I arrived at Red Fire Farm – along with many other girls in ten large trucks – late one spring afternoon in 1974. Our names had appeared on our schools’ Glorious Red Lists, a great honour, but one which meant that we would have to leave home to work in another province. The farm was near the East China Sea. It consisted of endless fields of sea reeds, and rectangular grey barracks each with a long outdoor sink.

I was assigned to house number three, and to a small room with bunk beds for my seven room-mates. The floor was packed earth. My only private space was provided by a mosquito net that hung from thin bamboo sticks. The bed next to mine was given to a girl named Shao Ching, who, like me, was seventeen years old. Shao Ching was pale-skinned and slim as a willow. When she spoke, she looked down at the ground. Unlike the rest of us who tied our braids with standard brown rubber-bands, Shao Ching tied hers with colourful strings. She was extremely neat. No matter how tired we got after a day’s heavy labour, she would walk forty-five minutes to the hot-water station and then carry back water to wash herself.

I was proud to be Shao Ching’s friend. She showed me how she used remnants of fabric to make pretty underwear, finely embroidered with flowers, leaves and lovebirds. She hung a string next to the little window between our beds on which she could hang her underwear to dry. In our bare room the string was like an art gallery.

All the girls secretly envied Shao Ching. She redesigned the clothes she was issued: her shirts to taper at the waist; her trousers to make her legs look longer. She was not embarrassed by her full breasts. The male soldiers stared at her whenever she passed by and when the weather got hotter, she dared to go without a bra. There was one man who was said to have burst into tears on hearing that Shao Ching was running a high fever.

I had become friends with Shao Ching on our first day in the rice fields. A leech had bitten her, and when she went to pull it out it had burrowed into her skin, leaving only a black dot on the surface. I was working alongside her; when she screamed, I called A-Lan, an experienced soldier, who showed us how we should pat the skin above the leech’s head so that it would back itself out.

We had been greeted at the farm – as we got down from the trucks on that first afternoon – by the Company Commander, Yan. She was about twenty-three, tall, well-built, and walked with authority. She wore an old People’s Liberation Army uniform, washed white and gathered at the waist with a three-inch-wide belt. Her hair was plaited into two short, thick braids. She had examined us one by one, then begun to speak in a whisper, introducing herself – ‘My name is Yan Sheng. Yan meaning discipline; Sheng, victory’ – welcoming us, and then shouting suddenly, ‘I have only one thing to say: Don’t any of you shit on my face! Don’t any of you betray the glorious name of the Advanced Seventh Company, model of the entire Red Fire Farm Army!’ She’d asked if she had made her point clear.

Startled, we had answered, ‘Yes!’

My platoon leader, a bearded man called Lin, was a great admirer of Yan. During a break from work in the fields, he told us how Yan had been accepted as a member of the Party at the age of nineteen. When she had arrived five years ago, he said, the land of Red Fire Farm had been barren. She had led her platoon of twenty Red Guards in reclaiming it. Lin had been among them.

‘Yan is famous for her iron shoulders,’ he said. ‘We all had blisters when we were working on irrigation channels. To remove the mud, we had to make at least twenty half-mile trips in a day, carrying over a hundred and sixty pounds in two hods hanging from a shoulder-pole. Our shoulders swelled like steamed bread. Strong men like me gave up. Yan was a thin girl at that time, but she did not quit. She continued carrying the hods of mud and her blisters bled.’

In my first days at the farm, I had seen Yan carry large loads. She had piled reed upon reed upon her head until she looked like she had a hill on her shoulders, with only her legs moving underneath.

Lin mentioned a fire from the last summer. ‘Our grain stores, straw-huts and fields of ripe crops,’ he said, ‘were destroyed. Soldiers cried. But Yan stood in front of us. One of her braids had burnt off and her clothes were smoking; she told us that our faith in Communism was all we needed to rebuild our dream. We built these houses in five months . . .’

I imagined Yan with a burnt off braid, her skin scorched by fire raging behind her. I had always admired the heroines in the revolutionary operas created by Madam Mao, Comrade Jiang Ching.

Without being aware of it, in a few weeks, I started to imitate Yan. My belt was only two inches wide; I wished it was an inch wider. I cut my long braids short. I tried to carry as much as I could when our platoon was sent to dig a new irrigation channel, even tried to allow my shoulder-pole to rub my bleeding blisters, though the pain was unbearable. And every night I gave speeches at meetings for confession and self-criticism.

At one of these meetings Yan raised an important matter. It concerned Shao Ching. Two of her prettiest hand-embroidered pairs of underwear had been stolen from the line between our beds. The platoon leader suspected the male soldiers and had reported the case to the Party Committee. No one had admitted to the theft. Yan’s deputy, a fierce woman named Lu, said that such behaviour shamed us all. She criticized Shao Ching for vanity and ordered her to make a confession. Yan told Shao Ching that in future she should not hang her underwear near to the window.

After some months on the farm, a group of us were selected for military training programmes. I was among them. We were given tuition in shooting, handling grenades, and combat. We were also called on ‘midnight emergency searches’ when we had to pull ourselves out of the bed and be ready to leave with our rifles and flashlights in three minutes.

One night in early summer, the platoon leader called for me at my window and within minutes I was off with the group. There was a warm, gentle breeze. We moved briskly, almost jogging, through the reeds. When we reached the wheat fields, an order was given in a whisper: ‘Load!’

I snapped awake – this was the first order to use live ammunition – something serious had happened. I loaded my gun.

‘Lie down!’ I heard Yan’s voice. ‘Advance!’

We began crawling through the wheat. It was hard to see. The male soldier in front of me stopped crawling and passed back an order, ‘Stand by!’

I lay there holding my breath, listening. The insects were singing and the wheat smelled sweet. Mosquitoes began to bite me through my clothes. There was a noise in the distance. Then silence. I thought the noise had been my imagination. After about a minute, I heard the noise again. It was two sounds. One was a man’s, the other was a woman murmuring. I heard a soft, muted cry. And then my shock: I recognized the voice as Shao Ching’s.

My only thought was: I can’t let Shao Ching be caught like this. She was my best friend, the only person in my room who was open with me. She had never told me anything about being involved with a man, though I could understand why: it would be shameful to admit. A good female comrade was supposed to devote all her energy, her youth, to the Revolution; she was not permitted even to think about a man until she reached her late twenties, when marriage would be considered. I thought of the consequences Shao Ching would have to bear if she were caught. I crawled forward towards the noise. A firm hand immediately pressed me down to the ground. Yan. She seemed to know exactly what was going on.

As the murmuring and hard breathing became louder, I heard Yan clench her teeth together and draw in a breath, then she loosened her grip on my back and shouted suddenly, ‘Now!’

It was as if a bomb had exploded next to me. Yan turned her flashlight on Shao Ching and the man. About thirty other flashlights, including mine, were switched on at the same time.

Shao Ching screamed. She was in her favourite shirt – the one embroidered with pink mei flowers. The lights shone on her naked buttocks.

The man with Shao Ching was skinny, wore glasses and looked very bookish. He pulled up his pants and tried to run. He was caught immediately by the group led by the deputy commander, Lu, who pulled out her rifle, and held it to the bookish man’s head. He wasn’t from our company, but I remembered having seen him at the market. He had smiled at Shao Ching, but when I had asked whether she knew him, she had said no.

Shao Ching was trembling and weeping. She scrambled back and forth for her clothes, trying to cover her buttocks with her hands.

I lowered my flashlight.

Yan slowly approached the man, ‘Why do you have to do this?’ To my surprise, I saw that her eyes glistened with tears.

The man bit his lip.

Yan threw her belt down and ordered the male soldiers to beat the man. She walked away but stopped and said, ‘I’ll be pleased if you can make him understand that today’s woman is no longer the victim of man’s desire.’ She took off her jacket to cover Shao Ching. ‘Let’s go home,’ she said softly.

The bookish man didn’t look guilty. As the kicking and whipping began, he struggled not to cry out.

I returned to the barracks with the other female soldiers. From a distance we could hear muted cries from the man and Lu shouting, ‘Death to the rapist!’ Shao Ching could not stop whimpering.

A public trial was held in the dining-hall. Shao Ching had undergone four days of ‘intensive mind re-brushing’. On a makeshift stage, she declared in a high, strained voice that she had been raped. The paper from which she read slipped out of her hands twice. Her bookish lover was convicted. I will never forget his expression when the death sentence was announced. As if waking from a nightmare, he looked suddenly relaxed. His bruised purple face had brightened when Shao Ching walked into the hall.

No one talked about the man after the execution, although he was on everyone’s mind. But Shao Ching had changed. She stopped washing. Months passed. Still she hadn’t washed. There were complaints about her smell. When I tried to persuade her to wash her underwear at least, she took a pair of scissors and cut it into strips. She chopped off her long braids and stopped combing her hair. Mucus dripped from her lips. At night, she sang songs off-key. My room-mates reported her behaviour and she was sent to the farm’s hospital. The doctors referred her to a hospital in Shanghai where she was diagnosed as having had a nervous breakdown.

When Shao Ching returned from hospital six months later, I didn’t recognize her. The drugs she had been prescribed had made her gain weight. She was as fat as a bear.

She was again given a bed in my room, where she sat quietly most of the day, staring in one direction. Her pupils sometimes moved upwards, then disappeared into her skull as if she was trying to read her own brain. Her hair was matted. I thought of the evenings when she would wash her hair after dinner, and comb and dry it as the sun set. She used to sing ‘My Mother Land’, a song that we all knew.

There are girls like beautiful flowers,
Boys with strong bodies and open minds.
To build our new China,
We are happily working and sweating together . . .

I spent the night of my eighteenth birthday under my mosquito net. I had a small mirror and used it to examine my body. I was restless. I had begun having thoughts about men and I felt disgusted with myself.

‘Learn to have a stainless mind!’ was a popular slogan at the time. The model women used in propaganda never had men. The heroines in the revolutionary operas had neither husbands nor lovers. The heroine in my life, Yan, didn’t seem to have anything to do with men either. Did she feel restless? How did she feel about her body? Recently, she seemed more serious than before, and more irritable. She had tried several times to talk to Shao Ching. Each time she had been left staring at Shao Ching with a confused expression.

In the late evenings I saw Yan setting out alone for the fields. When I followed her I found that she was trying to catch poisonous water snakes in the reeds. When she caught one she put it in a jar she carried. I did not have the courage to ask what she was doing.

2

In the early hours of the morning the rain had started. The clothes I put out to dry before going to bed were wet and muddy. I took them down from the string and put them on, then dragged myself to the field. We were transplanting rice shoots. We worked for three hours without a break. I was working the edge of the field and noticed a trace of blood in the muddy water. I tracked the blood and found A-Lan, the woman who had shown us how to remove leeches, down on her knees in the water, her pants bloody red. A-Lan always had problems with her period. It could last for half a month, bleeding her to exhaustion. She told me that she hadn’t understood what her period was when it first came. She felt too ashamed to ask anyone for advice and stuffed unsterilized clothes into her pants to try to block the blood. She became infected. I asked her why she hadn’t told her mother or a friend about it.

‘My mother was in a labour camp,’ she said. ‘My friend knew even less than me. She once asked me if Chairman Mao was a man or a woman.’

Why hadn’t she asked the platoon leader for a day off?

‘I did,’ said A-Lan, ‘but I was rejected. The head sent me to Lu and Lu said that the transplanting had to be completed by midnight or we would lose the season.’

I told A-Lan that I would help her as soon as I finished my own planting.

The rain became heavier. I worked fast so I could go to help A-Lan, my arms and fingers moving as if they were not mine. Standing to stretch my back, I noticed Yan a few plots away. She moved like a dancer: passing the rice shoots from left hand to right and inserting the shoots into the mud in perfect time with her steps backward. Her wet clothes were pasted to her body.

I did my best to compete, Yan responded to the challenge. She sped up and I fell far behind; then suddenly slowed down to allow me to catch up, before surging ahead again. She finished with one plot, then went on to the next without turning her head.

The sky turned dark. A loudspeaker broadcast live interviews with labour heroes and encouraged everybody to make a final effort. Two huge bright lights were carried to the fields, and steamed bread was brought out. A-Lan was in tears when I finally went to help her, and a long way behind. We chewed our bread while we planted the shoots. We finished at ten o’clock.

A-Lan thanked me, crying with relief, ‘My mother would have killed herself if she had seen me working like this . . .’

As we left the field, a meeting was called. One of the lights was being moved to the plot where we had worked, millions of mosquitoes swarming into its ray. Lin, our platoon leader, shouted for our attention. ‘We need to talk about the quality of our day’s work. Here is the Commander.’

He passed the loudspeaker to Yan, who was coated with mud. Only her eyes were sparkling. She ordered for the light to be moved to illuminate a particular spot where dozens of rice shoots were floating on the water. ‘Someone did a nice job here!’ Yan said, ‘The shoots will all be dead before daybreak.’

The soldiers began to survey the fields nervously. The word broke out that the section responsible for the careless planting was platoon number four – our territory. I recognized that it was the area I had worked as I tried to keep up with Yan.

Lu ordered that the person responsible should step out of the ranks. A-Lan sensed my fear, and grabbed my hand tightly.

‘No one leaves until the mistake is admitted,’ said Lu.

As I gathered all my courage and was about to step out, Yan suddenly said, ‘Well, I prefer to let the comrade correct his own mistake. Understood?’

‘Yes!’ the soldiers called.

The fields had become quiet in the moonlight. The drizzle had stopped and the air was still. I planted my feet in the mud and began to redo the work, singing a Chairman Mao quotation song to fight off sleep, ‘Made up my mind, not to fear death; overcome all the difficulties, and strive for victory. Made up my mind . . .’

The sky was piled with orange clouds when I woke. The sun was yet to rise. I sat up looking around, knowing I hadn’t finished the work. But I saw that it had been done. Was I dreaming? As I looked towards the sun, there was someone, about thirty yards away pacing the field.

It was Yan. After she was done, she washed her hands in the irrigation channel. ‘A-Lan came to me last night and told me everything,’ she said, unknotting her hair, then bending to wash it in the channel. She combed her hair with her fingers and braided it. ‘When I found you,’ she said, ‘you looked like a big turtle lying in the field. I thought you were dead.’ She paused. ‘I felt guilty.’

I rubbed my eyes.

‘You are strong willed.’ She looked me in the eyes, a thread of a smile on her face. After a while she got up and said, ‘I want you to be the leader of platoon number four. Move in with me so we can discuss the company problem together.’ She walked quickly back to the barracks.

I moved in with Yan and six other platoon heads. Yan and I shared a bunk bed, I occupied the top. The room was the same size as the room I had lived in before. It served as bedroom, dining- room and conference room. It was also a battle front: for although Yan was officially in charge, Lu was obsessed with power.

I always took Yan’s side when they fought. After Lu had tried to ‘cultivate’ me as an advanced activist of her own ‘special study team,’ and I had showed my disinterest, she saw me as a stone in her shoe. ‘If one doesn’t come to her political senses, one might lose her future,’ she reminded me.

I cared about my political image and I wanted to look noble to the others. To make Yan proud, I often picked the hardest labour task for my platoon. At the end of the year we were given a citation and I was accepted by the Communist Youth League. At the ceremony, Yan walked on the stage to congratulate me. She took my hands and squeezed them in her thick, carrot-like finger joints. Laughing, she whispered that she couldn’t wait to have me join the Party. For many nights afterward, before going to sleep, I replayed the ceremony in my head. I dreamt of Yan’s laughter.

After the busy summer season ended, the soldiers were allowed a little time to themselves after dinner. The spare time made my heart feel empty. I missed Shao Ching terribly. I combed her hair and washed her clothes. Although her body was getting back to its shape – she was once again slim like a willow – her mind seemed to have gone for ever. Nothing I tried made her respond to me. She still wore the shirt with mei flower on it – the one she had on the night she was caught–but it had holes under the armpits and at the elbows. The shirt reminded me of the night – I’ll never forget it – when I had my gun pointed at her. Shao Ching had become dangerous to herself. Once I caught her swallowing stones. I reported the incident to Yan. From then on, I often saw Yan following her around the fields in late evenings; they were like two boats drifting over the sea in a dense fog.

Anchee Min, Red Fire farm, 1975

3

I began to dislike going into my mosquito net. It was too quiet. I avoided my bed and walked the narrow paths through the reeds. One night, I found myself at the farm’s brick factory. Thousands of ready-to-bake bricks were laid out in patterns. Some stacks were eight feet high, some leaning as if about to fall, and some had already fallen. I could hear the echo of my own steps. The place had the feel of an ancient ruin.

There was another sound among the bricks, like the noise of an erhu, a two-stringed lute. I picked out the melody – ‘Liang and Zhu’, from a banned Chinese opera, my grandmother used to hum it. I loved the ending of that opera: Liang and Zhu, the two lovers who commit suicide are transformed into butterflies. It surprised me to hear someone on the farm able to play it with such skill.

I followed the sound. It stopped. I heard steps and found the erhu on a brick stool. As I bent over to pick up the instrument a pair of hands came from behind me and covered my eyes.

‘Who is this?’ I asked.

No reply.

I reached back to tickle the body behind me. There was a giggle, a hot breath on my neck. ‘Yan?’

She stood in front of me, smiling, and I felt a sudden joy. She sat on the brick stool and motioned me to sit next to her. I wanted to tell her how beautifully she played. Still smiling, saying nothing, she picked up the erhu and the bow, retuned the strings, bent her head toward the instrument and closed her eyes. She started to play a tune called ‘The River’. Her fingers ran up and down on the strings. When she stopped the notes, she held her breath. Then she slowly inhaled as her fingertip plucked the string. The stronger notes were wrenched out violently. She raised her head with her eyes closed and chin tilted up: the Party Secretary, the heroine, and the erhu player . . . She played ‘Horse Racing’, ‘The Red Army Brother Is Coming Back’, and finally, at my request, she played ‘Liang and Zhu’ again.

We talked. We told each other our life stories. In our eagerness to express ourselves we overlapped each other’s sentences.

Yan’s parents were textile workers. Her mother had been honoured as a ‘Glory Mother’ in the fifties for producing nine children. Yan was the eighth. They lived in one wood-framed room and shared a well with twenty other families. They had no toilet, only a wooden shit container. Yan took the container to a public sewage depot every morning to clean it.

Her parents loved folk music; they saved their money and bought Yan an erhu for her tenth birthday. They hoped that Yan would one day become a famous erhu player.

Yan was fifteen years old when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. She joined the Red Guard and marched to Beijing to be inspected by Chairman Mao at Tiananmen Square. As the youngest Red Guard representative, she was invited to watch an opera. She fell in love with the three-inch-wide belts the performers were wearing. ‘I traded a belt with one of the performers for my best collection of Mao buttons,’ she said. She showed me her belt, made of real leather and copper. ‘The performer told me it was designed by Comrade Jiang Ching.’ She said she had read every book of Mao’s, had memorized the Little Red Book and knew every quotation song.

I began to sing, ‘The Party runs by good policies . . .’

‘Page seven, second paragraph!’ she said loudly.

‘If the broom doesn’t come, the garbage won’t automatically go away . . .’

‘Page ten, first paragraph!’

‘The world is yours . . .’

‘Page two hundred and sixty-three, first paragraph!’

‘Studying Chairman Mao’s works, we must learn to be efficient. We should apply his teachings to our problems to ensure a fast result . . .’

Yan joined my singing, ‘as when we erect a bamboo stick in the sunshine, we see the shadow right away . . .’

‘Where are we?’ I shouted.

‘Vice Chairman Lin Bioa’s Preface For Mao Quotation, second edition!’ Yan shouted back, and we laughed with great joy.

We were still talking when we reached our barracks. We stood in the dark, filled with delight.

After that night, as if by secret arrangement, Yan and I betrayed no intimacy in public. We silently washed each other’s clothes and took trips to fill hot-water containers for each other. We became accustomed to each other’s eye signals. Every couple of weeks, we would go separately to visit our ‘ruins’. Yan would make excuses such as ‘checking the quality of the day’s work.’ I would take the thickest of Mao’s books and my notebook and pretend to find a place to study by myself.

Even when winter came, we didn’t stop meeting. Yan would practice her erhu; I would just lie back and listen. We began to talk about everything, including that most forbidden subject – men.

Yan said that according to her mother, who hated her father, most men were evil. ‘Mother said that she wouldn’t have ever produced nine children with my father if she had not wanted to respond to the Party’s call. Men take pleasure in seducing and raping women,’ she concluded.

I remembered how Yan had taken off her belt that night and ordered the male soldiers to beat the bookish man – and I told Yan that I had hated her for exposing Shao Ching.

Yan lowered her head and listened to my accusation quietly. I cried. Yan said that she hated herself too. She had known for a long time that Lu had been spying on Shao Ching. As the Party Secretary and Commander, she had no choice when the case was reported. She took my hands in hers and rubbed them. Her hands were rough, like those of an old farmer. ‘Don’t worry,’ Yan said, gazing at the sunset, ‘Shao Ching will recover one day.’ She then told me that she had collected sixty-nine water-snakes in a jar which she stored under our bed: the snakes I had seen her catching in the reeds.

‘This is the first time in my life I’ve put faith in superstitions,’ she said. ‘My grandmother once collected snakes to cure her disabled sister. When she had one hundred, her sister stood up and walked. She had been paralysed for six years.’

When Yan asked me how I felt about men, I told her a story I had never told anyone. It had happened during a Red Guards’ meeting when I was seventeen. There had been a power cut and as we were waiting in the dark, a hand touched my back. Trembling, it slowly moved around my side to touch my breast. I allowed the hand to stay there for about a minute then stood up and moved to another seat. When the lights came back on I turned to see three boys, all about my age. I knew one of them – a straight-A student with a girlish face. He looked nervous and pale.

‘Why didn’t you yell,’ Yan asked.

I told her that actually my body had felt good.

Yan looked stunned. She sat in silence for a while. Then, blushing, she told me she had something to confess.

I waited.

She took a breath and said she couldn’t, then rested her head on her knees.

I pulled her knees apart and lifted her chin.

His name was Fong Chen, she said, he was head of Company thirty-two and she had met him at the headquarters meeting two months ago.

I asked if they had talked, and Yan said they hadn’t.

‘Well, how do you know he likes you?’

She just felt that he did, she said.

‘Oh! What a personal life corruption!’ I said. ‘Please raise this problem at the Company meeting.’

She told me to stop joking, she was worried, I had to help her.

I said I would lend her The Second-time Handshake – a banned book that Shao Ching had copied and lent to me when she had first arrived at the farm.

Yan read the book in three nights at the brick factory. When she returned the copy to me, she seemed inspired. She wanted to write to Fong Chen. Then her face fell. Yan explained how Lu had intercepted and read Shao Ching’s love letters; that was how they had known she would be in the field that night. ‘I can’t do things I have forbidden others to do.’

I argued that if she now understood that what she had done to Shao Ching was wrong, why should she repeat the mistake?

That night, on our way home, we discussed how the letter should be written, and how I could find an official excuse to deliver it to Fong Chen.

Two weeks passed, and Yan had not given me anything to deliver. Then one night, when I was lying in bed, she opened my curtain and threw in a folded letter:

Comrade Fong Chen
How are you? I was wondering how the agricultural initiative is progressing in your company. Here we are making good progress.
I have thought of our meeting often. It was meaningful, as well as politically fruitful.

In the margin Yan had written, ‘Will you please help.’ I took a piece of paper and replied that I would do whatever the Party required of me. The next day I rewrote her letter. I didn’t know what Fong looked like so I described Yan’s face instead. I tried to imagine how they would touch each other; just thinking of it made my heart beat fast. I wanted to describe Yan’s body, but I had never seen it. I described my own instead, touching myself and imagining my body were hers and my fingers his.

When Yan returned, I whispered that I had finished. We told Lu – who was up as usual studying Mao – that because it was so cold we would sleep in the same bed and share blankets. Yan pulled them up over us and turned on her flashlight. I watched as her face flushed. She re-read the letter three times. Through the mosquito net I saw Lu stand up and turn out the light. Yan wanted me to imagine how Fong would react to the letter. I whispered that he would be unable to stop thinking of her. We lay awake in the dark, too excited to sleep.

Yan turned away from me and sighed; she seemed to be murmuring something.

Our room-mates were breathing evenly, Lu was snoring.

Yan sighed again, ‘Too bad,’ she said, ‘that you are not a man.’

I asked what she would do if I were.

Her breath was hot. She said she would do exactly as I had described in the letter.

We lay in silence. She put one of her legs between mine. Our arms were around each other. Then almost at the same time we pulled away. The snakes were beating against the sides of the jar under the bed.

I delivered four letters to Fong in two months. He never wrote back. In order to share a bed with Yan, I continued to complain of the cold. She did not wash her mosquito net because the dirt made it less transparent. When the light was on, no one was able to see us.

I enjoyed seeing Yan flush when she read my letters. I asked her to imagine herself being loved by Fong, insisting on detail that I could use the next time I wrote. Yan would grin and say I was embarrassing her. One day she grabbed my hand and pressed it to her chest telling me to feel how I was driving her to a heart attack. Her heart was hammering. She was wearing a thin shirt with a bra under it. Her lips were parted slightly. I heard Lu’s cough. She was sitting three feet away at the table concentrating on Mao. She turned a page. Yan closed her eyes and moved my fingers up to caress her face. I made an effort to look away, staring at the ceiling. Yan put her arms around my neck so that her breasts were pressed against my shoulder. She untied one of her braids then helped me to untie the other so that I could smooth the loose hair with my fingers. Lu was now brushing her teeth. She spat outside, then came in and turned out the light. The bed frame shook as she climbed in. I waited for her snoring. Yan began to whisper in my ear, reciting some of the phrases I had used in my letters.

4

One day in spring I took my platoon to repair a bridge. By four o’clock I was able to dismiss them. The members of my platoon liked me. My policy was unique – when the assignment was completed they were allowed to take the rest of the day off. In many cases, those who finished the work would stay to help other platoons, in response to my call ‘to carry forward the communist collaborative spirit.’ Lu didn’t like my policy; she called it ‘capitalist contract bullshit’. She had asked me to change it and I had no choice but to acquiesce. But when she wasn’t inspecting, I did things my way.

When the work was done I walked across the bridge. Along the canal side there was a huge slogan painted on canvas and mounted on thick bamboo sticks which said ‘Do not fear death or hard work.’ We had created the canal ourselves that winter. I felt proud every time I walked by it.

This particular day, as I passed by the bridge I heard a local boatman calling me from his boat. He told me to come quickly; he had discovered a drowned body. I ran down to the boat. It was a female body. The boatman slowly flipped it over like an egg-roll on a skillet. In front of me was Shao Ching. I lost my breath. Her face was puffed. The whole head had swelled like a pumpkin. There were traces of cuts on her arms and legs.

‘It looks like she had a fit,’ the boatman said. ‘You see these cuts? She struggled, but got tangled in the weeds.’

I stood there motionless.

Someone got the news to Yan. She came running down from the bridge like a mad horse with her hair standing back on its roots. Her face was blue and red as if it had been beaten. She wouldn’t listen when the boatman told her that it was useless to attempt mouth-to-mouth life saving. ‘She’s been dead for hours,’ the boatman said. Yan kept pumping and pumping at Shao Ching’s chest. Heavy sweat ran down her hair in tiny streams. Her shirt was soon soaked. She didn’t stop until she completely exhausted herself.

The Red Fire Farm headquarters held a special memorial service for Shao Ching. She was honoured as an ‘Outstanding Comrade’, and was admitted posthumously into the Youth League of the Communist Party. Shao Ching’s grandmother attended the service. She was very beautiful which reminded us of the way Shao Ching used to be. Lu, representing the farm’s Party Committee, issued her a cheque for 500 yuan as a condolence.

Before the service ended, Yan left suddenly. She didn’t come back for dinner. I went to look for her, searching everywhere, before I finally found her sitting under the bridge. The jar which she used to collect the snakes was placed next to her. A few days before she had told me in great delight that she had just reached the perfect number – one hundred snakes – and was expecting Shao Ching to come back to her senses magically.

I stepped closer to watch Yan and saw that she was pulling each snake’s head off its neck. The dark brown blood of the snakes spattered all over her face and uniform. When all the snakes were torn, she took up the jar and smashed it.

I went up to her. She crouched at my knees. I held her as she began to cry.