by Cheng Nien
In a corner of the shop, I saw under the label “Literature” a few books lying flat on the shelves. I could not see their titles. I went up to the clerk and asked her, “Have you a copy of Three Hundred Tang Poems?”
She shook her head and said, “No, of course not.”
From her tone of voice I understood that Three Hundred Tang Poems had been banned by the radicals. She probably thought me very stupid even to ask for it.
Pointing to the books lying flat on the shelves behind her, I asked, “What are those books?”
Without speaking, she picked up a copy and turned it around to let me see the title. It was The Song of Ou Yanghai, the story of a soldier who was killed by a passing train when he tried to save his mule. His courage and spirit of self-sacrifice were attributed to the fact that he had studied Mao’s books diligently and therefore was fearless. The story had been approved by the Maoist leaders, especially Jiang Qing. Tens of thousands of copies of the book were printed, and the author was made a Central Committee member at the Ninth Party Congress.
“I’ve already read that. Have you anything else? What about that?” I pointed to the lower shelf.
She patiently picked up the book and showed it to me. It was just another copy of the same book.
“Have you any other book?”
“There is The Diary of Lei Feng,” she said.
Lei Feng was another soldier who died and was declared a national hero and a model of self-sacrifice by the Maoists. He had been eulogized before the Cultural Revolution in a nationwide campaign called “Learn from Lei Feng,” when the indoctrination of all Chinese people with Mao’s books was intensified. Passages from Lei Feng’s diary, such as “Read Chairman Mao’s books, obey Chairman Mao’s orders, and be Chairman Mao’s good warriors,” were widely quoted by newspaper articles and Party leaders including Lin Biao. The case of Lei Feng was used by the Maoists in the army to illustrate their assertion that political indoctrination was more important than the modern weapons and combat skill advocated by military leaders subsequently purged during the Cultural Revolution.
“I’ve already read that. Have you any other books?” I asked.
She shook her head again.
I walked out of the Xinhua Bookshop and boarded a bus to go home. I thought that the Cultural Revolution could be more aptly named Cultural Annihilation.
Since I could not obtain English textbooks, I could not teach beginning students but had to accept only those who had studied English already and were equipped with books. I had six students and gave either a morning or an evening to each from Monday to Saturday. After the lesson, we would chat over a cup of tea. My students brought me news and gossip that was not printed in the newspaper. It was largely through my students that I was kept informed of the volatile political situation in China during that time.
My most interesting student, and the one who stayed with me for many years, was a young man who had been a leader of the Red Guards in the early years of the Cultural Revolution. Da De had rather an unfortunate personal background. His father deserted his mother when he was only a few months old and disappeared in Hong Kong, never to be heard of again. There was little money. His mother, his two sisters, and he lived in great poverty for many years before his mother obtained a job teaching English at the Shanghai Foreign Language Institute. Her salary was small. Even though they no longer had to sell their belongings to buy food, they remained poor. His mother’s youngest sister, however, married a general in the Communist army in the early fifties when, flushed with victory, many Communist Party leaders discarded their peasant wives and married attractive city girls.
His family connection with the elite of the army and his intense hatred of anybody who was rich catapulted him into leadership positions, first in the Red Guard organization of his own school and later in the Red Guard organization of the city. He took part in all the Red Guard activities: plundering the wealthy, torturing class enemies, fighting factional wars, and killing innocent people. When we practiced English conversation and I asked him to tell me stories in English, he would talk about his exploits during the Cultural Revolution in a matter-of-fact voice, as if he were talking about the weather. He was not proud, or ashamed, of what he did. I thought Da De was amoral. And I wondered why he wanted to learn English from me when his own mother was an English teacher. Once, I asked him point-blank. He merely shrugged his shoulders and said, “You mustn’t ask anyone a direct question like that. In any case, you can’t afford to believe the answer, whatever it is.”
Da De told me that he had lost his leadership position in the Red Guard when his uncle by marriage, the general, was buried alive at the order of Lin Biao. This happened after the Ninth Party Congress when Lin Biao was made the official successor of Mao Zedong. His uncle, a longtime Party member and much-decorated war hero, had voiced doubts about Lin Biao’s suitability because of Lin Biao’s addiction to heroin.
“Can I afford to believe what you have just told me?” I asked him half jokingly.
“Yes, definitely. Because believing it will do you no harm. However, you may foolishly choose to trust me more because I’m no longer a leader of the Red Guards and my uncle has died. But I’m sure you know trusting anybody at all is ill-advised,” he said, blithely dispensing wisdom as if he were an old sage.
The name Da De means “great virtue.” I couldn’t think of anyone I had ever known who was more indifferent either to virtue or to vice. Intelligent and self-taught, he was extremely egotistical. In fact, it was his overdeveloped ego that prompted him to tell me from time to time what he knew of the power struggle within the Party hierarchy. And he loved conflict of any kind. When he talked about the political intrigues of the Party leaders, he glowed with excitement. He seemed to relish other people’s misfortune and despised victims simply because they had failed to win. To him, there was glamor in success no matter how it was achieved. It was difficult to know where his loyalty lay. Once I asked him, “Which side are you on?”
Pointing to his chest, he said, “Of course, here, on my own side.”
One day he saw a copy of a Red Guard publication on my desk. “Why do you bother reading such childish rubbish?” he asked me disdainfully.
“I want to know what went on during the Cultural Revolution when I was locked up in the detention house.”
’I can tell you everything, from beginning to end, and more,” he boasted.
“Won’t you get into trouble for doing that?”
“Why should I if you do not tell anybody? And if you do tell somebody, you’ll get into trouble just as fast as I will.”
“What if the authorities find out anyhow?” I asked him.
“How can anybody find out if neither of us talks about it? Your room isn’t bugged.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. You are not important enough for mechanical devices that are in short supply, only for human effort,” he said, laughing uproariously.
Da De became my student through what I later realized was an elaborate maneuver. When I first started to give lessons, one of Meiping’s friends, a violinist with the disbanded Shanghai municipal orchestra, became one of my students. His mother was a fellow student when I was at Yanjing University. She asked me if I would take on her son because the young man hoped to emigrate to the United States, where his uncle was a tenured professor. Because I was under the impression that the young violinist was very anxious to learn English, I was extremely surprised to find he was not attentive during lessons and did no homework. In fact, he often did not come at all at the appointed hour.
One day I was waiting for him and feeling increasingly exasperated when Da De turned up. He introduced himself and said, “I’ve come to apologize for Zhang. He has just been called to the police station to get his passport and can’t come today.”
He sat down across the table from me, opened the book he was carrying, and said, “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m trying to study English by myself. Could y
ou explain this passage for me?”
I looked at the book. It was The Gathering Storm by Sir Winston Churchill.
“Where did you get this book?” I asked him.
“I borrowed it,” he said, laying emphasis on the word “borrow.” “There was a whole set, but I was able to borrow only this one volume.”
“Were you a Red Guard?”
“Oh, yes!” He smiled at me and said, “You are very quickwitted, just as I have heard. I have also heard that your spoken English is the best in Shanghai.”
The book had actually been stolen by him when he went with the Red Guards to loot homes. The other volumes had probably been burned.
A few days later, the violinist came with Da De to bid me goodbye and asked me to accept Da De in his place.
A-yi was always excessively polite to Da De when she brought us tea, though her attitude towards my other students was one of indifference. A-yi’s attitude and Da De’s maneuver to become my student aroused my interest in this lanky young man. Also he seemed anxious for my company. In addition to the mornings designated for his lessons, he took to visiting me almost every day under one pretext or another. He told me that he had plenty of time since he was “waiting for employment”—an expression used by the People’s Government for “unemployment,” which was not supposed to exist in a socialist state. He also said that he wished to render service to me in order to repay me for the free lessons.
He often accompanied me on shopping trips. Then he would stand on line with me, push through the crowd when it was disorderly, and tell me what commodities were available on the counter, because he could see over the heads of the other shoppers. Sometimes he even stretched out his long arm to take something from the shop assistant before the other customers could get it. If we failed to find what I wanted after visiting several shops, he would offer to get it for me through the back door. On the bus, he would shield me from the jostling crowd and elbow people to make room for me to get on and off. When I thanked him after an exhausting day, he would say, “I enjoy shopping with you. You always buy the best of everything. That makes me feel good.”
Very soon I discovered that he liked good food but could not afford to go to good restaurants. So when he accompanied me on shopping trips, I would treat him to a really good lunch in a restaurant of his choice. On the first occasion, he asked me, “Do you want to go to one of the best restaurants?”
“I’ll take you to whichever restaurant you want,” I told him.
“Never mind the cost?”
“Never mind the cost.”
He ordered enough food for four people and finished everything. That was when I realized that he was thin because of undernourishment. I felt sorry for him even though I was aware of the likelihood that he was an informer planted by those who wished me ill.
I would be a hypocrite if I did not admit that I hoped to make use of Da De. If he had indeed been planted by someone who wanted me under constant observation so that he could make use of a careless word or an inadvertent action to incriminate me, Da De was likely to know the truth about my daughter’s death. At an opportune moment, I meant to ask him. That moment had to be one when such divulgence would not be detrimental to his own self-interest. In the meantime, I thought I could use him to convey an image of myself I wished his peers to have.
Long before there was any possibility of my leaving China, I tried to create the impression that I could not live without servants. Once, in my hearing, Da De told Kong, “She hates housework of any kind and can’t even boil rice!” I was sure he despised me as a parasite and probably told everybody so. In fact, the impression I deliberately created of wishing to live in China because I liked having servants probably contributed in the end to my being given a passport to visit my sisters in the United States. Those who decided to give me the passport probably thought I was sure to return after a few months because I could not manage without servants.
Early in 1974, having recovered from my operation and improved the apartment, I was in euphoric mood. Teaching prevented me from brooding over my daughter’s death. I felt more peaceful and relaxed than I had been for a long time.
As the Chinese New Year approached, A-yi told me that special rations for the festival, first cut back and then abolished by the Revolutionaries, were being distributed again. Unrationed food items were also more plentiful in the shops. It seemed to me that the effort made by Deng Xiaoping and his lieutenants to restore China’s economy had been fairly successful, in spite of resistance by the radicals. The political wind in China had certainly veered to the right since the Tenth Party Congress as more and more former senior Party officials, denounced as “capitalist-roaders,” were reinstated.
My students brought me reports of drastic measures, including arrests, being taken against the more intransigent Revolutionaries. One of them told me that the newly rehabilitated minister of railways went to Xuzhou, a vital junction linking Guangzhou (Canton) and Shanghai to Beijing, to restore service. When the Revolutionaries, who had occupied the railway junction and paralyzed its work, refused to obey his order, the minister of railways, Wan Li, called a mass meeting. He condemned the leading Revolutionaries in front of their followers and had them taken out and shot. Such decisiveness by an old Party official was encouraging to the long-suffering people who cheered him and his action. Unfortunately it also hastened the next round of struggle as the radicals saw their hard-won position being eroded under their feet. However, the old Party officials were careful not to repudiate the Cultural Revolution openly. They found enough quotations from Mao’s old writings to justify their efforts to restore order and to prevent any accusation that they were against Mao’s policies.
The Chinese New Year celebrations were traditionally linked to ancestor worship. When I was a child they lasted a full month, with preparations beginning fifteen days before the New Year and lasting until the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth of the first lunar month. Even though life had become much simpler under socialism and family reunions had taken the place of ancestor worship, the Chinese people still prepared seriously for the Chinese New Year celebrations. On New Year’s Day everything in the home had to be clean, so A-yi and I spent days cleaning the apartment, taking everything out of the cupboards, waxing the floor, polishing the furniture, and washing the windows. There had been a time when we wore a completely new set of clothes on New Year’s Day. Not everybody could afford a new suit of clothes now, not because of the price but because there was rationing of clothes coupons. All I could manage was to get A-yi a padded jacket. But it was a more stylish one than she normally wore. We both stood in numerous lines to get the food we were going to serve to our visitors. I expected all my students to come to wish me a happy New Year, as it was the custom. For those who might bring children, I prepared good-luck money wrapped in red paper. As she watched me getting it ready, A-yi became nervous and asked whether the Residents’ Committee ladies might accuse me of trying to revive an old custom. I told her I would give the money only to those who were not likely to report to anybody.
With my returned foreign exchange account I was obviously a great deal better off than most people, so I decided to be generous to everybody. I even bought a large cream cake and two catties of chocolates for the Zhus as a New Year’s present. Deep in my heart, however, I was very sad, because while others were surrounded by their families, I was alone. Scenes of past New Years I had spent with my daughter and my husband were always in my mind. But I was determined not to let anyone know how I really felt. I wanted the Revolutionaries to think I had assumed a fatalistic attitude towards my daughter’s death.
Two days before the Chinese New Year, Hean came home with her husband and children to spend the holiday with her family. I was very happy to meet her extremely intelligent husband and to hear his version of the power struggle going on in Beijing. Their two children were adorable. Being too young to feel the political cloud over all our heads, they were completely carefree and happy.
Hean was fortunate to have her husband and children with her. Many young people in China were sent away from their families to work in other parts of the country, thousands of miles away, and allowed short “marital leave” only once a year. Children grew up hardly knowing their fathers, while women faced the dual responsibility of bringing up the children single-handed and holding demanding jobs. The Party inflicted this mindless cruelty on China’s young people in the name of “the needs of socialism” and “serving the people.” The hypocrisy of the claim was exposed by the fact that Party officials and their children were seldom asked to make such sacrifices. Instead, they received “special consideration” and were given jobs in the same city as their spouses.
The news of my release had spread among Meiping’s friends. During the holiday period, many of them came to visit me, including those home on marital leave. Much of their conversation was about job transfer. They were anxious to take advantage of the present rampant use of the back door to get themselves transferred to places near their loved ones. Those who had already started the process of negotiation were anxious to exchange information and experiences with one another when they met at my place. From their conversations, I learned of the widespread practice of bribery and corruption in all parts of China among the lower-ranking Party officials.
“How do you account for the collapse of idealism among Party officials when the purpose of the Cultural Revolution was to purify Chinese society and promote socialism?” I asked one of Meiping’s friends who was on marital leave from Wuhan and was trying to get herself transferred to somewhere near Shanghai, where her husband was.
“The new Party officials promoted during the Cultural Revolution were never idealists in the first place,” she said. “They saw the Cultural Revolution simply as an opportunity for personal advancement and joined the Revolutionaries to realize their ambition. The old Party officials who have been reinstated might have been idealists when they joined the Party a long time ago, but they are now thoroughly disillusioned by their humiliating experiences during the Cultural Revolution. They feel that they have been treated unfairly by the Party and that their sacrifice during the war years was for nothing. All they are concerned with now is their political survival in future power struggles and a comfortable life for themselves and their children.”