by Fang Lizhi
The main workforce in railway construction was the Railway Militia, which was run like an army, and we transplanted intellectuals were their adjuncts. We, too, were organized into squads, platoons, and companies. We slept one platoon per tent, and it was very crowded. A person’s sleeping space was about three and a half feet wide. I slept next to my platoon leader, Cheng Fuzhen, who later became an important collaborator with me in astrophysics research. The militaristic standardization to which we were subjected had a fortuitous side effect in my case. On campus I had been a “target of the proletarian dictatorship”—very low in the caste system—but at the railroad worksite all intellectuals had the same label: “objects for reeducation.” For me, relative to others, this was actually a boost.
We were assigned to build the Lianggezhuang railroad station near Zhoukoudian. The rail line had been designed with many tunnels (perhaps because it was an important escape route?) and our work site was between two of them. One was 260 feet long, and the other, which was still being dug, would be longer. The work inside the tunnels was assigned entirely to the Railway Militia. Our job was to blast the mountainside and move loose rock to construct a flat area between two hills.
We were divided into five work details that did six-hour shifts around the clock. We worked six hours, rested twenty-four, again worked six, and so on. The six hours of work were intense and dangerous. The final task in each work shift was to blast the mountain to knock loose rocks for the next shift to work on. So each time we set out to work we had to negotiate piles of loose rock. It was easy to slip and fall, and falls were unusually hazardous because newly blasted rock is sharp. The first skill we had to learn was how to maintain our balance on sharp, unstable rock.
The actual work brought even more peril. Our job was to go to the top edge of the blasted area and push rocks downhill. We did this while people were working down below. So long as the rocks bounced down singly, the danger was still not too great. But sometimes, because the rocks were loose, pushing one would trigger a general rockslide. You can imagine the dangers for the people below. It was worse at night, when the people below could only hear, not see, the cascading rock. As they worked with their hands, their ears had to stay super-sharp. The slightest sound of a rockslide sent them scurrying for cover. Gradually, we up top learned which rock patterns were most likely to trigger rockslides and could shout advance warnings to the people below. That helped a lot.
The fallen rocks were loaded onto trolleys that ran on a temporary rail line into a valley below, where the rocks were dumped. A trolley loaded with rocks could be pushed by a single person, and that was actually fun, because when you reached the beginning of the downward slope you could hop on and coast down. Sometimes, though—maybe because the rider found it so much fun that he forgot to apply the brakes, or maybe just because the brakes failed—the cart went too fast, jumped the rails, and tumbled into the ravine.
We were lucky there were no fatalities, but there were some permanent injuries. A colleague who later worked with me in an astrophysics group had the forefinger on his right hand squashed and never could straighten it out again. That is only a minor example, of course. It is an uncanny fact that among all the injuries, not one, at least in our group, happened to any of the ox ghosts and snake spirits. I personally came through without a scratch. It was as if the Creator was shielding the pariahs of the empire.
After I got used to the work, I didn’t mind doing the night shift from midnight to six a.m. In fact I preferred it to the others. Our work was near the mountaintop, where, about four a.m., one could observe a subtle brightening at the horizon. Then it would grow, and in that limbo between seeming-bright-but-not-yet-bright, the vault of heaven announced its gentle promise of fathomless hope and yearning. Some people, when they watch sunrises, pay attention only to the moment when the sun breaks the horizon. But actually it is the black sky, when it first shows a pregnancy with light, that is most moving. Fundamentally this is the same psychological principle that makes political hats most frightening when they are impending, not when they are actually put in place.
Our railroad work ended in May. Before it was over, Li Shuxian and our elder son, Fang Ke, came to visit me. We went to visit nearby Zhoukoudian, where “Peking Man” had been discovered and where an anthropological museum had been built. Political turmoil had closed the museum, but the walls around it were low enough that even six-year-old Fang Ke could climb over them. So we visited. The sites where Peking Man’s bones had been discovered, and the caves that had been his home five hundred thousand years ago, showed no signs of revolutionary molestation. Peking Man may have been the only resident of China not to be assigned a class status.
Some people like to call the Chinese “descendants of the Yan and Huang emperors,” but in fact most Chinese are not that. Yan and Huang were two ancient areas in the Yellow River basin that conquered their neighbors and were home to the original Chinese people. But the people in the conquered populations, as well as all the “barbarians” who got mixed in later, were not “descendants of Yan and Huang.” My ancestors in Huizhou, all the way back to Fang La, cannot be called Yan-Huang descendants.
Genetically speaking, the Chinese descendants of Peking Man probably far outnumber the descendants of Yan and Huang. So perhaps we should change our cliché to call ourselves the “descendants of Peking Man.” My visit to Zhoukoudian caused me to reflect that talk about “descendants of” has nothing to do with anthropological science and much to do with politics. The phrase “descendants of Yan and Huang” was likely invented by Yan and Huang themselves, or their heirs, in order to make clear that their dominion over other human beings was anchored in bloodline. Chinese emperors in the dynasties often referred to their subjects as their “children.” But if calling the people whom one rules one’s “children” makes one an emperor, what, I asked myself, does that make today’s Communist Party of China, which openly asks that “everyone be the good sons of the Party”? The first precept for children in all the elementary schools was “Be Chairman Mao’s good child!”
I resolved to tell my own son this: “You are not Mao Zedong’s child. You are yourself.”
10. REEDUCATION AT BAGONG MOUNTAIN
The three months from May to August 1969 were very ordinary ones for our little family. In the context of the times, though, “very ordinary” counted as highly unusual.
There were four of us: our sons Fang Ke and Fang Zhe had joined Li Shuxian and me. I reflect now that during the more than twenty years since our marriage, years when the boys were born, grew up, and went off to college, China was not involved in any foreign wars. (There were, to be sure, some border skirmishes, but they did not amount to much.) You might think that a small family living during an extended period of peacetime would, whether or not it prospered, at least not be forcibly knocked apart.
But no. For our family, those three months in 1969 were the only ones we spent together in a normal way during twenty-plus years. We were divided sometimes between two locations and sometimes among three, but we were never, save those three months, together. And we were not unusual. Many people in our generation, especially intellectuals, had the same problem. It was a hallmark of Mao’s China. In our case, the silver lining was that we were merely separated—not, as others were, driven to destruction or death.
When I returned to Beijing after my work assignment at the Lianggezhuang rail station, it was the first time I had been allowed to go home in nearly a year. June 3, 1968, was the day the Red Guards had come to arrest me and other USTC ox ghosts. Our second son, Fang Zhe, was born nine days later, on June 12. So he was nearly a year old before I saw him for the first time in May 1969.
Then began our three months of ordinary life. I remained “hatted”—a target of the proletarian dictatorship—but could at least go home to sleep every night. On Sundays I could even take my boys out to Jingshan Park or Zhongshan Park and be a proper dad for a day. But those three months turned out to be a calm between two s
torms, rather like a little Lianggezhuang rail station set between two tunnels.
Even though the days were calm, I couldn’t do physics. Some of my books had been lost, and with Red Guard house raids all around us, others were hidden away; in both cases, they were inaccessible. The libraries remained closed. My spare time and energy, such as they were, went to printing photographs. I built my own photo enlarger, and it actually worked! It brought back memories of my junior high school years, when I had tried to build a pinhole camera and had failed; now, twenty years later, this homemade enlarger was my revenge. It was easy to build a darkroom then, because the nights were already very dark, and I printed a lot of photos, sometimes deep into the night. This caused no problem of sleep deficit, because my daytime hours were filled with political study sessions in which most people were half asleep anyway. I could catch up then.
The new political storm cycle began at the end of the summer of 1969, when the government issued a formal command (the so-called Lin Biao Order No. 1). It said that the Soviet Union was about to invade and war was imminent. All universities were ordered to leave Beijing as soon as possible. Peking University announced that the entire school would move eleven hundred miles south to Liyuzhou in Jiangxi Province, and other universities rushed to make their own evacuation plans. The only other time Peking University had left Beijing was in 1937, when it and other schools moved to the southwest to flee the Japanese invasion of north China. Now, thirty-two years later, there was another great migration of the universities, but the reason—the real reason—was not an imminent Soviet invasion. It was the idea, hatched at the top of the Communist Party, that peace makes people revisionist and that only struggle and war can preserve revolutionary Marxism.
Li Shuxian was in the first group to be shipped out to Jiangxi. Before she left, she, Fang Ke, and I went for one last visit to the Summer Palace. The park there is world-famous, and tourists often gape in admiration. For Li Shuxian and me the charisma had long worn off, because, in our student days, we used to go there almost every day in summer to swim, and now it was just an ordinary place. On that last day, though, we looked for pretty spots and took photos. Li Shuxian left for Jiangxi on August 29, 1969, and that day marked the end of our life as a family of four. Ke, Zhe, and I stayed in Beijing at my parents’ home.
USTC was also under orders to leave Beijing, but it was hard for school authorities to find a destination. The claim that a possible Soviet invasion was the reason for moving the universities logically implied that the universities were things to be treasured and protected, but the reality, in those politically fevered days, was the opposite. Nobody dared to receive a politically dubious thing like a university. USTC sent messengers to Sichuan, Henan, Shandong, and elsewhere looking for a temporary home—and came up empty. After three months, the only place that said yes was Nanyang City in Henan, home of Zhuge Liang, the strategy wizard famed in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Still clinging to a shred of its tradition of respect for learning, Nanyang offered USTC to move into Zhuge Liang’s very own thatched hut. A thatched hut couldn’t hold a university, though, so that didn’t work.
Other universities had the same problem. No one wanted them. They were, in effect, hanging a sign in the marketplace that said NATION’S PRECIOUS PROPERTY, FREE FOR THE TAKING, and there were no takers. But who could blame the non-takers? Mao had just summed up the universities as “shallow ponds, full of turtles”—where “turtle” was the word wangba, similar in sense to “bastard” in English. Turtle schools, full of bastards? Who would dare to want them now?
In the end, Anhui Province accepted USTC and allowed it to move to the capital city of Hefei. I’m not sure if this had anything to do with the fact that Anhui is famous for turtles. Eighty percent of the foreign currency that China was earning from the export of edible turtles was earned in Anhui. In this province, anyway, the creature’s reputation was not one hundred percent bad.
So our whole school headed for Anhui. The evacuation process was rushed and a bit ragged—almost as if a foreign invasion really were the reason for it. We later calculated that about half of the university’s equipment was destroyed in the move. Who needed an invader? We had wrecked half our luggage all by ourselves.
My own departure took place in January 1970, right after the Chinese New Year. Leaving Ke and Zhe with my parents, I headed for Anhui with some colleagues and students from USTC’s physics department. Li Shuxian would be transferred back to Peking University in 1971, and although I applied many times for a transfer back to Beijing, it was never approved, so our family life from this point forward was limited to short visits during vacations.
It turned out that Anhui’s willingness to take USTC was not part of any plan to strengthen education in Anhui. Local universities had suspended classes four years earlier, and there were no plans to resume them. The place of professors in the province was not to educate but to receive proletarian reeducation. The train that took us to Anhui did not even stop in Hefei. It brought us straight to the mining region in southern Anhui to receive reeducation from coal miners.
The coal mines were near Bagong Mountain—“mountain of the eight lords.” This was where, in the fourth century A.D., Emperor Fu Jian of the Former Qin Dynasty led an invasion of the Eastern Jin. When he reached the city of Shouyang he ascended the city wall to survey the enemy troops. There were no telescopes then, but Fu Jian, peering out, could descry a fearsome gathering of Jin soldiers in the distance. Behind them, arrayed on the mountainsides, he thought he could make out support troops, extending apparently without limit, swaying in readiness. Fu Jian was shocked, ordered a retreat, and later was defeated in what became known in history as the great Battle of the Fei River.
It later turned out that his defeat had to do with poor eyesight. There had been no Jin fighters on those hills. The swaying things were grasses and trees, not people. This is the story behind the Chinese idiom “every leaf and limb a soldier,” used for satirizing paranoia, and Fu Jian has been a laughingstock for centuries. But wait. Didn’t he have excellent company in today’s world? Hadn’t the Great Commander of today—even with the advantage of telescopes—ordered a massive retreat without ever laying eyes on an actual enemy soldier?
When we got to Bagong Mountain it was bare. There was no sign of any swaying grasses or trees. Collapsed mines had caused cave-ins here and there, leaving the surface a patchwork of unsightly undulations, like a mangy bald head. It was hard to imagine the famed ancient battle site. But the walls of Shouyang city, higher than most, were still intact, and it was still possible to imagine Fu Jian standing atop them, peering out at the mountain.
We were assigned to the Xiesan mine, which had been built in the 1950s using Soviet technology and was one of the most productive in southern Anhui. Most of its daily output of two to three thousand tons of high-quality coal was shipped to Shanghai.
Lesson one in our reeducation was to descend the mines and dig coal. Men over fifty-five and women were exempted, but for others it was compulsory.
My first descent remains the clearest in my memory. We changed into full miners’ gear, including headlamps, then got into cable cars that descended vertically into the mountain. There were two mining levels at Xiesan, one a bit more than three hundred feet down, and the other about a thousand. We went to the higher level first.
A miner met us there and led us to the active digging area. The main tunnel was about fifty feet wide and was equipped with lights. It looked rather like a subway tunnel. The branch tunnels, though, had no lights except for the headlamps of miners, and the narrow paths could be negotiated only single file. We followed one another in the dark, paying especially close attention to the swaying beam of light cast by the person in front. This was the only sign of where to go, and any deviation could be costly. The web of tunnels was complex, and if you were not careful you could get lost, and that—if you wandered into an area filled with gas—could cost you your life. Where the tunnels curved, the person in front o
f you might momentarily disappear, leaving you in total darkness except for your own lamp. It was important not to panic when that happened.
The closer we got to the digging area, the tougher the going was. Eventually there was no path, just tunnels of various sizes, some so small that only one person could crawl through at a time. The digging area itself was more expansive. It was a space about seven feet high, twenty feet wide, and more than a hundred feet long. Tightly packed columns of steel rods held it in place. At intervals along that hundred-foot stretch—called a “palm,” in mining argot—miners were digging coal.
I discovered that coal digging in some ways resembles rock digging for railway construction. First, chunks of coal are blasted loose. Then miners use shovels to toss the loose lumps onto a conveyor belt—called a “slipper”—that runs the length of the palm. Coal is less heavy than rock, so this digging was easier labor. The drawback in the mines is that you can’t enjoy the scene of a torrent of rock cascading down a mountainside. Inside the pitch blackness, you can’t see anything but the coal under your feet and the moving slipper. You can barely even see the miner next to you, which probably explains why there is very little conversation. Normally there are no sounds except those of shovels hitting coal and the grinding of the conveyor belt.
I remember an incident when the eerie silence was broken. One of the intellectuals being reeducated accidentally stepped onto the conveyor belt, stumbled, and got carried along with the coal. He might have suffered the same fate as the coal itself if other people, farther down the line, had not heard his cries and pulled him off. But the utter blackness that had endangered his life had also, thankfully, saved his pride, because there could of course be no eyewitnesses to the ridiculous spectacle of a man riding a conveyor belt on a pile of coal. When it was over, everybody went back to silent digging.