by Li Cunxin
The time at the dormitory allows us to meet the other students. Four are from the countryside and others are from the city. There is something different about the city students. They seem more worldly than us country kids. There is also a man wearing a military uniform. He is called “the political head.” And there’s one of the teachers who auditioned us. They have come to Qingdao to collect us and will accompany us on our train trip to Beijing. We are briefed by the political head about certain rules and expectations the academy has for us. I have trouble understanding some of the terminology because they all speak in the Mandarin dialect.
By the time night comes, I still have not eaten since breakfast, so my brother peels me an apple. It’s the first time I’ve ever had a whole apple to myself. I feel so lucky and so special. We settle down for the night. My only real comfort is my big brother, sleeping on a small bed next to mine.
Early next morning, we take a bus to the train station, an old building crammed with hundreds of people. I have never been to a train station before. I’ve only seen trains from a distance. Our train is a steam train, puffing out volumes of smoke and making an enormous noise. Our teachers push their way through the crowds and onto the train, and we pass our luggage through the windows because everyone is fighting their way on at the same time.
I leave my brother standing on the platform and find my seat on the train. Then, five minutes before departure, the loudspeakers announce that all family members and friends are to leave the platform. This is my last chance to say good-bye to my brother. He extends his hand through the window. As I grasp it I feel him give me something. It is a two-yuan note, his cigarette money. He will have to go without his beloved cigarettes for the next few months. I know how precious his cigarettes are to him. But he quickly runs into the crowd before I can say anything. I hold the money in my hand, tears streaming down my face, and watch Cuncia disappear into the crowd.
I listen to the sound of the train. With a sudden jolt, a massive puff of steam swallows our carriage and Qingdao Station slowly slips away. With the click-clack sound of each passing section of the track I know I am moving farther and farther away from my parents. My heart races along with the gathering speed of the train. I don’t know how I am going to survive the next twelve months before seeing my niang again. I long to sleep next to my parents. Even my brother’s smelly feet don’t seem too bad now.
We have reserved seats on the train, but being Chairman Mao’s good children, we give our seats to some elderly people who can only afford to buy standing-room tickets. Five people are squeezed on a bench for three. The overhead rack is overflowing with luggage. A couple of times the train makes a sudden jolt and some bags crash down onto unfortunate passengers below.
At first, the trees and fields flashing by are familiar sights, but then the landscape changes and the trees, crops, even the smell of the air, become different and unfamiliar. Even though it is winter, the windows are open to allow the fresh air in.
At almost the halfway point in the journey, the train stops at Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province. Here the station is grander than Qingdao’s, and well lit. Our teachers tell us that we can go and stretch our legs. There are peasants selling smoked chicken, steamed bread, roasted peanuts, sunflower seeds and sweets. Most of the students from the city buy something, but the country students like me just watch.
Later, back on the train, the political head and the teacher lead us to the dining car. Not many people are allowed in this car. In fact, only government officials are allowed, but we are Madame Mao’s students, so we are invited to go along. We occupy nearly half the car. There are two cold dishes on each table, a plate of pickled peanuts and some thinly sliced marinated beef. The beef is tough but delicious—this is heavenly food! We quickly demolish the cold dishes and then three steaming hot courses arrive: a whole fish, stir-fried pork with green chives and a mixed vegetable dish. We each have a bowl of rice too. The rich and delicious smells take my breath away. Every dish is shining with oil! Even the sauce for the vegetable dish is full of flavor. I have never seen so much meat in my whole life! We devour the food like hungry tigers. I wish for more, but I am too embarrassed to ask.
I hardly sleep for the entire twenty-four hours of the train journey. Just before we pull into Beijing Station, our teachers warn us that it will be very crowded. Stay very close, or we will get lost.
I am stunned when I see the sea of people at the station. There is no way our teachers could have prepared us for such a scene. Instead of hundreds of people, I see hundreds of thousands, all pushing and shoving in a huge open space. The ceiling is so high and bright, almost blinding me with its many fluorescent lights. It is so grand. Even the passageways are chock-a-block with people, sleeping on the floor while they wait for their next train. The sound is deafening—hundreds of thousands of people all talking at the same time. The smell too is indescribably strange—virtually everyone carries some kind of hometown delicacy: I have my apples, pears, sorghum sweets, snakeskin and dried shrimps, but who knows what others are carrying. The smell makes me want to escape this place as quickly as I can, but my bags are too heavy and I can only move slowly. I try so hard to keep up with my group. I enter a tunnel, but when I come out the other end, the familiar faces of my fellow students are nowhere in sight. My two bags are pushed and pulled by the crowd, and several times I nearly lose my balance. I look around. I don’t know which direction to take. I am exhausted and desperate, so I move to the side, out of the way of the fast-moving people. I sit down against a wall, lost.
I am frightened. I want to go home to my niang. I start to sob. A soldier comes up to me and asks me why I am alone. I tell him I have become separated from my group and don’t know which way to go. He kindly takes one of my bags and leads me to the exit. I am so grateful to him, this Lei Feng-like soldier, and as I step out of the crowded train station I am relieved to see one of our teachers from the Beijing Dance Academy.
It is Chen Lueng, the tall teacher who auditioned us, and he is with a couple more teachers from the academy who are at the station to greet us. A bus is waiting, too, and I am the last person to climb on. The students from Shanghai had arrived an hour before and are already impatiently waiting on the bus.
I hear one of the teachers tell the driver to close the door. I want to be helpful, so I start to pull the door closed, but the driver has pushed the control button and the door closes automatically in front of me. It takes me by total surprise. The buses at home don’t have doors like this. I stumble back and fall. Everyone laughs. I have made a fool of myself within the first few minutes of being in Beijing. I feel desperately alone. At this moment I realize I have entered a completely new world.
Throughout the eleven years of my childhood in Qingdao, I’d always lived with the harsh reality of not having enough food to fill our stomachs, of seeing my parents struggle, of witnessing people dying of starvation, of constantly being trapped in that same hopeless, vicious cycle as my forefathers. I had been determined to get out of that deep, dark well. I cannot remember how many times I’d wanted to let go of my life and relieve some of my parents’ financial burden. I would have sacrificed my own life to help my family, but would it have made much difference? Whom did my life belong to anyway?
But somewhere deep in my heart there is a buried seed, a seed of hope. It isn’t even a light. I can’t see any light to guide me out of this cruel and unfair world. But that seed of hope has always existed, and it implants itself in my mind. Its power is strong. It makes me feel that one day everything will be all right. It is my escape, and my secret dream.
Beijing is my chance. I am scared to leave my parents, yet I know this will be my only chance of helping them. I am afraid of what is waiting for me, yet I know I have to take that first step forward. I can’t let my parents down. I can’t let my brothers down. I am carrying their dreams as well as my own. My niang said never look back.
I pick myself up off the floor of the bus, and walk down the ais
le toward my seat.
PART TWO
BEIJING
8
FEATHER IN A WHIRLWIND
At first, despite missing home, the thrill of being in Beijing near our great and beloved leader Chairman Mao completely overwhelmed me. Here I was, part of the Beijing Dance Academy, with Madame Mao our honorary artistic director. My family, my relatives, the people in our village and commune, even the Shandong Province officials themselves, would all have enormous expectations of me: from this moment onward, I would have an “iron rice bowl”—a good job and enough food for life.
On the way to our academy on the bus that day we detoured to Zhongnanhai, where Chairman Mao, Madame Mao and all the top government officials lived. It was a huge complex, right next to the Forbidden City, with barbed wire and high, faded red-gold walls. Security guards stood beside huge red wooden doors, their hands firmly grasping their semiautomatic guns. Guards seemed to be everywhere, spread evenly along the walls, ready to pull the trigger on anyone who might pose a threat.
I simply couldn’t believe I was here! Here, where our godlike leader slept, worked and made all his important political decisions. What was it like in there? I wondered. I could see many tall trees inside, and I’d heard that there was a fishing pond there, called Daiyutai. I imagined it had lots of different fish in it, and it must surely be round, like the image of Mao, our sun.
I was stunned with the sheer scale of Beijing: enormous buildings, endless street-lighting, wide smooth streets, nothing like the muddy dirt roads we had in Laoshan County. And the men and women—their Mao-style jackets looked so smart! I could see very few patches on their clothes. And the number of cars, buses, jeeps, bicycles—it simply shocked me. How could there be so many bicycles in one city! Officers in army uniforms directed the flow of traffic, but nobody seemed to pay much attention to the traffic lights themselves. I was completely fascinated. I’d never seen traffic lights before.
As the bus pulled into Tiananmen Square, my heart leaped. I could see long rows of gigantic light poles. I could see an ocean of people. I immediately noticed the Gate of Heavenly Peace on our left and the grand building of the People’s Congress on the right. They were so familiar—I had seen them in so many pictures: even in my collection of Mao’s buttons at home there was one with Chairman Mao smiling and waving at me from the top of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. It made my spine shiver. Tiananmen Square was our great symbol of communism. It was here, on the Gate of Heavenly Peace, facing millions of jubilant people, that Chairman Mao declared the birth of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949. It was a date that all the children of China had etched into their minds.
For our first day in Beijing it was sunny, and the combination of body heat from the crowd, the sunshine and the smog made the square warm. Our bus wasn’t allowed to drive too close to the center, so we got out and our political heads and teachers herded us toward the Gate of Heavenly Peace. People swarmed everywhere, many stopping to take pictures, so it took some time before we could get close. Then one of our political heads told a security guard that we were from Madame Mao’s school. That mention alone was enough, and he happily let us into the security area surrounding the Gate of Heavenly Peace, so we could pose for several group photos.
It was only once I settled back onto our bus that a sense of insecurity began to overwhelm me. I sank down into my seat and looked out the window. The buildings around the square seemed to stare at me. Why are you, peasant boy, here in this magnificent city? Throughout my childhood I had always dreamed of coming here. I had always believed I never would. Yet now I was here, among fifteen million people. I felt like a feather swept up in a whirlwind. I was only eleven years old. Nothing could have prepared me for this.
Our bus traveled through the city streets and gradually the tall buildings of Beijing were left far behind. We drove on and on, heading, we were told, toward a village called Zhuxingzhuang, about one hundred and twenty miles away. The name meant Zhu’s New Village, and it was to be our new home.
The wide, open fields of the countryside seemed to invigorate me. The fields here were flat compared to the layered fields surrounding my hometown, but there were enough similarities in the countryside to relieve my anxiety just a little. It was a long drive, and one of the teachers suggested we sing propaganda songs as we went along, and this too temporarily kept my attention.
Eventually, just as our bus turned into a drive, the political head proudly announced, “We are here! Our school is on the left.”
I could see tall, bare trees on each side of a driveway (it was February and still bitterly cold) and within a couple of minutes our bus turned toward a metal-barred gate that had bright red letters over the top of it: Central 5-7 Performing and Arts University. The numbers, our political heads explained, referred to 7 May 1970, when Madame Mao delivered a famous speech to the arts and education communities, using Chairman Mao’s philosophies to encourage all intellectuals to engage, both physically and mentally, with the three classes: peasants, workers and soldiers. They were golden words to the Ministry of Culture, so they proposed that Madame Mao should be the artistic director of this new university, and that it should be located in the heart of the communes, where future artists could learn and work among the peasants every day. In such an isolated site, surrounded by communes and fields, students would be protected from any negative influences from the city. Madame Mao supported this idea, and the project quickly received the central government’s backing.
Our bus came to a stop inside a compound, and we all filed out. A small group of officials and teachers helped the girls with their luggage before we were all taken inside a new three-story building. I smelled fresh paint as we entered, an overpowering, unfamiliar smell, but the teachers didn’t seem to notice. Before we climbed upstairs to the second floor, one teacher read out our names and divided us into groups according to our age and gender. I was put in the younger boys’ class.
There were three stairways: we went up the center one, and I noticed next to the other stairs there were two bathrooms, one for each sex. The teachers explained things as we went. The boys’ bathroom was divided into two sections: the outer section was for washing, and there was only cold water there. We were told that we had to collect our hot water from the boiler room near our canteen. Water coming through pipes, instead of having to carry buckets from the well! I thought it was amazing!
Next we were shown our bedrooms. There were four rooms, two for boys and two for girls, and about ten or eleven of us to a room. The beds were crammed in so close together. It would be a luxury to have a bed all to myself, but I knew I’d still miss my brother’s smelly feet and long for the security of my parents.
We were allowed a few moments to put our personal belongings away, so I put my snakeskin and the smelly dried shrimp and my other items in a little bedside chest of drawers next to the bed I was allocated. Then I got out my niang’s precious handmade quilt and carefully folded it on top of the bed. Then all of us, all forty-four students, were taken to the sports ground near the canteen by our three political heads. They organized us into four straight lines according to height, the smaller ones at the front and the tallest at the back. I was the second smallest boy in my line.
Once everyone was standing quietly, the head of our academy, a broad, strong man in a green army uniform, started his lecture. “Students, I am your director and you can call me Director Wang,” he said in a rusty, deep voice with a distinct southern accent. He looked around. I could see his scary little eyes. There was complete silence. “On behalf of our beloved Madame Mao, I welcome you to the Central 5-7 Performing and Arts University. You are privileged to be chosen to be part of Madame Mao’s new school. Do you know what your chances of being chosen were?” He paused. “One in a billion! That’s right, one in a billion! You are the lucky and proud children of the workers, peasants and soldiers of China! You will carry Chairman Mao’s artistic flag into the bright future. Not only will you receive six ye
ars of ballet training, but you will also study Chinese folk dance, Beijing Opera Movement, martial arts, acrobatics, politics, Chinese and international history, Chinese and international geography, poetry, mathematics and Madame Mao’s Art Philosophy. What’s Art Philosophy you may ask?” He paused again and looked around once more with his scary little eyes. “Art Philosophy is the relationship between politics and the arts. It is Madame Mao’s wish that you don’t just grow up being a dancer, but a revolutionary guard, a dedicated and faithful servant of Chairman Mao’s great crusade! Your weapon is your art. Madame Mao and over a billion pairs of eyes will be watching your progress. The expectation is enormous. The hurdle is high. The task is difficult. But what you are assigned to do is glorious!
“Your parents helped Chairman Mao win his first war. You can help him win his future battles. You will need skills and mental strength. They don’t come easily. You will need to work hard every day of the year. Your daily schedules will be posted on the bulletin board on your floor and they will be strictly followed and reinforced.” Another pause. “Any who are not up to this important task, raise your hand now!” His head did not move, but those scary little eyes moved from left to right, and right to left. Nobody raised a hand. He smiled, which made his already tiny eyes look even smaller. “Good!” he continued. “There are five people working full-time to support each of you here. I hope you don’t let them, and over a billion other people, down. Now, you can go to your supper.”
Director Wang’s lecture left me confused and lost. I vaguely understood that we had been assigned an important job, that I was to devote my life to Chairman Mao’s revolutionary causes. But this was nothing new. From the first day of school we were told to love, follow and even die for our great leader, Chairman Mao. Director Wang’s words were clear and authoritative about that, but I couldn’t grasp the rest of what he said about art and politics. I wondered whether Chairman Mao’s artistic flag was going to be a different color from the flag of China. I didn’t know what to think. All I could think of was standing on my toes in a pair of pointe shoes all day.