XINRAN: Had the people in your home town seen the reports of you in the papers?
MRS YOU: Yes, in 1954, in the People's Pictorial News, People's Daily . . . you could find reports about me in all the youth papers. All my family knew, all the teachers too. The news caused a nationwide sensation at the time, this was the early fifties, remember. The Xinhua News Agency took photographs for propaganda, women going to work in difficult places was big news, they were big pictures too. We got letters encouraging us from all over the country, all the young people wanted to be like us, and went as construction volunteers to the north-west. We were all yearning to sacrifice our youth to the motherland.
XINRAN: You spent your youth toiling so hard, did you ever cry?
MRS YOU: No.
XINRAN: Not once? Why not? You have a woman's body too, don't you?
MRS YOU: No, I really didn't cry, not once. I think it's because I had good health, I never got even a touch of frostbite, or any injury – good health is one of my best traits. Plus I had both a burden and an ambition. When I was a student in Yan'an I read a book, in those days the Soviet Union was a model for China, and this story was set in a very, very cold place that was a long way away from Moscow, it was the story of a woman engineer who toiled, struggled and devoted herself to the motherland. I am a woman engineer too, I was a Bolshevik like her, and I was a long way from Beijing, in the Gobi Desert, the Great North-West, struggling for the sake of my own motherland. I thought I was the Chinese version of her.
XINRAN: Then have you ever been worried?
MRS YOU: Oh, I've had every kind of worry in my work! What did it mean to be a Big Brigade Leader, and how did I set about being one? I just didn't get it, but I was the first, there was nobody to teach me. At the very beginning we had to set up four starting points for prospecting sites in a day, when we went out in the morning the sky might be clear for a thousand miles, but a moment later we'd be in the middle of a thunderstorm, the light was all wrong for surveying, so the observation points weren't accurate, and inaccurate surveying would affect the quality of our work. The plan had been to finish our mission in eighteen days, but we couldn't make the deadline, we were working on it for a month. That was an anxious time, we all cried together, we all commiserated. At that time we took the nation's plans very seriously indeed; failure to complete your plan on time was like committing a crime, so if everyone was unable to complete their mission, they would be very, very guilty, profoundly guilty.
XINRAN: So have you cried over matters to do with the home?
MRS YOU: Over family matters? No.
XINRAN: And you didn't cry for your children either?
MRS YOU: No I didn't! The children were raised by their two grandmothers, so I didn't worry about them, we couldn't keep the children with us, and the old people were fond of them.
XINRAN: Mrs You, have you told these stories to your children?
MRS YOU: Not in as much detail as this, not yet.
XINRAN: Why haven't you told them?
MRS YOU: Ah . . . well, I said not in as much detail, didn't I?!
XINRAN: Did you not have a chance to talk about them? Or were you unwilling to speak of them? Or did you think there was no need to talk?
MRS YOU: I didn't . . . I didn't really go into it.
XINRAN: Have they asked?
MRS YOU: Not like you. They know a little bit. They complain that their parents didn't bring them up when they were small, they grew up tagging along after the old people, they couldn't even go to school properly.
XINRAN: Why not?
MRS YOU: This was the 1960s, the Cultural Revolution, my husband was "struggled against", and he was relieved of all his duties.
XINRAN: So did you get struggled against too?
MRS YOU: I hadn't had as much pre-Liberation schooling as he had. He was worried that I wouldn't be able to bear to see him punished, so he fixed for me to go and stay in the south for a while. I wasn't with him when the public humiliation and criticism were worst, I felt very guilty that I hadn't taken good care of him – '68 was the cruellest time for him, and I didn't come back until '69. Afterwards we had very poor living quarters, our bed was a narrow slab of wood, we had to squeeze onto it to sleep.
XINRAN: At that time, did you have any regrets? That you had married him? That other people didn't understand you?
MRS YOU: I had no regrets. At the time I thought: What's the worst that can happen? He'll go back home to the countryside, he can till the fields and I'll weave cloth, and we'll never go back to any leaders' jobs again, a peaceful, stable life is best.
XINRAN: Do you understand why it all happened?
MRS YOU: I can understand it. They struggled against him because he had been to study in the Soviet Union. Relations between the Soviet Union and China had been good, then later they deteriorated, and he became a running dog of the Soviet Union, and the knowledge he had studied in Soviet Union for the sake of the nation became a crime. [She sighs.]
XINRAN: You have experienced so many changes in China. What do you think is the biggest difference between young people now and in the past?
MRS YOU: The young people today haven't let themselves get caught up in political movements. We were witnesses to the whole process, we were the ones who went through it all. First it was suppressing counterrevolutionaries, later it was the Three Antis and the Five Antis, then the Four Clean-Ups, then the Anti-Rightist campaign, one movement after another. They haven't experienced that spiritual pressure, or seen the pathetic figures their parents cut on the stage in those sessions.
XINRAN: Do the young people today have the faith or aspirations you had in those days? As I was listening to your story, I felt it was full of heroic spirit, such hardship, such exhaustion; your expression when you were speaking was so full of pride, treating those arduous conditions like they were nothing special. So what about young people nowadays?
MRS YOU: Young people nowadays . . . judging by our own sons and daughter, they don't have our faith or sense of responsibility. In our day, work came first.
XINRAN: Do they understand you?
MRS YOU: Yes, they do, but now I feel very ashamed and full of regrets. We didn't bring up our three children properly, because we were both so devoted to our own work.
XINRAN: Why do you say you didn't bring them up properly?
*
Mrs You's eyes had started to redden and swim with tears. That face, which had been so full of high morale and fighting spirit, fell, and she stared at her hands, rubbing and twisting them together uneasily. When she spoke again it was in the voice of a child who had done something bad.
*
MRS YOU: When they were the right age for school it was the Cultural Revolution, and because their father was a "bad man", they weren't considered suitable. It wasn't till they were grown up that they went to the adult education school, and they found that really hard going. At that time we both had ambitions, we were both educated people and we had very high expectations for our children, but none of them measured up to our ambitions, not even in education. All this was because we had buried ourselves in our own careers, our careers for the sake of the future they have today, yet our children were rejected by the times.
XINRAN: Mrs You, if you could live your life over again, your career, your family, right up to your present day, would you choose this path in life?
MRS YOU: I . . . I think I have no regrets of any kind about my choice of career, in spite of the illnesses I picked up, the stomach problems and the rheumatism I have now. When I recall the hard work of those days, I feel very proud, I feel I have brought honour to my own life, because a person who has never experienced hard work and suffering will never know how sweet work and life can be afterwards.
XINRAN: If your children or your grandchildren were to ask you sometime, what made a girl like you, a girl who was afraid of the dark and afraid of water, into someone as strong and tough, successful and self-confident as you are today, would you say that
was because of the times you lived in? Or because of your family? Or your personal ambitions? Or your will?
MRS YOU: This has a lot to do with the education in those days. The idea of women's liberation in those days was very masculinised. I wanted to be able to do anything boys could do. In the propaganda team I wanted to dress up to play the boys' roles. My father told me that he wanted me to have the same success as a boy – whatever a boy could do, he required me to do, his demands on me were very severe. There are other stories of Chinese women too, Hua Mulan following the army, Qiu Jin in the 1911 revolution, and Communist women like Song Qingling and Deng Yingchao. Those women influenced me a lot – in those days we were all imitating heroes.
XINRAN: Do you still believe that it was right to have those kinds of aspirations and beliefs?
MRS YOU: I feel that I was right.
XINRAN: Do you know that many young people say that their parents' generation was very foolish in their loyalty, and, going back another generation, that their grandparents' generation was both foolish and ignorant? How do you see this?
MRS YOU: China's current greatness and strength didn't just fall out of the sky, it's only the hard, bitter struggles and sacrifices of the previous generations, one generation after another, that have given us the China we have today. If you don't believe it, ask You later – our generation just had more spirit than today's young generation.
XINRAN: Are you certain that Teacher You will think the same as you?
MRS YOU: Other things I can't be certain about, but we're of one mind about the price we paid in those years for our work, and for the motherland.
XINRAN: Have the two of you ever had arguments?
MRS YOU: Oh yes, we've had arguments.
XINRAN: What do you argue about?
MRS YOU: Sometimes our opinions are different, or our ideas of family life.
XINRAN: In the family? Over the children? Or about life in general?
MRS YOU: He's a northerner, I'm a southerner, sometimes our tastes in food are different – he likes spicy things, I like sweet things – but we aim for agreement in big matters and agree to differ over smaller issues.
XINRAN: Who gives way most, you or him?
MRS YOU: Well, it's usually me who gives way . . . It's a miracle he's still here, he's had a lot of narrow escapes, he's been in car accidents, aiya, several times he's come out safely from some pretty scary situations. Once he was in a truck that turned over – he was on his way to help some other people, and his vehicle turned over in the same place; that big Liberation truck went belly up, all four wheels pointing to the sky, and the people inside all came tumbling out from inside the cab. He's been to that big desert they call the Sea of Death – for every ten people who went in nine never came out again. After the Cultural Revolution he became a big leader again, he must have received honours from every institute of learning in the world, rushing here and there, flying all over the place. He didn't retire till he was over seventy, and he's still climbing up and down the mountains, organising efforts to alleviate poverty.
XINRAN: You really are very strong, with a life like this, full of scares and alarms, but never complaining. If someone were to ask you what kind of man Teacher You is, as a comrade, as a wife, as friend, how would you reply?
MRS YOU: He's very strong, he's a very loyal friend, very practical, and in the time of the Cultural Revolution he didn't make wild statements about other people in order to clear himself.
XINRAN: Is he a good husband?
MRS YOU: Ah . . . [laughs] . . . he's a good husband.
XINRAN [also laughs]: Is he a good father?
MRS YOU: You can only call him just about average, because none of the children have grown up into people of accomplishment. None of them have his deep scholarship, none could ever equal him.
XINRAN: If I were to describe a woman like you in three sentences, what three sentences do you think could give the best picture of you?
MRS YOU: I'm really not very outstanding. I have ambition and I've struggled.
XINRAN: But especially as a woman?
MRS YOU: Ah, hmm . . .
XINRAN: As a woman, as a wife, as a mother, as a grandmother.
MRS YOU: I don't know what to say. I want to make it up to them by being a mother and grandmother to them. And I don't know if they're grateful for what I've given up, coming to live in this out-of-the-way place. I want to go to the Old People's University too; I want to play mah-jong, take part in singing contests, sing songs, go on trips to scenic spots. But because I didn't do a good job of raising them before, now I'm retired I want to repay the debt I owe my children through my grandchildren. These aren't very grand ideals, but they come from the heart.
XINRAN: They are words from the heart that I've come on a journey of thousands of miles to hear. I have two questions – I don't want your answers now but I hope you'll think them over. One is: what are the three most bitter and three most happy things in your life? The second question is: you are so successful, you are one of the people who created an era; in the eyes of people nowadays, in the eyes of the young, was it worth it? Please consider these questions.
MRS YOU: I'll think about them, I won't be able to sleep for thinking about them.
XINRAN: I think you must have already spent more nights than you can count thinking about these questions. In fact, once we've given ourselves an answer, we can relax a bit, and sleep a bit easier, at least we won't be disturbed by dreams full of anxiety or sleepless nights. You have a rest now – I'll see you in a bit when we eat.
MRS YOU: Then you try to rest for a while too, don't wear yourself out.
*
When I invited Teacher You in for his interview, his first act on entering the room was to apologise, in a typical Chinese "great man" way, for his wife: "very naive", "no notion of other people's time", "endless nattering" and a series of similar "errors". Although I did not accept his apologies, I did not contradict him either. The first reason for this was that I no longer had the confidence to debate the rights and wrongs between Chinese men and women; the second was that we didn't have the time to discuss this question of "whether a woman could be great, wise and clever in the eyes of her husband", for which no woman has ever had a clear answer since the beginnings of the women's liberation movement. I was one of the many women who had been "taught" by this kind of very successful man; I knew that no matter who you were, in those men's eyes, you would never, ever be able to distance yourself from their preconceived notions of "women and their bad habits".
Teacher You was a man with many honours after his name, most of which were to do with geophysics and oil, but also including a few government posts. This is another very "Chinese" phenomenon: many name cards in China come folded into three sections, with rows of "honours and positions", high-ranking and important offices jostling for space. Sometimes I used to think that they must have three heads and six arms each – how else could they have enough time in the work unit to live out all these parallel existences? A person with so many titles is bound to be a great achiever. However, sometimes you will notice that the majority of the work units to which those titles belong share an address, and can be found in the same unit of the same block of flats: so does the sitting room perhaps count as an organisation? And the kitchen and the bathroom as two companies?
Teacher You's professional titles were all at a national level, yet I could feel a kind of "emptiness" in all of his titles; a feeling that things didn't quite meet in the middle; a sense that there was no successor to carry on his work. This was the "hunger" of modern China's oil business, the "thirst" of modern China's geophysics.
I don't understand the science or history of petroleum, but since the USA and Britain invaded Iraq in 2003 I have seen the madness and cruelty to which petroleum can drive humanity: the men with guns shouting out for freedom and democracy, with never a thought for the children who cannot say in the morning if they will live to see nightfall, and nobody to console the aged mothers
left without help or support in the middle of a racial war; and I have seen those oil-drunk "liberators" racing to divide up the "liberated" oilfields. Humankind has barely progressed from the primitive plundering, religious battles and power struggles of the last century; nowadays the evils that spring from hunger and desire have just learned to dress themselves in names like "justice and democracy". I worry that oil will cause my own rapidly developing country to turn to crime in its turn. So I wanted very much to know what those petroleum titles represented.
*
XINRAN: Teacher You, the first time I heard about you, I learned that you had very many titles. Please tell me something about the ten titles that you personally consider the most important, if you don't mind?
YOU: I'll tell you the simple truth: I only recognise a few of those titles. I have been Deputy Commander and Chief Engineer of the Yinchuan Petroleum Prospecting Command Office, and Deputy Head of the China Petroleum Prospecting Bureau, and then in 1979 Zhao Ziyang made me Head of the China Petroleum Prospecting Bureau. Now, although I wear many "hats", according to national policy I am classed as retired. When I was still in post, there were many local factors involved in some of my transfers. For example, I was once made head of a local law court in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. When the Petroleum Bureau found out, they said: "You can't go to work in the regions – you belong to us! So the boss of the Petroleum Bureau came with me to the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Regional Office and got me transferred back. Later on the government of another province wanted me to head their Fossil Fuel Bureau, but the Party organisation didn't allow it, and I was transferred back out again that same night.
The Chinese system of employing people is far from perfect; there is a lack of professional knowledge and imagination both in the plan as a whole and the way it is regulated and carried out.
XINRAN: But as I understand it, you are retired in name only – in fact, you are not properly retired.
YOU: I retired in 1990, it would have been impossible not to go then; people have to retire so that young people can get a chance at the top jobs – if the nation doesn't cultivate young people it will be too late for us. But what you say is quite correct: after I retired I was a consultant for five years, in fact I was also doing five years of bureau chief work. Before I was in post I thought that nobody dared to take the lead in anything, everything had to go through the bureau chief – I was in that position, so I had power, I could use the National Prospecting Bureau to sort out the issues surrounding prospecting on a national level once and for all, and sort out international cooperation in many different areas. So although I had retired, I made use of this time to make adjustments to the overall petroleum situation.