How many children a woman bears in her life is controlled by fate, Mother said. Who needs your planning? To me you people are like a blind man lighting a candle, just wasting wax.
As Mother said, Gugu and the others were wasting their effort and money and creating a bad name for themselves. They began by giving free condoms to the heads of women’s associations in every village to pass out to women of childbearing age and ask their husbands to wear them. The condoms wound up in pigpens or were blown up like balloons, some even painted, for children to play with. Gugu and the others went door to door to distribute birth control pills, but met with resistance from women who complained about side effects. Even if they forced them to take pills in front of them, as soon as they left, the women would stick their fingers or chopsticks down their throats to regurgitate the pills. The resistance eventually led to a call for vasectomies.
Word quickly spread throughout the villages that Gugu and Huang Qiuya were the inventors of vasectomies. People even went so far as to say that Huang created the concept, while Gugu put it into practice.
They aren’t normal, two old maids who are green with envy whenever they see a married couple, Xiao Xiachun said assertively, which is why they came up with their plan to make every family childless. He told us that Gugu and Huang had first experimented on young male pigs, then on monkeys, and finally on ten death-row prisoners. When the experiment was called a success, the men had their sentences reduced to life imprisonment. Naturally, it didn’t take us long to discover that Xiao did not know what he was talking about.
Back then, Gugu’s voice often came to us through loudspeakers. Brigade cadres, hear this: In the spirit of the eighth meeting of the commune’s family-planning steering group, all men whose wives have borne them three or more children and any male with a total of three children are to report to the commune health centre to undergo a vasectomy. They will receive a bonus of twenty yuan to help them recuperate and will be given a week off with no deduction of work points.
Men got together to complain. Shit, they griped, you neuter a pig, you castrate a bull, and you geld horses and mules, but since when did they start cutting off a man’s balls? We’re not candidates for palace eunuchs, why go after us? But when the family-planning cadres explained to them that a vasectomy only… Well, they glared and they protested: That sounds fine now, but when you put us up on the bed and get us all numb, we doubt you’ll stop with our balls. They’ll probably cut our pricks off at the same time. Then we’ll have to squat to pee, like women.
Good for the women, it was a simple procedure with extremely rare after-effects for the men, but it met with inflexible resistance. Gugu and her helpers prepared a room in the health centre and waited. No one showed up. The county headquarters called daily for a report on numbers, and were openly dissatisfied with Gugu’s lack of progress. The Party secretary called a special meeting, which led to two resolutions: 1) Vasectomies will be performed on males beginning with the commune leadership and spread to Party cadres and regular workers. In the villages, brigade cadres will take the lead, followed by the masses. 2) Men who resist the procedure and those who initiate and spread rumours will be subject to the dictatorship of the proletariat; all those who qualify for vasectomies but refuse to undergo the procedure will have their right to work revoked until they do so; if that doesn’t prevail, their grain ration will be reduced. Cadres who resist will be removed from office, workers who resist will lose their jobs, and Party members who resist will have their membership revoked.
Party Secretary Qin Shan made a personal address over the PA system in which he said that family planning was an issue of paramount importance to the national economy and the people’s livelihood, and that commune departments and production brigades were to attach the greatest importance to it. Qualified male cadres and Party members were to lead the way in undergoing the procedure to set a positive example for the masses. Then, abruptly changing to a more relaxed, everyday tone, Qin said: Comrades, take me for instance. My wife has already undergone a hysterectomy due to an illness, but in order to allay men’s fears, I plan to have a vasectomy performed on me tomorrow morning.
In his address, Secretary Qin asked the Communist Youth League, the Women’s Association and school authorities to get behind the campaign and publicise it aggressively in order to reach peak participation. As in previous movements, Teacher Xue, the school’s most talented literary figure, composed a clapper-talk lyric, which we quickly memorised. Then, organised into groups of four and armed with homemade paper or tin-plate megaphones, we went up onto rooftops and climbed trees to spread the word:
Commune comrades be not afraid,
Commune comrades be not delayed.
Vasectomies are the simplest things,
No gelding attempts will ever be made.
The tiniest cut, half an inch long,
Fifteen minutes, you can’t go wrong.
No blood and no sweat,
Back to work that day, just as strong.
Over that special spring, according to Gugu, a total of 648 vasectomies were performed at the commune, only 310 by her hand alone. All that was really needed, she said, was a clear explanation of the rationale behind the policy; then, with the senior personnel taking the lead, followed by men at every level, the masses would respond reasonably. The majority of procedures she personally performed were on village cadres and organisational heads who came willingly. Only two cases involved troublesome men who were openly hostile and required coercion. One was our village carter Wang Jiao, the other was Xiao Shangchun, the granary watchman.
Wang Jiao, whose family background was politically ideal, acted with reactionary arrogance. He was no sooner released from detention than he began to rant that anyone who tried to force him into undergoing a vasectomy would know what it meant to see a knife go in clean and come out red. My friend Wang Gan, who had fallen hard for Gugu’s assistant, Little Lion, was on Gugu’s side emotionally. He tried to get his father to get a vasectomy, for which he was rewarded with two resounding slaps. Wang Gan fled from his house, his father on his heels, whip in hand. When they reached the pond at the head of the village, a coarse argument bridged the water.
Wang Jiao: You fucking dog, how dare you try to get your father to have a vasectomy!
Wang Gan: I’m a fucking dog? Okay, I’m a fucking dog!
Wang Jiao stopped to think. Calling his son names was the same as calling himself those same names. He renewed the chase; father and son began circling the pond, like turning a millstone. The curious stopped to look and added fuel to the generational fire with provocative shouts and raucous laughter.
One day Wang Gan stole a deadly sabre from his house and turned it over to the village’s branch secretary, Yuan Lian, telling him it was a lethal weapon that his father had said he’d use on anybody who tried to make him have a vasectomy. Yuan Lian did not waste a minute, running off to the commune with the sabre to report to Party Secretary Qin Shan and my aunt. He’s not on our side, Qin roared as he pounded his desk. Sabotaging our family-planning campaign is a counter-revolutionary act! Letting Wang Jiao get away with this will make our job harder, Gugu said. You’re right, Qin agreed, knowing that village males in line to get vasectomies were watching to see what happened with Wang Jiao.