Frog

You are putting words into Chairman Mao’s mouth, Sister-in-law, Gugu said, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. In olden days, you’d lose your head for falsifying an imperial edict. We’ve never said that women cannot have babies, but that they should not have too many. In other words, planned pregnancies.

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.