(continued from Part 2)
I finished high school and started going out to the fields with the rest of the village. In China back then, people who farmed weren’t called “farmers” — they were commune members. The villagers themselves never took to the word “commune member,” though. They preferred the name handed down for a thousand years: farmers.
The whole countryside was organized into People’s Communes: the land, the labor, and the harvest were all shared, not privately owned. There was a song everyone knew by heart, and its promise was simple: the commune is the vine, and we are the melons on it — the fatter the vine, the sweeter the melon. Indeed: take care of the commune, and the commune would take care of you.
The moment I became a commune member, the guaranteed grain that had come with city life was taken away. Now, like everyone else, I ate only if the vine produced.
Here is what the vine produced. Our village, Sunying, was one production team of thirty-seven households farming about forty acres together. When the harvest came in, it was divided in a strict order: the country took its share first of the best grain, the team kept back seed and animal feed second, and only what remained was divided among the families.
And the remainder was almost nothing. In 1969, a full day’s labor was worth about eight cents, and a person’s entire grain allotment for the year came to 136 jin, roughly 68 kilograms, of unmilled grain. Once hulled and spread across a year, it was barely a few hundred grams of edible grain a day. No amount of careful budgeting could stretch numbers like these into a livable life. The villagers survived on a hundred rough, stubborn ways of getting by — far too many to list.
Here is one of those ways, and it’s the one closest to my heart. If a household had a daughter or daughter-in-law due to “sit the month” that year, the family would plan ahead — raising a few extra hens, saving up every egg they could.
But where was the spare grain to feed chickens? Every hen ran free; at dusk you’d scatter a little feed and call the “chicken children” home to roost. My mother kept seven hens, raised just this way.
Shoulder to Shoulder
I have always been someone who takes life as it comes. My head was fairly empty — I didn’t dwell on things, let alone fret about the future. The “educated youth” around me were full of complaints, anxious about their dim prospects and their marriages, but I’d simply let things take their course, the way I always had. And here, as before in the city and at school, I had friends my own age. We chatted; they taught me needlework — how to stitch the soles and uppers of cloth shoes — and every kind of farm work. When we weeded the corn, the two of us would take a single row together — one of us in the shallow trench down each side — hoeing out the weeds as we worked our way along. To keep me from falling behind, my partner would quietly clear two-thirds of the way and leave only a third for me, so we could stay side by side.
The longer I worked alongside them, the more I saw how the villagers looked after this city girl who’d landed among them — and one small moment showed it more clearly than any other.
An Unspoken Kindness
Carrying the cut wheat from the open fields to the threshing ground — the flat, hard-packed yard where the harvest was processed and weighed — was heavy work, and I had to learn to walk the narrow ridges between the paddies. When I reached the threshing ground, I’d carry my load up to the work-points recorder, who held a big steelyard scale; he’d weigh it, call out the number, and log the points. When he finished weighing mine, he shouted, “A hundred and twenty!” Hearing it, a sweaty pride welled up in me — a hundred and twenty jin, sixty kilos! I really was a hard worker. I gave myself a thumbs-up on the inside.
The boy who’d weighed in just ahead of me, the Li family’s Xiaogouzi, turned to stare at Jian Mazi1 the recorder, then glanced at me, opened his mouth as if to speak and quickly swallowed the words back down. In their place, he gave me a little smile. Once I understood that smile, it stayed with me for life, and it has moved me for life. In it was the kindness of seeing through something and choosing not to say it; the unspoken understanding about Jian Mazi deliberately calling out a heavier number to “cheat” in my favor; a generosity toward me; and so much more. What a clever, kindhearted boy Xiaogouzi was.
A Little Night School
So much kindness, given to me freely despite their poverty. After a while, even a blockhead like me couldn’t help but turn the question around: what could I do for them?
The first thing I thought of was a night school. In the countryside of northern Jiangsu, girls past the age of twelve — and certainly no later than sixteen — had generally already been promised to a future husband’s family, the betrothal gifts accepted, waiting in their rooms to be married. My friend Song Yuxia’s fiancé was serving in the army; they exchanged the occasional letter, and she could half-read, half-guess her way through a few characters. I sensed what was on her mind and suggested, “Let’s study together in the evenings.” Several of the other girls answered the call too. So every other evening, in the cook-room of our house, we set out little stools, a little table, a little blackboard; my parents bought them all pencils and exercise books, and we really did keep it up for a while. You could see how much they loved the paper and pencils in their hands — and not only for the sake of finding a husband.
Strangely, not one of the boys ever joined the night school. You’d think they’d want to learn a little something even just to find a match — but they didn’t see it that way. They would rather wait for their parents to arrange things, sitting by the tree stump waiting for the rabbit to run into it, certain a rabbit would eventually come along on its own.2 What’s the use of book learning? It wasn’t for lack of schools — there were primary schools, middle schools, even a high school. In their own words, they “didn’t feel like going to school,” it “didn’t sit right” with them.
“Just Sit in and Listen”: How I Came to Acupuncture
What else could I do for everyone? The chance came soon enough. The army unit stationed nearby at Dashishan got in touch with the commune and sent down a medical team to train barefoot doctors for us, with the focus on acupuncture. Each brigade had two full-time barefoot doctors, one man and one woman, chosen by the brigade cadres, with their pay covered by the individual production teams. By then the leaders of China had begun to take seriously the shortage of doctors and medicine in the countryside. Mao Zedong had issued his supreme directive to “put the emphasis of medical and health work on the rural areas,” and across the country the policy of “a single herb and a single needle” was being pushed hard. Because acupuncture cost nothing, worked quickly, and needed no complicated equipment, it became the cornerstone of rural medicine. For exactly that reason, there was simply no question of a medical license back then; putting needles in someone was absolutely not against the law — on the contrary, it was something society held up and praised.
I wasn’t one of the chosen barefoot doctors, but I couldn’t be bothered about that — I went straight to the training class. I found the army officer in charge and explained that I wanted to learn acupuncture. On the spot they asked the opinion of the barefoot doctors from our own Qiaonan Brigade, and everyone said warmly, “No problem at all, just sit in and listen.” Even I never expected that this one week of study would benefit me for the rest of my life. From then on, I developed a deep and lasting fascination with Chinese medicine, Chinese herbs, and acupuncture.
What Those Few Needles Could Do
The people of Sunying never expected, either, that the little I’d learned could truly, tangibly help them. Sunying was separated from the other eight production teams by a river about twenty meters wide — really the spillway of a reservoir — and the village sat at the foot of the mountain. Ordinarily, if someone had an ache or a fever and wanted to cross the river to find a barefoot doctor, it not only cost them a day’s work but was terribly inconvenient. When they heard that I, too, had studied acupuncture, they gave me their fullest trust and support, in their hearts and in what they did.
Someone would come to the house and say, “I’ve got a headache — see whether the needles do any good.” After I’d needled them, I’d tell them, go try that bupleurum you dug up yourself, boil a mouthful of broth, drink it, sleep on it, and you’ll be fine tomorrow — don’t only think about selling it for money. Or someone with a headache, after needling, I’d tell them to gather some mugwort leaves, boil the water, soak their feet, and sleep with their head covered. These bits of common knowledge were, in fact, all things they had taught me.
Someone would come and say, “Toothache — I want to see whether the needles can do anything.” Usually they’d tell me they’d already rinsed with water boiled from cleavers and it hadn’t helped. I’d give them a little ball of medicinal cotton and suggest they pound the cleavers into a juice, soak the cotton in it, and try biting down on it against the tooth.
Every single villager who came to me for acupuncture — man or woman, young or old — I recorded carefully: the date they came, name, age, sex, symptoms, which points I needled, the gauge of needle, how many sessions in all, and what herbs were used alongside. Over about two years, it filled a thick notebook. The most common cases by far were strained backs and legs, headaches and toothaches, colds and coughs. Most of the cases that passed through my hands were the ordinary acute kind, and after acupuncture most of them improved markedly. As word spread, more and more people came — even people from neighboring villages came seeking me out by reputation.
I ran into difficult cases, too.
The Deng family’s Xiaowu was a young man of eighteen or nineteen with a problem of his eyes watering in the wind, and he earnestly asked me to needle him. I said, “That point is too close to the eye — I’m not sure of myself.” He told me, utterly firm, “It’s all right, give it a try. If it doesn’t work I’ll never blame you.” As it turned out, each needling would help for several days, but two days after stopping, the old trouble would come back. In the end he didn’t keep it up, and I didn’t follow up either.
An Unspeakable Trouble
There was another — Xiaoraozi, from the west end of the village. I don’t remember his family name. His mother was a widow who’d raised two children through bitter hardship: Xiaoraozi was seventeen, his younger sister thirteen and already promised to a husband’s family. One day his mother came to our house, uneasy, to talk to me. She said, “We’ve arranged a wife for Xiaoraozi, and she’s to come into the house next month. But Xiaoraozi has a problem of wetting the bed at night. Could you give him a couple of needles? Let’s try — would that be all right? Cure it or not, we won’t blame you.”
I felt such sympathy for her. We looked into each other’s eyes, and I had no way to say “no.” If she hadn’t been pushed to a hard place, a mother would never have brought herself to ask this. Xiaoraozi3 was a bright, healthy-looking boy; perhaps because he’d grown up without a father, he was a first-rate hand at the work and generous with people too — and perhaps it was exactly this unspeakable trouble that kept a quiet shame locked in his eyes. After his mother left, I looked it up in A Barefoot Doctor’s Manual and learned that the pathology behind adult bed-wetting is tangled and complex, and that with my ability alone, I’d never sort out the specific cause. The book said that several key points on the lower abdomen — guanyuan, zhongji — combined with the warming tonification of moxibustion, had many precedents of marked success. So I agreed to go to his house and try.
The first acupuncture worked, miraculously, right away. Mother and son were beside themselves with joy, and I was genuinely happy for them. I needled a second time two days later, with equally good results. Those few needles helped him pass smoothly through that delicate stretch when a new bride first enters the house — the time most likely to bring embarrassment. For some reason, after those two times they never came to me again, and I didn’t have the heart to ask whether the trouble ever returned. I suspect that just two acupuncture sessions, with no medicine of any kind to support them, could not really have resolved so stubborn a condition for good. But whenever I think of this case, I still feel a real sense of accomplishment.
Melons on the Same Vine
Now and then a villager would bring their own precious eggs to thank me. This I absolutely could not accept. I knew very well that in that era, a farmer’s eggs were an extremely scarce resource they could trade for cash. Buying kerosene, lighting the lamp, buying toothpaste, getting cloth to make clothes — all of it depended on the eggs this flock of hens laid. The neighboring village of Yinpai4 sat halfway up the north face of the mountain, even less accessible than we were; when the Yinpai folk came down the hill to find me for acupuncture, they’d carry along a load of firewood-grass to express their thanks, and my mother would buy it from them at the market price. Behind me, my parents were my steadfast support. Without the slightest hesitation they covered every expense the acupuncture required — the alcohol, the medicinal cotton, the professional books — and now and then gave me their few quiet words of encouragement, and the approval that shone in their eyes.
In an age of such extreme scarcity, the vine was not so fat and not so strong. And yet the melons clung to the vine, and the vine carried the melons — that we were all melons on the same vine was the plainest, hardest truth of that era. It was never really the commune that held us; it was each other. To step so genuinely into the farmers’ world, to throw myself into learning a real skill, and to do something truly useful for them with all my heart — that joy, welling up from inside, surpassed any happiness I’d ever felt scoring a hundred on a test at school.
FOOTNOTES
1“Jian Mazi” means something like “Pockmarked Jian.” “Mazi” pointed to the scars smallpox had left on his face. Smallpox has since been eradicated; in my mom’s village it was still a living memory.
2“Waiting by the tree stump for a rabbit” is an old Chinese saying about a farmer who once saw a rabbit run into a stump and break its neck — so he gave up farming and just waited by the stump for the next one. It means passively hoping for luck instead of working for it.
3“Xiaoraozi” comes from rao (绕), “to wrap” — he was named for being born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. There were actually two boys in Sunying who carried that name.
4The village names hold a small lesson in yin and yang. Yinpai (阴牌) sits on the shaded north face of the mountain, where little sun reaches. Over the ridge lies its twin, Yangpai (阳牌), on the sunny southern slope — yin for shadow, yang for sun — where the light is generous and things grow more easily.
