China Witness

make friends with me, and was that all right?

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In China before 1990, 'lover' was an embarrassing word, even a louche, dissolute word. When a man and a woman were said to be 'making friends', this referred to courtship. In the period between 1930 and 1980, a couple who were Party members had to gain authorisation from the Party organisation before 'making friends'; from the 1950s to the 1980s this rule was an unwritten law in Chinese society.

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XINRAN: How did you reply?

MRS YOU: At first I really didn't know what to reply. When I kept silent he said: 'It's perfectly simple, just tell me, do we or don't we? Be frank.' At that time there were quite a few people who were keen on me, but I agreed anyway. Why did I choose him? This has a lot to do with my family, and the influence of my older girl cousins: they had all married university students in the 1920s and 30s, and they were all very talented men: one was a professor in the Shanghai Finance and Economics Institute, and one had been a student of literature at the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong, and after the Liberation he became a teacher, everyone thought he was amazing – at that time people who had been to university were rarer than a unicorn horn or phoenix feathers. So I thought I couldn't do less than them, and I had always admired educated people. At that time I'd never heard of MAs, PhDs or anything like that, and though my ambition had been to be a university student myself, it was impossible then, so I would naturally tend to look favourably on a university graduate as a marriage partner! The best candidates among my classmates were only vocational school graduates, none of us had been to university. So You's educational background and his personal circumstances both met my standards, but actually the most important thing was the man himself. Besides, that writer Sha Duoling, our deputy group leader and the organisational secretary of the Youth League had all told me: 'A Hero of Labour is bound to be a hard worker, and a hard-working man is always good news.'

XINRAN: So, your marriage was influenced by the Party, and by the Party organisation.

MRS YOU: Oh, at that time an introduction from the Party organisation was as good as a guarantee, many people said yes as soon as the organisation introduced them! In those days we'd only just freed ourselves from arranged marriages – anything that wasn't decided by our parents was a kind of freedom! Besides, I had this notion of marrying a university student, so when other classmates suggested getting together, I turned them down. He was the first one I considered, but I didn't know how to answer him.

XINRAN: So how did you answer him?

MRS YOU: He was a leader – even when proposing marriage he knew a thing or two about leadership. He saw I was unable to speak so he said: 'Can we or can't we? If not, we don't have to,' just like that. I still didn't reply, but I didn't refuse him either.

XINRAN: And how long did your courtship last?

MRS YOU: Not that long. It was silly of me, he won a Hero of Labour prize (back then prizes were always The Complete Works of Mao Zedong) but when the time came for him to collect it he didn't go himself, but sent me to collect it for him, so I went blundering off to collect his prize. All this had a purpose, it was to test whether I was really serious, and to show me that he was a famous Hero of Labour. Afterwards when we returned from Jiuquan to Xi'an, he took my suitcase for me, and put it in the truck for me. He didn't lift a finger to help any of my other classmates, I remember it very clearly. When we were back in Xi'an for theoretical study, we went to the Xi'an restaurant on our rest day to eat snacks, especially their local speciality. Xi'an was very backward in those days. There were no cars or buses – we took a horse and cart from outside the city wall to the city centre.

XINRAN: What was the local speciality?

MRS YOU: Different kinds of Xi'an dumplings, all different types, and there was yang-rou-pao- mo – lamb stew with coriander and crumbled flatbread.

XINRAN: When you ate out together, who paid?

MRS YOU: He paid. I wanted to pay, you know, equality between the sexes and all that, but he wouldn't let me.

XINRAN: What was your marriage ceremony like?

MRS YOU: The marriage ceremony I do remember. Before we were married, the Petroleum Bureau wanted to train a group of people in aerial surveying at the Beijing Central Mapping Bureau, in order to improve the speed and quality of surveying. My name was on the list. But then the leaders said: 'You're getting married soon, you don't have to go.' At that time I always felt I had never learned enough, I'd always dreamed of a university diploma; given a chance like this, I couldn't not go. So I said: 'It doesn't matter if I'm getting married, I can still go once I'm married. I'll come back when the course is over.' I was already China's first head of a women's surveying team, I wanted to be a member of China's first aerial surveying team as well. In those days new training programmes were kept secret, there was no announcement. I'd heard the phrase 'aerial surveying' but didn't knew whether it meant flying in the air or walking on the ground. I had no idea. I supposed that if it was aerial, it must be flying in the air, surely? I was determined to fly up to the sky; I wanted to be the first female aerial surveyor of the New China. Since I was going away to study, my colleagues said: 'Have your wedding right away, before you leave, a settled relationship is beneficial to study' – and so we got married. We were still wearing our fieldwork clothes, even in our wedding photograph, but I bought us two new scarves for the photo, both the same colour and style, and we wore rosettes, attached to our work clothes. Our colleagues had a whip-round and got us two sets of bedding and some sweets, it was a very simple wedding.

XINRAN: Was there any of the traditional horseplay at your wedding?

MRS YOU: Of course – at that time marriages were the biggest events in our social life. They forced us to sing a song. A few of his geophysicist classmates were a bit more unruly, they were slightly older, they'd seen more of the world. I could sing Shaoxing Opera, and so I sang a bit of that, not very well, just 'Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai'. When I was young I used to join in the community singing, and I was in the singing group. Later on I had my tonsils out, and my voice turned hoarse.

XINRAN: Did you really go to study as soon as you were married?

MRS YOU: Mmm, I did.

XINRAN: For how long?

MRS YOU: Two years in all. As it turned out he was sent to Moscow for two years while I was studying – he went in 1956.

XINRAN: How long did you live apart?

MRS YOU: Three years, he didn't come back till '58.

XINRAN: Did you go to visit him when he was abroad?

MRS YOU: Go to the Soviet Union? No, in those days it was impossible, they were very strict about letting you go abroad. Besides, we had had our first child by then. When You came back from his studies in 1958 he was assigned to the Bureau of Mines in Turfan, in Xinjiang province; at that time the slogan was 'Spur on the galloping horse to full speed, march on Turfan'. They dug a well for prospecting beneath the Flaming Mountain, the same Flaming Mountain as in Wu Chengen's Monkey, the part where the monks borrow the fan of the Iron Fan Princess. We set up camp at the foot of the mountain, where we had a one- room brick house for living quarters. There were no fans or electrical equipment then, and in summer the average temperature was over forty-two degrees, and that was in the shade, impossibly hot, you could cook an egg by burying it in the sand. It was over forty degrees inside too, all our things were scalding hot – you could burn your hand on an iron bedstead. Nowhere was it cool, you had to splash the beds and ground with water and at midday draw the curtain, which was just a piece of black cloth, like in a photographer's darkroom; we had to turn day into night to survive there. At midday when it was hottest, work was out of the question, we women just lay there on soaking wet beds, and even that wasn't enough, we had to cover ourselves with sopping towels. The men went to the irrigation ditches, where they skulked under the little bridges, hiding from the heat of the sun. There was nothing else we could do in the middle of the day. Luckily by then our fieldwork could be taken indoors, but the drawing board was so hot that our maps used to stick to it. During the worst heat of the day all we could do was