DOGS

The dogs ran downhill in packs, in pursuit of mates. Spring had arrived.

When a group of male dogs chased after a female, the locals called it ‘mounting the trellis’.

The males darted this way and that, forgetting food and drink in their single-minded frenzy for females, running around in the chaos of battle.

The earth had thawed, and their paws were thick with mud.

They clawed and bit each other, fighting over a bitch. As soon as one male had the upper hand, the pack abruptly stopped moving. The losers reluctantly shuffled aside and slunk away.

The rutting dogs spent a long time stuck together.

This was the moment that the educated youths chose to come running, shouting with their sticks raised, chasing after the fleeing dogs as if they were a man and woman engaged in improper behaviour, until the dogs uncoupled.

I sat at the entrance to our tent, scraping mud off my shoes with a stone, listening to the cries of men and dogs.

‘It’s springtime! Just like that, taken over by heat and madness . . .’

RABBITS

In the sixties and seventies, high-school students from cities across China were rounded up, labelled ‘educated youths’, and sent to desolate farmlands in the border regions to be reformed through labour. Over 2,000 educated youths gathered at the reservoir and a pair of rabbits (as gay men were known in the local slang) were hauled up onstage, bound hand and foot. When one of them struggled, he was knocked to the ground with a hoe, and didn’t stand again.

From the audience came thunderous cries of ‘Beat the wicked! Down with this nastiness!’

Whether it was a man and a woman, two men, two women, two dogs or two cats, as long as there was a whiff of sex in the air, everyone got incredibly worked up and started screaming attack slogans.

Qiao had been pent up for too long. He assaulted other people to release his feelings. He told me once that the whole time, he was mentally beating himself up. ‘Hey, keep a hold of yourself. If you think about that sort of thing, you’ll end up getting attacked too.

‘You have to keep it in. Endure, endure. Don’t let anything happen, or you’ll end up dead.

‘Beat them, go on, beat them to death. Harder!’

In springtime, there was blood everywhere.

WORKPLACE INJURY

The Harbin educated youth Big Eyes stood at the doorway of the barber shop, pointing at the upper bunk in the back room and quietly telling everyone who passed by, ‘Xu Dahuan is in there nursing a “workplace injury”. Ha! She was doing it with the Third Brigade Leader on a desk at the primary school, and they got caught in the act. Goddamn it! Of all places, the primary school! Kids go there!’

He was full of glee, using ‘workplace injury’ to refer to such an act.

The Third Brigade Leader was a local. In the days after he was caught, his wife cooked three meals a day and brought them to him. When they saw each other, she didn’t utter one word against him, but kept cursing her love rival as a nasty little vixen. Being female, it was better for her to rebuke the other woman.

The two of them were locked up for a few days, then they were released and that was that.

At the next assembly, the Branch Leader was obliged to say a few words to the young people from the cities. ‘Before you educated youths arrived, we had quite a few of these incidents. Just a squabble between two families, no big deal.

‘It’s forty below in the winter, really harsh, the sun goes down so early, and there’s no electricity. Two people hear each other breathe, groping through the dark to speak . . . You know? Do you know what I mean?’

FANG SI’ER

Fang Si’er was a child of Logistics HQ and Jiang Yong grew up in the Navy Compound. Military brats like them always went around in senior officers’ uniforms belonging to their elders, to show off that their parents had been high-ranking back in the day.

Fang Si’er came to Third Brigade from the fields, on a tractor, covered in dirt.

Whenever he came into view within a crowd, it brought to mind Mao’s 1957 address at Moscow University, where he told the Chinese overseas students, ‘The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigour and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you.’

They were Pushkin, they were Nekhlyudov, they were the Brothers Karamazov, dazzling in the sunlight. They were the elite.

At Third Brigade, he ran into Big Ni in the bathroom. The two of them had gotten into a fight in the fields when they first arrived. This time round, they both looked a little startled as they brushed past each other. No more fighting. That’s how it is; if you don’t start brawling within that first second, it’s not going to happen.

The news spread among the men: Fang Si’er had come to Third Brigade. He was well known among the 20,000 educated youths on this farm as the sort of person who raised a plume of dust walking down the street.

At noon, the military brats of Third Brigade took him to lunch. They asked what he was doing here, but he wouldn’t say.

Afterwards, it started raining heavily, and he looked out the window.

Jiang Yong came to the men’s dorm, a raincoat draped over her head.

Fang Si’er went out. Huddled beneath the same raincoat, beneath the watchful eyes of over 300 educated youths staring from the dorm windows, they walked together to the feed store by the stables, went inside, and shut the door behind them.

We all knew exactly what they were doing in there. Fuck it! Couldn’t they at least try to hide it? They were meant to be the elite! The sun at eight or nine in the morning!

We couldn’t see what they were doing, which made all the men uneasy that rainy day.

‘Maybe they’re just chatting.’

‘Fuck you. Coming all this way for a chat? Why not say they’re discussing political ideologies?’

Over an hour later, they stepped out again into the downpour.

Jiang Yong was blushing so deeply we could see it through the rain.

Back at the Third Brigade dorm, Fang Si’er grabbed Ling Qiusheng’s leftover noodles.

He slurped them ever so loudly.

From his sickbed, Ling Qiusheng sat up and asked, ‘. . . Did you do it?’

Fang Si’er didn’t answer, simply ate his noodles.

Ling Qiusheng: ‘. . . Come on, tell us.’

Everyone crowded over, listening eagerly.

Fang Si’er finished the noodles, drank the broth, and lit a cigarette. He smoked and smoked.

Everyone wanted to know.

After a long while, wreathed in smoke, he said, ‘There are some things . . . You can do them, but you can’t talk about them.’

As he spoke these words, the rain stopped. He went outside and drove back to the fields.

‘He really was a shining sun . . .’

HYSTERISM

1. Washing His Sheets

Two years after we were sent to the Great Northern Waste, we started hearing about hysterical women.

The first was a woman in the Machinery Unit, from Tianjin – a large-boned, sturdy type in her twenties. Whenever she spoke to a man, even about the most mundane subjects, her words brimmed with emotion and her gaze was passionate, leaving everyone she talked to uncomfortable.

One day, she walked into the Arts Troupe’s male dorm in order to wash the bedding of handsome Liu Fusheng.

He gaped at her. ‘My sheets aren’t dirty.’

And yet she insisted on pulling them off his bunk and walking off with them.

In the dormitory courtyard, she began work with much fanfare. First the quilt had to be removed from its cover. Then she went to fetch some water and splash, the sheets were soaking in a tub. Next she strung up the cotton padding and bashed it with a wooden pole, pak pak. Finally, she put a washboard into the tub. Sitting astride a small stool, she grabbed a corner of a sheet, soaped it, and energetically scrubbed it, krssh krssh.

Everyone, men and women, watched from the windows.

She scrubbed with such force that all the filth Fusheng had left on his bedding was washed clean away.

Fusheng gawped at her. ‘Fuck! What the hell is this?’ Feeling hard done by, he lay on the bare boards of his bunk, unable to go on watching.

After the sheets and blankets had been thoroughly cleansed, she rinsed them a few times. No one came to help, so she painstakingly wrung them out herself, those long swathes of fabric. She shook them open and hung them up to dry.

A woman walked over and sneered, ‘Who are you washing those for?’

She didn’t try to hide it. ‘For Fusheng.’

‘Are they dirty?’

‘Not really.’

‘Why wash them, then?’

‘If you wait till they’re truly dirty, it’s too late. You’ll never get them clean.’

By evening, the sheets were dry. She placed the cotton padding back into the cover, sewed it shut, folded it neatly, and as if hugging a beloved person, delivered it into the men’s dorm, her face full of delight.

Fusheng, who had been lying on his bare bunk all day, took them from her with a murmured ‘Thanks’. Then he turned away from her.

After this, she’d come to the dorm every evening and call from the doorway, ‘Is Fusheng there? Is he in?’ If no one answered her, she’d go on shouting.

Fusheng endured this for a fortnight, then asked for leave to go back to Beijing.

In his absence, she began grabbing other men’s bedding to wash. In order to guard their sheets, the men took to locking their dorm during the day, even if there was someone inside.

When she couldn’t get her hands on anything to wash, she’d pound on the door, raising a huge racket. Her friends from Tianjin couldn’t bear to see her like this. They came and said to us, ‘Just let her wash your sheets if she wants. It’s therapeutic.’

This was the first time I heard of this condition, hysterism.

Her illness got worse and worse. She went around with her hair dishevelled, blushing whenever she saw a man, muttering something lovelorn. A truly pathetic state of affairs.

The local bachelor quickly got wind of this. He stopped her in the street and invited her back to his shack for a meal. She went with him, and her Tianjin friends had to run after her to bring her back.

That night, the Tianjin educated youths had a meeting. First, they set up a rota for the women to take turns to watch her. Next, they wrote a letter to her family, which they all signed.

Her parents hurried there, and when they saw the state of their daughter, they bundled her back to Tianjin without another word.

The local bachelor said, ‘Hysterism is just lovesickness. You young people don’t understand. Only marriage can cure this disease.’

2. Little Chilli

The Beijing educated youth known as Little Chilli was in Seventh Brigade. She was tall and slender, with a spicy temperament.

One of the symptoms of hysterism was writing a man’s name over and over on the same sheet of paper even after it was full, stacking the name high, layers and rows of them, oceans and mountains of man.

My name appeared on one of these, as ‘Moon Over Mountains’ – the title of a song I performed onstage that subsequently became my nickname.

On a sheet of paper, Little Chilli wrote over and over, Moon Over Mountains, Moon Over Mountains, Moon Over Mountains . . .

Someone told me, ‘Little Chilli from Seventh Brigade has you on her mind. She covered a piece of paper with your nickname.’

I had no idea what to say to that.

For some time afterwards, I tried to work out what kind of news this was: I was nineteen years old, and a woman I’d never seen before, more than thirty kilometres away, had grown fond of me. I’d never met her. I didn’t know what she looked like. Would I like her if we met? But she liked me. At the age of nineteen, a woman being fond of you, poring over your nickname, writing you out again and again . . . What could be more precious than that? This was glory! A medal for a nineteen-year-old to proudly pin to his chest! Isn’t this how a man lives his entire life?

I began to grow happy. Here was the taste of love and being loved!

I decided I would write a poem and bring it to Little Chilli at Seventh Brigade. I would accept her feelings in person, and express my own.

Before I could write the poem, unfortunate news arrived: Little Chilli was madly in love with an educated youth from Beijing, the tall and silent man known as ‘Housefly’, who’d grown up in Zhongguancun, where the Science Institute was.

This was all too sudden. I hadn’t even stepped onstage, and already the curtain was coming down? What the hell! Couldn’t this have waited a little?

A guy from Seventh Brigade came and told me the pair of them were running off every night to the grain store in the threshing field, where they got it on. Little Chilli was radiant, more beautiful than she’d ever been. As for Housefly, the big man had plunged deep into the obsession and exhaustion of love.

It was as if Dulcinea had voluntarily given herself to Quixote without a hint of reluctance, without a coquettish refusal, without any preamble or poetry or play-acting. Does love like this have any meaning? Do the pair of you mean anything?

You wrote my name over and over, but you didn’t carve it into your heart.

The Seventh Brigade Bro told me she’d written many men’s names, and I was just one among them. His words made my medal throb. I looked down and saw instead a great scar on my shrivelled chest.

I said, ‘A scar! That’s the true medal of a nineteen-year-old.’

The Seventh Brigade Bro said:

They were copulating in the grain store every day, so of course some of the harvest got damaged.

Finally, the Brigade Leader couldn’t stand it any more, and criticised them during assembly, in front of over 200 people. ‘Imagine doing this sort of thing in the grain store. Seed scattered across the floor. Dogs only mount the trellis in February and August, cats are only in heat once a year, so why do humans need to do it every day? Haven’t you had enough? Do the two of you even have time to think about Revolution? You educated youths came to the Great Northern Waste in order to be reformed, not to make babies. There are plenty of us locals to do the baby-making! You’re destroying the grain day after day.’

The local bachelor heard about this and quipped, ‘It sure sounds like a lot of seed got spilled!’

Everyone burst out laughing.

Little Chilli heard the joke and laughed along with everyone else.

Housefly sat expressionless. He always was a quiet person, tender and steadfast.

One of the locals said, ‘Sir, they don’t go every day. They’re not there today, for instance.’ And everyone burst out laughing again.

After the assembly, Little Chilli and Housefly didn’t return to the dorm. As usual, they headed for the grain store.

The meeting had taken up their lovemaking time, and now they couldn’t wait to get moving. The educated youths of Seventh Brigade watched them in disappointment.

Much of the time, romantic couples got separated by political criticism and shame. Little Chilli and Housefly were unmoved. They stayed together, and eventually they went back to Beijing, where they got married.

Many years later, at a reunion for the educated youths of the Great Northern Waste, I saw Little Chilli for the first time in years. She’d put on more weight than I’d expected and was still beautiful. When I saw her, she was saying to a group of women, ‘It’s been more than twenty years, and we’re just as in love as when we first met.’

Hearing these words sapped my courage, and I didn’t go over to say hello to her.

She was showing off! But what could be worth bragging about more?

There’s a time for everything. At the age of twenty, when a herd of oxen couldn’t hold you back, that’s when you fall in love, even if that means going against the political slogans of the time.

As a young man, I wanted to learn how to love, but in the end, I did nothing. I wanted to torture myself, but didn’t know where to begin.

Image courtesy of University of Victoria (B.C.) Library, Workers and peasants welcome spring as one family, 1975