by Ting-Xing Ye
China’s broadest and most elegant avenue was lined with leafless trees—and temporary latrines, constructed of bamboo poles with woven bamboo mats wired to them to the height of my head. Inside the bamboo enclosures, cement paving squares had been lifted and pits dug. These were the revolutionary toilets. When full, they were covered over with earth and the squares put back where they belonged. The area was slick with frozen urine. Millions of visiting Red Guards created more than just political problems.
The red walls of the Forbidden City were papered over with da-zi-bao. The Palace Museum itself was, to my disappointment, closed, because sightseeing was discouraged as unrevolutionary. Guo-zheng and I sat on the broad steps of the Great Hall of the People across the road and rested in the sun. Later, tired, we returned to the barracks.
Our newly assigned room had once been someone’s office. Six bunks lined one wall. After another hot meal, the officer in charge called us to a meeting and asked us all to state our class background and report on our day’s activity in the “heart city” of our country. I prepared myself to lie again when my turn came. I was stunned when one girl told the group that she was from a shopkeeper’s family. How could she be so stupid? I thought. Surely she would have trouble heaped upon her?
But no one showed any resentment. I realized that here, too, the “capitalist roader” had taken over as the number-one class enemy. I began to relax a little, but lied anyway when it was my turn, reporting that I had spent the entire day closely studying the da-zi-bao on the walls of the Forbidden City.
Yang-yang, fervent as she was, read out the accusations she had copied down at Qinghua University. The most dramatic and shocking of these attacked Liu Shao-qi, president and second man after Chairman Mao. He was declared the number-one capitalist roader who aimed to change the nature of communism. Worse than all this political denunciation was the information from his private life.
According to Yang-yang’s notes, Liu Shao-qi had married five times. She had written down the details of each failed marriage. There were even cartoons of Liu and his latest wife on the posters, Yang-yang reported. I listened, gaping, as she gave out information that until then had been treated almost as a military secret. Any gossip about the private life of our leaders was a sure road to severe criticism and punishment. It had been revealed only recently that Mao Ze-dong himself had a young wife named Jiang Qing and, although people were naturally curious about her, no one dared speculate about Mao’s personal life.9 Ordinary citizens like me lived in an environment where we had to reveal every detail of our personal and family history for several generations back, yet in this society where the word privacy did not exist, the impression had been given that state leaders led the life of nuns or monks. But if the president’s life could now be turned inside out like a dirty sock, I wondered, who would be safe?
The afternoon following Yang-yang’s scathing report, the women’s bathhouses opened. It had been almost a week since I had washed in warm water and I rushed to line up. Two hours later, after a long shower in gloriously hot water, Guo-zheng and I decided to go out and have a treat: candied haw berries, famous in Beijing. My hair was still wet, and soon I had icicles clicking at my ears. I paid dearly for this foolishness. That night I developed a high fever and ran from one nightmare to another. My own screaming woke me up, and in the morning Guo-zheng fetched a doctor. My temperature was around forty degrees and I was taken to the infirmary on a stretcher.
If the plentiful food at the canteen was a luxury, the hospital was paradise. The ward was much brighter and cleaner than the one I had seen when visiting Mother at the hospital in Shanghai. There were five beds in the room besides mine, all filled. Mine was like a cloud. I lay on a spring mattress and bounced up and down on it. The nurses were friendly and kind, so different from people in the outside world, where it seemed to me that yelling and shouting filled our everyday lives.
When I had recovered several days later and began to eat again, I was even offered a choice of food. What an easy life! Great-Aunt would have said, “Hold out your arms and you will be dressed; open your mouth and you will be fed.” At night we patients were entertained by a song and dance troupe.
One day after I had left the infirmary I learned at the evening meeting that there would be a big rally at the airport the next day. We would see Chairman Mao with our own eyes! Preparations must be made and, of course, new rules laid down.
First, we were paired up at random, each partner under the other’s responsibility and scrutiny—a common surveillance technique. No one was allowed to leave the compound until the morning, when we would all depart for the rally together. No pocketknives or sharp metal tools were permitted. We were reminded how vast the crowd would be—hundreds of thousands. While marching we should never, ever try to pick up anything we had dropped, or we might never stand up again. Each of us was issued a pair of extra-long shoelaces and instructed on how to bind them tightly around our insteps, since the thousands of trampling feet around us might grind our heels and pull off our shoes. Not only would the lacing technique keep us from injury or even death, it would aid the street sweepers who usually faced mountains of lost shoes when the rally was over. On the way out of the canteen everyone was to be given a paper bag holding two boiled eggs and two fat steamed buns stuffed with pickled vegetables.
I couldn’t believe I was going to see Chairman Mao in person! I had seen his picture all my life, staring at me from walls, buses and store windows. In real life I saw people aging or even dying, most of them much younger than Mao; but he, in my eyes, didn’t seem real. He was like the immortals I read about in fairy tales, never one day older, with the same smile and the same mole under his mouth. The songs and slogans called him the sun, the rescuing star of our universe. Was he really a great man? Or was he the author of all our misfortunes as I had always believed? I wondered if my attitude would change after I saw him.
Before we were allowed to climb into the military trucks early the next morning, my partner and I, a girl from Anhui Province, searched each other in front of another pair, then reversed roles with them. After an hour’s jouncing along the cold streets, we were dropped off about five kilometres from the airport and ordered to form ranks. We marched eight in a row under a cloudy sky, scrutinized by PLA soldiers and officers, singing our revolutionary songs. Even the fierce wind from the northwest didn’t seem too bad. Compared to my night parade in Shanghai months before, this one was a picnic—and much more exciting.
Bright chalk lines divided the tarmac at the airport into squares. There wasn’t an airplane in sight. Each square could hold at least thirty rows of twelve spectators. The sun was peeking from behind the clouds when we sat down, as instructed, on the icy cement, cross-legged, like the soldiers in front of us. Because I was small, I was put in the second row, so I was certain I’d get a good view. We were required to remain seated throughout the rally so everyone could see, and under no circumstances were we to rush the motorcade.
At noon, I broke out my food, peeling chilled eggs under the envious eyes of those who had eaten theirs earlier. Although the steamed buns were now hard as a rock, I didn’t dare drink too much water to soften them. There were toilets, but they were far from us and no one knew exactly when Chairman Mao would appear.
It got colder. My bottom was like a block of ice and my legs grew numb. I received permission from a soldier in front of me to kneel to ease my cramped limbs. Hours of singing and reading from the red book crept by. I yawned and shifted my position, my enthusiasm dampened by boredom.
Suddenly, from far away, came the rumble of engines, then hysterical chanting—“Long live Chairman Mao!”—roared in the sky. One minute I was slapping my numb legs to warm them, the next I was rising to my feet, in spite of the orders not to, yelling at the top of my lungs like everyone else.
“Long live Chairman Mao!” I shouted, my voice lost in the waves of sound.
Tears streamed from my eyes. The motorcade was moving, bearing down on us. Pe
ering between the soldiers in front of me, I got a brief glimpse of a jeep. There was Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing! And Lin Biao standing right beside her! They were waving their red books, but their faces were pale and unsmiling. Frantically I searched for Chairman Mao. In another jeep I saw Liu Shao-qi, Mao’s second-in-command, dressed in army fatigues, looking worn down and disturbed. I recalled what Yang-yang had told us about him. My eyes followed his grim form until it disappeared, and I wondered how such a powerful man could be attacked just like the teachers in my school and the neighbours in my lane back home.
It was then that I realized I had missed Chairman Mao!
I closed my eyes and covered my face with my hands, feeling cheated and lost.
On the way back through streets jammed with marching youngsters and loaded trucks, although exhausted from ten hours of walking and waiting in the cold, I hid my disappointment. Everyone was excited, telling each other how clearly they had seen Chairman Mao, how healthy he looked, how kind he appeared, how lucky they were. Some could not wait to get back to the barracks: they wrote down their impressions as the truck bounced through the streets, overwhelmed by the sense that they had participated in the making of history.
I joined them enthusiastically, using my imagination, unwilling to admit that I hadn’t seen the Chairman at all, even though I had been in the second row. If everyone else had seen him, so had I. That was what I was going to say to everyone, including my siblings and Great-Aunt. That night when I told Guo-zheng that I had also seen Liu Shao-qi, she covered my mouth with her hand, fearing I would cause trouble again. Yang-yang pointed out that he had been in the last jeep. We all knew what that meant: he had fallen from Mao’s favour.
Early the next morning, after our last free meal, we were trucked to the train station. I had already changed my plan to stop at Wuxi. I never thought I could miss Great-Aunt so much.
8. Pu-tong-hua—Common Speech—became the official dialect of the whole country after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. In North America it is known as Mandarin.
9. In fact, Jiang Qing was Mao’s fourth wife.
CHAPTER NINE
January, the first anniversary of Mother’s death, ushered in another year of turmoil. More state leaders were denounced and jailed, and Chairman Mao urged the whole nation to seize power from the capitalist roaders who “still occupied the bourgeois headquarters across the country.” Confused as they were by Mao’s inexact call to arms, the people of Shanghai took action. On January 4, the Shanghai Workers Revolutionary Rebels overthrew the municipal government, which had, so the radio broadcast told us, “turned rotten to its roots.” The coup was headed by a textile-factory security officer named Wang Hong-wen under orders from Zhang Chun-qiao, who rose to be head of the Cultural Revolution Authority for the entire country. Jiang Qing—Mrs. Mao—and Wang and Zhang, joined by a well-known writer, Yao Wen-yuan, later formed the notorious “Gang of Four.”10
This “January Storm” in Shanghai brought great trouble to our doorstep. Number 2, being a member of the defeated Loyalist faction, was swept up in the subsequent purge.11 The Shanghai Revolutionary Committee had received the blessing of Chairman Mao himself and it set about housecleaning with a vengeance. Soon the majority of Loyalists, after criticism and self-criticism, were identified as “good people but misled” due to their “simple but pure class feeling toward the Party.” But that was not the case for Number 2. He was set up as an example of those who “secretly supported the old municipal government while showing their resentment of the Cultural Revolution led by our great Chairman Mao”—in other words, my brother was labelled anti-Mao, a deadly charge. He was forced to sweep the floor and scrub toilets alongside former factory authorities during the day and to submit to merciless condemnation at evening rallies. The cleaning during the day was actually easier than his job dyeing rubber, and he continued to receive his salary. It was the public humiliation of the “struggle meetings” and the constant fear that things could get worse for him that hurt most.12
One night when he had been allowed to come home for clean clothes, I could tell that Number 2 was scared.
“Some people,” he said, “have been beaten to death by their fellow workers in the struggle meetings, especially in factories involved in military projects.”
I was horrorstruck. “You mean the same might happen to you?”
He shrugged his thin shoulders. “I don’t know.”
The Red Terror ushered in the spring. Fighting among the factions broke out everywhere, each group claiming to be more revolutionary than the next. Factories, government offices, research institutions and communes had turned into battlegrounds of hatred. The streets on the outskirts of Shanghai rang with gunfire. The history I learned at school was no longer a theoretical study: the Communists’ struggle to eliminate all classes other than proletarians had escalated. Chairman Mao continuously harangued us that this last fight was Ni-si-wo-huo—You die; I live. The bare fists and bronze belt buckles used by the Red Guards were now replaced by iron rods, steel bars and bullets. The entire nation was in an uproar, and cruelty ruled.
And then Chairman Mao did what many thought he would never do. Until now the PLA had remained neutral, kept out of the Cultural Revolution. But when Mao was notified that in some areas of the country the rebels had not been successful, while in others the fighting was out of control, he relented and ordered in the army. The army’s involvement made the muddy waters muddier. And it brought Commander-in-Chief Lin Biao into prominence as Mao’s numb er-two man.
Was this how I would have to spend the rest of my life—hiding at home, fearing for the safety of myself and my family, watching my future dissolve? The days dragged by, but my sleep was filled with nightmares, especially when Number 2 was forced to fight in the streets again, for the PLA had at last moved into Shanghai to oust a powerful faction in the Shanghai Diesel Engine Factory. The battle raged for three days. This time, the losers were not simply arrested or set to humiliating tasks. They were killed.
A week or so later a letter arrived from Auntie Yi-feng, who lived in a village near my grandfather’s house in Qingyang. As we deciphered her unpunctuated sentences and characters with bits missing, we had our worst fears confirmed. The fighting had spread strife throughout the countryside, the peasants were at war, and my paternal grandfather was right in the middle. He was attacked because he used to be a businessman and had owned a plot of land. First his house in Qingyang was confiscated and he and Grandmother were left with only one room while other families moved in. Next the rebels slaughtered his chickens, rabbits and goats to “cut off his capitalist tail,” that is, deprive him of his sideline. When he tried to stop the crazed rebels from tearing down the “bourgeois” grave mounds of his mother, his first wife and my parents, he was so badly beaten that he had to be carried home on a door, and had been confined to bed ever since. Not long after, Grandfather died of his injuries.
He was cremated, against his and Grandmother’s will. The rosewood coffin he had had made when he turned fifty was broken up by the rebels and sold for making furniture. Preparing one’s own funeral far ahead of time was traditional, and many believed that the better provided you were, the later the funeral would occur. I had seen Great-Aunt making her tiny red silk burial shoes even before she retired, each with a ladder stitched on the sole to help her climb to heaven. The Red Guards had labelled this tradition as “belonging to the Four Olds,” and punished it severely. My neighbour Granny Ningbo had been made to walk down our lane wearing all her burial outfit, followed by jeering children, then to throw the clothing into a bonfire. She died soon after the humiliation. I wondered, in Grandfather’s case, how great a part humiliation had played in his death, as he was a well-known and highly respected resident of Qingyang before the rebels attacked him.
By the time my sixteenth birthday approached, the country’s food productivity had dropped alarmingly. In the countryside, Auntie Yi-feng wrote, crops were neglected or not sown at al
l. “Better to have proletarian weeds than capitalist seeds,” screamed the posters. Hunger began to stalk the country again.
Probably because he realized the damage caused by the chaos across China, Mao urged us to, “Grasp revolution in one hand, boost productivity with the other,” and called upon young people to “resume classes while continuing to make revolution.” In May, after two years of idleness, I received a letter authorized by the Mao Ze-dong Thought Propaganda Team calling me back to school.
I welcomed an end to boredom and wasted time, but I knew it was not the end of harassment from the Red Guards, so I went back with mixed feelings. Ai Guo Middle School was then in the hands of a new administration, composed of politically appointed workers, none of them qualified to run a school. Their leader required the teachers and students to address her as Master Ma. There was no sign whatever that classes would resume, as my letter had said. The teachers who had survived the cruel attacks from their own students and colleagues did not dare to teach. The students, after two years of challenging authority and humiliating their teachers, found it hard to sit down again. Most of our textbooks had been labelled “poisonous weeds,” but there were no new ones to replace them.
So, despairing that I would never get enough education to try the university entrance exams, I submitted once again to the required reading of newspapers and Mao’s quotations. Not long after the recall, I found out the real reason for it: we were all—the entire school population—being de-enrolled in July! There were to be no exams: they had been abolished as “bourgeois tools” used to “discriminate against working-class children by barring them from higher learning.” We had to leave the school to make room for younger kids like my little sister, who had never been to middle school but would be a second-year student as soon as she walked in the door, and graduate a year later.