its own.
“Next time you write to your mother and father,” Tao says as his fingers slip into my wetness, “ask if they can get permits for us to visit them in Shanghai.”
BEGINNING IN FEBRUARY, I wake up and go to bed hungry. I tell myself that I’m not as hungry as I think I am, that I have a bad Western attitude, and that what I’m seeing and sensing is not real. But some people say this is the worst between the yellow and the green ever. A few want to break up the commune, claiming they were better off when they were responsible for their own land, grain, and families. I keep my mouth shut, but I begin to think that the canteen is no longer there to encourage us to eat for free; it’s there to restrict what we’re given to eat.
All this leads to new inspections.
“Are you hiding grain?” Brigade Leader Lai demands, as Party Secretary Feng Jin and Sung-ling look through our cupboards.
Tao’s mother is small but tough. She looks him straight in the face. “Where could we hide anything?”
That momentarily stumps him.
“Have you turned in all your cooking utensils?” Sung-ling asks—woman to woman. “You shouldn’t have any cooking utensils. By now, they should have been either given to the canteen or melted in the blast furnace.”
“Are you asking if we’ve been cooking?” Fu-shee retorts sharply. “We couldn’t cook even if we wanted to. All we have left is our teapot.”
I thought my mother and aunt were good liars, but my mother-in-law may be the best, and she knows how to take care of her family. She’s been going out to the fields with the younger children and scavenging rice, turnips, and peanuts that were ignored during the hurried harvest. She also saved enough utensils—all hidden in a hole in the floor—to make corn-flour buns, which we eat with pieces of dried peppers.
“I smelled food when I came in,” Sung-ling continues accusingly. “You must be smelling the hot water we make to drink, since we no longer have leaves to make tea.”
That night I write to my mother:
They say mothers-in-law are awful creatures put on earth to torture their daughters-in-law, but Fu-shee isn’t so bad. She’s pregnant again. I’m not. I’d like to have a baby. A son, of course. It would make Tao happy. It would please my in-laws. I hope it would make you happy too.
In Chinese, the word womb is made up of characters for palace and children. At night, lying next to Tao, I send propitious wishes to my womb. If marriage doesn’t cure my sadness, maybe a baby will.
AT CHINESE NEW YEAR, food is found in a neighbor’s house during an inspection. The house is torn down. The family has nowhere to go, so they sleep in the ancestral hall. Also, as a result of our neighbors’ sloppiness, all the locks in the commune are taken away.
“If you don’t give up your locks,” Brigade Leader Lai tells us, “we’ll take away your doors.”
He doesn’t stop there. In a flurry of activity, gates and courtyards that separate property are taken down to prevent the hiding or hoarding of food—and to keep everyone and everything visible. If clear lines of sight still aren’t available, then the entire house is destroyed. “Our new policy benefits the motherland,” Brigade Leader Lai remarks, “since the last remaining metal from hinges and locks can now be smelted and we can use the wood from houses and furniture to stoke the fires in the furnaces.” The villa, where he lives, remains untouched.
Three days later, we come home from the fields and find Fu-shee squatting in the corner, a bucket filled with blood and little bits of tissue under her. I’m told to clean the bucket, which is sickening and revolting. I try to be helpful in other ways too, but whatever gains I’ve made with my mother-in-law disappear. Now she looks at me reproachfully. Soon other pregnant women in the commune walk the other way if they see me or turn their backs on me. Women who haven’t given birth are believed to bring bad luck to unborn and newborn babies.
My only friends are Yong and Kumei, who repeatedly tell me not to be concerned. “We’re between the yellow and the green,” they say, as though that will make me less hungry, pregnant women less likely to ignore me, or my mother-in-law less upset with me. “It’s worse than usual, but it happens every year.”
I have an American perspective: Should we accept something just because it’s always happened that way? I come up with ideas to help ourselves.
“Let’s buy a few chicks to raise, so we’ll have chickens to lay eggs,” I suggest to my husband’s family.
“Where would we hide them?” my father-in-law asks. “What would happen when the brigade leader comes for his inspection?”
“We could make tofu,” I say. “When I was a little girl, my grandfather made tofu in our bathtub.”
“Where will we get soy milk?” my husband asks.
“What’s a bathtub?” Fu-shee asks.
“Maybe we could start a wheelbarrow business,” I try again. “People always need things hauled to the main road.”
“Where will we get money to buy them?” my father-in-law asks.
“I have some money,” I say. “We’re a family. I want to help in any way I can.”
I buy three wheelbarrows. We earn four yuan—a little less than two dollars—a day carrying coal, bricks, and grain, until we’re told we have to stop. The village cadres criticize us and remind us that no private enterprise is allowed. The next time I make a suggestion to improve our situation, Fu-shee snaps, “Instead of bragging about your money, why don’t you buy us some food?”
But I can’t buy food, because there’s no food to buy. Even if there were, where would I change my American dollars? I’d have to go to Tun-hsi, maybe even Hangchow, to do that. The brigade leader would never give me permission.
I could write to my mother about all this, but I don’t. How can I? I don’t want to hear her say, “I told you so,” when even worse recriminations run through my brain.
Joy
GLASS CLOTHES
I WAKE JUST after dawn on a Sunday morning in late March. The first thing I see is our new poster of Chairman Mao pasted to the wall. Every house in the commune has the identical poster—Mao floating above a sea of red clouds. I imagine this same poster in every house throughout the country. Nothing can hang above him (which would be insulting), and nothing can mar the surface of the poster (which would prove that the household is not showing the proper respect). I shift my weight, causing the babies and small children snuggled around me to wiggle and squirm. I put a hand on my stomach, trying to calm my nausea. Something I ate or drank has caused me to feel low. I quietly get up off my sleeping mat and go outside.
The spring air is crisp and the sky is bright blue. Standing on the terrace, I see out over several fields of rapeseed. The plants are in full yellow flower, reminding me of the wild mustard that grows in Southern California at this time of year. Plumes of smoke curl into the air from chimneys throughout Green Dragon. I chop wood and start the fire in the outdoor stove. Then I grab a couple of buckets, walk down to the stream for water, haul them back up the hill, and put some of the water on to boil.
My mother-in-law joins me outside. “You still brush your teeth with boiled water?” she asks with false incredulity. “You’ll never be one of us until you can drink the water. Here, let me make you some tea with ginger in it to help your stomach. It’s always calmed mine.”
Since it’s Sunday and we have no work
to do for the commune, everyone’s slow getting dressed. I tell Tao I’m going on ahead to the canteen. He doesn’t mind. Spring is all around me—more rapeseed fields, trees in extravagant flower, pink and white petals drifting through the air like snow, and fresh new greenery on the precious few tea bushes that have been spared Brigade Leader Lai’s insistence that all land be converted to growing grain. Although we had a tough winter, I’m eagerly anticipating the harvest of the commune’s first winter wheat crop in June. We’ve been close-planting other crops—tomatoes, bok choy, corn, and onions—as we’ve been instructed by Brigade Leader Lai, putting in two or three times the usual amount of seed per mu. We tell ourselves Chairman Mao wouldn’t steer us in the wrong direction. Yes, the longer days and warmer weather have done a lot for my mood. Maybe this hasn’t been a mistake. Maybe I was just a girl from Los Angeles who truly was suffering from too many years of comfort and waste.
Now, looking at the bright green of the fields against the sky, I wish I could spend the day perched somewhere, painting and drawing. Instead, I eat a small breakfast, go home, and pass the rest of the morning writing letters to my mother and aunt. “Life is OK. The weather is better.” Tomorrow I’ll wait by the pond for the mailman to arrive. I’ll give him my letters and hope he brings some for me.
In late afternoon, the loudspeaker in the main room crackles to life.
“All comrades come to the canteen immediately!” It’s the brigade leader’s voice. “All comrades come to the canteen immediately!”