by Fang Lizhi
Oops! Time to add coal again.
There was not much politics in our work at the brick factory. In theory we were still targets of the dictatorship, undergoing “remolding.” But other than assigning an old artisan to direct our labor, the authorities pretty much left us alone. They may have concluded by then that we were unreformable.
If so, they were largely right. Five years of Cultural Revolution had left me certain that there was no way at all I could accept the slightest remolding by the regime. This was as clear to me as the principle of not going back to eye skills once you have pyrometers. So farewell, political dreams of youth! I wrote in a letter to Li Shuxian: In recent times we seem to be returning to those clear-headed days of the early 1950s. The innocence is gone, but that cool feeling of confident candor is similar. Leaving the naïveté behind gave me a new sense of assurance.
With the illusions set aside, the mandatory pretense that one still believed them turned into farce. Every morning at the brick factory there was a five-minute exercise during which we were asked to “confess our crimes before Chairman Mao.” The form of the exercise, as in some religions, was collective confession. The twelve of us who bore guilt stood in silence, heads bowed, before a portrait of Mao. In theory each of us was recounting our crimes in silence before the Great Leader. What was actually going on inside the minds of those professors and lecturers, though, was anyone’s guess. There may have been no thoughts at all, but just an observation, perhaps, of a fly crawling across the sacred visage …
People like us were known to the authorities as “old oil oxen”: “old” because we’d seen it all, so were not easily frightened; “oil” because using extreme tactics on us was about as effective as using a knife to cut oil; and “oxen” because trying to use ideological persuasion on us was like singing to a cow.
Right through the 1980s, when I exchanged letters with my friends from the brick factory days we addressed each other as “Dear O3,” which was our abbreviation for the English words “old, oil, ox.” The incorrigibility of O3 was, at bottom, the irreversibility of science. Science advances only on mechanics that are intrinsic to science; it does not—cannot—go into reverse because of any nonscientific force, however strong. The historian of science George Sarton has commented that of all the areas of human endeavor, science is the only one that always moves forward—even if, sometimes, the forward movement is slow. The brick factory was a crystallization of this principle: trying to use two-thousand-year-old technology to “remold” the precision of mathematical formulae simply does not work.
We objects of remolding did not mind moving backward in all sorts of ways as long as science remained pristine. On the outside, we looked every bit the part of criminals who were undergoing reform: ragged clothes, bodies covered in clay and coal bits, faces caked with ash and dust. Out on the streets, while hauling clay or coal, we usually wore those same dull expressions of indifference to dirt and exhaustion that people who have to haul for a living often wear. People who did not know us would never guess by looking at us that we were highfalutin professors. Unless, of course, they were suddenly to ask:
“Hey, you guys know about the Taylor expansion?”
“How about showing us a few Maxwell equations?”
I would have been ready. In my spare hours during those brick making days, I was deep into Maxwell’s equations in curved space-time.
In August 1971, a severe heat wave put many departments into temporary shutdown. We labor convicts were not eligible for vacations, but because the master brick worker also thought the weather was too hot and wanted to take a few days off, the authorities had no choice but to declare a one-week “amnesty.”
Great, I thought, I’ll go have a honeymoon! By chance, Li Shuxian was able to put in for a vacation at the same time. We had been married for nearly ten years, but this was the first time we had had vacations that overlapped.
In those days our little family lived separately in three locations. Li Shuxian was in Jiangxi, I was in Anhui, and our two boys were in the care of my mother in Beijing. The chance for a vacation arrived so abruptly that it made it hard to arrange for the boys to come south to meet us. Moreover, they were young, and it was not clear that they would be able to keep the secret nature of our travel under their hats. So, all things considered, we just decided to take the “honeymoon” that we had missed the first time around.
Honeymoons are supposed to be both sweet and secret—and given our circumstances, both these elements were double in weight. It was still the high season of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and both of us were still targets of the dictatorship, so of course the trip had to be secret. But we weren’t much afraid, either, because years of class struggle had already killed the zest for travel in the general populace. Never mind outcasts like us—even the politically acceptable population did not venture out much anymore, and the guardians of the dictatorship would never imagine that impurities like us would have either the interest or the nerve to go out sightseeing. We calculated that the tourist spots would be low-pressure zones for class struggle, and that turned out to be correct.
We chose as our destination the beautiful Huangshan mountain area. On August 12 we both set out, Li Shuxian from Nanchang and I from Hefei, headed for Shanghai, where we arrived the next morning. We met at the rail station, but did not behave as lovers normally do when they meet after a long separation. For one, time was short; we couldn’t afford much of it for chat or shilly-shally. Moreover we had to be careful not to divulge our status. We gave each other smiles. I noticed that she had become as darkly tanned as I, and later learned that she had immediately noticed the same about me. Similar labor reform, similar sun exposure, similar tans. That was fine. Tans were good cover.
We stayed a night in Shanghai and then went to Hangzhou. The city was pleasant, as always, but it was not our destination so we did not stay long. On the morning of August 15 we took a long-distance bus from Hangzhou westward toward Huizhou. Outside the window the Fuchun River flowed gently and quietly through the hills. Its lines were delicate but sharp. Beneath the sun, glistening in its fluid brilliance, it resembled the patterns in Hangzhou’s embroidered silk. It occurred to me that this route was probably the one my grandfather had traveled, but going in the opposite direction, when he ventured from Huizhou to Hangzhou at the end of the last century. As we proceeded farther west, into the mountains of western Zhejiang Province, the escarpment grew steeper.
Around noon the bus labored its way over the Yiling Pass and crossed the border into Anhui Province. The forests of southern Anhui were as luxuriant as ever, but there weren’t as many rivers as in Zhejiang. A few little streams gushed through mountain crevices, but that was all. The roads were no longer paved; now they were brown dirt. The villages were simple, primitive, and isolated. At 1:00 p.m. the bus stopped briefly at a little town near Jixian—the birthplace of the great May Fourth intellectual Hu Shi—and the passengers got off to have lunch. Who would have guessed that modern China’s strongest proponent of “thorough Westernization” would have been born in an isolated mountain village like this?
It was dusk when the bus arrived at Shexian and Yansi near the Huangshan Mountains. We felt lucky that there were very few tourists. In the whole of the Huangshan area, whose radius was about twenty miles, there seemed to be only about thirty of them. When we got to Shexian there were uncrowded shuttle buses ready to take us to the guesthouse at the foot of the mountains. When we got there, a slogan in giant characters—NEVER, EVER, FORGET THE CLASS STRUGGLE!—glared at us from the guesthouse wall, but the people at the reception desk did not look closely at our credentials and treated us the same as the revolutionary guests. The room rate was tiny: eighty cents per person per day. A meal cost fifteen cents.
The guesthouse, whose design mixed East and West, had a Chinese-style tile roof but a Western interior. It nestled well in its environment, resting in a tranquil nook inside a ravine, where you heard nothing but the music of a tr
ickling brook that flowed past in front. After dinner we followed the brook downstream to a cavernous pool, where the sound of the water was louder. By then it was completely dark. The craggy rocks in the stream, the whitewater splashing against them, and White Dragon Bridge, vaguely visible in the distance, were all bathing in the gentle silver light of the moon. It was hard to see anything very clearly except the rocks at our feet and the stream water that flowed over them. The water was cool. The air was cool. The sticky heat of the day on the bus had melted away—no, more than that, the grime of two years of class struggle was also being washed away. We felt like lingering indefinitely at the cavern pool, letting the stream water wash our spirits clean, letting the gentle moonlight take charge …
But we couldn’t. We had big plans for the next day.
On August 16 we were up and out at 6:30 a.m. After climbing for an hour, we reached Half-Mountain Temple. The trail grew much steeper after that, and the cliffs at the two sides were more imposing. We were getting into the heart of the mountains.
Huangshan rocks are a symphony of differences. Look this way and they are round, that way and they are angular. They appear huge in the distance, but small up close. Varying in length and in flatness, alternately soft or angry, they follow no rule. They seem almost alive, growing at will, free of bonds. It’s a pity that so many rock formations at Huangshan have been given tacky, unimaginative names that liken them to human beings or to gods—“Boy Praying to Guanyin,” “Prime Minister Watching Chess,” and so on. Why do human beings have the peculiar need to anthropomorphize things that they find in nature? It is such a narrow view, so self-referential and silly. It is why Li Shuxian and I, at Half-Mountain Temple, did not wait to listen to the monks explain the name for every rock in sight. Instead we kept climbing. We thought the rocks themselves should keep their rights of self-expression and that the freedom to imagine should be left to individual hikers. Romantic footnotes should be left to pairs of lovers.
For the next two and a half hours we hiked up and down the two main peaks—Capital of Heaven Peak, which is about 5,740 feet high, and Lotus Blossom Peak, 6,167 feet at the top. Veterans of these climbs might reasonably suspect that I am in error here, because most hikers reserve one day for each of these peaks—or, at a minimum, half a day for each. The reason we could do both within half a day had much to do with the fit physical condition that our labor reform had put us in, but also something to do with our shortage of time. Our whole vacation had to be on fast-forward.
The weather was kind to us. Bright sun and gentle breezes made it possible for us to cover all the main sites at Huangshan within two days. Had it rained, we could not have gotten up Capital of Heaven, the peak with the steepest ascent. To reach the top you had to cross a long, rocky slope over which (in 1971, anyway) there were no steps to help you out. There were small indentations, enough to place your foot—or half of it—chiseled into the rock. In some places there were also hanging chains that you could grab onto as you went up or down. A place called “fish-back ridge,” about three feet wide, featured drops into abysses on both sides. Once a year or so a careless climber lost his or her life there. We made it, though, and heaved a sigh at the top. (We visited Huangshan again in 1987 and rode to the top in a cable car. That meant we missed, of course, the beauty of the bare-handed climb.)
The peak at Capital of Heaven is the most beautiful in the Huangshan Mountains. The top is like a small island that juts out toward space, holding its own, bucking and tossing among the clouds that billow one moment and disperse the next as they blow by. The air is thin, the wind chilly; this is the frontier of the secular world, the edge where the cacophony of human loves and hates melts away. It reminded me of the “Paradiso” section of The Divine Comedy, where the highest level in Heaven is occupied not even by God but only by Dante, his lover Beatrice, and their limitless joy. Peering out and down as far as we could, we could still discern the rivers, streams, and land that lay below, lit by the bright sun and home to all of that noise that we had risen above. Chinese poets through the centuries have written many famous lines about mountain peaks of various sizes (including some, truth be told, that are not all that pretty), but for some reason there isn’t any poem about Capital of Heaven. Perhaps the poets who ventured there were all shocked into mute stupor at sights that exceeded the bounds that the imagination could encompass.
At 1:00 p.m. we finished an ascent of the third main peak, called Brighttop, and then reached the Northsea Guesthouse, the highest guesthouse in the Huangshan range. We stayed overnight there.
We rose early the next morning to see the sunrise. I had seen so many sunrises at Lianggezhuang that this one did not do much for me. Then we headed down the mountain by a different route, arriving at the town of Dunxi, which is the commercial hub of Huizhou County and is divided down the middle by the Xin’an River. Dunxi was our home for the evening and night, but the 104-degree heat killed our interest in sightseeing and almost killed our ability to sleep. Early the next day we escaped northward by bus to Wuhu, Anhui’s most bustling city, but I’m afraid that our deepest impression of Wuhu was a bowl of spoiled noodles that we bought. We continued on to Nanjing, but by the time we got there the only place to sleep was in the main hall of the rail station. No bed, no pillows, yet we slept soundly. Six days of travel had exhausted us.
On the morning of August 19 we reached Mingguang, also known as Jiashan, which is Li Shuxian’s hometown and was the last stop on our honeymoon tour. Our final tourist visit was to the Tomb of Aunt Cao, which is just outside Mingguang. Aunt Cao was the younger sister of Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). As a major personage of the imperial clan she should, by rights, have had an extravagant burial. But she died too soon, before the dynasty was really up and running, and when there were more pressing priorities than burials. So her tomb is nothing special. There is no memorial arch and, in accordance with local tradition, no tombstone. To judge from the remnants that survive, the stone guardians and horses that had been sent to accompany her into the next world were not very big. The only really distinguishing feature of her tomb was the size of its lot, which was about ten times that of the adjacent tombs for commoners. Compared to the tombs of her descendants—the thirteen famous Ming Tombs near Beijing—this was frugal in the extreme.
This illustrates a general pattern with China’s dynasties. The first generation is violent but frugal. Zhu Yuanzhang’s own mausoleum in Nanjing is downright shabby compared to the opulent tombs of his successors. Succeeding generations keep the violence going, but turn profligate and corrupt. By the end of the dynasty they are violent, corrupt, muddleheaded, and incompetent. They fall, and then a new cycle begins: violence to corruption to mediocrity to annihilation, in a repeating pattern that has its internal logic.
I felt the Mao dynasty was observing the same trajectory. By the end of my belated honeymoon, my road ahead seemed clearer to me.
12. TURN TOWARD ASTROPHYSICS
My work at the brick factory came to an end less than a month after I got back from Huangshan. The authorities reassigned me to the physics department. The decision arrived abruptly and for a reason I hardly expected. It was not that they suddenly concluded that I no longer needed reform, and it was not that the brick factory suddenly closed. It was that Lin Biao suddenly changed from Mao Zedong’s “closest comrade in arms” to “traitor” and died.
In China’s planned economy, everything was supposed to go according to a central plan. The reality for citizens, though, was very nearly the opposite. To plan one’s life could be treacherous, because the core of the Party, while planning what would happen to everybody else, could not plan itself. Interminable struggles over the political “line” at the highest levels, and unpredictable risings and fallings of top leaders, happened quite outside any plan. The government regularly issued five-year plans for the economy, but never published a five-year plan for the intra-Party struggles over the political line, even though, for ordi
nary people, the consequences of the latter were far greater than those of the former. This proves that life in China’s socialist system obeyed one of the fundamental tenets of Marxist “dialectics”: it showed that A arises from a lack of A—a plan arises from the lack of a plan.
On September 13, 1971, Lin Biao met with his unplanned death according to plan. (Exactly what plan led to the death has been a topic for lively debate among historians ever since.) After that, the Great Cultural Revolution entered its second half, which was a stage of decline. Slogans about revolutionary struggle still rent the heavens, but to judge from the exhausted look in Mao’s eyes (apparent in photographs), the campaign was on the wane. Soon the “Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams,” whose job it had been to stir up class struggle, left the campuses, and after that the “proletarian dictatorship brigades” (of which our brick factory group was one) were disbanded as well.
A “new” revolution arrived, however. Its formal name was the Proletarian Education Revolution, and its slogan was “Return to class to make revolution.” My recall to the physics department happened under its aegis.