The Years of the Corps

I was born in a company in the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a place you can’t find on a map.

There were no mountains or sea. But in October, there was a field of white more vast than the ocean: the cotton fields in bloom, stretching as far as the eye could see. When the wind blew, they rolled like silver waves.

From crawling along the ridges between the cotton fields at one year old to carrying a cloth sack bigger than myself and squeezing through the plants at seven; from following my parents as they sowed cotton seeds in spring to singing in the back of a tractor as we headed to the fields in autumn. I grew up bouncing along to the tractor’s puttering, was nourished by the smell of lunch in the fields, and fell asleep on my mother’s back.

This book holds the smoke rising from the company’s kitchens, the red scarves at school, and afternoons spent fishing in the irrigation canals; the embarrassment of being too small to reach the cotton branches when I first picked cotton, the mischievous delight of sneaking cotton into a classmate’s collar, and the creaking old scale used to weigh the cotton at sunset. It also holds the sight of my parents’ backs growing more stooped, and the tears of a young person looking back at the silver sea beneath the Tianshan Mountains while setting off with a pack on their back.

From underground dwellings to earthen houses, from cotton fields to exam halls, from a little child riding on their mother’s back to an eighteen-year-old leaving home to travel far away: this is a shared memory for a generation of Corps children, and a long letter to the oasis watered by their youth.

If you also grew up somewhere called a “company,” you’ll see yourself here. If you didn’t, you’ll discover that there’s a kind of childhood called growing up in the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.