God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [54]
[Zhang stops talking, either too tired or unwilling to continue his story; his wife continues.]
Li Guizhi: After my husband was taken away, I went to stay with my parents in Salaowu. Since my family didn’t own land and my parents were not connected with the Nationalist government or the church, we were not affected; we were classified as part of the revolutionary masses. All I could do was cry all day. One day someone stopped by and told me that my husband was dying. I was desperate and rushed to Zehei, which was about forty-five kilometers away. I saw him kneeling in the rain, like a ghost. I squatted in front of him, but he didn’t recognize me. I was afraid his soul had gone. After I called his name a couple of times, he began to respond. I had brought boiled potatoes and fed him. A militia guy came and yelled at us. I ignored him and continued to feed my husband. The guy hit us with his stick. A potato fell to the ground. It was horrible. He had been kneeling there like that for three days and three nights without food. In the end, they kicked me out. By the time I got home, my house was guarded by members of the Poor Peasants Association. I was not allowed to leave my home.
At the tail end of the campaign, my husband crawled home. The night he returned, I had been unable to sleep, and just before dawn I heard strange scraping sounds outside. When I opened the door, there was a person covered in mud lying at my feet, hands reaching for my legs. It was my husband. He didn’t even have the strength to moan. I pulled him inside, wrapped him in a quilt. Several hours later, the local militia people arrived. They wanted to drag him to a public denunciation meeting. When they realized that he couldn’t move, they found a wooden plank and carried him out, put him on stage, and forced him to open his eyes.
Zhang: There were about three to four thousand people there. I couldn’t move. There were ten others on the stage for denunciation, all tied with ropes. My eldest brother was there beside me, his arms held behind him by two militiamen, his body bent to ninety degrees. I lay on the wooden plank, looking up. The rain had stopped. Amid the loud shouting, I could hear the river nearby. The clouds had dispersed and the sky was a clear blue. I thought: People lived harmoniously under this same sky in the same village for many years. Why did they act like this now? Why did they hate each other and torture each other like that? Was that what the Communist revolution was all about? All the “class enemies” had been beaten; their faces were swollen and their heads scarred. Beatings couldn’t quench their thirst. They started killing. After that meeting, all the former officials under the old regime were executed, including my brother; their children were sentenced to ten or twenty years in jail, where some lost their minds, or died.
I wasn’t involved in politics at all. I had never exploited anyone. So they let me live. The torture left me disabled for the rest of my life. I was ordered to work under the supervision of the revolutionary masses. I wasn’t allowed to preach, of course. In 1958 during the Great Leap Forward campaign, they sent me to a labor camp. Around that time, our commune was building a dam. My job was to dig mud. After that, I was assigned to a different reeducation group and worked at a coal-burning kiln for ten months. Our group had about 250 members; within a month, one third had fallen ill because there wasn’t enough food. We ate soupy rice porridge every day and didn’t have the strength for heavy labor. I wasn’t a strong person in the first place.
That was the summer of 1959, a year of widespread starvation. We had eaten everything—tree bark, grass and leaves, things animals didn’t even touch. Many died of food poisoning. One day, three in my group dropped dead by the side of a road. Passersby stripped off their clothes. Their teeth and tongues stuck out, as if they were still hungry. We had to bury the bodies deep or they would be dug up again. People were desperate