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Death before Marriage

Gongba Market is situated on the banks of the Paoshui (Gongba) River in the northeastern portion of Daoxian, about 20 kilometers from Daojiang and connected to it by a gravel road. The market itself is unimpressive and indistinguishable from other rural markets in the Hunan region, consisting of a main thoroughfare about half a kilometer long, lined with hundreds of houses and several open areas used for trading in pigs, plow oxen, and bulky agricultural byproducts. It’s normally quite deserted, but on market day farmers arrive from all around, packing the market so densely that a person can hardly move through it. My deepest impression is of the old wooden bridge crossing the Paoshui River to Gongba Market, about 50 meters long and a meter wide and constructed entirely of wood. When I stood on that bridge and looked at the Paoshui River flowing beneath it and heard the pounding of footsteps on the bridge, it reminded me of blood surging through veins. Zhu Xianhou pointed to the bridge while telling us how his 70-year-old mother was thrown into the river below it.

In the Gongba production brigade, where this bridge was located, lived three girl cousins, all around 17 years old, named Tu Yuehua, Tu Meizhu, and Tu Qiulei. To these girls and their families, the Cultural Revolution was like a bus careening into them from behind as they walked along the road. Day after day, they went to the commune’s fields for the “double rush” season, working themselves to exhaustion and drenched in sweat, with no time to do anything or think about anything but working, eating, and sleeping. They had no idea what was going on in Beijing, in the provincial capital of Changsha, or even elsewhere in Daoxian. All they knew was that if they didn’t work, they wouldn’t eat, and if they didn’t work hard, they’d be criticized.

On the evening of August 24, 1967, the production brigade suddenly called a mass rally during which a dozen or so people were tied up, beaten, and denounced, and three “troublemakers and arch-criminals” were buried alive: a landlord in his 50s, a 17-year-old landlord offspring, and Huang Renfeng, the 43-year-old mother of Tu Meizhu, described as a “landlord’s wife.” Huang Renfeng was seven or eight months pregnant at the time, and given that she herself was classified as a poor peasant, she dared to protest her treatment, as a result of which she was flogged. It is said that Huang Renfeng had not been on the production brigade’s original killing list, but when her husband, Tu Hongchang, “fled to escape punishment,” Huang Renfeng was forced to take his place.

We were unable to clarify the sequence of events that followed. Several other people had also been buried in the pit on August 24 but were then pulled out with ropes and “treated leniently.” It could have been that the intention was to “kill one to warn a hundred” while obeying the upper-level directive to “kill one or two troublemakers.” But then why, the next day, did the brigade suddenly hold a mass rally and kill 22 people at once, including those who had been shown “leniency” the day before? It remains a mystery. We asked a comrade from the Task Force about this, and he replied, “Many of those involved [in the killings] are dead now, and the others have put all the blame on them, saying that they said killing three was not enough and the revolution was not thorough enough, so more had to be killed. The dead can’t speak, so we haven’t been able to determine the truth.”

The next day, August 25, was market day, and the brigade’s leaders rushed to take advantage of this time when so many people were in one place to hold a rally to pronounce the judgment of the peasant supreme court. The brigade’s black elements and offspring, young and old, including Tu Hongchang’s eldest brother, Tu Hongguang, were bound up and brought forward, and after the death sentences were pronounced, the condemned were dragged to two empty sweet-potato cellars next to the market for execution. Because so many were “dumped in the cellar” that day, the brigade didn’t use the live burial method of the day before but instead stabbed the victims before tossing them in and covering them with earth, with the production brigade leaders offering a reward to the person who killed the most.

After doing away with these 22 people, the brigade penned up more than 40 surviving women and children like livestock in the storeroom of the commune’s supply and marketing cooperative to await an order from the peasant supreme court to take them to the killing ground. That order for the class enemy to be “obliterated root and branch” was finally delivered at noon on August 27. The condemned were escorted to the execution ground, with no one weeping or crying out. One little boy was bound so tightly that he had to hop along until his pants fell off, and even then he said nothing.

At that point, a district leader who was passing by and saw so many women and children in the group asked what was going on. The escorting militiamen said these were “landlord whelps” being taken for “root and branch extermination.” The leader said, “The big tigers deserve to be killed for their crimes, but there’s no need to kill children. If you insist on killing them, you need to wait for a central directive.” The Task Force’s subsequent inquiries determined that this leader was Ou Rifu, the head of Gongba District. Ou Rifu was one of the main people responsible for the killings in Gongba District, and he personally directed mass killings in Caoyutang, Xiaojia, and other production brigades. Ironically, his brief words were sufficient to save dozens of women and children in the Gongba brigade, including the three Tu cousins. It seemed that the Buddha preserved them.

The brigade’s cadres discussed the matter and felt that the upper-level leader was truly taking the higher road and the longer view; since maggots could hardly overturn a millstone, the tiger cubs could be spared and reformed. In any case, the cadres held all the power, and dictatorship could still be imposed if the class enemy attempted an overthrow later. Besides that, it seemed a waste to kill so many women when many class brothers lacked wives; even some production team cadres were still unmarried. The group was therefore escorted back to the production brigade. Their parents were dead and their homes and belongings had been seized, but one house was set aside for the Tu cousins and several younger girls. By then the brigade Chinese Communist Party (CCP) branch had already begun considering how to “change their classes,” and the brigade’s poor-peasant association (PPA) chairman handed down an order assigning each of the three cousins to one of the brigade’s bachelors. One of the men was mentally handicapped, and the other two were irredeemably shabby. The PPA saw this as the best outcome for the girls, whose daily needs would be met and who would gain a new lease on life through their change in class status. Yet much to everyone’s surprise, all three refused to marry. The representative of the brigade’s peasant supreme court was enraged: “If you don’t marry them, we’ll kill you!” The girls replied in a chorus: “We’d rather die!”

Perhaps those who have circled the gate of hell gain a clearer perspective on life and death, and their fear of death is no longer so intense. The girls probably thought: if our parents have died, why shouldn’t we die as well?

Seeing how the landlord whelps remained entrenched in their reactionary standpoints and refused to reform their thinking, the PPA was enraged; if they’d known the girls would be so stubborn, they would never have let them off. Now the upper level had handed down a prohibition against random killings, and besides that, if the girls were killed, the three class brothers would still be left without wives. So the girls were bound up, beaten, and subjected to public denunciation. Incredibly, all three still refused to give in.

Since the stick hadn’t worked, the carrot was plied, and someone was sent to carry out ideological work on the girls: “A girl is born to belong to another. Whoever heard of a woman not marrying? If you marry, you’ll never have to worry about having enough to eat, and with your class status changed to poor peasant, how much better your life will be!” But the three girls stuck to their own rationale: if marrying these men was such a great idea, why didn’t anyone else want them? They didn’t dare say this out loud, of course.

Finally Tu Yuehua and Tu Qiulei managed to escape, but Tu Meizhu was left behind with the three younger girls to accept her fate.

Tu Meizhu may have been surprised to learn that while she looked down on her prospective husband for gambling, gluttony, laziness, and stupidity, she was deplored as politically undesirable and as a taint on three generations of poor-peasant purity; the soldier brother of the man to whom Tu Meizhu had been promised wrote a letter objecting that Meizhu’s class status would harm his career prospects, and his firm rejection put an end to the match.

Nevertheless, one can only imagine how hard it must have been for a 17- or 18-year-old girl to support herself and three children. She finally married a youth from a poor peasant family in Dongmen Commune’s Shuinan production brigade, whose poverty had prevented him from finding a wife, and who was willing to raise the three girls as well.

I can’t help feeling a deep admiration for these three cousins. Although having no real education, given the choice between death and dignity, they chose the latter (how costly a luxury is dignity!) and became a thread of light in the depths of darkness. Because of them, when we look back at these days of insanity and bloodshed, we aren’t rendered speechless with shame but have the courage to continue on as decent human beings.

Years later, while carrying out supplementary interviews regarding the Daoxian massacre, I met Tu Meizhu once more. By then she was in her 50s, and the hardships of the intervening years had etched her face like a knife. The only consolation was that as her living environment gradually improved, she had emerged from the deep shadows of her family’s destruction and had gradually regained her human dignity. She still worked from dawn to dusk to improve her life, little by little. I spent a morning conversing with her.

This wasn’t a formal interview, because that wasn’t part of my plan for this particular visit. I had originally come because some of Daoxian’s oldest survivors had begun expressing a willingness to talk. The passage of time makes individual suffering recede into the background, but surprisingly, as society began reconsidering the Daoxian killings, some people who had previously refused to speak of the tragedy now felt they couldn’t take what they knew to their cremation urns but should share their experience for the sake of their grandchildren’s generation. When I returned to the guest house to put my notes in order after interviewing some of these people, I became lost in thought again. Our interviews regarding the massacre, especially those conversations carried out in 1986, had been limited by time, opportunity, and our own mental conceptions to focusing on incidents and processes while neglecting the conditions and environment both of victims and killers. In a sense, we’d missed the essential part. I became convinced that the story of how Tu Meizhu’s family was “revolutionized” provides an important reference both for officials and researchers, and with Tu Meizhu’s cooperation, I present it here.

The Tu family was not originally from the Gongba brigade, but rather from the Shangyunba brigade (village). Tu Meizhu said, “The destruction of our family has to be traced back to my grandfather. If he had been a gluttonous idler, we would have been classified as poor peasants during Land Reform. Then during the Cultural Revolution, even if we hadn’t killed others, at least we wouldn’t have been killed ourselves.”

So what kind of person was Tu Meizhu’s grandfather? Simply put, he was a skilled stonemason. Stonemason Tu was born to an average peasant family in Shangyunba Village, and his parents left only two things to him: an intelligent mind and a robust physique. Of course they also had him learn a skill, but that was secondary: Tu would have excelled at whatever occupation he put his hand to. One year, when Daojiang was repairing its dockyard, Stonemason Tu was lucky enough to do the stonemasonry work and make some money. As it happened, there was a drought the next year, and with land selling cheaply, Tu took advantage of the hardship of others to buy some land, establishing himself as a small landlord.

Throughout his life, Stonemason Tu had a number of disagreeable qualities: first, whenever he saw a rich or powerful person, he would bow and scrape. Second, when he saw a poor person, especially a gambler or loafer, he would roll his eyes in disgust. Third, he was a miserly man who never spent a penny more than necessary on anything, and if he had 90 cents, he’d find a way to borrow another 10 cents and buy land. Fourth, he was a hard-hearted man, feeding his children nothing but congee three meals a day. If a son went out to work for someone else, he’d chase after him shouting: “Don’t get fat! If you come back with a big belly, you won’t be fed at home!” Tu Meizhu’s father had acquired the nickname “Scar” from an overturned caldron of congee that scalded his leg as a child.

Stonemason Tu’s wife was of a similar character, and apart from laboring from morning to night, she was always conniving to increase the family’s fortune. If anything, her faults were more egregious than her husband’s. Anyone who dared to steal a melon from their garden or pluck a leaf from their tea plants would be treated to a harangue of such deafening volume that half the village would know of it.

Envious of other families with a smattering of learning, Stonemason Tu after long consideration finally decided to send his second son, Tu Hongsheng, off to school. (Looking back, this may have been the one correct decision Stonemason Tu ever made in his life. Although this modest schooling brought Tu Hongsheng unending tribulations, it allowed him to avoid the slaughter that struck his village during the Cultural Revolution.)

The Land Reform movement began in Daoxian in 1951. On the eve of the campaign, Stonemason Tu’s family resources were roughly as follows: 50 mu of land, a large tile-roofed house, hillside land for gathering firewood, five sons (the fourth of whom had left the village to seek his living prior to Liberation, and no one knew what had become of him), four daughters-in-law, and a number of grandchildren, bringing the number of family members to more than 20. His children all worked, and Tu also had long-term hired hands. The upshot was that during Land Reform, Stonemason Tu was “suppressed” (i.e., killed) as a despotic landlord.

Tu Meizhu observed: “My grandfather wasn’t very good with people. He was mean to his family but treated outsiders pretty well. When my parents were still alive, I remember them saying that they never ate anything but congee, but my grandfather’s long-termed hired hands were given proper rice to eat. If you don’t feed people decently, they won’t work well for you, but you can begrudge your own family members a cup of cold water. My grandfather’s household had 50 mu of land at that time, which qualified him as a landlord. But at that time there were more than 20 of us, so that meant only around 2 mu of land per person, which was the standard for a middle peasant. After Land Reform, the poor peasants in our township were allotted 2 mu of land per person, which was about the same as what our family had before Land Reform… . It would be unreasonable to say that my grandfather acquired his property through exploitation, but even if you have to confiscate it, you don’t have to kill for it, and if you insist on killing, even in the Old Society, only the exploiter himself was killed without pulling the rest of his family down with him. All my life I’ve relied on the labor of my two hands to support myself, and, if anything, I’ve been undercompensated, not over- compensated, for my work. Why should I be designated a member of the exploiting class? Back then, even a three-year-old child would curse you as an evildoer, but my parents and I, and my uncles and aunts who were killed, never did anything bad… . In the Old Society, people were allowed to have a little extra.”

After land reform, the Tu brothers split up into individual households and began to lead separate lives. Luckily, they were used to hard living, and now they could even eat a little rice instead of congee three meals a day. In 1954, the Tu brothers sold off the house in Shangyunba and moved to Gongba Market to make a living from small businesses. At that time, Gongba Market consisted of nothing but a gravel road and a hundred-odd wooden, brick, and thatched houses. Because the Tu brothers were shrewd and capable, they quickly established themselves at Gongba Market. Perhaps they believed that by leaving their old village and no longer engaging in farming, they could permanently cast off their landlord status. They didn’t realize that this cap was virtually imbedded in their heads, and that it would accompany them to even the remotest corner of the country. When the People’s Commune movement began in 1958, small tradesmen and craftsmen such as carpenters and blacksmiths all were made part of large collectives, and the Tu brothers became members of the Gongba production brigade of the Weixing (Satellite) People’s Commune, which was later renamed Gongba Commune. Eldest son Tu Hongguang and third son Tu Hongchang, who had shops in Gongba Market, were kept on to work in the commune’s supply-and-marketing cooperative. They made decent enough livings, what locally would be considered middle-class standard or above.

Old Mother Tu had it the hardest, now dependent on her children and subjected to the temper of her daughter-in-law, who would be scolded at work and then come home and vent at her mother-in-law for not knowing how to eat and dress decently but instead buying land that only harmed her progeny. Aware of how she had gone wrong, the old woman just shrank silently into herself. When the Three Years of Hardship came, her children didn’t have enough to eat themselves, much less to properly look after her needs. Old Mother Tu contracted edema, and after subsisting on chaff and pomegranate leaves she finally died of a bowel obstruction.

The educated second brother, Tu Hongsheng, had once served as a low-level officer in the Kuomintang army, so he was designated a pre-Liberation counterrevolutionary in 1953 and sentenced to 10 years of labor reform in Hengyang. After being released and returning home in 1962, he was much worse off than his brothers. Although clever and able, he had a weak constitution, having studied in his youth and then undergone labor reform, so he had difficulty with farming work. Fortunately, Stonemason Tu had arranged for him to marry a sturdy woman, who while lacking physical allure was a better worker than most men. Back then, quite a few people were eager to marry into the Tu family, and Stonemason Tu had only one standard for selecting a daughter-in-law: looks didn’t matter, but anyone who wanted to marry one of his sons had to know how to sift rice, brew liquor, and pickle vegetables, and in particular had to be strong enough to lift the household’s heavy caldron. Tu Hongsheng’s wife, Qin Ji’e, met all these conditions, and while originally less than happy with his parents’ choice, Tu Hongsheng now appreciated his wife’s virtues; without her, the family would have been finished, and he would have starved to death.

Having taken up farming in midlife, Tu Hongsheng was not as competent as his brothers, and while plowing one day in 1963, he accidently struck a poor-peasant commune member on the forehead with his whip. Tu immediately begged for forgiveness, and since it had been an accident and no serious injury was caused, the peasant didn’t blame him, and the matter should have ended there. But that evening, when work points were recorded, the public-security head made Tu go up on the podium, where he was surrounded by seven or eight others and beaten with carrying poles until he coughed blood and passed out. Watching from below, his brothers were struck dumb with fear and just bowed their heads without saying a word. After the meeting was adjourned, they carried the half-dead Tu Hongsheng home on a door plank and then furtively took him to Gongba Market for medical treatment the next day. After examining Tu Hongsheng’s injuries, the doctor said, “You’re too badly injured to treat here. You need to be taken to the city. I’ll write you a prescription first. Go home and take the medicine and then get to the city hospital as quickly as possible; otherwise, even if you live you’ll be crippled for life.” After returning home and recuperating for a time, Tu Hongshen said to Qin Ji’e: “I’m neither dead nor alive and can’t go on this way. I want to go to the city for treatment… . If I get better, I’ll come back, and if I don’t, I’ll die there and you should just forget me.” When Qin Ji’e heard this, she began weeping, but, unable to think of any alternative, she could only agree and told their son to go with Tu and look after him on the way. Tu packed a small toolbox (he was skilled in fixing clocks and watches, radios, and fountain pens) and set off secretly with his nine-year-old son.

A few years later the Cultural Revolution broke out, and the killing wind began blowing through Daoxian. Here I’ll hand the story over to Tu Meizhu:

When the killing began, it was during the double-rush season, and we went out with the production team every day for work, having no inkling what was going on. One day, the production brigade called my mom and dad in for a meeting. My father wasn’t at home, and my mother, who was seven or eight months pregnant, went to the meeting with her big belly. I stayed home with my two younger sisters waiting for them to come back. I waited until late at night and still they didn’t return. I was worried and went to my second uncle’s home to ask what was going on. As soon as I opened the door, I saw my aunt [Qin Ji’e] sprawled out on her bed, covered with sweat, her arms swollen this big [while saying this, Tu Meizhu used her hands to show the size of a large bowl] and covered with blood. I was shocked and asked what had happened. They quickly waved at me to be quiet, or everyone in the house would be killed. That was when I learned that my mother had been buried alive in the pit. Apart from my mother, they’d also buried a class enemy offspring the same age as I, 17 years old, who had been my classmate in school. They said he was a troublemaker who didn’t submit to remolding. They had tied up my aunt so tightly that they’d broken her arms, because they said she had special kung fu skills that could break rope, and they’d broken my uncle Tu De’s leg with a hoe. They would have been buried alive as well, but when asked if they admitted their crimes, they said they did, and when asked if they would behave, they said they would, so they were pulled out of the pit with ropes as a show of leniency.

At the time, I was too terrified to grieve. I ran home and told my youngest sister to tell my maternal uncle to come for us, because they were poor peasants. My uncle came over early the next morning, but he didn’t dare enter our home and arranged to meet me in the tea grove out back. All my uncle could do was tell me to look after our home and be careful, and then nothing would happen to me. At that time I didn’t know what had happened to my father, and only later learned that he had gotten word of what was happening and had run off during the night. I heard that after running away, my father was found by militia patrolling in Yao Mountain over by Hongtangying, and that they’d hacked him to death and left his body there in the wilderness. To this day I don’t know exactly where he died.

The next day, the people who hadn’t been killed the day before were captured again and killed, including my younger uncle and his wife and my elder uncle. Then they rounded up all of us class enemies and offspring, regardless of age or sex, tied us up, and locked us in the supply-and-marketing cooperative storehouse, dozens of us, old and young… . They finally decided to throw all of us into the pit. By then I was numb, feeling neither sadness nor fear; my mind was blank, and I just did whatever they told us to do. But fate was on our side, and as they dragged us out to be killed, a district cadre came along, and when he saw us he said, “Big tigers deserve to die for their crimes, but killing children is inconsistent with party policy.” So for the time being they spared us 30-odd children and girls, while the older boys were still taken to the pit and killed like my mother. There were 20 to 30 people killed that way. Their bones and my mother’s are still in that pit.

My parents and the males in my uncles’ families all were killed. All that was left was my second uncle [Tu Hongsheng], who along with my cousin was spared because they’d gone to the city to get treatment for my uncle, and now they were working in Xinjiang. In 1982, my uncle was given a notice of rehabilitation and returned to Daoxian, but the production brigade still wanted to arrest him, so he ran back to Xinjiang and never returned.

After my parents were killed, the production brigade’s Supreme People’s Court of the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants carried out a second “Land Reform” and confiscated my family’s house, livestock, farming tools, food, and clothing. They left just one house for our families, and my cousins and I and my sisters lived there together. I was 17 years old at the time, and my sisters were 11, 8, and 4. We lived wretchedly, cold, hungry, and worse off than dogs or pigs. In September, the so-called judicial leaders, including public-security head Zhu Xianru, Li Debing, and others, came and “arranged marriages” for us. I was to become the wife of a simpleton. I firmly refused, and as a result I was beaten on the spot and then denounced in large and small meetings and rallies, being paraded in the street and thoroughly humiliated until I was half dead. We couldn’t even shed tears quietly at home, because there were always some ne’er-do-wells crowding around our doorway and teasing and insulting us. Several times I considered suicide, but when I looked at my little sisters, I knew I couldn’t die. What would become of them? I later heard that in the county town there was an army called the 47th Army that could save us, and I thought that if we stayed at home, we would just starve to death, so it would be better to risk our lives trying to get to the county town for help.

One night, I took my three sisters and ran off in the direction of the county town. All my sisters were young, so we didn’t get far before stopping to sleep under the eaves of a house along the way. When dawn broke, an old woman woke us up and said she was the mistress of the house. She asked where we were from and where we were going. Seeing that the old woman had a kindly face like my mother’s, I tearfully told her of my family’s tragic situation. The old woman said, “The 47th Army won’t be able to help you. A lot of class enemies are already in the county town begging for food, and how can you manage there, a young girl looking after three children? I’ll tell you where to go, and you can decide whether to go there.” She told me about a young man in their village named He Weishun and suggested I marry him. She took me to He Weishun’s home to meet him, and I saw that although the family was very poor and the elderly father was paralyzed in bed, He Weishun was a good man and not bad looking. If his circumstance had been better, he wouldn’t have wanted to marry me, either. He Weishun, who is now my husband, agreed to raise my three sisters as well. I had no other options at the time, and for the sake of my young sisters and for my own stability, I agreed to marry him. My husband had been secretary of the Shuinan production brigade’s Youth League branch, but because he married me, he was considered to have lost his class standpoint, and he was dismissed from his position.

In May 1968, I summoned up the nerve to visit my old home in Gongba with my husband. All that was left was four walls packed with pig manure. The head of our production team, Tang Huatong, had taken possession of our home, removed the partitions, and converted it into a pigsty.