by Fang Lizhi
I was denounced, too, and also had to listen to some catcalls of “Phony!” but I was never officially labeled a rightist. This was only because Peking University was no longer my “work unit.” I was under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Deng Xiaoping had not visited the Academy, so he had not honored it with extra percentage points in its quota for rightists. The Academy’s original 5 percent had already been filled up. All the “rightist hats” had been distributed to others, and there was none left for me.
Still, it was a splendid success: in a single blow an entire gang that had planned one whole letter that had never been mailed was completely annihilated. Ni Wansun was fired from the university and sent to do labor reform. He returned to his post twenty-two years later. Li Shuxian was kept at the university as a “teacher by negative example”—a euphemism for a political pariah. In December I was expelled from the reactor research team and assigned to a farming village to do labor.
News of other great annihilations came in one by one. That classmate of mine at Fourth High who liked to play leading roles on stage had entered the Chinese Department at Peking University, and then, after graduation, had gone to work at the Central Academy of Drama. From time to time he sent me theater tickets, for everything from the Western opera La Traviata to a Sichuan opera version of The Dough-Kneading Jug. Then suddenly the tickets stopped coming. He had been made a rightist. Hou Depeng, the color-blind physicist, went to work at the Party’s Central Propaganda Department after emerging from Postbox 546. He and his colleagues started a discussion salon there, which I attended a couple of times. Then it suddenly stopped. Hou’s name appeared in the People’s Daily in the first group of rightists to be named. People who have studied the question say that about a third of the one hundred members of the class of 1956 of the Peking University physics department ended up labeled as rightists. The “degree of trust” for our cohort had plummeted.
This was also the point at which the stock of the Communist Party of China itself reached an apex and began a slide toward its low point.
7. LIFE IN THE FIELDS
In the early 1980s, during a trip to Europe, I was chatting with some physicist colleagues about where we had been in life and commented that I had worked several times in the fields. One of them was puzzled, wondering why I had used the plural for “field.”
“You mean field, right? Field theory.”
It made me think that English has a defect here. How can a single word be used for such different concepts as “field” in physics and the places where farmers work? Maybe the confusion never arises for my English-speaking colleagues because, for them, it is so unlikely to have worked in both kinds of field. But for us Chinese physicists it was fairly common. From the 1950s through the 1970s I was sent from physics study to farms four different times.
My first trip—from December 1957 to August 1958—was simultaneously a very serious matter and a relaxing break.
Near the end of the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leader announced that “cadres should go to the countryside for manual labor.” I was named to go, and for me history seemed to be repeating itself. I had been in the first cohort to join the Communist Youth League and now I was in another first group. And there was more to the parallel: just as I had been, according to the rules, too young to join the League, now my status as “cadre” also fell short of proper standards. In Communist terminology, “cadre” and “masses” are correlative terms: a “cadre” means an administrator and “masses” means people who are administered. The phrase “cadres go to the countryside for labor” means, in theory, that officials go down among the people whom they rule, joining in their labors and savoring their pains and pleasures. On the face of it this is a good thing to do, and at first it seemed an honor. For a low-ranking science intern like me to be viewed as a “sent-down cadre” was a major and unexpected boost.
As it turned out, the high-ranking Communist cadres selflessly allowed all of the honor to go to us low-ranking types. Not one among the high-ranking saw fit to join. Most of the several dozen who went from our Institute of Modern Physics were young. The two other honorees from my own research group were a research intern (like me) and a laboratory worker. The post of lab worker was as low-ranking as one could get, yet this man was viewed as a “cadre” who could be sent down. Later it became apparent that all of the people who received the special honor were ones who had “had problems”—meaning political problems—during the recent Anti-Rightist Movement. From day one, in other words, it was clear that being sent down was in fact a form of punishment—wrapped in “honor,” but a punishment in fact.
In mid-December we gathered at the Qianmen Railway Station in Beijing, loaded down with our luggage, ready to head for villages to the south. There were plenty of higher-ranking cadres in attendance—but only to see us off. They pinned on each of us a big red flower of the kind that, in imperial times, were for scholars who had passed the civil service exams or for grooms at weddings. Their words of congratulation, encouragement, and best wishes gushed and swirled, generating a most lively atmosphere. It truly seemed that we were receiving a high honor, as if we were the first group of passengers headed for paradise. Later, in reading history, I learned that “honor-plus-punishment” was not an invention of the Communist Party of China but a standard technique of earlier Chinese authoritarians. In the fourteenth century, Zhu Yuanzhang, the first Ming emperor, while executing his chief marshal, Xu Da, at the same time erected a monument in honor of Xu. This huge lonely monument still stands on the outskirts of Nanjing.
Li Shuxian was among the people who saw me off at the rail station. She didn’t say anything in our last poignant moments together, but it was profoundly comforting to me that she was there.
The village to which I was assigned was in Nanxingguo Township in Zanhuang County, Hebei Province. Zanhuang County spans the eastern foothills of the Taihang Mountains; its western half is in the mountains, its eastern half on the adjacent plains. Nanxingguo is in the east. The closest rail station, about five hours south of Beijing on the Hankou line, is a little stop called Yuanshi. From there to Nanxingguo one went by horse cart. If you were lucky enough to find one of the two-horse carts that had rubber tires, it was a bit more than a hour away.
It was dusk by the time the cart carrying the three of us reached the village. No one seemed to be there. No dogs, either. Not even a whisper of green was on the earth—just grayish black. Very few trees. On the flat, dull-looking fields, a few branches that looked as if they had survived some kind of disaster were sticking up here and there. There were no lights in the village. In the distance loomed the dim silhouette of what looked like a giant rock, crouched on the plain like something that prehistory had left behind. Could this be what the foothills of the Taihang Mountains, in that song “On the Taihang Mountains,” which had so moved me in grade school, really looked like? The beautiful feeling that the song had planted inside me suddenly evaporated.
Too desolate, too destitute—that is the only memory I have of my first impression of the place. In my youth the idea of material hardship had never really bothered me; I had even entertained romantic daydreams about living in rough and risky conditions. But what now lay before me was not riskiness or roughness but only dull, sluggish poverty. It was a life that demanded nothing of intelligence or courage, a life any dullard could keep passing through, mechanically, without disaster but without anything else of note, either. It had been this way for a thousand years—perhaps two thousand. The place got the name Zanhuang, which means “praise the emperor,” when an emperor happened to pass through a few centuries ago. After that the wheel of life kept turning without change. The glorious visit had all but decreed that there be no change.
The three of us moved into a vacant room in the home of the village head. It had no electricity—just like the rest of the village. We slept on an earthen platform bed, which, because it was of one piece with the exterior ground, had to be thoroughly heated every night. We immedia
tely fell ill with colds if we didn’t do this. Even people who can swim in January cannot tolerate the cold that seeps through the ground during Hebei winters.
Platform beds are warmed by lighting fires in a cavity beneath their surfaces. The main fuel in our village was wheat stalks, and it was very hard to get them to burn if they got damp. Matches were in short supply, so flint stones were the usual way to light the stalks, and we learned how to use them. First you lay a little roll of fluffy paper on the ground, then knock a small iron block against a flint stone to produce sparks that fall onto it. If you do it right, the sparks will bring the paper up to the combustion point, and it will begin to smolder flamelessly. You then blow gently on the paper to lure flameless combustion into flamed combustion. Then you apply your little flame to dry straw, let it grow, and use it to light the wheat stalks, which then produce a larger flame. You have to keep blowing—now softer, now harder—at every stage of the process. It takes considerable lung power to keep the fire going. (It may be that the reason why eagles had to keep coming to eat Prometheus’s liver was to reduce his ability to blow and to steal fire for humanity.)
Water technology in the village was only slightly ahead of fire technology. The only water supply was from a well that was about thirty feet deep. A windlass at the top of the well was used to draw buckets of water from below. It worked on human power exclusively, but it worked well enough that human power sufficed. The hard part was to be sure that the empty bucket, when lowered into the well, landed on the water’s surface upside down so that it would sink into the water and fill completely. If that maneuver failed, the bucket might fill only halfway, or might even float on the surface without filling at all. It is by no means easy to control the orientation of an object thirty feet down when one’s only connection to it is a soft rope. It took me more than two weeks of practice to master the necessary remote control techniques. During those days, as I toiled at the wellhead, experimenting with water buckets as Isaac Newton once had, I thought: How many other physicists have had this kind of connection with Newton’s buckets?
Because it lay on the flat land in the eastern part of Zanhuang County, Nanxingguo was materially better off than neighboring places. I had a high school classmate who had been working at the Institute of Philosophy in Beijing when he was sent down to the hills in the western part of Zanhuang County. Where he was, there were not even wells. Rain was the only water source. The villagers dug deep pits to hold runoff, and the resulting ponds provided water for drinking as well as every other use. In winters, when the rains stopped, the ponds ran low and the use of water for any purpose except drinking was strictly prohibited. My philosopher classmate went four months without washing his face or rinsing his mouth. Maybe this fit him as a philosopher, I thought. In high school we gave him the nickname of “the thinker” because he liked to imitate the pose of Rodin’s famous sculpture. He often seemed lost in thought, in a world all his own. It may have been that life in the remote mountains, without face washing or mouth rinsing, brought him closer to the rarefied terrain that philosophers explore.
Some of the non-philosophers in our sent-down group decided they couldn’t take it anymore and absconded. The laboratory worker who was sent down with me headed back to Beijing on his own after a month and never returned. But most of the sent-down, including me, stuck it out and gradually adapted because we really did believe that tempering ourselves in desolate and primitive conditions was the only way to make our souls more saintly.
We all knew that the reason we had been sent down was that our thinking needed reform. Those who had been criticized in the Anti-Rightist Movement were especially vulnerable to guilt feelings. They often felt that only heavy and bitter physical labor could help them to redeem their errors and begin life again. It is important to realize that this guilt mentality was sincere; it was not feigned. Many people set to work feverishly as soon as they arrived. The toughest job? The dirtiest? I’ll do it! They seemed to feel there was a direct correlation between how hard they worked and how much error they were redeeming.
Still, for many, the question “Am I really wrong? Really guilty?” recurred from time to time. The problem was that two principles, each irreproachable in its own right, and seemingly as irrefutable as Kant’s categorical imperative, were in conflict. Principle one was logic. When the Party called for annihilation of the “three evils” (bureaucratism, dogmatism, and subjectivism), the students who dared to ask what produced the three evils were automatically labeled “rightists.” But what was wrong with asking the question? Were we to believe that phenomena exist without causes? Principle two was Mao and the Party. Whatever happened, there could be no doubt that Mao and the Party were correct. It was faith. Mao had personally launched the Anti-Rightist Movement, so the rightist views he was criticizing had to have something wrong with them.
Fatigue and exhaustion from labor might have worked on me as a sort of narcotic, helping me temporarily to set aside this nettlesome dilemma, but that did nothing to help resolve it.
Then another shock arrived, and this one was harder to absorb. On January 2, 1958, I received a letter from Li Shuxian in which she wrote that she had been formally expelled from the Communist Party at the end of 1957. We had seen this coming, because Deng Xiaoping had already said in his reports on the Anti-Rightist Movement that all “rightist elements” within the Party would be purged.
One problem was that I was still a Party member. According to the principles of class struggle, there was not the slightest question about what I should do—I should sever ties with Li Shuxian. A member of the Communist Party could not be in love with a class enemy, and rightists, by definition, were class enemies. The rule was merciless. How many loving couples were forced by the Anti-Rightist Movement to separate abruptly and become nothing more than passersby on the street? No one knows. All the tender feelings they had had were of no use. Among my colleagues and friends who faced this terrible dilemma, not one escaped. All were forced to make public shows of “clean breaks” with their romantic partners.
Now it was our turn to face the question. On January 4, 1958, I left Nanxingguo and returned to Beijing.1 I went to Peking University, where the Yan Garden campus lay under a deathly pall. The alternatives for Li Shuxian and me were stark: be true to our political faith and separate, or be true to our feelings and stay together. Fate awaited and time was short. I can no longer remember how much we said to each other during the forty-eight sleepless hours that ensued. (Perhaps she can recall more than I, and perhaps will leave a fuller account in memoirs of her own.) But I do recall that the stare of grim reality somehow made us more clear-eyed and rational. In the end it was not completely our political faith, and not completely our feelings of love, but more the guidance of reason that led us to our decision: we would “freeze” our love. What did “freeze” mean? Even now we cannot put it into precise terms, but the word did allow us to find a path across the complexly interconnected landscape of the disaster we found ourselves in. Eventually the tactic did allow us to reconnect, safely and happily.
During the “freeze” we stopped writing letters and cut off all connection in space and time. The connection between our hearts was somewhere else, outside space and time.
When I went back to Nanxingguo I understood things more deeply, and my mood was calm. I threw myself into labor. It was the coldest time of the year, and the village was digging a well. Daytime temperatures peaked around 25 degrees, and a wind blew from the north. The ground was frozen, and we followed the tradition in Chinese well digging of doing it all by hand. Two dozen or so of the strongest men in the village did the basic labor, while another two dozen or so people, some of whom were women, worked in assisting roles.
The first step in building a well the Nanxingguo way is to dig a pit about thirty-five feet deep and nearly twenty-five feet in diameter. At some time more than three hundred million years ago, the foothills of the Taihang Mountains had been a sea beach. This explains why, when we reached
a depth of six or seven feet, we began finding pebbles that had been carried from the mountains by rivers that had flowed into the sea. The deeper we dug, the larger the stones were, until, beyond twenty feet down, they were a foot or more in diameter and very hard to remove. Even the strongest workers among us could not keep at it for more than an hour at a time, so we organized ourselves into teams of five and took turns going to the bottom of the shaft in one-hour shifts. This was the most efficient method of energy allocation.
At a depth of twenty-five to thirty feet the roundish stones were fewer and we encountered sand. This was the ancient sand of that original beach. The great scholar of the Song period Shen Kuo (1031–1095) had dug seashells in this area, but we had no inclination to follow him in this amusement because our work was already getting too dangerous. The walls of the pit were beginning to cave, and stones of various sizes often tumbled down. The safety gear for a worker at the bottom of the pit was a stiff hat woven from strips of willow.
At depths beyond thirty feet, water began seeping into the well bottom, and that created the difficult task of scooping out wet sand. If any sand remained at the bottom, seepage into the well would be slow, and it is precisely the rate of seepage—the amount of water that enters a well per unit time—that defines a well’s quality.
I joined in the sand scooping. At the beginning of this well project, we “sent-down cadres” had been assigned—along with the women, the old, and the feeble—to do assistant work. The farmers couldn’t trust our mettle, so they gave us the lighter work. To me, though, descending the well seemed a romantic challenge. I thought I could do it, persisted in saying so, and eventually was included on one of the heavy-work teams that did sand scooping.