Spider Eaters - Rae Yang

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left, she cried and said repeatedly, “What am I to do? How can I face people after today? I lost face for my parents. I lost face for my whole family. They will disown me. I don't want to live!”

      Many of the villagers, however, men and women, believed that Laomizi was not raped but merely seduced by Chen. “She must have been willing at the time and regretted it only afterwards.” Why? Because Chen was not a stranger. As the head of the pig farm, he had worked with her side by side and taught her many skills. In the evenings she was often seen at Chen's home, having a meal or using their sewing machine to mend her clothes.

      While this was true, Laomizi was not the only one who did this. In fact, all the young women on the pig farm had worked with Chen, learned from him, and visited him at home in the evenings. Such activities were encouraged by the leaders as parts of our reeducation by the poor peasants. Chen was a poor peasant and a veteran of the Korean War. The exact type for us to “unite” with.

      A few days later another argument prevailed in the village, which said that Laomizi was a fool. First she let herself be taken by a married man who was probably older than her father. Then she went around telling everybody that he had raped her. As a result, it would be useless to transfer her, for gossip would surely find its way to her new work unit. In the future who would want to marry such a woman? So if her reputation was ruined and her future was in jeopardy, she had no one else but herself to blame for it.

      As for Chen, after he was questioned by Zhao, the political instructor who was the number-one leader of our village, he packed up his belongings, left the pig farm, and reported to work at the construction site. Seeing this, some people said Zhao was partial to Chen, because they were both from Yangzhou of Anhui province. Yet others said that Chen was hardly punished because it was not easy to punish a peasant in China. You could not strip him of his Party membership if he did not have one in the first place. You could not demote him, as he was already at the bottom of the society. Take away his city residency? That was out of the question. Expel him from the country? Where could we send him? So as the saying goes, “A dead pig is not afraid of boiling water.” A peasant in China was a dead pig.

      So this was how the Laomizi incident ended. Gradually people ran out of things to say about her and she was forgotten. Perhaps that was what she wanted. After she left the village, she never came back to visit us. Nor did she send letters to anyone. She simply vanished from our lives. Yet she comes back, in my dreams, and she stays, in my memory. Always a grown-up teenage girl, with rosy cheeks, big hands, and big feet. She is blushing and smiling. She is happy. I have never seen her cry.

      Besides this incident, something else made me regret that I had worked on the night shift. In the beginning it was a small problem: the pig farm did not have an alarm clock, which did not seem to bother others. But without it, for a while I found it extremely hard to wake up at three o'clock.

      To this day I remember vividly the panic I felt, when I opened my eyes in broad daylight, knowing that I had overslept. As a result, the pigsties were an awful mess and others had to toil for hours under the low roof, attacked by mosquitoes from all sides, to clean them. This unpleasant truth I would soon have to reveal to my fellow workers, and their eyes would shame me to death even if they said nothing. It would be useless to try to explain or apologize.

      Yet buying an alarm clock was out of the question. In those years my wages were thirty-two yuan a month. Everything had to come out of this budget: food was twelve yuan a month; the rest had to cover my clothes, shoes, working gloves, postage stamps, toothpaste, toothbrush, soap, shampoo, toilet paper, feminine napkins, candles, batteries, plus a few cans of fruit that I could not resist. On top of this, I needed to save thirty yuan in two years for a train ticket to Beijing or else I wouldn't be able to have a home visit. Taking these into consideration, I decided that an alarm clock at more than ten yuan was beyond my means and I would have to cope without it, like everybody else.

      Gradually I trained myself into waking up at exactly three o'clock, as if I had a magic clock ticking in my head. At first I was thrilled by what I had accomplished. Later, however, it became a scourge. The alarm went off every night at three o'clock, on the nights I worked and the ones I didn't. Three years later I left the pig farm and began to work in the fields, and the invisible clock kept waking me up.

      Another two years passed, I left the Great Northern Wilderness and began to study with my parents. The old habit followed me back home like a ghost. Even the Pacific Ocean could not stop it from chasing me. Therefore the pig farm gave me a souvenir I was unable to forsake.

      Many times when I woke up in the middle of the night and could not find my way back to what the Chinese call heitianxiang (the black and sweet homeland), I was so annoyed that I found myself in tears. When I took up my studies again in 1973, seven years had elapsed without my hand ever touching a textbook. At the age of twenty-two, it wasn't easy for me to start all over. I hated to lose sleep at night, knowing the next day my head would be a big jar of paste, thick and heavy; nothing would register there. At such times I wished I could make a deal with a deity or even the devil himself. I was willing to give up ten years of my life if only he could rid me of this cursed habit.

      Despite the bitter regrets, now when I look back on it, I must say that waking up at three did me some good as well. For instance, it made me remember and think about my dreams. The ones I had while I was awake and those I had in my sleep. Most of them would have been forgotten, if I had not suddenly waked up in the middle of the night.

      On the farm I hardly had time to think about dreams or anything. By day the work was very hard. At night I shared a room with nine other women. Five slept side by side on one big bed on the southern side of the room; the other five on the northern side. Between the two beds there was a passage some five or six feet wide. In such a room I had privacy only when I woke up at three o'clock.

      Knowing that no one was watching me, I felt safe enough to ask myself: what kind of person am I? A die-hard Manchu aristocrat like Nainai, my grandmother, or an educated new peasant in a new society? Am I a true believer of communism or a hidden counterrevolutionary with many dangerous thoughts? Is my life meaningful only because I can serve the people or work for the revolution? What is the purpose of my life? What things am I willing to sacrifice for the sake of my dreams? And what are those, I know by now, I won't give up despite the dreams my parents and I have cherished? In trying to make our dreams come true, what foolish things have we done? What crimes have we committed? If the crimes were committed out of good intentions for the world, would heaven punish us for them or pardon us? If there is no retribution from heaven, should there be no indictment from the court of my own conscience?

      2

      Old Monkey Monster

      When I look back on what I have been, sometimes I, too, am perplexed. The pictures that remain vivid in my memory don't seem to fit together.

      —In the fifties there was a black-eyed and black-haired Chinese girl on Lake Geneva. A precious pearl on the palms of her parents, followed everywhere by her devoted Chinese nanny. Pink satin dress. White leather shoes. Colorful hairpins. She was proud. She was nice to people. Tourists were charmed by her. They asked to take her picture.

      —In 1966 there was a Red Guard who jumped on a train and traveled over a thousand miles to Guangzhou to spread the fire of the Cultural Revolution. She criticized First Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang to his face for his tolerance of capitalism and saw drops of sweat as large as soybeans roll down his face. An order issued by her and her comrades shook the city like a hurricane. In its wake, thousands of privately owned shops were devastated.

      —In the early seventies there was a peasant on a pig farm. Her face

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