Making It in the People's Republic
Miriam & London, Ivan D.
Miriam & Ivan D. London Making It in the People's Republic In the commune it's not who you know, but how low your ancestors go. In our years of interviewing peasants from the China mainland we...
...Son of a landlord...
...Although he once walked a long distance to another commune in search of a bride, he could not find one, for nobody wanted him...
...After all, he was the son of a member of the Poor-and-Lower-Middle Peasants' Association (which the Party rated so highly) and he had done service in the army (even if his behavior had not been the very best...
...Mine will be nothing but a water buffalo his whole life...
...who watched our pens skim across our notebooks, as only an illiterate can, in helpless awe, viewing every document as a dread mystery awaiting revelation...
...No one could be worse-born in topsyturvy China, where the ragamuffins of the past are the blue-bloods of the present, and the crime of belonging to the wrong, or "black," classes is hereditary...
...Bad-class member...
...They returned him to the village...
...Ivan D. London is professor of psychology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York...
...He was the son of a former "great landlord...
...After the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, he became, along with other assorted outcasts, the whipping boy of every political movement: He was "struggled" and paraded about in a dunce cap "at least forty times," but he no longer cared...
...He held in contempt those whom the new bureaucracy had designated as his betters, especially the "scum and vagabonds" of bygone days assembled in the Poor-and-Lower-Middle Peasants' Association-a sort of Maoist House of Lords...
...What are you trying to do-die...
...He was, in fact, an aristocrat, whose obstinate soul the Party could never crack...
...Some were heard on occasion to hint at his "dirty mind" and others seemed vividly to recall how even in primary school he had been known to steal pens and other objects from his little classmates...
...Cow-ghost and snake-demon...
...All the girls in the village had heard of his military "exploit" and were scared of him...
...1 t In Cantonese and Mandarin, the difference in pronunciation between "ma" and "horse" involves only a change of tone...
...Indomitable Yuan Tung once, during an interview session, astonished us by cracking a hard-shelled filbert with his teeth...
...He went about everywhere saying with a false humility that belied his conceit, "Oh, my children are really to be pitied...
...They allowed him to remain in the army (what with his good class background and all), but in order to keep him out of further trouble, they put him severely off by himself with only horses to tend...
...At twenty-five he already showed the scars and coarseness of a man who has been badly treated and driven too hard, but he was strong and cleanskinned and his eyes brimmed with intelligence...
...The response of the team cadre was to bind him with rope, force him to his knees, and beat him...
...The family of any peasant who sought to enlist would be investigated for three generations back to make certain that it had always been properly impoverished (without a single unseemly renegade to the ranks of the wellto-do) and innocent of the slightest offense to the Party...
...The story concerns his eldest son, Kim-fung...
...The man was evidently not made of good metal...
...Although quick and promising as a boy, he had not, because of his "black" origin, been allowed to continue his studies past primary school...
...WVhether Dog-Bear himself had got word of this, no one could say, but since his eldest son had joined the army-and his only daughter, besides, had been selected for the commune propaganda team-he had quite lost his head...
...Dog-Bear's son was enrolled in an officer's training school...
...said one of the cadre to Yuan Tung...
...They always keep their ears open...
...A year later, Yuan Tung and the girl began to live together...
...After he rose through the ranks of the Communist Youth League and seemed slated to become a Party member, the cadre felt really confident...
...Of course, even then there were those in the village who had their own "viewpoint...
...Ordinarily, when a soldier came home, he had no difficulty marrying immediately, ennobled as he was by army service...
...What a thing to do," he commented, "to a boy of fifteen...
...Who are you...
...But now others replied sarcastically, "Of course, your son is so important...
...If they ever really had to earn a living, they'd end up with nothing...
...In China, Yuan Tung explained, it is no small matter to become a soldier...
...He told it artlessly and then promptly lost interest, but when the details sorted themselves into sequence, we saw with wonder that it was a story in counterpoint to his own and a classic...
...His village was still very "feudalistic" and such things were considered a scandal...
...deliberately slurring the last word to sound like "mare...
...But the fact was that Dog-Bear's son had "relations"'-with a horse...
...Dog-Bear was the chosen member of the Peasants' Association in the village...
...However-Yuan Tung shrugged as he cited the adage-mountains can be moved and rivers change their course, but a man's nature cannot easily be altered...
...You...
...A man who dares not show anger must be guilty," concluded Yuan Tung sagely...
...All they know how to do is fan up wind and start a fire...
...Within three months the authorities had been forced to expel him from the officers' training school...
...At fifteen, he learned that reason and justice did not apply to a landlord's son: He had naively asked his production team to review an unfair debt allegedly incurred by his widowed mother...
...The commune cadre still did not lose hope and arranged for him to be a bookkeeper in the general store...
...and the characters across the top strip proclaimed: "A Revolutionary Household...
...He never replies...
...To the girl he said, "You are a daughter of the 'poor-and-lowermiddle' peasantry, an inheritor of the red-you have a bright future-and you want to marry him, the son of a family on its way out...
...The other kind of peasant was enlightened and bitter, knowing exactly what had been done to him and prepared to tell us how and why...
...At the very least, everyone thought, he would emerge a company commander...
...Once when he was imprisoned in the "cow-pen"-the local thought-reform jail-a young village girl of poor-peasant background began to visit him...
...Such a man, Yuan Tung explained, would be sentenced to several years of hard labor as a "militarymarriage criminal," who had done a soldier's family wrong...
...For had not Mao Tse-tung himself said that a soldier is "like a pillar of stone standing in the Yangtze River" and that a soldier's family was privileged above all others in the village...
...From the very beginning the commune had great expectations of - An epithet of the Cultural Revolution...
...He laughed and explained, "We're very primitive...
...My eldest son has been taken away by the government...
...Not for long, however...
...Young Yuan Tung, whom we interviewed in Hong Kong during the winter of 1973-1974, was one of these...
...To this day in the village, the young fellows smirk at him...
...Today they took me out to 'struggle' me and tomorrow I said 'good day' to the cadre as usual...
...Indeed, if he left a girl behind, she would have to be true to him, since no other man would risk courting a soldier's girl in his absence...
...Later, the two of them applied to the commune cadre for permission to marry...
...And you want to marry her...
...The production team cut off her grain allotment and she was soon compelled to return to her parents' home...
...However, the other workers became annoyed, since they were not likewise graciously permitted to steal, and reported him...
...Your son is in the army...
...A counterrevolutionary like him, etc...
...Finally one day another soldier returned to the village to tell the news...
...What with such prospects and the best class background, they thought, if he did not become a big official, then nobody could...
...The army service of Kim-fung went by and nothing was heard of his upward climb...
...Dog-Bear's son...
...Aside from their ignorance and bad character, they're miserable-looking as well...
...How he came to be so-called is no longer clear, but the nickname rather well suggested the man...
...Miriam London is a researcher in Soviet and Chinese studies...
...On New Year's Day, such a family was given red paper strips to paste at their front door...
...Dog-Bear and his wife now became more smug than ever...
...As soon as they hear of anyone saying or doing anything wrong, they sneak off to report it to the 'above.' So when the next movement comes along the files are all ready and waiting-when and where you said this or did that...
...Dog-Bear's son, however, could find no wife...
...Everyone in the village knew that each member of a soldier's household received the maximal rice allotment during his years of service and that, on his return, he would no longer have to muddy his feet in the paddy fields, but would likely be assigned to a coveted factory job or even be appointed one of the leading cadre...
...In the soldiers' dormitory he had taken to stealing toothbrushes and toothpaste, and at the army hospital he had molested a girl nurse...
...Or, more wistfully, "You have such a good son...
...Sometimes when they see him go by, they call out, "Kim-fung, how's your ma...
...He hardly knew how to say this, he said...
...Whenever old people met Dog-Bear now, they would stop and say, "How nice...
...But, thenSuddenly, Yuan Tung blushed and looked at us tentatively...
...So they could not readily send him back to the village...
...The cadre was aware of this but pretended not to notice, still wanting to give him "some face...
...At last the commune cadre realized it was useless...
...It had evidently been the talk of several villages and he could not repress it, once it came to his mind...
...But the day that Kim-fung joined the army it was unanimously agreed-his future looked brilliant...
...In our years of interviewing peasants from the China mainland we have met, over and over, two kinds: one the poor clod who fixed on us, as we sat and talked, a stare of glistening panic, like that of a small woodland animal freezing before onrushing doom...
...In due course, Kim-fung "switched vocation," as they say, and returned to civilian life...
...Now that we reflect on it, he was wrong...
...It was in this connection that he remembered and related-with malice and mirth-the story of Dog-Bear's son...
...Alas, there was an incident shortly thereafter in the general store: Kim-fung stole a clock...
...It turned out that, not only had there been no progress, but-oh, horror-it was just the reverse...
...Dog-Bear's son had been bad all the time-clearly a man, as everyone could see, who did not have "proper respect" for other people...
...If you lined them all up in a row," said Yuan Tung of the Association members in his commune, "what a sight that would be...
...As for a despised landlord's son, he could not even join the militia, let alone the army...
...What else could they do...
...He dares do what no one else would...
...Very soon he took to stealing money from the meat sales by slipping it into his waterproof boots...
...Then they sent him to work in a butchery where pigs and ducks were slaughtered and sold...
Vol. 12 • January 1979 • No. 1
