Party Voucher

4

Before achieving his first goal in life, Ming knew that he would have much more to go through, and the most challenging time turned out to be July and August, the two hottest months in a year, when pine caterpillars posed the biggest threat to the survival of young pine trees. To control the plague, the farm management set up a task force consisting of twelve pest controllers, whose job was to blow 666 powder [dried HCH] onto the trees while they were still wet with heavy dew in the morning. Of all the zhiqing at the youth station, Ming was the only one drafted into the team. Without knowing what lay ahead of him, he readily took the job the post as the operator of the heavy-duty blower powered by gasoline. Whatever the Party assigned him to do, he must do it well unconditionally. That’s all he knew as one of its “most active” applicants.

From Big Tang, the director of the forest division and deputy secretary of the Party branch, Ming learned that pest control was actually the most demanding work for anyone on the farm. Since ordinary forest workers would shy away from this extremely tough work, the management had to call all party members to step forward. As a result, each time the pest control team was organized, the members were all strong-bodied men with a full or probationary Party membership.

To ensure the best result, the team had to get up at two o’clock every morning. Within half an hour, all the members would finish their breakfast and get both the equipment and 666 powder in place. Led by Big Tang personally, the pest controllers would hit the road in the heart of darkness, trudging up or down a hill every minute through grubs and bushes, with two of them carrying the big blower like a sedan-chair positioned upside down, the other eight carrying the pesticide loads on their shoulders behind the operating group, ready to replace the machine carriers when they needed to take a break. Whenever they arrived at an infected area, which looked as if burned by a wild fire, Ming would start the powerful machine, and Big Tang was the one to manipulate the head and blow the chemical powder overwhelmingly high above the trees. While everyone had to put up with the blower’s deafening noise, they also had much difficulty breathing because of the thick masks they wore. Slowly, the powder settled down like a yellow cloud and became mixed with the dew. As the team members kept moving back and forth, their shoes and clothes grew all wet inside out with dew and sweat. If the double darkness from the nighttime and powder-smoke was something they could learn to get used to, the powder itself, which was, as Ming knew many years later, highly detrimental to humans, was so poignant it made everyone sneeze, choke and cough constantly.

While the machine carriers could take turns for a bit relaxation as they were replaced every half an hour or so, Ming had to walk side by side with it all the time as its sole operator. When the blower worked well, he must help to carry it as circumstances required, or replace Big Tang to control the blow-head. However, the blower was a nasty trouble maker, for the working condition was no less harsh to the machine than to the humans. Every time the blower broke down for one reason or another, Ming must diagnose and fix the problem manually while Big Tang was waiting and watching listlessly beside him. If the trouble persisted and had no easy solution, Ming would feel so much pressure he could have let out a loud cry, but he had learned to bite his teeth tight and sweated it out, doing everything to his best ability. As the only one who was still an applicant of the Party membership, he must show himself to be as good a worker as any other communist-member of the team. On such occasions, Big Tang, the most experienced pest controller of all, would show more or less understanding, sometimes even saying that nobody else could have done a better job than Ming did.

As the youngest team member with the weakest physique, Ming was, needless to say, bound to suffer most throughout the campaign. Though he had endured many physical hardships since childhood, he found this job simply too exhausting. For one thing, he was starving to death every morning because nobody had anything to eat or drink until after finishing their work around ten o’clock when all dew had evaporated. For another, working so hard for eight consecutive hours in such harsh conditions without a break, he felt so spent he could collapse any moment. Worse still, he had much less time to sleep than his fellow workers. Every day, after the brunch, other members could take a long nap until suppertime, but he had to spend a couple of hours maintaining the machine. To make sure the blower would behave properly the next morning, he had to dismantle the whole machine, soak the parts in gasoline and clean them well before restoring them for a test run. Every so often he needed to change those parts that had worn out, especially the belt, the cylinder gaskets and spark plugs. After the supper, for which there were only steamed rice and potato slices fried with pepper, exactly the same as they had for each brunch every day, he would take the lead in the daily political study by reading People’s Daily, Chairman Mao’s selected writings, and other Party documents to the team, conducting a self-inspection, or reporting how he had understood them. Being the best educated member of the team, he must perforce “do more according to [his] ability,” as Big Tang often said to him.

Once, on a particularly dark night, he lagged behind when he helped shoulder-carry loads of 666 powder. Walking on a thickly bushed ridge, he stumbled over something and then kept lying down there amidst the grass. Because he had been too drowsy, hungry and tired to get up, he fell into sleep before he knew it. When he was found a few minutes later, Big Tang said to him in a soft voice for the first time, “I knew it’s been too tough for a town boy like you!”

Even more unbearable than hunger, malnutrition, physical exertion and lack of sleep was the hot weather. Since his early childhood, Ming had nurtured an intense dislike for the local climate. “The fucking climate’s like a living hell itself,” he often cursed aloud when nobody could hear him. During the summertime, the temperature was usually between 39 and 41degrees Celsius according to the local weather forecaster, who was not allowed by the authorities to tell the truth if it was actually higher than that. While it was sizzling hot everywhere, there was neither rain nor wind that could be expected almost for the whole season. Electric fans and air conditioners were still far from becoming known in the country, and there was no lake or even a decent pool of water in the hills, a place where humans could cool themselves down by soaking in it like water buffalos. The only thing they could do was hand-wave a make-do fan every second, but that would make one sweat even more. Coupled with the great nuisance of mosquitos biting humans aggressively day and night, the heat drove everyone nuts.

In the depth of his young heart, Ming felt that he just couldn’t stand the situation anymore. On several occasions, he was tempted to withdraw from the team, but each time he managed to suppress his impulse by reciting Mencius’s famous teaching about how to enduring hardships. No pain, no gain. And luckily, two weeks before the yearly campaign against pine caterpillars came to an end, he became bedridden with a persistent high fever. Seeing him completely breaking down, Big Tang told two members to send him to the clinic down at the headquarters, where the barefoot doctor told him his tonsils were terribly infected and had to be removed as soon as possible. After he was transferred to Songzi General Hospital, the doctor in charge said he also had viral myocarditis and rheumatoid arthritis. So, for the first time after coming to Mayuhe, Ming finally got a chance to take a real break, though as a quite critically ill patient.

The day before he had his bad tonsils removed, Secretary Shao came to see him in his ward, telling him that he had passed two major political tests purposely prepared for him: one was to let him work alone as a forest ranger, the other as a pest controller. Because his work performances were well satisfactory to every Party member within the branch as well as to the Party organizations at higher levels, his application for a full membership was officially approved. “Congrats, Comrade Ming!” Shao said warmly as he gave him a long handshaking. That was a sunny Sunday in the winter of 1975, almost exactly one month after Ming turned eighteen.