by Ping Fu
My classmate replied, “Perhaps the key is to find the middle ground between the two.”
Right now in my life, I realized, I needed to move toward my passion and away from the downward pull of my conscience. I had to let go of the feelings of guilt that plagued me regarding my divorce from Herbert, Shanghai Mama’s lonely death, recent struggles to connect with my adolescent daughter and aging mother, and the dissatisfaction of my employees during this economic downturn. I had to rediscover my passion for being a mother, an entrepreneur, and a joyful person in the world. There at the Peak District National Park, I found my resolve. The words of Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, came to mind: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
I returned to North Carolina feeling ready to face anything. I had been experiencing an emotional low, but I recognized that my life was not at its lowest point—not even close. Like a rainflower stone buried in a riverbank, I had allowed myself to become caked with mud. Taking the time to connect with friends and myself was something that I rarely had done since starting Geomagic, if ever. Now I could see the myriad colors of my inner being sparkling brightly once again. Happiness, I knew, was my choice and responsibility.
The peaks and valleys, both professional and personal, that I experienced between 2008 and 2010 reminded me intensely of my university years in China. That, too, was a time full of surprising ups and downs. Looking back, paradoxically, I can see it was in those moments when I felt myself standing at the peak of achievement that I was least prepared for any emotional downturns.
UNIVERSITY: 1978–1982
SUZHOU IS KNOWN as the “Venice of the East” thanks to its picturesque canals; it is an old university town renowned for centuries as a center of culture and commerce plied on gondolas. The university campus had been built by American Christians in the nineteenth century and still retained its graceful lines. The year I arrived, its once grassy quads were dirt and the old brick buildings nearly bare. There was a scarcity of teachers. A Communist monitor sat in the front row of every class. Yet every step I took exhilarated me. I was nineteen, hungry for knowledge, and thrilled with my newfound freedom.
Our class, the product of ten years of pent-up demand for higher education, was one of the most intelligent and diverse in Chinese history, ranging in age from eighteen to twenty-six. I made friends quickly. There was JJ, the chain-smoking writer with the jumping mind who would go on to become one of China’s most gifted newspaper columnists; Lao Han, the oldest student in our class, a white-haired genius who had spent the past decade firing terra-cotta roof tiles; and Jin Lin, the son of a Red Army family who charmed me with his dimples and easy laugh.
My friends and I often visited Suzhou’s world-famous scholar gardens—intricate urban oases that had inspired my grandfather’s backyard in Shanghai—to compose poetry and spend hours luxuriating in intellectual banter. Accepting this radical contrast between my present and past life circumstances was not easy. Sometimes, my young mind had to be coaxed with a long pause to accept that such changes were not a dream, but a new and unexpected reality.
Walking through a Chinese scholar garden means taking a spiritual journey that unfolds like a painted scroll. As we wound our way over dragon bridges and through gateways decorated with hexagonal windows, we encountered one unexpected view after another. It was in such a garden in Suzhou that the thought first occurred to me that my future might be utterly different from my past. I could be somebody someday. With my classmates, we discussed how there are two kinds of people. A “sunrise person” goes through life open to the idea that the best may still be coming. A “sunset person,” on the other hand, believes that the present is always sloping downhill. We reassured each other that we would be sunrise people and prevent the past from contaminating our future.
I had wanted to major in aerospace engineering, but the government had decided that I would study literature. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Thanks to Uncle W, I had been exposed to great Western literature throughout my teenage years. Now I got to read novels, immerse myself in poetry, and even watch Western movies as homework—The Sound of Music, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, and Jane Eyre, among others. Zorro, a romantic “foreign devil” who rode with a sword on horseback, made me and my female classmates swoon like the young women in peril he rescued on the silver screen. That time was a high point of my life. I reveled in my creative activities and new friendships.
—
Halfway through our first semester, my friends and I decided to publish a literary magazine composed of our essays and poems, as well as articles about events taking place across campus and in Suzhou. I was elected editor in chief, partly because I was the only woman in the group and the young men couldn’t agree upon which one of them should be the leader, and partly because I was competent at handling administrative tasks like printing, accounting, and distribution.
Over the course of the next year and a half, our magazine grew quite popular—and not just among the university students or in Suzhou. The monthly issues were passed around among friends in different cities and mailed out to other universities as well. There still wasn’t much reading material available in China since the publishing industry had yet to return. My classmates and I enjoyed writing and publishing immensely, with no sense that there was any risk involved in our poetic ruminations; our professors endorsed us, and the university itself printed the magazine. But it turned out that we were part of a nascent literary movement that was coalescing nationwide, which posed a threat to the Communist Party.
In the fall of 1979 at Suzhou University we formed the Red Maple Society, a student run literary society. Our group was invited to attend a meeting in Beijing with the publishers of literary magazines from thirteen other universities. Since we were not ranked a first-tier school, this was a tremendous honor. The Red Maple Society slaved for weeks to create what we considered our finest magazine yet. And in so doing, we took a huge risk: we chose to include an article written by a student titled “A Confession of a Communist Member.” The author, our classmate and a party member, expressed his disappointment with the corruption he had observed in the Communist Party, and called attention to what he saw as contradictions in Communist teachings.
We made a special cover for the issue, and I spent many nights hand printing copies. We then sent one representative from our inner working group to Beijing for the meeting and distributed the publication around Suzhou.
When our student representative returned from Beijing, he told us he hadn’t gone to the meeting for student magazines. He had gone to a different meeting, he said, in the Great Hall of the People, and Deng Xiaoping had been there. I remember him telling us that some of the other meeting participants had a copy of the Red Maple Society’s current magazine in hand. Deng asked to see what people were reading. One student from Beijing University passed him a copy of our magazine with its pages opened to the “Confessions” article, which was considered daring and controversial.
“A Communist member questions his own party?” Deng asked. It wasn’t clear to our Red Maple Society representative or the other students in attendance whether Deng’s comment was a condemnation. While I was writing this book, I talked to some of my classmates. We all seem to have different memories of exactly what had happened, and it’s unclear whether Deng had had our publication or another magazine.
The period from 1978 to 1984 was known as Deng Xiaoping’s First Reform. Although the Cultural Revolution had ended, tremendous freedom was nevertheless still mixed with uncertainty. Those in creative fields generally experienced some bumps in the road before becoming fully accepted. The local government continued to rule with people from the red-blood lineage, and they were incapable of following new directions from the central government. So when the story came back to Suzhou Unive
rsity of what Deng Xiaoping had said about the student magazine, the authorities interpreted it as very bad news and took a preemptive strike against us.
The Red Maple Society was deemed an illegal underground society responsible for publishing anti-Communist propaganda. University officials arrested and interrogated all the students who belonged to our magazine group. For weeks, they pressed us to confess our counterrevolutionary activities. As the editor in chief, I was held most responsible for the trouble. For punishment, I was given a black mark in my personal file. I was labeled as a “Four Anti”: anti-Communist, anti-socialist, anti-stability, and anti-China. This was the worst label anyone could receive. I knew full well that my hopes for a good life had been extinguished. In all likelihood, I would be sent into exile after graduation and be assigned to hard labor. I wondered if I would even be permitted to continue with my studies.
I also knew for sure that I now could not form a romance with anyone. Soon after my troubles, my dearest friend and classmate, Jin Lin, announced that his family had introduced him to a girl from a Red Army family whom he intended to marry after graduation. No one in our group of friends knew that he told me this with a deep sense of regret—not because the girl was an unsuitable wife for him, but because he had hoped that we might have a chance someday. I was touched and wished him well, encouraging him to proceed with the engagement and keep his distance from me. I had to push Jin Lin away to spare us both the trouble that would have come from his romantic involvement with someone as black as I.
For the rest of the semester, I endured relentless criticism by Communist Party officials and never-ending confession sessions. I sank into a deep depression. How could I have been so foolish as to jeopardize my college education and my entire future? I wrote to Uncle W asking for his advice. He counseled me to declare that I had “gone crazy” as an excuse for my lack of judgment—a tactic he himself had employed at one point to avoid punishment for having made inflammatory political remarks. Then, he said, I should drop out of school, returning only when the controversy had blown over.
I did not follow Uncle W’s advice, but rather chose to stay on at Suzhou University and complete my education. It was the only hope I had left of pursuing my dream job: I wanted to be a newspaper reporter because I loved to travel and explore. I dared not reinvolve myself in the literary magazine, however. I felt lost as I struggled to find my place, now that I had been disgraced. I was blessed when a gentle and nurturing literature professor with a brilliant mind, Professor Xu, took me under her wing. She reminded me of Shanghai Mama and Nanjing Mother combined. She kept me out of politics and out of trouble, encouraging me to focus exclusively on my studies. To this day, I keep a melancholy poem that she wrote about mist settling over the canals of Suzhou hanging on my bedroom wall.
—
During my senior year, I selected a somewhat obscure research topic for my thesis: China’s one-child policy. When I had been born in 1958, China was still encouraging large families. As Nanjing Mother had explained to me as a teenager, that was why she had given birth to two children when she had wanted none. Feeling that she couldn’t burden Shanghai Mama with another child, Nanjing Mother had resorted to jumping off tables when she was pregnant to try to abort Hong.
But as China’s population burgeoned, the government reversed course and, in 1979, started enforcing its “one family, one child” rule. By 1982, regulations had grown so strict that they included mandatory IUD insertion for all women who already had one child, abortion for women who had an unauthorized pregnancy, and sterilization for couples with two or more children.
At our school, family planning committee members, teachers, and facility workers would confirm that all female students were menstruating by checking their sanitary napkins. When they discovered that some women were cheating by bringing in their friends’ soiled pads, the female enforcer began asking women to check for blood in front of them using their own fingers. The degrading practice made me wonder how the rest of China was responding to the one-child policy. Uncle W gave me his blessing, saying this sounded like a powerful humanitarian topic. Even the Communist Party leader at my school approved.
I spent a few months traveling around the Chinese countryside conducting research. I interviewed doctors and midwives, as well as farmers and family planning committee members. What I discovered was shocking. In rural areas, infant girls were being killed. In spite of decades of Communist propaganda about the equality of the sexes, ours remained a patriarchal society. Out of desperation, some parents chose unborn sons over born daughters. I witnessed the horrifying consequences with my own eyes: female infants drowned in rivers and lakes, umbilical wounds still fresh; baby girls flushed down the sewage system or suffocated in pillow cases and tossed into garbage bins. Women I spoke to sobbed as they told me how their female infants were taken away immediately after delivery, sometimes by a local family planning committee member, other times by the village midwife. The most painful stories to hear were about those in which the husband took the baby before the mother could even see it. I didn’t think there was any way I could help, but at least, I thought, I could offer them an opportunity to unload their burdens and cry on a sympathetic shoulder.
When I completed the research for my thesis in the spring of 1982, I never imagined that anything would come of my work. Unbeknownst to me, someone in my department sent a copy of my research to the Chinese press and my work on female infanticide came to the attention of the Communist party.
—
One day in the spring of 1982, as I innocently walked across campus making preparations for graduation, someone sneaked up behind me, jammed a black canvas bag over my head, and bound my wrists together tightly. “Don’t scream,” a menacing male voice whispered as I was escorted into a nearby car.
We drove for hours. I had no idea what was going on, as I knew nothing of the international human rights pressure on China that had been traced back to my thesis. I did not ask any questions, either, as I had learned never to make inquiries in China, especially when the cops were involved. I simply remained silent as my mind raced, trying to guess what had gone wrong. The only thing I could think of was that the black mark in my personal file from my days at the Red Maple Society had caught up with me.
Eventually, we arrived at our destination. I was taken from the car and deposited in a pitch-black windowless room. My hood was removed but my wrists were left bound together in front of me. I heard the door close behind me. The stench of human excrement mixed with ammonia made me gag. I shuffled on hands and knees across the concrete floor exploring my prison. All I found was a thin mattress and a bucket, which I presumed would serve as my toilet. After what might have been many minutes or several hours, someone gave me a container of water and untied my hands. I received no food, but I did not feel hungry; my stomach churned with acid and fear.
The government officials did not beat me or even interrogate me. They ignored me completely. I was not given any information about why or for how long I was being held captive. The unknown was intolerable. I couldn’t sleep. I could barely breathe. My mind started filling the darkness with vivid replays of the struggle sessions at NUAA, the rape, the burning of my journals, the murder of teachers and black elements. I tried to convince myself that my death would be quick and painless. I no longer had the responsibility of raising my little sister, so I could go. And yet it seemed cruel that I should meet with my end now, when I had survived the worst of the Cultural Revolution and finally gotten a chance at an education.
I thought about my Shanghai and Nanjing parents, my cousin-siblings, Uncle W, my college friends, and most of all Hong: Would they come looking for me? Would they ever find out what happened to me? Or would I, like so many others before me, simply disappear without a trace?
I lost track of time in the darkness. After what I later found out was three days, I had fallen asleep at last, so it startled me when the door to my cell slamme
d open. “Get up and come out!” cried a loud female voice. The small amount of light filtering in through a few high barred windows in the hallway nearly blinded me. Everything around me looked foggy and white. “You stink,” the guard snarled. She handed me loose-fitting clothes and led me to a washroom where I could shower and change. “Go clean yourself,” she said as she pushed me inside.
In the bathroom, there were just a few showerheads, no bench on which to put my clothes, and no dry towels. When I was finished washing, I stepped into the clean clothes, wrapping them over my wet body. The guard ushered me into the office of a burly fifty-something-year-old man in a police uniform. His eyeglasses made him look scholarly and less intimidating. “Sit,” he commanded. He pushed some papers across his desk at me.
“You will go home now and await further instructions,” the official said.
I was still blinking as my eyes adjusted to the light, my body weak from lack of food and sleep, my thoughts slow and fuzzy. Was I being placed under house arrest? I wanted to ask what offense I had committed, but once again I kept my mouth shut.
The guard escorted me out of the official’s office and handed me over to a policeman with a round, soft, kind-looking face. As he drove me to my birth parents’ apartment in Nanjing, we chatted a little. He told me that I had brought shame to our country because of my research on female infanticide. Through him I learned that while my name had not appeared in newspapers, I had been traced as a source of international embarrassment. I would have been in even more trouble, except no one had been able to find any evidence that I had done anything wrong other than not having a written permit to conduct interviews in remote areas.
“You are a lucky girl,” he said before dropping me off at the gates of NUAA. “If this were the Cultural Revolution, you surely would be dead by now.”
But I didn’t feel lucky. I felt as though a thousand-pound stone had crushed my chest. I didn’t know where I would be sent next or what kind of future I would face.