Hong Taiyue, in a brand-new black uniform, arrived at the edge of the field, looking much older, his hair turned gray, his cheek muscles slack, the corners of his mouth sagging. Jinlong followed behind him, carrying a clipboard in his left hand and a fountain pen in his right, sort of like a reporter. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what he was going to record – not every word uttered by Hong Taiyue, I hoped. After all, even with his revolutionary history, Hong was merely the Party secretary of a small village, and since grassroots cadres of those days were all the same, he shouldn’t have postured so much. Besides, he’d cooked and eaten a goat belonging to the collective and had nearly been cashiered during the Four Clean-ups campaign, which meant that his political consciousness was less than ideal.
With unhurried efficiency, Dad lined up the plow and checked the harness on the ox, leaving nothing for me to do but look on excitedly, and what stuck in my mind were the stunts I’d watched him and his ox perform on the threshing floor the night before. The sight of the powerful figure of our ox reminded me what a difficult maneuver it had been. I didn’t ask Dad about it, wanting it to be something that had actually happened and not something I’d dreamed.
Hong Taiyue, hands on his hips, was giving instructions to his subordinates, citing everything from Quemoy and Matsu to the Korean War, from land reform to class struggle. Then he said that agricultural production was the first battle to be fought against imperialism, capitalism, and independent farmers taking the capitalist road. He brought the experience he’d cultivated during his days of beating his ox hip bone into play, and even though his speech was peppered with mistakes, his voice was strong, his words hung together, and the plowmen were so intimidated they stood frozen in place. So did the oxen. I saw our ox’s mother among them – the Mongol – immediately identifiable by her long, crooked tail. She seemed to be casting glances our way, and I knew she was looking at her son. Hey, at this point I can’t help but feel embarrassed for you. Last spring, when I was fighting with my brother on the sandbar after I’d taken you out to graze, I saw you try to mount her. That’s incest, a crime. Naturally, that doesn’t count for much with oxen, but you’re no ordinary ox – you were a man in your previous life! There is, of course, the possibility that in her previous life she was your lover, but she’s the one who gave birth to you – the more I ponder the mysteries of this wheel of life, the more confused I get.
“Put those thoughts out of your mind, right now!” Big-head said impatiently.
All right, they’re out. I thought back to when my brother Jinlong was down on one knee with his clipboard on his other knee writing at a frantic pace. Then Hong Taiyue gave the order: Start plowing! The plowmen took their whips off their shoulders, snapped them in the air, and shouted as one: “Ha lei-lei-lei-” It was a command readily understood by the oxen. The production brigade plows moved forward, creating waves of mud to both sides. With mounting anxiety, I said softly: Dad, let’s get started. He smiled and said to the ox:
“All right, Blackie, let’s get to work!”
Without recourse to a whip, Dad spoke softly to our ox, who lurched forward. The plow dug deep and jerked him back.
“Not so hard,” Dad said. “Pull slowly.”
But the overeager ox was set on taking big strides. His muscles bulged, the plow shuddered, and great wedges of mud, shimmering in the sunlight, arced to the sides. Dad adjusted the plow as they went along to keep it from getting stuck. As a onetime farmhand, he knew what he was doing. What surprised me was that our ox, tilling a field for the first time, moved in a straight line, even though his movements were somewhat awkward and his breathing was, from time to time, irregular. Dad didn’t have to guide or control him. Our plow was being pulled by a single ox, the production brigade’s plows by teams of two, yet we quickly overtook their lead plow. I was so proud I couldn’t contain my excitement. As I ran back and forth, our ox and plow created the image of a sailing vessel turning the mud into whitecaps. I saw the production-brigade plowmen look over at us. Hong Taiyue and my brother walked up, stood off to one side, and watched with hostility in their eyes. After our plow had reached the end of our land and turned back, Hong walked up in front of our ox and shouted:
“Stop right there, Lan Lian!”
With fire in its eyes, the ox kept coming, forcing Hong to jump out of the way in fright. He knew our animal’s temper as well as anybody. He had no choice but to fall in behind our plow and say to Dad:
“I’m warning you, Lan Lian, don’t you dare so much as touch land belonging to the collective with your plow.”
Dad replied, neither haughtily nor humbly:
“As long as your oxen don’t step on my land, mine won’t step on yours.”
I knew that Hong was trying to make things difficult, because our three-point-two acres were a wedge in the production brigade’s land. Since our plot was a hundred yards long and only twenty-one yards wide, it was hard not to touch theirs when the plow reached the end or went along the edges. But when they plowed the edges of their land, it was just as hard to avoid touching ours. Dad had nothing to fear.
“We’d rather sacrifice a few feet of plowed land than step foot on your three-point-two acres!” Hong said.
Hong could make that boastful statement since the production brigade had so much land. But what about us? With the few acres we worked, we couldn’t sacrifice any. But Dad had a plan. “I’m not going to sacrifice even an inch of my land,” he said. “And you still won’t find a single one of our hoofprints on collective soil!”
“Those are your words, remember them,” Hong said.
“That’s right, those are my words.”
“I want you to keep an eye on them, Jinlong,” Hong said. “If that ox of theirs so much as steps on our land-” He paused. “Lan Lian, if your ox steps on our land, what should your punishment be?”
“You can chop off my ox’s leg,” Dad said defiantly.
What a shock that gave me! There was no clear boundary between our land and that belonging to the collective, nothing but a rock in the ground every fifty yards, and keeping a straight line by walking was no sure thing, let alone an ox pulling a plow.
Since Dad was employing the cleft method of plowing – starting from the middle and working his way outward – the risk of stepping on their land was minimal for a while. So Hong Taiyue said to my brother:
“Jinlong, go back to the village and prepare the bulletin board. You can come back and keep watch on them this afternoon.”
When we went home for lunch, a crowd had gathered around the bulletin board on our wall. Two yards wide and three yards long, it served as the village’s center for public opinion. In the space of a few hours my talented brother had made it a feast for the eyes with red, yellow, and green chalk. On the edges he had drawn tractors, sunflowers and greenery, commune members behind steel plows, their faces beaming, and oxen pulling the plows, their faces beaming as well. Then in the lower right-hand corner, in blue and white he’d drawn a skinny ox and two skinny people, one adult and one child – obviously, me, my dad, and our ox. In the middle he’d written in ancient block letters: spring plowing: people are happy, oxen are lowing. Below that in regular script he’d added: “A clear-cut comparison between the bustling activity of the People’s Commune and State-Run Farm as, bursting with energy, they engage in spring plowing, and the village’s obstinate independent farmer Lan Lian and his family, who tills his land with a single ox and plow, the ox with its head lowered, the farmer looking crestfallen, a solitary figure looking like a plucked chicken, his ox like a stray dog, miserable and anxious, having come to a dead end.”