‘We have four hens, two of them lay eggs.’
‘Comrade Journalist, please send our message to the government. I am a Party member, I led a production brigade. .’
I ask to take a picture of them outside and suddenly they freeze.
The director pulls me aside and whispers, ‘They never take photographs of each other. Haven’t you noticed there are no mirrors in the camp?’
‘Comrade Journalist has shown us respect. We should allow him to take our photograph.’ Old Wu waves his hand and everyone returns to their rooms to change into their best clothes. Old Wu has no feet but he sticks his leg stumps into a pair of old leather shoes, leans on the table and pushes himself up.
It is still drizzling outside. A wet hen scuttles out of the chicken coop. Everyone helps carry the old woman out of her room and comb her hair in place. Thirty disfigured faces stare into my lens, their eyes crying out for help. The women brush their hair back. The director holds an umbrella over me, my hands are shaking. I don’t know what I can do for these people.
Back in his office, the director tells me that without the vegetable plots and three apple trees the patients would starve. ‘No one could survive on what the government gives.’
‘But they are crippled. How can they work on the land?’
‘Two of them still have use of their hands and the staff help out with basic necessities.’
‘The old woman they carried out is not well, is she?’
‘She’s been ill for ten years. She has never had leprosy though. Her boyfriend caught the disease in the 1960s. They came here together, and had their wedding in the camp. He died four years later and she has been here ever since.’
‘How many patients were here at the height?’
‘Over a hundred, I think. They used to have dances on National Day. But conditions are terrible now. We never have enough medicine. The doctor’s salary is just a hundred yuan a year, no bonuses. The local peasants assume the staff are contagious and refuse to come near us.’
‘Can’t you get a transfer?’
‘Probably, but I have grown attached to the patients, I can’t just abandon them. Last year they caught a wild bird, made a bamboo cage and gave it to me for Spring Festival. They know it is dangerous to make gifts of food, so they keep all the apples for themselves.’
In the morning I return to the red path. The sky is clear now, but the air around the wall-less camp looks cold and stiff. I glance back at the white building rising from the neat vegetable plots. It looks like an empty shell hovering above the ground. If it hadn’t rained yesterday, I would have walked straight past.
Mountains Behind Mountains
It is the middle of April but the rivers are still ice cold. Whenever I wade across one, my legs go numb for hours. I climb two mountains a day and at last reach Shimenkan village, drained and exhausted. The village head gives me a friendly welcome and offers me a bed in the committee house.
‘This house was built by English missionaries. It used to be a church.’ He was sent here by the local government to work on poverty relief.
In the evening I open my map. I am at the north-western tip of Guizhou Province, near the borders of Yunnan and Sichuan. I close my eyes and picture the mountains I have crossed during the last month, and wonder how Mr Bagley and his wife managed to make it here all those years ago. They came in 1902 to build a school and a church for the villagers, and stayed until Mr Bagley’s death from typhoid thirteen years later. I visited the school this afternoon. The children sleep on wooden planks now. When they are hungry they take a potato from a cloth sack and cook it on a fire of dried leaves.
The next morning I visit the cemetery and see the open graves of Bagley and a fellow missionary who was murdered by local tribes. The smashed tombstones lie scattered on the grass. You can still see the English letters and Chinese characters of the inscriptions. After the men were buried, the villagers continually unearthed their graves looking for treasure. In the end they took everything, even the bones.
Bagley’s only real legacy is the group of thirty children he sent to England for a secondary education. When they returned they became the cultural elite of the province, and occupied the most important posts at Guiyang schools and colleges. Not one of them returned to Shimenkan though.
The poverty in these mountains puts me to shame. Most people have never worn shoes. The family I stayed with a few days ago cooked their food on a piece of broken terracotta. They served me a bowl of maize gruel and a cup of salt water, and I gave them my last packet of biscuits. They told me they grew enough grain to eat for two hundred days, and the rest of the year have to make do with husks and potatoes.
That afternoon cadres from nearby villages gather at the committee house to read the central authorities’ 1986 agricultural plan. There are ten Party members, but only five know who Deng Xiaoping is and none have ever heard of Secretary Hu Yaobang. At the close of the meeting, the Party secretary announces that tonight’s mission is to arrest a man who has fathered four children and owes the state thousands of yuan in family-planning fines.
‘We ransacked his house last month, but he still won’t give himself up. He was seen creeping back to his house two nights this week, and leaving before dawn, but his wife will not admit to it and refuses to tell us where he is hiding. Tonight we must surround his house and catch him red-handed. Liu Wang, you place six men in ambush outside his uncle’s home, and don’t forget the torches. The rest of you must guard the village gates.’
In the middle of the night, twenty militiamen arrive at the committee house and wait for their orders. When I see their guns I suspect the peasant will not survive the night.
Surprisingly, though, he surrenders without a fight. The men bring him to the committee house, tie him to a table, open his abdomen and snip his sperm ducts. In the afternoon he squats in the office refusing to leave, but no one takes any notice.
‘Why not go home? Your wife will be getting worried.’ If he stays here all night I will not get any sleep. He rolls his eyes, one hand still clutching his bandaged stomach.
‘I am not going until they give me back my bull.’ Ever since they cut through his skin, he has looked like a deflated football.
‘You haven’t done so badly. You still have four children at home.’ He looks away and ignores me from then on.
The village committee confiscates his door, window panes, roof tiles and farming tools, but these are still not sufficient to cover his fine. At dusk they drag him outside. After a meal of mutton noodles with the village cadres, I open the front door to see if he is still there, but he has vanished into the black night.
Between Daxing village and the Jinsha River, the temperature suddenly rises, and banana and prickly-pear trees appear by the side of the road. I cross the river at dawn and start my ascent of Mount Daliang. At noon it is so hot I climb stark naked, but when I reach the two-thousand-metre peak I shiver in my down jacket.
That evening I reach a village called Mayizu and stop for the night. A Hong Kong-Shenzhen production is shooting a movie here and has transformed the village into a film set.
In the morning, the Yi villagers dress in their national costume and parade through the mucky lanes, laughing and kicking dogs out of the way. No one goes to work on the fields. When the crew start shooting, the Yi follow them from location to location, brandishing wooden chests, hip knives, earrings and bracelets, hoping the director will need to hire them for the next scene. When the director picks someone for a role, they moan at the injustice. They cannot understand why the dirtiest layabouts and ugliest women are always given the best parts. After the director shouts, ‘Action!’ the villagers start laughing and crying as if they were watching a film at the cinema. The puny director’s constant pleas for quiet are translated into Yi by the security guard sent down from the county town.