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A Strange Gift from the Pig Farm

Fifteen years ago when I left China for the United States, I wanted to forget the dreams my peers and I used to have. These we had inherited from our parents. Some of them had long since turned into nightmares for me. I wanted to open a new chapter in my life. Let the old fear, anger, and guilt melt away and the barriers between myself and others slide into the melting pot. But by and by I realized that this was just another dream.

I could not leave my past behind, as I could not help waking up at three o'clock in the morning. I acquired this habit in China in the early seventies. When I woke up, for a moment I did not know where I was. The chill in the air reminded me of Manchuria. Then as light slowly filtered into my bedroom, worries began to flood back into my mind.

The J-I visa I was forced to take when I left China, a handicap in my hopes to compete with others in the United States.

The agents the CIA sent to the door of my university to check on me.

The liberal professor who told the agents to get out of his sight (while I had hoped that he might answer some of their questions in my favor).

The sense that I was an outsider, socially and culturally, then and thereafter, no matter how hard I tried to fit in.

The doubt that I was as competent as others . . .

Such thoughts told me that I was in America. My new life was not easy. What the future held for me I was not sure. So the old memories, though painful at times, had become quite reassuring.

So I turned my thoughts back, to China, to the pig farm where I worked on the night shift and acquired the habit of waking up at three o'clock. For a seventeen-year-old girl who had grown up in big cities—Bern, Geneva, and Beijing—the night shift was a tough job. The day before I had to work for more than ten hours like everybody else, racing after the pigs on the grazing land, feeding them, and cleaning the sties. At dusk others would finish their work and go back to the village to eat and sleep. After the last person was gone, I alone had the company of several hundred pigs. My duty was to protect them from whatever danger might arise during the night and to drive them out three times (at midnight, three o'clock, and dawn) to relieve themselves so they wouldn't mess up the sties.

On such nights the light of my oil lantern was small, a faint, shivering, yellow ring against the immense darkness that reigned over the huge swamp called the Great Northern Wilderness. Here the night wind flew high and the moon was as pale as a ghost. The grass around the pig farm grew to the height of a person in summer. Wolves, hungry for piglets, lurked in it. Outside my window, my dogs howled in the middle of the night like wolves, echoed by other dogs in the village; or maybe it was the wolves running across the plain who answered them. I really couldn't tell which was which.

When winter came the nights became endless. At four o'clock I lit my oil lamps, which I kept burning until after nine the next morning. Outside, all was covered with snow, two to three feet deep on the plain. On the southern side of the shacks, the snow formed a slope after the first blizzard. The tip of it nearly touched the eaves. Throughout winter the snow would not melt. After midnight the temperature dropped to forty degrees below zero, centigrade or Fahrenheit, it made no difference. The heavy old sheepskin coat Mother sent me felt like a piece of paper once I stepped out into the wind.

Sometimes when the region was pounded by a snowstorm, I remembered the stories the villagers told: some people lost their sense of direction in it. Scared to death, they kept running until they dropped to the ground. Afterwards they were frozen in the snow. The next April, if the wolves did not get there first, people would find their remains.

Even more unfortunate were those who perished within a stone's throw of their own homes. Blindfolded by the storm, they walked in endless circles, hour after hour. Being “walled up by ghosts,” the local people called it. In such cases, people were doomed unless timely help reached them from the outside.

With such stories lurking at the back of my mind and the snoring of the pigs rising and falling all around me, I moved from sty to sty to carry out my duties. A lantern and a whip, I held in my two hands. A pair of sharp scissors was hidden in a pocket next to my heart; I would use the scissors as a last resort to defend myself.

Of course even at the age of seventeen, I was not so naive as to really believe that the scissors would save my life or my reputation if I were attacked. But what alternatives did I have? I once thought firecrackers might work better. Yet how to keep them dry and light them in an emergency, I never quite figured out.

On the wall of our shack, somebody had left a gong. With a smile I stood in front of it and contemplated the idea. After a while I decided that a gong was no good either. The nearest house in the village was a good half-mile away from the pig farm. The weather was so cold in this region that people slept with their windows shut even in summer. During winter, sawdust was packed between windowpanes, the houses were literally sealed up. If something happened on the pig farm during the night, no one would hear me no matter what I did. I'd better face the fact.

Actually I wouldn't need to work on the night shift and worry about such things if I had not volunteered to do so in the first place. Before I came to the pig farm, no one had ever imagined that a woman would work on the night shift. It had always been strictly a job for men. Then in 1969, somehow there was a temporary shortage of manpower on the pig farm. So I told Chen, the head of the farm, that he could count me in to work at night. When he realized that I meant what I said, he looked at me as if I were from another planet.

This was, however, not the first time that I volunteered myself. In the summer of 1968 I had volunteered to leave Beijing for the countryside. I did this out of a conviction that it was not fair for some young people like my schoolmates and me to enjoy all the privileges China could offer, which included living in big cities, having access to top schools, good libraries, large bookstores, museums, parks, and theaters, while others had to stay in their native villages and never had a chance to prove themselves. In new China everybody should be equal. If we wanted to reform society, we ought to have the courage to let the change start from us. By giving up our privileges, we would make room for the children of the peasants. Let the hardship in the countryside temper us as revolutionary wars did our parents. Eventually we would eliminate the gap between cities and rural areas in China. This idea soon carried me to a small village in Manchuria called Cold Spring, a thousand miles northeast of Beijing.

In Cold Spring, before three months was over, I volunteered again. This time I went to the pig farm where the work was the dirtiest. I wanted the challenge. Ever since my childhood I had lived in clean houses with clean toilets. My worst nightmares had always been that squashy, smelly excrement surrounded and suffocated me. My feet got stuck in it. I could not move. The hot excrement seeped through my shoes. I was so disgusted that I woke up with goose bumps all over my body.

In my mind, such an ordeal would be a hundred times worse than all the tortures the revolutionary martyrs had gone through. Yet I knew that this way of thinking was wrong. It belonged to the exploiting classes. No doubt about it. Peasants in China loved excrement, using it as manure. So working on the pig farm, I reckoned, would be the most effective way to correct my thinking as well as my feelings.

The night shift was the third entry in my history of volunteering. It was also the last. After that, I discovered some unpleasant truth about volunteering: in China it always turned out this way. When you first volunteered, the leaders would be agreeably surprised and would praise you. Pretty soon, however, it became an obligation. They expected you to do it. But that was not the worst. The leaders would also use your example to put pressure on others and make everybody “volunteer.” So a few months later when all the women on the pig farm had “volunteered” to work on the night shift and some of them, I knew, were quite uncomfortable doing this, I began to feel sorry about what I did.

The truth is, I did not feel too bad about my volunteering until the summer of 1971, when the night shift got Laomizi into trouble. Laomizi, which means Sleepy, was the nickname the villagers gave to a girl from Harbin, the capital city of Heilongjiang province. Like many others from the north, she was tall and plump, well developed physically at the age of eighteen. One night she worked on the night shift and something happened. The next morning Laomizi told people in the village that Chen had come during the night and raped her.

The incident occurred when I was on my first home leave. By the time I got back from Beijing, Laomizi was gone, transferred to another farm that was remote. It was usual practice in those days. Supposedly it would protect her. Thus I never had a chance to talk to her.

I heard, however, a great deal of gossip that was still spinning around in the village. The young women on the pig farm told me that before Laomizi left, she cried and said repeatedly, “What am I to do? How can I face people after today? I lost face for my parents. I lost face for my whole family. They will disown me. I don't want to live!”

Many of the villagers, however, men and women, believed that Laomizi was not raped but merely seduced by Chen. “She must have been willing at the time and regretted it only afterwards.” Why? Because Chen was not a stranger. As the head of the pig farm, he had worked with her side by side and taught her many skills. In the evenings she was often seen at Chen's home, having a meal or using their sewing machine to mend her clothes.

While this was true, Laomizi was not the only one who did this. In fact, all the young women on the pig farm had worked with Chen, learned from him, and visited him at home in the evenings. Such activities were encouraged by the leaders as parts of our reeducation by the poor peasants. Chen was a poor peasant and a veteran of the Korean War. The exact type for us to “unite” with.

A few days later another argument prevailed in the village, which said that Laomizi was a fool. First she let herself be taken by a married man who was probably older than her father. Then she went around telling everybody that he had raped her. As a result, it would be useless to transfer her, for gossip would surely find its way to her new work unit. In the future who would want to marry such a woman? So if her reputation was ruined and her future was in jeopardy, she had no one else but herself to blame for it.

As for Chen, after he was questioned by Zhao, the political instructor who was the number-one leader of our village, he packed up his belongings, left the pig farm, and reported to work at the construction site. Seeing this, some people said Zhao was partial to Chen, because they were both from Yangzhou of Anhui province. Yet others said that Chen was hardly punished because it was not easy to punish a peasant in China. You could not strip him of his Party membership if he did not have one in the first place. You could not demote him, as he was already at the bottom of the society. Take away his city residency? That was out of the question. Expel him from the country? Where could we send him? So as the saying goes, “A dead pig is not afraid of boiling water.” A peasant in China was a dead pig.

So this was how the Laomizi incident ended. Gradually people ran out of things to say about her and she was forgotten. Perhaps that was what she wanted. After she left the village, she never came back to visit us. Nor did she send letters to anyone. She simply vanished from our lives. Yet she comes back, in my dreams, and she stays, in my memory. Always a grown-up teenage girl, with rosy cheeks, big hands, and big feet. She is blushing and smiling. She is happy. I have never seen her cry.

Besides this incident, something else made me regret that I had worked on the night shift. In the beginning it was a small problem: the pig farm did not have an alarm clock, which did not seem to bother others. But without it, for a while I found it extremely hard to wake up at three o'clock.

To this day I remember vividly the panic I felt, when I opened my eyes in broad daylight, knowing that I had overslept. As a result, the pigsties were an awful mess and others had to toil for hours under the low roof, attacked by mosquitoes from all sides, to clean them. This unpleasant truth I would soon have to reveal to my fellow workers, and their eyes would shame me to death even if they said nothing. It would be useless to try to explain or apologize.

Yet buying an alarm clock was out of the question. In those years my wages were thirty-two yuan a month. Everything had to come out of this budget: food was twelve yuan a month; the rest had to cover my clothes, shoes, working gloves, postage stamps, toothpaste, toothbrush, soap, shampoo, toilet paper, feminine napkins, candles, batteries, plus a few cans of fruit that I could not resist. On top of this, I needed to save thirty yuan in two years for a train ticket to Beijing or else I wouldn't be able to have a home visit. Taking these into consideration, I decided that an alarm clock at more than ten yuan was beyond my means and I would have to cope without it, like everybody else.

Gradually I trained myself into waking up at exactly three o'clock, as if I had a magic clock ticking in my head. At first I was thrilled by what I had accomplished. Later, however, it became a scourge. The alarm went off every night at three o'clock, on the nights I worked and the ones I didn't. Three years later I left the pig farm and began to work in the fields, and the invisible clock kept waking me up.

Another two years passed, I left the Great Northern Wilderness and began to study with my parents. The old habit followed me back home like a ghost. Even the Pacific Ocean could not stop it from chasing me. Therefore the pig farm gave me a souvenir I was unable to forsake.

Many times when I woke up in the middle of the night and could not find my way back to what the Chinese call heitianxiang (the black and sweet homeland), I was so annoyed that I found myself in tears. When I took up my studies again in 1973, seven years had elapsed without my hand ever touching a textbook. At the age of twenty-two, it wasn't easy for me to start all over. I hated to lose sleep at night, knowing the next day my head would be a big jar of paste, thick and heavy; nothing would register there. At such times I wished I could make a deal with a deity or even the devil himself. I was willing to give up ten years of my life if only he could rid me of this cursed habit.

Despite the bitter regrets, now when I look back on it, I must say that waking up at three did me some good as well. For instance, it made me remember and think about my dreams. The ones I had while I was awake and those I had in my sleep. Most of them would have been forgotten, if I had not suddenly waked up in the middle of the night.

On the farm I hardly had time to think about dreams or anything. By day the work was very hard. At night I shared a room with nine other women. Five slept side by side on one big bed on the southern side of the room; the other five on the northern side. Between the two beds there was a passage some five or six feet wide. In such a room I had privacy only when I woke up at three o'clock.

Knowing that no one was watching me, I felt safe enough to ask myself: what kind of person am I? A die-hard Manchu aristocrat like Nainai, my grandmother, or an educated new peasant in a new society? Am I a true believer of communism or a hidden counterrevolutionary with many dangerous thoughts? Is my life meaningful only because I can serve the people or work for the revolution? What is the purpose of my life? What things am I willing to sacrifice for the sake of my dreams? And what are those, I know by now, I won't give up despite the dreams my parents and I have cherished? In trying to make our dreams come true, what foolish things have we done? What crimes have we committed? If the crimes were committed out of good intentions for the world, would heaven punish us for them or pardon us? If there is no retribution from heaven, should there be no indictment from the court of my own conscience?