by Rob Schmitz
He looked out the tiny hotel room window and began to cry. “My wife has lost her dignity. We’ve both lost any sense of security we’ve ever had,” he said through tears. “It’s all gone. The government talks about the Chinese Dream. Whose dream is that?”
It is rare to see a Chinese man cry, and it was clear from the way Xie looked at her husband that he was no exception. After a decade of fighting, he had finally lost everything he owned. Xie put her hand on her husband’s shoulder.
“They just want us to keep dreaming,” she told him softly.
It’s a Friday night at the intersection of the Street of Eternal Happiness and Rich People Road. This summer evening, both live up to their names. Affluent foreigners and Chinese stumble out of dance clubs onto the hot and noisy sidewalk. Uighur men pursue with whispered catcalls: “Hashish! Marijuana!”
Steps away, people throw coins at a monkey performing tricks, while his master, a disheveled fat man with a beard, scoops up the renminbi and shoves it into his pocket.
Perched upon the curb on the Xuhui side of the street is my homeless Chinese New Year companion Zhang Naisun. He sits atop a bag of recyclables sipping the remaining Heineken from a bottle a foreigner just donated. I stop to chat. It’s late August, he tells me he just returned from his annual summer vacation to Henan, and he’s back to being dressed in tatters with a donation box in front of him. It’s bursting with coins and notes.
The rest of the Street of Eternal Happiness settles in for the evening. Six blocks down, Zhao Shiling has closed up for the night and is turning in. She’ll wake up early tomorrow to manage the morning shipment from the flower wholesaler. Four blocks away in their tiny room behind their streetside kitchen, Uncle Feng and Auntie Fu are fast asleep. Just a block away, CK is upstairs at 2nd Floor Your Sandwich drinking imported beer and discussing tantric Buddhism with friends.
But here on this neon-lit corner, the night is young, and the scene is already coming close to conjuring Ringling Brothers. Moments later, the circus is complete: the motorcycle gang arrives. A thunderous rumble of two dozen Harley-Davidsons reverberates through the muggy evening, the earsplitting firing of pistons rising and falling as they slowly make their way down the street. The machines climb single file up onto the sidewalk. The monkey scurries out of the way. They ride past Old Zhang, who raises his fist in greeting, hoping for a few coins in return.
The group park their bikes in a row, a few of them revving up their engines one last time to announce their arrival to the hard-of-hearing. If there were any corner on the Street of Eternal Happiness that could attract the Hells Angels, this would be it: there’s a row of bars and a Mexican-themed cantina with outdoor seating. But this group struts past all of these establishments, earning stares, and instead turns into the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. They emerge with foamy lattes and frothy cappuccinos, sipping them around outdoor tables.
This is a motorcycle gang of Chinese executives and self-made millionaires. They meet for coffee here every Friday night to discuss business and plan road trips together. “Between us, we probably know everyone in town,” one of them boasts.
The gang takes up five outdoor tables. Their gear—helmets and leather jackets—takes up a sixth. They chat and laugh, keeping an eye on crowds of young Chinese who hold their phones up to take photos of their machines. “One Friday night we got rained out and everybody drove their cars,” the group leader tells me, motioning to their bikes, lined up neatly in a row. “This area was full of Bentleys, Ferraris, and Land Rovers.”
These men were born in a humbler time. The country was rising from the ashes of Mao when a diminutive leader named Deng told his subjects to go out and make money. An old quote of Deng’s from the 1960s—a pragmatic proverb from his native Sichuan—was resurrected to clear up any contradictions between socialism and capitalism: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
These leather-clad tycoons have caught a lot of mice. Chen Jun’s factory makes designer clothes. Tony Tang is a diamond wholesaler. Frank Zhu owns a cashmere sweater company. Winston’s company ships coal, and a Taiwanese guy named Sa owns a gold mine in Zimbabwe. Their motorcycles, lined up along Rich People Road, display their status. In the United States, Harley-Davidsons start at eight thousand dollars. The same machines in China start at twenty thousand dollars and work their way up past fifty thousand, with an additional ten grand for a license plate.
Frank Zhu, a fifty-two-year-old man under a mop of curly black hair who can’t seem to stop smiling, shows me pictures on his phone from a Harley tour he had just completed across Tibet and Xinjiang, two of China’s most remote and unforgiving regions. Others show me photos of rides to Mongolia, Southeast Asia, and beyond. China has paved 32,000 miles of highways in the past eight years. It is the world’s most expansive road-building campaign since the United States built its interstate system fifty years ago. For the first time, hundreds of millions of middle-class Chinese are driving their first cars cross-country, exploring this vast land, deepening their understanding of their nation.
This age of exploration carries with it a newfound sense of freedom. “Life in the city can be very depressing,” Harley rider Jerry Gong tells me over an espresso. “You’re stuck inside all the time in a confined space. A motorcycle doesn’t have a roof or a window or any doors. It gives me freedom. It lets me indulge my passion for life.”
I think about my friends down the street who have never known what it’s like to indulge in a passion for life. I wonder if they ever will. I think about Wang Ming and the family he left behind along this very stretch of the street four decades earlier, a time when capitalism was punished with a labor camp sentence instead of rewarded with high-end toys.
I study Jerry as he sips from his tiny cup. He has watchful eyes and a slightly uneasy smile, but among his leather-clad friends here, he seems at peace. I ask him what he does for a living. His mouth curls into a nervous grin.
“I build prisons,” he says.
IN 1957 ON THIS BLOCK, they arrested a capitalist. Police marched past red propaganda banners urging neighbors to root out Rightists and arrived at the home of factory manager Wang Ming. The letters in a shoebox on my desk tell the rest of the story: Police seized Wang from his wife, six daughters, and unborn son. Months later, a judge sentenced him to fifteen years in a labor camp two thousand miles away on the edge of Tibet. He was charged with practicing capitalism.
I fumble through the stack of letters and select one with the return address Delingha Camp. It’s a letter from Wang to his wife, Liu Shuyun.
I open it. It’s dated March 14, 1968. In the upper-right-hand corner of the browned sheet of rice paper is a printed box outlined in red. It’s filled with simplified Chinese characters:
CHAIRMAN MAO’S WORDS
We should be humble and careful. Avoid pride. Be patient. Serve whole-heartedly the Chinese people.
—“The Two Fates of China”
The letter is scrawled in tiny black traditional Chinese characters. The penmanship is impeccable.
Liu’s husband, Wang Ming, has survived ten years inside the camp and has five years left of his prison sentence. Liu had stopped writing her husband seven years earlier. Corresponding with a “bad element” has gotten her in trouble with local police. At school, classmates and even teachers bully her children for having the wrong background.
Yet Wang’s letters continue to arrive. The letter in my hands is written to his father. The first line contains an error that violates the code of the times: Wang addresses his dad as Fuqin Daren, an honorific title permissible in any other time save for that of the Cultural Revolution. In a return letter dated May 24, 1968, Wang’s father takes his son to task:
You referred to me with the honorific “Da Ren.” It is now the era of the Cultural Revolution and it is time to smash the Four Olds. Next time you write, simply call us Father or Mother. You should study hard and learn how to think correctly and study Chairman Mao’s wor
ds more often.
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung—known in the West as the Little Red Book—is quickly becoming one of the most printed books in history. Elderly Chinese and schoolchildren alike commit its passages to memory.
At the family home on the Street of Eternal Happiness, Mother Liu has little time to memorize quotes. Apart from managing six children, she works full-time at a neighborhood box factory.
By 1968 the famine has passed, and Big Sister and Sister Two have both dropped out of high school to work at textile factories. Sisters Three, Four, and Five and their little brother Xuesong have the luxury of attending school.
“They are all positive inheritors of socialism,” writes Wang’s sister later that year. “They study hard and they love labor.”
The children have overcome malnourishment and now look “nice and fat.”
Little Xuesong, she writes, is old enough to read his father’s letters.
More than a thousand miles away at Delingha Labor Camp, Wang Ming attends study sessions of Mao Zedong Thought followed by self-criticism sessions. Inmates are trained in the habit of searching their own thoughts to suss out counterrevolutionary ideas.
Other thought purification methods are employed, too. In a letter dated January 14, 1969, Wang Ming complains of suffering from repeated bouts of the flu and a bloated stomach, a sign of malnourishment. His close-cropped hair is turning gray and the sturdy physique of his younger years has been reduced to skin and bones. Instead of treating his physical ailments, the camp doctor gives him narcotics.
“I later learned this old doctor was treating me for having ‘thought problems,’ ” writes Wang. “I continued to have stomach problems. Sometimes on Sundays I play poker. I recently won the price of a stamp. I ate very happily that day, and I didn’t have any stomach problems. That was a good day.”
Eventually, he discovers the root cause of his stomach ailment and treats it himself—with “Chairman Mao Thought”: “First, I diligently studied ‘Fight Privatization, Criticize Revisionism,’ a reading issued last year…”
Wang tops it off with Mao’s writings on the role of the family in Communist China. “Before we raised children to take care of the elderly,” observes Wang in a letter to his uncle. “But now we raise them to prevent revisionist thinking. In the past I became overly obsessed with the traditional idea of a ‘happy family,’ and I became mired deeper and deeper until I couldn’t relieve myself from its grasp.
“Once I tasted the sweetness of the great works of Chairman Mao,” concludes Wang, “my stomach problems haven’t returned!
“But are the Chairman’s thoughts embedded firmly enough in my head?” Wang asks himself in the letter. “Not necessarily yet. Old thoughts sometimes return uninvited. So I must further my studies in order to embed these thoughts more firmly.”
Reading this made me wonder what was going on inside Wang’s head. Was he writing this to please authorities who would be inspecting the letter? Or was it the drugs talking? Did he really think “Mao Zedong Thought” was curing his illness?
Harry Wu, who spent decades inside a Chinese labor camp near Delingha at the time, explained it this way: prisoners of that era endured so many study and self-criticism sessions that most of them believed Mao was God. Wu talked to me over the phone from his home in Washington, DC. It was a gradual transformation, he said, and it evolved alongside emotional deprivation, hunger, fatigue, and isolation.
“Today you say, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ and I say, ‘Bullshit,’ ” Wu explained. “Tomorrow you say, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ and I say, ‘I’m tired.’ The third day you say ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ and I don’t respond. The day after that you say, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ and I ask ‘Why?’ The fifth day you say, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ and I’m interested. The sixth day you say, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ and I repeat it.
“And then when Chairman Mao dies,” concluded Wu, “I weep.”
ON APRIL 17, 1970, after nine years of silence, Liu Shuyun finally writes a letter to her husband. She offers no explanation for the gap in writing, and it begins the way all of her letters do: “Your letter has been received.”
In it, she advises her husband to get a second opinion about his illness. “Don’t procrastinate,” she writes. “It should be treated as soon as possible and you should properly diagnose the cause.”
There’s good news. The children are all grown, Mother Liu writes, and they’re helping put food on the table. The couple’s little brood has grown up and they’re all taller than she is. Three of them have started working. Big Sister makes thirty-six yuan a month. Sisters Two and Three are apprentices, making eighteen yuan a month each. Sister Four was just assigned to work in the countryside in Anhui after graduating from middle school.
Baby Sister, the child they gave up, is doing well in the countryside, writes Mother Liu. And their little boy is now in middle school, earning 100 percent on all his exams. Liu includes six photos of the children.
Wang hasn’t seen his children in twelve years. He’s waited nearly a decade for a letter, for news of their health, for anything. His response to Mother Liu is grateful, and filled with questions. It’s the only letter in which Wang apologizes to his wife for how everything turned out.
April 26, 1970
Shuyun:
I received your letter yesterday with the photos. I was so happy. At the same time, it brought thoughts and feelings to the surface. I didn’t sleep last night and luckily today is a day of rest here. The children are all grown up and they are all well. This is a result of your hard work. All of this has had an impact on your health. You look older. It’s all my fault. I escaped the responsibility I was supposed to fulfill and I left you alone to shoulder everything. I can only wait until I get a new life to make up for my ways.
I keep looking at the photos of the children. Their faces still retain the same shape from when they were young. Only Sister Two and Sister Three have completely changed. It’s probably the same for Baby Sister. When I look at these children—my own flesh and blood—I feel like I’m looking at strangers. Our family has transformed. Everything has changed for the better. We have changed from a family that exploited others like parasites to a family that makes their livings through honest work.
As long as you can write me a letter each month, that’s my biggest comfort. If indeed you have difficulty or trouble to write, please ask the children to write instead. If you have Baby Sister’s photo, please send it. Please also send one or two photos from the past, such as our family photo when I was still there. When I’m depressed, I read your letters over and over and carefully study the photos. This is good for my health. I hope you understand.
Wang Ming
From the surge of letters that follows, it’s clear the dynamics between husband and wife have changed. Mother Liu now writes to her husband with the self-assurance of a mother who has raised six children, alone, through famine and constant intimidation. The children are on career paths, and their only son is on the track to a higher education.
The Party’s Cultural Revolution demanded people smash Confucian traditions, but the reality of Mother Liu’s situation left no alternative. The mother was in charge here, and her children were growing to resent their father.
Dozens of letters in the early 1970s show Mother Liu repeatedly pulling rank on her husband in family matters. The oldest girls are approaching marrying age, a time when a Chinese father would typically oversee an appropriate match for his adult children. In a letter in 1971, Mother Liu assures her husband, “As for the marriage matters of the kids you’re concerned about, they should be able to choose for themselves. Besides, the government is now promoting marrying late. Stop worrying about that.”
Later, when Liu’s second and third daughters apply to become Communist Party members, managers from their factory first check on their father’s progress at Delingha. In a letter to her husband, Liu writes that her greatest fears are confirmed:
&
nbsp; Several months ago, the leaders from our daughters’ factory went to your labor camp to check on your behavior and your progress. The feedback was bad. According to your file, you routinely violate the rules of the camp and are not dedicated to labor. They said that sometimes you have even skipped work to go out and trade cigarettes that I’ve sent you for other things from locals in the nearby village. Apart from that, they heard that you often talk about returning to Shanghai and living on government subsidies meant for the ill and disabled.
I was so heartbroken to hear this. You should behave yourself, not only for your own good, but also for the future of our children. They all have worked very hard and are consistently praised by their colleagues. It hurts them so much to hear how their father has failed them. I hope you will take real action to make a change for your children and for me. Next time, think twice before you speak. I will never send you cigarettes again.
The final year of Wang’s prison sentence was 1973. His release proved to be incredibly short-lived. Just a little over a week after he returned home, police escorted him to the Shanghai Railway Station and put him on a train that would take him two thousand miles back to Qinghai. They’d denied his application for a Shanghai hukou. Without a residency permit, his presence in his own hometown was illegal.
After a brief taste of freedom, Wang returned to the place of his hukou: Delingha labor camp. He continued to labor. He had finished serving his sentence, but he had no other choice but to continue to serve time, work hard, and study Mao Zedong Thought.
That is, until Mao Zedong died.
I WALKED SLOWLY along a curved section of the Street of Eternal Happiness, my eyes fixed on the green number plates. I didn’t expect to find the Wang family home. It was inside an old lane community, and my experience with Maggie Lane had taught me what usually happened to old lane communities.