by Jung Chang
This consolidation of Mao's new power system had profound effects on my family. One of the first results was a decision to withhold part of the salaries of the capitalistroaders and only to leave each dependent a small monthly cash allowance. Our family income was cut by more than half. Although we were not starving, we could no longer afford to buy from the black market, and the state supply of food was deteriorating fast. The meat ration, for instance, was half a pound per person per month. My grandmother worried and planned day and night to enable us children to eat better, and to produce food parcels for our parents in detention.
The next decision of the Revolutionary Committee was to order all the capitalist-roaders out of the compound to make room for the new leaders. My family was assigned some rooms at the top of a three-story house which had been the office of a now defunct magazine. There was no running water or toilet on the top floor. We had to go downstairs even to brush our teeth, or to pour away a cup of leftover tea. But I did not mind, because the house was so elegant, and I was thirsty for beautiful things.
Unlike our apartment in the compound, which was in a featureless cement block, our new residence was a splendid brick-and-timber double-fronted mansion with exquisitely framed reddish-brown colored windows under gracefully curving eaves. The back garden was dense with mulberry trees, and the front garden had a thick vine trellis, a grove of oleander, a paper mulberry, and a huge nameless tree whose pepper like fruit grew in little clusters inside the folds of its boat-shaped brown and crispy leaves. I particularly loved the ornamental bananas and their long arc of leaves, an unusual sight in a nontropical climate.
In those days, beauty was so despised that my family was sent to this lovely house as a punishment. The main room was big and rectangular, with a parquet floor. Three sides were glass, which made it brilliantly light and on a clear day offered a panoramic view of the distant snowy mountains of west Sichuan. The balcony was not made of the usual cement, but of wood painted a reddish brown color, with "Greek key' patterned railings. Another room which opened onto the balcony had an unusually high, pointed ceiling about twenty feet in height with exposed, faded scarlet beams. I fell in love with our new residence at once.
Later I realized that in winter the rectangular room was a battlefield of bitter winds from all directions through the thin glass, and dust fell like rain from the high ceiling when the wind blew. Still, on a calm night, lying in bed with the moonlight filtering through the windows, and the shadow of the tall paper mulberry tree dancing on the wall, I was filled with joy. I was so relieved to be out of the compound and all its dirty politics that I hoped my family would never go near it again.
I loved our new street as well. It was called Meteorite Street, because hundreds of years before a meteorite had fallen there. The street was paved with crushed cobblestones, which I much preferred to the asphalt surface of the street outside the compound.
The only thing that reminded me of the compound was some of our neighbors, who worked in my father's department and belonged to Mrs. Shau's Rebels. When they looked at us it was with expressions of steely rigidity, and on the rare, unavoidable occasions when we had to communicate, they spoke to us in barks. One of them had been the editor of the closed-down magazine, and his wife had been a schoolteacher. They had a boy of six called Jo-jo, the same age as my brother Xiao-fang. A minor government official, with a five-year-old daughter, came to stay with them, and the three children often played together in the garden. My grandmother was anxious about Xiao-fang playing with them, but she dared not forbid him our neighbors might interpret this as hostility toward Chairman Mao's Rebels.
At the foot of the wine-red spiral staircase which led to our rooms was a big half-moon-shaped table. In the old days, a huge porcelain vase would have been placed on it with a bouquet of winter jasmine or peach blossom. Now it was bare, and the three children often played on it.
One day, they were playing 'doctor': Jo-jo was the doctor, Xiao-fang a nurse, and the five-year-old girl the patient.
She lay on her stomach on the table and pulled her skirt up for an injection. Xiao-fang held a piece of wood from the back of a broken chair as his 'needle." At this moment, the girl's mother came up the sandstone steps onto the landing. She screamed and snatched her daughter off the table.
She found a few scratches on the child's inner thigh.
Instead of taking her to a hospital, she fetched some Rebels from my father's office a couple of streets away. A crowd soon marched into the front garden. My mother, who happened to be home for a few days from detention, was immediately seized. Xiao-fang was grabbed and yelled at by the adults. They told him they would 'beat him to death' if he refused to say who had taught him to 'rape the girl."
They tried to force him to say it was his elder brothers.
Xiao-fang was unable to say a word, even to cry. Jo-jo looked badly scared. He cried and said it was he who had asked Xiao-fang to give the injection. The little girl cried, too, saying she had not had her injection. But the adults shouted at them to shut up, and continued to hector Xiaofang. Eventually, at my mother's suggestion, the crowd, jostling my mother and dragging Xiao-fang, stormed off to the Sichuan People's Hospital.
As soon as they entered the outpatients' department, the angry mother of the girl and the dramatically heated crowd started to make accusations to the doctors, nurses, and the other patients: "The son of a capitalist-roader has raped the daughter of a Rebel! The capitalist-roader parents must be made to pay!" While the girl was being examined in the doctor's room a young man in the corridor, a complete stranger, shouted, "Why don't you grab the capitalistroader parents and beat them to death?"
When the doctor finished examining the girl, she came out and announced that there was absolutely no sign that the girl had been raped. The scratches on her legs were not recent, and they could not have been caused by Xiao-fang's piece of wood which, as she showed the crowd, was painted and smooth. They were probably caused by climbing a tree. The crowd dispersed, reluctantly.
That evening, Xiao-fang was delirious. His face was dark red and he screamed and raved incoherently. The next day, my mother carried him to a hospital, where a doctor gave him a large dose of tranquilizers. After a few days he was well again, but he stopped playing with other children. With this incident, he practically said goodbye to his childhood at the age of six.
Our move to Meteorite Street had been left to the resources of my grandmother and us five children. But by then we had the help of my sister Xiao-hong's boyfriend, Cheng-yi.
Cheng-yi's father had been a minor official under the Kuomintang and had not been able to get a proper job after 1949, partly because of his undesirable past and partly because he had TB and a gastric ulcer. He did odd jobs like street cleaning and collecting the fees at a communal water tap. During the famine he and his wife, who were living in Chongqing, died from illnesses aggravated by starvation.
Cheng-yi was a worker in an airplane engine factory, and had met my sister at the beginning of 1968. Like most people in the factory, he was an inactive member of its major Rebel group, which was affiliated with 26 August.
In those days, there was no entertainment, so most Rebel groups set up their own song-and-dance troupes, which performed the few sanctioned songs of Mao quotations and eulogies. Cheng-yi, who was a good musician, was a member of one such troupe. Though she was not in the factory, my sister, who loved dancing, joined it, together with Plumpie and Ching-ching. She and Cheng-yi soon fell in love. The relationship came under pressure from all sides: from his sister and his fellow workers, who were worried 'that a liaison with a capitalist-roader family would jeopardize his future; from our circle of high officials' children, who scorned him for not being 'one of us," and from the unreasonable me, who regarded my sister's desire to live her own life as deserting our parents. But their love survived, and sustained my sister through the following difficult years. I soon came to like and respect Cheng-yi very much, as did all my family. Because he wore glasses,
we took to calling him "Specs."
Another musician from the troupe, a friend of Specs, was a carpenter and the son of a truck driver. He was a jolly young man with a spectacularly large nose which made him look somewhat un-Chinese. In those days the only foreigners whose pictures we saw often were Albanians, because tiny, faraway Albania was China's only ally even the North Koreans were considered to be too decadent.
His friends nicknamed him "Al," short for "Albanian."
Al came with a cart to help us move to Meteorite Street. Not wanting to overtax him, I suggested we leave some things behind. But he wanted us to take everything. With a nonchalant smile, he clenched his fists and proudly flexed his taut, bulging muscles. My brothers poked the hard lumps with great admiration.
Al was very keen on Plumpie. The day after the move, he invited her, Ching-ching, and me to lunch at his home, one of the common windowless Chengdu houses with mud floors, which opened directly onto the pavement. This was the first time I had been in one of these houses. When we reached Al's street, I saw a group of young men hanging about on the corner. Their eyes followed us as they said a pointed hello to Al. He flushed with pride, and went over to talk to them. He came back with an animated smile on his face. In a casual tone he said, "I told them you were high officials' children, and that I had made friends with you so I could lay my hands on privileged goods when the Cultural Revolution is over."
I was stunned. First, what he said seemed to suggest that people thought officials' children had access to consumer goods, which was not the case. Second, I was amazed at his obvious pleasure at being associated with us, and the prestige this clearly gave him in the eyes of his friends. At the moment when my parents were in detention and we had just been thrown out of the compound, when the Sichuan Revolutionary Committee had been established and the capitalist-roaders had been ousted, when the Cultural Revolution seemed to have won, AI and his friends still apparently took it for granted that officials like my parents would come back.
I was to encounter a similar attitude again and again.
Whenever I went out of the imposing gate of our courtyard, I was always aware of the stares from people on Meteorite Street, stares which were a mixture of curiosity and awe.
It was clear to me that the general public regarded the Revolutionary Committees, rather than the capitalistroaders, as transient.
In the autumn of 1968 a new type of team came to take over my school; they were called "Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams." Made up of soldiers or workers who had not been involved in factional fighting, their task was to restore order. In my school, as in all others, the team recalled all the pupils who had been in the school when the Cultural Revolution started two years before, so they could be kept under control. Those few who were out of the city were tracked down and summoned back by telegram. Few dared to stay away.
Back at school, the teachers who had not fallen victim did no teaching. They did not dare. The old textbooks had all been condemned as 'bourgeois poison," and nobody was brave enough to write new ones. So we just sat in classes reciting Mao's articles and reading People's Daily editorials.
We sang songs of Mao's quotations, or gathered to dance 'loyalty dances," gyrating and waving our Little Red Books.
Making 'loyalty dances' compulsory was one of the major orders issued by the Revolutionary Committees throughout China. This absurd twisting was mandatory everywhere: in schools and factories, on the streets, in shops, on railway platforms, even in hospitals for the patients who could still move.
On the whole, the propaganda team sent to my school was fairly benign. Others were not. The one at Chengdu University was hand-picked by the Tings because the university had been the headquarters of their enemy Red Chengdu. Yan and Yong suffered more than most. The Tings instructed the propaganda team to put pressure on them to condemn my father. They refused. They later told my mother that they so admired my father's courage that they decided to take a stand.
By the end of 1968, all university students in China had been summarily 'graduated' en masse, without any exam, assigned jobs, and dispersed to every corner of the land.
Yan and Yong were warned that if they did not denounce my father, they would have no future. But they stuck to their guns. Yan was sent to a small coal mine in the mountains of east Sichuan. This was just about the worst job possible; the work conditions were extremely primitive and there were virtually no safety measures. Women, like men, had to crawl down the pit on all fours to drag the coal baskets out. Yan's fate was partly the result of the twisted rhetoric of the time: Mme Mao had been insisting on women doing the same kind of work as men, and one of the slogans of the day was Mao's saying "Women can hold up half the sky." But women knew that when they were given the privilege of this equality they were in for hard physical labor.
Immediately after the expulsion of university students, middle-school pupils like me discovered that we were to be exiled to faraway rural and mountainous areas to do backbreaking farm labor. Mao intended me to spend the rest of my life as a peasant.
22. "Thought Reform through Labor"
To the Edge of the Himahyas (January-June 1969)
In 1969 my parents, my sister, my brother Jin-ming, and I were expelled from Chengdu one after another, and sent to distant parts of the Sichuan wilderness. We were among millions of urban dwellers to be exiled to the countryside.
In this way, young people would not be roaming the cities with nothing to do, creating trouble out of sheer boredom, and adults like my parents would have a 'future." They were part of the old administration which had been replaced by Mao's Revolutionary Committees, and packing them off to the sticks to do hard labor was a convenient solution.
According to Mao's rhetoric, we were sent to the countryside 'to be reformed." Mao advocated 'thought reform through labor' for everyone, but never explained the relationship between the two. Of course, no one asked for clarification. Merely to contemplate such a question was tantamount to treason. In reality, everyone in China knew that hard labor, particularly in the countryside, was always punishment. It was noticeable that none of Mao's henchmen, the members of the newly established Revolutionary Committees, army officers and very few of their children had to do it.
The first of us to be expelled was my father. Just after New Year 1969 he was sent to Miyi County in the region of Xichang, on the eastern edge of the Himalayas, an area so remote that it is China's satellite launch base today. It lies about 300 miles from Chengdu, four days' journey by truck, as there was no railway. In ancient times, the area was used for dumping exiles, because its mountains and waters were said to be permeated with a mysterious 'evil air." In today's terms, the 'evil air' was subtropical diseases.
A camp was set up there to accommodate the former staff of the provincial government. There were thousands of such camps throughout China. They were called 'cadres' schools," but apart from the fact that they were not schools, they were not just for officials either. Writers, scholars, scientists, teachers, doctors, and actors who had become 'useless' in Mao's know-nothing new order were also dispatched there.
Among officials, it was not only capitalist-roaders like my father and other class enemies who were packed off to the camps. Most of their Rebel colleagues were also expelled, as the new Sichuan Revolutionary Committee could not accommodate anything like all of them, having filled its posts with Rebels from other backgrounds like workers and students, and with army men.
"Thought reform through labor' became a handy way of dealing with the surplus Rebels. In my father's depa,iment only a few stayed in Chengdu. Mrs. Shau became deputy director of Public Affairs on the Sichuan Revolutionary Committee.
All Rebel organizations were now disbanded.
The 'cadres' schools' were not concentration camps or gulags, but they were isolated places of detention where the inmates had restricted freedom and had to do hard labor under strict supervision. Because every cultivable area in China is densely populated, only in arid or moun 506 "Thou
ght Reform through Labor' tai nous areas was there space to contain the exiles from the cities. The inmates were supposed to produce food and be self supporting. Although they were still paid salaries, there was lit He for them to buy. Life was very harsh.
In order to prepare for his trip, my father was released from his place of detention in Chengdu a few days before his departure. The only thing he wanted to do was to see my mother. She was still being detained, and he thought he might never see her again. He wrote to the Revolutionary Committee, as humbly as he could, begging to be allowed to see her. His request was turned down.
The cinema in which my mother was being kept was on what used to be the busiest shopping street in Chengdu.
Now the shops were half empty, but the black market for semiconductor parts which my brother Jin-ming frequented was nearby, and he sometimes saw my mother walking along the street in a line of detainees, carrying a bowl and a pair of chopsticks. The canteen in the cinema did not operate every day, so the detainees had to go out for their meals from time to time. Jin-ming's discovery meant we could sometimes see our mother by waiting on the street. Occasionally she did not appear with the other detainees, and we would be consumed by anxiety. We did not know that those were the times when her psychopath guard was punishing her by denying her permission to go and eat. But perhaps the next day we would catch sight of her, one among a dozen or so silent and grim-looking men and women, their heads bowed, all wearing white armbands with four sinister black characters: 'ox devil, snake demon."
I took my father to the street for several days running, and we waited there from dawn fill lunchtime. But there was no sign of her. We would walk up and down, stamping our feet on the frost-covered pavement to keep warm. One morning, we were again watching the thick fog lift to reveal the lifeless cement buildings, when my mother appeared.