LOFTER-网易轻博

5

Three-legged donkey

 

Old Zhang had been a good patient. His pelvic bone(盆骨) had been splintered and the main ligament on the inner side of the knee ruptured by a fall of rock while excavating a water-cistern two months before. The pelvic fracture had caused blood to collect under the skin of the buttock and this gave rise to a problem in treatment, for while it was necessary to relieve pressure on the buttock in order to prevent sloughing of the skin, the best method of treatment for the knee injury required him to lie flat on his back.

 

We tackled this problem by driving screws into the prominent part of the hip bone on each side and attaching a system of weights and pulleys to them to lift the buttocks clear of the bed, thus relieving the skin of all pressure. Then, with a needle and syringe we aspirated the collection of blood and injected an enzyme(酶) to help the absorption of any that remained.

 

The pelvic injury must have bruised the nerves to the bladder for the patient was unable to pass urine. To deal with this we called in a colleague from the acupuncture department. The Chinese traditional doctor, bearded and dignified, felt the pulse, nodded sagely and in a completely matter-of-fact way, told the patient that his problem would be solved immediately. This unbounded confidence in the efficacy of their treatment is characteristic of traditional doctors and probably contributes not a little to their success. He cleaned the skin with alcohol and iodine and, with a delicate twirling motion, inserted fine acupuncture needles into the chosen spots. Within a few minutes the patient was able to pass urine and from that time onward he had no further bladder trouble.

 

There were three possible lines of treatment for the ruptured knee ligament and we debated the merits and demerits of each of them. One method was to immobilize the whole lower limb in a plaster cast(石膏绷带) until the ligament had healed. This method was simple but it had the disadvantage that as the swelling subsided, the plaster cast would become loose and the ligament might heal with the knee in a slightly knock-kneed position. Moreover, immobilization causes muscle wasting and joint stiffness which delays full recovery. Another method was to operate on the knee to stitch the torn ends of the ligament together. This could ensure normal healing of the ligament, but every operation is associated with a certain risk and many of us thought that if the same result could be obtained without operating, then it was better not to do so.

 

The method that we finally decided to use combined the principles of Chinese traditional medicine and modern surgery. Chinese traditional doctors believe that controlled movements do not interfere with the healing of torn tissues or broken bones but, on the contrary, promote healing. We therefore neither immobilized the knee nor operated on it, but used a method of splinting(夹板) which guaranteed that knock-knee deformity could not develop and which permitted the patient to exercise the knee while the ligament was healing.

 

Within a week, when all danger of sloughing of the skin of the buttock had passed, we removed the screws and allowed him to lie normally in bed. Soon afterwards he was able to bend the knee to a right-angle and to straighten it without help. Since he came from a mountainous region, and needed strong legs, we next concentrated on redeveloping muscle power. We tied a sandbag to his ankle when he exercised, so that he had to contract his muscles more powerfully and Old Zhang, determined to recover as quickly and as completely as possible, constantly urged us to increase the weight of the sandbag.

 

I often visited Old Zhang in the ward for he was a racy conversationalist and I enjoyed his reminiscences and his descriptions of his present life. Like 500 million other Chinese peasants, he was a member of a People's Commune and although, judging from his description, the area where he lived was singularly barren, his enthusiasm for it was unbounded. He often suggested that I should visit him and one day, shortly before he was due to go home, he suddenly became very serious, took hold of my hand and said, 'You know, Comrade Doctor, I'm not just inviting you to visit us out of politeness. I really want you to come. It's true that Peking is the capital, but wonderful things are going on in other parts too. It would be good for you to visit us— even to stay with us for a week or two if you don't mind rough living.' I promised I'd go.

 

The day before he left the hospital he asked for a bucket of earth from the hospital garden to take back to his Commune. 'You see,' he explained, 'you have plenty of good earth here, but we live in a place where earth is so scarce that whenever any of us goes to a place where soil is plentiful, we bring a little back with us. When you come, Comrade Doctor, perhaps you would also bring some. We'd appreciate it.' A few weeks later he wrote asking me to visit him the following Sunday.

 

Old Zhang thanked me for the earth I had brought from Peking, ran his fingers through it appreciatively and sprinkled it on one of the newly-built terraces.

 

I already knew much of his past, but as we trudged round the village he filled in the details. He had come here thirty-three years ago when he was twenty-one years of age. No one came after him until the Commune was formed in 1958 for there was nothing to come to. The area which he had left had rich soil, but, in good years and bad, the landlord had exploited his family mercilessly until they lost their land and all their possessions. Zhang's mother died and his father joined the flood of landless beggars which streamed over the land. Zhang himself, full of the confidence of youth, went his own way.

 

After months of wandering he came to the mountains of eastern Hopei province and there, far from warlords and officials, he found shelter with a family as poor and dogged as his own. They never ate grain but lived on flour made from wild Chinese dates(酸枣), on leaves and wild vegetables.

 

Even here, the land was owned by a landlord. Zhang visited him in his spacious residence down in the valley and told him that he wished to settle in the mountains, marry and raise a family. 'Certainly, young man. Choose your own mountainside, wherever you like, grow what you like. Build yourself a house. Find a good wife. We need people like you in these parts— young and strong and not afraid of work. You'll do well here—mark my words.' Zhang had a bitter experience of landlords and was not entirely reassured. He explained that he had no money and could pay no rent. 'Rent! Don't think about rent! Just open up the land and raise crops and not until the crops are standing in the fields will I ask you for rent. And even then I won't want much. Just give me sixty pounds of grain a year for every mu you cultivate and I'll be satisfied.' (One mu is one sixth of an acre.) 

 

So Zhang selected a slope and set to work. The whole place was a desert of stones—enough to deter the most lion-hearted of men. No speck of soil was visible on the surface but beneath the stones there was a thin layer. He used some of the stones to make himself a shelter where he slept, and with the others he built low walls so that when the rain fell it would not wash the soil down into the valley. 

 

Before dawn every day he left his shelter and walked ten miles to the county town where he hired himself out as a labourer. In the evenings he continued clearing the land and after a year of back-breaking toil he had cleared and levelled one sixth of an acre. On his way to and from work he collected manure for his plot of earth. When the spring came he planted the land to millet, and now all his energy had to go into carrying water for the precious green shoots. 

 

In the autumn he harvested eighty-five pounds of golden millet—sixty pounds of which he poured into the landlord's granary. 

 

Zhang married a strong, wholesome girl with unbound feet. Between them they enlarged the stone shelter, built a stove and a kang(炕) and made a door of millet stalks. Between them they cleared and terraced another mu of land. Zhang made some primitive wooden farming tools, a bucket and a carrying pole(扁担).

 

A son was born. This meant more work for Zhang since his wife could not do as much heavy work as formerly. In good years Zhang could raise enough grain to pay his rent and leave a small surplus. But in 1941, disaster struck. The baby fell ill and nearly all Zhang's savings went in buying herbal remedies. Then the spring rains failed to materialize and the soil became parched and powdery and was scattered by the wind. Zhang trudged endlessly down to the valley for water. One day he found a barricade around the spring in the valley and the landlord's bailiff was standing there demanding payment for each bucket of water. He said that the spring belonged to the landlord and although the landlord was a very kind man and had let the people use it free of charge, he couldn't go on doing this for ever. Zhang felt a surge of desperate anger and asked to see the landlord's title deeds. But the bailiff laughed contemptuously(轻蔑地) and told him that an illiterate lout like himself couldn't read the title deeds(地契) even if he showed them to him. 

 

That autumn Zhang harvested just enough grain to pay his rent. There was no surplus at all. Next year the spring drought was even worse, and in the summer the sparse, spindly millet was battered by downpours of rain which swept away the walls and washed the soil down the mountain side. Zhang, weak from a diet of wild plants, scarcely had the energy to repair the walls of his terraces. He took all his harvest to the landlord but it fell short of the agreed amount by seventy pounds. 

 

The landlord was magnanimous. He didn't beat Zhang or throw him into prison or seize his land. He told him that if his baby had been a girl he might have accepted her in place of the grain for a girl was always useful in the house and one day she would bring in a little dowry. As things were, he was prepared to let Zhang carry forward his debt to the following year, adding an additional seventy pounds by way of interest—providing that Zhang agreed to work on the landlord's land for two days each week until the debt was repaid. 

 

But things didn't work out that way. In 1943, a detachment of the Communist Eighth Route Army occupied Zhang's village. The landlord fled and the villagers ceremoniously burnt all his title deeds. Under the guidance of the Communists, they elected a committee, including Zhang, to look after their affairs. They organized a militia(民兵) to defend the village and to help the Communist Army in its fight against the Japanese. They set up a school and Zhang, who had never had a day's schooling in his life, laboriously started to learn to read. 

 

Ten years went by. Landlordism, foreign invaders and indebtedness had disappeared from the face of China. Tens of millions of formerly landless peasants had become smallholders. But things couldn't stop there. The peasants were secure in their land tenure but they were still at the mercy of nature. 

 

To move China forward from the past to the future, it was necessary to change individual farming into collective farming. Zhang, by now a seasoned fighter for socialism, saw this need and explained it to his fellow villagers. In 1953, twenty-three of his poor fellow peasants organized themselves into a farming co-operative(合作社) which the rich peasants sneeringly called the Paupers Co-op(穷棒子社[1]). 

 

The Co-op's only draught animal was a donkey which had broken a fetlock some years before. The bones had joined but it still hobbled about on three legs and the Co-op members, as a riposte to the sneering name given by the rich peasants, named their Co-op the Three-Legged Donkey Co-op. Its membership and resources grew rapidly and during the next few years it became well known by this name. 

 

The urgent need was to open up more land for cultivation and to ensure a water supply. The task was huge and the Co-op lacked manpower, money and machinery. They had, however, as Zhang explained to me, one asset which was to prove decisive and this was an unshakeable conviction that by hard work and by relying on their own efforts, they would be able to overcome all difficulties. I asked Zhang what was the source of this inner strength and he replied that it came from the teachings of Mao Tse-tung. 

 

One of Chairman Mao's best known articles is called 'The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains'. It was delivered as a speech in 1945 at a time when the Communists faced great difficulties, and its purpose was to inspire confidence to overcome these difficulties. It tells of an old man in ancient times whose house faced south but whose view was obstructed by two great mountains. Together with his sons he began to dig away the mountains. A greybeard with a reputation for wisdom saw them doing this and laughed at them for attempting the impossible. But the old man was not daunted and he replied: 'When I die, my sons will carry on; when they die there will be my grandsons and then their sons and grandsons and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains can never grow any higher. Every bit that we dig away will make them that much lower. Why can't we clear them away ?' 

 

The conviction that by determination and tenacity they could overcome all obstacles gripped the minds of the peasants in the Three-Legged Donkey Co-op and generated in them a force which finally enabled them to transform the barren mountains into fertile terraces. To do this it was not enough just to remove the surface stones, for on most of the slopes there was no soil beneath them. They had to carry the soil, basketful by basketful, from threequarters of a mile away, and each mu of land needed a minimum of 2,000 baskets of earth. To find water all able-bodied peasants contributed from ten to twenty days of voluntary labour a year to the collective. In fourteen years, 90,000 work days were used in the search for water by a population which never exceeded its present level of 598. The older and more superstitious peasants insisted on asking a geomancer(风水先生) where to dig for water, but after months of fruitless digging they threw superstition to the winds and called in a geologist who located water on the far side of the hill. Here they dug a well, installed an electric pump and laid a pipe over the hill to a cistern twelve yards deep and seventeen yards in diameter which they had hewn out of solid rock. It was while working on this cistern, a key part of the new irrigation system, that Old Zhang had been injured.

 

In 1958 the Co-op amalgamated with neighbouring Co-ops to become a production brigade in a People's Commune, and from being grain-deficient in 1953, by 1964 they had an average per mu yield of 614 pounds and were able to sell 91,600 pounds to the state.

 

The thin mountain air parched my lips and the sun reflected from the stoneclad mountain sides dazzled my eyes. For all his recent injury and for all his fifty years of hard toil, Old Zhang, deeply suntanned and sprouting a stubbly little beard, was as nimble as a mountain goat and I had difficulty in keeping up with him. He could see that I was getting tired and suggested that we go down to the village for lunch. On the way down he pointed out landmarks in the village below.

 

'See those houses with tiled roofs down there?' he said. 'We built those last year. They may not look very grand to you since you come from London, one of the great cities of the world. But we like them very much. The heavy roofs keep out the summer heat and the winter cold. During the past twelve years we have built an extra four rooms per family.

 

'That building over there is our new school. In the old days the likes of us never had the faintest possibility of going to school—not even to see what it was like. I know, because when I was a kid I was terribly curious to see what went on in school and one day I smuggled myself in. But they found me and kicked me out. They told me I was a disgrace because I had brought fleas into the school.

 

'Now all the children in the Commune aged eight and over go to school. If a child is sick for any length of time, we have a special teacher who goes to his home to teach him there. This brigade has two primary schools and one half work/half study middle school. We even have four students in University, including my eldest boy who is studying geology in Changsha. When they come home during the vacations they work in the fields with the rest of us.'

 

We visited the clinic in a brick-walled whitewashed cottage. Members of a mobile medical team were carrying out a health check on the children and were vaccinating youngsters against infantile paralysis. They visited this village every ten days from their headquarters fifteen miles away, making the journey on donkeys. I asked the doctor if he was ever called out to an emergency and he told me that two months before he had performed an operation for obstructed childbirth in the very room where we were talking. He saw me glance at the beaten earth floor and the coarse wooden furniture and said, 'I know what you are thinking. It's true that conditions here are not nearly as good as we would like them to be. But until last year, no doctor or nurse had ever come to this village. Soon there will be enough money to build a much better place—maybe even with tiled walls and running water! But for the time being we have to make do with what we've got. When they called me out two months ago, the peasants scrubbed this place until it was as clean as a new pin. Both mother and baby did very well and there was no infection of the wound.' 

 

He had performed quite a number of operations for obstructed labour because, owing to widespread poverty and malnutrition in the past, rickets(佝偻病) had been common and many women had grown up with deformities(畸形) of the pelvis(骨盆) which prevented natural childbirth.

 

As we left the clinic a group of strapping girls passed by. 'What do you think of our tough lasses?' Zhang asked. 'No rickets or semistarvation now! That group goes in for tree planting on the highest slopes and is always breaking records. We have planted 102,000 walnut and apple trees, and we plan to plant one million trees during the next three years. Some of our members objected to using so much labour power on tree planting. They said that trees grow slowly and that we should concentrate on quick returns. Others argued that New China is here to stay and we ought to think not only of our own good but also of the coming generations. We argued about this for a long time and in the end everyone agreed to go ahead with tree planting.' 

 

We briefly visited the lame donkey which had inspired the poor peasants' name for their original Co-op. Too old to work, it was comfortably pensioned off and earned its corn by helping to remind the youth that their present good life had been hard won. 

 

Then, to my relief, we reached the cottage where we were to have lunch. We sat on the kang, and chatted with the lean young peasant who was our host as we ate millet porridge, wheaten pancakes and eggs. 'I was born in this village,' he said. 'I was just a nipper when Old Zhang came here. As soon as I was old enough, just like all the other lads, I wanted to leave. The trouble was that there was no better place to go to. Everywhere was just as bad. My old granny persuaded me to stay. Somehow she seemed to know that things would change one day. How right she was! I love this place now and will never leave it. My sweat—and the sweat of my mates—is on every bit of earth and every stone. It's something that we made ourselves out of nothing. Something useful, something beautiful, something that will last for ever. That gives you a fine feeling of contentment.' 

 

An old peasant, with a week's growth of stubble on his chin, came into the cottage. 'Sit down, uncle,' said our host, 'I'm glad you've come. Tell our guest here about your pig. He'll be interested.' He turned to me. 'His name is Wang Chen and he and his pig have become quite famous in these parts.' 

 

Old Wang looked embarrassed. 'Why should he be interested in that defile-mother pig? I wish I'd never set eyes on the animal!' 

 

'He raised that pig from litter,' said our host, ' and it turned out to be an exceptionally clever animal. Some people think pigs are stupid, but they're not. This one followed Old Wang round like a dog. He could find his way home from anywhere. Last New Year's day, Old Wang sold the pig in a market fifteen miles away, and, believe it or not, by the following evening the pig turned up again, his trotters a bit sore but otherwise none the worse. And what's even more remarkable, a couple of days later Old Wang took a full day off work, went back to the market with his faithful pig, found the couple who had bought it from him and returned it to them. You see, Old Wang, if he'll forgive me for saying so, has a reputation for being rather tightfisted and everyone was amazed that he should give up the pig so readily.' 

 

'You're wrong on two counts,' said Old Wang testily. 'In the first place, I'm not tight-fisted—I'm just careful. If I hadn't been careful I wouldn't have been able to keep alive as long as I have. In the second place, it wasn't easy to give up that pig. My old woman heard him snorting and grunting outside and when she opened the door and he came trotting in, we looked at each other with exactly the same thought in our heads. We'd sold the pig once and now we could sell it again! Believe me, it wasn't easy to decide to return that pig to its rightful owner. My wife and I talked it over half the night before making up our minds.' 

 

'What made you finally decide?' I asked. 

 

'It's difficult to say,' said Old Wang, unwilling to reveal the conflicts that had gone on in his mind. 'You see, we'd been learning about what the Chairman had to say about being unselfish and concerned about others and all that. And we knew that the couple who had bought the pig had lived just the same kind of life that we had. Another thing was that only a few days before we'd had a meeting to criticize the former brigade leader for selling a worn-out wheat grinder which had cost us 400 yuan six years ago for 300 yuan. He tried to defend himself by saying that he had not sold it on his own behalf but for the brigade as a whole and that he had not sold it to an individual but to a brigade in the next county. That was true enough, but everybody said that, whichever way you looked at it, it was just capitalist swindling and if every brigade in the country were to try and swindle every other brigade, we'd certainly never get real socialism. In the end we made him refund 150 yuan to the brigade which had bought it and since I'd voted in favour of that, how could I keep the pig just because it could find its way home ?' 

 

1. By chance, this was the day when the new irrigation scheme, which had involved such Herculean(艰巨的) efforts, was due to come into operation and so, after lunch, we climbed up to the cistern cut in the rock. A small crowd of Commune members had gathered for the opening ceremony. Drums and gongs had been assembled and a choir of Young Pioneers waved their scarlet flags and sang lustily. The sun beat down from the desert of white stones on the upper slopes. The old men sat on the rocks and puffed at their longbrass-bowled pipes. We waited while the workmen joined up the last section of earthenware piping. We waited while the last minutes of an epoch ticked away. We waited to see the consummation of an heroic victory. 

 

Soon the work was finished and the oldest member of the Commune—a spruce great-grandmother of eighty-three, who still insisted on working half-day, gave the signal to start the electric motor on the other side of the hill. 

 

Nothing happened. A tense silence gripped us. After minutes that seemed like hours, a few drops of water trickled from the pipe and disappeared into the vast empty cistern. Gradually the trickle became a torrent. Clear mountain water gushed out and echoed back faintly from the rocky depths of the cistern. 

 

Only the children cheered. 

 

The older ones were too moved by the magnitude of their victory over the bitter, painful past. Silently they broke up into groups and walked home.

 

 

 

 

[1]1952年，西铺村村民王国藩响应农业合作化号召，把村里最穷的23户农民组织起来，联合办起了一个初级社。由于社里唯一的一头毛驴还有四分之一的使用权属于没有入社的村民，人们便把他们称作 “三条驴腿”的“穷棒子社”。参考https://tv.cctv.com/2019/09/17/VIDEadjgXSGD60RF4mptn6cS190917.shtml