by R Yang
"Or if you think you can scare me with such a spectacle, you pick the wrong man! This is a pretty sight compared to the scenes I faced on the battleground. A commander in chief has nerves as strong as steel, who uses human lives as chips to buy victory. If necessary, I will send ten thousand men to death-my own brother among them-without batting an eye."
Such is the facade he puts up, knowing that things will be ten times worse for him and his fiancee if he lets the enemies guess his true feelings. His acting works. The enemies are disappointed. But they persist in the hope that something might come from the torture.
Meanwhile only the young woman knows what is going on inside her lover. They put his heart in boiling oil and fry it for hours on end, day after day; yet he cannot cry out with pain. He has to sit there and watch her suffer without changing his facial expression. He cannot allow his lips to tremble. He cannot turn his eyes away. Or sweat. His heartbeat has to remain normal. His willpower may be strong, but his strength is not limitless.
Though his face does not betray him, she can read his thoughts from the depth of his eyes: he hates the fact that he is still alive and has to watch all this. Living like this is worse than death. In the past, he has always been a leader, a winner, a national hero. No matter how difficult the situation, he was in control. He always managed to outmaneuver his opponents. Now he and she are at the mercy of their enemies. They are like meat on a chopping board as the butcher's knife hacks at them. The butcher's knife is ruthless, striking her in the body and him in the heart. He will not be able to stand this much longer. Within his skin the concealed agony turns him into ashes inch by inch.
She must take action immediately, she decides, or it will be too late. The next morning when they are brought together, she looks him deep in the eye and gives him a dazzling smile. The next moment she manages to break from the guards, runs to the window, and jumps out. No one is quick enough to seize her. She flies down like a bird, wild and free. The building is tall; her flight is short. Yet to him it is an eternity. Time is frozen in horror. Sound is lost. The world ceases to exist. He himself ceases to exist, except for his eyes, which are fastened on her. In the end, she lands on the concrete pavement where she bursts into a tiny red flower. The fragrance of it will remain for a thousand years.
At this instant, red blood spurts from the young man's throat. So much of it. Unstoppable. It chokes him. He falls to the ground. Someone has grabbed his heart, pulled it out of his chest, and dashed it against the granite floor. It bursts into a thousand pieces. Heaven and earth turn upside down. Daylight fades out. Darkness drowns the world. In the middle of immense darkness, a tiny red flower ...
For several months the young man is on the brink of death. A high fever consumes him. His heart fails. The best doctors are flown in by special airplanes. They operate on him several times and bring him back to life.
When the young man wakes up again, he feels a void in his heart. His mother is dead too, he knows. Having found out what happened to her son and her would-be daughter-in-law, she could not forgive her self. Nor could she face the truth about her husband. With remorse, abhorrence, and bewilderment, her heart could not find a moment's peace until she was buried in the yellow earth. The young man takes his mother's death calmly. Yet deep down he feels that fate has played a cruel joke on him. After all the risks he and his fiancee have taken, neither of them was able to see the old woman while she was alive. Now the two women he loves most have vanished from the surface of the earth, leaving him behind, alone, with a bleeding heart in this hateful prison. The thought of joining them under the nine springs seems a sweet dream. But the doctors have no mercy. They will not let him die.
Pondering his situation, my hero sits in the yard of a special hospital. Over his head white clouds drift across a sky framed by electrified barbed wire and bayonets. Around him dead leaves dance in swirls like the ashes of paper money. He is all skin and bones in a white silk robe, the color of infirmity, the color of mourning ...
But the young man is a revolutionary hero. He cannot be heartbroken forever. Something will stir him, pull him into action-yes, a secret plan imparted to him by an underground worker he protected. It says the enemy will secretly exterminate all the political prisoners in the concentration camp, hundreds of men and women. Tested in blood and fire over the years, they are the most courageous and steadfast. Precious property of the Party. In the future they will prop up the great mansion of a new China. The hero must save their lives.
He organizes the political prisoners and puts them in touch with the underground. A plan to rescue them is worked out. It is a perfect plan, but its success depends on its secrecy. In a dungeon under this prison camp there exists a secret tunnel, dug by an old revolutionary martyr for the sake of others years ago. Now all the prisoners are to escape through this tunnel with the help of the underground workers and guerrilla fighters.
The plan is known only to a few, who are most reliable. Thus when a prisoner betrays the group, he can only suggest vaguely that there might be such an attempt. The enemies are not convinced, yet they are alarmed. They figure if there were such a plan, the hero would be the first one to know it. So they torture him for a confession.
They take him to the "tiger bench." Tie his legs to it at a place just above his knees and put bricks under his feet, one after another. Sweat of pain rolls down his ashy face, the drops as large as soybeans. To endure the pain, he bites his lips until blood trickles from his mouth. He knows that his comrades are unable to sleep, they are listening in the dark. He does not want to agonize them. He keeps his silence until his legs are broken.
After that the torturers tie his hands to the arms of a special chair and knock sharp bamboo sticks into his fingertips. They split when they hit the bone. Then the torturers pull them out, one by one. The excruciating pain in his fingers makes the hero faint again and again. Each time when he wakes up in cold water, he denies that he knows any plan for the prisoners to escape.
But the enemies are still not convinced. So they take him to an electric chair and run the current through him. A minute is as long as a century. An hour is eternity. The torturers have experience. They know how to increase and decrease the current to keep him from losing consciousness. That way the pain accumulates. It shoots through his veins, throbs in every cell of his body, and pours into his heart. The young man gasps for breath. His face is as white as a sheet of paper. Cold sweat drips from it. But he does not confess to make them stop.
Finally the hero is dragged into a dark dungeon. There at first he sees only a roaring furnace. At the sight a shudder runs through his body, but his heart is firm. The torturers bind him to a pillar beside the furnace. Next they take out a white-hot iron from the fire and press it against his chest.
When the iron touches his skin, the skin turns black instantly. A sickening smell spreads out and fills the room. The torturers laugh in excitement and press harder. The burning iron sizzles through his flesh. The pain is too much for a human being to bear. The young man can no longer hold back his screams. In despair, he prays to heaven for death. Any death, no matter how painful, is a mercy. Anything is better than this! But it is of no avail.
The torture continues. After one iron cools off, another is taken out. They put it to his thighs, his armpits ... Then they bring it up to his eyes and tell him this is his last chance. If he does not make a clean breast of the whole thing immediately, he will regret it for the rest of his life. The hero insists, with whatever strength he still has, that he has nothing to confess. His words are cut short by a savage scream forced from him by a horrible pain in his eyes ...
A gust of wind rises from the grass. Sudden, violent wind. It makes the sand fly, the stones walk. Two bright stars from the night sky are blown out. From then on, perpetual darkness ... The enemies' doubts at last come to an end. They believe that no human being of flesh and blood can go through such torture without confessing the truth. Their vigilance lapses. Then one night the rescue is carrie
d out. The political prisoners escape into the mountains. All are safe except my hero, who was taken to a secret place the day before.
The next morning, from the stir in the air the hero knows that the plan has worked. He has not suffered in vain. His last wish on earth is fulfilled. His heart is serene and content. He knows that the enemies will not let him off. They will vent their anger on him, but he doesn't care. Let them do whatever they want with him. He'll gladly take it all. He has only one life to lose, no matter how many times they make him die.
His death sentence comes before dawn, signed by his own father. Before he goes to the execution ground, he gets no wine, no final meal, as Chinese custom requires. But he does not need these to help him face his final moment. He dies with a smile on his face, for though he cannot see the first ray of light breaking the darkness in the east, he hears the booming sound that grows louder and louder: the Liberation Army is coming! Its advance is irresistible. A new China, like a precious infant, will soon be born.
At this point it must seem that my hero's story had come to an end. But it didn't, because the story I dreamed about was not linear. It became so only when I wrote it down. Originally the story had no beginning, no end. The various scenes floated and revolved around me like stars in a galaxy, waiting for me to pick them up and animate them, one at a time. Later when I put them back into their orbits, they were always a little changed. And each time I read a book, saw a movie, or heard a story from someone, a few new episodes would appear in my story. Old episodes, on the other hand, if I neglected them too long, would grow pale, lose weight, and vanish. Thus the story was fluid and the hero was not always as I describe him. One night he was a passionate lover, the next a loving father to a little girl. Or a loyal friend, a devoted student, a gallant sworn brother, a filial son to a working-class foster mother, and much, much more. No matter what role he played, the hero always suffered and died young. I could not imagine him any older than thirty.
Thanks to this hero, for several years I lived two lives at once. On the one hand, I attended classes, ate lunch at the school cafeteria, did physical labor, and went to meetings just as others did. I dare say I functioned quite well. At least no one had noticed anything strange about me. Yet whatever I did in the outside world, my heart and soul were not in it. Day and night, the hero's dream wrapped me in an atmosphere no one else could see. Within it, the hero and I were one. His excruciating pain vibrated through my body; his anguish pierced my heart. How sweet the heartbreaks! How pleasurable the torture! Playing the hero in my mind, I forgot my loneliness and inferiority. I forgot that I was a girl. I could be a man as well as a woman. Whatever the hero accomplished, I did. There was no limit to my power, as long as I had the power to imagine it.
After the campaign of Exposing the Third Layer of Thoughts, of course, I knew the danger of indulging in one's imagination. Things could go wrong in the wink of an eye and the damage done to me might be irretrievable. Yet I would rather take the risk. Without the hero, life was so dull, so cold. It was not worth living. Thus I went on dreaming about him until the Cultural Revolution.
In the summer of 1966, for a few months I was so busy making revolution that I forgot the hero. In fact, in those days my mind was taken over by another hero, who was not a product of my imagination but real. This hero was Chairman Mao, whose story became known to us shortly before the Cultural Revolution broke out.
Mao was from a peasant's family in Hunan Province. In his youth he cherished a great ambition to reform China. To prepare himself for the struggles ahead he studied hard, both at school and on his own, especially on his own in public libraries. Sometimes he and his friends read books at noisy marketplaces so as to practice concentration. Sometimes they ate only one meal a day and slept in the open air to temper their bodies. When it rained hard or the wind was strong or the sun was blazing hot, they'd take off their shirts to have "rain baths," "wind baths," and "sun baths." One summer he and a friend traveled on foot through Hunan to make social surveys. On this trip they talked to all kinds of people: peasants, merchants, Buddhist monks, Confucian scholars, a county magistrate, a fortune-teller ... Between the two of them, they did not have a single cent. They did this deliberately to see if they could survive in difficult situations. Yet their minds were so rich and broad that they embraced the entire world.
These stories fascinated me. This was what youth should be: creative, exciting, with heart-warming friendship! It was utterly different from the boring reality we had to face daily at I o i, where independent thinking and taking initiative met with disapproval; freedom was suppressed in the name of revolutionary discipline; friendship was killed in competition when no one looked beyond grades. But the contrast does not explain why I loved Mao at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
I loved him because of the tremendous sacrifice he made for the Chinese people: in the past four decades, he had lost six family members. His first wife, Yang Kaihui, was the daughter of his beloved teacher, Yang Huaizhong. She was arrested by the Nationalists in 1930, while Mao was fighting guerrilla wars at the famous Jinggang Mountain. The enemy told her if she would break off with Mao, they would set her free. She refused to do so. As a result, she was executed. By then she was only twenty-nine years old.
In 1956, twenty-six years after she died, Mao wrote a beautiful poem to commemorate her. In that poem he describes her imagined ascent to the moon palace. There a god named Wu Gang welcomes her with cassia wine and Chang E, the lonely celestial beauty, waves her long sleeves to dance for her. Later when she hears the news that in the human world the revolutionary people have won the war, Yang Kaihui is so happy that she weeps. Her tears fall from heaven to shower the earth.
Beyond this poem I really did not know much about Mao's private life and his relation with Yang Kaihui. But that was not a problem. I filled the void with my imagination. I saw in my mind's eye his sleepless nights: a lone lamp is burning; bells ring in the rain. Fireflies take his thoughts to the woman he loves. The tears he would not let others see ...
In addition to his wife, Mao had lost his younger brother, Mao Zemin, and his oldest son, Mao Anying. The former was arrested and killed in 1943 by a warlord named Sheng Shicai in Xinjiang. The latter was sent by Mao himself to the front during the Korean War, where he died in an air raid. Mao and Yang Kaihui had had two more sons; one was lost after Yang's execution and the other became mentally ill, probably traumatized by his childhood experiences.
When I heard these stories, I was deeply moved. Henceforth I loved Mao in two different ways. He was, on the one hand, the radiant sun in the sky, giving life to everything on earth. This Mao I loved as millions of Chinese did at the time, as our great leader, great commander, great teacher, and great helmsman. In 1966 he was seventy-two years old, tall and stout, with a receding hairline and rosy cheeks, which were evidence of his great wisdom and excellent health.
But behind this Mao there was another: a secret, sweetheart hero of a fifteen-year-old girl. This Mao was perpetually young and handsome. He was tall and slender, with thick black hair and slightly knit eyebrows. Perhaps he was thinking about the future of China and the fate of humankind? Or was he sad because he had lost his beloved wife and children? His eyes were gentle and somewhat melancholy, with double-fold eyelids. This Mao, to me, was not the radiant sun but a vulnerable man, a tragic hero. Like Prometheus, he had given fire to humankind and, as a result, had to withstand the wrath of Zeus. Chained to the top of a mountain and tortured by an eagle night after night, he was glad nonetheless. He never regretted what he had done.
For such a hero I was willing to do anything he might want me to do. Sleep in a graveyard. Drink a bottle of poison. Stab myself in the chest. Like Juliet? No! I mean I would continue to make revolution under proletarian dictatorship and defend his revolutionary line. Climb a mountain of knives. Jump into an ocean of raging fire. Face a forest of rifles and charge forward into a shower of bullets. I would do it for his sake. Proudly and gladly. Let my bod
y be pierced a hundred times and my bones be shattered. My heart would remain true to him. With my last breath I would cry, "Long Live Chairman Mao!"
Looking back on the two kinds of love, I don't know which was stronger. But I know that when they joined forces in my heart, they turned me into a burning coal, radiating heat from the red sun. When the red sun rose in the east, it eclipsed the bright star of the hero I had dreamed about. I did not even realize the change until a few months later he came back in a different dream.
This time I was at a struggling rally. I had attended such a rally at Beijing Workers Stadium earlier. Was it in July or August? Who did we struggle against? I could not recall. Too many rallies occurred in 1966. Too many people we struggled against. After a while I got them mixed up. All I remember about this rally was the fact that it was held at night in pouring rain that did not taper off in three or four hours. The rain poured down on the heads of eighty thousand people who came from all over Beijing. It was like pouring oil on flames. The revolutionary masses were in a great rage. Their voices, "Down with so and so!" overwhelmed the sound of thunder. From time to time people got so angry that they rushed down from the stand to the middle of the football field to grab the "enemies" who stood in a thin line. They kicked their legs to make them kneel on the ground. They punched their heads to make them bend even lower. The speech was interrupted. No one was listening to it anyway.
The rally goes on. I stand in the rain, shivering from head to feet. Why am I so cold? I am scared! Why do all these people hate me so much? What have I done? Oh yes, old revolutionaries are now capitalistroaders. The struggle and sacrifice we made in the past have become our crimes. Around me, people are furious. Yelling at the top of their voices: "Smash your dog head!" "Bombard you with cannonballs!" "Fry you in boiling oil!" "Condemn you forever!" Hatred is what I inspire. Revenge is what they want. Blood for blood. Life for life.