Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [40]
A month ago, I didn’t know how to do this work. I did my best, but I was hopeless and exhausted. I kept thinking about one of my professors, who said that the Chinese peasant is “the twin brother to the ox.” I wasn’t at all like an ox. I’d come back from the fields with an aching back, sore muscles, and blisters on my hands. The hot sun was brutal, and I didn’t understand that I needed to keep drinking boiled water and tea. But as they say around here, “Seeing something once is better than hearing about it a hundred times. Doing something once is better than seeing it a hundred times.” I’ve been learning and observing from real life. I’m still a long way from becoming one of Mao’s “shock team” women, but I’ve found what the villagers call an iron spirit.
All around me I hear people working: the shush shush as they glide between the cornstalks, the hacking of hoes as they aerate the furrows, and the melodies of a recently authorized harvest song rising into the air from the hayfield adjacent to us. This is everything I imagined the New China would be: rosy-cheeked peasants helping one another and sharing the benefits, the sun warming my back, the sound of cicadas and birds accompanying our songs.
At eleven, some married women arrive from the village with tin canisters tied to the ends of poles and strung over their shoulders. They serve us rice and vegetables—cucumbers, eggplants, tomatoes, and onions, all of which were grown by the collective—and then we go back to work. A little after noon, Z.G. appears. He wears a big-brimmed straw hat and carries a satchel and an easel. He works in the field for an hour or so before going to sit under a tree to draw. No one objects. He’s recording our work.
At four, the hottest time of the day, the married women return, bringing tea thermoses and more rice. During our break, people gather around Z.G. to look at his sketches, often exclaiming and laughing as they recognize themselves and others.
“Look, there’s Comrade Du’s bat-shaped scar!”
“Are my legs as bowed as that?”
“You can see the girls from the irrigation team walking together in this one. You put those girls together and all you get is laughter. They think life is so carefree.”
These compliments should be hard for Tao to hear, since he once received them himself, but he knows he’s in the presence of a far better artist.
After our break, we return to the furrows. It’s almost the end of the day when I hear a woman shriek. The singing stops, but the cicadas continue to whine as we listen through the warm air for the source of the sound. We begin to hear shouts and a woman’s pained cries. Kumei and I rush through the cornstalks and into the adjacent hayfield. The harvest has begun in this field, and the far end has already come under a sharp-bladed hay cutter. It’s there, in the cleared area, that a group of people cluster together. We run to them and elbow our way through the crowd. A man, splattered with blood, stands over a woman. He looks pale and distraught. The woman’s neck has been torn open, and her arm is nearly gone from her body. Blood spurts and pools around her. Three women have stripped off their kerchiefs and are using them to try to stop the bleeding, but it doesn’t seem to be helping.
The smell of the blood under the hot sun is thick at the back of my throat. I feel sick and repelled, but flies and other insects have been attracted to the scent and are buzzing about the woman, swooping in to drink her blood. I’ve seen her before—in the village, at our evening art classes, and on the paths to the fields—but I don’t know her name.
“It’s not my fault,” the blood-splattered man says in a shaky voice. “I was working in my furrow. Comrade Ping-li was next to me. The next thing I knew, she threw herself in the hay cutter’s path—low, so I couldn’t miss her. She must not have seen me. But how can that be?” He looks at us, searching for an answer, but none of us have one. “She had