The Woman Liu

This is something that occurred a long time ago.

Preface

I stayed in prison for ten years. I lived with other women prisoners day and night from the time I was twenty-eight to the time I was thirty-eight—longer than some marriages last—and our relationships were closer than those of many young couples. Life in prison seemed calm on the surface, but in fact it was as turbulent as a stormy sea.

Every prisoner had her own experiences. Those experiences are stories, and many prisoners had new stories after being incarcerated. The Woman Liu is one such story. In 1980, I told Wu Zuguang the story of this woman. Afterward, he paced back and forth in his living room and said excitedly, “Yihe, write this down, and you’ll have a novella. You must write it down!” Now, thirty years later, I’ve written her story down. But Mr. Wu Zuguang passed away years ago, and perhaps the real woman Liu has also died.

This novella is not about politics or the system. It focuses on the destinies of the women prisoners. I’ve tried to explore their inner selves. This is my first attempt at fiction. It was difficult for me, and although I worked very hard at it, I’m not sure if I’ve succeeded. I will persevere.

December 2010, Beijing

Chapter One

It had been quite a few weeks since I arrived at M prison.

If you asked what made the biggest impact on me here, I would answer with one word: hunger.

That’s right: I was hungrier than a beggar. The beggars wandering the city streets were hungry, too, but they could find discarded vegetable leaves in the market, or they could rummage in the trash cans and pull out biscuits that were past the sell-by date or canned foods that had gone bad. Here in prison, there was nothing to find. Absolutely nothing. There were iron-barred windows, fences, mesh covers, and sentry posts. There were three meals a day. Breakfast and lunch consisted of steamed cornbread. Supper was rice. Side dishes were boiled pumpkin, boiled turnip, boiled cabbage, or boiled green vegetables . . . In fact, all the vegetables were boiled and overcooked. A spoonful of oil was splashed on top just before the dish was served, so the surface looked oily, but only boiled vegetables lay beneath it. You picked up the bowl and ate it all. When you set your chopsticks down, you still felt hungry.

At six o’clock, we rose, got dressed, made the beds, used the bathroom, combed our hair, and washed our faces: we were allowed only thirty minutes to do everything. At six thirty, when the sky was still a blurry gray, we ate breakfast. At dawn, we were gnawing hard bread. At seven o’clock, the whistle blew for us to assemble, and we all went out to work. We did farm labor until noon. But even before ten o’clock, we felt hunger pangs. No other torment can be compared with hunger. The human tummy is a supple sack—but with no food, it turns into two pieces of sandpaper rubbing against each other ruthlessly and relentlessly. As time passed, people grew so confused that they felt they would soon stop breathing, and they wished someone would come over and strangle them. Simply to end the hunger.

“When can we have a meal with meat?” I quietly asked the young monitor.

Her name was Su Runjia, and she was an Yiguan Dao priest. For being religious, she had been charged as a counterrevolutionary. Even now, I don’t understand what Yiguan Dao is. Its followers seemed to worship everything—the Buddha, the Daoist gods, and even Jesus Christ. There were several hundred thousand believers—so many that the newly established government felt compelled to clamp down on them. Su Runjia was a good worker, familiar with farming. She was also okay as a person—a rarity among group leaders in the prison.

She said, “Once a month.”

“God! Just like my period!” I exclaimed...