Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [135]
IN EARLY DECEMBER, Brigade Leader Lai brings militiamen from Tun-hsi to search our houses, because he no longer wants to do his own dirty work. “Where have you hidden your grain?” the men demand gruffly. “We know you stole it.”
The amount we’ve hidden is small—just cupfuls—but we’ve spread it widely throughout the two-room house. We’ve slit open our padded jackets and sewn little packets of gleaned rice and wheat in with the cotton bunting. We buried some millet in a jar under the sleeping platform. We wrapped foraged peanut shells in an old rice sack and tucked it between a rafter and the roof. We’ll grind the shells to mix into porridge. Party officials have told us to “live an abundant year as if it were a frugal one.” To me, we’re living in a frugal year, doing everything we can to get by, and it still isn’t enough.
Brigade Leader Lai’s men come to Green Dragon Village every day for two weeks. (I’ll say this: it’s easy to tell who’s been eating just by looking at their bodies. The brigade leader and his militiamen don’t show signs of starvation. They haven’t lost weight, developed concave stomachs, or had any of their limbs swell from edema.) People hope that if Lai’s men find a stash it will divert them from searching other houses in the village and that the punishment won’t be too harsh. The lucky are beaten with sticks, or have their hands tied behind their backs and then are hung from a tree by their wrists until they scream from the agony. Those less lucky are forbidden to eat at the canteen. The least lucky are sent to a distant irrigation project, but no one can work in icy water in this weather and survive. Those who’ve been sent away have not returned, but many who’ve been beaten have died, and not getting to eat in the canteen is also a way to die, only slower. The village, the fields, and the canteen begin to look like movie sets—just façades. The people around me seem fake too, putting on their smiling faces and shouting slogans about things they don’t believe. Everyone still pretends to be open, welcoming, and enthusiastic about the Great Leap Forward, but there’s a furtiveness to them that reminds me of rats slinking along the edges of walls.
Even though our first winter wheat crop was paltry, Brigade Leader Lai hasn’t given up on the idea of converting still more of our rice paddies, vegetable fields, and tea terraces to wheat. Now he wants us to deep-plow too. We’re to dig ten feet under to make our furrows richer than ever before—or so he says. The farmers know that topsoil is precious and that what lies beneath it is useless, but the brigade leader won’t take no for an answer. Even though it’s winter, we’re ordered back to the fields. One man pulls a plow and two men push it, while the rest of us dig even deeper with shovels and hoes. The slogan is “Plow deep to bury the American aggressor!” When we aren’t reciting the slogan, we’re encouraged to chant, “We work all day! We work all night! We work all day! We work all night!” And we do, sometimes stopping only to nap by the side of the field or slurp down our single bowl of rice porridge. When someone asks the brigade leader why we have to use our own bodies to do what draft animals have always done, he responds, “An ox or a water buffalo can’t dig as deep as humans.”
I remember the story Tao told me about the water buffalo and why it wore blinders. He said the animal’s suffering in this life was punishment for things it had done in a past life. Now I think of a different reason. To make an ox or water buffalo work so hard, it needs to be blinded and uninformed. That’s what the government is doing to the masses now. Why? Because peasants are China’s true beasts of burden. Still, no one blames Chairman Mao. “The Great Helmsman wouldn’t hurt us,” my neighbors say. “The people around him just aren’t telling him the truth. It’s not his fault.” They spout this even as they develop dark patches on their lips and limbs that quickly turn into running sores. They feel sick to their