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Born in the 1950s - Xu Yiling, 59
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Xu Yiling, 59, will never forget that feeling of despair when she first set foot on the Yuejin Farm in suburban Chongming County for the first time. She was 17 then.
Xu was sent to the farm in rural Shanghai to do labor with the peasants during the “cultural revolution” (1966-1976). One of her sisters was sent to a factory, while another went to the countryside in Yunnan Province.
They were part of the estimated 12 million to 18 million “intellectual youth” sent from cities to the countryside to learn correct political ideology from the peasants. They were called “rusticated youth.”
“I cried when I saw the harsh conditions at the farm,” Xu says, with tears in her eyes.
Eight people had to sleep in a shabby shed of about 10 square meters, she recalls. They slept on the ground strewn with straw amid mosquitoes, cockroaches and rats. In winter, the cold wind whistled through the leaky walls.
Her only dream was to leave the farm.
“I was willing to do anything to be able to return to my parents — work as a road sweeper or a rubbish collector,” she says. “I was only 17 years old when I was sent to the farm, so how could I have imagined a life of such hardship?”
Forced to start work at 4am every day in summer, Xu planted rice and cotton, transplanted seedlings, carried mud in buckets hanging from a shoulder pole, picked weevils from cotton, twisted straw into ropes and spread human excrement on the soil without the benefit of gloves.
She got a monthly salary of 18 yuan (US$2.70), and everything they might have wanted to buy required government coupons. She ate mostly rice and celery cabbage, about the only foodstuff available.
Farm work was an alien realm to a city girl. The workers were forced to race against time to transplant rice seedlings within two weeks in July.
“My back was stiff and aching, my face almost touched the ground,” she says. “My bare feet were mired in mud and my hands swelled from so much time in water.”
Adding to the misery, the farm was full of snakes. “How scary life was!” Xu says with a shudder.
The bitterest part was dredging waterways in the winter, Xu says. Men shoveled the soil into buckets that the women had to carry off on their shoulders. A basket of soil weighed up to 40 kilograms, and the weight abraded the skin to bleeding.
The dredging sites were a two-hour walk away and there were no toilets. Xu says she still suffers chilblains from those days.
She was allowed to return home twice a year, once during the Spring Festival. The journey took about half a day by boat.
“I stayed awake the whole night before, waiting for daybreak, because I was so excited to return home,” Xu says.
The night before having to return to the farm, she cried herself to sleep.
When the list of names of those being allowed to return home permanently was read off at the farm, all the rusticated youth held their breath.
“Those whose names were called jumped up in almost frenzied joy,” she says. “Those not named broke down in tears.”
When her name was finally called one day, Xu says she was so overwhelmed that she couldn’t sleep for two days.
“It was like a dream come true,” she says.
Xu later married a man who had worked with her on the farm. She worked as a parcel sorter until she retired two years ago.
She says she now enjoys her life.
“The bitterness of that time taught me to be strong and independent, and to treasure life,” she says.
She now does some dancing in the park and dabbles in the stock market. Her son, who graduated from Fudan University, works for Shanghai Telecom.
Last year, she became a grandmother and she says she takes great joy in helping care for her grandson.
“I am satisfied with my life,” she says.
She has two dreams.
The first is to move into a new apartment with an elevator. She has been living for the past 20 years on the fifth floor of a building with no elevator, and it’s hard to lug a baby and baby stroller up all those flights at her age.
The other dream is that her family and her grandson will enjoy good health.
“At our age, my generation doesn’t have dreams that aren’t practical,” she says.
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