And that wasn’t the end of it.
A particularly zealous student decided to write to Chairman Mao. She was from a family of government dignitaries, and wanted to explain to him what was happening at the Conservatory. She told him about the students who had made disparaging remarks about workers and peasants; how they judged them to be incapable of appreciating Western classical music. She informed him that there was a boy who styled his hair like Beethoven. That another listened to classical music on a stereo system. That yet another prostrated himself listening to Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony. Finally, and worst of all, she revealed that a student had been on the verge of killing herself because of Western music.
The letter could have been lost among the many letters that Mao received every day. But it was returned, annotated in his handwriting:
This letter is very well written. We must solve this problem. Western culture must be put to the service of our country. We must develop our own culture.
Mao Zedong
The author was going to be received by Madame Mao herself, Jiang Qing. What we didn’t know was that Jiang Qing was just then entering the political scene: it was the beginning of a career that would be remembered with fear.
As for me, I only knew one thing: Chairman Mao had judged my actions and my words—me, barely fourteen years old. How was this possible? How, amidst seven hundred million Chinese, could he have taken an interest in me?
In short, my plans collapsed; it was a life sentence. Every door would be closed to me forever. There was no question of attending university, finding a normal job or any sort of future life. Many Chinese in similar situations preferred to die. In my own circle, the guilty owner of the stereo system was the first victim. He left the Conservatory, moved to the country, and joined the army before committing suicide, overwhelmed by the weight of what he considered to be a grave error.
Actually, Mao’s answer was part of a vast movement that, in 1963, heralded the arrival of the Cultural Revolution. The first reports and instructions began to circulate about changes that should be made to art and literature to ensure that they served the Revolution properly. Soon, on the orders of Zhou Enlai, the Conservatory would be divided into two parts, with a department of Chinese music on one hand and a department of Western music on the other.
In reality, Mao—whom the disaster of the Great Leap Forward had forced, in his own words, “to withdraw from the front”—was waiting in the wings, and took advantage of the economy’s relative recovery to attempt to regain power. To do so, he understood that he had to isolate his political enemies and dismantle the Chinese state apparatus. He did so by calling directly on the people, in particular on the young, for whom he was a living god.
In the midst of these political struggles, I was only a tiny pawn, easily manipulated. Why me? Because of my bad family background, or because I had been arbitrarily chosen—something characteristic of all totalitarian regimes? Whatever the case, I had little idea of the consequences.
5
From Mozart to Mao
If our writers and artists who come from the intelligentsia want their works to be well received by the masses, they must change and remold their thinking and their feelings. Without such a change, without such remolding, they can do nothing well and will be misfits.
(Mao, “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art”)
The trucks into which the professors and students had been packed rolled along the dusty highway. All we could see were fields stretching to the horizon.
It was the beginning of the Shang shan xia xiang movement. Its goal was to send students into the countryside in order to radically change their way of thinking.
“Over this summer vacation, we will have the chance to help the peasants with their work, and to practice our art in their service,” announced the Conservatory’s director.
As we bounced along the road, everyone was enthusiastic, especially me. I saw this as a way to redeem myself, to reclaim my place in the group, to win back people’s trust…I promised myself that I would behave in an exemplary manner. I couldn’t stand being an outsider anymore.
Finally we arrived at the little village where we would live. We drove past a large drawing of Mao, next to a blackboard on which a maxim from the Great Helmsman had been written in chalk. The portrait, which had to have been done by one of the locals, was not particularly skillful—its subject was barely recognizable. Then the trucks turned onto the village’s main street, which consisted of a large group of siheyuan. The peasants were dressed in rags, and their children went unclothed. Chickens cackled everywhere. I had never seen such filth and misery.
For most of us, this was our first experience in the fields, and the shock was enormous. And yet, compared with other intellectuals who had been sent to the countryside to follow the rule of san tong—i.e., the “three withs,” to “eat with, live with, and work with the peasants”—we received special treatment. Starting at dawn, we helped the peasants in the fields all day, and we slept in their houses on huge, flea-infested straw mattresses, but we took our meals separately. The work was hard. The more time passed, the more my admiration grew for these people who had devoted their entire lives to the earth.
At night, among ourselves, during our sessions of denunciation and self-criticism, we drew on these experiences. We commented on “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” a famous text by Mao from 1942, and on one passage in particular, in which he declared:
But after I became a revolutionary and lived with workers and peasants and with soldiers of the revolutionary army, I gradually came to know them well, and they gradually came to know me well, too. It was then, and only then, that I fundamentally changed the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois feelings implanted in me in the bourgeois schools. I came to feel that compared with the workers and peasants the unremolded intellectuals were not clean and that, in the last analysis, the workers and peasants were the cleanest people and, even though their hands were soiled and their feet smeared with cow dung, they were really cleaner than the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois intellectuals.
Inspired by these lines that we knew by heart, we discussed the best way to definitively join the proletariat, and to create an art that truly served workers, peasants, and soldiers.
Towards the end of our stay, a session of Yi ku si tian was organized for us: a peasant joined us in order to “remember the sufferings of the past and to evoke today’s happiness.” This meeting, which was followed by many others, would remain forever imprinted on my memory.
There were about sixty of us, gathered around a rickety table in a small room lit by dirty neon bulbs. An old woman came in. Her face was deeply lined, her hands calloused, and she had tiny feet. She smiled at us—she had lost nearly all of her teeth. One by one, we greeted her. She had a kind word for each of us, and a smile that was full of humanity. She was curious about all the new things that we had brought with us. “What do you have there?” she asked me, pointing to my little transistor radio.
And then we sat down to eat. While we shared her meal—a completely inedible gruel—she told us her story.
She had been born seventy years ago. From a very young age, she worked for a landowner from morning to night for no wages. He gave her a bit of bran for food. In winter, to keep warm, she had no choice but to plunge her hands and feet in cow dung. One day, her mother fell ill; nevertheless, the landowner demanded that she continue to work in the fields. She saw her mother collapse: she ran over—her mother was dead. One of her little brothers starved to death before the age of ten. She was married at sixteen, and lived with her husband in such poverty that they had to sell off one of their daughters as a domestic servant.
At this point in her story, the old woman began to weep. She could not go on. No one dared say a word. We were moved to tears. How could such things have happened? How could they have existed? We did what we could to comfort her. Had her situation improved? Yes, she said, thanks to Chairman Mao, her life
was better today. She was no longer exploited; she had recovered her dignity. She owed everything to the Great Helmsman and the Communist Party. She stopped crying and stood up, proclaiming in a voice that quivered with emotion:
“Long live Mao!”
The next day, we discussed at length the lessons we could glean from the previous evening. The old woman’s story had touched us deeply. It was unacceptable that a human being could be so exploited; no one could deny that her condition had improved.
As the date of our departure drew near, we prepared a little concert for our hosts. The news spread, and spontaneously, processions of peasants came from dozens of miles around to hear us. The village was crowded with people, and the audience, hungry for music, applauded wildly.
As we took our leave, we were all convinced that we had been transformed by our stay. The peasants cried when they saw us climbing onto the trucks that would take us back to Beijing. We were also in tears, convinced that what we had just experienced would help change the world and make it a better place.
In the truck on the way back, I thought about what I had learned in the course of this month of Shang shan xia xiang, and during the evening of Yi ku si tian. I thought about how hard it was to work the fields, and how essential it was for feeding China. About the generosity of the peasants. I was overwhelmed. I told myself that I was not living in the real world. I only thought about playing classical music, but it meant nothing to these peasants. The proof? During our farewell concert, the only classical work we played was a short piece by Grieg. The rest of the program consisted of popular works.
A few weeks later, the school year started, and I resumed my studies at the Conservatory. Thankfully, the memory of my errors had begun to fade. The summer holidays and our stay in the countryside helped; no new catastrophe had occurred. Also, I had behaved in an exemplary manner.
But the start of this school year was not like those in the past. Individual classes were replaced by group courses in which all students, regardless of level, had to study the same works. My new professor, a Party member chosen by the Conservatory’s administration, gave us mostly Chinese music to practice.
During the sessions of denunciation and self-criticism, the discussions became increasingly animated. We were preoccupied—even obsessed—by two main questions. Should we perform music that really served the masses, or class-oriented music? Should we try to educate people by bringing them classical music or play music that they spontaneously enjoyed?
Over time, my outlook changed and altered. I understood better what was expected of us, and I was becoming a better revolutionary. I could feel it.
And the more I felt it, the more ill at ease I was with my family. I clearly saw that my parents could never become good revolutionaries. And I hated them for it. I hated them for their bad family backgrounds, which were the source of all my troubles. My father became increasingly self-effacing, saying nothing. After my self-criticism, his only reaction was to forbid me to read, on the recommendation of the Conservatory’s director. I couldn’t keep from expressing my hostility, even my contempt. When I came home on Sundays, I never smiled. My mother cooked my favorite dishes; I never thanked her. One day she came to the Conservatory to invite me to go to the theater with her. I refused. And yet, as I watched her walk away, I felt a pang. What had I done? How could I cause her such sorrow? But I was doing just what was expected of me. The new China would never be built unless the children of bad family backgrounds disowned their parents.
In 1964, everything changed.
We returned from our winter holidays. This time, we had spent them with workers in a steel mill, and it had reinforced our belief that we were serving the wrong cause with our music. We resumed our discussions about our role in society with a vengeance. Yes, Western classical music was for the elite. And what was more, who among the peasants, workers, and soldiers really liked it? A tiny minority. Yes, we had to play music, popular songs, ones that the people appreciated and understood. This would be our contribution to serving the revolutionary ideal. Our talks became impassioned. We took turns speaking:
“Classical music is bourgeois. It was not written for the people!”
“Beethoven was an egoist.”
“All his life Bach wrote for the Church. Do you believe in the story of Mary, the mother of Christ? No? Well, he wrote works about her!”
“Chopin was nothing but a sentimentalist.”
“And Debussy was an idealist.”
Only Mozart escaped this bonfire of criticism. I never really understood why. No doubt this was additional proof of his genius.
A few months later, we were all convinced: from now on, we had to play genuinely proletarian music and to perform it in the countryside, in factories, and in military camps. I went a step further than the others: I wanted to change my life, stop playing the piano, and become a soldier. I wanted to be a real revolutionary! We were shown examples of young university students who had gone to live in rural areas. Among them was one of my cousins—I idolized him. Many were Chushen bu hao students who had severed ties with their families. One of my schoolmates had disowned his mother and had gone in search of a new one, in a factory or in the countryside.
By late spring, events had begun to accelerate.
The Little Red Book had just been published. Purges in the literary and artistic world began. We divided our summer break between a new Shang shan xia xiang and a few weeks of vacation before starting at the Conservatory again. On the first day of classes, the director informed us of instructions she had received from the Ministry of Culture. From now on, we would no longer play Western classical music. Only a few volumes of technical exercises would be tolerated—Czerny, Hanon—but nothing else.
Like my other schoolmates, I was neither surprised nor distressed. It was a logical decision. We were prepared for it. In the course of a year, the vast majority of the four hundred students and professors of the Beijing Conservatory had been completely turned around in their thinking. We were now convinced that we should put Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven behind us and only play authentically proletarian music. Mao could be proud: he had accomplished something that no one in history had dared to imagine.
Under such conditions, life at the Conservatory no longer resembled anything coherent. Without scores, music classes no longer had any reason to exist. Mao had invented a “Conservatory without music.” The only classes that were still held were those of general education, as well as denunciation and self-criticism sessions. We discussed the new heroes that the regime provided as examples, first and foremost Lei Feng, a young soldier who had died in 1962 after a life devoted to the revolutionary cause. We read his journals with fervor, and by so doing followed Mao’s slogan: “Learn from Comrade Lei Feng.” Every day we asked ourselves how we could best imitate his example by attempting, in turn, to come to the aid of our family and friends. We were told that Lei Feng had drawn his strength from a close reading of Mao’s writings. It was through his ceaseless study of them before taking any action that he had been able to attain such a level of perfection. I was captivated: Lei Feng dominated my life.
New forms of interpersonal control were put in place. The regime sensed that the relative idleness of several hundred musicians, most of them from bourgeois backgrounds, was a dangerous thing. Each one of us was therefore obliged to be part of a two-person “red team,” where each person criticized the other in order to help him or her progress. The composition of these teams was carefully worked out to match good revolutionaries with those who were less so. To avoid any collusion, the teams changed frequently.
However, the situation created by the ban on Western music soon became untenable. In the autumn, the professors decided to collectively write a certain number of compositions. At least that way we would have something to play.
The works that emerged a few weeks later were inspired by scenes from the life of peasants, workers, and soldiers. The titles included The Little Shepherd, Return from Shooting P
ractice, and The Wheat Dance. The most cheerful of them all was Return from Shooting Practice.
The scores were dreadfully difficult: using a pentatonic scale, they forced us to rework whole areas of our technique. For months, the “Conservatory without music” resounded with this handful of works that hundreds of students played at the same time.
Concurrently, the administration decided to teach us to dance and to train us in the performing arts. This was so we could participate in the staging of the Yangbanxi, the “model works” that Madame Mao—whose political role continued to expand—had decided to commission to compensate for the enormous gap left by the ban on the great Western works. The Yangbanxi dominated the programs of every concert given in China, no matter what the venue, whether it was a theater, soldier’s camp, factory, or countryside; and the students from the Conservatory had a duty to promote them. For me, it was a form of torture: physically awkward, I was nevertheless obliged to, by turns, dance, sing, recite, and play the piano. Once again I was severely criticized: if I was incapable of dancing, it was because I didn’t have a real feel for the proletariat.
It goes without saying that under these conditions, any competitive spirit and drive for success disappeared. How one played was now of secondary importance: the only thing that mattered was one’s political behavior.
At the end of 1964, intensification of the class struggle had become the battle cry. Mao demanded that we, the young people, never forget it. The term “Cultural Revolution” was heard for the first time. The whole of 1965 was spent between the monotonous life of the “Conservatory without music” and an increasing number of Shang shan xia xiang in the countryside, factories, and military camps. Beneath an outer calm, the storm was brewing.
The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations Page 5