Chapter 7

TEACHING AT THE WINTER SCHOOL PROVED to be more strenuous than Ku expected. The schoolhouse was five miles away and he was not used to walking. Besides, he was hungry. Even when he had been there a week, after puffing up the path against the choking north wind he felt so faint when he stood at the blackboard that he kept dropping the chalk.
The food was shocking. He came to the country grimly prepared for anything but this. Various friends who had gone out in the country to help in the Land Reform had given him advice with an ill-concealed air of superiority. "The farmer is naive," they said. "VVhen he feels friendly toward you he might offer you a sesame cake he has al ready bitten on. Be sure to eat it up. Again, the farmer's wife might wipe a chair with the same cloth she had just dried the baby's bottom with and ask you to sit down. You must not hesitate and hurt her feelings." He did not find the farmers as naive as they were pictured. And where were the sesame cakes? All they had here was a watery gruel with inch-long sections of grass floating in it.
Of course he could not speak to anybody about the matter, and least of all to Comrade Wong. So he had no means of finding out whether the situation was only local or spread over a large area. He could find no mention in the newspapers of famine in this or any other part of the country. He had a curious sensation of having dropped out of time and space, living nowhere.
The strange dull, gnawing sense of hunger, something new to him-a cross between toothache and heartache—made everything else seem unreal, the sunny fields, the woodcutters on the hillside, the sound of distant gongs and cymbals in the wind-the people in the Rice-Sprout Song Corps had been called out to practice again and were dancing and wriggling under the eye of the cul-tural cadre.
It was incredible how the people carried on as usual. They cooked three times a day. In the damp air the blue wood smoke hung around for a long time with its clean, acrid fragrance. At noon, all over the countryside the black-roofed white houses issued smoke from square holes in their walls. Slowly it poured out like the soul leaving the body and melting away in a moment of holy ecstasy. Watching it, somehow Ku thought of an oft-quoted saying of Confucius or some other sage, "To the people, food is God." Watching the wood smoke trailing off into the air from the stoves under the pots of thin rice gruel, he thought, how can they go on like this, when food is God to them?
He was afraid that he was losing weight. That worried him most. Everybody who participated in the Land Re-form boasted of having grown fat after three months in the country. Some claimed they had been cured of all kinds of illnesses of long standing. To those who hung back from the dreaded ordeal they would say, "It is a hard life but you can grow fat, if your Thought has already been Straightened Out." On the other hand, growing thin would indicate inner conflict, resistance in the sub-conscious mind. Ku wondered how he was going to face his friends and colleagues. Two or three months of this, and he would be thin as a scarecrow. And he could not blame it on the famine. That he could never mention to anybody, unless he wanted to run the risk of being ar-rested as a Nationalist spy spreading malicious rumors.
It would seem, he told himself, rather admiring his own sense of satire, that in the matter of ill-nourishment and long working hours The Party Comrades departed from their materialistic standpoint and became extreme spiritualists, forever asserting the superiority of mind over matter. Bitterly, Ku recalled the much-publicized case of Miss Totally Fragrant Fu, the famous Shaoshing opera actress and a beautiful consumptive, who had taken part in the Land Reform. She wrote to all her friends giving glowing accounts of how her health improved under the trying circumstances. She said she had served as an errand boy and trudged thirty miles on straw sandals in snow two feet deep, to deliver a letter. Now she could eat three huge bowls of rice every meal and had gained twenty pounds. Three bowls of rice! Ku felt that he could do with three huge bowls of rice himself.
He tried to work in spite of this craving obsession. He was searching for story material that might be interpreted in such a way as to throw light on the flourishing and progressive state of the peasantry after the Land Reform. In his heart he still maintained that the country must be prospering, "as a whole." He found that a very useful phrase.
He talked with various persons. Comrade Wong ac-companied him to some of the neighboring villages to visit the soldiers' families. The people were very pleasant but they never had much to say. On the other hand, there were quite a few who talked too much, probably under the impression that he was some visiting dignitary who had the power to improve their lot. In halting, mumbled phrases they would intimate that they were actually worse off than before. To handle such cases Ku had discovered the simple expedient of dismissing them as "not typical."
Comrade Wong would probably call Big Aunt 'typi-cal." But Comrade Wong had never lived with her and did not know her intoning of those set phrases could get to be very monotonous. Sometimes Ku could almost believe that she was a shameless liar. He interviewed Gold Root Tan and his wife. They both seemed shy, but Ku still had hopes that when they grew more used to him they might open up.
Gold Root took the Winter School seriously. Moon Scent also went regularly because her husband seemed to like it. She learned the tunes of some of the songs they taught there, "The East Is Red" and "Beat Down the American Wolves." But she paid little attention to the lessons. She was not interested in self-improvement. Like all women who are happy in their marriage, she felt im-mensely complacent.
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Gold Root went and asked Ku to write out the char-acters for "door," "table," "chair," all those things around the house, for him to cut out and paste on the actual object. Everybody crowded around Ku's door to watch him wield the brush. Moon Scent also came peering, standing on tiptoe with an arm around the neck of Sister-in-Law Gold Have Got.
Then she said, "Ai, Sister-in-Law Gold Have Got, with a teacher right in your house you should really be ashamed if you do not learn your lessons!" She gave the older woman a push and ran away laughing.
Sister-in-Law Gold Have Got blushed and smiled con-fusedly because nobody ever joked with her. And Ku looked up at this with a smile. Sometimes this pretty country woman could be bold, too, he thought.
He ought to be able to build a story around her. She was a true daughter of the soil, unspoiled by her stay in the city. She had come back in answer to the call of "Return to the Land," and he noticed that she seemed happier than most other people around here.
One day when he returned from a stroll he saw her hanging up her washing on a tree. There were some chil-dren's underpants made of an old cotton print of a pinkish red color which looked well on the high branches. The tree seemed bright with flowers in midwinter. She was not tall but she was sturdily built. Ku found himself wondering what she was like in summer without those wadded clothes that made every woman look pregnant. The padded pants folded right over the stomach, pushing the jacket well out.
"The winter is colder here than in Shanghai," he said. She agreed with him pleasantly. He sat down on the boundary stone nearby, and asked her where she used to live when she was in Shanghai. It turned out to be not far from his place. She remarked that it was a conven-ience to have the market only a few blocks away.
She seemed singularly accessible today. As they went on talking she asked him how many people there were in his family, how many servants, and if they had the house to themselves and whether they had many friends and relations in Shanghai. With a shock he came to realize that she was working around to sounding him out on the possibility of his getting her a job in the city, and also help her husband to find one if possible.
After that he never approached her again.
He wrote regularly to his wife and friends and walked thirty miles to the village town to post the letters. After-ward he would have lunch in a restaurant—rice or noodles with eggs, meat, bean-curd skin, vegetables, and bamboo shoots. He looked forward to those trips with increasing impatience. Then one day Comrade Wong dropped in to ask him if he had any letters to post. Com-rade Wong was going to town for a meeting and could mail them for him.
He found himself trembling with anger. So they wanted to deprive him even of this one full meal in days. Then he pulled himself together. There was every pos-sibility of Wong having spied on him while he was in town but Wong probably would not object to his eating a good meal out of his own pocket, though he might despise him for it.
"No, I don't have any letters to mail," he said, smiling. Luckily the one he wrote last night had a book lying on top of it on the table to press down the flap of the en-velope. The glue never stuck since it went down in price to Face the Masses.
It was crazy, his telling a lie like that. If Wong hap-pened to take up that book and see the letter he would certainly think it held some secret. Otherwise, why should he be afraid to trust it to anybody else?
He must get Wong away from this room as soon as possible.
"The New Year is coming; you must be homesick," Wong said jocularly, slapping him on the back. "Miss your lover?" He used the accepted Communist term for wife.
Ku smiled. "Comrade Wong, are you going home to see your lover during the New Year?"
"I have not been home for two years," Wong said, smil-ing. "You know how it is. There never is time."
"Comrade Wong, you are too ardent in serving the people. And you are always so busy from morning till night. I never have a chance to learn from you."
"You are too modest. There is no need to be modest when you are among your own comrades."
"No, but there are many things I want to consult you about. If you are going to town this morning, suppose I walk you to the Temple of the Earth God? We can talk on the way."
"Yes-in fact, I should have started before now."
Comrade Small Chang was waiting for Wong outside the house. The local militia wore no uniform, and for arms most of them had to make do with rods, swords, and lances. But Small Chang carried a rifle. They made an impressive showing as they strolled out of the village with their bodyguard bringing up the rear.
Comrade Wong asked Ku how he was getting on with his story, and observed, as he had done on several prev-ious occasions, "You should have been here during the Land Reform. Let me tell you-it was a truly inspiring experience."
Ku resented having this thrown in his face all the time-that he did not volunteer his services during the Land Reform. It had been a particularly severe winter and his wife had worried about his lungs. Of course he knew exactly what Wong thought of him-a latecomer to the scene, purely an opportunist.
"Truly inspiring. You should have seen the look of sheer joy in the farmers' eyes when they had the land-lord's farming implements divided among them," Wong said.
"But that kind of joy is out of date now," Ku said testily. "The Literary Journal had a special article about it last month. It says writers are not to dwell on the happiness of the farmers after the Land Reform. That must only be a passing phase. It is time to move up a step."
Wong listened carefully, with the proper respect for the leading magazine of the nation. "Yes, that is true," he said guardedly. "There is still lots of work to be done."
"The Literary Journal has lashed out at the present state of mind in the countryside. It says the Turned Over Farmers think only of eating and drinking. They have dreams of sun-changfa chia, Produce-and-Build-up-a Family Fortune. Up north they made up a jingle which sums up their ideal:
"THIRTY ACRES AND A BUFFALO,
A WIFE AND BABY AND A WARM BED."
"Yes, yes-they lacked Political Awareness," Comrade Wong agreed.

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written about and told to the people. All that was taboo under the reactionary government can now be told. Everywhere you look you see a story."
Ku agreed that this was indeed a great age.
"I used to write myself when I was young," Wong said wistfully.
Ku could imagine what kind of things Comrade Wong had written as a budding Communist for the school mag-azine. But he listened politely to Wong telling him how he used to contribute to and then edited the local news-paper in a town in Kiangsi.
In winter the water was shallow, revealing piles of gray stones in the middle of the stream. Ku thought it looked like a concrete road under repair.
It was then that he got his great idea for the story of the dam. Suppose that the stream overflowed every year, flooding the fields and wiping out part of the crop. Well, let's make the engineer from the city and some old farmers put their heads together and solve the problem by building a dam with a door. This would serve to illustrate the union of technical knowledge and peasant wisdom. If the engineer thought it up all by himself he, of course, would be guilty of the Self-glorifi-cation of the Intellectual. And if the old farmers refused to co-operate, relying only on their past experiences, they were guilty of Experiencism. This idea would avoid both.
There had been numerous films about the engineer and the old factory workers putting their heads together and working wonders. They would repair a burst boiler, prolong the life of an old worn-out lathe, manufacture for a cotton mill an important spare part that was previ-ously imported from America and could not be replaced. But hitherto the situation had never been applied to the' farming population. He had opened up a whole new vista.

In his excitement he cast aside his usual reserve and asked Wong as soon as the latter came to a pause in his literary reminiscences, "Comrade Wong, is there a dam anywhere near here?"
"A dam?" Wong was taken aback, his story about the newspaper choked off in midstream. "No. But why? You want to see a dam?" From the sudden interest that lit up his eyes and widened his smile, Ku could see that he had become suspicious.
"No, I was just thinking, would it help to build a dam here if the stream overflows in summer and floods the fields?"
"It does not overflow."
"But suppose it does," Ku explained. "I was just thinking I might build up a story around that."
"Yes, but—" Wong stared at him in amazement. "Why would you want to make one up, when there is so much story material around, in this great age? Be-sides-it does not overflow." At last he had Ku sized up as that kind of writer. He opened his mouth to laugh and checked himself just in time. But a great flock of ducks suddenly burst into sight and floated downstream incredibly fast, cackling madly with an elderly glee. It was as if, through a brilliant feat of ventriloquism, his laughter was transplanted and borne swiftly downstream. It left him and Ku both somewhat out of countenance.