The Remote Country of Women Read online
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The
Remote
Country
of
Women
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Fiction from Modern China
This series is intended to showcase new and
exciting works by China’s finest contemporary
novelists in fresh, authoritative translations. It will represent innovative recent fiction by some of the
boldest new voices in China today as well as classic works of this century by internationally acclaimed
novelists. Bringing together writers from several
geographical areas and from a range of cultural
and political milieus, the series opens new doors
to twentieth-century China.
h o w a r d g o l d b l a t t
General Editor
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Bai Hua
Translated from the
Chinese by Qingyun Wu
and Thomas O. Beebee
General Editor, Howard Goldblatt
University of Hawaii Press Honolulu
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The
Remote
Country
of
Women
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Originally published in Chinese in 1988.
Taiwan edition by Sanmin Publishers,
Taipei.
English translation 1994 University of Hawaii Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging–in–Publication Data
Pai, Hua, 1930–
[Yüan fang yu ko nü erh kuo. English]
The remote country of women / Bai Hua : translated from
Chinese by Qingyun Wu and Thomas O. Beebee.
p.
cm. — (Fiction from modern China)
ISBN 0–8248–1591–2. — ISBN 0–8248–1611–0 (pbk.)
I. Wu, Qingyun, 1950– .
II. Beebee, Thomas O.
III. Title.
IV. Series.
PL2895.A3465Y813
1994
94–9956
895.1’352—dc20
CIP
University of Hawaii Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources
Designed by Richard Hendel
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Bai Hua,
a photo taken by
Tak-wai Wong
in 1988
When a stream flows into a big river, it loses its purity but gains breadth. When humanity walks toward
modernization, what is gained and what is lost? Here I can only unfold to my readers the panorama of life as it is and wait to hear their judgment.
—Bai Hua, June 18, 1993
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Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
—T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”
The most irredeemable sin is caused by
the mischief of the fool.
—Baudelaire
I fear and hate any veil;
Yet all things are shrouded in mist.
I am no exception—
Only my soul, leaking through eyes of gauze
Soundless, colorless, shadowless, shapeless
Freely looking down at humanity
Including the self, made of flesh.
—Bai Hua
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1
She was going on thirteen. Oh, beautiful Suna-
mei! A crescent was waxing into a half-moon.
“One, two, three, four....” A group of boys
and girls, all dressed in long shirts that looked like oversized blouses or undersized gowns, squatted beneath a row of ritual pennants on the hilltop and counted the vehicles crawling one by one around the bend of the hill like beetles.
There were four cars: one black, two blue, even a red one. In their wake were two buses and three huge trucks. In the
trucks sat People’s Liberation Army soldiers, with guns in hand and bayonets flashing. It was scary. The children
hushed up; even Geruoma, who was always laughing,
frowned this time. Those naughty children often threw
stones at trucks or intercity buses. Even the girls, aping the boys, tried to pee on the buses from above. But this time they did no mischief. They were too shocked. So many shining beetles and PLA soldiers carrying real guns. What a
show. There was a saying, and it seemed to be true: in the outside world the more important the person, the smaller the car he drives, and the larger the house he lives in. Perhaps the tide of the great Cultural Revolution was pushing its way here.
The storm known as the Cultural Revolution had broken
loose in the outside world when Sunamei was four years old.
Since then, nine years had passed. She recalled how, when she was five, several Red Guards had run into her village.
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Singing and shouting, they had gone from house to house
and hung big posters on the walls. Stamping their feet and waving their hands, they had called on the villagers to rise up and make revolution. The grown-up villagers had
responded with funny expressions as though suppressing a laugh. Who knew how to stand up and revolt? At least it
had been a great party for the children. They had followed the Red Guards everywhere, singing, crying, shouting
slogans. Some had even scooped red paint from the Red
Guards’ bucket and smeared it on their faces.
The villagers had prepared a dinner to thank the Red
Guards. After the dinner, some Red Guards had asked a
villager who knew a little Chinese, “What are you thanking us for?”
“For all the fun you’ve given our children. They don’t
often get to see youngsters from outside.”
Not very pleased with this answer, the Red Guards took
out their Little Red Books and read a sampling of Chairman Mao’s quotations. The villagers nodded their heads, and
the one or two Mosuo who could read even joined in the
chanting.
Then the Red Guards asked, “Do you understand what
we’ve been reading to you?”
“No.” Those who had nodded now shook their heads.
The Red Guards seemed terribly disappointed. After
assembling all the children, they gave each a red armband.
Some children asked for extra ones. Then the Red Guards
taught the children to mumble incantations like a Mosuo
shaman as they thrust their Little Red Books over and over again into the air.
The next morning the Red Guards commanded the
Mosuo, grown-ups as well as children, to persecute their commune cadres. The children balked, as did the grown-ups. They pretended not to understand the instructions.
Even the few wh
o knew a little Chinese became incapable
of understanding a single word. Instead, the children sim-2
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ply stripped off their clothes and, plunging into Lake Xienami, paddled fiercely. Following the children, the Red
Guards also jumped naked into the lake. In the water their skin appeared exceptionally white. Years later, many women still chatted about this in wonder and delight: “Oh, Ami!
Those naked bodies were so white! As white as – oh my,
whiter than milk. Even the blue lake could not stain them.”
After their blissful bath, the Red Guards marched off singing songs from Quotations of Chairman Mao. The waters of Lake Xienami once again calmly reflected the sky in mirror-like tranquility.
Women took the red armbands from their children and
used them as diapers. Even now, right beside Sunamei, the little sister on Geruoma’s back was wearing one of these diapers. The women were even complaining that the red satin did not absorb well.
After that bunch of Red Guards had decamped, the
entire great Cultural Revolution became a story from far away. Horse drivers often brought laughable yet terrifying anecdotes about it into the village. Everyone loved to hear them. It was as if they were being charmed by ghost stories: they always listened with wide-eyed attention.
Now many more vehicles and soldiers were coming. Per-
haps they wanted to force their Cultural Revolution onto the Mosuo village. Could the Mosuo possibly escape this
disaster? Unlikely. The PLA soldiers were different from the Red Guards – they had real guns. Moreover, some big shots were also coming in their small cars. The children were
excited and curious. They wanted those funny, terrifying stories acted out in their own village, right before their own eyes, and they wanted people they knew to be the actors.
The day before, a commune cadre had informed the vil-
lagers that the central committee was sending a team there.
What was this central committee? They could make neither heads nor tails of such a thing. They were, however, quite familiar with teams. They had seen various teams. All those 3
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teams were like clouds blown in from outside: some rained a few drops; some thundered; others neither rained nor thundered. All the clouds eventually blew away; the blue sky and Mount Ganmu remained.
As soon as a team arrived, they began holding daily
meetings: a cadres’ meeting, a seniors’ meeting, a women’s meeting, a children’s meeting. It was as though their words could never end and their characters could never be
exhausted in writing. They performed a lot of tricks: a wave of shouting, a gust of criticizing, a surge of vilifying. Then they would dust themselves off, happily departing with
folders full of criticism papers, bags of peanuts, dried fish, and whole salted pigs. No one ever remembered what they
said at these silly meetings. Those who had been criticized didn’t change a bit. No one felt a dismissed cadre had lost an arm and a leg or anything like that. Who wanted to be a cadre, anyway? Cadres were always having to stay up late.
The children still remembered those funny days. The
strangest team was the one that had forbidden women to
have babies. They put up posters that showed body parts
and the formation of a baby in the womb. In neighboring
Han villages they castrated women like pigs. They tried to persuade the Mosuo women to undergo castration, but no
one would listen. The Han women had no choice except to
scream like pigs being butchered. Dressed in white gowns, the men and women on the team stripped the women of
their clothes, shaved their private parts, pressed them onto the broad slaughtering bench, held their hands and feet
down, then used a shining little knife to castrate them. The innocent children got so excited that they jumped, stamped their feet, shouted at the top of their lungs. What a scene!
The children were worried that the team wouldn’t stay long enough; adults prayed for them to leave for fear they would get really warmed up and turn their scalpels on the Mosuo women.
The members of the team also wished to leave as soon as
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possible because they had their own families. Some male
team members, seeking pleasure, stole into Mosuo women’s huagu. Afterward every one of them would give some gifts to his Mosuo lover and order her, “Don’t tell anybody about us. If you do, you’ll ruin me!”
Those Mosuo women did not understand why they could
not reveal their joy to another person. “Afraid? If you were afraid you shouldn’t have come to me. We haven’t done anything shameful.”
At that point, the team members wished they could sew
the women’s mouths shut. But instead they begged the
women to tell no one – not a soul.
One night at midnight, little Sunamei bumped into a
team member in her village. He was holding his shoes in his hand and tiptoeing as if stepping on thin ice. If anyone had said boo he would have tumbled down the stairs. When he
met another team member on the path, the two of them
told each other the same story: “I have been interrogating so-and-so...and we talked until late into the night.” They mentioned only men’s names. Why did they need to tell
each other a man’s name? Sunamei had seen both of them
coming out of a huagu. At big meetings, such men always demanded confessions and repeatedly shouted an eight-character slogan: “Leniency to the confessors, severe punishment to resistors.” Why wouldn’t they confess, then?
Women who had affairs with those team members chat-
ted among themselves afterward: “Although he can’t speak our language, when he comes to play, he is certainly an old hand at it.”
“During the day his face is cold as slate. Who could have guessed that last night in my huagu it would smile and drip honey?”
So the team of the central party committee came to camp
around Lake Xienami. Its members deliberately chose to
stay in Mosuo villages. No one could guess what they were up to. Did they want to remove another batch of commune
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cadres? Catch thieves? Castrate women? Who knows? The
weather was fine; yet everyone’s face was cloudy. All the cadres from the production team were assembled in the com-
mune courtyard. Each of them brought his own sleeping
bag and no one was allowed to go out. They were kept at the meeting for three days and nights behind the barred gate.
The children learned from the car drivers that the team of the central committee really did not have a single soul from the central committee on it. The Cultural Revolution group of the central committee merely nominated a provincial
party secretary as the team leader and the chairwoman of the provincial women’s federation as the assistant team leader. It was said that they had come here to clear up the Mosuo
mess. Two central committee members called Zhang Chun-
qiao and Yao Wenyuan had really lost their tempers this
time and had written a lengthy article of tens of thousands of characters, which asked, “In China, the most advanced and most revolutionary socialist country in the world, why haven’t we rooted out this most primitive, most backward, and most barbarous lifestyle?” Little Sunamei understood only the meaning of root out in this long sentence because she had begun to dig up grass with a shovel in the buck-wheat field when she was very small. What did they want to root out?
The three-day (and night) meeting, in which the team
leader asked Mosuo cadres to explain how
the Mosuo matrilineal family was set up, amused and amazed the team
members more than myths of goddesses. Young female team
members blushed, male team members laughed with their
heads shifting back and forth and their mouths hissing
strangely. The Mosuo cadres at the meeting found this
behavior most incomprehensible. “What’s so funny about
our way of life?” they asked. Every Mosuo cadre felt angered and insulted. When the meeting was over, all those Mosuo cadres had become drawn and sallow, like young buds
struck by frost. Each of them took several team members to 6
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his village. Those glowing, ruddy faces turned to slate as soon as they entered the village. Among the five who came to little Sunamei’s village was Gu Shuxian. Gu brought
with her a squad of PLA soldiers to guard her abode day and night. She was a fat woman in her forties who wore over her mouth a sterile mask that made her look like a donkey. Little Sunamei thought, “She must be afraid of what might
happen if she let herself loose to snap a mouthful of high-land barley.” Gu’s quivering flesh made her gasp at every step she took. She wore a soldier’s uniform, and a large Chairman Mao badge shone at her breast.
On first arriving in the village, Gu held a party meeting.
It was already dark. Three party members and five team
members, eight in all, attended the meeting in the pine forest along the mountain slope. A group of children in short linen gowns crept together toward the campfire. The children knew that the woman in charge was guarded by sol-
diers with pistols. Yet they neither thought they could be discovered nor believed the soldiers would really shoot
them. They crawled to where they could hear the meeting
and stayed put. They waited through two meals and did not hear anyone take the floor. The three Mosuo party members bowed their heads like sunflowers at night. The five team members were staring at them with round eyes, like toads squatting on lotus leaves. The children were getting tired but dared not leave. It was so quiet that the slightest movement would spook the meeting. Finally, Gu Shuxian could
not bear the silence any longer. She ordered Suola, the
Mosuo team leader, to interpret for her.
“Why is it so hard to take a stand? A Communist party
member must take the lead in everything. We’re not asking you to climb a mountain of swords or wade a flaming sea, but you must be trailblazers. Just think – everything is being done for your sake. We want you to live a decent, monogamous, legitimate life. What kind of life are you