by Li Cunxin
Teacher Song handed out our textbooks. “Students. Welcome to your first official lesson.” She paused. “Do you know who this person is?” She pointed to Mao’s picture on the wall.
“Chairman Mao, Chairman Mao!” we all shouted excitedly.
“Yes, our beloved Chairman Mao. Before we start our first class each day, we will bow to Chairman Mao in all sincerity. We should wish him a long long life, because we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him. He is our savior, our sun, our moon. Without him we’d still be in a dark world of suffering. We will also wish his successor, our second most important leader, our Vice Chairman Lin Biao, good health, forever good health. Now, let’s all get up and bow to Chairman Mao with your heart full of love and appreciation!”
We all stood up, took our hats off, bowed to Mao’s picture and shouted, “Long, long live Chairman Mao! Vice Chairman Lin, good health, forever good health!”
“Before you sit down,” Teacher Song continued, “we need to perform one more school rule: I’ll say, ‘Good morning, students,’ to you and you will say, ‘Good morning, Teacher,’ in reply. Now, let’s have a practice. Good morning, students!”
“Good morning, Teacher!” we replied in unison.
“Good! Now sit down.” She smiled. “Raise your hand if you have Chairman Mao’s Red Book.”
Most of us raised our hands.
“Those who don’t have one, please ask your parents to buy you one from town. I want you to have them tomorrow. This is very important. We should follow Vice Chairman Lin’s example and never go anywhere without Chairman Mao’s Red Book. The Red Book will give us guidance in our lives. Without it we will be lost souls.” We placed our Red Books on the left-hand side of our workbenches, as instructed.
“I’ll be your teacher for both Chinese and math,” Teacher Song continued. “You will learn how to read and write. Raise your hand if you can already read or write.”
I looked around. Very few students raised their hands: mostly girls, and I was relieved. I, for one, couldn’t recognize a single word in my textbook.
“Good, we have a few smart kids here. Now, please open the first page of your textbook,” Teacher Song instructed.
A big colored picture of Chairman Mao stared out at me, occupying half the page, with shooting stars surrounding his face, as though Mao’s round head was the sun. The bottom half of the page had words on it, which just looked like a field of messy grass to me. Whoever invented them must have been a peasant, I thought.
“Can anyone read the words on this page?” the teacher asked. The same girls raised their hands again.
“What does the first line mean?” Teacher Song asked the girl sitting to my right.
“Long, long live Chairman Mao!” replied the girl in a proud voice.
“Good, very good!” Teacher Song paused. She glanced over the class. “Yes, we want to wish Chairman Mao a long long life, because our great leader saved us. I’m sure your parents have told you many stories about the cruel life they lived under Chiang Kaishek’s Guomindang regime. They were cold, dark days indeed. That government only cared for the rich. Children like you couldn’t even dream of sitting here, but Chairman Mao made it possible for everyone in China to have this privilege. Today, I’ll teach you how to write ‘Long, long live Chairman Mao, I love Chairman Mao, you love Chairman Mao, we all love Chairman Mao.’ I’ll now write them on the blackboard. Pay special attention to the sequence of the strokes.” She turned to the blackboard and wrote several lines with furious pace.
I was stunned. I didn’t get the sequence of strokes at all! I turned to look at one of my friends. He just drew a circle around his neck with his right hand and pulled upwards, his eyes rolling and tongue hanging out, as though he were being hanged.
“Okay, now I want you to repeat each phrase after me.” The teacher pointed to the first line of words with her yard-long stick. “Long, long live Chairman Mao,” she read.
“Long, long live Chairman Mao!” we repeated.
“I love Chairman Mao!” she read.
“I love Chairman Mao!” we replied.
We repeated the phrases again and again until we had memorized them for life.
The next hour, Teacher Song explained in detail how to write each stroke of the words and the sequence we had to use. I picked up my pencil and realized that I didn’t even know how to hold it. I looked to my right and copied the girl next to me, but I pressed too hard and broke the tip. I quickly took out my dia’s knife, but as I tried to sharpen the tip, it broke again.
“Here, you can use mine,” the girl next to me said.
“No. Thank you,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m all right.”
“I have three. You can use it for this class and return it to me later,” she said in a soft voice.
Three ? She must have come from an official’s family to have so many pencils!
“What’s the matter?” Teacher Song suddenly appeared in front of us.
“He broke his pencil,” my desk-mate answered.
“Oh dear, and you haven’t written a single stroke yet,” she said.
My face swelled up like a red balloon. I reluctantly took the girl’s pencil. Under Teacher Song’s gaze I carefully placed the tip on the paper and to my horror the strokes popped out of my uncontrollable pencil like popcorn, ugly and messy, in all directions. They looked nothing like what was written on the blackboard.
“I can’t do it,” I conceded hopelessly.
“Let me help you,” Teacher Song said patiently. She placed her hand over mine and we finished “Long, long live Chairman Mao” together.
“Good. Now you know how, repeat these words five more times and you’ll be fine,” she said, and went to help some others. I quickly looked at my friend behind me. He shook his head in disgust at the words he was supposed to write, and made funny faces. Another friend in front of me kept grunting and kicking his workbench. Others gave him dirty looks. It was as though he was a trapped tiger, but my friends’ reactions made me feel better. At least they felt the same as me.
It might have been cold outside, but all through class that day I felt agitated and hot, beside myself with frustration. It felt like I was sitting on thousands of needles. My whole body itched. I wasn’t sure if it was paranoia or lice. All of the students scratched, even our teacher scratched herself occasionally. Itchiness became a permanent feature of our class for the first few years of my schooling. That day I itched so much I couldn’t sit still, and before I knew it a huge splinter from the bench stuck right into my thumbnail. Nobody could pull it out and blood gushed everywhere. I cried all the way home with my bloodied hand. My fourth uncle was there, home from his nightshift, and he managed to pull only half of the splinter out with a pair of pliers. The other half was left in there until the nail fell off a few weeks later. My niang smacked a thick layer of dust on the wound and, with throbbing pain, I was sent back to school.
The class was only halfway through the third hour of Chinese when I returned. The rest of the day went by excruciatingly slowly, and we only had a ten-minute break between each hour. Teacher Song’s sweet voice went in one ear and out the other. The lessons were far beyond my comprehension. My thoughts were instead out on the streets and in the fields. I felt trapped and bewildered. I couldn’t wait for each ten-minute break to arrive.
During the final hour of our lessons that day, as I continued to try and write with my bloodied finger, I heard a bird chirping outside. My heart immediately flew out and joined it.
I was always fascinated with birds when I was a child. I would watch them and daydream. I admired their gracefulness and envied their freedom. I wished for wings so I too could fly out of this harsh life. I wished to speak their language, to ask them what it felt like, flying so high. I wondered which god to ask or indeed if there was such a god who had the power to transform humans into animals. But then I also thought of the constant danger of being shot down by humans or eaten by larger animals. And the birds never seemed to h
ave enough food to eat either, because they were constantly nibbling human feces. Without food, life as a bird might not be much better than life as a human. And if I became a bird, I would not see my family again. This would surely break my niang’s heart. Sometimes I thought I might be able to help them more as a bird, flying high in the air and spotting food for my family. I sat at my desk that day and remembered a tale my dia once told me:Once upon a time, a hunter shot down a bird, his arrow injuring one of its wings. The hunter could speak the bird’s language and when the bird begged him not to kill her, to her surprise, the hunter said, in her own language, “I don’t want to kill you, but I have no other food to eat.” The bird promised him that she would return his leniency by finding food for him once she could fly again. The bird had only one condition: the hunter had to share any findings with her. The hunter agreed.
True to her word, the bird passed on information to the hunter. “There is a dead squirrel up the mountain by the big rock.” The hunter was ecstatic. He followed the bird’s guidance and found the squirrel. He happily shared it with the bird. The bird went on to provide the hunter with other food, and their sharing arrangement continued.
But gradually the hunter became greedy and stopped sharing with the bird. The bird wanted revenge. One day the bird told him about a dead mountain goat. The hunter followed the bird’s instructions and rushed to the location. From the distance he could see a white object lying on the ground, surrounded by a small group of people. He was worried that those people who had arrived before him would take the goat. He rushed toward the goat. “That’s mine, that’s mine! I killed him!” But the white object was not a goat. It was a man wearing a white shirt. The hunter was charged with the man’s murder and was sentenced to death by a hundred cuts. The hunter told his story about the bird, and appealed to a higher court.
The higher court judge didn’t believe that this hunter could speak the bird’s language, so on the day of his execution, the judge asked the hunter, “What are those two birds saying up in the tree?” The hunter replied, “The birds are angry about their missing children and said, ‘Judge, judge. There is no animosity between us. Why did you hide our babies?’” The judge found the hunter innocent and released him, for the judge had secretly removed the young birds from the nest, to test the hunter’s innocence.
I liked this tale and its moral: that it’s important to keep one’s promises. I also liked the fact that the little bird had outwitted the powerful hunter.
That day at school I continued to daydream about my birds while others practiced their writing. I scribbled mindlessly on my practice pad, my thoughts interrupted only by Teacher Song’s voice. “All right, that’s enough for today. I want you to practice what you’ve learned at home. It is called ‘homework.’ Tomorrow, I expect you to remember what we’ve done today. Do you understand?”
“Yes!” we replied.
“Good. Now I’m going to teach you a song. You would have heard it before. It is called ‘I Love Beijing Tiananmen.’”
We’d heard this song many times over our village’s loudspeakers. So Teacher Song led and we sang:I love Beijing Tiananmen,
The sun rises above Tiananmen.
Our great leader Chairman Mao,
Lead and guide us forward.
The singing became my favorite part of our day.
On the way home we exchanged our feelings about that first day of school.
“What a boring day!” one of my friends said.
“Boring? It’s horrible!” said another.
“I hate sitting next to girls.”
“What about the bird?” I asked.
“What bird?”
“Didn’t you hear it? On the windowsill during the last hour,” I said.
“I was struggling so much trying to write ‘Long, long live Chairman Mao,’ why would I hear a bird?” another friend replied.
We stopped at a sandy bank by the little stream south of our village and were surprised to discover that Yang Ping’s group of friends had beaten us there and were playing “horse fight” already. This was one of our favorite games, and I soon joined in with my friends. One person would sit on another’s shoulders, and opposing groups would try hard to unseat their opponents. Both Yang Ping and I were physically similar and were the “anchor horses” at the bottom. That day we were the last two standing on each team. We fought one another tooth and nail until we dragged each other down in a draw, totally exhausted, muddy and with our clothes torn. Yang Ping and I immediately struck up a good friendship after that, and our after-school gatherings became frequent. My niang cursed me for my irresponsible behavior, though, because my clothes were always either torn or dirty or both. One afternoon, after our usual “horse fight,” Yang Ping and I went on wrestling, tripping and pushing each other to the ground. Yang Ping went down hard on one of his arms and broke it. I felt so bad and afraid that his family might make my family pay his hospital costs, so I kept the accident a secret. When my parents did find out, from one of my other friends, they were livid. “Why didn’t you tell us?” my niang demanded.
“I was afraid his parents would ask us to pay for his medical bills.”
She sighed. “What a silly boy you are! Yes, we are poor! But we can’t lose our dignity over this, even if it means we have to borrow money from our relatives.” But when my parents offered them our assistance, Yang Ping’s family politely refused.
The only real pet I ever had was a bird that I caught myself during that first week of school. In the springtime of each year, groups of beautiful birds would arrive at the small stream south of our house. Sometimes my niang would do her washing there, and my friends and I would splash or skip stones over the surface of the water.
On this particular day, I’d taken an old pot with a lot of holes in the bottom and a piece of my kite string. I tied the string onto a wooden stick, placed the pot on the sandbank by the stream and supported it with the stick on a forty-five-degree angle. I left a few dead worms under the pot and hid in a ditch about twenty yards away, holding the other end of the string.
Some birds flew near my pot a few minutes later. One hopped under and began to eat the worms. I pulled the string excitedly, trapping the bird inside. I could not believe how beautiful this bird was. I was convinced it was female because its feathers were too colorful for a male. I named her Beautiful River Treasure. My second brother, Cunyuan, made me a simple wire cage for her. I didn’t want to leave my Beautiful River Treasure. I was obsessed with her. I collected worms for her on the way home from school. I showed her off to my friends. I even promised them a baby bird each, if I could catch a male bird and get her to mate. I thought she was the most beautiful bird in the world. One day she might teach me her language, I thought, or she might learn ours. I imagined her flying above me and landing on my shoulder whenever she wanted to, spotting food, just like the bird in my dia’s story.
I told everyone that she was such a happy bird, because she chattered and sang all day and all night. She drove my whole family crazy, though. “She isn’t singing, she is crying, ‘Let me out, let me out!’” Cunfar said, acting as though he was the poor bird.
“Don’t be silly, she loves me. I’m her savior. Look at all the food she gets.”
But in reality she ate very little. After school one day that week, I rushed home with some worms in my hands and found my Beautiful River Treasure dead in her cage. I sobbed my heart out. I blamed every member of my family for her death. I thought they’d killed her because of her singing. I had lost my first and only pet. My heart was broken. Deep inside I knew I was responsible for her death. Instead of helping her, I had taken her freedom away, and I hated myself for it.
I made a beautiful box as her coffin and took her back to the bank of the stream where I had caught her. I buried her under a large tree where there was good Feng Shui. I knelt in front of her little tomb and apologized for my stupidity and told her that she was the only pet I’d ever owned and loved. I never tried to cat
ch another bird to keep as a pet again.
We spent our first two weeks of school in that stinking temporary classroom until a room became available at the proper school. This consisted of single-story brick-and-stone classrooms joined to each other just like commune housing. I knew the local school well because sometimes I had secretly climbed over the walls and played there with some of my friends on Sundays.
But today was different. At eight that morning, the head of the school welcomed us, and we were led by Teacher Song to our official classroom. It was a square room with two rice-papered windows on the outside wall, and a window and a door on the inside. There was slightly more natural light here than in the temporary classroom, and the ceiling was high and the air fresh. Pictures of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin were glued on the back wall. On the front wall were large pictures of Chairman Mao and Vice Chairman Lin Biao, smiling warmly to us from above the blackboard. The blackboard was already filled with the words we were to learn that day. Under the blackboard was a foot-high concrete platform, and we had desks and small benches to sit on. This was luxurious compared to the temporary classroom!
My fourth and fifth brothers were also at the school, and this gave me comfort. It was my fourth brother’s sixth and final year before he moved to the middle school, and my fifth brother was in his third year.
After the first two weeks of school, I still had no idea what I’d learned or why I should study. Listening to Teacher Song babbling on just made me sleepy, especially if we had afternoon classes, which went from two until six. The only thing that kept me awake was the thought of playing with my friends during those ten-minute breaks.
After our second class one day, we were told to go out onto the school ground to have our first fifteen-minute physical education class, with all two hundred and fifty students. The sports teacher stood in front of everyone with a loudspeaker in hand and shouted out the eight exercise routines accompanied by recorded music. They were simple arm and leg stretching exercises that took no more than five minutes. The new students were placed in the last line, and we simply followed the older students in front of us.