Read Online The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China by Yuan-Tsung Chen - Free Book Online Page B

find it too tough.” Despite his words, there was a hint of tenderness in his teasing. I didn’t answer, but just watched the way he ran his fingers through his tousled hair as he left the room.
    Two weeks later, we gathered in the early morning at the theater to start our journey to the Northwest. Two buses and a truck were soon filled with the seventy of us and our belongings, and we were off to the railroad station. The lead driver took us by way of the Bund, the riverside embankment road, to give us a last look at the Huangpu and its shipping. “You won’t see a river like that for a long time,” he told us. “The place you’re going to is a real desert.”
    Even at that early hour the river was alive with activity. Big ships swung at anchor from the buoys in midstream. Scurrying launches set junks and sampans bobbing in their wakes. On the far side Pudong was shrouded in morning mist that made its smoking factory chimneys seem like silent, stiff sea wraiths with gently waving hair. We passed the skyscraper banks and hotels and then turned away from the river up teeming Nanking Road with its many-floored offices and department stores with their glittering window displays. It would be five months at least before we saw such sights again. The part of Gansu Province we had been assigned to was more than one thousand miles away, three hundred miles beyond the railhead west of Xian. There was little chance of returning from there on leave. I turned my head back for a last look at the broad river before it was lost to sight amid the traffic and the throng of pedestrians in the morning rush to work.
    Shanghai people, like no others in China, know how to make an “occasion” of an event. The station was filled with a hurrying, jostling throng of cadres and their relatives and friends come to see them off. As more and more buses rolled up with groups from other organizations and districts, the noise and commotion reached a peak. To avoid being separated we formed a tight phalanx and pushed our way through to our train. Wang Sha had been appointed to lead our group of seventy going to the Northwest, and we found him waiting for us on the platform, holding up a card on a tall stick with the name of our destination—Gansu—written on it. A score of posters with other names cataloged the many other destinationsof land reform workers that day. Writers, musicians, film workers, dancers, singers, artists, producers, scholars, and a sprinkling of office workers and veteran cadres like Wang Sha moved along the platforms to their trains. The director of our theater and the heads of many departments and organizations of Shanghai were there to wish us well. There was even a band of our orchestral musicians tuning up for a farewell song.
    Wang Sha called the roll—still a few missing—and then in a moment of immense confusion we piled into the train with our belongings, trying to find our compartments and places. Like soldiers we had little baggage. We had been told, “Only essentials; no luxuries, please.” Like most, I carried a backpack of a bedding roll and a change of clothes, wrapped in a piece of oilcloth or raincoat, with an enamel basin tied to the outside and an extra pair of cotton shoes or sneakers. In practical fashion, we girls all wore cadres’ uniforms: trousers and soldier-style jackets of blue, grey, or khaki. We tied our enamel drinking mugs or bowls to our leather belts. A couple of notebooks, a pen, an extra sweater, little bags and baskets of goodies for the journey, and that was all. It was autumn and we could travel light. Our bundles of warm cotton or floss-padded coats and jackets and trousers and winter underwear had been sent to the baggage wagons. Everything else we possessed we had left with our families or stored with our organizations.
    Ma Li wore a floppy soldier’s cap pushed back on her head, the cardboard peak forming a halo over her thick