My Name is Number 4

by Ting-Xing Ye

  Not content with this, the poster writer also accused Teacher Zhu of refusing to have her own child out of vanity, “concerned that bearing a child will destroy her figure”—a rotten bourgeois way of thinking. I saw my former teacher standing in front of the poster, vainly trying to explain to the girls surrounding her that the charge was untrue. She could not have children, she said. She would show them her medical records.

  Unable to bear seeing her degradation, and sensing that no matter what she said, no one would listen to her, I stole away. All the way home I wished I could take back the unkind thoughts I had had about her when she gave me a low mark on my assignment. What will come next? I wondered. Whose turn will it be?

  I arrived at school late the following day to find a circle of screaming girls surrounding Teacher Zhu near the auditorium. Pale and exhausted, she stood with her narrow shoulders hunched and her head down. The sight sickened and terrified me.

  “What did you mean,” someone shouted, “when you taught us that ‘Long live Chairman Mao’ means ‘Chairman Mao lives long’?” It was one of my own classmates, Tang, nicknamed “Super Flat” because of the unusual flatness of her head and face. In two years I had never heard her utter a word in class. Now here she was attacking our teacher over a point of grammar. None of us had been able to understand how to translate “Long live Chairman Mao” because we had not yet studied the subjunctive mood, so Teacher Zhu had suggested that for the time being we take it as “Chairman Mao lives long.”

  “We all wish that Chairman Mao will live forever, but you said he just lives for a long time,” my classmate shrieked. “How long did you have in mind? What was your real purpose? Confess!”

  The girls immediately broke into a chant. “Wan-shou-wu-jiang! Wan-shou-wu-jiang!—May our great leader Chairman Mao live forever!” They waved a little book as they chased my teacher across the schoolyard.

  I realized that almost everyone had a red book except me, and, frightened by the attack on Teacher Zhu, I figured I’d better get one quickly. I headed for the main office, where two students sat behind a desk piled high with plastic covered volumes with Quotations of Chairman Mao embossed on the red plastic cover. I gave them my name and grade.

  “What is your class background?” the heaviest of the two demanded.

  All the political turmoil that had swirled through my school, all the personal attacks on teachers, should have made me more careful, but I was still naive. I answered.

  “Zi-chan-jie-ji—capitalist class.”

  “Then you don’t deserve one,” came the angry reply. “The red treasure books are for students who are from the Five Reds, not for your stinking shitty class, who exploit the workers!”

  In the files kept by the police on everyone, the most important item of information was your social “class.” People who were peasants or workers like Great-Aunt were good; landlords or business owners were bad. Because my grandfather Ye had once owned land and my father had owned a factory, my family was classified as capitalist, even though Father’s business was gone.

  I couldn’t believe my ears. I looked around for a teacher to help or at least tell me what was going on, but none was in sight. What were the Five Reds? All I knew was that red meant good and black was bad. What could they mean calling me an exploiter and member of a shitty class? My family was poor and I was living on welfare. I felt the tears sting my eyes, but refused to let them out.

  “You don’t need to insult me,” I said. “If you don’t want to give me the book, I’ll be fine without it.” And I ran from the office and out of the school. When I got home I broke down. I had thought that I would never cry like that again, never after my parents died. Great-Aunt listened without interruption, then went to her dresser and returned with a red book in her hand.

  “Ah Si, take mine,” she offered. “When the neighbourhood committee gave it to me I didn’t know what it was. All I can recognize is the portrait of Chairman Mao.”

  “You don’t understand!” I shot back. “I’m not crying because I don’t have this book. It’s the insult. I don’t deserve to be degraded like that. Calling me ‘shit’!” I threw down her book and stormed out of the room.

  As if I was not upset enough, Number 3 came home with a copy of the red book. When I retold my tale of woe, she burst out laughing, saying I was “brainless” and lacked “flexible thinking.”

  “Why did you tell them the truth?” she sneered. “Did you think they would bother to check? These books come by the truckload! I told them I am a daughter of an office clerk, not totally untrue. Father did work in an office and did clerical and accounting work, didn’t he? It all depends on your point of view. Smarten up, Ah Si!”

  I must have looked astonished. Was this what she meant when she said I was not “flexible”?

  That night, Number 2 explained to me who the Five Reds were: factory workers, poor and lower-middle-class peasants, soldiers and officers of the People’s Liberation Army, Party officials, and revolutionary martyrs. The families of these five categories were therefore “red” also. In contrast, the Five Blacks included former landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, and former capitalists.

  I was furious that my family was included in the Five Blacks, but puzzled as well. How could we be capitalists? We had been born and had grown up under the Communist flag. Our so-called capitalist parents were dead. We were poor. We didn’t own anything.

  I made up my mind before I went to bed that I was not going back to school the next day no matter what Great-Aunt said. To my surprise, she didn’t object, and I passed my time at home, reading and snoozing. Each afternoon Number 3 told me what was going on in her school. More teachers were publicly denounced and locked up in sheds. Students belonging to the Five Reds were calling for “revolution around the clock” and had turned the classrooms into dorms, refusing to go home. A “work team” composed of factory workers and government officials had been stationed in her school and was encouraging the students to “blast the lid off the class struggle.”

  “I don’t know how long you can stay home like this, Ah Si,” Number 3 warned. “They have a name for people like you now—idlers—and you won’t be able to get away with it for long.”

  6. A “character” in Chinese writing is equal to a word in English.

  CHAPTER THREE

  About two weeks later, at the beginning of August, Number 5 burst through the door in tears.

  “My classmates called me dirty names and told me that our father was an exploiter!” she wept. “Ah Si, I can’t even remember what Father looked like. I was so young when he died. I didn’t even know what he did for a living. How come the others know all that?”

  She had cried all the way home because she had been rejected by the Hong Xiao Bing—Little Red Guards—because of her family background. I was unable to comfort her.

  Recently, Mao had called upon young people, those still in school or university, to carry on the struggle to make revolution. He named them Red Guards. But to be a Red Guard you had to be from a politically “pure”—red—family.

  I myself was worried about the summons signed by Red Guards ordering me to report to them at my school. Great-Aunt had often said that if you have done nothing wrong you needn’t be frightened by a pounding on your door in the middle of the night. The next morning, I repeated the saying to myself as I walked along. If attacked for being an idler, I planned to confess my “lack of revolutionary spirit,” hoping that would satisfy them enough to leave me alone.

  The street outside the school was ablaze with big character posters. “Smash So-and-so’s dog head!” “Flog the cur that has fallen into the water!” (Be merciless with bad people even if they are down.) One poster declared the establishment of the school’s Red Guards, ending with, “It is right to rebel against reactionaries!”

  When I arrived at the school gate house, Old Uncle Zhang was not there as he usually was. I recognized all of the occupants there in his place except two young wo
men dressed in faded army fatigues with red armbands. Hong Wei Bing—Red Guards—was written in yellow.

  I was challenged by a knot of girls at the gate. “State your class background,” one of them shouted. There was no time to use the ruse Number 3 had suggested, for one of the girls recognized me and pointed her finger. “She’s the one who told me she could get along just fine without the treasure book!”

  One of the strangers strutted over and stood in front of me. She was much taller than me and solidly built.

  “You son-of-a-bitch capitalist!” she hissed. Her accent told me she was a Northerner. I hung my head, hoping not too many of my schoolmates had heard the insulting remark. She punched my shoulder to straighten me up. “Go to the side door. We will deal with you later.”

  Frightened, I did as I was told. As soon as I entered the side gate I was confronted by three Red Guards. My name and class background were taken down and I was directed to a Red Guard whose armband indicated that she was from Dong Chen District, Beijing, the capital city. She stood, sweating in her ill-fitting army uniform, cap pulled down tightly, armpits mapped with perspiration, thumbs in her belt in a pose praised by Mao, who had written that Chinese women preferred battle fatigues to silk. She ordered me to join six other students who stood facing a brick wall. I knew all of them. They were always well dressed and a few were members of the students’ council, a prestigious position in most people’s eyes, including mine. Not one of them said a word to me. I got the feeling that it was not their first experience staring at the wall, so I followed their lead, and stood still, looking down at my cotton shoes.

  Although it was not yet nine o’clock, the heat was stifling, beating down on us and radiating from the wall. By noon—I could tell the hour by the slow progress of our shadows—there were about two dozen of us wilting in line. Finally the Beijing Red Guard led us away toward the schoolyard. There weren’t many students there; most had been driven indoors by the sweltering heat. The dirt yard was like a laundry with crisp, faded paper sheets hung from numerous clotheslines strung from side to side.

  “You are ordered to read all the da-zi-bao and then report to me before you go home,” she shouted. “Maybe we can drive some stinking capitalist ideas from your heads.”

  Walking between the rows of hanging posters, I not only found many duplicates and copied newspaper articles, I noticed that some of the writers had inadvertently omitted half sentences or entire paragraphs, making the poster meaningless. They were all signed “East Is Red” or “Defending the East” or “Revolutionary Masses” or “Red Rebels.” How ridiculous, I thought.

  But I felt a chill when I saw that Teacher Zhang, my second-year English instructor, had been denounced. Someone had listed the names of her and her five siblings, circling the middle character of each name. The linked characters read “Long Live the Republic of China.”

  I knew Teacher Zhang was in big trouble. The Republic of China, not the People’s Republic of China, was how the previous government referred to my country before the Communists took over. To show the slightest loyalty to the old rulers was treason. But why blame Teacher Zhang? Why not blame her father? It was he who named his children.

  Number 1 was at home a lot, since the university too was in turmoil and all classes were suspended in favour of endless political study. That night I asked him about Teacher Zhang’s case. He said that obviously all the children in her family had been born when the Nationalists were still in power and her father had found a smart way to show his loyalty to the regime. It was difficult to get a legal name change, he explained; there were as many procedures as hairs on an ox.

  When I told him about the Beijing Red Guards, he grew agitated.

  “Listen, Ah Si, do whatever you’re told and never, ever argue or talk back. I know you too well. Your sharp tongue will get you in trouble. The Beijing Red Guards are the children of high Party officials. They have received Chairman Mao’s support and they can be very dangerous if they get angry at you.”

  “There are no imported Red Guards at my school,” Number 3 said. “They are probably punishing you for staying away from school, Ah Si.”

  Great-Aunt had stayed out of the conversation. When she and I were in bed she began to talk, staring at the ceiling. “It’s you again, Ah Si, bullied by the Red Guards. Why does bad luck always follow you around? If that isn’t Fate, what is it?” She let out a heavy sigh. “Your mother should have agreed when I offered to adopt you when you were a baby. Then you would be the daughter of a working-class woman and you would be safe.”

  I kept telling myself I would not let the Red Guards scare me any more, but as I got closer to school the next day my throat was dry and my legs were weak. For the first time I was grateful that none of my classmates lived in my lane and that the school was so far away. No one in my neighbourhood would witness my humiliation.

  That thought brought to my mind one of Mao’s sayings that had until recently begun our school day: “Good things can turn to bad things and vice versa.” I had always wondered why this inane statement was the object of reverence, but maybe it held some truth after all. Before I reached the school I decided what I would put in my thought-report to the Red Guards. I would tell them that I now understood the Chairman’s saying and that I had learned from my own experience how correct he was.

  But I never got the chance. My group had apparently been treated “too leniently,” walking around and reading posters. One of the Beijing Red Guards spouted from her red book: “Revolution is not a dinner party, nor is it writing articles, drawing pictures or doing embroidery; revolution is a class struggle of life and death.” She divided us into work groups and set us to our “life and death struggle”—cleaning toilets and sweeping out the classrooms.

  I knew that this assignment was not an effort to help the custodian and Old Uncle Zhang, who had been locked in a shed along with the principal because the Red Guards claimed that he was a spy for his former employer, the Christian mission school. As far as I could see, all he did was match our faces to the photos on our student cards every day as we passed through the school gate. I couldn’t imagine poor illiterate Old Uncle Zhang spying for anyone.

  So the hot days of August crept by. I had thought I would never sweep dirt floors again after I left the old temple school I used to attend in our lane when I was little, but now I considered sweeping the back alley, mopping wooden floors and stairs and cleaning out the washrooms to be easy. On bad days I was yelled at and forced to write self-criticisms, complying with the Red Guards’ shrill demands without hesitation. More than once I wondered what Mother would think, seeing her fourteen-year-old girl treated like an old-hand criminal.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  So far the Red Guards had wreaked havoc mainly inside the schools and universities, where they frequently beat teachers, sometimes to death, but an incident in Beijing raised their status dramatically. On August 18, Chairman Mao, wearing an army uniform, made an appearance at the Gate of the Heavenly Peace. He was formally presented with a Red Guard armband by a young woman named Song Bin-bin. Bin-bin—Genteel—is a fairly common name for a girl. Mao asked her, “Yao-wu-ma?—Do you want violence?” At that moment, said the newspaper reports, the young woman accepted Mao’s suggestion and changed her name to Song Yao-wu—Song Wants Violence.

  Hundreds of thousands of young people throughout the country rushed to change their names to respond to Mao’s call. And from that day the Red Guard movement, blessed by the Chairman himself, spread into the streets, its targets no longer limited to teachers. Mao Ze-dong had unleashed a violent windstorm that would engulf me and my siblings because we had been born to a capitalist father and mother who were no longer around to be attacked.

  “Long live Chairman Mao! Long live the red sun in our hearts!” screamed the weeping Red Guards in my school when the news about Mao’s blessing was announced. Armed with Mao’s personal permission for violence and chaos, they swept from the school to “smash the Four Olds.” This vague
category of new enemies comprised old culture, old customs, old habits and old ways of thinking.

  A few nights later a deafening racket of gongs, drums and shrill voices drew my sisters and me out of our apartment into the streets. Wuding Road was a turmoil of milling crowds, bonfires, shouted slogans. Number 3 and I walked around uneasy but fascinated, with Number 5 between us.

  We watched as the Guards renamed our street: Wuding (Violent Tranquillity) became Yaowu (Desire for Violence) to echo Mao’s call. We felt the heat of bonfires fed by books, paintings, embroidery and other “bourgeois goods” confiscated by the Red Guards when they raided local homes. Women with “bourgeois” hairstyles had their tresses hacked off in the street; men with haircuts that “looked like Kennedy” suffered the same humiliation. People wearing trousers with narrow legs were held down while the Red Guards took scissors and slashed the pants open. Those who wore pointed-toed leather shoes had them torn off their feet and hurled into the fire. Such “rotten Western” styles, the Guards screamed, must be driven out of China.

  A few days later I was stopped on my way home from school by two girls who were not of the Five Reds nor Five Blacks, but were “Grays,” children of shopkeepers, office clerks and elementary and middle-school teachers. They belonged to a Red Guard sub-unit, as they were not pure enough for the real thing.

  I was fortunate, the girls brusquely informed me. The Guards were going to allow me to join an overnight parade to show Shanghai’s support for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. “Allowed” meant that I’d better turn up and take the opportunity to “educate and reform” myself. I resented their arrogance, but was secretly glad of the opportunity because I was sick of being the object of scorn and abuse at school. Maybe if I took part in the demonstration they wouldn’t call me a shitty capitalist any more.