Choosing Revolution: Chinese Women Soldiers on the Long March

3. Little Devil

3. Little Devil The picture Ma Yixiang paints of her childhood is extremely grim, without any folksongs,stories,or legends to lighten the image of ceaseless drudgery and anguish that poverty and hunger can bring. Her father was continually disappearing to avoid his debts and family responsibility, her mother disliked her and blamed her for the deaths of her siblings,and her foster family seemed to take great pleasure in tormenting and abusing her. Yet she re- flects little hopelessness and was resourceful in finding solutions to her problems , sometimes following her father’s pattern of running away, sometimes persuading others to change their minds or attitudes through her dogged persistence. Ma Yixiang was born in May 1923 in the rolling mountains of northwestern Hunan province, about 100 miles west of Jian Xianren’s hometown. Although she didn’t realize it at the time, her family was not Han Chinese but Tujia,one of the fifty-five minority peoples in China,the majority being Han Chinese. Her memories of her grandparents are positive, though minimal; she described them only as “honest and kind.” Her grandfather,a long-term contract laborer, worked raw, previously uncultivated land that he rented from the landlord—the least lucrative, most arduous kind of farming. They lived beside a river bank at the foot of a mountain. “There was so little land around our place that we might fall into the water if we weren’t careful,” Ma Yixiang related. When his sons married, the grandfather added a single room for each couple, following the usual practice of keeping the grown sons within the family. Ma Yixiang’s father, the fourth of five sons, lived with his wife and children in one room furnished with one bed. They cooked and ate in the Little Devil 83 room,and all slept together on the bed.When their fourth child,MaYixiang, was born, the family had two living children. The infant mortality rate at the time was extremely high, especially for baby girls. Their first child, a daughter ,died perhaps from natural causes,or perhaps not,for the family was poor. Ma Yixiang’s father, a self-taught carpenter, was at the lowest social and economic levels. Her mother sold firewood and pig fodder she gathered in the mountains to add to the family income. Ma Yixiang explained, My father could only earn three to four copper coins a day and with that he could buy just one jin of rice. It was so hard for him to support a family of five. When my mother sold firewood and pig food, she had to beg people to buy it.We ate rice gruel and cornmeal mush. If we had it for breakfast, we wouldn’t have any for supper and we would go hungry. One jin of raw rice makes about eight cups of cooked rice. Because this family could not afford to buy meat,they received all their protein from grain. One pound a day of rice or cornmeal would not sustain a family of five people for very long. Every family needed a constant supply of brushwood for cooking, which the women and children usually gathered in the surrounding hills and mountains or bought from destitute people like MaYixiang’s mother.The pig fodder she sold probably was a cooked mush of rice husks, vines, and grasses she had gathered and boiled. This mixture was consumed in huge amounts by pigs owned by families fortunate enough to afford them. In addition to the rent they paid and the rice or corn they bought,MaYixiang’s family needed cash for salt, oil, clothes, needles, and thread. In 1923,when MaYixiang was born,China’s economy was rapidly restructuring in a move toward commercial agriculture.1 Civil unrest, fed by warlord armies and bandits,was plaguing the countryside. Depredations by soldiers and bandits and the unsettled nature of the economy caused great hardship for many mountain families in western Hunan.When MaYixiang’s father could not scrape together enough money to pay the rent, he left home for a year or two, hiding from the landlord. In recompense, the landlord insisted that Ma Yixiang’s mother send her older children to work for him to help offset the family’s debt. The children took care of the landlord’s dogs and chickens, swept his floors, and collected firewood from the mountains. When her brother, who was then about eight, fell ill, the family had no money for medical...