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
