by Weihua Zhang
Grandpa in an undated photo
I couldn’t understand then but did understand later why Mama tried to help our neighbors at her own risk. During the Cultural Revolution, Lao Ye, Mama’s father, had endured many denunciation sessions of his own. He had worked at Yabuli Train Station his entire life. Every day, he would inspect and sign off cargos shipped in and out of the station. His signature had traveled with the cargos all over China and to many parts of the world. During the Cultural Revolution, Lao Ye was accused of being an undercover Japanese agent. The evidence?
Lao Ye had worked at the same train station when Manchuria fell under Japan’s occupation in the 1930s. Lao Ye insisted on his innocence. The interrogators—his colleagues—did not believe him. “You’d better confess,” they warned him. “We know what you had done; our source is very reliable.” Lao Ye thought long and hard, but he had nothing to confess. “Look at this,” they pointed at the slogan posted on the wall, “Leniency to those who confess their crimes and severity to those who refuse to.” But Lao Ye still had nothing to confess. When the Cultural Revolution ended, the same interrogators told Lao Ye, “We thought we had nailed you, because the informant was your son-in-law.” Mama was never able to forgive the informant, my aunt’s husband. This had strained her relationship with her younger sister, my favorite aunt.
With Mama, aunt, and second brother (1962)
In June 1969, our city held a pre-execution rally in front of the City Center. Eighteen convicted counterrevolutionaries were propped up on six trucks, with their arms tied up behind them and big heavy signs hanging down their necks. A few hundred of us Little Red Guards joined several hundred more Red Guards to stand sentry from afar, our red armbands dazzling against the summer sun. The bullhorns blared out the offenses and verdicts of each criminal. Then the trucks began slowly circling the square before heading out to the execution site. The crowd closed in and hustled to catch a glimpse of the condemned, dragging me along. Suddenly, a sharp pain shot through my right foot. I had tripped over a plank and stepped on a rusty nail. For the next two weeks, I resigned myself to bed confinement and the twice-daily penicillin shots. Just like that, my Little Red Guard days were over. I waited anxiously for the arrival of fall and the start of high school (at the time, China’s secondary education consisted of 6-year elementary school and 4-year high school), when I could become a member of the elite—in my young eyes—Red Guards.
(April 2012)
Days in the Sun
One early July morning, a dozen of us high school graduates in my father’s company joined thousands more at a pep rally. We gathered together at the large plaza in front of the Changchun Geological College, took our oaths, then rode on trucks, vans, and buses, moving along one of the thoroughfares of Changchun, Xi’an Avenue, and continued onto our separate destinations. My group was going to Second Brigade, Wei Zi Gou Commune, in Jiu Tai County, an outlying region northeast of Changchun, my hometown.
The large wave of educated youths going to the countryside started in 1968, two years into the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, youths took on the role of destruction derbies. These were students in colleges, high schools, and even elementary schools. They were innocent, enthusiastic, and loyal to a fault, ready to answer the calls of the Communist Party and Chairman Mao. Now with the country in a near total collapse—factories closed down, schools suspended, social apparatuses non-existent or nonfunctional—young people were running wild on the streets, posing potential problems for the authorities. Hence, Mao decided to dispatch them to the rural communes and far away, underdeveloped regions, to be reeducated by peasants.
So in the month of my 18th birthday, July 1975, I arrived at Second Brigade, Wei Zi Gou Commune, which would serve as my makeshift home for almost two years. The Brigade Head, Mr. Wang, had generously offered up one of his two rooms for us to live in, while he and his wife, their three daughters, aged four, five, and seven, and their two-year-old son, crammed into the other room. It was a typical northern rural dwelling, a single-family, one-story clay house, with a brick facade. The kitchen was located in the middle and connected to the entrance door, with one room on each side. In each room, there were two kangs—heatable clay or brick beds—one facing the North, the other, the South. They took up a large area of the room. In the room we occupied, four of us girls slept on each kang. The six boys were hosted two each by three families from the Second Brigade community.
In my entire eighteen-year existence on earth, other than a few short stays in my grandparents’ house with Mama, I had never been away from my familiar dwelling or lived with total or close to total strangers. The villagers of Second Brigade were curious about us, the city-dwellers and intellectuals—a new species many of them had never laid their eyes on. They scrutinized everything: our clothes, hairdos, pale complexion, soft hands, speech patterns, and mannerisms.
The first time I held a hoe in my hand, I felt its heaviness. We were working in the cornfields. Before long, my tiny, soft hands were full of blisters, especially my fingertips. The summer sun hung high in the sky, the field suffocating, and very soon, I was puffing for air. I was left behind farther and farther. Even my fellow educated youth fared better than I: the slowest among them was at least 5 feet ahead of me. I kept pushing, ashamed of my own poor effort. Yet the harder I pushed, the farther behind I lagged. The unending row of corn stretched far into the horizon.
It dawned on me then that Chairman Mao was absolutely right when he hurled his criticism at us, the privileged city dwellers and intellectuals. We had been living a life where we were too dependent on others to make our life possible and comfortable. We had been living a rather parasitic life. Every day—as the saying goes—we would only “open our mouths to be fed and hold out our arms to be dressed”; we could “neither use our four limbs nor tell the five grains apart.” And here I was, doing my best to address my deficiency.
I breathed a sigh of relief when Zhao Di, “bring forth a brother”—a girl a few years my junior, came to my rescue. Zhao Di’s mother had given birth to five girls in a row until a male child came along. Zhao Di was only 14 at the time. She was betrothed, at 11, to a young man in a nearby village. She had been working hard to earn her own dowry. A heavy smoker like so many Chinese peasants at the time—she had been smoking for half of her young life—she would roll her own cigarettes from old newspaper and tobacco leaves whenever she was not working, eating, or sleeping.
My next hurdle was quite embarrassing as well as frustrating. I hadn’t realized that the simple task of answering the call of nature could prove to be so unnatural. Of course, there was no indoor plumbing in Second Brigade then. In fact, in the 1970s, all rural areas and many small cities, including towns in urban areas, did not have indoor plumbing either. Our makeshift outhouse was just the dirt ground next to our room, separated by a wall of clay, and fenced with cornstalks to give us some privacy protection. The space was big enough, about four square feet. There were no holes dug in the ground—just the ground itself. Our wastes became natural fertilizer, chemical free! Almost free, anyway. During one lunch break, I went out to relieve myself, but couldn’t. I squatted there for so long that my legs became numb. I tried to shift my body weight from one leg to the other. No luck. Sweat broke out on my forehead and dripped to the ground. I kept pushing. Still no luck. I would be late for work. I had to do something to get myself out of this stinky mess. But what could I do? Due to a combination of factors, such as hard labor, lack of nutrition, sleep deprivation, overexposure to the natural elements, and a complete change of surroundings, I suffered from a severe case of constipation. Whatever waste I had, it had hardened into tiny dry balls, the size of sheep dung. In a desperate attempt, I used my fingers to dig out these hard balls.
Nevertheless, life was not all hardships during my re-education days. It was during those days that Xiao Xiao and I had bonded. Though our parents worked for the same company, they were in different divisions.
Xiao Xiao and I only got to know each other after we arrived at Second Brigade, as we had been living in opposite sections of the city. But we clicked right away. We both were of the quiet type, sensitive, and the youngest of our respective families. We shared news and care packages from home no matter who was the lucky recipient; we worked side by side in the field; we even had a crush on the same boy. Three months into our time at the Second Brigade, Xiao Xiao’s mother came to visit her. I was genuinely happy for, and even jealous of, Xiao Xiao that she got the chance to see her mother so soon. The following day, Xiao Xiao did not go with us to work in the field. I thought nothing of her absence; I only felt happy for her as she got to spend more time with her mother. On the third morning, Xiao Xiao left with her mother for Changchun: her parents had secured a job for her in the city. I walked with her as far as I could, happy and sad at the same time. While tears of joy and sadness ran freely on my cheeks, Xiao Xiao kept her composure. Later that day, Mr. Wang’s niece, who was visiting her uncle at the time, asked me, “So you didn’t know Xiao Xiao was leaving? I thought you two were best friends.”
Xiao Xiao’s departure coincided with the start of the harvest season. First came the excitement, the special treats the earth had to offer, and our own labor helped bring about those treats. I loved it best when we harvested corn. Whenever we stopped for a break, some peasants would choose the juiciest cornstalks for us city youths to taste. With a scythe in hand, they chopped the top and the bottom, giving us the fat, juicy, sugary middle portions to suck. The sweet juice quenched our thirst, just barely, leaving us yearning for more. And the roasted new corn on the cob: we were in seventh heaven!
Next came the cold awakening, my least favorite part of the harvest: harvesting the rice paddy. In early October, the overnight temperature in the region could easily dip down below the freezing point—zero degrees centigrade. We struggled to get up, lingered long enough in our relatively warm room, before we headed out to the cold paddy field. The sky was still dark. Under the faint light of the moon and stars, I positioned myself in front of a ridge of rice paddy, bent down, grabbed a bunch with my left hand, and reached my right hand with the scythe, trying to cut it off just about the roots. Ouch! The icy paddy stalks shocked me wide awake! Only then did I notice that the rice paddy had been covered with a thin layer of frost. The thick canvas gloves I had on were no match for the biting frost. In no time, the icy coldness seeped through; my gloves stiffened like armor; my fingers became numb. I could hardly hold onto my scythe, which must have been the bluntest one in the entire world. With my two feet stuck in the freezing mud, I half-cut, half-pulled the paddies, attacking them with a ferocious determination. When the sun pushed away the darkness, I noticed some dark spots on the thin sharp paddy blades, stained by my bleeding fingers.
(May 2012)
PART II: EXPERIENCE GAINED
East meets West. Culture shocks abundant. In Nankai University, the chair of the English department told me “we need male teachers.” In America, I embraced the idea that I could just be a scholar. Or could I?
Daughter of the Middle Kingdom
On January 31, 1989, I—a descendant of the dragon and the daughter of the Middle Kingdom—boarded a Boeing 737 at Beijing Capital International Airport, embarking on a transcontinental flight of 23 hours that took me to the United States of America, my temporary home for the next six months. At the time, little did I know that my journey would last 21 years and counting, that the United States of America would become my second home, my adopted country, and that my life would be changed forever.
The People’s Republic of China of the 1980s was a hopeful place to live in. With the passing of the country’s three founding fathers in 1976—Premier Zhou Enlai in January, General Zhu De in July, and Chairman Mao Zetong in September—the ten-year Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) came to an end. China slowly but surely achieved a state of normalcy. People were finally allowed to do what they did the best: professors returned to classrooms to impart knowledge; factory workers churned out gadgets and gizmos to enrich people’s lives; farmers reacquainted themselves with the crops; and soldiers resumed their solemn duty to safeguard the country. Gone were the days of sheer chaos and total destruction that paralyzed the entire country during the Cultural Revolution. Though the wounds were still fresh, Chinese people in all walks of life started the healing process. Once more, we were all members of a big family working for the common good of the country, the Middle Kingdom, the Center of the Earth, and the cradle of one of the ancient civilizations.
With Qiwei at college (Changchun, 1979)
In 1989, I was not ready to make any big changes in my life. I had been teaching English (language and literature) at Nankai University in Tianjin, China since 1984 and married my college sweetheart that same year. Our daughter Feifei was born in 1986. Life was full of wonders. Change? I was not ready for it. I had a job for life and the respect of my colleagues and students alike. The handsome husband, adorable daughter, blissful wife/mother trio formed a happy family. I was living in a country that was undergoing great transformations. What more could I want?
My family in front of Nankai University’s main library (1987)
Growing up, I had lived through the upheavals and tragedies the country had endured: the Anti-Rightist Movement in 1957 affected some 500,000 people, with 90% of them intellectuals; the Great Leap Forward in 1958-59—a movement to modernize China—proved a failure and toppled the country’s economic foundations; the three-year Great Famine in 1959-61, compounded by the Great Leap Forward, saw an estimated 16.5-40 million people die of starvation; and the 10-year Cultural Revolution destroyed every fabric of Chinese society, pushing the country to the brink of collapse. Compared to the life I had lived in the past, China in 1989 was a paradise to me. One must be out of her mind to trade this paradise for a sordid place like the United States of America, that decadent capitalist country.
Yet, change was in the air as evidenced in the exodus of Chinese going abroad to study, either on their own or their government’s purse strings. I joined the crowd in 1989, courtesy of my university. I was sent to study at Swarthmore College, located in the suburbs of Philadelphia, as an exchange scholar for six months. What would that decadent country do to me? I did not have time to ponder. The exodus wave swept me away.
I arrived at Swarthmore College on February 1, 1989, already two weeks late into the spring semester, and managed to get into Professor Morgan’s “Folklore and Folklife” class. Professor Morgan was in her mid-50s, of medium height, and loved to wear colorful robe-like garments; her hair was braided with an assortment of beads, and big earrings dangled from her earlobes. This was quite a contrast to the way professors dressed back in China, myself included. Professor Morgan was a dark-skinned African American (the term was new to me). But her blackness did not shock me. After all, I had been exposed to African Americans in the past. When I was an English major in the Northeast Normal University in Changchun (1978-1982), Mr. John Brown—the first black person I had ever come into contact with and the first foreigner for that matter—was my English professor for three years. What shocked me or enlightened me was how Professor Morgan conducted her class. She would engage her students in critical thinking, which was a great departure from the spoon-fed method that had long dominated the Chinese educational system. She would bring in speakers of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints to enhance her students’ learning experience. I recall one day we had a guest speaker, a beautiful woman in her mid-30s. She was a practicing witch in flesh and blood, married, and had two kids! I remember thinking to myself: Wow, are there really witches on this planet?
But I soon grew on Professor Morgan’s class as she challenged us to think and speak freely. This totally contradicted the educational experience I had had in China. You see, I was not that far removed from a culture/country where the law of the land was to follow the leader, obey the authority, and march in unison. But Professor Morgan’s class assignments allowed me to test out
this newfound academic freedom. In a paper discussing folklore’s roles in society, I used my daughter’s favorite story “The Big Gray Wolf” to argue that folklore was alive and evolving. It was the storyteller who defined the characters (good and bad), not a bureaucratic organ that dictated the norm. In Feifei’s story, the Big Gray Wolf is a benevolent character. He shares his candies with little kids and small creatures alike. He is not the evil Wolf of Little Red Riding Hood. I received an A for the assignment, my first taste of academic freedom! At the end of the semester, I gained a better understanding of the universality of folklore, a greater appreciation for cross-cultural differences, and a deeper respect for intellectual freedom. I was forced to admit that just like the Chinese, Americans were genuine, smart, and reasonable human beings, not the foreign devils as they were called in China. I also understood why we should not view people with colored lens on. Whether we were Communist Chinese or Capitalist Americans, we had more in common than we had differences. On the personal front, what followed was a natural progression: I developed a bond with Professor Morgan (who passed away on November 28, 2010) and had come to regard her as my mentor. Our friendship exemplifies what is possible for the peoples of China and America, two countries on the opposite ends of cultural, social, and political spectrums: we can and must learn from each other. Together, we can build a better future for our two peoples.
While at Swarthmore, I also took an Honors English Seminar with Professor Peter Schmidt, who has remained my friend to this day. The course focused on the American modern period of 1900-1945 and challenged us to explore the literary texts in their cultural, historical, and social contexts. In one session, we discussed some poems by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), which proved too foreign to me. During the break, I approached Peter and pointed to a word I did not understand: deflower.