who's worked in the Construction Corps knows, everybody had to do a year's probation. You couldn't start your specialised job until after a trial year of labour.
I worked in the big fields. Really, farm work is just incredibly tough. I even had to work in the fields in winter. And what did we have to eat when we came home in the evening?
I couldn't detect any sense of hardship in Teacher Sun's narrative. This is a mark of the fortitude of that generation of Chinese; they regard 'the things I've done' and 'what others said about me' as far more important than 'eating in the wind and sleeping in the dew'. Their lives are lived on the spiritual level.
SUN: There were a lot of intellectuals in that place, relatively speaking, but I was the only girl who'd finished senior school. Four or five of the men were senior-school graduates, but none of them had been allowed to go on to university because of their class backgrounds, and that was why they had come here to make their way in the world. They were kind to me. They used to sneak rice or steamed buns into the big basket I carried on my back when picking cotton, so that I could snatch a bite to eat while I was changing baskets. I never asked who'd left them. Nothing about those people was straightforward. Nobody dared to get too friendly with anybody else. At that time it was tough, to be sure, and tense too, but the days went by very quickly. We used to go to the fields before dawn, eat our midday meal in the fields, and sometimes supper too. Then once it was too dark to see or pick cotton, we went to the maize fields for stalks. You could cut a good bundle of stems from a few rows of maize, and we carried them on our backs over all the fields we'd broken in for cultivation and back to the road, to be taken to the cow or sheep pens as fodder, or sometimes to the kitchen for cooking fuel. Freshly cut maize stems were very heavy. I really was dead on my feet, sometimes I used to weep from exhaustion. It was true hard labour.
XINRAN: Did you all have the same routines and bear the same heavy burdens, with no difference between men and women?
SUN: Oh yes, we all did the same work! Nearly everyone who came to Xinjiang in search of a future had a bad family background. It seemed that out of all the people around me, I was the only educated youth from a good class background.
XINRAN: So were you able to do a bit less than people from bad family backgrounds?
SUN: I didn't think in that way – we were all people. Besides, do you have any control over your family background? How is making children bear the sins of their parents any different from that old feudal punishment, the one where the whole family was punished for the crimes of one of its members?
I was never afraid of hard work, no matter how tough it was. I didn't build roads, dig canals, or break open farmland, but I'm a witness to the history of education in the Construction and Production Corps. In 1963 when we first built a school, there were very few children – only a handful of old comrades who had married after 1956 had school-age children; before that everyone was breaking open the wilderness. There were no houses or anywhere to sleep, who had the time or energy to get married or have children? Even if they had children back home, bringing them to the Gobi was out of the question – there was nothing here for them. Three work units joined together to set up a school, with just the one class. We had to make the schoolhouse ourselves, too. The Regimental Office assigned two comrades and me to make our own sod bricks and build a classroom from sod bricks and mud. Thick wooden sticks with grass stems tied on and topped off with mud went to make up the roof. We made piles of sod bricks, half a metre high, thirty centimetres wide and fifty long, laid sunflower or sesame stalks on top and smeared them with mud. Those were the school desks. The teacher's podium was made in the same way, and we didn't have a teacher's office at all. When there was a Chinese class, out would come the Chinese textbook. I was the teacher. The next class was sums, the children took out their maths textbooks, and I was still the teacher, then it was time for singing and it was me teaching again. After a while they would go out for exercise, and it was still me. I lived in the workers' dormitory, which was just the same: a big building, the beds piles of sod bricks with sesame stalks on top. I'd just turned twenty-six.
XINRAN: Could you bear so much all by yourself?
SUN: At that time there was nothing I couldn't bear. Teaching wasn't difficult. The hardest part was going to the roadside every morning to collect the pupils, especially when it rained in summer or snowed in winter. People could get blown away or buried by wind or snow in the Gobi Desert, sometimes. If it snowed or rained too heavily, I used to take the children halfway home, and then their parents would take over. Winter was the worst. I had to go to the schoolhouse before daybreak to light the stove for the students – that was an earth stove built like a
XINRAN: You used your own hair as padding to keep out the cold?
SUN: That's right. I used to have really long plaits, but one day when I was marking homework I forgot to hold my plaits out of the way while I was stoking up the fire. A swish of my plaits, and whoosh – one of them caught fire. Oh, I cried my heart out for a whole day. Another thing that caused me problems was films. It wasn't easy to put on a film in those days – we used to go a very long time between films, and on a film day none of the students wanted to go home. They said: 'Teacher, we want to see the film.' 'Stay and watch it then,' I'd say, so they did. They used to bring their own food supplies for lunch, not very much, so I usually had a bit of my own food put by for their supper when there was a film. It was different in those days, not like now, when you can find out where there's a film with just a telephone call, and you don't need to bring food because there are restaurants everywhere. At that time we were eking out a living in the Gobi Desert.
XINRAN: You must have been all by yourself then. Weren't you scared?
SUN: How could I not be scared? But in fact there was proper social order back then. There were no bad people. It's my belief that nobody had the energy to do anything bad – we were all half dead of exhaustion.
XINRAN: So when did you get other teachers for your school?
SUN: They didn't send us another teacher until the third year. Her husband was in the Security Office. He was in charge of the Reform through Labour teams, and he was away from home a lot.
XINRAN: Didn't you say that the social order was good, that there weren't any bad people?
SUN: I said there weren't any bad people in society, but there were lots and lots of Reform through Labour convicts! It was like all the Reform through Labour convicts in the whole country had been sent to Xinjiang. We were assigned a low little house near the school. There was a partition down the middle; she lived on one side, me on the other. It was much better after she came and there were two of us. I'd take PE while she took singing, and then we could swap for a while, or sometimes two classes would have PE or singing together. We taught that way right up to 1979. Before that it was mostly old comrades coming to open farms and things. Later on there started to be more new people, and more and more children. I began teaching middle school in 1984. I took two classes for Chinese, and I did that till 1994, when there was a shake-up in professional education under orders from the central government. Then the school set up a vocational senior high school, and I was transferred there.
