by Fang Lizhi
These lyrics not only transported my imagination; they also taught me that there was another kind of spirit in the world, a spirit different from the ones that were worshipped in the temples of peach gardens where people take brotherhood oaths. It was the spirit of freedom. This spirit asked for no kowtows from monks or nuns, no offerings of fish or meat.
And just like that, my own spirit was swept away in this dreamlike song.
4. MY PRIME MOVERS
On the last Sunday in September 1987, there was a celebration of the eightieth anniversary of the founding of my high school, the Beijing Fourth High School. This remarkable school began as an experiment in new-style education after the collapse of China’s imperial civil service examinations in 1905. At first it was called Shuntian High School and took students only from the twenty-four counties of Shuntian prefecture. The name change to Fourth High School came with the 1911 revolution, and from then on students had to pass an exam to get in. The school was perennially one of the best in the city, and its eightieth-anniversary celebration made for an extraordinary gathering.
At nine in the morning, a crowd of three or four thousand Fourth High students, as young as current juniors and seniors and as old as alumni in their sixties and seventies, crowded onto the school’s athletic field. The sunshine of early autumn was still intense enough to redden faces and draw perspiration from young and old alike, and this solar egalitarianism helped, along with the festive atmosphere, to erase all distinctions of age and occupation. Everyone was a Fourth High student—that was all that mattered.
Some of the liveliest people in the crowd were ones who had been known during their school years as troublemakers, and they were using the occasion to retell incidents of their misbehavior as glorious achievements. Practical jokes were remembered with relish, and the best stories brought rafter-rattling laughter. Spirits soared as alumni recalled what it was like before the fetters of adult life brought an end to an era when it was okay to be naughty. And true enough, I thought—high school indeed is a time when mischief is a sign of budding intelligence. If a reunion doesn’t remember the mischief, what, exactly, would be more worth remembering?
My own record of mischief in both junior and senior high school was mediocre. After graduating from elementary school in 1946, I went into an ordinary Beijing junior high school. Standards in the ordinary schools were low, though, so I registered for the test to get into Fourth High. I began at Fourth High at midyear in seventh grade and stayed through twelfth. In 1952, when I graduated, I had been at Fourth High continuously for five and a half years, and this made me a full-fledged Fourth High alumnus—except, I have to admit, by the mischief standard. I had no record there. I was a rule follower.
On that morning in 1987, as I was reminiscing, with a certain regret, on my poor record in practical jokes, I was unaware that a huge one was brewing right under my nose.
It was about 10:30 a.m., and out on the athletic field the formal reunion program was already under way. Representatives of the classes, one by one, were going to the podium to say a few words. Wit of every kind, including political innuendo, was richly on display, and the audience loved it. But the mood changed abruptly when the chair of the event announced that we would hear next from a representative of the parents, Mr. Wang Zhen. The collective gulp was almost audible. This Mr. Wang was famous in intellectual circles—not just because he was about to assume the post of vice chair of the People’s Republic of China, but because he had recently called for killing people. During the large political campaign in 1987 to “Oppose Bourgeois Liberalism,” this man Wang, who had begun adult life as a bandit and later turned into a “Communist,” had openly proposed “killing off a few hundred thousand” as the way to handle the bourgeois liberal intellectuals. And now this man, the astonished crowd was asking itself, is our “parental representative”?
If Wang, like the others that day, had chosen to reminisce—if he had shared stories about how he had robbed and pillaged during his bandit years—he might still have attracted an interested audience. But he did not, alas, know his strength, and instead of telling stories he actually tried to assume the pose of “the great parent” and preach to this group of current and former whiz kids. His oration, which floated free from both logic and grammar, served only to certify to his audience that, no, this person would not have gotten into Fourth High as a student. In short, in only a few moments he had made himself the perfect target for Fourth High pranksters. If they let such a golden opportunity slip by, when would there ever be a better one? Go for it!
And so it was, as the portentous Mr. Wang was reaching the zenith of his oration, that I noticed a number of youngish Fourth High graduates suddenly around me, pointing and grinning in my direction. Uh-oh! I thought. They’re going to make me the star in a prank. That fear occurred to me because just a few months earlier, I had been expelled from the Communist Party for “bourgeois liberalism” and the news had dominated television broadcasts for many days on end; so now, if I was reading correctly what these pranksters were up to, I was headed into the whirlpool of bourgeois liberalism again. And sure enough, more and more young bourgeois liberals stopped paying attention to the great parent at the podium and started sidling over to me to ask for autographs. At first they came in a trickle, then in groups. The activity was distracting, and before long the student monitors who were in charge of keeping order came over, but on learning what it was about, they asked for autographs, too. Then even more people gathered. An entire wing of the audience now was not listening to Wang’s speech at all. The two men chairing the event—the Communist Party secretary of Fourth High, who had been my classmate in school, and the vice principal, who had been two grades below me—could see that something was seriously wrong and hurried off stage to try to fix it. Setting aside our relationship as former schoolmates, they grabbed my arms like two policemen, one on the left, one on the right, and escorted me out. Their objective was to end the disturbance by removing the element that was causing it, but their own very conspicuous action only added fuel to the flames. Now a large group of students and alumni was crowding around, and when my escorts and I left the athletic field, this whole crowd went with us. The exodus was large enough that it looked like a planned event. So many people were crowding around me during those moments that I could not get a good look at how Mr. Wang, the killer parent, was doing up on stage. From what people told me later, I gather that the “disturbance” deflated his balloon almost completely.
After the kerfuffle I was stuck in the principal’s office at Fourth High, signing autographs, until about 2:00 p.m. When I finally left and walked out of the campus, where so many unforgettable memories of my high school years were rooted, I took a moment to recall that this was the place where I had made two of the most basic choices in my life: physics and Communism. These two forces were the prime movers that determined most of the rest of my life. At first the two had seemed unrelated, but gradually it emerged that they were contradictory in their underlying natures. As their incompatibility became more obvious and intense over the ensuing years, I was turned, step by step, from the rule follower that I had been in my youth to a role player in “disturbances” like the one that had occurred today. This shift had happened because physics, like the other natural sciences, takes skepticism as a virtue, while Communism asks one to adopt unquestioning belief. This generated problems.
During the last three years of the 1940s—which for me were grades seven through nine—belief in Communism swept through China like the circular wind cloud that an atomic blast creates. On the battlefields, the People’s Liberation Army seemed able to sweep away the Nationalist troops of the Kuomintang (KMT)—some surrendering, others fleeing—as if they were so much trash. The Communist armies could do this, moreover, without any heavy equipment, whereas the KMT troops had tanks and armored vehicles. The tide turned toward the Communists on the ideological battlefield even before it did on the physical battlefields. Almost all the intellectuals and
college students became sympathizers, supporters, or even worshippers of Communism—even without reading any Marx, Engels, Hegel, or Feuerbach. The energy in their sympathies came much less from the discovery of new truth than from a wish to jettison a moribund regime.
The image and prestige of the KMT government and its leader, Chiang Kai-shek, were fairly good when the war with Japan ended in 1945. At that time even Mao Zedong shouted “Long Live Generalissimo Chiang” in public. Very soon, though, incompetence, corruption, and a dictatorial style brought a nosedive in popular support for the KMT. Inflation was so bad that prices jumped more than once a day. People rushed to get rid of KMT banknotes before their value fell even further, and eventually the “get rid of it” mania extended to the KMT regime itself.
At first I was just a bystander to all this. My first direct experience came on the afternoon of May 22, 1947. It was a typical early-summer day in Beijing—windless, warm, and a great day for softball. After school a few of my friends and I went out to the athletic field (the same one where the “disturbance” I have just described would take place forty years later) to pick up a game. In the second inning, someone came running and shouting, “Police have surrounded the school!” We threw down our bats and ran over to the main building. A gaggle of students, from our school and others, were crowding around the auditorium. The police had already left, but some of the older students whom the police had clubbed were still there. Some heads were smeared with blood.
Asking around, I learned this: two days earlier, on May 20, students had demonstrated at the central government offices in Nanjing and were beaten by police. (This was known as the “May 20th Incident.”) Now, on May 22, students from Peking, Tsinghua, Yenching, and Peiyang Universities had come to Fourth High for a rally in support of the Nanjing students and to tell the truth about what had happened on May 20. The Beijing authorities had ordered the police to break up the rally, and they did this by surrounding Fourth High and using ropes to tie down the students who were scheduled to speak. Some students had been wounded by bayonets. I had almost no political consciousness at the time and did not understand the political meaning of what was going on. But seeing the bloodied heads of students turned my sympathies unambiguously in their direction.
This early brush with politics did not pull me in much deeper, though. What consumed me at the time (other than softball) was a little-known book called Youth Guide to the Manufacture of Electronic Devices. It was about three hundred pages long and covered everything from how to install doorbells and light fixtures to how to make voltage converters and electric motors. It even told you how to build a radio. Fascinated, I followed every one of its recipes, start to finish. The book also introduced some scientific theory. The foundations of my understanding of electricity came from this book.
One of the first neat ideas that I grasped was that as long as you make extra-sure that a circuit is not complete, there is no danger at all in using your bare hands to touch a wire that can carry 220 volts. I used this knowledge to impress my peers and smaller children. There was a lot of publicity in those days about the dangers of electricity, and people had the idea that only a real expert could know how to handle an electric wire safely. So I devised a little performance, which was to casually (well—not so casually, actually) pick up a wire and let everyone see how unafraid I was. My younger audiences gaped in amazement and admiration. To them this was proof that I could overpower electricity. Even adults were impressed with my electrical credentials. When gadgets broke, they would bring them to me for repair.
The hardest part of building anything electrical, or repairing it, was finding parts. It was prohibitively expensive to buy new ones, so my main supply came from old or broken things that I found at home or in the homes of neighbors. Occasionally I cannibalized from devices that were still in use, and after that my family and neighbors had no choice but to rely on me, because I had changed the circuitry in their equipment and only I understood it. Another source for me was junk dealers who sold used radio parts, most of which were from Japanese or U.S. military equipment. The dealers spread these parts out on the ground, regardless of size or value, and from a distance the stuff looked like rubbish. But if you knew what you were doing there was treasure there. Some large capacitors that I found there were still useful to me even after I graduated from college.
During high school my mother always gave me lunch money, but I sometimes skipped lunch and saved the money to buy parts. My first radio was built from lunch money. My mother didn’t know about the meal skipping until she saw the radio, and that brought me a good scolding. What angered her was not my deception, but the loss to my body of all those lunches. Actually, though, I hadn’t lost much in total calories, because every time I skipped lunch I gorged myself at dinner—or, if I planned in advance, would fill up on a big breakfast. The pattern had the additional benefit of providing me with a useful ability: even today I can eat a huge meal and then skip one or two with no problem.
The pinnacle of my building electronic devices was a hyper-heterodyne radio receiver. The next natural step would have been a radio transmitter, but that was too dangerous. With the civil war on, any unofficial broadcast—even within the bandwidth designated for amateurs—could be suspected of passing messages for the Communists. This was my first experience of political intrusion upon a completely apolitical interest.
My grades weren’t very good during my days of tinkering with radios. They hit bottom in seventh and eighth grade. I did pass, in both language and mathematics, but my grades were always in the low range. In eighth grade my score on the algebra final was only 60, and I almost had to stay back a year because of it. But then for some reason—I can’t explain it—a change came over me in the summer between eighth and ninth grade. I was smitten by the elegant logic of plane geometry and spent the whole month and a half of summer recess in the company of a ninth-grade geometry textbook. I scoured every page and did every exercise, and after that my grades jumped dramatically. From ninth grade on, I hardly ever scored less than 100 in math.
Geometry didn’t do much for my grades in Chinese, though. I still wasn’t reading novels, even though some of my classmates were so deep into kung fu fiction—like The Seven Knights and Five Braves and Swordsmen of the Sichuan Hills—that they actually thought kung fu heroes existed and headed out into the remote mountains to find them and acquire their magical skills. Other classmates were reading the new fiction of May Fourth, especially Ba Jin’s trilogy Family, Spring, and Autumn; but to me, at age twelve, these books were too much like Dream of the Red Chamber: a vast constellation of brothers, sisters, cousins, in-laws, maids, and young masters, most with their romantic entanglements—it was all way too exhausting! The only item I found mildly attractive in Chinese class was ancient poetry. The poems were only a few characters in length, and you could memorize them. Our ninth-grade Chinese teacher came out of the old-school tradition that stressed rote memorization, and he demanded it of us. If you couldn’t recite you got a whack on the palm. The whack wasn’t hard enough to hurt, but it was embarrassing. I never got whacked because I had mastered the secret of good performance: don’t think of the meaning, just spit the syllables out, say them in rhythm, and whatever you do, don’t stop—piao-piao-he-suo-si, tian-di-yi-sha-ou—until you are done. It always worked.
Once in a while—for other reasons—I did get palm whacks, but from ninth grade on I counted as a “good student.”
I first took physics in ninth grade. Our teacher, Ms. Huang, was fresh from the physics department at Jinling College in Nanjing and was too young to keep the lid on a classroom of naughty boys. (Fourth High accepted only boys at the time.) A person needed a stern countenance to subdue such a group, and she didn’t have one. One day, for example, she was trying to explain gas pressure. She used the example of a bicycle tire and went to the blackboard to sketch a tire and valve. Her valve, though, looked more like the piston of a steam engine, and for this we boys made huge fun of her behind he
r back. All of us rode bicycles—very rickety ones, usually—so we all knew about bicycle maintenance, and tires got deflated all the time. Nothing was more familiar to us than tire valves. Maybe our teacher didn’t ride bicycles, so was sketching more from imagination than from rich experience like ours. Anyway, we all had great fun asking each other where one could buy a bicycle tire that looked like the one she had drawn. She was my first physics teacher, and I remember her fondly, both when I am repairing bicycles and when I am not.
Near the end of 1948 our school was forced to suspend classes for a month and a half. Beijing was under siege by the People’s Liberation Army, and General Fu Zuoyi, the commander of the KMT’s Northern Headquarters for the Extermination of Bandits, expropriated the campus of Fourth High as an artillery base. Soldiers moved into our classrooms and then went to the athletic field (yes, that same athletic field), where they set up a dozen or so 100-millimeter cannons with which to bombard the Communist troops in the suburbs. We students were allowed onto the campus so long as we didn’t go onto the athletic field. So much for softball.
It was during this extended break that I secretly joined the Federation of Democratic Youth (FDY). This was one of two front organizations (the other was called the Alliance of Democratic Youth) that the Communist Party set up to attract young people and to recruit activists. All Communist activity in the KMT-controlled areas during those years was underground; a Party member, if exposed, went to jail or was executed.
The two student front organizations worked mostly on university campuses. Fourth High was not a university, but it was famous (which is why Mr. Wang Zhen wanted to be a “parent” there), and it was located right next to the Peking University medical school. Fourth High witnessed as many student movements as most university campuses did, and it had underground members of the Communist Party and the FDY as early as anyone else. These groups had been the organizers of the May 22 demonstration.