A Strange Gift from the Pig Farm

Fifteen years ago when I left China for the United States, I wanted to forget the dreams my peers and I used to have. These we had inherited from our parents. Some of them had long since turned into nightmares for me. I wanted to open a new chapter in my life. Let the old fear, anger, and guilt melt away and the barriers between myself and others slide into the melting pot. But by and by I realized that this was just another dream.

I could not leave my past behind, as I could not help waking up at three o'clock in the morning. I acquired this habit in China in the early seventies. When I woke up, for a moment I did not know where I was. The chill in the air reminded me of Manchuria. Then as light slowly filtered into my bedroom, worries began to flood back into my mind.

The J-I visa I was forced to take when I left China, a handicap in my hopes to compete with others in the United States.

The agents the CIA sent to the door of my university to check on me.

The liberal professor who told the agents to get out of his sight (while I had hoped that he might answer some of their questions in my favor).

The sense that I was an outsider, socially and culturally, then and thereafter, no matter how hard I tried to fit in.

The doubt that I was as competent as others ...

Such thoughts told me that I was in America. My new life was not easy. What the future held for me I was not sure. So the old memories, though painful at times, had become quite reassuring.

So I turned my thoughts back, to China, to the pig farm where I worked on the night shift and acquired the habit of waking up at three o'clock. For a seventeen-year-old girl who had grown up in big cities—Bern, Geneva, and Beijing—the night shift was a tough job. The day before I had to work for more than ten hours like everybody else, racing after the pigs on the grazing land, feeding them, and cleaning the sties. At dusk others would finish their work and go back to the village to eat and sleep. After the last person was gone, I alone had the company of several hundred pigs. My duty was to protect them from whatever danger might arise during the night and to drive them out three times (at midnight, three o'clock, and dawn) to relieve themselves so they wouldn't mess up the sties.

On such nights the light of my oil lantern was small, a faint, shivering, yellow ring against the immense darkness that reigned over the huge swamp called the Great Northern Wilderness. Here the night wind flew high and the moon was as pale as a ghost. The grass around the pig farm grew to the height of a person in summer. Wolves, hungry for piglets, lurked in it. Outside my window, my dogs howled in the middle of the night like wolves, echoed by other dogs in the village; or maybe it was the wolves running across the plain who answered them. I really couldn't tell which was which.

When winter came the nights became endless. At four o'clock I lit my oil lamps, which I kept burning until after nine the next morning. Outside, all was covered with snow, two to three feet deep on the plain. On the southern side of the shacks, the snow formed a slope after the first blizzard. The tip of it nearly touched the eaves. Throughout winter the snow would not melt. After midnight the temperature dropped to forty degrees below zero, centigrade or Fahrenheit, it made no difference. The heavy old sheepskin coat Mother sent me felt like a piece of paper once I stepped out into the wind.

Sometimes when the region was pounded by a snowstorm, I remembered the stories the villagers told: some people lost their sense of direction in it. Scared to death, they kept running until they dropped to the ground. Afterwards they were frozen in the snow. The next April, if the wolves did not get there first, people would find their remains.

Even more unfortunate were those who perished within a stone's throw of their own homes. Blindfolded by the storm, they walked in endless circles, hour after hour. Being "walled up by ghosts," the local people called it. In such cases, people were doomed unless timely help reached them from the outside.

With such stories lurking at the back of my mind and the snoring of the pigs rising and falling all around me, I moved from sty to sty to carry out my duties. A lantern and a whip, I held in my two hands. A pair of sharp scissors was hidden in a pocket next to my heart; I would use the scissors as a last resort to defend myself.

Of course even at the age of seventeen, I was not so naive as to really believe that the scissors would save my life or my reputation if I were attacked. But what alternatives did I have? I once thought firecrackers might work better. Yet how to keep them dry and light them in an emergency, I never quite figured out.

On the wall of our shack, somebody had left a gong. With a smile I stood in front of it and contemplated the idea. After a while I decided that a gong was no good either. The nearest house in the village was a good half-mile away from the pig farm. The weather was so cold in this region that people slept with their windows shut even in summer. During winter, sawdust was packed between windowpanes, the houses were literally sealed up. If something happened on the pig farm during the night, no one would hear me no matter what I did. I'd better face the fact.

Actually I wouldn't need to work on the night shift and worry about such things if I had not volunteered to do so in the first place. Before I came to the pig farm, no one had ever imagined that a woman would work on the night shift. It had always been strictly a job for men. Then in 1969, somehow there was a temporary shortage of manpower on the pig farm. So I told Chen, the head of the farm, that he could count me in to work at night. When he realized that I meant what I said, he looked at me as if I were from another planet.

This was, however, not the first time that I volunteered myself. In the summer of 1968 I had volunteered to leave Beijing for the countryside. I did this out of a conviction that it was not fair for some young people like my schoolmates and me to enjoy all the privileges China could offer, which included living in big cities, having access to top schools, good...